Speros Vryonis Jr The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century: The book in the light of subsequent scholarship, 1971-98

Perhaps it would be appropriate first to try to answer the question of why the book was ever written. One reason was the stimulus of my recently finished dissertation, which entailed an analysis of the Byzantine sources that dealt with Turkish nomadic incursions and settlements in Asia Minor and the perceptible economic and institutional decline in substantial parts of Anatolia during that time.1 By 1959, the broad question of what happened to the Byzantine, Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac Christian sectors of Asia Minor in the face of the Turkish tribal raids, conquests and settlements crystallized into the project that led to seven years of research and writing that resulted in the book.