Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Empire of Nicaea (1204-1261)

Education, learning, literature, and art 

Page 12

John Apocaucus, metropolitan of Naupactus, George Bardanes, metropolitan of Corcyra, and Demetrius Chomatenus, archbishop of Ochrida, are the most prominent representatives of the cultural movement in the Despotat of Epirus and in the short-lived Empire of Thessalonica. As far as Byzantine art was concerned, the new Frankish principalities established on the territory of the Byzantine Empire induced many artists from Constantinople and Thessalonica (Salonika) to seek new fields in the now powerful Serbian kingdom, or to join the artists already settled in Venice; there was a diaspora (dispersion) of the painters. These missionaries of Byzantine art gave direction to the Slav schools, the full achievement of which at a rather later time we are now only beginning to understand. But artistic traditions did not die out, and the artistic renaissance under the Palaeologi was, to a certain extent, due to these traditions and achievements of an earlier time which were preserved in the thirteenth century.

The literary movement of the epoch of the Nicene Empire has great importance for the general history of Byzantine culture. The center which had been created at the court of the Emperors of Nicaea became a nursery of culture, which, amid political division, violent international struggle, and internal troubles, saved, protected, and continued the achievements of the first Hellenic renaissance under the Comneni in order to make possible later the appearance of the second cultural Hellenic renaissance under the Palaeologi. Nicaea serves as a bridge from the first renaissance to the second.

The cultural center formed in the thirteenth century in the western part of the Balkan peninsula, in the territory of Epirus, was the link which related the Christian East to western Europe, and to Italy in particular, in the cultural movement of the time. The rise of the culture of Italy in the thirteenth century at the time of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, this prologue of the Renaissance, although it has not yet been thoroughly studied, has been and is being generally emphasized, discussed, and acknowledged. But the rise of the culture of Nicaea during the same century, and especially the movement in neglected Epirus, have not been taken into consideration. As a matter of fact, these three movements, in Italy, Nicaea, and Epirus, developed more or less actively along parallel lines, and perhaps with some reciprocal influences. Even a phenomenon so modest at first sight as the cultural rise of Epirus in the thirteenth century must lose its exclusively local significance and take its place in the history of general European culture of the thirteenth century

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