Imagining the Balkans
Author: Mariia Nikolaeva Todorova
Published by: Oxford University Press, 2009
288 pages
There had always been travelers traversing the peninsula, but most were in a hurry to cross and reach the two focal points of attraction: the Holy Land and Constantinople. Among European writings from the first centirues of Ottoman rule, the narrative accounts of travelers par excellence occupy a relatively modest place, the bulk of being works of anti-Ottoman polemic and propaganda, descriptions of the Ottomans and the Balkans in the early period was generated by the Venetians who had traditionally strong commercial, political, and cultural ties to the late Byzantine empire. The creation of a vigorous Greek intellectual diaspora after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 secured a continuous and fruitful exchange that became a fundamental element of the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. Vitally dependent on the preservation of its elaborate and sophisticated trade mechanism, Venice managed, by vacillating with skillful diplomacy between appeasement, collaboration, neutrality, and war, to maintain its privileged position in the Ottoman realm until the end of the sixteenth century, in the face of the increasing competition from the emerging continental European powers.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, when the activation of Russian policy in the Mediterranean stirred part of the Balkans in open revolt against the Porte, Italy acted as intermediary between east and west in a complicated relationship defined as "Italo-Greco-Russian symbiosis."
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Published by: Oxford University Press, 2009
288 pages
There had always been travelers traversing the peninsula, but most were in a hurry to cross and reach the two focal points of attraction: the Holy Land and Constantinople. Among European writings from the first centirues of Ottoman rule, the narrative accounts of travelers par excellence occupy a relatively modest place, the bulk of being works of anti-Ottoman polemic and propaganda, descriptions of the Ottomans and the Balkans in the early period was generated by the Venetians who had traditionally strong commercial, political, and cultural ties to the late Byzantine empire. The creation of a vigorous Greek intellectual diaspora after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 secured a continuous and fruitful exchange that became a fundamental element of the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. Vitally dependent on the preservation of its elaborate and sophisticated trade mechanism, Venice managed, by vacillating with skillful diplomacy between appeasement, collaboration, neutrality, and war, to maintain its privileged position in the Ottoman realm until the end of the sixteenth century, in the face of the increasing competition from the emerging continental European powers.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, when the activation of Russian policy in the Mediterranean stirred part of the Balkans in open revolt against the Porte, Italy acted as intermediary between east and west in a complicated relationship defined as "Italo-Greco-Russian symbiosis."
