He lived during the reign of Emperor Charles V (1516-1555) and the subsequent division of the Habsburg Spanish Empire between Philip II (heir to the ’Spanish’ holdings) and Ferdinand I, who took over the German hereditary lands, Bohemia and the north of Hungary.
Wolf saw the Great Peasants War of 1525 as a child of nine years. In 1551 he became secretary and librarian to the Fugger family in Augsburg. From 1551 to 1557 he was professor od Greek in the gymnasium of Augsburg, which with some other offices he held until his death in 1580.
Wolf was a man of very extensive learning and particularly distinguished for his knowledge of Greek, which is said to have written with greater facility than Latin.
The first use of the term "Byzantine" to label the later years of the Roman Empire was in 1557, when Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources.
Hieronymus Wolf died in the free imperial city of Augsburg.
Hieronymus Wolf: Father of German Byzantium Studies
