The Byzantine View of Western Europe Nicol, Donald M Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Winter 1967; 8, 4; ProQuest pg. 315

The Byzantine View of Western Europe 
Donald M. Nicol 

O NE THING that astonishes the reader of the Byzantine his­
torians particularly of the later period is their evident ig­
norance of the history and geography of western Europe; 

another thing is their boundless pride in their city, their Empire and 
their traditions. Their ignorance of the West is to some extent ex­
cusable. Part of it stems from the Byzantine propensity for archaizing. 
The nations beyond the boundaries of Byzantium had to be disguised 
or dignified with Herodotean names. The Serbs become Triballians, 
the Bulgars Mysians, the Hungarians Paeonians and the Mongols 
Scythians (though here confusion arises because some historians apply 
the name of Scythians to the Bulgars as well). The confusion becomes 
worse confounded when the Italians are called Franks, the Franks 
Celts and the Catalans Italians. George Pachymeres calls Charles of 
Anjou an Italian and entitles him "king of Apulia" and "brother of 
the rex Frantziskon," which sounds like king of the Franciscans. Nike­
phoros Gregoras can dismiss the Battle of Crecy with the illuminating 
sentence: "The Britons crossed over to the mainland of the Celts with 
their fleet and there was a great battle."! There are, of course, notable 
exceptions. One need only mention Constantine Porphyrogenitus. 
And in any event Byzantine ignorance of western affairs was no great­
er than western ignorance of the Byzantine Empire. The difference is 
that whereas western historians became better informed about the 
East as time went on, Byzantine ignorance of the West seems rather 
to have increased with the passage of the centuries. One is tempted to 
feel that, as the wind of change blew stronger in the West, the Byz­
antines simply closed their eyes and ears. Ignorance gave way to 
calculated indifference. 

It is easier to forgive their ignorance than to stomach their pride. 
". For it was a pride bordering on conceit. It was born partly of their 

1 George Pachymeres, De Michaele Palaeologo, ed.1. Bekker, I (Bonn 1835) 185 lines 15-16, 
358 line 5. Nikephoros Gregoras, Byzantina Historia, ed. L. Schopen. II (Bonn 1829) 689 
lines 2-4. 

5-G·R.B.S. 315 



316 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

ineradicable sense of exclusiveness as the inhabitants of the Christian 
Roman Empire, partly of their exalted idea of the unique and supreme 
position of their emperor. But it coloured their attitude to the rest of 
the world, both East and West. Its rhetorical expressions in Byzan­
tine writers make strange reading. It must have infuriated western 
Europeans, especially after they had become conscious of their own 
military and commercial superiority to the Graeculi of the East. For 
even when it was manifestly no more than a myth the concept of the 
exclusiveness of the emperor and his empire survived in Constanti­
nople. In a famous letter to the Grand Prince of Russia, Vasili I, written 
in the dark days of 1395 when the Turks were almost at the gates, the 
Patriarch Antony of Constantinople could still write: ce ••• if the 
nations (i.e. the Turks) (now) encircle the residence of the Emperor, 
it does not follow that Christians should despise him .... (For) when 
the prince of the Apostles, Peter, said ... <Fear God, honour the 
king' ... he did not say <kings', lest any man should think that he 
had in mind those who are called kings promiscuously among the 
nations: he said <the king', showing thereby that the universal king 
is one . ... For if there are also others in the world of Christian men 
who assume for themselves the name of Emperor, all such action is 
unnatural and illegal, the result rather of tyranny and force (than of 
nature)."2 

The Emperor was the elect of God, crowned by God and guarded 
by God. His person was sacred and he ruled from the Sacred Palace in 
the Queen of Cities as God's regent on earth: he was the terrestrial 
image of the Logos of God reigning over the earthly reflexion of the 
Kingdom of Heaven. The Byzantine Empire was not, like the king­
doms or principalities of antiquity, a temporary phenomenon which 
would one day come to an end. It was «a realm foreseen in the plan 
of the Creator, anchored in Christian eschatology, organically in­
volved in the age-old history of mankind and destined to endure until 
the Second Coming." Its flam/..€vs; and al'rroKp&'Twp was the representative 
of Christ who, as TTaf.Lfla(IL/..€VS; and TTWTOKp&'TWP, could only be one. He 
held the reins of all human affairs, temporal and spiritual, in his 
hand.3 

S F. Miklosich and J. Muller, Acta et Diplomata graeca medii aevi sacra et profana II (Vienna 
1862) 190-2; trans!' E. Barker, Social and Political Thought in BYZantium (Oxford 1957) 194-6. 

3 F. Dolger, "Europas Gestaltung im Spiegel der frankisch-byzantinischen Auseinan­
dersetzung des 9. Jahrhunderts:· Der Vertrag von Verdun, ed. Th. Mayer (Leipzig 1943) 



DONALD M. NICOL 317 

All this was basic political theory to the Byzantines. It is seldom 
spelled out in so many words for the simple reason that it was taken 
for granted. Those who affected to challenge or ignore this divinely 
ordained scheme of things were guilty of a form of heresy. They were 
either to be pitied or condemned. The Arabs, for example, and the 
Turks might be pitied as the victims of invincible ignorance; the 
Slavs might be thought to have the baptism of desire; but the peoples 
of western Europe, at least after the ninth century, were condemned 
as wilful and unrepentant deviationists. 

The Greek word commonly used by Byzantine writers to describe 
those outside the charmed circle of right believers was lOVYj, the 
<nations'. It is the term applied in the New Testament to the Gentiles, 
to those outside the flock of God's chosen people. The word {3ap{3apo, 
is also employed, as it had been in antiquity, to describe <outsiders', 
but it is applied rather to pagans, infidels or backward races than to 

Christians, however misguided. "EOvos was perhaps slightly more 
polite than {3ap{3apos, but neither word was necessarily abusive. A 
<barbarian' was no more contemptible to a Byzantine than to an 
ancient Greek or Roman. The Emperor John VI Cantacuzene, who 
gave his daughter in marriage to the Turkish Sultan Orchan in 1346 
and who relied heavily on Turkish military support, could happily 
refer to his quite civilised son-in-law as <the barbarian'.4 

The exclusiveness and the pride of the Byzantines were reflected in 
the word that they used to describe themselves. They and they alone 
were the <PwJLaLOt, the true Romans; and every Byzantine citizen of 
whatever race, Greek, Armenian or Slav, was aware of his right to 

call himself a 'PwJLaLos. The heterogeneous mixture of races that made 
up the Byzantine Empire has sometimes been compared with that 
which constitutes the United States of America, and with some jus­
tice. But the analogy should not be pressed too far. American citizens 
of whatever racial origin are conscious of a common nationality; but 
they are also conscious of the existence and of the rights of other 
nations on more or less equal terms. This was a concept foreign to 
the Byzantine mind, at least until the decline of the Empire after the 
thirteenth century. To be a Romaios was not to belong to anyone 

210 (repr. in DOlger, Byzanz und die europiiische StaatenweIt [EttaI1953] 291). P. J. Alexander, 
"The Strength of Empire and Capital as Seen through Byzantine Eyes," Speculum 37 
(1962) 355. 

'e.g. John Cantacuzenus, Historiarum Libri IV, ed. L. Schopen, II (Bonn 1831) 588 lines 
17-18. 



