Turning the Page: Reading Byzantine Literature in Early Modern Europe

This article examines readings of Byzantine literature in the centuries following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Moving beyond the familiar story of hostility or indifference towards these texts, it argues that readers instrumentalized Byzantine texts as tools for reconfiguring the past, present, and future. Humanists in Vienna used Byzantine historians to rewrite Roman history, reintegrating the emperors of Constantinople into a continuous Roman imperial lineage. In the editions and commentaries on Pseudo-Kodinos’ ceremonial treatise, successive editors and a French publisher deployed the text to dispute contemporary politics: irenic reconciliation, anti-Calvinist polemic, and a defense of royal bureaucracy. Byzantine literature also fueled centuries of crusading imaginaries, as the dream of recovering Constantinople provided a sustained justification for Byzantine scholarship into the late seventeenth century. Together, these cases demonstrate that the kaleidoscopic nature of Byzantine literature—its capacity to appear simultaneously Roman, Greek, and Christian—made it a uniquely malleable resource for early modern readers across a wide range of intellectual and political projects.