Ebook: Byzantium and the West: perception and reality (11th-15th c.)

"The interaction between Byzantium and the Latin West was intimately connected to practically all the major events and developments which shaped the medieval world in the High and Late Middle Ages - for example, the rise of the 'papal monarchy', the launch of the crusades, the expansion of international and long-distance commerce, or the flowering of the Renaissance. This volume explores not only the actual avenues of interaction between the two sides (trade, political and diplomatic contacts, ecclesiastical dialogue, intellectual exchange, armed conflict), but also the image each side had of the other and the way perceptions evolved over this long period in the context of their manifold contact. Twenty-one stimulating papers offer new insights and original research on numerous aspects of this relationship, pooling the expertise of an international group of scholars working on both sides of the Byzantine-Western 'divide', on topics as diverse as identity formation, ideology, court ritual, literary history, military technology and the economy, among others. The particular contribution of the research presented here is the exploration of how cross-cultural relations were shaped by the interplay of the thought-world of the various historical agents and the material circumstances which circumscribed their actions. The volume is primarily aimed at scholars and students interested in the history of Byzantium, the Mediterranean world, and, more widely, intercultural contacts in the Middle Ages"--;The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 to Saladin and its impact on Byzantine opinion / Michael Angold -- Admiral Eugenius of Sicily (12th c.) : court poetry and political propaganda in a cross-cultural environment / Eleni Tounta -- A detail of the Third Lateran Council (1179) : the leper king of Jerusalem and the Papal policy in the East / Nikoletta Giantsi -- Byzantium and Hungary in the late twelfth century and on the eve of the fourth Crusade : personal ties and spheres of influence / Alicia Simpson -- Nicaea and the West (1204-1261) : aspects of reality and rhetoric / Ilias Giarenis -- The image of the "Greek" and the reality of Greco-Latin Interaction in Romania, according to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Latin sources / Maria Dourou-Eliopoulou -- Perceptions of the Greek clergy and rite in late Medieval pilgrimage accounts to the Holy Land / Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis;Keroularios in 1054 : nonconfrontational to the Papal Legates and loyal to the emperor / Anthony Kaldellis -- Colonisation and population movements in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages / Michel Balard -- Genoa and Byzantium : aspects of a long relationship / Sandra Origone -- Byzantium and the Crusades in the Komnenian era : perception and reality / Athina Kolia-Dermitzaki -- Some thoughts on the relations between Greeks and Latins at the time of the first and fourth Crusades / Jean-Claude Cheynet -- Crusader perceptions of Byzantium, c.1095 to c.1150 / Jonathan Phillips -- The perception of Westerners in the court of John II Komnenos / Angeliki Papageorgiou -- A twelfth-century perspective on Byzantium's western neighbours : the witness of Manganeios Prodromos / Elizabeth Jeffreys -- De-centring twelfth-century Constantinople : Archbishop Eustathios and the Norman conquest of Thessalonica revisited / Catherine Holmes