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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BYZANTINE VISUAL CULTURE IN THE DANUBE REGIONS, 1300–1600
This volume aims to broaden and nuance knowledge about the history, art, culture, and heritage of Eastern Europe relative to Byzantium. From the thirteenth century to the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the regions of the Danube River stood at the intersection of different traditions, and the river itself has served as a marker of connection and division, as well as a site of cultural contact and negotiation. The Routledge Handbook of Byzantine Visual Culture in the Danube Regions, 1300–1600 brings to light the interconnectedness of this broad geographical area too often either studied in parts or neglected altogether, emphasizing its shared history and heritage of the regions of modern Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Czechia.
The aim is to challenge established perceptions of what constitutes ideological and historical facets of the past, as well as Byzantine and postByzantine cultural and artistic production in a region of the world that has yet to establish a firm footing on the map of art history. The 24 chapters offer a fresh and original approach to the history, literature, and art history of the Danube regions, thus being accessible to students thematically, chronologically, or by case study; each part can be read independently or explored as part of a whole.
Maria Alessia Rossi, PhD, is an Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Visualizing Christ’s Miracles in Late Byzantium: Art, Theology, and Court Culture (2024). She also co-edited Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean (2019), Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages (2020), and Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (2021). Rossi is the co-founder of the initiative North of Byzantium and the digital platform Mapping Eastern Europe.
Alice Isabella Sullivan, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture and the Director of Graduate Studies at Tufts University, specializing in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the ByzantineSlavic cultural spheres. She is the author of The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (2023) and co-editor of several volumes. In addition, she is co-director of the Sinai Digital Archive and co-founder of North of Byzantium and Mapping Eastern Europe—two initiatives that explore the history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe during the medieval and early modern periods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We conceived of this Handbook as a way to broaden and nuance knowledge about Byzantium and its legacy by looking at its history, art, culture, and heritage in relation to, and from the point of view of, its northern neighbors situated along the Danube River. We put out a call for papers for this project in 2020 and carefully selected contributions that engaged with local traditions and the broader interconnectedness of the regions of the Danube, especially relative to Byzantium. In an effort to broaden the scope and thematic purview of the project, we also invited other colleagues to contribute. The resulting 24 chapters offer an in-depth examination of the visual and cultural production of the area, navigating local traditions, the Byzantine heritage, and cultural forms adopted from other models while challenging established perceptions of what constitutes Byzantine and postByzantine artistic and cultural production in the period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In order to ensure a cohesive outcome for this publication, we wanted to give our authors the opportunity to hear and read each other’s chapters, as well as to offer feedback ahead of publication. As a result, the contributions could speak to one another and redirect readers to relevant topics throughout the Handbook. In May 2022, we organized a closed-door workshop—which shifted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic—with all the contributors plus invited guests. Each author circulated their essays before the workshop, gave a presentation, and engaged in discussion at the event. Afterward, each speaker received written feedback from us plus two other colleagues. We are grateful to our authors for participating in this event, presenting their research, engaging in cross-disciplinary dialogue on different topics, and sharing their feedback and comments with other presenters.
This volume would not have been possible without the generous financial support of several institutions and organizations: Tufts University; the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA); the Volkswagen Foundation; the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture; the American Institute for Southeast European Studies (AISEES); and the St. Archangel Michael Serbian Orthodox Church of Akron Ohio Endowment Fund of the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies and Hilandar Research Library at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio).
We would like to thank the following colleagues for offering opinions and advice at various stages of this project: Carlo Berardi, Florin Curta, Pamela Patton, Earnestine Qiu, Silvia Gianolio, and Justin Willson, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and thought-provoking suggestions. Furthermore, we extend our gratitude to the Routledge team, especially Michael Greenwood and Louis Nicholason-Pallet, for their support and patience. In the final stages of production, we are grateful to Jillian Lepek, our research assistant from Tufts University, for helping us with various logistical and organizational tasks related to the project; to Annika Fisher for her phenomenal copy-editing work and attention to detail; to Sever J. Voicu for gathering an incredible amount of information in a thorough and complete index; and to Richard Thomson for drawing the expert maps for our introduction.
This volume builds on our ongoing efforts to spotlight the history, art, and culture of Eastern Europe, as well as encourage its study and appreciation among students, researchers, and colleagues from around the world. This is the third volume that we have co-edited together in recent years, following Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450– 1450, 65) (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions (Sense, Matter and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Material and Literary Culture 6) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022). To complement these scholarly efforts, we realized the need for a volume that could be used as a foundational text for the study, teaching, and research of the area. So, we narrowed down the geography with a focus on the Danube regions and offered art-historical overviews for key centers and case studies that could easily be read and understood by both specialized and broad audiences.
These projects extend the reach of our North of Byzantium initiative , which is a project that we launched in 2018 with an initial three-year grant from the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture. Through annual events, publications, and other resources, this initiative addresses issues of visual eclecticism in art and architecture, patronage, and the transfer of artistic ideas and styles, and it charts how cross-cultural exchange operated in regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north, which developed at the crossroads of competing cultural spheres in the Middle Ages and the post-Byzantine period. As with our other efforts, we hope that this volume, too, will encourage current and future generations of students and scholars to delve into the rich material and textual evidence in order to question the nuances of cultural contact and interchange across Eastern Europe.
