Number DOI: http://doi.org/10.33209/2519-4348-2707-9627-2023-11-144

VB. – № 11, 2023. – P. 249-266

Summary

Byzantium, like any state entity, could not exist forever. Problems that have accumulated (overtly or covertly) without resolution for decades continued the decomposition process of this social institution. The culmination of the process of the gradual demise of the Byzantine Empire was not even the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, but the agony in which the state lived for the last two or three decades of its existence. This agony was most vividly emphasized by the attempt to conclude a church union with the Catholic West in order to obtain political assistance. But, as history will show, there was no such help, and the return to Orthodoxy did not save the state. This symbolism was quickly adopted by the Eastern Slavs: the Muscovites associated the fall of the empire exclusively with the phenomenon of apostasy, which became the foundation not only for their self-proclamation of the autocephaly of their church, but also for the formation of ideas about their religious exclusivity in the form of the ideology «Moscow – 3 Rome; Moscow – Katekhon», which was used both in the past (for example, during the process of anthologizing and sacralizing the «Russian form» of services by the Old Believers during the split of the Russian Church in the 17th century), and in the present (for example, the works of such philosophers as V. Trostnikov, A. Dugin, who use these ideologies to emphasize the superiority of the «Russian world»). Taking this into account, it is considered necessary to conduct a study, within the limits of which it would be found out, what led the medieval Greeks to such despair that they decided to abandon the faith of the fathers. What conditions forced the Greeks to take such a radical step, which turned out to be not only the end of Byzantium, but also became the reason why the Muscovites became proud? Let’s try to give a broad answer to this question.

Key words: Ferraro-Florentine Union, decline of Byzantium, socio-economic prerequisites, socio-political prerequisites, socio-cultural prerequisites.

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