ABSTRACT
The Western neglect of Byzantine affairs is not completely explained, however, by simply pointing to the bias of a few generations of modern historians. The Byzantine civil service was responsible for the organization of a financial system that elevated Byzantium above the vicissitudes of the feudal economies of all the other states of the Middle Ages. Byzantine diplomacy must therefore be regarded primarily as an organic part of the entire political structure of the empire. Byzantine opinion regarded the Russians as an inferior barbarian nation, from the ninth century, when they made their appearance in the Black Sea region, to the thirteenth, when they were subjugated by the Mongols. Kievan Russia is the root from which the modern Russian Empire grew, one may regard the securing of trade relations with Byzantium as the first enterprise in the establishment of the Russian state.
