Download PDF | Steven Runciman - The Last Byzantine Renaissance, Cambridge University, Press 1970.
123 Pages
PREFACE
This book is made up of four lectures delivered at the Queen’s University, Belfast, under the aegis of the Wiles Trust. They are printed much as they were delivered, with some slight re-arrangement and the verbal alterations needed when the spoken word is transformed into the written word. One of the features of the Wiles Lectureship is that scholars interested in the subject of the lectures are invited not only to attend them but promptly to criticize what the lecturer has said. I have profited from that salutary experience and have made a few further emendations in my text.
The nature of my subject precludes startling original research. It has, rather, been my aim to try to correlate and to put into perspective the intellectual achievements of the last two centuries of the Byzantine Empire, when the State was collapsing but learning never shone more brightly. I have made one serious omission. It would have taken too much time and space to have included a worthy discussion of the art that was the most splendid achievement of the period. The product of Byzantine scholars is less attractive to us today than the product of Byzantineartists. But scholarship should be judged by the standards of its age, not by the tastes of subsequent generations.
I have to confess that I have not read every word of the works of scholarship about which I am writing. That would be the task of a lifetime, especially as many of them are unpublished and not easily accessible nor easily legible. I am dependent for my knowledge of them to the labours of scholars who have studied them. Though I have tried at least to glance at the accessible printed works, I must admit that I have not had the time nor the enthusiasm needed to wade through the endless commentaries of ancient works of which the Byzantines were so proud, and whose style is for the most part distinguished for verbosity and elaboration. There are, indeed, writers amongst them whose works can be read with pleasure, such as Cabasilas and Demetrius Cydones; but they are in the minority.
Not wishing the text to be dwarfed by the referencenotes, I have kept the latter as short as possible. In particular, when dealing with individual scholars, I have avoided long bibliographical details but have preferred to refer to secondary works where such information can be easily found. My notes bear witness to the debt that I owe to such works. In transliterating Greek names I have kept to the traditional old Latin system, except where the name is more familiar in another form.
I should like to express my thanks to Mrs Janet P. Boyd, to whose generosity the Wiles Lectures owe their existence; to the Vice-Chancellor of the Queen’s University and Mrs Vick, to Professor Michael Roberts, and to other friends in Belfast who also gave me hospitality and help. And it is a special pleasure to me that the publication of the Wiles Lectures is assigned to the Cambridge University Press, to whose helpful friendship I have long been indebted.
STEVEN RUNCIMAN Elshieshields, Dumfriesshire, 1969.
IMPERIAL DECLINE AND HELLENIC REVIVAL
IF THERE IS any meaning in the concept of decadence, there are few polities in history that better deserve to be called decadent than the East Christian Empire, the once great Roman Empire, during the last two centuries of its existence. It was a period when a crumbling administration, directed by an inept and short-sighted government and centred ina city whose population was rapidly diminishing, vainly attempted to ward off increasing impoverishment and the steady loss of territory. The irresponsible ambitions of its leaders encouraged disastrous civil wars. Militarily and economically the decline was rapid. The Emperor himself was poorer and feebler than most of the princes whose domains surrounded him, and he was soon to become the vassal of an infidel master. The political history of Byzantium under the Emperors of the Palaeologan dynasty is a tale of folly and misery, until at last the coup de grace of 1453 comes almost as a relief.
Yet was it a period of decadence? In strange contrast with the political decline, the intellectual life of Byzantium never shone so brilliantly as in those two sad centuries. In the sphere of art the earlier Palacologan period was of supreme importance; and if the artistic output faltered and failed as time went on, that was due to the lack of material resources, not of inspiration. It was an age of eager and erudite philosophers, culminating in its later years in the most original of all Byzantine thinkers, George Gemistus Plethon. The previous generation had produced the finest mystical exegetist of the Eastern Church in Gregory Palamas. There was a sequence of ingenious scientists, whose discoveries, however, could not find practical expression because of the poverty of the State. At no other epoch was Byzantine society so highly educated and so deeply interested in things of the intellect and the spirit.
