Download PDF | The Patriarchate of Constantinople in Context and Comparison , By Christian Gastgeber, Ekaterini Mitsiou, Johannes Preiser-kapeller, Zervan Vratislav, Austrian Academy of Sciences 2017.
405 Pages
Preface
This volume presents the papers from the international conference dedicated to “The Patriarchate of Constantinople in Context and Comparison”, held at Vienna, 12"~15™ September 2012, and organised by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project “Edition of the Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople”! in cooperation with the EU project POSDRU 89/1.5/S/61104 of the Romanian Academy of Sciences”. The conference and the published results are parts of a large-scale European research focus whose principal investigators and collaborators are united in the common platform PATRHIST”. This international network aims at a co-operative research and linkage of projects on the second most important, partially also the first ranking factor of power in Byzantine history and religious policy. This volume thus continues a series of respective studies such as the proceedings of the first congress in Vienna (2009) entitled “The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. An Essential Source for the History and Church of Late Byzantium” or the proceedings of the thematic round table at the 22™ International Conference of Byzantine Studies (Sofia, 2011): “Le Patriarcat cecuménique de Constantinople et Byzance hors frontiéres (1204-1586).
Experts on religious, political, social, economical, and administrative history as well as on philology dealt with the following topics: The Patriarchate before the Register (LAURITZEN, GOUNARIDIS, TUDORIE, STAVROU) — Privileges, monasteries, and institutions (SMYRLIS, MITSIOU, EVANGELOU, CONGOURDEAU, ESTANGUI GOMEZ, MALATRAS, MELVANI) — Charters, texts, and copies (BLANCHET, GASTGEBER, PAIZIAPOSTOLOPOULOU, APOSTOLOPOULOS) — The Patriarchate beyond Constantinople (GEROLYMATOU, SHERWAN, VETOCHNIKOV, PREISER-KAPELLER, BENGA) — Introduction and Synthesis (HARRIS, MATSCHKE).
The conference was overshadowed by the bereavement of a leading scholar in Byzantine canonical law, Konstantinos G. Pitsakis, who died shortly before the event. It is therefore our heartfelt desire to dedicate the conference and the proceedings to his memory. The conference opened with a commemoration of that leading scholar by his friend and colleague Andreas Schminck of the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. The tragedy of life did not allow our colleague and adviser Andreas Schminck to see this volume published: he died in December 2015 We likewise owe it to him and his constant willingness to help with questions of canonical law to dedicate the volume to his memory as well.
This book would not have been published had the Austrian Science Fund not covered the costs of printing and open access. We want to express many thanks to the Austrian Science Fund for this essential support.
Finally, the editors would particularly like to thank their teacher and supervisor, Prof. Otto Kresten, for his guidance during years of reading and interpreting texts from the register of the patriarchate in his seminars and for evoking interest for this unique source in the Austrian National Library.
A technical remark at the end: the use of abbreviated cited literature—unless stated otherwise in the articles—follows the guidelines of the Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen Byzantinistik.
The editors Vienna, March 2016
The Patriarch of Constantinople and the last days of Byzantium
It has often been pointed out that whereas the Byzantine Empire came to an abrupt end in May 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, the patriarchate did not. Following his takeover, Sultan Mehmed II (1451-1481) saw to it that the monk Gennadios, the former George Scholarios was installed as patriarch. Mehmed chose him because he knew of Gennadios’ entrenched opposition to the union of the Byzantine and Latin churches agreed at Florence in 1439'. The Orthodox and Catholic churches consequently remained separate and Gennadios’s successor still resides in Istanbul today. It is impressive continuity which has been seen by nationalist historians such Apostolos Vacalopoulos as an important link between Byzantium and the modern Greek state’.