318 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

nation. It was rather to belong to the olKovf.LIVY}, to the world-to 
accept the fact that the world of right belief and right order, in the 
political and in the religious sense, was one and unchanging, that its 
Emperor was one, and that to live outside it was a great misfortune 
which Providence would one day rectify. It is true that a feeling of 
aggressive nationalism began to affect the Byzantines after the Fourth 
Crusade. It is expressed by an increasing use of the word 'Hellene' by 
Byzantine writers of the thirteenth century and later to make even 
clearer their distinction from the loathsome 'Latins'. But this was a 
late development and came, significantly enough, at a time when the 
Empire had been reduced by its eastern and western enemies almost 
exclusively to its purely Hellenic provinces.s In an earlier age popes 
and emperors in western Europe were guilty of a calculated breach 
of etiquette when they addressed the Emperor in Constantinople as 
imperator Graecorum, Emperor of the Greeks instead of Emperor of 
the Romans. The Emperor Nikephoros Phokas in 968 made an angry 
complaint on this score to Bishop Liutprand of Cremona when Otto 
the Great of Germany tried to exalt his own dignity by belittling that 
of the one true Emperor. Nikephoros pointed out to Otto's ambassa­
dor that his master was a mere barbarian king who had no conceiv­
able right to call himself either a Roman or an emperor.s Liutprand 
himself was well aware that the Byzantines would be shocked by the 
"sinful audacity" of the Pope in addressing Nikephoros as imperator 
Graecorum.7 As time went on, however, the western rulers became 
even more rude and confident about addressing the Byzantine em­
peror as 'Emperor of the Greeks' or simply 'Emperor of Constantin­
ople', which was even more wounding to Byzantine pride. The Em­
peror Michael VIII Palaiologos in the thirteenth century tactfully 
made no protest when addressed as 'Emperor of the Greeks' by the 

5 Nikephoros Gregoras in the fourteenth century distinguishes between 'Romaioi and 
Hellenes' on the one hand and 'the diverse nations (;OVTJ) and barbarians' on the other. 
Nikephoros Gregoras, Byzantina Historia II, 590 lines 3-5. Cf F. D61ger, "Rom in der 
Gedankenwelt der Byzantiner," Zeitsehr. fur Kirehengesehiehte 56 (1937) 7f (=D6Iger, 
BYZanz und die europaisehe Staatenwelt, 77f); and, in general, K. Lechner, Hellenen ultd Bar­
baren im Weltbild der Byzantiner (Diss. Munich 1954). 

6 Liudprandi Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, ed. J. Becker, Die Werke Liudprands 
von Cremona (Scriptores reTUm Germaniearum in usum sehoiaTUm, Hanover-Leipzig 1915) 
188-9, § XXV: Vis maius scandalum, quam quod se imperatorem voeat, imperii nostra themata 
sibi usurpat? Utraque non sunt ferenda; et si utraque importabilia, istud est non ferendum, 
immo nee audiendum, quod se imperatorem nominat. 

? ibid. 200, § XLVII: Quae vox, quae inscriptio (sc. imperatorem Graeeorum), secundum Graeeos 
peccatrix et temeraria ... 



:" 

DONALD M. NICOL 319 

Pope. He knew that he was in no position to stand on his dignity. But 
the theory of his unique dignity remained unaffected. 

Until the eighth century that theory, in so far as it was based upon 
the Roman tradition of a universal imperium, was common to eastern 
and western Europe. The refinements of the Byzantine Kaisergedanke 
may not have been fully appreciated in the West; but the general 
idea that the world was made up of one Empire and one Church 
governed by one Emperor survived the storms of the barbarian in­
vasions and the collapse of the western provinces. Justinian's expen­
sive campaign to retrieve those provinces was the last great attempt 
to put the theory back into practice. But the restoration of the im­
perium romanum as it had existed in the days of Augustus and Constan­
tine was always on the agenda of successive Byzantine emperors. HAll 
the countries that had once belonged to the Roman orbis, and later 
joined the Christian Church, were considered by the Byzantine em­
perors as their everlasting and incontestable possession."8 The facts 
indeed belied this proud claim, and the emperors in Constantinople 
were generally obliged to keep their eyes turned and their guns 
trained on the East and the North rather than the West. But the 
claim was none the less universally acknowledged. The Gothic and 
Frankish kings of the fifth and sixth centuries were prepared to accept 
it in principle, since to participate in the imperium by admitting a 
relationship to the Emperor of the Romans enhanced their own status 
and gave them a place in the divine order of things. They had no 
wish to set up world empires of their own.9 The Byzantines were thus 
encouraged to think of western Europe simply as the pars occidentalis 
of their empire which, owing to unfortunate circumstances brought 
about by the sins of mankind, had temporarily fallen into barbarian 
hands. Until it could be recovered, the Christian West was kept in 
the family of the Byzantine Empire by the institution of a compli­
cated system of honorary degrees of affinity graciously conferred on 
its various rulers by the Emperor, pending the day when he would 
re-assert his legitimate rights as paterfamilias. This concept of the 
mediaeval 'family of kings' has been thoroughly investigated by Dolger 

8 G. Ostrogorsky, "The Byzantine Empire and the Hierarchical World Order," Slavonic 
and East European Review 35 no. 84 (1956) 5. 

9 F. DOlger, "Byzanz und das Abendland vor den Kreuzzi.igen," Rela:{ioni del X Congresso 
Interna:{ionale di Scien:{e Storiche 2 (Florence 1956) 71-3 (reprinted in Dolger, IJAPA· 
l:IJOPA (EttalI961) 76-7. 



320 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

and Ostrogorsky.lo It illustrates the truth of Ostrogorsky's statement 
that "no one could show more contempt for facts when they contra­
dicted theory than the Byzantines. When facts and beliefs contradicted 
each other beliefs prevailed." But the belief in a hierarchical world­
order or family of kings effectively ruled out any abstract idea of 
<the West' as something distinct from the rest of Europe or from 
Asia. So far as the Byzantines employed the term Llvats (to mean 
western Europe) at all, it was in a purely administrative sense, as a 
geographical term to describe collectively the temporarily detached 
western provinces of the Roman Empire. 

Byzantine cosmic theory received its first serious shock in 800 when 
Charles the Great was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III. The his­
torical significance of this event for the West is evident. It marked the 
inauguration of Europe as a political concept, what D6lger has called 
the EuropabegrifJ. But for the Byzantines such a concept was a plain 
defiance of the truth. For another emperor to set himself up, even in 
a part of the world temporarily separated from the Roman imperium, 
was nothing but an act of usurpation. For it denied the principle that 
there could only be one Emperor in the world. Charles, though 
crowned as <Emperor of the Romans', seems to have had a more 
modest view than the Pope of his imperial status. He is said to have 
sought the hand in marriage of the Empress Eirene in Constantinople 
as a means of solving the problem and uniting the western and the 
eastern empires. But Eirene was deposed in a palace revolution while 
the western ambassadors were still negotiating with her; and her 
successor Nikephoros chose to bury his head in Byzantine sand by 
refusing to consider the possibility of any compromise. It was left to 
Michael I, who came to the throne in another revolution in 811, to 
find a way out of the dilemma. In 812 Byzantine ambassadors to 
Aachen agreed, on return to their emperor of some of the territory 
which Charles had recently conquered, to recognise him as <emperor' 
in an abstract sense-as imperator, but not of the Romans. To make 
quite sure that the message was understood it was delivered in Greek 
as well as Latin. Charles was to be recognised as /3aatA€VS, but not as 
/3aatA€VS <PwfLaLwv. Further he was promoted to the status of <spiritual 

10 F. Dolger, "Die Familie der Konige im Mittelalter," Historisches Jahrbuch 60 (1940) 
397-420 (=Dolger, Byzanz und die europitische Staatenwelt 34-69); Ostrogorsky, op.dt. 
(supra n.S) 1-14, and "Die byzantinische Staatenhierarchie," Seminarium Kondakovianum 
8 (1936) 41-61; A. Grabar, "God and the 'Family of Princes' presided over by the Byzantine 
Emperor," HarvSlavSt 2 (1954) 117-23. 



