as their race and language and education testifies", while Laonicus Chalcondyles was a proponent of completely substituting "Roman" terminology for "Greek" terminology. Constantine Palaiologos himself in the end proclaimed Constantinople the "refuge for Christians, hope and delight of all Hellenes". On the other hand, the same Emperor in his final speech before the Empire's demise called upon his audience to rally to the defenses by characteristically referring to them as "descendants of Hellenes and Romans", most possibly as an attempt to combine Greek national sentiment with the Roman tradition of the Byzantine crown and Empire, both highly respected elements in his subjects' psyche at that moment. Byzantines (Βυζαντινοί) By the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire most easterners had come to think of themselves as Christians and, more than ever before, as Romans. Although they may not have liked their government any more than they had previously, the Greeks among them could no longer consider it foreign, run by Latins from Italy. The word Hellene itself had already begun to mean a pagan rather than a person of Greek race or culture. Instead eastern Greeks overwhelmingly used the self-identifying term Rhomaios, "Roman".Gill Page (2008). Being Byzantine: Greek Identity Before the Ottomans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6. The term "Byzantine Empire" is commonly understood to have been introduced in 1557, about a century after the Fall of Constantinople, by German historian Hieronymus Wolf, who introduced a system of Byzantine historiography in his work Corpus Historiae Byzantinae in order to distinguish ancient Roman from medieval Greek history without drawing attention to their ancient predecessors. According to Anthony Kaldellis, an Athenian Laonikos Chalkokondyles in the mid 15th century who advocated a neo-Hellenic identity of the Romans, was the first to use the term in this way. Several authors adopted his terminology, but it remained relatively unknown. English historians preferred to use Roman terminology (Edward Gibbon used it in a particularly belittling manner), while French historians preferred to call it Greek. The term reappeared in the mid-19th century and has since dominated completely in historiography, even in Greece, despite objections from Constantine Paparregopoulos, Gibbon's influential Greek counterpart, that the empire should be called Greek. Few Greek scholars adopted the terminology at that time, but it became popular in the second half of the 20th century. Hellenic continuity and Byzantine consciousness The "Byzantines" referred to themselves as Rhomaioi to retain both