CONTRIBUTORS
Serena Acciai is an architect with research and teaching experience in the multicultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Her work mostly focuses on the construction, perception, and representation of cultural identities through architecture. She received her PhD (summa cum laude) in Architectural Design from the University of Florence with a dissertation entitled Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: fragments of generous ideas: The case-study of Sedad Hakki Eldem. She currently holds an appointment as a lecturer in the Theory of Architectural Design at the University of Florence.
Anna Adashinskaya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Romanian Centre for Russian Studies at the University of Bucharest. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a postdoctoral member of the ERC project Art Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry from the Perspective of Entangled Histories (New Europe College, Bucharest). She completed her PhD in Medieval Studies at Central European University with the dissertation Practices of Ecclesiastic Foundation, Sponsorship, and Patronage. Her research focuses on Byzantine and Balkan history and visual culture between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.
Vlad Bedros is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and a researcher at the Institute of Art History. He studies late fifteenth-century Moldavian art, its relation to the written culture of the respective periods, and the local hybridization of post-Byzantine visual sources. He was PI in the project Networks of Devotion: The selection of saints as marker of religious identity in post-Byzantine Moldavian representations (wall-paintings and texts), funded by the Ministry of Education and Research.
Jelena Bogdanović holds a PhD from Princeton University and studies cross-cultural and religious themes in the architecture of the Balkans and Mediterranean. Her authored and edited books include The Framing of Sacred Space: The Canopy and the Byzantine Church (Oxford UP, 2017), Type and Archetype in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture (Brill, 2023, with Ida Sinkević, Marina Mihaljević, and Čedomila Marinković), Icons of Space: Advances in Hierotopy (Routledge, 2021), and Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium (Routledge, 2018).
Zofia A. Brzozowska is a Paleoslavist and Byzantinologist. She researches the culture of the medieval Slavia Orthodoxa, especially the literature and art of the southern and eastern Slavic region (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rus’), as well as the history of women in the Middle Ages. She has authored or coauthored 8 books and over 60 articles, book reviews, and translations.
Irene Caracciolo completed her PhD in the History of Art at Sapienza Università di Roma with a focus on St. Nicholas’s pictorial narratives between Byzantium and Italy in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. Her research interests include Byzantine and Italian art and architecture, particularly, but not exclusively, in southern Italy; artistic mobility and exchange; hagiographical illustration; the cult of relics; and images of saints between East and West in the Middle Ages.
Marco Cassioli is an associate researcher at the TELEMMe Laboratory, University of Aix-Marseille. He received his university education in Turin and Aix-en-Provence and has also held a research fellowship at the New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study, in Bucharest. He has published in the field of medieval and early modern history, especially of the maritime Alps and the Danube region.
Danijel Ciković holds a PhD from the University of Zadar and is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Applied Arts at the University of Rijeka. His research focuses on the visual culture of the Adriatic region during the late medieval and early modern periods, with a special emphasis on Venetian artistic production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as artistic exchanges between the Adriatic coasts. He is currently working on the MONACORALE (ANR) and OPUS VENETUM (UNIRI) projects, focusing on late medieval artistic patronage.
Ovidiu Cristea is a Senior Researcher at the N. Iorga Institute of History of the Romanian Academy and a Visiting Professor in the Department of History and Political Sciences at Ovidius University (Constanța). With Liviu Pilat, he has co-authored the monograph The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the 15th Century (2017) and co-edited the collective volume From Pax Mongolica to Pax Ottomanica: War, Religion and Trade in the Northwestern Black Sea Region (14th–16th Centuries) (2020). He has also authored several books on Romanian medieval and early modern history, including Acest Domn de la Miazănoapte: Ștefan cel Mare în documente inedite venețiene [A distant prince: Stephen the Great in unpublished Venetian documents] (2018) and Puterea cuvintelor: Știri și război in sec. XV–XVI [The power of words: News and war in the 15th and 16th centuries] (2014).
Andrei Dumitrescu is a PhD student in Art and Art History at Stanford University. He holds an MA in Medieval Studies from Central European University in Vienna (2023), as well as a BA in Art History and Theory (2021) and a BA in Conservation of Artistic Heritage from the National University of Arts in Bucharest (2019). His research focuses on late and post-Byzantine visual culture in relation to literature, politics, and liturgy. Between 2020 and 2022, he worked as a research assistant in the project “Networks of Devotion: The Selection of Saints as Marker of Religious Identity in Post-Byzantine Moldavian Representations” at New Europe College in Bucharest.