DONALD M. NICOL 321 

brother' of the world-emperor in Constantinople in the Byzantine 
family of kings.ll 

This was the best that could be done. The western emperor had 
been acknowledged to have a limited imperium, limited to the terri­
tory of the Franks and to the lifetime of Charles. No suggestion was 
made that Charles was emperor of the pars occidentalis; and his suc­
cessors were demoted to the status of mere 'kings' in the Byzantine 
hierarchy.12 But the Byzantines had to admit that there were now two 
claimants to the imperium and that the emperor in the West, promp­
ted and supported by the papacy, was becoming more and more the 
exponent of a distinct and rival theory of the way the world was run. 
The West as an abstract concept-the EuropabegrijJ-was born and 
grew to plague the Byzantine mind thereafter. It is significant that 
the Byzantine emperors who had hitherto tended to describe them­
selves with the simple title of f3aatA€V~ seldom missed an occasion 
after 812 to employ their full title of f3aatA€U~ TCdV ·Pwp.alwv. 

Charles the Great may, with some reservations, have had a proper 
and deferential awareness of his relationship to the emperor in Con­
stantinople. But his followers were more outspoken in their claims. 
The coronation of Otto the Great and the institution of the Holy 
Roman Empire in 962 proved an even more serious blow to the 
Byzantine idea of world-empire. For Otto and his successors "insisted 
most emphatically on the Roman origin of their imperial status"; and 
the more they insisted the less the Byzantines liked it.13 The Byzantine 
view of the West from the tenth century onwards was increasingly 
jaundiced. Liutprand of Cremona, who went to Constantinople as the 
envoy of Otto the Great in 968, had been commissioned to negotiate 
for the hand of a Byzantine porphyrogenita, a princess born in the 
purple, as a bride for Otto's son. The proposal was received with 
ridicule and contempt by the Emperor Nikephoros Phokas. The idea 
of a princess of the blood imperial being humiliated by marriage to 

a barbarian king was not to be entertained. Only a few years before, 

11 Dolger, op.cit. (supra n.3) 295, 305; idem, op.cit. (supra n.9) 73. Constantine Porphyro­
genitus, De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae, ed. J. J. Reiske, I (Bonn 1829) 689 lines 11-12. See 
now R. J. H. Jenkins, Byzantium. The Imperial Centuries (London 1966) 105-16. 

12 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, ed. Gy. Moravcsik and R. 
J. H. Jenkins, I (Budapest 1949) 109; II (ed. Jenkins, London 1962) 83. W. Ohnsorge, Das 
Zweikaiserproblem im fruheren Mitte/alter. Die Bedeutung des byzantinischen Reiches fur die 
Entwicklung der Staatsidee in Europa (Hildesheim 1947) 28-47. 

18 Ostrogorsky, op.cit. (supra n.8) 7. 



322 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in a well-known passage 
of his De administrando imperio, had counselled his son most strongly 
against revealing the secrets of empire to barbarians or gentiles and 
no less forcibly against contracting marriages with them or their 
heirs. His words are eloquent of the Byzantine attitude to the West 
in the tenth century: "Never shall an Emperor of the Romans ally 
himself in marriage with a nation of customs differing from and alien 
to those of the Roman order, especially with one that is infidel and 
unbaptised, unless it be with the Franks alone; for they alone were 
excepted by that great man, the holy Constantine, because he him­
self drew his origin from those parts; for there is much relationship 
and converse between Franks and Romans .... But with any other 
nation whatsoever it was not to be in their power to do this, and he 
who dared to do it was to be condemned as an alien from the ranks 
of the Christians and subject to the anathema, as a transgressor of 
ancestral laws and imperial ordinances."14 The exception made of 
the Franks had, of course, nothing to do with Constantine the Great. 
It could be excused by the special relationship of spiritual brotherhood 
granted to Charlemagne in the Byzantine imperial hierarchy in 812, 
which had never been officially revoked for his successors. It had to 
be defended because marriages between Franks and Byzantines had 
already occurred. But in a more general sense it may be taken to 
indicate a stage in the development of the Byzantine consciousness 
of western Europe as a separate entity, a social and political world 
distinct from the otherwise undifferentiated mass of barbarians and 
gentiles.1s Clearly this was a development in their thought which the 
Byzantines did not care to admit was being forced upon them by 

14 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio I, 71-72. D. A. Zakythenos, 
"TJ Bv~&JI7'tOV /L€Tagv 'AvaToA7is Kal Llvu€ws," 'E1T€rY}pls 'ETatp€las Bv,aJI7'tvwV .E1TOV1)WV 28 
(1958) 367-400, chastises the school of modern historians who believe that "Byzantium was 
closer to Islam than to the Franks. to the East than to the West," and that it was an eastern 
rather than a western state, deriving its inspiration and taking its cue from the Orient, 
from Persia and the Arab world. He contrasts the refusal of the Emperor Theophilos to 
be bribed by the Caliph AI-Mamun (812-833) into sending Leo the Mathematician to 
his court (on the ground that the Romaioi could not share with the nations the wisdom 
for which they were renowned) with the present of the works of the Pseudo-Dionysios 
courteously sent by the Emperor Michael II to his cousin in the West, Louis the Pious, in 
827. These two instances are cited to prove that the Byzantines regarded the people and 
rulers of the Christian West "in a special way," realising that they were bound to them by 
the closest political and spiritual ties. Zakythenos, op.cit. 374-5. Theophanes Continuatus, 
De Michaele Theophili F., ed. I. Bekker, II (Bonn 1838) 185-91; F. Dolger, Regesten der Kaiser-
1Lrkunden des ostromischen Reiches I (Munich-Berlin 1924) nO. 408. 

16 Dolger, op.cit. (supra n.3) 286. 



DONALD M. NICOL 323 

circumstances. The sanction of Constantine the Great for converse 
with the Franks was therefore comforting. 

It should be observed, however, that Constantine Porphyrogenitus 
was writing some ten years before the coronation of Otto the Great, 
and further that when Otto sent Liutprand to Constantinople in 968 
the emperor on the Byzantine throne was not a scholar and a pedant 
but a brilliant soldier who was busily engaged in recovering the lost 
provinces and the lost prestige of his empire in the East. Nikephoros 
Phokas was not the sort of man to make nice academic distinctions 
between the Franks and the rest of the gentiles. So far as he was con­
cerned Otto was just a jumped-up barbarian chieftain. John Tzimiskes 
who succeeded Nikephoros in 969, handled the matter more dis­
creetly by sending to the German court his relative Theophano, who 
married Otto II in Rome in 972. She mayor may not have been the 
princess born in the purple for whom Otto's father had asked; but 
she was a Byzantine princess related to the reigning emperor, and 
therefore honour was satisfied and the crisis between the Eastern and 
the Western empires was averted.I6 But the fact that matters had 
come to a crisis between East and West demonstrated again what 
the Byzantines were loath to admit, that the Western empire had 
come to stay, that political developments in western Europe had 
outrun the point at which it would ever be possible to put the clock 
back to the time of the universal empire of Augustus, Constantine 
or even Justinian. 

