Byzantium between the East and the West

The Byzantine Empire is predestined by its geographic location to mediate between Europe and the Middle East, but also to constantly struggling with its opponents and often wage war on two fronts. The official ideology defines the empire as the heart of the Christian world, the chosen judgment of God's favor, beyond which everything else is a periphery of varying degrees of importance. Over the centuries, the empire, the heir of the ancient Greco-Roman world, will have to go through various complex relationships with its immediate or distant neighbors, as well as reconfigure its thinking from haughtiness through realism to humiliating solicitude. This book is devoted to the Middle East and Western European politics in the Middle East, to the perception of the other countries, and to the gradual erosion of the universal Christian world, which led to the emergence of two major contrasts - Catholicism and Orthodoxy.