Jana Gajdošová completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2015, with a focus on the Charles Bridge in Prague. She has since published articles on the topic in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association (2016), Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2017), and Kaiser Karl IV: 1316– 1378 (2016). Her wider scholarly interests, including the evolution of late Gothic design and the relationship between memory and medieval architecture, have also been published in Decorated Revisited: English Architectural Style in Context, 1250-1400 (2017), Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture (2023), and GESTA (Autumn 2022). Jana is currently a medieval art specialist at Sam Fogg, London, and she teaches a variety of courses for the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Antoaneta Granberg has a PhD in Slavic languages from Sofia University (1992). Granberg is a specialist in Old Church Slavonic, text transmission, and book history. She is currently an Associate Professor in Slavic languages at the University of Gothenburg (2008–), a series editor for Acta Slavica Gothoburgensia (2008–), and a board member of The Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg (2013–).
Vladislav Grešlík is a researcher of Ukrainian Icons in Slovakia and their contexts in the Carpathian region and the post-Byzantine world in general. He completed his doctoral studies in this field at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Ukraine. He has also published articles on the Iconography of Images of Saints and Feasts in the Churches of the Byzantine-Slavic Rite in Slovakia, as well as the Art of Slovakia after 1900.
Zsombor Jékely is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Art History at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. He is also the Director of Collections at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. He received his PhD in Art History from Yale University in 2003 with a dissertation on the medieval frescoes at Siklós. Between 2001 and 2006, he worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest before transitioning to the Museum of Applied Arts in 2006. He has also been teaching since 2016. His research focuses on late medieval art in Central Europe, and he has authored numerous books and studies on wall painting in medieval Hungary. Most recently, he co- authored a monograph on medieval frescoes in the historic county of Zólyom (2021).
Izabela Lis-Wielgosz is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland), specializing in Old Church Slavonic and Old Serbian literature and culture. Her publications include Death in the Old Serbian Literature (12th–14th centuries) (2003), Saints in the Spiritual Culture and Orthodox Slavs’ Ideology throughout the Middle Ages (till 15th Century) (2005), and On Permanence of Meanings: The Serbian Literature of the Seventeenth Century in Service with Tradition (2013).
Ioana Manea obtained her PhD in French literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She has held several postdoctoral fellowships in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Romania. She has also published numerous articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors and authored the book Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer. The Two-Faced Philosopher? (Narr, 2019). Her research is situated at the intersection of literature and intellectual history. At present, she is an Associate Professor
Marina Mihaljević holds a PhD from Princeton University and is an Assistant Professor of Art and Architectural History at the State University of Novi Pazar, Serbia. Her specialization is in the field of architectural exchange in the regions of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. She is the co-editor of Type and Archetype in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture (Brill, 2023, with Jelena Bogdanović, Ida Sinkević, and Čedomila Marinković) and author of several architectural texts, including “Religious Architecture” (2021) and “Üçayak: A Forgotten Byzantine Church” (2014).
Ljubomir Milanović holds a PhD from Rutgers University and is a senior research associate at the Institute for Byzantine Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade. He is an art historian specializing in Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval art with a focus on Byzantine and post-Byzantine production. His co-edited publications include Voices and Images. Modes of Communication in the Medieval Balkans (4th to 16th Centuries) (Belgrade, 2020) and Archaeology of a World of Changes–In memoriam Claudiae Barsanti (BAR publishing, 2020).
Elisabeta Negrău is a Senior Researcher at George Oprescu Art History Institute, Romanian Academy, Bucharest. She is an art historian specializing in Byzantine and post-Byzantine iconography, focusing on medieval to early modern painting in Wallachia. Her broader research interests include the connections between artistic and social transformations. Among her publications are The Cult of the Southeast European Sovereign and the Case of Wallachia: Art Perspectives (in Romanian, 2011, 2020) and The Iconography of the Brancovan Mural Paintings in Vâlcea District (co-author, Romanian, 2008).
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Ovidiu Olar is a Senior Researcher at the N. Iorga Institute of History of the Romanian Academy and Junior Group Leader in the Balkan Studies Research Unit (ERC StG ORTHPOL project) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Ovidiu has authored Împăratul înaripat: Cultul arhanghelului Mihail în lumea bizantină [The winged emperor: The cult of the Archangel Michael in the Byzantine world] (2004), Răzbunare împotriva tiranilor: Teoria politică a protestantismului francez [Vindiciae contra Tyrannos: The political theory of the French Protestantism] (2007), and La boutique de Théophile: Les relations du patriarche de Constantinople Kyrillos Loukaris (1570–1638) avec la Réforme (2019).
Anita Paolicchi is a research fellow at the University of Pisa. She received her PhD in Art History in 2020 from the University of Florence with a dissertation on reliquaries and tabernacles in the Slavo-Byzantine world. She has been awarded a REIRES scholarship (University of Sofia, December 2019) and a research fellowship at the University of Bucharest (ICUB, 2021). She is also the cofounder of Astarte Edizioni (Pisa), a publishing house focused on the history, art, and literature of the Mediterranean world.
Ivan N. Petrov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Philology and the Ceraneum Center of the University of Lodz, Poland. He is a linguist with expertise in Old Church Slavonic, the history of the South Slavic languages, historical syntax and morphology of the Slavic languages, theory and practice of translation from (Old) Church Slavonic into modern languages, and issues in Old Polish grammar. He is also the author or coauthor of six books and several dozen peer-reviewed articles. Elena-Dana Prioteasa is a scientific researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and History of Art, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch. A former medical doctor, she graduated from the Department of History and Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (2000) with a specialization in History and Art History. She completed her PhD (2012) in the Medieval Studies Department of Central European University in Budapest. Her research focuses on medieval paintings in Transylvania and the interactions between Eastern and Western European cultures as reflected in artistic production.
Maria Alessia Rossi, PhD, is an Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Visualizing Christ’s Miracles in Late Byzantium: Art, Theology, and Court Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She also co-edited Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean (2019), Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages (2020), and Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (2021). Rossi is the co-founder of the initiative North of Byzantium and the digital platform Mapping Eastern Europe.
Grant Schrama is a doctoral student at Queen’s University, where he is finishing his dissertation on the cultural history of Frankish Greece. His work focuses on the application of postcolonial theory to the post-1204 East Roman world and on the characteristics of Western European colonialism during the Middle Ages. He also works on the history of the Baltic Crusades and medieval Bulgaria.
Małgorzata Skowronek, University of Lodz, is a Philologist and palaeoslavist. Her research focuses on the history of biblical narrations in old Slavic literature, Slavic apocrypha, South Slavic Mediaeval polemic literature and monastic codices, textology, and the reception of Polish translations of Old Slavic literature. She has authored studies on the cult of Archangel Michael amongst the Orthodox Balkan Slavs and on the South Slavic tradition of the Historical Palaea, as well as other critical works. She is also an editor and Polish translator of Old Church Slavic texts.
Alice Isabella Sullivan, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture and the Director of Graduate Studies at Tufts University, specializing in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the ByzantineSlavic cultural spheres. She is the author of award-winning articles in The Art Bulletin (2017) and Speculum (2019) and the co-author of a study in Gesta (2021), among other peer-reviewed publications. She is also the author of The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (Brill, 2023) and co-editor of several volumes. In addition, she is co-director of the Sinai Digital Archive and co-founder of North of Byzantium and Mapping Eastern Europe—two initiatives that explore the history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe during the medieval and early modern periods.
Iva Jazbec Tomaić holds a PhD from the University of Zagreb and is a teaching assistant at the Academy of Applied Arts at the University of Rijeka. Her research interests include textile culture and historical textiles, especially Venetian, late medieval, and early modern silk, and embroidery. She specialized at the Fondazione Arte della seta Lisio in Florence. Her current research focus is on the Venetian embroidery heritage of the fourteenth century. Margarita Voulgaropoulou received her PhD at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2014 and is now an Assistant Professor of Art History at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a Visiting Professor at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2015–16) and for the ERC-funded project “OTTOConfession” at Central European University (2016–20). Her research centers on the reception of icon painting and the cross-cultural and crossconfessional exchanges between the Catholic, Greek, and Serbian Orthodox populations of the Adriatic region. Nikolaos Vryzidis received his PhD from the SOAS University of London with a thesis on Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical textiles of the Ottoman period. His work investigates the interplay between identity and consumption in relation to portable objects in the premodern Mediterranean. In 2016, he convened a workshop on Mediterranean textiles, the results of which were published in an edited volume. His recent projects include a volume on the medieval religious arts and a handbook on Byzantine and post-Byzantine textiles.
Introduction
Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan
For much of the Middle Ages and into the post-Byzantine period, the regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and beyond stood at the intersection of different and competing traditions, among them the Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Islamic. Yet Byzantium, with its cultural legacy and spiritual power, offered some of the most influential artistic, literary, religious, and political models to be used and adapted in local contexts, in this case to the north of the Byzantine Empire. In highlighting local specificity as well as the interconnectedness and shared heritage of this geographical area, the collection of essays in this Handbook challenges established perceptions of what constitutes ideological and historical facets of the past, as well as Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural production in the regions of the Danube River in Eastern Europe.
