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Lesser Known Byzantine Empire Facts

Khalid Elhassan September 11, 2020 35 min

Byzantine Empire - Constantinople — Procession of Emperor Manuel I Komenos in Constantinople. Imgur

39. The Term “Byzantine Empire” Was Coined Generations After the Empire Had Ceased to Exist

The word “Byzantine” is derived from the ancient city of Byzantium, on the European side of the Bosporus Strait separating Balkan Europe from Asia’s Anatolian Peninsula. In 330, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great chose the site of Byzantium to found a new capital city, which he named after himself, Constantinople.

Generations after the Byzantine Empire’s demise, sixteenth-century German writer Hieronymus Wolf titled his collection of sources on the vanished empire “Corpus Historiae Byzantinae“, thus introducing the term into scholarship. The term gained acceptance in the West, and eventually “Byzantine” replaced “Roman”, the term the Byzantines used when describing themselves and their state.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.