Византия между Изтока и Запада (културно-исторически паралели)
Byzantium between the East and the West: Cultural and Political Parallels

Summary/Abstract: The division of today's Europe into two clearly defined cultural and political zones is the result of the divergent paths, which the East and the West have been following since the fourth century. The Church, too, contributed to this process of divergence by abolishing, in 1054, the ephemeral unity of Christendom. In the period between the 11th and the 15th centuries, as a result of the Crusades, in Europe were created conditions that might have brought about the re-unification of the two halves of Christendom; the East, however, showed itself rather skeptical about the whole thing. It was only in the 14th and 15th centuries that the East, unable to withstand the Ottomans, was compelled to recognize the primacy of Rome. An interesting example of Eurasian cooperation is the Mongol initiative to the French and the papal courts, which aimed at creating an anti-Ottoman alliance. The projected cooperation, however, never materialized due to the different approaches of the two parties. The notorious European dynamism combined with a degree of utopianism accounts for the failure of the Western approach.

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