Continuity, however, is only a very small part of the picture. The Ottoman capture of Constantinople was a shattering blow which almost completely destroyed an entire society at a stroke. It was hardly unexpected, given the developments of the previous decades, and in the years before it happened the Byzantine emperors and the select group of their advisors had striven to avert it by every means in their power. Their response to the predicament in which they found themselves is intriguing because in many ways it was distinctly ambivalent. The rulers of Byzantium had to decide whether to collaborate with the Ottoman sultan or to defy him. They opted to do both, maintaining outward peace while pursuing a diplomatic offensive to stir up the Catholic powers of the west against the Ottomans. The emperor was effectively bankrupt: his wealthy courtiers stepped in to use private resources for the good of the empire, yet at the same time they preserved a safety net in case the worst should happen. Seeking union with the western Church to pave the way for military assistance was the policy of the emperors: his prominent subjects supported it but with little enthusiasm and sometimes with grave private reservations*. These three aspects of the Byzantine response will be examined by focusing on one particular member of the later Byzantine elite, Gregory II] Mammé, patriarch of Constantinople from 1445 until 1459*.
Gregory is not someone who has been subjected to very much scrutiny in existing secondary work on late Byzantine history. There is a good reason for that. One morning in August 1450, about five years after he had taken office, he abruptly left Constantinople, never to return. He apparently made no public announcement of his intention. That would certainly explain why our main source for his flight, the chronicler George Sphrantzes, says so little on the topic: he gives no reason why Gregory left’. That sudden departure has given rise to a number of misconceptions about Gregory III and his role in the last days of Byzantium. Some secondary works claim that he was dethroned or that he abdicated®. It has even been claimed that he was succeeded by another patriarch, Athanasius II, who reigned between 1450 and 1453, something that has been shown to be completely untrue. In fact, Gregory remained patriarch in theory until his death in 1459, even if he was living in exile in Rome and Gennadios was the de facto patriarch after 1454’.
Turning now to Gregory’s role in the last days of Byzantium, for the purposes of this article that period is going to be defined as being from 1422 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. 1422 seems to be an appropriate starting point because it was in October of that year that a change of regime took place in Constantinople. Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425) suffered a stroke and became incapable of ruling. Henceforth the empire was to be run first by his eldest son John VIII Palaiologos (1425-1448), and then by John’s brother, Constantine XI (1449-1453). Like all medieval rulers, they did not steer the ship of state alone. John’s accession brought to prominence a circle of influential advisers, many of whom had been his friends and supporters while his father, Manuel II, was still active. Some of these advisers were wealthy aristocrats who were connected to John by marriage such as Loukas Notaras (d.1453), mesazon and later Grand Duke, Demetrius Palaiologos Metochites (d.1453), grand stratopedarch and eparch, and Mark and Manuel Palaiologos Iagaris®. As well as this inner core of advisers, John also had in his circle some young men from less privileged backgrounds who might be better regarded as his protégés. These included George Scholarios (c. 1403-1472), the later Patriarch Gennadios II, John Argyropoulos (c.1415—1487), later professor of Greek in Florence and the monk Bessarion (1402-1472), abbot of St Basil, later metropolitan of Nicaea’. Many of these men were also prominent under Constantine XI.
Gregory Mammé was closely connected with this ruling circle. According to the sixteenth-century Ecthesis Chronica, he was the ovvtsexvoc of the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras: that is to say that as infants they were baptised at the same time. Another recension of the same chronicle suggests that as babies they had shared the same wet-nurse. In both cases a close bond would have been created between the two men and between their families’. These family connections no doubt helped Gregory to rise rapidly after he had become a monk in around 1420. He became the emperor’s avevpatucds or personal confessor and was also entrusted with delicate diplomatic missions. He was one of those chosen to negotiate with the envoys of the council of Basel in 1435. In 1437 he was part of a delegation sent by John VIII to the Peloponnese to mediate between the emperor’s brothers who were on the verge of fighting each other for territory there. The mission was successful in defusing the tension and finding an acceptable compromise'!. Gregory accompanied John VIII to the council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438 where he was one of the clergy appointed to represent Patriarch Philotheos of Alexandria who had not been able to attend. Along with Bessarion and Isidore, metropolitan of Kiev, he was one of John VII’s main advisers during the council. It was while he was at Ferrara that John appointed Gregory to the office of Grand Protosynkellos’”.
