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Author Laiou, Angeliki E., author.

Title Constantinople and the Latins : the foreign policy of Andronicus II, 1282-1328 / Angeliki E. Laiou
Published Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1972

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 390 pages) : illustrations
Series Harvard historical studies ; v. 88
Harvard historical studies ; v. 88.
Summary Annotation At the age of twenty-two, Andronicus II became sole ruler of Byzantium. His father, Michael VIII, had been a dashing figure--a good soldier, brilliant diplomat, and the liberator of Constantinople from its fifty-seven-year Latin occupation. By contrast Andronicus seemed colorless and ineffectual. His problems were immense--partly as a result of his father's policies--and his reign proved to be a series of frustrations and disasters. For forty-six years he fought to preserve the empire against constantencroachments. When he was finally deposed in 1328 by his grandson and co-emperor, Andronicus III, almost all of Asia Minor had been lost to the Turks, Westerners had taken over the defense of the Aegean, and the Catalan army he had invited to help him fight the Turks remained to fight the emperor. In this penetrating account of Andronicus' foreign policy, Angeliki E. Laiou focuses on Byzantium's relations with the Latin West, the far-reaching domestic implications of the hostility of western Europe, and the critical decision that faced Andronicus: whether to follow his father's lead and allow Byzantium to become a European state or to keep it an Eastern, orthodox power. The author, who argues that foreign policy cannot be understood without examining the domestic factors that influence, indeed create, it, devotes a large part of her study to domestic developments in Byzantium during Andronicus' reign-the decline of the power of the central government; the spread of semi-independent regional authorities; the state of finances, of the army, of the church. She concludes that, contrary to common opinion, Andronicus II sincerely desired the union of the Greek and Latin churches, when, in the last years of his reign, he realized that the political situation made such a union necessary. Maintaining also that the conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks was not a foregone conclusion when Andronicus II came to the throne, she discusses at length the errors of policy and the manifold circumstances which combined to precipitate that loss
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-380) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Diplomatic relations
Buitenlandse politiek.
SUBJECT Byzantine Empire -- History -- Andronicus II Palaeologus, 1282-1328. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85018510
Byzantine Empire -- Foreign relations -- 1081-1453. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85018482
Subject Byzantine Empire
Empire byzantin -- 1261-1453 (Dynastie des Paléologue)
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 78176042
ISBN 0674165357
9780674165359