This article is devoted to a brief Cyrillic text, known as “Polish Chronicle”. Presently kept in the library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, it was included in a 16th century Tetraevangelium (BAR, Ms. sl. 722). Only a small part of the text has survived, as the rest of the folio was cut off. It is a local chronicle from Galicia (then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) recording various events, most of which pertain to Polish-Tatar relations. From the surviving fragment, one may conclude that it is a kind of sylva rerum – a form of chronicle writing which was popular in that region and during this era. Although the text is brief and poorly preserved, I believe that researchers should be familiar with it.
In this paper, I will focus on the images of Constantinople’s past glory in literary texts written between the fifteenth and seventeenth century in vernacular Greek to express the sorrow after the fall of the City in 1453. To depict the images of Constantinople in the collective memory of the Greeks, I am going to discuss the following anonymous vernacular laments: Ἀνακάλημα τῆς Κωνσταντινόπολης, Ἅλωσις Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, Θρήνος και κλαυθμός περί της Κωνσταντινουπόλεως and Θρῆνος τῆς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως. The four texts deserve attention not only for linguistic and literary reasons, but also for providing a number of interesting insights into the relationship between the East and West and the way the Greeks perceived the past glory of Byzantium. For further exemplification, I will also use some monodies written in a rhetorical style in classicizing Greek. The comparative analysis will reveal common patterns of perception of Constantinople’s past glory in the Greek world after the fall of the City, as well as common ways in which Constantinople was conceptualised in the post-Byzantine period, in various, sometimes distant regions of the Greek world, where the City had already been largely perceived in mythical terms.
The depiction of Isaac II Angelos in the History of Niketas Choniates, rounded off with the full description of the emperor in the final paragraph of the account on his first reign (1185–1195), is by far the most complex of all imperial portrayals penned by the respectable historian. The outdated, typically negative image of Isaac II in modern historiography is based only on the surface level of Choniates’ intricate historical narrative, which has been analyzed in greater depth only in the more recent studies. As this paper shall hopefully demonstrate, despite of all literary distortion of his personality, Isaac II remains the most realistically represented character in the History, and the most tangible one, embodying the author’s philosophical-anthropological thought on human nature. The aforementioned description represents a set of authentic body features that meet the criteria of the Byzantine (male) beauty ideal, but it possibly connotes additional meaning, thus making the overall portrayal of Isaac II in the History uniquely complete.
It is well known that the foundations of Church organization were established by the Holy Apostles themselves, who were the first to spread the teachings of Christ. They fulfilled this mission in accordance with the command of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18–19), as they traveled to various regions to establish Christian communities. Initially, each Christian community, led by its bishop, constituted a distinct ecclesiastical unit, which may be regarded as the prototype of the modern local autocephalous Churches. The existence of multiple, distinct, and independent local Churches does not hinder conciliarity within the Church. On the contrary, the major issues concerning the life of the entire Church were historically resolved through conciliar processes. With the recognition of Christianity as a legally equal religion under Emperor Constantine the Great, the organization of Church dioceses began to mirror the administrative divisions of the Roman Empire. By the 4th century, this alignment was fully realized. In the centuries that followed, the structuring of local Churches developed gradually, shaped by historical circumstances.
