Zrod střední a východní Evropy - Mezi Byzancí a Římem – Dvorník František (2008)

The book The Making of Central and Eastern Europe. Between Byzantium and Rome represents one of the peak works of František Dvorník, a Czech medievalist, Byzantinist, and internationally renowned researcher who lived and published abroad, mainly in the United States, since the early 1940s. This work was first published in 1949 in London under the title The Making of Central and Eastern Europe, and in it, the author deals with the cultural and political birth of the area known as Central and Eastern Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries. He builds on his first major monograph Les Slaves, Byzance et Rome au IXe siecle (Slavs, Byzantium, and Rome in the 9th Century, Paris 1926). According to Dvorník, it was precisely in the early Middle Ages, when the Czech Přemyslid and Polish Piast states were forming, that a strong Slavic power could have emerged in Central Europe, which would have become a counterweight to the empire being built by the Germans. However, the starting point of Dvorník's perspective is not the history of individual (later national) states, but the fundamental cultural constants – Rome, Byzantium, the Slavic and Germanic elements – which played a central role in shaping the given state-political entities through their mutual tension. Dvorník gathered and organized an incredible amount of historical material concerning...