Post by krusader74 on Feb 27, 2014 4:26:48 GMT -6
I recently came across an early liturgical text which the manuscript designates “Byzantine,” so I am sure the adjective existed in contemporary use as a reference to the city (during the so-called Byzantine Period, which lasted 1124 years and saw 99 emperors), but in general it is true that the terms “Byzantine Empire” or “the Byzantines” were pretty much never used as far as we know. By the way, Hellene, or Greek, was a bad word, as it meant Pagan.
Sure, the Thracians built the city of "Byzantion" in 660 BC, it was conquered by the Romans around 160 AD, and renamed by Constantine in 330 AD. I think Professor Daileader's point was that this older name for the city was used only rarely from 330 AD until much later, after the Crusades. It's not a term that Crusaders would generally use. There's more detailed information on the nomenclature in this article:
The first use of the term "Byzantine" to label the later years of the Roman Empire was in 1557, when the German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources. The term comes from "Byzantium", the name of the city of Constantinople before it became Constantine's capital. This older name of the city would rarely be used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. The publication in 1648 of the Byzantine du Louvre (Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae), and in 1680 of Du Cange's Historia Byzantina further popularised the use of "Byzantine" among French authors, such as Montesquieu. However, it was not until the mid-19th century that the term came into general use in the Western world. As regards the English historiography in particular, the first occasion of the "Byzantine Empire" appears in an 1857 work of George Finlay (History of the Byzantine Empire from 716 to 1057).