The contrast is not easy to explain. Maybe we should look at it in reverse. Intellectuals are seldom good administrators. Had there been fewer of them in high places the government might have been more competent. The subjects of the cultured Emperor Andronicus might well have longed for a ruler less devotedly concerned with culture, such as the great Basil II. A civil service chosen for its high scholarship is not always the most effective. To quarrel passionately over the doctrine of the Energies of God when the enemy is overrunning the countryside and plague devastating the cities shows a sense of priorities admirable in the truly religious but unsuited for practical efficiency. Was it that the intense piety which had always inspired the Byzantine interest in philosophy and theology had now grown too great? Or was it a vicious circle? The more that the Byzantines concentrated on the intellect and the spirit the less able they were to meet the challenge of the outside world: while their failure to meet the challenge induced them, in the deepening gloom, to devote themselves more and more to the things that mattered for the world to come.
It is impossible to understand the Byzantines without remembering their piety. Every one of them firmly believed that this world was only a prelude to a better world in which he would share if he remained true to the Faith. He was not unaware of this world. In his personal actions he was full of practical and not always very ethical good sense; and his political dealings were often very astute. Byzantine diplomacy showed to the end a cynical appreciation of the human weaknesses of foreign statesmen and foreign peoples. But in his worldly dealings he was apt to look for immediate results. His longer view was dominated by his piety, which could easily lead to defeatism and even apathy when things went wrong. The disasters that befell the Empire were seen as divine punishment for the sins of its citizens. They were therefore inevitable and just. This belief did not prevent the Byzantines from continuing to sin. In particular the princes and magnates never ceased from indulging their ambitions by intrigue or even by open rebellion, and by behaviour that in any other society would have ranked as treason.
The melancholy sequence of political events certainly suggested that sin was rampant. It is fashionable amongst present-day Byzantine historians to play down the effects of the Latin capture of Constantinople in 1204.! The doom of the Empire was sealed earlier, at Manzikert and by the Turkish invasions, and the loss to the Empire of its economic and demographic heartlands in Anatolia. That may be true; and, if we wish, we can go further back and trace the decline to the ineffectual social and economic policy of the administration of the mid-eleventh century. But the search for earlier causes does not lessen the terrible effect that the events of 1204 had on Byzantium, politically and morally. New Rome, the Imperial City, the home of the Emperors and the centre of their government, had fallen into the hands of hated and despised Westerners. Not only was the whole physical organization of the Empire ruined, but the humiliation was bitter and unforgettable.
The sacred Imperial power was driven into exile; and even in exile it was divided, with claimants in Nicaea, in Epirus and in Trebizond; and even though the Nicaean Emperors eliminated the rivalry of the Epirotes, Trebizond remained as a separate entity and even survived Constantinople, with which its relationship was always a little equivocal. When the Nicaeans liberated Constantinople and re-established the Empire in its proper capital, it was not the same Empire. It no longer represented the Christian East. It was merely one State amongst others in the Levant; and most of the others were materially more powerful. The Imperial title still maintained a curious mystical prestige; Balkan monarchs were eager to have their own titles recognized by the Emperor; and this prestige was backed by the prestige of the great city and its great church and its historic Patriarchate. But even the Imperial prestige was fading. In about 1395 the Patriarch Anthony of Constantinople had to write to the Great Prince Basil I of Russia to remind him that, though the Empire was reduced to tragic straits, the Emperor was still the Holy Emperor, the head of the Orthodox commonwealth.!
The old conception of the Christian Empire was becoming a myth. Nevertheless, the shock of the disaster of 1204 seemed to give new force to the intellectual vitality of the Byzantines. It is interesting, if idle, to speculate on what might have happened had the Latin Empire of Romania produced other Emperors of the calibre of Henry of Flanders, men who sincerely sought to reconcile and absorb their Orthodox subjects, or even had Henry himself lived longer, or had the Roman Church shown greater flexibility and sympathy in dealing with the Greeks. Possibly then the majority of the Greeks might have accepted the new order, and a Greco-Latin synthesis might have evolved. But, as it was, the livelier elements in the Greek intellectual world went into exile, a few into the seclusion of monasteries and the rest to one or other of the Greek succession-states, eventually gathering round the Court at Nicaea, which seems to have the best claim to legitimacy and to offer the best hopes for the future.
Backed as it was by many of the best Greek brains of the time, the Nicaean Empire suggested that the Byzantines were recovering both their practical talent for government and their moral confidence. The Empire was well administered, with realistic common-sense and homely thrift. Where else could one find an Emperor making enough money out of his poultry-keeping to buy his Empress a new crown? The Nicaean diplomats showed the traditional Byzantine skill in taking advantage of their enemies’ rivalries and quarrels; and they were helped by the temporary weakness of the Turks, whose eyes were necessarily turned eastward, towards the menacing Mongols. The Court was highly cultured, and the Emperors were all of them men who commanded respect. Meanwhile the Latin Empire was sinking further and further into ineptitude. No one can have been greatly surprised when in 1261 troops from Nicaea recovered Constantinople.?