Thus there can be no doubt that Gregory was a part of Byzantine ruling circles and a close adviser of Emperor John VII, which was why he came to play a role in the empire’s dealings with other powers. Byzantine diplomacy during the last years of the empire was largely formed and influenced by a treaty which the Byzantines made with the Ottoman Sultan Murad II (1421-1451) in February 1424. It was by no means an agreement between equals. The Byzantines had lost a three-year war that they had largely been responsible for starting when they had attempted to foment civil strife among the Ottomans by backing Murad’s uncle, Mustafa, in a bid for the throne. After Murad had dealt easily with the challenge, he had turned on the Byzantines. Constantinople and Thessalonica were blockaded and the Peloponnese invaded. To bring the hostilities to a close, the Byzantine emperor had to accept the status of a tributary vassal of the sultan. He was henceforth to pay an annual tribute of 100,000 ducats and he had to surrender territory on the coasts of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea.
The treaty did not include Thessalonica because the previous year the Byzantines had handed the city over to Venice, since they despaired of being able to defend it themselves. So while Murad II ceased his attacks on Constantinople and the Peloponnese, the blockade of Thessalonica continued until the city was captured by the Ottomans in 1430. Nevertheless the treaty of 1424 saved Byzantium for the time being and gave it twenty-nine more years of existence’*. During those years, John VIII, Constantine XI and their circle of advisers ran a clearly discernible line of policy. They maintained an outward adherence to the treaty of 1424. The tribute was paid regularly and obsequious envoys were sent at intervals to the sultan’s court to assure him of the emperor’s good will. Behind the scenes, however, they were determined to push the boundaries of the sultan’s forbearance as far as they could.
One way in which they did that was to mount a series of military campaigns to expand Byzantine territory in the Peloponnese. By 1430 the Byzantines had taken Patras, in spite of the sultan’s specific instructions to the contrary. The whole peninsula was ultimately divided between John’s brothers Demetrius and Thomas. The Byzantines got away with it partly because Sultan Murad was distracted by threats elsewhere and partly because his deepest desire was to abdicate and to spend all his time in thought and contemplation’*. The council of Ferrara-Florence was another way in which the Byzantines tested the limits of the treaty of 1424. In theory a gathering of prelates to discuss how to end the centuries-old schism between the Byzantine and western churches was not a breach of the treaty. However, the sultan knew perfectly that the Byzantines hoped that western military aid would follow on from a resolution of the schism. He therefore discouraged the emperor from attending and seems to have deliberately made threatening military manoeuvres outside the walls of Constantinople. But he did not, in the end, launch an attack and once more the Byzantines got away with their dangerous game of brinksmanship’.
The council of Ferrara-Florence is an obvious example of how Gregory Mammé participated in this imperial policy. The anti-unionist priest Sylvester Syropoulos has drawn an unsympathetic portrait of Gregory’s role in the council. He describes how, in the eleventh session, Gregory quitted his place and sat at the back with George Amiroutzes and others, where they sniggered at the remarks made by other delegates. As a close clerical adviser to John VIII, however, Gregory naturally played a leading role in the debates and he was one of those who signed the decretal of union in July 1439'®. When the Byzantine delegation arrived back in Constantinople in February 1440, John VIII appointed the bishop of Cyzicus as Patriarch Metrophanes II (1440-1443) to replace Joseph II who had passed away in Florence. When Metrophanes in turn died in August 144317, it was not until nearly two years later that John VIII finally appointed Gregory Mammé as his replacement'®. The first task of the new patriarch was to preside over some tense discussions between the supporters and the opponents of the Union of Florence in the Xylalas palace in Constantinople before the emperor and a visiting papal legate with George Scholarios leading the anti-unionist side’. Gregory also put his pen in the service of the policy, sending a defence of the union to Emperor John IV of Trebizond (14291460) and writing a laborious reply to Scholarios’s criticisms of the agreement”’. So it is quite obvious that Gregory was an essential supporter of imperial policy here.
Gregory was not only the emperor’s agent in his efforts to trade ecclesiastical union for military aid, in defiance of the treaty of 1424. He was also involved in direct negotiations with Catholic secular rulers. One such ruler that the Byzantines were very eager to court during the 1440s and 1450s was Alfonso the Magnanimous, king of Aragon (1416-1458). In June 1442, Alfonso had succeeded in capturing Naples and so finally vindicating his claim to rule southern Italy. By this coup, Alfonso became one of the most powerful rulers in the Mediterranean, ruling not only the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Naples but also the islands of Majorca, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. He had at his disposal the kind of military muscle that would make him a very valuable Christian ally against the Ottomans. The Byzantines were not slow to make contact with Alfonso. Only a year after the capture of Naples, a Byzantine envoy arrived at his court and arrangements were made for a Catalan consul to reside in Constantinople to oversee the interests of merchants from Alfonso’s lands. Soon after his accession in 1449, Constantine XI made a series of approaches to Alfonso, proposing a marriage alliance between his niece and Alfonso’s nephew. Constantine’s brother Demetrius even made his own secret treaty with Alfonso providing for military co-operation against the Ottomans”'.
