When Did The Byzantine Empire Begin?  The date when the "Byzantine" empire began is debated by historians, but from the point-of-view of numismatists it begins with the reign of Anastasius (491-518). Numismatists and collectors (and coin handbooks) differentiate between “Roman” and “Byzantine” coins, as well as the government that issued them, with an artificial divide that is only numismatic--the bronze coinage reform of Anastasius. Even numismatically the only change is in the copper denominations. There is no change in the gold coins for hundreds of years between the introduction of the solidus by Constantine c. 310 and the 11^th century. The only significant change in the silver coinage begins with the reign of Heraclius (610-41). However, the drastic change in the copper coinage makes a convenient divide.
   Throughout the empire's thousand year history, its inhabitants thought of themselves as “Romans,” in unbroken continuity going all the way back to the Republican period. In contemporary late antique/medieval “Byzantine” sources the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire are always referred to as Romans. Our term “Byzantine,” referring to the Eastern Romans, was created by 16th-century humanists and never appears in contemporary Eastern or Western sources. The eastern sources, including those from the Islamic world, consistently refer to the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire as Romans. In the west, an increasingly grudging recognition of the term “Roman” for the Eastern Empire finally gave way to “Greek” following the coronation by Pope Leo III of Charlemagne as “Imperator Romanorum” on Christmas day 800 A.D. Thereafter the west denied the Eastern Empire the term "Roman" that it used for itself and consistently used the term “Greek,” never “Byzantine,” in reference to the Eastern Empire or its inhabitants. 
  The term “Byzantine” is derived from the name of the Greek city Byzantion which was rechristened Konstantinoupolis (City of Constantine). It is first attested in the 16^th century, but historians continued to describe the empire centered on the Constantinople as "Greek" well into the middle of the 19^th century. After resurgent Greek nationalism in the wake of the successful revolution of the 1820s and drawing on events such as the Crimean War, some scholars have suggested that Franco-British fears of a possible pan-Orthodox Tsarist empire spreading down to Constantinople provided an atmosphere favoring a more neutral term than either “Greek” or “Roman.”  In any event, by the later 19^th century, the politically neutral term “Byzantine" began to replace the word “Greek” to describe the eastern empire in the medieval period.
 

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