Historical Studies Program and Dean of the College Present

Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity and Legitimacy in the Late Medieval Mediterranean

476 CE conventionally marks the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet the empire did not cease to exist in the centuries after—it was just ruled from Constantinople, the empire we call Byzantium. Byzantine emperors still structured the passage of time in medieval chronologies, stamped their image on coins traded across the Mediterranean, and received prayers in sonorous Christian liturgies. Yet Byzantium has largely been effaced from Roman imperial history. This paper aims to decenter myopically Western histories of the medieval Roman Empire by focusing on a critical moment at the end of the Middle Ages. After centuries of polemics alienating the eastern empire from the legitimacy of ancient Rome, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 prompted Europeans to reconsider older animosity toward Byzantium. Drawing on oratory, genealogy, visual art, and humanist historiography, this paper reconstructs Byzantium's restoration to Roman imperial history in the 16th c. It argues that these dynamics re-Romanized Byzantium in early modern Europe, but they also signal an early and unrecognized stage of Europe's intellectual colonization of the East.

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For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin 202

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