The name "Byzantium" originally refers to the ancient Byzantine city in the Bosphorus. The city was built in the commercial colonial era of ancient Greece. In the 4th century A.D., Constantine the Great (reigned from 324 to 337) expanded the eastern capital of the Roman Empire on the ruins of the ancient city, which revived the glory of the empire. Since then, the city of Byzantium has developed rapidly, becoming the largest city in the Mediterranean, and the name of Byzantium has spread all over the world.

However, there was no "Byzantine Empire" in medieval Europe, and no nation called itself "Byzantine". At that time, the eastern part of the former Roman Empire was called the "Eastern Roman Empire", its monarch called himself the "Roman Emperor", local residents called themselves "Romans" and even their capital was called "New Rome". So, where did the names "Byzantine Empire", "Byzantine State" and "Byzantine People" come from? This question is not difficult to answer. In fact, these appellations are adopted in the research work of modern scholars. 1526, Heronius Wolff, a German scholar, used the word "Byzantium" for the first time in his initial work to lay the foundation for the editing of Bonn Daquan, in order to show that the contents of this series are different from other historical documents in ancient Greece and modern Greece. 1680, French scholar Sivio Dukang used this name as the title of his book History of Byzantium, telling the history of this eastern Mediterranean country with the ancient city of Byzantium as its capital. Over time, scholars dubbed things related to this ancient country "Byzantium", and the Eastern Roman Empire was naturally called "Byzantine Empire".