Indeed the ever more confident claims of the Holy Roman em­
perors to be themselves the heirs to that universal imperium began 
to make it necessary for the Byzantines to justify their own claim, 
to reassure themselves and to point out to the West just why and 
how their empire was the only one. To the theory that Constantinople 
was not, as Constantine himself had described it, the 'Second Rome' 
but the 'New Rome' (in contrast to the Old Rome in Italy) was added 
a new fiction; it was the tale of the translatio imperii from the old to 

the new capital, supposedly effected by Constantine. This story, that 
the first Christian emperor had deliberately abandoned his capital 
in Italy and transferred the whole works of his empire from Rome to 

18 For the literature on this vexed topic see, e.g. W. Ohnsorge, Abend/and und Byzanz. 
Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Geschichte der byzantinisch-abendlandischen BeZiehungen und des 
Kaisertums (Darmstadt 1958) 41 and n.150, 299 n.; G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine 
State (Oxford 1956) 263, and Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates3 , (Munich 1963) 246; 
Jenkins, op.cit. (supra n.ll) 293. 



324 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

Constantinople, was already tentatively put forward in the sixth 
century. But it was elaborated to its full expression, as a water-tight 
argument with which to baffle the claims of the Western emperors, 
in the tenth century and after. It is retailed with some vigour by 
Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Emperor Alexios I, at the time 
of the first crusades. The twelfth-century historian John Kinnamos 
confessed himself reduced to tears by reflecting on the absurd pre­
tensions of the popes and self-styled <emperors' of the west who 
presumptuously inferred that the Empire of Byzantium was some­
thing other than that of Rome.I7 

The translatio imperii was still an article of Byzantine faith in the 
fourteenth century. The Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, in his account 
of the capture of Herakleia by the Genoese in 1352, traces the way­
wardness and wickedness of these "Italians, barbarians in mind and 
body" to their failure to realise that they were lapsed members of 
the Roman Empire. "The great and wonderful Empire of the Romans," 
writes Philotheos, «was transferred from Italy to the East when Con­
stantine the Great, by divine command, was converted from Hellen­
ism to faith in Christ and transformed the dty of Byzantium into the 
present great dty which he called by his own name. It was he who 
built here a palace and moved the council and the senate over from 
Old Rome to make this, the New Rome, leader in authority over all 
other dties. So matters stood, with the Empire of the old Rome 
united under the rule of this dty until the time of the reign of Leo 
of Armenia. Thanks to his evil and misguided war against the 
icons the Church of Old Rome split off from that of Constantinople; 
and when the Church was divided so also was the Empire of this world, 
and those of Old Rome elected for themselves as their emperor a 
barbarian king from Germany. (This severed portion of the Empire 
then inevitably split into various sections and factions fighting against 
each other.) And the situation now is such that those of the New 
Rome, that is to say all of us who belong to the universal Church and 
are subjects of the Roman Empire and therefore continue to call 
ourselves Romaioi, differ so greatly from those of the Old Rome and 
all the various principalities of that now divided nation that very few 

17 Anna Comnena, Alexiad 1.13, ed. A. Reifferscheid, I (Leipzig 1884) 45-6. John Cinna­
mus, Epitome rerum ab leanne et Alexio Comnenis gestarum, ed. A. Meineke (Bonn 1836) 
218-20. Cf. DOiger, op.cit. (supra n.5) 98f.; P. J. Alexander, "The Donation of Constantine 
at Byzantium and its Earliest Use against the Western Empire," Zbornik Radcwa Vi~anto­
losiwg lnstituta 8 (1963) (=Melanges G. Ostrogorsky I) 12-25. 



DONALD M. NICOL 325 

of them recognise the fact that they too were once Romans and of the 
same nation and Empire and that the cause of their present detach­
ment from the Church as from the Empire is their own shortsighted­
ness and folly."18 It is a sign of weakness rather than strength when 
fictions have to be invented to support alleged realities. But in defence 
of the Byzantines it may be said that the fables that they conjured to 
boost their morale and prestige were no more monstrous than those 
invented by the popes and emperors in the West. 

That the conflict between the Eastern and Western emperors was 
confined to words and never came to open war was due most prob­
ably to geographical factors, to the great distance separating the two 
empires. Only in the south ofItaly was there anything like a common 
boundary, and there in the eleventh century the Normans arrived 
to complicate the issue. But where a rival claimant to the universal 
imperium appeared as it were on the doorstep of the Byzantines they 
were obliged to take more direct action and to make greater con­
cessions. Symeon of Bulgaria, unlike the rulers of western Europe, 
was in a position to state his claim sword in hand at the walls of 
Constantinople, as he did in 913; and that claim was not simply for 
the national independence of a Bulgarian kingdom. It was for the 
creation of a new universal empire to absorb and replace that of 
Byzantium. The Patriarch of Constantinople seems to have decided 
that the only way to satisfy Symeon's pride was to provide him with 
an imperial crown, though not of course the crown of Emperor of 
the Romans. As a diplomatic gesture this was feeble if not dishonest; 

18 Philotheos (Kokkinos), "Aoyos iUTOPLKOS on the siege and capture by the Latins of Hera­
kleia in the reign of the pious Emperors Kantakouzenos and Palaiologos," ed. C. Trianta­
fillis and A. Grapputo, Anecdota Graeca e codicibus manu scriptis Bibliothecae S. Marci I (Venice 
1874) 10-11. Somewhat similar sentiments were expressed, if the curious account of the 
fifteenth-century English chronicler Adam ofUsk is to be believed, by some ambassadors 
sent by the Emperor Manuel II to Rome in 1404. They protested to Pope Boniface IX 
that, as the rightful heirs of Constantine the Great, they had been unjustly deprived of 
the Roman Empire by "the tyrant of Germany," and went so far as to beg the Pope to 
restore it to them together with "the kingdom of Naples and all Lombardy." Alter­
natively the Pope should appoint a day on which the claim could be contested in open 
battle before the city of Rome. The Pope is said to have replied that they had forfeited 
their right to the Empire by reason of their heresies and schisms, especially in the matter 
of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, and their deviations from Roman practice in the 
sacrament of Confession and the liturgical use of leavened bread. Chronicon Adae de Usk, 
A.D. 1377-1421, ed. and transI. by E. M. Thompson (London 1904) 96, 272. This passage 
from Adam of Usk seems to reflect a recognisable if garbled version of the Byzantine 
view of the West. It has been but little noticed; though cf A. A. Vasiliev, "The Opening 
Stages of the Anglo-Saxon Immigration to Byzantium in the Eleventh Century," Semi­
narium Kondakovianum 9 (1937) 69-70 



326 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

and the Byzantines were discouraged to learn soon afterwards that 
Symeon had taken to calling himself Emperor of the Bulgars and the 
Romans. But the problem was solved by his death in 927. His son and 
successor meekly submitted to taking the simple title of /3auL/..Evs, 
and he accepted in marriage a Byzantine princess not born in the 
purple.I9 But Symeon's claim was to be revived in the thirteenth 
century by Kalojan and John Asen of Bulgaria, and in the fourteenth 
century by the other next-door neighbour of Byzantium in Europe, 
Stephen Dusan of Serbia, who had himself crowned in 1346 as 
Emperor of the Serbs and Romans. 

What happened in the Balkans was of immediate concern to 
Byzantium and frequently shaped or dictated imperial policy. But 
what happened in France, Germany and the West was of much less 
compelling interest, apart from the constitutional principles involved. 
During the glorious era of the Macedonian emperors in the tenth 
and early eleventh centuries it did not much matter. No ruler in the 
distant West seemed likely to offer a direct challenge to the might of 
an emperor like Basil II. Indeed Basil was actively preparing a cam­
paign for the recovery of the western provinces, beginning with the 
reconquest of Sicily from the Arabs, when he died in 1025. It was the 
last time that there ever seemed the remotest chance that the theory 
of a universal empire might be put into practice. 