This Handbook focuses attention on the relationship between Byzantium and the Danube regions between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. This relationship takes many forms, including instances of transmission, adaptation, negotiation, or eclecticism, and it informs our understanding of the role of these territories of Eastern Europe that are often neglected in scholarship and little known outside of local circles. Specifically, we designed this Handbook with three main aims: first, to present Byzantium in dialogue with other regions while redefining what this looks like. The Danube regions were not passive recipients of Byzantine culture or the legacy of the Byzantine Empire. Instead, these territories were active players, negotiating on their own terms their histories as well as artistic and cultural production. Second, we wanted to focus on the Danube in order to allow the geography of the territory to speak instead of imposing twentyfirst-century categorizations and labels. This major river in Europe—the continent's second largest—has long been a key marker on the topography, informing local developments, and it has served both as a connector and a divider. Our third and final aim is to structure the contents of this Handbook in such a way as to make them accessible and engaging to a broad audience. In fact, we have been working since 2018 to bring Eastern Europe, or the regions to the north of Byzantium, to the forefront of arthistorical discussions.1 This volume complements our efforts by creating a solid foundation for anyone interested in the region: the art-historical overviews offer in-depth discussions of the state of the research of key areas that then allow the specific case studies covered in the other chapters to be understood better and contextualized. Specifically, at first glance, this volume does not seem to reflect the structure of a traditional Handbook. But what a Handbook does is offer clear and straightforward teaching tools to the reader and it is our aim to reach this same goal by using a slightly different format. Chapter 1, the art historical overviews in the first section, and the selected bibliography at the end of the volume introduce readers to a basic knowledge of the artistic production of the region in light of the historical complexities and historiographical issues. The next three sections allow readers to delve into specific case studies showcasing the dynamism and cultural complexities of the region, as well as the original and interdisciplinary research of individual scholars and team of experts. Since Eastern Europe and the Danube regions in the period under scrutiny here are often neglected in Medieval Studies and Byzantine Studies, this volume offers introductions and tools for research, while revealing how vibrant the research and teaching potential can be in this area. Byzantium in Dialogue Whereas Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire have been at the center of scholarship for a long time, the relations of Byzantium and its northern neighbors have been little explored. The northern regions of the empire, located in present-day Eastern Europe, broadly conceived, have been studied within limited geographical, political, and temporal frameworks and never with the same interest and emphasis. Within the field of Byzantine Studies, these territories have been regarded as “peripheral” and often have been taken into account only as examples of “places of influence.” But Eastern Europe, in fact, offers a key to understanding how the Byzantine heritage was transmitted, continued, and transformed before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The histories, cultures, and artistic productions of the territories of the Danube, ranging from modernday Serbia to Slovakia and from Croatia to Romania, developed at the intersection of different cultural and religious traditions, but they are all notably indebted to those of Byzantium. The aim of this multiauthor, interdisciplinary volume is to broaden knowledge about Byzantium and look at the historical, intellectual, cultural, and ideological legacies of the empire from the point of view of its northern neighbors in the period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. As such, the temporal parameters of this volume span the decades before and after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, demonstrating aspects of both continuity and transformation. The year 1453, which has for long served as a cutoff date for the study of Byzantine and, more broadly, medieval culture, is here treated within a continuum. The territories of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine legacy continue to live on and develop after 1453. What this volume demonstrates is that bridging the medieval and early modern periods, as well as the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods, and engaging them in conversation, can be extremely fruitful. The Role of the Danube The terminology used for the regions of Eastern Europe often in itself creates limitations to the ways in which these territories have been approached and studied. Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe, and SouthEastern Europe have implicit connotations and have been used to include as much as to exclude different territories for political, religious, and socioeconomic agendas. Similarly, the Balkans has been used as a label for the regions to the south and north of the Danube, and while it is appropriate for the former, it is not for the latter. Within this volume, we wanted to offer an alternative by focusing on a specific region of Eastern Europe and defining it by its geographic characteristics, in this case, the Danube River. But why the Danube? By leaving aside the political categorizations and the borders of modern-day countries, the 24 chapters in this volume explore the many different roles of the Danube as connector and divider, as much as a place for trade and transmission as a site of contention. The Danube River flows from southern Germany, through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine to reach the Black Sea (Map 0.1).2 It has long connected Europe through navigation, trade, and commerce with far-reaching corners of the world. But the river has also served as a divider, marking boundaries between great powers and empires. In antiquity, it demarcated the northern borders of the Roman Empire. Beginning in the fourteenth century, many powers across Eastern Europe competed for control of the Danube, but the Ottoman Empire succeeded in establishing it as its northern border for several centuries. Today, too, parts of the Danube are division lines: it forms the southern border of Slovakia and Hungary, it marks a border between Serbia and Croatia, and it separates Romania from Serbia and Bulgaria. The geography is as complex now as it was during antiquity and the Middle Ages.
In scholarship, too, the Danube has served as a marker of connection and division, as well as a site of cultural contact and negotiation. In Architecture in the Balkans, Slobodan Ćurčić clearly states that his definition of the Balkans will be exclusively geographic, using the physical space and terrain as a demarcation of the territory: the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea to the west; the Mediterranean, Aegean, and the Sea of Marmara to the south; the Black Sea to the east; and the Danube and Sava rivers to the north. The use of the Danube as a divider, in this instance, was a challenging choice since Ćurčić himself states, “Culturally, these two late medieval entities [Wallachia and Moldavia] were intimately linked with contemporary developments in the Balkans.”4 Nevertheless, these connections are not explored in his monumental study.
