# The "Byzantine Empire" Instead Of "Constintine Empire"?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 16, 2007, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503 "2007-02-16T17:09:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AndrewJRichards](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7ea924/32.png) [@AndrewJRichards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndrewJRichards)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503/1 "2007-02-16T17:09:25Z")

</div>

Why isn’t the Byzantine Empire called the Constintine Empire instead? After Constantine changed the name of the city from Byzantium to Constantinopolis - it remained that way for 1600 years. I would imagine that the empire would be called the Constintine Empire instead of the Byzantine - a name that predated the actual empire entirely.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503/2 "2007-02-16T17:11:41Z")

</div>

Any nobody living in the Byzantine Empire called it that. It was simply the “Roman Empire”. In Western Europe it was sometimes called the Greek Empire.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AndrewJRichards](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7ea924/32.png) [@AndrewJRichards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndrewJRichards)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503/3 "2007-02-16T17:21:56Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=alphaboi867]  
Any nobody living in the Byzantine Empire called it that. It was simply the “Roman Empire”. In Western Europe it was sometimes called the Greek Empire.  
[/QUOTE]

But why is is called the Byzantine Empire _now_?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503/4 "2007-02-16T17:26:23Z")

</div>

Because, before the city was named Constantinople, it was a smaller town named Byzantium, hence the name “Byzantine”.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-byzantine-empire-instead-of-constintine-empire/392503/5 "2007-02-16T17:46:40Z")

</div>

It was a convention adopted in the 18th and 19th Centuries, most likely to indicate the basically Greek nature of the empire (Byzantium being the Greek name).

From [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire)

> [@](#):
>
> The term Byzantine Empire was never used during the Empire’s existence. The Empire’s native Greek name was Ρωμανία, Rōmania, or Βασιλεία Ρωμαίων, Basileia Rōmaiōn, a direct translation of the Latin name of the Roman Empire, Imperium Romanum. The descriptor Byzantine was introduced in western Europe in 1557, derived from Byzantium, the earlier name of Constantinople, by German historian Hieronymus Wolf about a century after the fall of Constantinople. Hieronymus had taken it from the writing of 15th century Byzantine historian Laonicus Chalcocondyles. He presented a system of Byzantine historiography in his work Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, in order to “distinguish ancient Roman from medieval Greek history without drawing attention to their ancient predecessors”.
> 
> The term ‘Byzantine’ was introduced in the English-speaking world by Sir George Finlay in 1851, in his History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Crusaders to its Conquest by the Turks.
> 
> Standardization of the term began gradually in the 18th century, when French authors such as Montesquieu began to popularize it. Before this, the Empire was described in the West as the Empire of the Greeks (Imperium Graecorum), since Byzantine claims to Roman inheritance had been actively contested by Western Europeans at least since the time of the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800.