Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 The Byzantine world in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries
- Map 2 Byzantium and its neighbors, c. 1350
- Map 3 Byzantium and its neighbors after 1402
- PART I INTRODUCTION AND POLITICAL SETTING
- 1 The topic and the sources
- 2 The shrinking empire and the Byzantine dilemma between East and West after the Fourth Crusade
- PART II THESSALONIKE
- PART III CONSTANTINOPLE
- PART IV THE DESPOTATE OF THE MOREA
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Archontes of Thessalonike (fourteenth—fifteenth centuries)
- Appendix II “Nobles” and “small nobles” of Thessalonike (1425)
- Appendix III Constantinopolitan merchants in Badoer's account book (1436–1440)
- Appendix IV Members of the Senate of Constantinople cited in the synodal tome of August 1409
- Appendix V Some Greek refugees in Italian territories after 1453
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The topic and the sources
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 The Byzantine world in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries
- Map 2 Byzantium and its neighbors, c. 1350
- Map 3 Byzantium and its neighbors after 1402
- PART I INTRODUCTION AND POLITICAL SETTING
- 1 The topic and the sources
- 2 The shrinking empire and the Byzantine dilemma between East and West after the Fourth Crusade
- PART II THESSALONIKE
- PART III CONSTANTINOPLE
- PART IV THE DESPOTATE OF THE MOREA
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Archontes of Thessalonike (fourteenth—fifteenth centuries)
- Appendix II “Nobles” and “small nobles” of Thessalonike (1425)
- Appendix III Constantinopolitan merchants in Badoer's account book (1436–1440)
- Appendix IV Members of the Senate of Constantinople cited in the synodal tome of August 1409
- Appendix V Some Greek refugees in Italian territories after 1453
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book is a study of the political attitudes that emerged among different segments of Byzantine society in response to the Ottoman expansion. Its principal aims are, first, to categorize these attitudes with regard to specific groupings among the urban and rural populations of the Byzantine Empire (e.g. the aristocracy, merchants, lower classes, ecclesiastical and monastic circles) and, secondly, to explore the underlying social and economic factors, besides the more apparent political and religious ones, that played a role in the formation of political attitudes. In an atmosphere of extreme political and military instability marked by a number of civil wars and foreign invasions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people from different segments of Byzantine society in different regions of the empire sought by various means to secure their best interests in the face of the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. How they reacted to the Ottoman advance, the kinds of solutions they sought, the preferences they developed with respect to foreign alliances, and the local factors that played a role in regional variations are complex issues that merit careful investigation. In themselves, the options that were available as far as foreign political orientations are concerned were perhaps limited, consisting of either a cooperation with the Latin West against the Ottomans, or an accommodation with the Ottomans, or, in rejection of both, the maintenance of an opposition to the Ottomans by means of the empire's own resources and capacities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Byzantium between the Ottomans and the LatinsPolitics and Society in the Late Empire, pp. 3 - 17Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009