It was with happy hopes for the future that the Empire was reinstated in its sacred and historic capital. But the reconquest created new problems. It roused schemes of revenge among the Western powers. It caused difficulties with the Italian sea-port cities whose merchants had taken control of the international trade of the city and were not to be dislodged. The city itself had to be administered and fed and protected from the ambitions of the Balkan princes. The government was so anxiously concerned with potential dangers from the Balkans and from the West that it began to neglect the Eastern frontier. There the Turks had long been quiescent, but now a vigorous new emirate was emerging, led by Osman and his successors. The Empire was to pay heavily for this neglect.
The Emperor Michael Palaeologus, the recoverer of Constantinople, saw the Empire safely through the immediate crises. The Empire was still rich. The thrift of the Nicaeans had left the treasury full. The Italian capture of the carrying trade did not destroy but, rather, enhanced the importance of the markets in Constantinople: while Thessalonica, the second city of the Empire, prospered as the chief port of the Balkans.
Michael’s diplomacy was aided by his discreet use of money. The plot culminating in the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, in which he was deeply involved, lessened the danger from the West; and his intrigues kept the Serbian and Bulgarian rulers from threatening his dominions and enabled him to recover lands in the Greek peninsula from the Franks. But he left the Empire divided internally. He was an usurper, and he had promised to maintain the rights and welfare of the young legitimate Emperor, John IV. When he brutally broke his promise, the Patriarch Arsenius excommunicated him, and he in his turn dethroned the Patriarch. This caused a schism in the Church. While most of the hierarchs were prepared to forgive him once he had made an act of contrition, many of the lesser clergy and the monks, who were always resentful of Imperial control of the Church, continued to regard him as excommunicated and Arsenius as Patriarch. The Arsenites, as they were called from their somewhat unwilling leader, formed for a generation a party that refused to co-operate with the State; but after Michael’s death in 1282 they faded out.
But meanwhile Michael’s policy had led to a more lasting division. In his desire to ward off attacks from the West he decided that it would be politically desirable for the Church of Constantinople to re-unite itself with the Church of Rome, even though Rome demanded the submission of Constantinople as the price of union. His policy stirred up a controversy that was to last, with varying intensity, until the fall of the Empire in 1453. Henceforward, while every thinking Byzantine had to make up his mind whether or not his Church ought to submit to Rome, the Byzantine man in the street, to whom the idea was repugnant, turned against any Emperor or minister who sought to further the union.!
After Michael’s death the Empire, politically and economically, began to run steadily downhill. His son and successor, Andronicus II, was a highly educated man of great personal charm, but ineffectual as a ruler. He restored peace amongst his subjects by reconciling the Arsenites and by repudiating the union with Rome that his father had accepted at the Council of Lyons. But the Ottoman Turks now presented a threat that could not be ignored; and his attempt to curb them by hiring the services of the disreputable Catalan Company resulted in the Company devastating his own territory and doing nothing to stem the Turkish advance. He could not prevent the ominous rise of the Serbian kingdom. He could not control his own relations or his ministers. Eventually, after a reign distinguished for its cultural and artistic activities but otherwise disastrous, he began to lose his earlier popularity. His eldest son predeceased him; but his grandson, Andronicus III, led the opposition against him, and, after seven years of fitful civil war, deposed him in 1328.
Andronicus III, ably helped by his chief minister, John Cantacuzenus, was a more vigorous ruler under whom the Empire won some successes in Thessaly and Greece. But the civil war had been debilitating. The Turks continued to advance in Asia and the Serbs in Europe. When he died in 1341 only a few isolated towns were left to the Empire in Asia, and the Serbians were at the gates of Thessalonica. The fifty-year reign of Andronicus’s son, John V (1341-91), was a period of unceasing disaster. John, who was ten years old at the time of his accession, was removed from power in the course of it by his father-in-law, his son and his grandson, though he was never actually deposed and died as Emperor.
