io8 RENAISSANCES

been moved by a short-sighted eagerness to turn to immediate account
the military weakness of Prankish trespassers on East Roman ground
who had become even more decrepit than the Byzantine lawful owners.
In reconquering the Morea from the Latins, the Palaioltfghi were impro-
vidently securing the twofold immediate satisfaction of taking their
revenge for grievous wrongs suffered in the past at the hands of hated
schismatic Christian aggressors and at the same time momentarily con-
pensating themselves for irreparable losses of strategically invaluable
territory in Anatolia with ephemeral gains of strategically valueless terri-
tory in Rumelia. The Palaiol6ghi chose to act on this short view without
reflecting that, in expelling the Franks from the Morea, they were work-
ing, not for themselves, but for their future Ottoman successors. Yet,
unstatesmanlike though their preoccupation with the Morea may look in
retrospect to an historian's eye, there is no evidence that the warping of
their political judgement was the effect of any sentimental attachment to
a country that had once been the cradle of Hellenism.

In the vocabulary of a Greek Orthodox Christendom the word
'Hellene* had acquired the opprobriously pejorative connotation of the
English Western Christian word 'heathen';1 and, in the sixth, no less
than in the first, century of a progressive renaissance of the Ancient
Greek language and literature in Byzantium that had started in the
generation of Photius (vivebat circa A.D. 820-91), this was still the first
association that the word 'Hellene' would spontaneously suggest in the
minds of Byzantine Hellenists, however pedantically they might have
schooled themselves to conform to the literary affectation of using the
term in its original laudatory sense, in imitation of its usage in the classi-
cal works of Hellenic literature which they had consciously taken as
their models. Moreover, even the most affectedly self-conscious Byssan-
tine votary of an Hellenic literary culture would never have answered
'Hellas' if he had been asked to name his cultural holy land; for, though
the East Roman garrisons in Central Greece which had kept their heads
above the flood-waters of a Slav Volkerwanderung had been christened
'the Helladhiki', neither a mouldering Athens nor a desolate Delphi and
Olympia were the sites which, in the vision of a Photius or a Soutdhas,
were hallowed by the visibly abiding presence of the Hellenic genius.

The temenos which every Byzantine votary of Hellenism would have
named as his cultural holy of holies was not an Athens that had been
'the education of Hellas'2 at the Hellenic Civilization's apogee; it was a
Constantinople that had become Hellenism's city of refuge in the last
chapter of Hellenic history. This transference of a cultural halo from the

1 See the passage in chap. 50 of Constantine Porphyrogenitue'a D« fmperio Admims*
tremdo that has been quoted in II. ii. 250, n. I,

* Thucydides, Book II, chap. 41.

3 The common noun that thus became Constantinople's distinctive appellation
eventually provided 'the City' with a new proper name. The Ottoman Turkiih uatanbui'
reproduces a Megarian Doric Greek ei's- r&v ir6\w (pronounced 'atambdlin), aignifyin*
*to the city' m the sense of 'to Constantinople'. This would be the context in which the
term would first come to the ears of non-Greek-speaking stranger* who h»d aiked the