ABSTRACT
The historiography of the Later Byzantine period is marked by a dominant teleology where decline is understood to lead inexorably to the final fall of the Empire. Conversely, this chapter insists that the concepts of decline and fall, so tightly intertwined by Edward Gibbon and repeated thereafter, should be disaggregated from one another. The Byzantines of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may have understood their historical moment as one of decline, but not one marked by a predetermined end. In the face of pronounced socio-economic exigencies, the Later Byzantine administration actively sought to ameliorate its standing in the medieval world and cultural production figured prominently in this agenda. In examining the Later Byzantine engagement with history and historical thinking, this chapter traces how the Byzantines themselves understood their own time and how they created strategies for exercising agency within their particular, albeit diminished, political circumstances.
