Academic fields have emerged to study specific periods, regions, languages and literatures, states, cultures, religions, movements, wars, or methodologies regardless of where and when they are applied. In short, there are fields to study all the ways in which we chop up history. They are named after their primary subject matter, in a direct and concise way, for convenience and possibly in order to say something about the field's relationship to its peers.

Byzantine Studies has always been oriented around the Byzantine state, so-called Byzantium. Accordingly, “the Byzantines” have always been seen as the subjects of that state. This does not mean that all Byzantine research studies the state; far from it. But whether one works on texts, art, religion, archaeology, or whatever else, often without the state being directly relevant to the matter at hand, it is nevertheless generally called “Byzantine” only if it relates in some way to life in the Byzantine state or was adjacent to it (geographically or chronologically). By contrast, studies of ancient Greece or the medieval West are not oriented around a single state in the same way, but rather around clusters of polities that made up a vaguely coherent cultural block in the eyes of scholars and possibly even of the people who lived at the time. But histories of ancient Rome and of Byzantium have always been histories of the Roman state, its politics, wars, society, and culture. This was true of the histories written at the time, by both the ancient Romans and the “Byzantines” themselves, and it remains true of the histories written about them since. The Byzantines called their state “the polity of the Romans” or Romanía; medieval Europeans called it the empire of the Greeks; and modern scholars call it the Byzantine empire.

In the case of Byzantium, this state-oriented conception of the field holds together relatively well because the state in question happens to have been one of the most coherent, centrally consolidated, and effectively run state projects in all premodern history. For most of its history and over most of its territory at any time, there was only one legitimate political authority in Romanía that enforced a single legal framework, implemented a uniform system for assessing and collecting taxes, recruited a single army from the entire Roman territory, and recognized only one official religion, successfully persecuting most of its rivals out of existence.