The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453 ed. by Vlada Stanković (review)

This volume faces the difficult task of exploring southeastern Europe during the period contiguous to the Fourth Crusade, and that when the Ottoman Empire replaced the Byzantine one—with Constantinople becoming Istanbul—, while the contributors are cognizant of a contemporary Balkan region and its devastations. Vlada Stanković notes that the volume’s final form is due to the formidable Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the nearer Serbian and Cypriot institutions, and a similar project that he headed on ‘Christian Culture in the Balkans in the Middle Ages: Byzantine Empire, the Serbs and the Bulgarians, 9th–15th Century’ (p. xiv). Organized in three parts, the contributions illuminate variously the object of the volume, with Part 1 dedicated to ‘In a World without a Center: Remaining Byzantine’, Part 2 to ‘The Peripheries: In the Shadow of Constantinople and its Influence’, and Part 3 to ‘Aftermath: Between Two Empires, Between Two Eras’. With thirteen chapters, the specific considerations within this broad range grapple with what Stanković introduces as life ‘In the Balkans “without” Constantinople: Questions of Center and Periphery’ (pp. xi–xviii). In fact, Jelena Mrgić’s contribution, ‘The Center of the Periphery: The Land of Bosnia in the Heart of Bosnia’, begins by clarifying that the ‘“center-periphery” model was introduced to historical research from economic studies during the second half of the last century, and it provided a new approach to this phenomenon’ in what, Mrgić suggests, confronts ‘the basic problem of how to compensate the overall lack of evidence and to make the picture more complete’ (p. 165). The geographical emphasis throughout these considerations confirm the weight of the region’s essential historical, and Byzantine, aspect. Jelena Erdeljan’s study of ‘Studenica and the Life Giving Tree’ investigates what she says is ‘the defining element […] of the Holy Wood of the Life Giving Cross through which earthly and heavenly paradise are (re)united into one’ (p. 81). Alicia Simpson’s ‘Byzantium’s Retreating Balkan Frontiers’ introduces characters and incidents in a difficult Serbian history, long before the Ottoman Empire and an Islamic component, detailing the events leading up to a ‘change of leadership in Constantinople, [which] was crucial to the delicate balance of power in the western Balkans foremost because it marked the end of the Byzantine-Hungarian alliance’ (p. 16). In Vlada Stanković’s chapter on ‘Rethinking the Position of Serbia within Byzantine Oikoumene in the Thirteenth Century’, the author’s consideration of the Crusaders’ capture of Constantinople in 1204 saw the region strengthened through an ‘all-encompassing hierarchical system of mutually connected relatives [and] prevented a total political upturn in the region’ (p. 91). Popes and imperial families feature in Stanković’s view of the crusade’s aftermath from the perspective of a Serbian historiography ‘marred by [a] narrow “national” approach to the set of complex problems from the Middle Ages’ (p. 91). Unexpected topics help bring Byzantium to life. Dušan Popović contributes ‘Discontinuity and Continuity of Byzantine Literary Tradition after the Crusaders’ Capture of Constantinople: The Case of “Original” Byzantine Romances’, and offers comparisons with medieval Greek romances since the Hellenic period. He argues for ‘the persistence and continuity of certain narrative techniques’ as ‘the strength of a typically Byzantine tradition of education and culture’ (p. 240). Popović also notes how romance texts created a Byzantine Iliad in ‘an original and creative way adapted to the taste and expectations of the Byzantine audience’ (p. 27). This is not a history well-known beyond its research specialists, thus the volume is of value to scholars in this particular field as well as interdisciplinary studies.