Gregory too played a part in the negotiations with Alfonso but only after he had left Constantinople in 1450. It is noticeable that on his departure, he did not go immediately to Rome. In October he was reportedly in the town of Coron in the southern Peloponnese, a Venetian colony. It was not until May 1452 that there is definite evidence of his being in Rome when he first started to draw his papal pension there”. The question therefore arises of where Gregory was and what he was doing in the meantime. One strong likelihood is that he paid a visit to Patras before or after going to Coron. The town was the headquarters of Thomas Palaiologos, the brother of Constantine XI. Thomas, unlike his brother Demetrius, was a supporter of the Union of Florence and is therefore likely to have welcomed the patriarch. If so that would certainly account for Gregory’s role in Thomas’s diplomatic contacts with Alfonso of Aragon.
Those negotiations were particularly delicate in Thomas’s case. Alfonso considered himself to have inherited a long-standing Catalan claim to the duchies of Athens and Patras which included what were now Thomas’s lands in the north-western Peloponnese. In November 1444, Alfonso wrote to Constantine XI and Thomas Palaiologos to remind them of that and to demand the surrender of Glarentza and Patras”*. Any help that Alfonso supplied against the Turks was therefore likely to be at the expense of Thomas’s territory. Thomas himself seems to have entered into negotiations with Alfonso with a view to betrothing his daughter to Alfonso’s grandson. It is not clear which daughter Thomas had in mind: his elder daughter Helena was already married to a member of the Serbian royal family and his youngest, Zoe, had not yet been born. Whoever the mysterious daughter was, Thomas probably hoped that the marriage alliance would stave off the territorial claim. Thomas’s go-between in these negotiations seems to have been Patriarch Gregory III. In around 1452, Gregory had sent a monk to Naples to outline the scheme to Alfonso. Later that year, Gregory was visited in Rome by an envoy of the king, Arnoldo Fonolleda™*. The discussions seem to have ended here. Neither the marriage nor the alliance ever took place and Thomas was ejected from his Peloponnesian lands by Sultan Mehmed II in 1460. Nevertheless, Gregory’s involvement puts him at the heart of the Byzantine policy of seeking aid from the west while maintaining ostensible peace with the Ottoman Sultan.
There was another way in which Gregory participated. Central to the policy was the constant reminding of western rulers that the Byzantines were Christians who were being oppressed by the infidel Ottomans. One way in which they did this was through frequent gifts of religious objects, usually relics or icons. Emperor Manuel II had liberally handed out portions of the tunic of Christ during his tour of western Europe in 1399 to 1403. He also presented an icon of the Virgin to the duke of Milan”’. In November 1445, Theodore II Palaiologos, despot at Mistra, sent a parcel of relics to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Like Alfonso of Aragon, Philip was a powerful western ruler who could provide significant military assistance. He had just sent a fleet to support the crusade of Varna which had operated with some success, even if the crusade itself had ended in disaster. The gifts included a reliquary made of the wood of the True Cross and part of the tunic of Christ that was touched by the woman with an effusion of blood. Patriarch Gregory III played his part by writing a letter to accompany the relics, guaranteeing their authenticity”®.
So far the picture is one of Gregory as an obedient imperial servant, loyally carrying out his emperor’s policy: that of pretending to observe the treaty with the sultan while negotiating with the king of Naples and the duke of Burgundy behind his back. But in the last days of Byzantium it was not just a case of following orders. Everyone in the circle to which Gregory belonged knew perfectly well that the emperor whom they served had virtually no resources or income. Even his own palace was in an advanced state of disrepair~’. So we often find members of the ruling class stepping into the breach and using their own resources to plug the gap. But at the same time, everyone knew that Constantinople stood on a knife edge and could be attacked by the Ottomans at any time: if the city fell everything would be lost. Thus, as well as taking the initiative to prop up the empire, most also used what resources they had to provide some kind of backup plan, in case the worst should befall.
