Ronchey, S. “Bisanzio veramente ‘volle cadere?’ Realismo politico e avventura storica da Alessio I Comneno al Mediterraneo di Braudel.” Quaderni di Storia 52 (July-December 2000): 137-58.

Inspired by a public debate between Fernand Braudel and Hélène Ahrweiler on the impossibility of reconciliation between the West and Byzantium, this contribution highlights the inadequacy when applied to the western context of the long and fruitful – albeit elsewhere - tradition of Byzantine Realpolitik.  And, if we look at the arc of Byzantine history, it confirms that the Latins, and not the admittedly warlike, oriental “barbarians,” were the real enemies of the empire and the cause of its fall.  As a result of the concession of commercial privileges to Venice in the famous crysobull of Alexius I Comnenus, Byzantium, historically and essentially extraneous to the Baudelairean idea of the “foul spirit of commerce,” suffered brutally at the hands of proto-capitalism.  After the Latin occupation of 1204, it was irreparably weakened by the mercantile war waged on its territory and along its coasts between Genoa and Venice.  The Western historical topos of a Byzantium in perennial decline, beaten by the Turks out of “fatigue,” is disproved, in general, by the reality of the extreme cultural and ideological vitality of the last Palaeologian renaissance and by the Byzantine roots of European Renaissance philosophy and political thought, influenced primarily by Georgius Gemistus Pletho’s Platonic revival, and, in particular, by an analysis of the process of his pupil Bessarion’s move to the unionist faction during the Council of Florence.  Bessarion’s so-called Kehre was an act of Realpolitik. The alliance with the Roman Curia, aimed at the financing and organisation of a crusade in the defence of Constantinople against the Turks, could not be achieved without a nominal surrender to the Roman papacy on points of dogma. But Bessarion’s “theological bad faith,” as a pupil of Pletho naturaliter follower of Palamas, seems clear from the text, content, and structure of his so-called Discourse on the Union.  The Oratio dogmatica sive de unione copies John Bekkos’ Epigraphai, a pamphlet dating from the Council of Lyon and thoroughly discredited and refuted in writing by Palamas.  Bessarion’s “plagiarism” of Bekkos’ Titles, so over-blown as to appear almost a coded message to the clergy of Constantinople, sanctioned the virtual and fleeting Union of Florence and permitted the last crusade against the Turks, which, having set off from Hungary, saw its tragic epilogue at Varna in 1444, compromised by the implacable interests of the commercial war between Genoa and Venice: the very same to consign Constantinople definitively to the Turks in 1453.  At this point, a last example of Byzantine Realpolitik can, in fact, be seen in the pro-Turk attitude of the last Constantinopolitan bureaucrats: proof not so much of the fact that Byzantium “allowed itself” or “wanted” to fall, but of an act of retaliation against the West.  It was thanks also to the audacious Realpolitik on the part of the last Byzantine élite that the Ottomans were able to carry on the legacy of Byzantium, absorbing some of the structures, particularly administrative, of the thousand-year-old empire they succeeded.