On the opposite end, Robert G. Ousterhout, in his noteworthy contribution Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands, attempts to place in conversation architectural developments to the north and south of the Danube, thus supplementing Ćurčić's efforts. In Chapter 26 of his book, Ousterhout discusses “regional diversity” by looking at the architectural traditions of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania relative to Byzantium. Although each region negotiated in a local context, Byzantine traditions were mediated directly and indirectly, and each also developed a local architectural and visual idiom. As Ousterhout concludes: “While their late medieval predecessors had looked to Byzantine architectural forms for imagery that connoted power, authority, or sanctity, the new nations often sought to distance themselves from Byzantium, to focus on what was truly ‘theirs.’ One wonders if the inhabitants of the late medieval Balkans [and Carpathians] would have viewed these monuments similarly—that is, as regionally specific political signifiers—or whether religious affiliation outweighed national or ethnic identity.”5 In architecture, as in art and other cultural facets, the connections among the regions to the north and south of the Danube are apparent and worth analyzing, as is the local specificity and contacts with Byzantine traditions, especially in the periods before and after the fall of the empire in 1453. Similar notions of connectivity around the Danube are explored in two other noteworthy titles. Alina Payne, in Part Three of her book The Land Between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, 1300–1700, emphasizes the Danube as a connector, as a place of exchange, renewal, and transformation. The essays in this section demonstrate that access to the Danube allowed for the establishment of trade routes, the transportation and proliferation of commodities, and the cooperation and cohabitation of faiths and cultures. As Payne explains, “This liminal zone was neither periphery nor center but a world onto itself, more flexible and elastic in manners, tastes, and even faiths, and that it belies the simplistic binary view of East and West, Christian and Islamic, and high and low with which history writing has traditionally defined it.”6 A similar echo of connectivity is found in the volume Across the Danube: Southeastern Europeans and Their Travelling Identities (17th–19th c.), edited by Olga Katsiardi-Hering and Maria A. Stassinopoulou.7 Although its focus is on the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and thus on a period after the one covered in our volume, the notions of contact and exchange, the establishment of commercial networks and local communities, as well as issues of cultural and religious relations across the Danube, demonstrate the continuation and transformation into the modern period of key issues that our volume addresses for the earlier centuries. How to Use This Handbook The contributions to this book fall under four main thematic sections: “ArtHistorical Overviews,” “Contacts and Patronage Beyond Borders,” “Ideals and Ideologies in Images and Texts,” and “Adaptations and Transmissions Across Media and Geographies.” Before delving into a chapter overview, we would also like to offer suggestions for how this Handbook could be used. The chapters in the “Art-Historical Overviews” section could be used in introductory courses or as preliminary research to get a sense of the region in question, its artistic production, and how it has been studied to date. These chapters offer overviews that set the stage, so to speak, for the contributions that follow. Readers can get started learning about the regions of the Adriatic and those to the north and south of the Danube in Eastern Europe, Hungary, and Slovakia. Chapter 1, moreover, plays an introductory role by focusing on the historiographical issues and debates of the region. Also devised as a teaching tool is the “Selected Bibliography” at the end of the volume that gathers the most important scholarly contributions cited in the book, allowing readers and teachers to use this easily in the classroom and for research. These specific publications provide the general understanding of a particular region's historical picture, which the compelling case studies in the remaining chapters amplify, nuance, and complicate. Readers can also engage with the Handbook by media, type, or geography, depending on whether they want to learn more about monumental art and architecture, textile production, manuscripts, or metalwork or whether they want to focus attention on a particular region, be it Serbia, the Romanian principalities, or the Adriatic (Map 0.2). A map shows the location of monuments, artwork, and key cities across the European regions. A legend shows triangles representing the location of monuments, triangles representing artwork, and squares representing key cities.
This Handbook aims to highlight the most recent scholarship on key facets of the history, art, and culture of the Danube regions relative to Byzantium and other traditions, but, of course, more work remains to be done. A comprehensive study of Byzantium and the Danube area would require hundreds of chapters to tell a multitude of local stories and highlight the plethora of material and textual evidence. But that is not possible within the scope of this project. Nevertheless, this Handbook offers overviews, exemplary case studies, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches that could help guide and expand future studies on the rich history, art, and culture of Eastern Europe in the late medieval and postByzantine periods. Overview of the Chapters The various sections of this volume, detailed later, are preceded by Chapter 1, which contextualizes the twentieth-century historiographic concept of “Byzance après Byzance.” As Ovidiu Cristea and Ovidiu Olar explain, this concept has continued to stimulate scholarship on the legacy of Byzantium beyond the borders of the empire in the so-called post-Byzantine period across regions of Eastern Europe, especially in the Romanian principalities to the north of the Danube River, with some contributions challenging and others promoting this paradigm. The “Art-Historical Overviews” section includes six chapters that detail historiographical concerns and methodological approaches to the study of art, architecture, and visual culture in select regions of the Balkans and the Carpathians, including the Adriatic coast, Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Slovakia. These overviews are not exhaustive but offer glimpses into art-historical approaches and key monuments of study that we hope will sit at the foundation of future work in these and adjacent regions. In Chapter 2, Margarita Voulgaropoulou examines the reception and development