At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantial common ground. The ‘heritage’ of the Modern Greek people from the ancient past plays a large part in the work of both — explicitly and at length in the writings of Koraes, less conspicuously but scarcely less fundamentally, as this paper will argue, in Toynbee’s mammoth investigation of the forces at work in shaping world history.

Before the Turkish incursions of the late fourteenth century Albania had often been the frontier between the spheres of influence of Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy. Though in the wake of the Crusades certain areas of northern Albania and in particular the Adriatic ports under the growing influence of the Serenissima had come to look to Rome, most of central and southern Albania remained derivatively Byzantine. To this day, the double-headed eagle of Byzantium, a symbol of this heritage, adorns the Albanian flag.

As the Ottoman Empire tottered towards its final collapse at the end of the First World War the fate of its various territorial components aroused the interest not only of other states, but of interest groups within those states. Britain in particular revealed a strong concern with this subject, having long been interested in the Eastern Mediterranean. The end of the Ottoman Empire saw the legendary Lawrence of Arabia grasping the Arab lands, various secret treaties with the other Great Powers disposed of much of Anatolia, and the future of Turkish rule over Constantinople, that much sought after city, now hung in the balance. The final fate of the city would be decided at the postwar Paris Peace Conference. Of all of the spoils of the Ottomans none evoked such passions as that inspired by Constantinople — Byzantium, the Second Rome. If any building could epitomise the Europeans’ vision of this city it was the St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, which since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had been a mosque. With the end of Ottoman dominance an opportunity was seen by some of symbolically completing a crusade begun centuries before, with the expulsion of the Turks, and Islam, from Europe. Nothing could so symbolise a change of control at Constantinople than the reconversion of St Sophia into a church. This found support from those who wished to see the Turk expelled bag and baggage from Europe.

Colour is the ‘dark continent’ of Byzantine art history, the most neglected element of art. In 1931, Ernst Diez wrote: ‘a coming generation of art-historians may be puzzled to understand the paradoxical prejudice still latent in our time, which treats colour as not the most significant quality of a coloured work of art, but as an accident that can be overlooked in scientific research work’. A similar comment would still be valid today. Colour is barely, if at all, recognised as an aspect of artistic style; it rarely features in stylistic analysis. Its significance within a picture is ignored — analyses of Byzantine colour iconography and symbolism are few and far between. We have not even begun to ask whether colour is a meaningful aspect of Byzantine art.

Amongst the collection of icons at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, is a small panel depicting a woman wearing a black veil kneeling before the equestrian saint Sergios (fig. 1). The icon is one of a group of thirteenth-century Sinai icons, many of equestrian saints, whose date and provenance has been a matter of debate. But lacking from this debate has been interpretation of the icon as an indicator of a particular social, religious and political field. The intrusion of the material world of the viewer in this icon, through the gesture of the kneeling woman, enables it to be interpreted as a personal prayer, an act of supplication for protection at the critical period before the final loss of Latin Syria to the Mamluks. It was arguably commissioned from one of the Syrian Orthodox artists whose work can be seen displayed in the churches to the east and south of Tripoli. This identifies an intense period of activity in wallpainting and icon production in Syria during the middle to second quarter of the thirteenth century of which work at the end of the century in Cyprus was the continuation. Looked at from the perspective of the woman herself, the icon raises issues of the role of women in the patronage and veneration of icons in the Latin East.

Unlike the historiography of the sixth century, the historiography of the fifth century has been preserved but fragmentarily. One of the results is the fact that the reign of Zeno (474–491), among others, has been given little attention as a whole; various aspects of this reign have been studied more than once, but apart from an Inauguraldissertation written by Wilhelm Barth almost a hundred years ago, no comprehensive monograph has been written about the emperor and his reign.

Little attention has been paid to the relative dating of the ‘learned’ romances of the twelfth century. It has generally been accepted that Prodromos’ Rhodanthe and Dosikles is the first in the series, while the general consensus is that Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias was written some time in the second half of the twelfth century or, at any rate, after the works of the genre’s revival.

The present study is an attempt to construe the position of Britain and the US as well as Greek reactions with regard to the Cyprus question at a stage which preceded its internationalisation and the concurrent deterioration of Anglo-Greek and Greek-Turkish relations. There is a voluminous bibliography on the problem, which has developed into one of the major international entanglements of our time. Most works on the Cyprus question, in the form of either general scholarly works or memoirs, devote very little space to the 1949–1952 period — when they do not overlook it entirely. A notable exception is Angelos Vlachos’ Deka hronia Kypriako (Ten Years of Cyprus Question) which mainly examines the attitude of the Greek government and the Greek-Cypriot Ethnarchy towards the question of Enosis. Francois Crouzet’s Le Conflict de Chypre, 1946–1959, on the other hand, published in 1973, offers a rather limited insight of the question at its early stage given the absence of relevant primary sources at that time. The present paper, however, is primarily based on British and American diplomatic records.

Anna Comnena’s history the Alexiad has been accorded a high honorary status by Byzantine historians. Her pioneering efforts in philosophy and the thoroughness of her historical methodology are admired, although there is a distinct reluctance to analyse her historical writing. On a superficial level the Alexiad is a straightforward text: an historical panegyric in its organisation, frequently eulogistic in tone, in the manner of court orations, and rhetorically strongly influenced by conventional Byzantine pastiches of Homer.

In the course of her elaborate description (Alex. 13.10) of the physical and moral qualities of Bohemond, Anna Comnena writes of his nasal and pulmonary makeup thus:

In this note I would like to discuss the problems presented to researchers by the almost complete lack of reliable information concerning the dates of pre-war rebetika recordings. It is unfortunately no exaggeration to say that with very few exceptions the published dates of older rebetika recordings are not to be trusted, and they have not been based on factual evidence.

Byzantine silk research evokes images of glamour but it is prudent to consider grass roots as well as exotic aspects of this enticing subject: without the grub there would be no glamour. In its fullest sense a study of Byzantine silk weaving entails research on many and varied levels, across a broad range of disciplines. An immense variety of topics require consideration: the production of the silk yarn; the various workshop practices involved in weaving the yarn into silk cloth; the relationship between technique and design; the marketing and the numerous uses of the silks both at home and abroad, and the implications of the distribution of Byzantine silks purely through diplomatic channels.

This article presents the conclusions of a Byzantinist and an Information Specialist working together to explore new solutions to age-old academic problems. It is the second of two related articles in this journal: the first is by Anna Muthesius.