Dimensions
156 x 232 x 38mm
Eastern Europe 500 - 1453
Throughout much of the Middle Ages, the lands of Eastern Europe - the Balkans, Russia, Rumania and the lands on either side of the middle Danube - lay within the orbit of Byzantine political and cultural influence, and in turn formed a major preoccupation of the Empire. Professor Obolensky here provides a comprehensive historical account of the relations - political, diplomatic, ecclesiastical, economic and cultural - between the Empire and the peoples of Eastern Europe.
He shows how there emerged in the early Middle Ages a community of nations which in the course of time came to share a common cultural tradition. The history of this international community, which he terms the Byzantine Commonwealth, is traced from the barbarian invasions of the sixth and seventh centuries, through the Byzantine recovery and successful counter-offensive in the ninth and tenth centuries to the later Middle Ages, when the Empire, though politically a dying body, was able to reassert its cultural dominance over the greater part of Eastern Europe. This is a clear and illuminating account of the often obscure history of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.