The reign began with a civil war of six years’ duration, when John Cantacuzenus, deprived of his expectancy of the regency by the intrigues of the Empress-Mother, Anna of Savoy, and of the Patriarch, John Calecas, resorted to arms and was eventually recognized as John V’s senior colleague in the Empire, the young Emperor marrying his daughter. But John VI Cantacuzenus was unseated in a plot in 1354 and spent the rest of his long life as a monk, but treated also as an elder statesman. John V then governed feebly for nineteen years, to be unseated by his eldest son, Andronicus IV, for a few months in 1373 and again from 1376 to 1379. Andronicus continued to plot until his death in 1385; and in 1390 John VII, the son of Andronicus, drove his aged grandfather into retirement for nearly a year.'
The plots and civil wars were disastrous for the Empire. They used up its wealth; they dislocated trade; and neither side had any scruple about inviting foreign forces to intervene. As a result, the Turks were able to establish themselves in Europe in the 1340s and by 1360 controlled the whole province of Thrace. The power of Serbia grew and might have overwhelmed the Empire had not disorders followed the death of the great Serbian monarch, Stephen Dushan, in 1355. In the end it was the Turks who destroyed the Serbian menace. They annexed the greater part of Bulgaria during the years that followed their great victory over the Serbian and Bulgarian armies on the River Maritsa in 1371, and most of Serbia after their still greater victory at Kossovo in 1389. By the time of John V’s death the Turkish dominions had reached the River Danube, and the Christian Empire consisted of little more than Constantinople itself, a few sea-ports strung ‘along the Balkan coastline, a few small islands in the Aegean Sea, and the Peloponnese, ruled by cadets of the Imperial family, where alone Byzantine arms and diplomacy had met with some success. Thessalonica had been temporarily held by the Turks in 1387 and was annexed by them in 1394. Since about 1375 the Emperor had acknowledged the suzerainty of the Turkish Sultan.!
Visitations of the plague had helped to ruin the economy and the well-being of the Empire. The Black Death struck Constantinople in 1347. Horrified contemporaries declared that nine-tenths of its population perished. Allowing for medieval exaggerations it is probable that the population of the city did decline by nearly a half, and that of the whole Empire by about a third. Though the neighbouring Turks and Balkan peoples suffered too, their more rural economy made their losses not quite so severe.”
Social problems added to the chaos. The civil war between John Cantacuzenus and the government of the Empress Anna has been explained asa struggle between the landed magnates and the urban proletariat. This view is, I think, an oversimplification. If we examine the reactions of the Byzantines of whom we know some thing, we find that each reacted individually to individual questions, without following any consistent party-line. There was certainly hostility between the poorer citizens of the cities and the landed aristocracy that ran the government; but it was affected more by religion than by politics, while personalities counted for more than policies. There were indeed massacres of the magnates in the course of the civil wars in several cities; and the Zealot rising in Thessalonica, which gave those municipal rebels control of their city from 1342 to 1349 and disrupted its hitherto prosperous life, was accompanied by class bloodshed. But even there it is impossible to distinguish the social from the religious issues and unwise to ignore the clash of personalities. !
The fourteenth century was thus for Byzantium a century of decline from which recovery was impossible. The admirable efforts of the Emperor Manuel IT, who succeeded his father John V in 1391, were fruitless, even though the Turks were checked for a time by the invasion of Anatolia by Timur the Tartar and his victory over the Sultan at Ankara. Byzantium was given a respite. A few cities, including Thessalonica, were restored to Imperial rule: though Thessalonica was sold by its despairing governor to the Venetians in 1423, and the Turks re-annexed it in 1430. Manuel himself, till the close of his reign, when his son, John VIII, had taken over the government, kept on fairly good terms with the Turks. But Constantinople and the Empire itself were clearly doomed. The reign of John VIII (1425-48), was dominated by the question of union with Rome, the policy which the Emperor believed might bring aid that could perhaps save the Empire, but which was rejected even so by most of his subjects. The end came under John’s brother and successor, Constantine XI, when a vigorous and brilliant young Sultan, Mehmet II, to be surnamed the Conqueror, organized and administered the final blow.:
This is the background against which we must see the scholars of Palaeologan Constantinople. It is a period that begins with a short-lived feeling of hope, after the recovery of the capital from the Latins, but which soon sinks into disorder and disillusion and at last despair. How was it that the intellectual life could burgeon so splendidly?
