Ronchey, S. “Bisanzio Continuata. Presupposti ideologici dell'attualizzazione di Bisanzio nell'età moderna.” Lo spazio letterario del medioevo, III/1. La cultura bizantina. Ed. G. Cavallo Rome: Salerno, 2005. 691-727.

This contribution investigates the legacy of Byzantium in modern and contemporary nations. After the dual failure of the project - promoted by Bessarion and Pius II and planned around the figure of Thomas Palaeologos - to re-establish the basileia in Morea, according to the new concise formula created by Gemistus Pletho and the School of Mystras - and of the plan to save the titulus of Constantine in the West, the marriage orchestrated by Bessarion between Thomas’ eldest daughter Zoe Palaeologina and Ivan III of Russia marked the passing of the strictly dynastic legacy of the orthodox empire of Byzantium to Moscow, the third Rome.  This determined a first and almost direct assimilation of Byzantium’s legacy – not only cultural and ideological (above all, the doctrine of divine right autocracy), but also political-administrative (starting from Ivan IV’s reorganisation of the imperial administration along the principles of Byzantium centralist statism) - by the Tsarist empire.  A century after Ivan the Terrible and much further west in 17th century France, the rediscovery of the legacy of Byzantium in scholarly thought and erudition gave rise to a revival or “modernisation” of the divine right basileia in the figure of the “Sun King” – an inheritance of Hellenistic monarchy in the first centuries of Byzantine political ideology that was still emerging clearly when the empire was waning in Bessarion’s verses dedicated to Manuel II Palaeologos – now placed at the centre of modern absolute monarchy as Jean Domat would theorise succinctly at the end of the same century.  Already at the time of Louis XIV, therefore, we can date the birth of Byzantine studies in France with the first work of classification and editing of Byzantine historiographical sources (the Louvre Corpus) financed by Colbert and with Du Cange’s writings and reflections. Furthermore, seventeenth century France was the first country in western Europe to develop a Byzantine aesthetic connected to the grandeur of absolute monarchy: an authentic Constantinople-Versailles transference found expression in the revival of the great tradition of Constantinopolitan court protocol.  After the Congress of Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century, the torch passed to the monarchy of a nation on the rise, Prussia, and in parallel fashion, the Louvre Corpus found continuity in the Bonn Corpus.  Further revivals of Byzantium would mark the second half of the 19th century in Europe - between Ludwig II of Bavaria and Napoleon III – with increasingly less political vitality until fin-de-siècle France when every authentic memory of the Byzantine statist tradition would be obliterated or mystified and the stereotyped image of Byzantium as cypher of protracted decadence and vacuous kingdom of effeminate intrigue would form. However, never extinct in the Tsarist empire, the Byzantine legacy would find its most important modern political realisation in the philo-Byzantinism of the twentieth century autocrat Joseph Stalin, who would promote Byzantine studies and exalt the autocratic model subsumed from Ivan Grozny.  The Byzantine concept of power and aesthetics would thus see their most complete re-elaboration in the cinema of Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Terrible II: the Boyars’ Plot), in which the historical reconstruction contains contemporary allusions, an homage and, at the same time, an authentic Byzantine Kaiserkritik of the Stalinist government.