Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
In the fourth century A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great established Christianity as the state religion of Rome and founded Constantinople on the ancient site of Byzantion. Apollonia Pontika was reborn as the Christian Sozopolis, and the Hellenes of the Black Sea became Byzantine Orthodox Christian Greeks tied by history, language, religion, and the sea to the center of their universe, Constantinople.
Constantinople was for one thousand years the City from which Emperors and Patriarchs ruled a vast Empire and led the political and religious lives of its people. The City withstood onslaughts from east and west ~ Huns in the fifth century; and later, Slavs, Avars, Moslem hoards and Christian Crusader armies. It nurtured a society:
... in which one Emperor after another was renowned for his scholarship; a society which alone had preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity, during these dark centuries in the West when the lights of learning were almost extinguished ...(23)
The army of the Fourth Crusade led by the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo sacked Constantinople in the early thirteenth century. The Venetians and their Latin brethren ruled the remains of the Byzantine Empire parceling among themselves its lands in the Morea,(24) Athens and Achaea, Ionia, and the Aegean Islands.
Later in the same century, in 1261, the Greeks regained Constantinople with the assistance of Venice's archrival, Genoa.
But the dark legacy that it left behind affected all Christendom ~ perhaps all the world. For the Greek Empire never recovered from the damage, spiritual as well as material, of those fateful years. Nor, with its loveliest buildings reduced to rubble and its finest works of art looted or destroyed, did it ever succeed in recovering its morale. Before the Latin conquest the Empire had been one and indivisible, under a single basileus, Equal of the Apostles. Now that unity was gone. There were the Emperors of Trebizond, still stubbornly independent on the Black Sea shore. There were the Despots of Epirus, always ready to welcome the enemies of Constantinople. How, fragmented as it was, could the Greek Empire continue as the last great eastern bulwark of Christendom against the Islamic tide?(25)
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