The disaster of 1204 provided the first stimulus. The Byzantines had always been conscious of their Greek past. They might call themselves Romans and remember proudly that theirs was the legitimate Roman Empire. Still more, they were Christians, to whom pagan learning was of secondary importance in comparison with the Christian revelation. But their language was Greek, their literature written in Greek; and the works of the ancient Greek world were still studied and admired. Homer was to them ‘the Poet’, quotations from whose poems were expected to be immediately recognized and appreciated.! Plato and Aristotle were to them teachers with whose philosophy anyone with a claim to education must have some acquaintance. Their sciences all rested on old Classical foundations.” But the word ‘Hellene’ was to be avoided, as it carried the meaning of ‘Pagan’. The Byzantine child had to ‘hellenize’ his tongue (as Anna Comnena words it); that is to say, he had to learn to write Greek in a Classical style with a Classical vocabulary. The study of rhetoric, as this discipline was called, was a necessary part of a full education. But the language taught in it was far removed from the spoken tongue. It aimed at Attic purity, but it became far too often an artificial katharevousa, flowery and verbose. In defence of rhetoric we should remember that, in the days before printing, a book if it was to circulate at all widely would have to be read aloud, the number of manuscripts being limited ; and a concise style, however agreeable to an individual reader, is often difficult for a listener to follow. A wordier style suits him better. But, unfortunately, too many Byzantine writers became intoxicated by wordsand wrote with such elaboration that neither reader nor listener could easily comprehend the meaning.!
This education enabled a Byzantine to read the Classics; and the Classics were read. It is true that the Byzantines had a love for compilations and encyclopedias, short cuts to learning. But this love should not be exaggerated. The originals were not neglected. Indeed, when making quotations, they were all too often apt to rely upon faulty memories and not to consult their dictionary of quotations.?
The cult of the Classics was thus nothing new. It had been encouraged by the Iconoclastic Emperors. It had been actively patronized by Constantine Prophyrogenitus and by the cultured Emperors of the eleventh century. During the twelfth century the scholarship became a little more profound. The commentaries on Classical authors made by John Tzetzes, who was born early in the century, cover an enormous range and show enormous erudition, though to modern eyes they may seem naive and superficial, and are unsuitably written in indifferent verse.! Inthe next generation Eustathius, Metropolitan of Thessalonica, a pious and active hierarch, found time to write a commentary on Homer which is first class and still of value; and healso studied Hesiod.? Atthe end of the century Michael Acominatus, Metropolitan of Athens, was a Classical humanist whose sensitive appreciation of past literature is reflected in the easy elegance of his letters. Though he was a sincere Christian, to whom ‘ Hellene’ still meant ‘pagan’, he felt himself to be of the same mould as the Hellenes.3
This consciousness of the Hellenic inheritance was enhanced by the Latin Conquest and the exile in Nicaea. Byzantium still claimed to be the Roman Empire; but the claim must have begun to sound a little hollow to men who saw Westerners controlling New Rome and Old Rome itself at the centre of an ebullient civilization. The Westerners had defeated and humilia~ ted Byzantium; but there was one thing that they could not take away and that they could not as yet share; and that was the Greek tradition. On their side the Westerners began to realize something of the wealth of Greek learning. They discovered that in the Greek lands which they had invaded, Aristotle, the philosopher whom they were beginning to admire so greatly, could be read and studied in his original words, and Plato too, and other philosophers whose names they knew. They despised the Greeks around them, but they could not despise Greek learning. It was natural that the Greeks should make use of this asset. They were proud to be Greeks. The word ‘Hellene’ began to lose its pejorative connotation.
It is possible that demographic reasons aided the change in sentiment. The loss to Byzantium of central Anatolia and the Balkan hinterland reduced the Empire to territories that had been Greek since the dawn of history, lands in the Greek peninsula itself and along the coasts of the Aegean and the Euxine and in the islands, where the earliest Greek colonies had been settled. Greek blood had been mixed even in Classical times and had become far more mixed in the cosmopolitan centuries that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great and the oecumenical centuries of Rome and the Later Roman Empire. But now the Byzantines, concentrated in historic Greek territories, could know themselves to be geographically Greek and could imagine themselves to be racially Greek.
It was not, however, until the mid-fourteenth century that Byzantine writers dared to make use of the word ‘Hellene’ to describe themselves.! In the great speech that the Emperor Michael VIII made at Nymphaeum a few days before his triumphant entry into Constantinople, a speech which contains the germ of the later Megal Idea, the doctrine that the Greeks are a race specially endowed down the ages by the grace of God to take the lead, politically and intellectually in Europe and in Asia, he was thinking of old Greek traditions but he referred to his people as the Romans— Rhomaioi—while the citizens of Rome itself were merely called Italians, /ta/o7.2 Even in the later fourteenth century intellectuals such as the ex-Emperor John Cantacuzenus, who was perhaps a little conservative in his views, and Nicephorus Gregoras, who regarded himself as completely up-to-date, still use ‘Hellenic’ to describe the old pagan learning as opposed to the ‘inner’ learning of Christian theology.
