The district of Epiros in north-western Greece became an independent province following the Fourth Crusade and the dismemberment of the Byzantine Empire by the Latins in 1204. It retained its independence despite the recovery of Constantinople by the Greeks in 1261. Each of its rulers acquired the Byzantine titles of Despot, from which the term Despotate was coined to describe their territory. They preserved their autonomy partly by seeking support from their foreign neighbours in Italy. The fortunes of Epiros were thus affected by the expansionist plans of the Angevin kings of Naples and the commercial interests of Venice. Until 1318 it was governed by direct descendants of its Byzantine founder. Thereafter it was taken over first by the Italian family of Orsini, then conquered by the Serbians, infiltrated by the Albanians, and appropriated by an Italian adventurer, Carlo Tocco. Like the rest of Byzantium and eastern Europe it was ultimately absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in the fif
Theodore Spandounes belonged to a Byzantine refugee family who had settled in Venice after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. He wrote an account of the origins of the Turkish rulers and of their phenomenal rise to power. It was partly a plea to the Popes and princes of western Christendom to unite against the infidel and one of the earliest works of its kind. The first version of the book, written in Italian, appeared in 1509 and was translated into French in 1519. The final version was made in 1538 and a full Italian text was published in 1890 though without any historical commentary. This book presents an English translation of the full text with a preface, commentary and notes; a discussion of the sources which Spandounes might have consulted and an assessment of the value and interest of this hitherto neglected and undervalued treatise.
This book traces the diplomatic, cultural, and commercial links between Constantinople and Venice from the foundation of the Venetian Republic to the Fall of the Byzantine Empire. It aims to show how
Constantine XI Palaiologos was the last Christian Emperor of Constantinople and Byzantium. In 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, he was last seen fighting at the city walls, but the actual circumstances of his death have remained surrounded in myth. In the years that followed it was said that he was not dead but sleeping - the 'immortal emperor' turned to marble, who would one day be awakened by an angel and drive the Turks out of his city and empire. Donald Nicol's book tells the gripping story of Constantine's life and death, and ends with an intriguing account of claims by reputed descendants of his family - some remarkably recent - to be heirs to the Byzantine throne.
The Byzantines lived in a theocratic society. They were less ready than their western contemporaries to draw the line between things spiritual and things temporal, between Church and state. This book explores some of the characteristics of that society in the age of its decline and fall between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Though irremediably shattered by the effects of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Byzantine Empire found the will to reassert itself and to endure for another 250 years. Material recovery was hardly possible, but there was a remarkable reawakening of scholarship and of the spiritual life. The world's debt to some of the late Byzantine scholars is known to classicists and to students of the Italian Renaissance. The contribution of the latter-day saints of Byzantium, the hesychasts and scholars of the spirit, has been less publicized.