of Byzantine pictorial forms in regions of the Adriatic, which were promoted through commercial and diplomatic contacts, as well as the circulation of Eastern Christian icons and the movement of icon painters. Artistic traditions were thus modified to cater to local Catholic and diasporic Eastern Christian groups, depending on the desires of the patron and the skill of the artist, resulting in new visual vocabularies that intermingled Western and Byzantine styles and iconographies. This chapter, moreover, engages with key issues of terminology, unpacking aspects of Adrio-Byzantinism, eclecticism, and hybridity. Nearby, in the Serbian cultural context, as Jelena Bogdanović, Ljubomir Milanović, and Marina Mihaljević demonstrate in Chapter 3, the artistic and architectural production between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries developed at the nexus of Byzantine, Latin, and Slavic domains, with evident impact from the Islamic cultural sphere in the later periods. The indebtedness to Byzantine artistic models, both direct and mediated through regions of the Balkans, is evident in the art and architecture of Wallachia, as well. As Elisabeta Negrău demonstrates in Chapter 4, the visual culture of Wallachia was mainly informed by Byzantine conventions between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, as evident in architecture, painting, and the decorative arts. But whereas Byzantine forms are more apparent in the earlier period, by the sixteenth century the visual culture of Wallachia offers a local adaptation of Byzantine, Balkan, East-Central European, and Ottoman models based on the desires of the patrons and the skills of the artists employed. A similar scenario is evident in the principality of Moldavia, as Vlad Bedros details in Chapter 5. The Moldavian artistic production similarly exhibits a plurality and eclecticism with respect to sources, being indebted to Byzantine and Western medieval models adapted in a local context. Moving to the West of the Carpathian Mountains, Chapter 6 shifts attention to the Kingdom of Hungary, offering a brief historical overview of the region and a historiographical overview of the Byzantine elements in local wall paintings. Aspects of Byzantine visual culture, as Zsombor Jékely explains, were mediated in this region from Byzantium and through regions of Italy and other parts of Central Europe. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 7, looks at the visual culture of modern Slovakia, the impact of Byzantium on icon painting, and the extant mural cycles found in Gothic churches. In this region, as Vladislav Grešlík explains, Byzantine culture was experienced directly in this region for much of the Middle Ages; in the post-Byzantine period, it was mediated through regions of the Balkans and the Carpathians, including western Ukraine. All of these chapters reveal the role of Byzantium in shaping local artistic traditions, but since these regions developed at a crossroads, other models also left an imprint. The modes of transmission and adaptation in local contexts, however, remain open to debate and research. These contributions, moreover, touch on local historiographic conventions, underscoring the opportunity for new readings and perspectives that this material invites of future researchers. The second section of the volume, “Contacts and Patronage Beyond Borders,” follows the same geographical path as the first part, moving from the Adriatic to the Balkans, the Carpathians, and parts of East-Central Europe, exploring various aspects of patronage informed by contact with Byzantium. In Chapter 8, Iva Jazbec Tomaić and Danijel Ciković look at silk patronage in the eastern Adriatic with a particular focus on luxurious embroidered liturgical objects created for the local social elites that demonstrate Byzantine and later Ottoman artistic styles and techniques. The patrons, in this case, had significant financial power, access to top artists, and selective tastes. Moving from economic and artistic concerns related to patronage to legal frameworks, Chapter 9 demonstrates relationships between texts, laws, and architectural projects relative to patronal figures, as well as how the Byzantine canons and texts were appropriated in a local Serbian context. In this chapter, Anna Adashinskaya details issues of patronage within and across social borders in the Serbian cultural context prior to the creation of the Serbian patriarchate in 1346, which shifted the structures of interaction between the ruler and Church officials in matters of monastic patronage. Chapter 10 moves to the northDanubian principalities and examines how the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia established ongoing contacts with the monasteries on Mount Athos and Mount Sinai, offering recurring monetary gifts and donations, which, in turn, helped promote aspects of Byzantine spirituality, culture, and art in these Carpathian regions. These contacts, as Alice Isabella Sullivan explains, were facilitated not only by patrons but also by the individuals who traveled between these centers to deliver the gifts and donations. Figures as key agents of contact and exchange are also the topic of Chapter 11, in which Marco Cassioli examines economic relations and the activities of Greek merchants in the Genoese Lower Danube. They facilitated contacts across the Black Sea, connecting parts of Eastern Europe to regions in Asia Minor. Chapter 12 demonstrates that Transylvania's visual culture, as evident primarily in wall paintings, shows aspects of east-west transmission between competing traditions and lived realities. Whereas the murals of the Orthodox churches emulate Byzantine stylistic and iconographic patterns, the elite donors represented in them chose to assimilate elements of the Western-infused culture that dominated most of Transylvania due to the institutional presence of the Hungarian Kingdom. The donors, as Elena-Dana Prioteasa argues, thus negotiated between East and West in their modes of self-fashioning, adapting Byzantine and Western models for their personal Orthodox desires. Further considering the direct and indirect mediation of Byzantium, Chapter 13 looks at icon painting and stone incrustation (both mosaic and opus sectile) in Prague. As Jana Gajdošová demonstrates, Charles IV manipulated the ancient past to fit his new ruling ideologies through his patronage of icons, as well as the decoration of spaces of Prague Cathedral. Drawing on textual sources and material evidence, these chapters contextualize various facets of patronage in regions of the Danube, demonstrating how the heritage of Byzantium was adopted, mediated, and transformed in local contexts. The third section of the volume engages with “Ideals and Ideologies in Images and Texts.” In Chapter 14, Andrei Dumitrescu addresses notions of