This book addresses Christendom's eastern frontier, the principality of Moldavia: its political, economic, and cultural history from its formation in 1359 to the early sixteenth century.
This article examines the range of religious embroideries produced in Moldavia during the fifteenth century, and especially in the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. These church ...embroideries offer iconographies, styles, and techniques that both continued and adapted Byzantine artistic traditions and image types. The objects under consideration consist of liturgical vestments and veils, as well as tomb covers that reveal through their iconography, style, and execution the sophistication of late medieval Moldavian workshops and the aspirations and concerns of the royal patrons who commissioned them. Through visual and technical analyses of select Moldavian religious embroideries from the fifteenth century, this study exposes some of the ways in which Byzantine artistic and iconographic traditions of church embroidery were perpetuated and transformed at the Moldavian court in the crucible of the post‑1453 world.
This article explores how the visual culture of Eastern Europe has been studied and often excluded from the grander narratives of art history and more specialized conversations due to political and ...cultural limitations, as well as bias in the field. The history and visual culture of Eastern Europe have been shaped by contacts with Byzantium, transforming, in local contexts, aspects of the rich legacy of the empire before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This study expands and theorizes the eclectic visual cultures of Eastern Europe during the late medieval period by focusing on two ecclesiastical buildings of the 14th century built under princely and noble patronage in regions of North Macedonia and Wallachia, respectively: the Church of St George at Staro Nagoričane, near Skopje, modern-day North Macedonia (1315–17) and Cozia Monastery in Călimănești, Wallachia, modern-day Romania (founded 1388). The 14th century was a transformative period for the regions to the north and south of the Danube River, establishing the contacts that were to develop further during the 15th century and especially after 1453.
Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued and transformed alongside local developments in the artistic and cultural ...traditions of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In the post-Byzantine period, the rulers of the north-Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, through their monetary gifts and donations, played central roles in the continuation of ...religious life within and beyond the borders of their domains. This essay charts the patterns of patronage of two key donors – Neagoe Basarab of Wallachia (r. 1512–1521) and Peter Rareș of Moldavia (r. 1527–1528; 1541–1546) – in order to underscore their piety and the broader implications of their activities. Through the extant textual and material evidence, this study engages with aspects of the desires, collaborations, and effects of patronage from these two important rulers within Wallachia and Moldavia, respectively, and to far-off places like Mount Athos and the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. This study reveals a complex web of personal, spiritual, and ideological facets of leadership and identity that shaped a culture of donations and piety rooted in Byzantine models and transformed in local contexts through the desires and ambitions of each individual ruler.
Although princely endowments to monasteries outside Moldavia often occurred, most numerous were the gifts and donations from the Moldavian princes, and in particular from Stephen III, to the monastic ...communities on Mount Athos. As I demonstrate, Moldavian aid to the Orthodox monasteries on the Holy Mount intensified during the second half of the fifteenth century. Stephen sought through his support of Athos—the pan-Orthodox and multinational community of Christians that served as an enduring emblem of Orthodox Christianity, especially after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople—to nurture and renew symbolically the former glory of the Byzantine Empire. His efforts ensured his perpetual commemoration by the Athonite communities and also, perhaps more importantly and by extension, rendered Moldavia, as a polity, an heir to Byzantine Orthodoxy. In undertaking this task as patron and protector of Mount Athos, Stephen, moreover, like all the rulers that came before him with similar intentions, also cast himself as an heir to the authority of Byzantine emperors among the Christian peoples under Ottoman control. Upon this ideological basis, Stephen established the protection of his domain and his resistance against the Ottoman Empire.
In the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the principality of Moldavia emerged as a Christian bastion against the Ottoman Empire that was beginning to assert its dominance over eastern ...Europe. A new image type developed in the Moldavian monastic context of the early sixteenth century that conflated key historical narratives about Constantinople's miraculous deliverances during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. Painted on the exteriors of several churches in the region, this mural articulated a view of history as a series of interventions and presented a visual commentary to Moldavia's contemporary military struggles.
PDF
