Provides a comprehensive historical account of the relations--political, diplomatic, ecclesiastical, economic and cultural-- between the Empire and the peoples of Eastern Europe. Shows how there emerged in the early Middle Ages a community of nations which in the course of time came to share a common cultural tradition.

This book describes the role of Byzantine diplomacy in the emergence of Moscow in the fourteenth century.

The essays which comprise this book aim to identify and discuss aspects of the Byzantium heritage, whose principal beneficiaries were the Greeks, the Slavs and, most prominently, Russia. These 12 studies divide into three groups: the first is concerned with general aspects of Slavo-Byzantine relations; the second deals with the specific features of the acculturation process; and the third, which includes among others Russia's Byzantine Heritage is concerned with the contacts between Byzantium and medieval Russia.

This book demonstrates how the political economy of mercantilism was not simply a Western invention by various cities and kingdoms during the Renaissance, but was the natural by-product of perpetually limited growth rates and rulers’ relentless pursuits of bullion. It contributes to discussions of the economic history surrounding the so-called “Great Divergence” between East and West, which would consequently lend context and credence to differences of economic thought in the world today. Additionally, it seeks to explain present economic thought as tacitly derived from implicit antique paradigms. This book advances fields of research from numismatics and sigillography to historical materialism and historical political economy. Divided into three parts, Orthodox Mercantilism first examines the political theology (the sovereignty) of the œcumene from the early 11th century. Second, it analyzes its peripheral legislation from the customary laws of newly Christianized dynasties up to the Kormčaja Kniga’s adoption (the Nomokanon) by 13th-century Orthodox dynasties across Eastern Europe. Third, it explores how these dynasties (and their own satellite dynasties) hoarded finite bullion to pay for defense, resulting in the 11–14th-century coinless period across Eastern Europe and Western Eurasia. Appealing to students and scholars alike, this book will be of interest to those studying and researching economic and mercantile history, particularly in the context of Byzantine and Eastern European societies.