Download PDF | [Cambridge Medieval Textbooks] Florin Curta - Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
528 Pages
Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages stood at a strategically important crossroads of trade and crusading routes and fell within the spheres of influence of both the Byzantine Orthodox Church and Latin Christendom. This comprehensive and authoritative survey draws on historical and archaeological sources to illuminate 750 years of the region's history, covering Romania, southern Ukraine, southern Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. Exploring the social, political, and economic changes that marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, the book addresses important themes such as the rise of medieval states, the conversion to Christianity, the monastic movement inspired by developments in Western Europe and in Byzantium, and the role of material culture (architecture, the arts, and objects of daily life) in the representation of power.
FLo R 1 N cuRT A is Associate Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. He is the author of The lvfakinx (~{the Slavs: History and Archaeology l?{ the Lower Danube Region, c. 50o-700 AD (Cambridge University Press, 2oor).
INTRODUCTION
This book is an attempt to explore the fundamental dimensions of the medieval history of Southeastern Europe from c. 500 to 1250, broadly the period between the last century of Roman power in the Balkans and the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe. The primary aim of the book is to provide an overview of the historical developments that characterized a region of Europe about which there is generally little knowledge outside a small number of scholars with specific, often narrowly defined research interests. In the last few decades, the study of medieval societies in Eastern Europe has moved in new and significant directions.
The successful use of interdisciplinary approaches, the growth of medieval archaeology, the revived interest in the history of the Church, the development of gender studies, and the encouragement to engage with comparative history have all informed research into the medieval past of Eastern Europe. The following chapters will make extensive use of the results of these new lines of research, in the process delineating a general conclusion that is worth stating plainly from the very beginning: medieval Southeastern Europe was in many ways similar to other parts of Europe, to a degree far greater than most scholars have so far been willing to admit. The secondary purpose of this book is therefore to relate to each other developments in the southeastern region of the European continent and to consider their implications for our understanding of the Middle Ages.
The book is therefore concerned with moving back from the modern constructs and possible misconceptions deriving from attempts to draw lines of contrast against which either "Western" or national medieval histories were defined. During the first half of the twentieth century, many historians in those countries in Eastern Europe that had either emerged or been enlarged at the end ofWorld War I reinforced, rather than challenged, such misconceptions. A Polish historian, Kazimierz Tymieniecki (I 8 87-I 968), first addressed the problem of the medieval history of Eastern Europe at the Sixth International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Oslo in I928. By Eastern Europe, Tymieniecki meant the regions east of the Elbe, namely Poland, to the exclusion of both Scandinavia and the Balkans. Scandinavia was still perceived as part of the "West," but the Balkans were not granted the status of a fully European region.
WHAT IS SOUTHEASTEHN EUROPE?
While the idea of "Eastern Europe" originated in the intellectual milieu of the Enlightenment, Southeastern Europe as a geographical expression has a much more recent history. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the preferred name for that region of the continent was "European Turkey," which included Greece (even after that country gained its independence in I 829), as well as the Romanian Principalities, Walachia and Moldavia, technically not part of the Ottoman Empire. Several other phrases have subsequently been coined, ranging from the "Greek-Slavic world" to the "Balkans," a name that proved remarkably resistant, perhaps because of its derogatory meaning introduced shortly before and during World War I.
On the eve of the Congress of Berlin (I 878), a new term appeared, "Southeastern Europe," which seems to have been initially used mainly by scholars interested in comparative linguistics, and especially in common elements to be discovered in such languages as Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, and Greek. In other words, the use of the phrase Southeastern Europe is linked to some of the earliest attempts at identifYing what is now known as the Balkan linguistic unity, the world's most famous linguistic example of language contact.'
The phrase was quickly adopted in Austria, especially by statesmen and diplomats, to refer to the region between the Carpathian Mountains, the Dniester River, and the Aegean, Black, and Adriatic Seas, a region of vital importance for the expansion of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire around I l)OO. Thirty years later, the phrase was similarly used to express Nazi political aspirations in that region. 2
The first course of Southeast European history was offered at the University of Vienna in I C) 12 and was taught by a Romanian, Ion Nistor (I 876-I902), later to become a renowned historian of the Middle Ages. 3 Following that appointment, another Romanian historian, Nicolae Iorga (I 871-I ()40), founded in Bucharest an Institute of Southeast European Studies ( 1 ()I 4), and later a periodical, Revue lzistoriquc du sud-est curopem (I922), dedicated to the study of the Balkan region, which hitherto both historians and politicians had excluded from Europe. Iorga's goal was to remove the stain of the derogatory meaning attached to the phrase "Balkans," while promoting a certain foreign policy at a time of growing Romanian influence in the region. 4 To lorga, the history of the Southeast European countries revealed a number of similarities strikingly reminiscent of the Balkan linguistic unity.
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