The new use of ‘Hellene’ seems to have been inaugurated in Thessalonica. Thessalonica had always been a Greek city, without the Imperial oecumenical traditions of Constantinople. Its hierarchs had in the distant past, it is true, been the exarchs of the Roman pontiffs in the East. But they liked to forget that they owed their prefix of ‘Holiness’ to that position. The schools of Thessalonica had long been centres for Classical learning; and the work and influence of the great Metropolitan Eustathius had enhanced their reputation. By the end of the thirteenth century a large proportion of the leading Byzantine scholars were Thessalonians by birth or by upbringing. It is in the writings of one of the most distinguished members of this Thessalonian milieu that we first find the new use of the word ‘Hellene’. In an eloquent encomium of Saint Demetrius, patron saint of the city, which Nicholas Cabasilas wrote as a young man, in about 1348, he describes Thessalonica as the second Athens, the home of the Hellenes of his day; and, in a covering letter that he sent with a copy of the encomium from Constantinople where he was living to his father in Thessalonica, he expresses his misgivings in letting him see the work for fear that its inelegant language might shock ‘you Hellenes’.!
Cabasilas there uses the word in a cultural sense, but without any suggestion that Hellenes were to be equated with pagans. Soon, more significantly, we find the word used in a racial sense. Nicephorus Gregoras kept up a correspondence with a Cypriot scholar, Athanasius Lepenthrenus, from whom he wanted to find out what remained of ancient Greek splendours in Cyprus and in other places which Lepenthrenus, who was an eager traveller, had visited. Gregoras is careful in his terminology; but Lepenthrenus, in a letter written in about 1355, speaks openly of ‘all the Hellenes here in Cyprus’, and goes on later, when speaking of other lands, to mention ‘everywhere where Hellenes live’.?
Very soon afterwards we find Demetrius Cydones, who, like Cabasilas, was born and brought up in Thessalonica, though of Cretan origin, using ‘ Hellas’ to mean the Byzantine Empire. Ina later letter Cabasilas follows his example.3 By the fifteenth century the usage was fairly general. In about 1440 John Argyropoulos wrote of the struggle for the freedom of ‘ Hellas’ in a letter addressed to John VIII as ‘Emperor of Hellas’.! We have come a long way from the days when the ambassador Liudprand of Cremona was thought unfit to be received at the Court because his credentials were addressed to the ‘Emperor of the Greeks’. But “Graeci’? was never an acceptable term. George Scholarius, the future Patriarch Gennadius, who was to be the link between the old Byzantine world and the world of the Turcocratia, often uses ‘ Hellene’ to mean anyone of Greek blood. But he had doubts about its propriety ; he still retained the older view. When he was asked his specific opinion about his race, he wrote in reply: ‘Though I am a Hellene by birth, yet I would never say that I was a Hellene. For I do not believe as the Hellenes believed. I should like to take my name from my faith and, if anyone asked me what I am, to reply “a Christian”. Though my father dwelt in Thessaly,” he adds, ‘I do not call myself a Thessalian, but a Byzantine. For I am of Byzantium.”? It is to be remarked that though he repudiates the name of Hellene he calls the Imperial City not New Rome or Constantinople, but by its old Hellenic name.
This revolutionary revival of the word ‘Hellene’ gives a clue to the nature of the last Byzantine Renaissance. It was a Greek, a Hellenic, renaissance. With their political power crumbling around them the Byzantines clung to their great cultural asset. In a world where ancient Greek learning was increasingly admired they could claim that they were Greeks, the heirs in unbroken succession to the poets and philosophers, the historians and scientists of ancient Hellas; and the claim carried them proudly on. Ethnologists may question the racial basis of the claim, theologians point out the difference in culture that Christianity had brought; and historians may reflect that an Athenian gentleman of the fifth century B.c. would have felt far from home in Constantinople of the fifteenth century A.D. Yet the claim was not illegitimate. The Greek world of the last two centuries of Byzantium had shrunk now to become little more than a group of citystates, Constantinople, Thessalonica, Trebizond and Mistra. It had become, far more truly than Byzantium in its grand Imperial days, the descendant of the citystates of the ancient Hellenic world, and it showed the same intellectual vivacity and bustle.
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