Название: Byzantium after Byzantium
Автор: Nicolae Iorga
Издательство: Center for Romanian Studies/Histria Books
Год: 2023
Страниц: 258
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 10.18 MB

Although Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, bringing an end to the Eastern Roman Empire which had survived its predecessor in the West by nearly one thousand years, this important book argues that Byzantium did not die, but continued to influence European history all the way up to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The author' s formula " Byzantium after Byzantium" defines several centuries of world history. Iorga points out the great contributions of Byzantine civilization to the Western world, especially during the Renaissance. He demonstrates that Byzantium survived through its people and local autonomies, as well as through its exiles. They continued the Byzantine ideas, aspirations, education, and way of life. All of this allows us to speak of a Byzantium after Byzantium.

Byzantium, with all it represented — not as the authority of a dynasty, or as the domination of a ruling class, things that could disappear in a catastrophe, but as a complex of institutions, a political system, a religious formation, a type of civilization, comprising the Hellenic intellectual legacy, Roman law, the Orthodox religion, and everything it created and preserved in terms of art — did not disappear, and could not disappear with the fall, in succession, in the fifteenth century of its three capitals: Constantinople, Mistra, and Trebizond.

The Ottoman Turks did not bring with them new ways of life — as a Turkish nationalism of recent origin claims, going back to the relics of the Hittite civilization and searching for ancestors toward the Oxus and the Jaxartes —, instead they built on top of ruins. It was the Byzantine Empire that, with everything it preserved in terms of memories, means, and indestructible ideals, transformed, day by day, those who had come from Brusa and Adrianople to establish themselves in the great city of Constantinople, capable of using and exhorting all nations.

It is undeniably necessary that we consider the facts of this conquest, beginning with 1453 for many different reasons. Nevertheless, to leave aside from that date what was imperially Byzantine, soon after the bloody scenes of a lightening invasion, would be a mistake which would contribute to the falsification of the history of the immense regions that fell under the domination of Mehmed II and his grandson Selim I, the conqueror of Asia and Egypt.

Contents:
Chapter I — The Exiles
Chapter II — The Great Constantinople Rallies: The Permanence of Byzantine Forms
Chapter III — The Local Autonomies
Chapter IV — The Patriarch and His Clergy
Chapter V — The Archons
Chapter VI — The Byzantine Imperial Idea through the Romanian Princes
Chapter VII — The Romanian Princes Protection of the Byzantine Church and Civilization
Chapter VIII — Renaissance through School
Chapter IX — The Phanarion
Chapter X — The End of Byzantium
Index