George Akropolites and the Counterexample(s)

Abstract

This chapter studies aspects of George Akropolites's History, which was a chronicle of the Byzantine successor state in Nicaea covering the years 1204–61. More than anything else, what can be learned from Akropolites with respect to the concerns of this investigation is that there were a great number of Greek Christians who did not believe that the Latin Church should be sacramentally isolated from the Greek Church even if the Latins were an inferior race and their presence in the East had caused devastation to the Byzantine community. Akropolites presents the Latin occupation of Constantinople as just another of the many political challenges that befell an empire that had lasted more than a millennium. He certainly does not present the Latin occupation of Byzantium in terms of the existential and epistemic rupture that most modern historians of Eastern Christianity believe it to be. Nor does he present the Byzantines as any kind of backward or inferior society that needs the rejuvenation provided by its colonial masters. In these ways, Akropolites appears to offer an important counterexample to some of the very assumptions that underlie the framework of this book.