The chapter outlines the impact of romantic philhellenic and Slavophile thought on the emerging grand narratives in southeastern Europe. Its focus is the formative phase in the national historiographical canons of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania during the nineteenth century and the interpretations of Byzantium intrinsic to these narratives. The Greek historiography devoured the empire and its cultural heritage wholesale, turning it into an integral part of national continuity and assimilating the canonical (and teleological) European division of history into classical, medieval and modern periods. For the Bulgarians, Byzantium, which they equated with contemporary Greeks, featured as the main adversary in confrontation with whom the Bulgarian national state and identity crystallised and were sustained. The Serbian historians foregrounded the significance of the medieval empire of Stefan Dušan as an actual heir and improved version of the Eastern Roman empire. Romania, the latecomer on the medieval political scene, reconfirmed its claims to represent the Latin West in the (post-)Byzantine East.

Against the backdrop of turbulent political developments with deep cultural implications – civil war, military dictatorship and post-1974 liberalisation – the chapter discusses the changes in Greek historiography, with impact on the treatment of Byzantium as part of the Greek national history, after World War II. It scrutinises the impassioned debate on the historical premises of Greek identity, which erupted in the late 1960s and spilled into the 1980s, between three British holders of the Korais Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at the University of London, on the one side, and Greek and Greek-American scholars, on the other. The final section discusses at some length a contemporary debate pro and contra the Byzantine empire as a nation-state between Greek diaspora byzantinists.

The Epilogue and Conclusion discusses summarily, first, some main changes in the representations of Byzantium and the new directions of Byzantine studies in western Europe and the USA in the last couple of decades. Turning to southeastern Europe, the political caesura of 1989 entailed less, or at least less fast, change in the national historiographic mainstreams than one would have expected, especially as regards medieval history-writing and treatments of Byzantium in the grand national narratives. Yet byzantinists in the region have exerted themselves to diversify their subject matter by including previously unstudied themes. In the Epilogue and Conclusion the new tendencies in the national historiographies, which have impacted the understanding of Byzantium, are broached. The Epilogue and Conclusion outlines the underlying drivers that help explain the diversity of interpretations and instrumentalisations of Byzantium, as well as particular strands of the longue durée such as connections between history and politics, the persistence of the national-Romantic canon, rivalry and cross-fertilisation between historiographical schools as two closely related processes.

The interwar period was marked by a wide gamut of interpretations of Byzantium, which involved a growing number of disciplines, different interpretative strategies and methods (from rigorously factographic to metahistorical) and competing political agendas and ideological orientations – national, quasi-imperial (or multinational) and regionalist. Byzantine studies became firmly embedded in the academic systems in the region, yet even those trained in this field were busy bringing their expertise to bear on the current debates about collective identity and state formation rather than cultivating knowledge of Byzantium. The resultant confrontation between the different historical narrations fed on a set of shared assumptions and ideological concepts, which underwrote the fragmentation of history into national compartments. The positive appropriation of Byzantium was reserved for those of its achievements or imprints that could be effectively nationalised or made to serve a national cause. The only remarkable exception was the supra-national agenda of the budding ‘science of balkanology’, but its theoretical and programmatic acumen was not matched by actual historical research.

The Introduction explicates the rationale behind and structure of the book, its thematic and chronological purview and methodological premises, and its take on the Byzantine phenomenon.

The interpretations of the Byzantine empire in Bulgarian historiography after World War II are analysed in the context of the revisionist shifts that Bulgarian history-writing underwent under communist rule from the late 1940s until 1989. Shored up by Marxist teleological thinking, the nationalist turn that began in the late 1960s set the stage for the gradual re-evaluation of the Byzantine impact in Bulgarian history. This re-evaluation was epitomised by notions such as ‘Slavia Orthodoxa’, ‘Bulgarian-Byzantine reciprocity’ or ‘dialogue’ and, in the most forceful statement of an imperial version of the national narrative, ‘pax Symeonica’ and ‘Preslav civilisation’.

After briefly surveying the treatments of Byzantium in early modern western European and Balkan literature, the chapter proceeds to explore, more pointedly, the Enlightenment approaches to the Greek antiquity and the Byzantine phenomenon in western Europe, Russia and the incipient national history-writing in the Balkans. Attention is paid to the key role played by Western philhellenism in the construction of the Greek national ideology with its cult of ancient Greece, by the contemporary Bulgarian relations with the Greeks in the construction of the Bulgarian historical narrative about the corrupting Byzantine influence, and by the Latinist school in Transylvania for the Romanian narrative about the Greek ‘theft’ of the Roman empire from its rightful heirs.

This chapter examines, against the backdrop of Turkey’s turbulent post-World War II political experience, the evolution towards a more conservative and Islamic understanding of Turkish history. Mid-twentieth-century Turkish historiography undertook to mend the precarious thread running directly from the pre-Islamic Turks to the Kemalist Republic by incorporating the Ottomans as the bridging link and Ottoman history as the crux. This trend culminated in the 1980s in the so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis. In this cultural-political context the representations of Byzantium, its history and relations to Turkish history, as well as attitudes to the Byzantine cultural heritage, are discussed.

In communist Yugoslavia, research on Byzantium became institutionalised already in 1948 with the setting up of the Belgrade-based Institute of Byzantinology (Vizantološki institut) within the Serbian Academy of Sciences. Its thematic priorities, as before the war, were heavily tilted towards Byzantine-South Slav (especially Serbian) relations in the political, cultural and, increasingly now, socio-economic sphere. Compared to other branches of historiography and to the situation in Bulgaria and Romania, Yugoslav/Serbian medieval and Byzantine studies were less affected by doctrinaire Stalinism, while, already in the late 1940s, the communist leadership was encouraging Yugoslav historians to put Marxist historical theory to a more creative use. But if such a modicum of intellectual freedom helped sustain Byzantine research, its fecund development after the war owed everything to the Russian-born émigré byzantinist Georgiy Ostrogorski’s personal prestige and dedication to the growth of the ‘byzantinological’ field in Yugoslavia.

The chapter discusses the institutionalisation of Byzantine studies as a separate field in western Europe and Russia and the impact of the positivist (‘scientific’) method on the production of historical knowledge in southeastern Europe. This phase in the development of the national historiographies coincided with the emergence of the first cohort of professional Balkan medievalists and byzantinists in these countries. But if the critical turn imposed discipline on Romantic nationalism, historical Romanticism continued to nourish attitudes and interpretations, often reiterating the underlying tenets of Romantic historiography. The scientific paradigm was readily adopted to legitimise particular readings of the national cause and preoccupation with constructing national identity came to be seen as the core vocation of the professional historian. The positivist historiographic phase thus came to be characterised by different ways of conceptualising and instrumentalising the Byzantine history and legacy not just across national narratives but within discrete historiographies, on behalf of sometimes diametrically opposed political values and competing political projects.

This chapter explores and juxtaposes the discussions of Byzantium and the Byzantine-Ottoman institutional (dis)continuity as well as the evolving attitudes towards cultural material heritage in the late-Ottoman and early Republican Turkish historiography. During the last decades of the Ottoman empire, the presentations of the Byzantine institutions and material heritage and the assessments of their importance for the Ottoman successor were characterised by considerable plurality, compared to the early Republican (Kermalist) period, when the robustly ethnocentric ‘Turkish History Thesis’ came to overpower the Turks’ historical imagination. The influential work of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, rejecting Byzantine influence on the Ottomans, and his contribution to the Turkification of Ottoman imperial history is discussed.