The obvious example is the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras, Gregory’s ovvtekxvoc. We find him paying for repairs of the Land Walls. That is suggested by a now vanished inscription on one of the towers, reading AOYK. NOTAPAX AJIEPMHNEYTOY. He also provided security for a loan from Genoa to pay for the defence of Constantinople, since the emperor’s credit rating would hardly support the sum needed*®. At the same time, however, the Grand Duke was keeping large amounts of money in banks in Italy as an insurance policy against catastrophe. According to the Ecthesis Chronica, he sent his daughter Anna there with a large sum of money”’.
Gregory II acted in much the same way. We first find him stepping into the emperor’s shoes in 1438 at Ferrara during the council. Several members of the emperor’s bodyguard approached him to say that they had not been paid and asking him to intercede with the emperor on their behalf. Syropoulos, who describes the incident, calls them janissaries which may suggest that they were Turkic mercenaries of some kind. Gregory’s response is interesting. He did raise their case with the emperor but when he got nowhere he instead gave them some of his own money. When that was spent and the men came back he gave them some of his ecclesiastical vestments to sell*”. Syropoulos, of course, represents the incident in the worst possible light as a ploy to put the blame on the anti-unionist Mark of Ephesus for impeding the union and keeping everyone in Italy but he cannot hide Gregory’s generosity here. Gregory played the same role even after his arrival in Rome in 1452 and after Constantinople had fallen a year later. As Syropoulos again had to admit, Gregory felt great sympathy for those Byzantines left behind in Constantinople who had no means of escaping to Italy and an entry in the records of the apostolic camera seems to confirm that. In April 1455, probably at his request, Pope Calixtus HI gave him thirty florins to distribute among ‘certain poor Greeks’. These were almost certainly refugees from the catastrophe in Constantinople*'. With the emperor dead and gone, the patriarch was stepping in to help his needy subjects. He was doing on a much smaller scale exactly what Notaras had done.
One the other side of the coin, Gregory, like Notaras, had clearly made contingency plans to secure his future in the dangerous and difficult times in which he lived. It is unlikely that he would have turned up in Rome unless he had hopes of a friendly reception there. Although he was not treated quite as royally as Bessarion who was also in Rome by then, he was given a regular monthly pension of 100 florins. He certainly was not living in poverty because the pope gave him permission to make a will, implying that he had something to leave*’. It is known that Gregory took one particular step to ensure a friendly reception. It was one which many Byzantine refugees heading west took and one which mirrored the diplomatic practice of the last years of the empire. Those who chose to abandon their homeland and seek asylum abroad often brought religious objects with them, icons, relics or reliquaries, either to sell or to present to anyone willing to help them. The most obvious example is the despot Thomas Palaiologos himself. When he arrived as a refugee in Rome in 1461, he had with him the head of the Apostle Andrew which he had taken from the cathedral in Patras. Pope Pius II arranged an impressive ceremony to accompany its arrival in Rome and commissioned Isaia de Pisa (fl. 1447-1464) to produce a marble reliquary tabernacle to house it**. Other humbler refugees brought less valuable items. The icon of the Virgin preserved in the church of Sant’ Agostino in Rome is said to have been brought to the city by a group of refugees from Constantinople who claimed that it had originally hung in Hagia Sophia**. Gregory III did exactly the same thing. When he reached Rome in 1452, he had with him a holy relic. Interestingly it was part of the garment of Christ that had been touched by the woman with an effusion of blood: presumably from the same garment from which the portion sent to the duke of Burgundy came. It is unlikely that Gregory had permission to take this and relics were usually kept locked in a chest to which only the emperor had the key*’. Perhaps as patriarch, Gregory would have had had access to them and one assumes that he helped himself to the relic before he left Constantinople in 1450. On arrival, he presented it to Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455). The pope, in turn, later gave it to James, bishop of Perugia. We know this from a Greek inscription on the lid of the reliquary which used to house the fragment. Since the inscription is in the first person, it was presumably written by Gregory himself*®.
