Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity Online

The formation of early Christian liturgy has been a subject shrouded in mystery since the earliest times. Not an area of controversy historically, the formative development of the Christian liturgy is not a field that has been assiduously recorded and argued over – as was clearly the case with the church’s doctrinal tradition and the unfolding of many other aspects of its polity. The Christian church’s collective memory has always tended to presume that its liturgical customs were venera…

Byzantium, also known as the Byzantine Empire, was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its predominantly Greek-speaking continuation during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The name “Byzantium,” adopted in scholarship and modern conventional use, is not appropriate; it comes from the ancient name of the capital of the empire, Byzantium/Βυζάντιον. The German scholar, Hieronymus Wolf (d. 1580), was the first to use the term Byzantium to characterize this medieval state. However, the Byzantines called themselves Romans/Ῥωμαῖοι and their state Romania, that is Roman Empi…