Byzantine ‘Nationalism’ and the Nicaean Empire

Abstract

AbstractThe 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 an...