Abstract
In the mid-eleventh century Byzantium was Europe’s greatest city and the Byzantine Emperor claimed to rule the entire civilized world. In terms of precedent and potential this claim was not wholly ridiculous. The empire stretched from the heel of Italy in the West to Armenia and Syria in the east, and from Crete in the south to the Crimea in the north. It included the Balkans south of the Danube but its sphere of influence extended far beyond, and both Russia and Venice were counted among its clients. The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire, and though its Emperors had long since abandoned Latin for Greek they called themselves Romanoi and still thought of themselves as Romans.
The damned Latins ‖ lust for our possessions and would like to destroy our race .… A wide gulf of hatred divides us from them. Our outlooks are completely different; our roads lead in opposite directions.
Nicetas Choniates, Byzantine chronicler
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References
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The term ‘Russian’ here is used literally to represent the old Slavonic term Rus’ which embraced all the East Slavs. There is no evidence that the ancestors of Ukrainians and Belorussians regarded themselves as any different from the ancestors of the Russians at that time.
Translation adopted from S.H. Cross (ed.) The Russian Primary Chronicle (Cambridge, Mass., 1930) pp. 239–40.
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The term ‘oriental despotism’ derives from Wittvogel’s theory, since discredited, associating great public works with despotic government.
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See the discussion in J. Szucs, ‘The Three Historical Regions of Europe’ Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 29(2–4) 1983, p. 137 (from which the phrase is quoted). There are some western equivalents, apparently. Dublin, for example, seems to have developed under ‘Bristol law’.
This despite B. Krekic’s largely unsupported claim that the pace of urban development did not lag far behind that of western Europe: B. Krekic (ed.), The Urban Society of Eastern Europe in Premodern Times (Berkeley, California, 1987) p. ix.
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Metochites, in lit.
S. Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1970) especially Chapter III; J. Meyendorff, The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, New York, 1982) pp. 133–8. However, Meyendorff is uncomfortable with the term ‘humanism’ in this context.
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© 1992 Philip Longworth
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Longworth, P. (1992). The Age of Crusades (1071–1352). In: The Making of Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22202-5_10
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