Byzantine ‘Nationalism’ and the Nicaean Empire

Abstract

The fall of Constantinople on the night of 13 April 1204 to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade is taken as the crucial turning point of the history of the later Byzantine Empire. For many the final period of Byzantine history is nothing but the pathetic survival of a state built on the memories of its former greatness. This is in many ways far too gloomy a picture. Constantinople was to be recovered by the Byzantines in 1261; and we should not forget that the last centuries of Byzantium saw a flowering of Byzantine art and scholarship. This achievement naturally directs our attention to the period of exile, when the foundations of this ‘Last Byzantine Renaissance’, as it has been called, were laid. In exile the Byzantine Empire was re-established and the Byzantine heritage preserved, at a time when both appeared to be in danger of being recreated in a Latin image, for a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch had been established in Constantinople in place of the Byzantine emperor and the Byzantine patriarch. The fall of Constantinople, indeed, produced a feeling of fatalism and despondency among the Byzantines. There was a tendency to accept the Latin conquest. The peasantry of Thrace even took pleasure in the discomfiture of the Byzantine aristocrats and intellectuals of Constantinople. Some Byzantine magnates attempted to organize resistance to the Latin conquest, but even this, at least in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, was probably done in the hope of securing a favourable bargaining position with the Latins. One of the great Byzantine magnates of Thrace, the Caesar Theodore Vranas, entered the ranks of the Latin aristocracy. Even Michael Angelos, the founder of what we have come to know as the Despotate of Epiros, was willing to submit for a short while to the authority of the Latin emperor.