The decline of Byzantine power and prosperity that set in after 
Basil's death was particularly unfortunate as regards Byzantine rela­
tionships with the West; for it coincided with the resurgence of 
western Europe characterised by the Gregorian reform of the papacy 
and then by the Crusades. However one may interpret the schism 
between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople in 1054, it is 
highly significant that it occurred when it did. The clash of wills 
between Cardinal Humbert and the Patriarch Michael Cerularius 
was a symptom of the ideological collision between East and West 
in the middle of the eleventh century; for it was at this poine of time 
that the centre of gravity of the Christian world began to move from 
Constantinople and the Greek East back to Rome and the Latin 
West. The claims of the Hildebrandine papacy seemed to the Byz­
antines to be every bit as extravagant and perverse as those of the 
German emperors. Some of the Byzantine clergy. among them 

19 S. Runciman, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and his Reign (Cambridge 1929) 80£. 
Ostrogorsky, op.cit. (supra n.16) 231-7; Jenkins, op.cit. (supra n.ll) 231-2. 



DONALD M. NICOL 327 

Cerularius himself, were rather taken with the way in which the 
popes insisted on setting the affairs of the Church above and beyond 
the reach of the emperors. But this did not excuse the pope for 
behaving like an emperor himself.20 

lYluch has been made of the flattering words addressed by the 
Emperor Michael VII Doukas to the Norman leader Robert Guiscard 
in 1074, only twenty years after the schism, as indicative of the under­
lying feeling of unity between Byzantines and westerners as members 
of a Christian and European community.21 Is it not absurd, the 
emperor writes, that we, who are united in the Christian faith and 
joined by ties of common racial ancestry, should be divided and at 
war with one another? "For this is nothing but the cutting up of one 
body, the rending and separation of its very limbs." This sounds very 
fine and noble. But it should be noted that the agreement, of which 
these words are the preface, was Michael VII's third desperate attempt 
to come to terms with Robert Guiscard and his Norman knights who 
had just successfully appropriated all that remained of Byzantine 
Italy. The emperor had been driven to recognising the Norman con­
quest as a fait accompli; he now gave his own son Constantine in 
marriage to Guiscard's daughter and pandered to Norman vanity 
by an unusually generous gift of imperial titles and pensions.22 The 
language of this document is more diplomatically phrased than deeply 
felt. What may be described as the more honest Byzantine sentiment 
about the Normans and about Michael VII's concessions to them is 
expressed by Anna Comnena in the next generation. Far from con­
gratulating him for his understanding of the basic unity of all Euro­
pean peoples, Anna angrily rebukes the emperor for his want of 
propriety in promoting what she calls "an alien, barbarous and 
wholly unsuitable marriage" between his own son and "the daughter 
of this barbarian" Robert.23 

In the twelfth century the Western emperor Frederick Barbarossa 
set his lawyers at Bologna to study the laws of Justinian and discovered 

20 Cf Alexander, op.cit. (supra n.17) 25-6. 
!1 Letter of Michael VII to Robert Guiscard, ed. K. N. Sathas, Bibliotheca Graeca Medii 

Aevi (M€aaLwvLK-r/ BL{1AW()rJKrj) V (Venice-Paris 1876) 388-92, esp. 389. Zakythenos. op.cit. 
(supra n.14) 375-6. 

22 See P. Charanis, "Byzantium, the West and the Origins of the First Crusade," Byzan­
tion 19 (1949) 17-24; idem, "The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century," A History oJ 
the Crusades, ed. K. M. Setton, I: The First Hundred Years, ed. M. W. Baldwin (Philadelphia 
1955) 187-8. 

113 Anna Comnena, Alexiad 1.10, ed. Reifferscheid 1.35. 



328 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

to his delight that Justinian had been supreme lord not only of the 
State but also of the Church. Armed with this knowledge of what 
was after all the genuine Roman tradition, Frederick could confi­
dently oppose the claims of the papacy. But his researches into 
Justinian's law also strengthened his belief that imperial sovereignty 
meant universal sovereignty; and this was an excellent stick with 
which to beat the emperor in Constantinople, whom Frederick 
rudely regarded as nothing more than a Greek king.24 The tables 
were being turned on the Byzantines by the temporal as well as the 
spiritual rulers of the West; and by the twelfth century they were 
obliged either as realists to accept the unpalatable truth that they 
had lost the initiative in world affairs, or once again, to bury their 
heads in the familiar sand of the Byzantine myth. 

The Emperor Manuel Komnenos, to whom Frederick Barbarossa 
was so uncivil, could in some sense be honoured as the first of the 
Byzantine realists, to the extent that he was prepared to learn from 
the West. Manuel had the wit to see the attractions and the possible 
benefits of the western way of life. He was fully conscious of his posi­
tion as the one true Emperor and a firm believer in the tradition of 
the universal Empire, which, for a glorious moment, he recalled by 
launching a campaign against the Normans in south Italy.25 But he 
seems to have felt that active co-existence with the western powers 
was more likely to bring them round to the Byzantine view than a 
policy of obstinate isolationism. He married twice, and both of his 
wives were westerners and not Greeks. Under his influence foreigners 
from the West were encouraged to come and do business or reside 
in Constantinople and even given responsible appointments as state 
officials, while the romps and antics of western chivalry became 
fashionable among the Byzantine aristocracy. Manuel himself un­
horsed two of the most accomplished French knights in a famous 
tournament in Constantinople. But the Byzantine people, backed 
by their clergy, were not impressed by the emperor's prowess, and 
simply accused him of being a "Latinophile." They bitterly resented 
his favouritism towards the hated foreigners. Maybe they had some 
cause for bitterness, for they had endured many indignities and 
suffered many losses from the crusaders who poured through Con­
stantinople and its territories on their way to Syria. Such experi-

S4 Alexander, op.cit. (supra n.17) 22-5. 
15 Ostrogorsky, op.cit. (supra n.16) 341-2. 



DONALD M. NICOL 329 

ences served to reinforce their unshakeable belief in their own super­
iority to all the 'nations' of the West as the chosen people. 

The superiority complex of the Byzantines was in fact aggravated 
rather than cured by physical contact with the representatives of the 
West who arrived in the East in increasing numbers in the twelfth 
century. either as crusaders or as hard-headed businessmen from 
Venice and Genoa. In the summing-up at the end of Volume III of 
his History of the Crusades Sir Steven Runciman write'): "Throughout 
the ages there have always been hopeful politicians who believe that 
if only the peoples of the world could come together they would 
love and understand each other. It is a tragic delusion."26 The pent­
up hatred of Byzantines for foreigners broke out in a bloody massacre 
of the Latins resident in Constantinople in 1182. The Crusades had 
magnified the misunderstandings, underlined the points of difference 
and confirmed the ideological separation between East and West. The 
leaders of the Crusades seemed to the sophisticated gentry of Con­
stantinople a rough and uncouth lot. The rabble of ordinary crusaders 
spoke no known language, were grasping and bad-mannered and 
yet had an intolerable conceit of themselves. Anna Comnena was 
deeply shocked by the martial and murderous bearing of crusading 
bishops and priests. "The Latins," she writes, "do not have at all the 
same notion of a priest as we have." Indeed the whole western concep­
tion of the Crusade as a religious ideal was essentially foreign to the 
Byzantine mind. In itself it presupposed a completely different theory 
of the order of things. For the Crusades were inspired by the papacy 
in its supposed capacity as head of all Christendom; and this to the 
Byzantines was foolishness. For the war against the infidel, whether 
Persian, Arab or Turk, had been, since the beginning of the Christian 
Empire, the care of the Roman Emperor who was in fact and not 
merely in his own vain imagining the regent of God on earth and 
father of all Christians.27 

The damage done to the Byzantine view of the West by the early 
Crusades can hardly be assessed in concrete terms. A deepening of 
mistrust and suspicion, a strengthening of prejudices, an increasing 
awareness of radal differences, an obstinate withdrawal by the Byz­
antines into the protective shell of their tradition-these were some 

28 S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades III (Cambridge 1954) 475. 
27 Cf. D. M. Nicol, "Byzantium and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century," jEcC/Hist 

13 (1962) 19 and references. 



330 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

of the consequences. The Byzantines began to stiffen their ranks and 
to become conscious of their national solidarity as Greeks. It was the 
Crusades that first prompted them to regard the West as one hostile 
block collectively known as 'the Latins', a race of people utterly 
distinct from the true Greek-speaking Romans. "Between us and the 
Latins," writes Niketas Choniates at the end of the twelfth century, 
His set the widest gulf. We are poles apart. We have not a single 
thought in common. They are stiff-necked, with a proud affection of 
an upright carriage, and love to sneer at the smoothness and modesty 
of our manners. But we look on their arrogance and boasting and 
pride as a flux of the snivel which keeps their noses in the air; and we 
tread them down by the might of Christ, who giveth unto us the 
power to trample upon the adder and upon the scorpion."28 

The damage done to Byzantium by the Fourth Crusade could, of 
course, be assessed in concrete terms. The westerners themselves, 
with what the Byzantines would have called their customary mater­
ialism, made some rough calculations. Geoffrey of Villehardouin 
estimated that the amount of loot taken at the sack of Constantinople 
in 1204 was greater than that taken in any city since the creation of 
the world and might have realised 400,000 silver marks, not to speak 
of at least 10,000 horses that changed hands. The enthronement of 
an alien emperor in their capital, the appointment of a foreign and 
heretical patriarch, the deliberate conquest and dismemberment of 
their provinces by the Latins-these experiences inevitably confirmed 
all the Byzantines' fears and suspicions of the westerners. They were 
not concerned to argue and debate, as modern historians do, whether 
the blame for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade lay with the Pope 
or the Venetians or the Franks or the Lombards. For them the collec­
tive guilt of the crime was fastened on the Latins, the "Latin dogs," 
the adulterers of the faith, the forerunners of antichrist. It was barely 
possible after this disaster for the Byzantines ever to think dispas­
sionately or in rational terms about the West. What is remarkable is 
that some of them made the effort to do so, and a few succeeded. 

It is commonly said that the Byzantine Empire never rallied after 
the mortal blow of the Fourth Crusade. Territorial, economic and 
population statistics may show this to be so; the restored empire of 

28 Niketas Choniates, Historia. De Andronico Comneno, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn 1835) 391 
line 24-392 line 12; transI. by R. J. H. Jenkins, The Cambridge Medieval History IV.2 (Cam­
bridge 1967) 81. 



DONALD M. NICOL 331 

the Palaiologi after 1261 was soon to be reduced to the little measure 
of Constantinople, Thessalonica, a part of Greece and the fringes of 
the Aegean Sea. But the cultural and intellectual life of the empire 
seemed to thrive and grow in proportion to its material decline. 
Hatred of the West was now more firmly rooted than ever among 
the conservative majority of Byzantines. It was sometimes to be 
inflamed beyond endurance by the latinophile policy of emperors 
desperate for help against their enemies. But among the intelligentsia 
and the ruling aristocracy in the last two centuries of the Byzantine 
Empire there were, one might say, two views of the West, one realis­
tic, the other romantic. They were minority views, both contrary 
to the ostrich-like attitude of the conservatives. 

The realistic view was that the emperor must come to terms with 
the West, even if it meant making certain concessions. Its greatest 
exponent was the first emperor of the restoration, Michael VIII 
Palaiologos. Michael was firmly persuaded that Constantinople had 
been liberated from the Latins and restored to him in 1261 by a 
miracle of divine favour. But he was determined not to tempt 
Providence too far; for he was fully aware that the Latins, having 
tasted the fruits of Byzantium, now appreciated the value of the 
prize that they had lost and would return in force to recapture it. 
Faced with the prospect of a large-scale invasion of his empire by 
Charles of Anjou, Michael VIII courted the favour of the only west­
ern power that could exercise a restraining influence on him, namely 
the papacy. Michael's negotiations with the papacy, which ultimately 
brought about the so-called Union of Lyons in 1274, were the product 
of a cool, almost cynically realistic appraisal of the political situation. 
The thing above all others which the popes had hoped to gain out of 
the miserable experiment of the Latin Empire of Constantinople was 
the acknowledgement by what they chose to call the Greek church 
of the universal supremacy of Rome. This Michael was prepared to 
give them in return for their assurance that they would not preach 
or sanction a repetition of the Fourth Crusade. But to sell this policy 
to his own subjects proved even more difficult than he had imagined. 
It was useless to impress on them that the pope lived far away across 
the sea and would never be likely to come to Constantinople to en­
force his jurisdiction; or to assure them that not one jot or one tittle 
would be altered in the Orthodox creed and doctrine. For most of 
those whom he was trying to persuade, and notably the clergy, clung 

6-G.R.B.S. 



332 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

fast to the irrational faith of their ancestors, which their emperor 
seemed to have lost, that their empire was ordained by God and its 
capital guarded by God. The fact that it had succumbed to its enemies 
in 1204 was due entirely to the sins of its inhabitants and to God's 
anger with them; the fact that it had been restored was clear evidence 
of God's renewed favour. But God's favour would quickly be with­
drawn again if his people sacrificed their spiritual integrity on the 
altar of political necessity by making compromises with the wicked 
and heretical Latins. Michael VIII saved his empire from its western 
enemies, but he got little thanks from his subjects. They accused hinl of 
selling his soul and their Church to Rome, nicknamed him the 
Aanvbcppwv, <Latin-minded', and denied him the right of Christian 
burial when he died. 

His successor Andronikos II cravenly retreated from the naked light 
shed on the Byzantine myth by the harsh realities of western Europe. 
The Latins and the popes of the fourteenth century periodically con­
sidered an invasion or a crusade for the incorporation of Constantin­
ople in a temporal or spiritual empire of the West. But with Charles 
of Anjou gone their chances of success were never very great. It was 
left to the commercial republics of Italy to bleed the dying body of 
the Byzantine Empire while its heart was steadily eaten away by the 
Turks. The idea of enlisting military help from the West to defend 
Byzantium against the Turks constantly recurred to the minds of 
the succeeding emperors; and the more realistic of them were pre­
pared, as Michael VIII had been, to come to terms with the papacy so 
that they might be put on the crusading list. The Emperor John V. 
predisposed to a liking for the West by the upbringing of his Catholic 
mother Anne of Savoy, proposed an extravagantly naive bargain to 
Pope Innocent VI in 1355, offering, in return for a fleet and an army, 
to convert the whole Byzantine people to Catholicism within six 
months. Seventeen years later, an older and a wiser man, he went 
alone to Rome and made his personal submission to the pope. But 
neither his Church nor his people supported him, and he was arrested 
at Venice as an insolvent debtor on his way home. In 1399 his son 
Manuel II set out cap in hand to beg from the western powers the 
funds or the troops to save his empire from extinction. He visited 
Venice, Paris and London. On his way from Dover to London he was 
royally entertained by the Austin friars at Canterbury. King Henry 
IV, who had plenty of other things to do, having just succeeded in 



DONALD M. NICOL 333 

getting Richard II off the throne of England, nevertheless escorted 
the eastern emperor from Blackheath to the city of London in solemn 
procession and spent part of the Christmas holiday with him at 
Eltham. Manuel was touched and gratified by the hospitality and 
presents showered upon him. He made a great impression too, but 
more by his pathetic plight than by his grandeur. Adam of Usk, who 
seems to have met him in London, writes: "I thought within myself, 
what a grievous thing it was that this great Christian prince from the 
farther east should perforce be driven by unbelievers to visit the dis­
tant islands of the west, to seek aid against them. My God! What dost 
thou, ancient glory of Rome ?"29 Manuel's visit to the cities of western 
Europe did much to stimulate cultural exchanges between Greeks 
and Latins; but otherwise, from all his wanderings he got nothing 
but presents and promises. The kings and princes of the West were 
too busy putting their own houses in order at the turn of the four­
teenth century to have much to offer except sympathy to the emperor 
in ConstantinopJ e. 

So it came about that, on the eve of the empire's fall, the Emperor 
John VIII and his patriarch with a great cloud of Orthodox witnesses 
went to Italy and signed away the orthodoxy of their Church at the 
Council of Florence in 1439. Desperate situations demand desperate 
measures. But to most of the citizens of Constantinople, who were 
daily expecting the Turks to break into their city and not enjoying 
expense-account luncheons in Florence, it seemed that their emperor 
had signed their death warrant. By betraying their faith and their 
Church he had also betrayed the whole Byzantine myth. The 
die-hards of the Byzantine imperial tradition in Constantinople 
positively rejoiced that the promised crusade from the West, the 
reward of their Emperor's betrayal, came to grief at the hands of the 
Turks at Varna in 1444. For they believed, as their ancestors had be­
lieved in the thirteenth century, that if the Empire survived it wouJd 
only be through the loyalty of its inhabitants to the faith of their 
fathers; if it fell, as fall it did fourteen years after the Council of 
Florence, it would be because that faith had been contaminated by 
the errors of the Latins. 

It could be argued that the greatest realists of all at the hour of the 

29 Ostrogorsky, op.cit. (supra n.16) 493-4 and references. Chronicon Adae de Usk (supra 
n.18) 57, 220. 



334 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

empire's death were those few Greeks who squarely faced the fact 
that the management of their world, as opposed to the alien world 
of the West, was now committed to the care of an emperor who was 
not a Christian. The Byzantine historians Laonikos Chalkokondyles 
and Kritoboulos of Imbros, writing just after 1453, accepted the fact 
that the Christian Empire had given place to the Ottoman Empire, 
and indeed wrote their histories to show how this had come about 
and why it should be regarded as part of the divine dispensation. But 
it was still the one empire, its capital was still the Queen of Cities and 
the hub of their world; and its new ruler, the Sultan Muhammad II, 
was its [3aaLA€VS, its Emperor, appointed by God. The continuation 
of the Empire in another form was clear and logical. But in the nature 
of things there could still only be one Emperor. Kritoboulos addresses 
his history to the Sultan in these words: "To the supreme aVToKpaTwp 

Emperor of Emperors, Muhammad ... by the will of God invin­
cible lord of land and sea."30 The sultan was the direct inheritor of 
the last Christian [3aaLA€VS of the Romans, and so of Constantine 
himself. Even as late as the eighteenth century we find this explana­
tion of the Turkish conquest being openly expressed by the hierarchy 
of the Greek Church. The conquest is explained as God's way of 
preserving the Orthodox faith from the corruption of western here­
sies; the rule of the SUltan-Basileus is part of the divine economy for 
the chosen people. In the Paternal Exhortation of the Patriarch of 
Jerusalem published in Constantinople in 1798 we read: "Behold 
how our merciful and omniscient Lord has managed to preserve the 
integrity of our holy Orthodox faith and to save (us) all; he brought 
forth out of nothing the powerful Empire of the Ottomans, which 
he set up in the place of our Empire of the Romaioi, which had begun 
in some ways to deviate from the path of the Orthodox faith; and he 
raised this Empire of the Ottomans above every other in order to 
prove beyond doubt that it came into being by the will of God .... 
For there is no authority except that deriving from God."31 

The romantic view of the West was held by a minority of highly­
educated Byzantines in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One 
can understand why the conservatives in Byzantium, even in their 

3D Critobul din Imbros (Kritoboulos), Din Domnia lui Mahomed al II-lea anii 1451-1467, 
ed. V. Grecu (Scriptores Byzantini IV, Bucharest 1963) 25 lines 4-6. 

31 Th. H. Papadopoulos, Studies and Documents relating to the History of the Greek Church 
and People under Turkish Domination (Brussels 1952) 143. 



DONALD M. NICOL 335 

city's darkest hour, regarded the West with suspicion; why, as one 
of them expressed it in a well-known outburst, he would rather see 
the sultan's turban in his city than the Roman mitre. What is perhaps 
more difficult to understand is why so many of the Byzantines did 
in fact contrive to sink their prejudices, even to the extent of becoming 
themselves westernised. What made so many of the Greeks accept 
the Union of Florence in 1439, knowing full well that on Rome's 
terms it implied abandoning their whole conception of empire, 
recognising not only the supremacy of the pope but also the super­
iority of the Latin West over the Greek East? 

This was a thought that had occurred to a few Byzantine intellec­
tuals even as early as the fourteenth century, though they might not 
state it in quite such embarrassingly definite terms. The ominous 
advance of the Turks and the evident impoverishment and decline 
of the empire had led several of the intelligentsia to question the 
inherited article of faith that their Empire and Church were God's 
last word on the order of the world. In the fourteenth century men 
like Theodore Metochites, Grand Logothete of Andronikos II, or 
Demetrios Kydones, prime nlinister of John Cantacuzene and John 
V, were already casting about for a substitute theory that might bear 
closer relation to the facts. Metochites derived comfort from the 
reflexion that other empires had come and gone; he even went so 
far as to say that the Roman Empire at the height of its glory had 
never been truly oecumenical or universal, which implied that, if 
the pessimists were correct in thinking that the end of the universal 
empire was at hand, it did not mean the end of the universe. For a 
Byzantine this was a revolutionary idea, since most of the prophets 
had foretold that Constantinople would endure until the Second 
Coming.32 

But the new ideas did not stop short at the re-evaluation of the 
Byzantine myth. Now that western Europe had something more pro­
found and rewarding to offer than the arts of jousting and chivalry, 
some Byzantines were quick to see what they were missing. Deme­
trios K ydones had the freshness of mind to realise that culturally as 
well as politically the moment had come at which the Byzantines 
were being outstripped by the westerners. For K ydones the discovery 

3Z I. Sevcenko, "The Decline of Byzantium Seen through the Eyes of its Intellectuals." 
DOPapers 15 (1961) 183. 



