Byzantine East after the Loss: Anatolia/Asia Minor, Christianity, and the idea of Reconquista in Byzantine Thought in the Late Middle Ages (12th–15th Centuries)

Prof. Vlada STANKOVIĆ, University of Belgrade

Anatolia/Asia Minor represented for more than seven centuries the heartland of the Eastern Roman empire, the Empire’s richest and the most populous region, and equally important, the real birthplace of Byzantine Christianity. The shock of the late eleventh century’s loss of almost the entire Asia Minor to the Seljuks changed dramatically over the course of just a few generations both the realities of the Byzantine world, and the Byzantine self-perception, provoking a plethora of questions regarding the identity, the faith, and the position and role of the  Christian Romans in a new world in which the capital Constantinople, the umbilicus of the Christianity, found itself at the very frontier of that changed world. Even though the Byzantines managed to reconquer the littoral regions of the Asia Minor already in the last years of the eleventh century, and to form a functional polity in the northwestern and western Anatolia between 1204 and 1261, the Byzantine East will never again constitute an integral part both of the Empire and of the Byzantine Christianity, and it was practically completely lost to the Byzantines by the mid fourteenth century.

After the seminal 1971 study by Speros Vryonis Jr. on the decline of medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor there have been little scholarly interest in Byzantine attitudes toward Asia Minor in the Late Middle Ages, and Anatolia/Asia Minor is, for example, surprisingly completely absent from the 2011 volume Identities and Allegiances in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204 edited by J. Herrin and G. Saint-Guillan. This paper aims at filling that scholarly void by analyzing Byzantine, and some Slavic texts from the 12th through the 15th century and the attitudes of their authors regarding Christianity and Islam, the East and the West, and the new Muslim rulers of the Asia Minor.