Introduction: In the Balkans “Without” Constantinople: Questions of
Center and Periphery, Vlada Stanković
Part I: In a World Without a Center: Remaining Byzantine
Chapter 1: Byzantium’s Retreating Balkan Frontiers during the Reign
of the Angeloi (1185–1203): A Reconsideration, Alicia Simpson
Chapter 2: Discontinuity and Continuity of Byzantine Literary
Tradition After the Crusaders' Capture of Constantinople: The Case
of "Original" Byzantine Novels, Dušan Popović
Chapter 3: The Divided Empire: Byzantium on the Eve of 1204,
Radivoj Radić
Chapter 4: The Fate of the Palaiologan Aristocracy of Thessalonike
after 1423, Nicholas Melvani
Chapter 5: Paintings of Donor Portraits in the State of Epirus:
Aesthetics, Fashion and Trends in the Late Byzantine period,
Katerina Kontopanagou
Chapter 6: Monastic Foundation Legends in Epirus, Christos
Stavrakos
Part II: The Peripheries: In the Shadow of Constantinople and Its
Influence
Chapter 7: Studenica and the Life Giving Tree, Jelena Erdeljan
Chapter 8: Rethinking the Position of Serbia within the Byzantine
Oikoumene in the Thirteenth Century, Vlada Stanković
Chapter 9: The Synodicon of Orthodoxy in Manuscript BAR Sl. 307 and
the Hagioriticon Gramma of the Year 1344, Ivan Biliarsky
Chapter 10: Mount Athos and the Byzantine-Slavic Tradition in
Wallachia and Moldavia after the Fall of Constantinople, Radu
Păun
Chapter 11: The Center of the Periphery: The Land of Bosnia in the
Heart of Bosnia, Jelena Mrgić
Part III: Aftermath: Between Two Empires, Between Two Eras
Chapter 12: Before and After the Fall of the Serbian Despotate: The
Differences in the Timar Organization in the Serbian Lands in the
mid-15th Century, Ema Miljković
Chapter 13: Memories of Home in the Accounts of the Balkan Refugees
from the Ottomans to the Apennine peninsula (15th–16th centuries),
Nada Zečević
Vlada Stanković is professor of Byzantine studies and director of the Center for Cypriot Studies at the University of Belgrade.
This volume, composed of contributions by an international team of
established scholars as well as rising figures in Southeast
European historical studies, demonstrates the value of abandoning a
center-periphery view of the Byzantine world in favor of a regional
investigation of southeastern Europe across the traumatic divide
that was the Latin conquest of Constantinople.
*Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study*
These essays chart the ebb and flow of the gravitational pull that
Byzantium exerted on the Balkans between the two conquests of
Constantinople. They reveal the complex world that had always
existed beneath the empire’s centralizing aspirations, a multipolar
and eventually post-Byzantine world. This timely collection
explores the political, religious, artistic, and social history of
the fascinating microcosms that emerged in the interval between
empires. Written by both new and established scholars from the
regions in question, this richly documented book makes the latest
developments in Balkan research available to the English-speaking
world and offers new interpretations of texts, events, and
controversies.
*Anthony Kaldellis, Ohio State University*
This is a new and dynamic approach to the relationship between
Byzantium and its Balkan neighbors. Instead of seeing the history
of these medieval Orthodox Slavic states as only explainable
through their relation to the Byzantine imperial center, the
contributions in this book place emphasis on their own agency in
the political and cultural sphere. The plurality of the questions
raised in this volume will undoubtedly contribute to new readings
of this turbulent period in the history of Southeastern Europe
between the fragmentation of political space as a result of the
Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the reinstatement of a powerful
centralized state under the Ottomans by 1500. This book examines an
astonishing variety of materials from frescoes to liturgical
manuscripts and from land ownership to heraldry. Most is little
known and will therefore be very useful to scholars who work on
questions of center and periphery in the pre-modern world. This is
a new approach that emphasizes the emergence of regionalism in the
area, of multiple, interconnected centers whose trajectories are
independent and often unpredictable despite not being entirely free
of the hegemonic Byzantine discourse.
*Dionysios Stathakopoulos, King's College London*
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