The idea that the terms “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines” are traditional, and therefore hallowed by hoary heritage, is incorrect. These terms have been used in this way only since the later nineteenth century. They are barely 140 years old. There are turtles alive today that are older. But the field tells itself a different story. It is common to read that these terms were invented by the German philologist Hieronymus Wolf in the sixteenth century. This would make him, in a manner of speaking, the Father of Byzantine Studies, and he is often called that, in a way that is only half-ironic.

This origin story is wrong in every significant way. A close look at the evidence suggests that Wolf was not responsible for the use of “Byzantine” in the title of one of his editions. More importantly, it did not inaugurate a new paradigm for thinking about the eastern empire. Since around 800 AD, western Europeans had called it “the empire of the Greeks” and its subjects “the Greeks,” and so did Wolf, his contemporaries, and his successors. This did not change in the sixteenth century, or even in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Edward Gibbon, for example, writing in the later eighteenth century, also called it “the Greek empire” and its subjects “the Greeks.” He uses the terms “Byzantium” and “Byzantine” only as synonyms for “Constantinople” and “of Constantinople,” just as those words had been used by the east Romans themselves, referring to the city only, not the empire as a whole and its entire population.

It was only after the Crimean War (1853–1856) that western scholarship moved away from the “Greek” paradigm and turned to a “Byzantine” one. It did so because of Great Power politics. Specifically, after 1821 there was a Greek state that aspired to expand at the expense of the Ottoman empire. In the west, Greece was often seen as aligned with Russia, which was almost never the case but it was at one important moment: the Crimean War. Greeks then joined Russia, which was fighting against Britain and France, and Greek fighters and newspapers hyped the slogan “Greek empire or death!” The Greek empire that they wished to revive was the very one that countless western textbooks discussed under that name.