Finally, there is the third way in which Gregory Mammé seems to typify the reaction of his circle to the last days of Byzantium: a certain ambivalence towards relations with the Catholic west. It is customary to divide the late Byzantine population into those who were Latinophiles, in favour of union with the western Church and those who were implacably opposed to it. Certainly there were those who were completely convinced on one or other side of the argument, such as Bessarion for the unionist position and Mark of Ephesus for the anti-unionist. Many others, however, took a much less cut and dried attitude to the question. Even among the group of advisers at the court of John VHI who were actively pursuing the policy of offering ecclesiastical union in return for military aid, some seem to have taken a very schizophrenic view of the process.
Again, an obvious example is the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras. As the most prominent adviser, first at the court of John VIII and then of Constantine XI, both of whom supported the Union of Florence, Notaras could hardly have remained in office if he had openly opposed the unionist policy. True, he had not attended the council of Florence but that was probably because he was too central to the administration of Constantinople in the emperor’s absence. There is also a letter that Notaras wrote to George Scholarios, the leader of the anti-unionists, in the autumn of 1452. In it he warned Scholarios that the commemoration of the pope in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia was going to go ahead whether he liked it or not*’. Nevertheless, there are indications that Notaras was not entirely happy about the Union of Florence. The letter to Scholarios makes no attempt to convince him of the merits of the union; it merely stresses its inevitability. It is almost as if it had been written out of duty rather than conviction. Even more telling is the letter written to Notaras by the fiercely anti-unionist John Eugenikos. He scolded the Grand Duke for being too willing to associate himself with unionists and sternly warned him that he risked falling himself into ‘the cesspit of Latinism’ (gig tov BoOpov tod AatIwicpod)**. The implication is that the anti-unionists regarded him as being their camp. He was even credited with the ultimate anti-union catchphrase that ‘it would be better to see the sultan’s turban in Constantinople than the Latin headgear’*’. Notaras probably never said any such thing but Doukas’s attribution of the phrase to him is possibly evidence that deep down he might have been very lukewarm about the union.
Since the chief minister of the emperor who negotiated the union was lukewarm, perhaps it is not so surprising that the patriarch appointed to oversee its implementation was too. Numerous small pieces of evidence suggest that Gregory III was by no means a convinced Latinophile on the lines of Bessarion or Demetrius Kydones. According to Syropoulos, he was reluctant to accompany the emperor to Italy for the council because he feared that if he went he might do evil things, hardly the words of a convinced advocate of union*’. Nor does Gregory seem to have had much empathy for western religious culture. Early in the proceedings of the council of Ferrara, he remarked that whenever he went into a Latin church he did not recognise the saints depicted on its walls*’. Likewise in the debates among the Byzantine delegates at the council, Gregory allegedly sometimes argued for the union, sometimes against*’. That might explain why, once he was patriarch, his defence of the union was so muted and why, after five years in office, he preferred to slip away and leave all the arguing to others.
In this very lack of enthusiasm Gregory and Notaras are representative of what was probably a very common attitude among the later Byzantine ruling class. Take the courtier George Sphrantzes who exclaimed that he wished that John VIII had never left for Florence. He was critical of the Union of Florence in his memoirs but not on any theological or dogmatic grounds. His objection was purely practical. The union angered the Ottomans and gave them a pretext to attack and conquer Constantinople*’. Gregory and others among Byzantium’s ruling elite backed the policy because it seemed to offer some alternative to perpetual vassalage to the Turks. It was not something they felt deeply or passionately about, as Bessarion did.
To return, in conclusion, to the installation of Gennadios IJ as patriarch in 1454, it might well seem that in comparison to that event and its long term consequences, the short and abruptly ended patriarchate of Gregory Ill is of little significance. His main activity as patriarch was a half-hearted attempt to implement a union which was to become a dead letter once Constantinople fell in 1453. If, on the other hand, the last years of Byzantium are studied for their own sake, rather than as a tail end or a new beginning, then he appears in a new light. Gregory is a perfect example of the schizophrenic way in which the Byzantine ruling classes responded to the desperate situation in which they found themselves. That reaction was a strange combination of heroic self-sacrifice, cynical diplomacy and calculated self-interest. It may be a rather less inspiring vision than that of Orthodoxy triumphantly surviving the wreck of Byzantium and prefiguring the national revival but it is a human and credible response to calamity.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق