CEU Press

CHAPTER I. Introduction
1. The Discipline of History: Canons and Divergences
2. The Problem of Continuity: Theories of Origin and Political Imperatives
3. In the Shadow of the Empire
4. Describing the Network: The Ottoman Framework and its Collapse
CHAPTER II. The Iconoclast Byzantium of Greek Nationalism
1. Manuel Gedeon’s Perception of History
2. A Periodization
3. Zambelios’s Transcendant Byzantium: From Aristotle to Hegel
4. Paparrigopoulos’s Phanariot Byzantium and French Imperial Nationalism
5. France and Russia in Constantinople: Toward an Interpretation of the Great Idea
6. Helleno-Ottomanism: The Response of Constantinople
7. Heretical Byzantium in The History of the Greek Nation
8. Iconoclasm as a Conspiracy of the Monarchy
9. Iconoclasm as Reformation
10. Gedeon’s Medieval HellemismHellenism: The Zambelios–Paparrigopoulos Construct Scheme and the Ottoman Divergence
11. Footnotes: The Denunciation of Helleno-Orthodoxy
12. Byzantium as a Metaphor: Greeks and Slavs
13. The Iconoclast Byzantium and the Break from Greek Historiography
14. Byzantium as a Metonymy: The Church and the Ottoman State
15. Ecumenism as a Romantic Reconstruction
16. Histories of the Ottoman Empire
CHAPTER III. The “Medieval Antiquity” of the Bulgarian Historiography
1. The Canon of Bulgarian Historiography: the Origin Model
2. Bulgarians: Vandals, Illyrians, or Macedonians?
3. Drinov’s History: The Slavicisation of the Bulgarians
4. Krâstevič’s Thesis: The Bulgarians are Huns (The Positive Use of Byzantine Chronography)
5. Drinov’s Thesis: The Bulgarians are Slavs (The Negative Use of Byzantine Chronography)
6. Krâstevič’s Response: The Huns are Slavs
7. The Romantic Reconstruction of Imperial Discourse: Some Conclusions
8. Povestnost Instead of Historija: Georgi Rakovski’s Hyper-Hermeneutic Model
9. The Balkans as East: Charilaos Dimopoulos’ History of the Bulgarians
CHAPTER IV. Byzantinisms and the Third Rome: Russian Imperial Nationalism
1. Konstantin Leont’ev: On the Edge of Two Epistemological Paradigmes
2. Leont’ev’s Byzantism
3. The Middle Ages as a Canonical Model
4. Byzantism as Imperial Discourse: The Parity of Russians and Ottomans
5. Leont’ev’s Slavism: Greeks/Bulgarians, Germans/Czechs
6. The Three Romes
7. A Romantic Reconstruction of History: the Persians’ Vindication
8. Leont’ev and Marko Balabanov: Byzantism as a Bridge
9. The Meaning of Progress and the Possibility of an Ottoman Nation
10. Byzantium and the “Groundless Accusation of Ethno-Phyletism”
11. Balabanov and Renan: “Balkans Will Turn into a Volcano”
12. Byzantium and Great Idea: The Serbian Perspective
13. Ivan I. Sokolov’s Byzantinism
14. Pan-Orthodox Ecumenism and Byzantinisms: Gedeon’s Two Moments
CHAPTER V. The “Roman Byzantium” of the Albanian Historiography
1. Namık Kemal and Renan
2. The Rupture of Pan-Islamic Ecumenism: Şemseddin vs. Sami Frashëri
3. Between Ancient Greeks and Modern Europeans: Islamic Civilization as a Mediator
4. The “De-Arabification” of Islam
5. The Management of Time and Space in Islam
6. From the Islamic Ummah to the Albanian Nation: The Return of the Pelasgians
7. The Problem of Discontinuity in Albanian History
8. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos and the Pelasgians
9. The De-Islamification of Albanian History
10. Pan-Islamic Ecumenism and Roman Byzantium: The Immanence of Empire
CHAPTER VI. Byzantium as ....
Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a “war of interpretation” as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon.
Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.
Dimitris Stamatopoulos is Associate Professor at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece.