ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the eastern Mediterranean area and the nascent Russian state. The latter had owed its distant origin to Scandinavian settlements on the overland route to Byzantium and at the end of the day Russia, with a Greek Orthodox Church and a language which employed the Greek alphabet, was to inherit some of the ambitions of the vanished empire of Constantine. The Eastern Empire never forgot its august origins nor the world dominion claimed by Constantine and his successors. The city had remained enormously wealthy at a time when barbarian invasions reduced the towns of the western Empire to shadows. Plethon's Hellenism represented a tradition consciously inimical to Christianity and one which had incurred political and ecclesiastical censure whenever it had manifested itself earlier in Byzantine thought. The Byzantine rulers of the past had often allied with Turkish rulers, had often recruited auxiliary forces from the Turks.
