Between Culture and Politics: Identity, the Balkan Enlightenment, and the Greek War of Independence (original) (raw)

In 1935, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga published Byzance après Byzance. In this text, Iorga argued that the Ottoman conquest did not erase all traces of Byzantine civilization. Instead, he contended that from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on, Byzantium’s legacy shaped cultural, religious, and political institutions in the Balkans. Profoundly impacted by the Balkan Wars, Iorga thesis sought to emphasize the historical and cultural unity of the region over the divisions created by nationalist ideology. In some ways, Iorga’s paper, and the monograph he later published, prefigured contemporary historians’ reassessment of the national paradigm. In more recent decades, Paschalis Kitromilides has championed a similar line of thinking. Kitromilides points not only to the region’s shared traditions, but also to the ideological uses of a Byzantine ideal from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and has called for a reexamination of the Balkan history from a transnational perspective. At the same time, Kitromilides has characterized the Balkan Enlightenment as a confrontation between tradition, based to a large extent on the Byzantine ideal and Christian Orthodoxy, and West European thought in the region. The Greek War of Independence brought this confrontation to a head. This paper explores if either the Byzance après Byzance or tradition-modernity model can help historians make sense of individuals’ motives and their complicated public and private personas during this period. To do so, it examines the biographies and political, economic, and philanthropic, endeavors of Iordache and Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu. The Rosetti-Roznovanus belonged to a “Phanariot” family that settled in Moldova in the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century, they were among the wealthiest and most political well-connected men in the Principality and were active in the Moldovan administration and commerce. Benefiting from a broad network of professional and personal contacts across the region and Europe, they attempted to shape local and international politics. They also lived through the Greek War of Independence, a moment that brought profound political, cultural, and social change to the Principalities and the Balkans. As educated individuals who left a wealth of archival records, the pair offers historians an interesting case study.