Views from the East: changing attitudes to Venice in late Byzantium

Abstract

This paper explores the changing attitudes towards Venice in late Byzantine texts. It argues that, along with the strengthening of political and cultural ties between Byzantium and Venice, the Byzantines' perspectives evolved from rejection to admiration. As scholars like Demetrios Kydones and Manuel Chrysoloras began to teach Greek in Venice, exchanges intensified and the Byzantines' views became more nuanced. The later Byzantine émigrés in Italy, George of Trebizond and Bessarion, not only fostered stronger intellectual links but also perceived the Republic as supporting their efforts to reinvent a Hellenic identity outside Byzantium. While court rhetoric collapsed Venice's representations into a generic image of Italy, historians like Laonikos Chalkokondyles idealized its political system whose roots, he emphasized, were to be found in the ancient political systems. Finally, after 1453, vernacular laments of the fall of Constantinople, portrayed Venice as inheritor and potential saviour of Byzantium's imperial glory, thereby signalling the connections between the cultivation of the Byzantine heritage and Venice's political ambitions.