Byzantine studies is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the history, culture, demography, dress, religion/theology, art, literature/epigraphy, music, science, economy, coinage and politics of the Eastern Roman Empire. The discipline's founder in Germany is considered to be the philologist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580), a Renaissance Humanist. He gave the name "Byzantine" to the Eastern Roman Empire that continued after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD. About 100 years after the final conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Wolf began to collect, edit, and translate the writings of Byzantine philosophers. Other 16th-century humanists introduced Byzantine studies to Holland and Italy. The subject may also be called Byzantinology or Byzantology, although these terms are usually found in English translations of original non-English sources. A scholar of Byzantine studies is called a Byzantinist.

Medieval Greek is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.