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 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.