ruling ideology and the monarchic institution in the post-Byzantine Moldavian context through analyses of key visual representations of princely portraits, depictions of Christ, and their spatial organization in the interiors of churches. The contribution details local interpretations of Byzantine and Balkan visual forms and meanings, while aiming to refine understandings of the religious construction of political legitimacy after 1453. Moving from the Moldavian to the Wallachian cultural context and from the second half of the fifteenth century to the initial decades of the sixteenth century, Chapter 15 examines the relationship between ethics, piety, and politics in the text known as the Teaching of Neagoe Basarab to His Son Theodosie. This text, as Ioana Manea explains, adapts aspects of the Byzantine tradition of mirrors of princes to shape local ruling ideologies in the Wallachian context. In Chapter 16, Zofia A. Brzozowska shifts attention to images, particularly the representation of Sophia—the personification of divine wisdom—in the southern Slavic context. Rare in Byzantine art, this iconographic type became popular in regions to the south and north of the Danube River in the late Middle Ages, becoming intimately tied to monastic contexts and ideals. Bringing the religious and the secular in dialogue, Chapter 17 examines the relationships between political ideology and spiritual connections in the Serbian cultural context relative to Byzantium. Irene Caracciolo looks at the legitimizing role of Saint Nicholas as a dynastic saint in the various hagiographies of Stefan III Uroš Dečanski (r. 1321–31) and their pictorial manifestations. Finally, Chapter 18 analyzes textual sources to explain how the Eastern Romans (or Byzantines) and the Bulgarians perceived each other in the decades after the Fourth Crusade. Grant Schrama demonstrates that these perceptions oscillate between difference, stereotype, and communal identity. The chapters in this section make use of text and image to complicate our understanding of the political, social, and religious ideals of these territories in relation to Byzantium. These take the form of shared iconographies imbued with different meanings at different times and the circulation of written texts to analyze local perceptions as well as ruling ideologies. The final section, “Adaptations and Transmissions Across Media and Geographies,” explores visual and textual evidence of cross-cultural contacts, transmission, and exchange in the Danube regions with examples spanning from metalwork to paratexts and from architectural trends to textiles. Chapter 19 addresses issues of terminology in the study of the cultural heritage of Eastern Europe and the visual eclecticism of local metalwork relative to Byzantine, Western medieval, and Islamic traditions in the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Anita Paolicchi focuses on the adaptability of metalwork and identifies networks of contacts that developed across Eastern Europe at this time, which facilitated the movement of artists, ideas, and objects. These enabled new visual forms and adaptations across media to emerge, contributing to new stylistic features and technical innovations. Turning attention to textiles, Nikolaos Vryzidis in Chapter 20 examines textiles and sartorial traditions in the regions of the Balkans and the Carpathians and how these were informed by Byzantine, Central Asian, and Persian traditions in terms of style, iconography, and technique. Chapter 21 shifts attention to architecture. Serena Acciai contextualizes the development and proliferation of overhanging rooms in the houses of the Danube region relative to competing traditions in the East and West. The final three chapters focus attention on key aspects of medieval texts. Chapter 22 examines the Alexander Romance and its transmission through manuscripts from Byzantium throughout the Slavic cultural contexts, with examples preserved in repositories to the north and south of the Danube River. Antoaneta Granberg demonstrates that regions of the Balkans and the Carpathians adapted this Byzantine text for local use but shared a similar transmission of the text. The text appealed to both secular men and clerics and was often enhanced with secular and religious additions. Transmission is also a key theme of Chapter 23, in which Małgorzata Skowronek shows how the text of the Palaea Historica was transformed in different South Slavic contexts, combining various genres and styles, including biblical narratives, liturgical poetry, and polemical statements, among others. Finally, Chapter 24 looks at small literary forms or paratexts found in South Slavic manuscripts, arguing for their standard codicological, paleographic, and cultural value. Izabela Lis-Wielgosz and Ivan Petrov assert that such notations offer insight into the individual, the community, or the region that used and adapted a particular text.
Outcomes and Future Directions By examining the cultural production of the territories to the north and south of the Danube, the 24 chapters in this volume deepen our understanding of this river as a connector as much as a divider; the Danube was a site of mediation, transformation, adaptation, and contention. The role of Byzantium and its legacy through texts and images are at the heart of this volume. Through examinations of the surviving sources, each chapter challenges our understanding of what is Byzantine in the Danube regions, where Byzantium ends (be it before or after 1453), and where we can start identifying local trends and negotiations. These territories are not discussed in a vacuum: Byzantine, Western, Slavic, and Islamic traditions are involved, revealing a much more complex and eclectic reality than previous scholarship has often assumed. Furthermore, what emerges from the explanations and analyses is the importance of local connections and cultural contacts: borders were shifting constantly, people and objects were moving, and boundaries were not as fixed as sometimes presumed. In fact, Byzantine, Western, Slavic, and even Islamic models all made their way directly into the Danubian region and were mediated by local contexts. We designed this volume to complement Florin Curta's The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500– 1300, which explores the complex history and culture of the regions of Eastern Europe, including those around the Danube River, in the centuries preceding our efforts.8 This present volume continues Curta's story, while bringing to the fore the richness of the extant textual and visual sources and the various modes of their interpretation and contextualization. Together, these two Handbooks could serve as a strong foundation for the study of Eastern Europe in the classroom and among diverse audiences.
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