336 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

that the Latins had much to offer on the intellectual plane was 
exhilarating rather than humiliating. His position at court made it 
necessary for him to learn Latin in order to cope with the emperor's 
correspondence and western ambassadors. The Dominican friar who 
gave him lessons set him to translate the Summa contra Gentiles of 
Thomas Aquinas for his homework; and "the world of Latin theology 
was suddenly opened up to him." Kydones had, in his own words, 
"tasted the lotus" of Latin thought and culture. He could no longer 
subscribe to the ancient illusion that the world was divided into 
"Hellenes and barbarians." "Before this," he writes, "there was no 
one to persuade our people that there is any intelligence in the Latins, 
and that they are able to discuss anything besides these paltry and 
<banausic' arts (of war, commerce and huckstering), because the long 
separation of the two peoples has resulted in much ignorance of each 
other."33 

Kydones had accompanied the Emperor John V on his journey to 
Rome in 1369. It seemed inevitable that he himself should go over 
to the Roman Church and finally take up residence in Italy and the 
West. But it was not entirely a case of the rats leaving the sinking 
ship. Kydones and others like him were lured away by the greater 
security and more exciting intellectual life of the West; but always 
they had in their minds the prospect of saving the wreck of Con­
stantinople from total submersion by interesting the powers of west­
ern Europe in its fate. K ydones never ceased to hope that one day 
the popes would preach the crusade that would rescue his homeland 
from the Turks. 

By the fifteenth century, when the situation in the East was still 
more critical, even churchmen like Bessarion of Nicaea and Isidore 
of Kiev chose to desert the darkening Orthodox world in favour of the 
bright lights of Italy. Both were created cardinals for their devoted 
labours at the Council of Florence; for both saw in union with the 
Roman Church and acknowledgement of papal sovereignty not only 

38Demetrios Kydones, Apologia della propria fede I: Ai Greci Ortodossi, ed. G. Mercati, 
Notizie di Procoro e Demetrio Cidone, Manuele Caleca e Teodoro Meliteniota ed altri appunti 
(Studi e Testi 56, Vatican 1931) 363--6, esp. 363 line 30f, 365 line 84f; transl. by K. M. Setton, 
"The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance," ProcAmPhilosSoc 100, 1 (1956) 
53-4. The <Gentiles' of Thomas Aquinas become the <Hellenes' of Demetrios Kydones, 
who entitled his rendering: T6 TOU @wp.a Ka(}' <E>J...qvwv f3tf3Alov. See Kydones, Apologia 363 
line 28; cf A. Turyn, Codices Graeci Vaticani saeculis XIII et XIV scripti annorumque notis 
instructi (Vatican 1964) 150-4. 



DONALD M. NICOL 337 

a promlsmg alternative to the now doomed concept of a world­
empire ruled from Constantinople, but also a means of bringing the 
East into contact with the new and vigorous life of western Europe. 
Bessarion knew his countrymen, however, and tactfully pointed out 
to them that they would lose nothing of their dignity by taking lessons 
from the Latins, since they would only be reaping the harvest of the 
seeds sown in the West by their own ancestors. He sugared the pill 
by arguing that the cultural superiority which the westerners were 
then enjoying was built upon the foundations of Byzantine culture 
which they had acquired long ago. As an interpreter of ideas between 
the Greek East and Latin West Bessarion takes the prize. He was, as 
Lorenzo Valla describes him, Latinorum graecissimus, Graecorum 
latinissimus.34 

But his view of the West was not characteristically Byzantine. It 
was that of a romantic rather than a realist; that of one who sought 
the comfort of a new myth rather than live with the depressing con­
sequences of the tradition into which he had been born. A romantic 
or an escapist of another kind was his contemporary George Gemistos 
Plethon who, though equally interested in bridging the intellectual 
gap between East and West, despaired of Christianity altogether and 
tried to evolve a completely new philosophy of life based on Plato 
and a renaissance of Hellenism. 

The Byzantine ignorance of the Latins of which Demetrios Kydones 
complains was not due to lack of contact, sodal or political. The 
Byzantines of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were all too well 
aware of why they disliked the Latins. Some of the intellectuals were 
able to rise above their prejudices. But for the ordinary people Greek 
translations of Thomas Aquinas brought little comfort. Such a one 
was Alexios Makrembolites in the middle of the fourteenth century. 
Makrembolites was no great scholar. But his surviving works are 
eloquent of the feelings and reactions of what may be called the 
middle class of Constantinople a hundred years before its fall. When 
speculating on the reasons for the evident collapse of his world, 
Makrembolites blames the sodal injustices sanctioned by the rich 
of Constantinople at the expense of the poor; he blames his own 
fellow-citizens for their failure to adhere to the precepts of the Gospels; 
and he explains the alarming success of the godless Turks by their 

3. Sevcenko, op.cit. (supra n.32) 177; Setton, op.cit. (supra n.33) 73. 



338 THE BYZANTINE VIEW OF WESTERN EUROPE 

"innate moral superiority to the Byzantines .... For in spite of their 
abominable faith, many Turks were like true Christians in their 
deeds and lacked only the name of Christian." But above all he blames 
the Italians, the westerners, who were such an obnoxious feature of 
the life of the capital in his day. By the generosity of previous emperors 
they had been granted commercial quarters and settlements across 
the Golden Horn, and now they had turned and bitten the hand that 
fed them. But what could one expect of Latins, of Italians from 
Genoa, or rather from "the fire of Gehenna," whose corruption and 
savagery surpassed even that of the Scythians and the Arabs. They 
were like the snake that killed the farmer who put it in his bosom; 
and it seemed appropriate that those who professed to worship the 
Cross and then took up arms against it should have the snake as their 
emblem.35 

Since the tragedy of the Fourth Crusade the western attitude 
towards the Greeks, compounded of blatant hostility and barefaced 
exploitation, had in fact sharpened the Byzantine sense of pride and 
exclusiveness into a much more cutting weapon than it had been 
even in the great days of Basil II. From being a passive, complacent 
state of mind it had become an active obsession. The greatest insult 
to a Greek in the thirteenth century and after was to be told that he 
had acquired the habits of a Latin or a Frank. One of the imperial 
legates returning from the Council of Lyons in 1274 was taunted 
with the words (/Jpayyos Ka()Ea77JKas, CYou have become a Frank'.36 
Michael Apostolis, one of the refugees in Crete after the Turkish 
conquest of Constantinople, complains in a letter to Cardinal Bes­
sarion: ccFrom the time I expressed my opinion of the Latins and sup­
ported the adherents of the Roman Church with words-from that 
time they (the Greeks) call out to me (in the streets): cLook, the 
devil got him too. Look at the accursed one, behold the wretch r" 
In Greece today the term of abuse considered appropriate to a con-

35 Alexios Makrembolites, "Aoyos laTop'K6S treating of the weakness of the Genoese 
when they arrived in the country of the Greeks and of the benefactions of the Emperors 
towards them, and of their consequent prosperity and expansion and their subsequent 
wickedness and intrigue against their benefactors," ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 
'AvM£KTa <l£poaoAvllomKfjs l:TCr.XvoAoy{as I (1891) 144-5, 147, 148. Cf I. Sevcenko, "Alexios 
Makrembolites and his 'Dialogue between the Rich and the Poor'," Zbornik Radova Vizan­
toloskog Instituta 6 (1960) 194-9. 

36 Cited by D. ]. Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West (Cambridge 
[Mass.] 1959) 271, from Metochites in M. H. Laurent, Le bienheureux Innocent V (Pierre de 
Tarentaise) et son temps (Studi e Testi 129, Vatican 1947) 424 n.23. 



DONALD M. NICOL 339 

vert to Roman Catholicism is still er/JpaYK€¢'€s-'you have become a 
Frank'.s7 The Byzantine view of the West dies hard. 

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 

August. 1967 

31 Cited by D. J. Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice. Studies in the dissemination of Greek 
learning from Byzantium to western Europe (Cambridge [Mass.] 1962) 95.