THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, and their empire as the Roman Empire, seeing it as a continuation of the glorious past. The first scholar to call them Byzantines (using the earlier name of the city) is the German historian Hieronymus Wolf (1516-80). Scholars use this nomenclature thereafter.

Wolf publishes the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae in 1557, which begins a tradition of exploring the Byzantine Empire separate from the earlier Roman Empire