The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453

This book represents the first attempt to analyse historical and cultural developments in late medieval and early modern South Eastern Europe, as a set of intertwined regional histories, burdened by the strong dichotomy between the almighty centre—Constantinople—and the periphery that is rarely visible in both contemporary sources and modern scholarship. These original studies are devoted to various regions of the Byzantine Balkans and show the complex character and fragmented structure of this vast region with his huge variety of histories, arts and ideologies. The book focus on the two captures of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453, and the contributors analyse the significance of these catastrophic events on the political destiny of medieval Balkan societies, the mechanisms of adapting to the new political order, and the ever-present interconnectedness of a lower, regional elite across South Eastern Europe that had remained strong even after the Ottoman conquest.

A cura Di Chiara Galli