Chapter 1 - Precursors

Summary

After briefly surveying the treatments of Byzantium in early modern western European and Balkan literature, the chapter proceeds to explore, more pointedly, the Enlightenment approaches to the Greek antiquity and the Byzantine phenomenon in western Europe, Russia and the incipient national history-writing in the Balkans. Attention is paid to the key role played by Western philhellenism in the construction of the Greek national ideology with its cult of ancient Greece, by the contemporary Bulgarian relations with the Greeks in the construction of the Bulgarian historical narrative about the corrupting Byzantine influence, and by the Latinist school in Transylvania for the Romanian narrative about the Greek ‘theft’ of the Roman empire from its rightful heirs.