Chapter 1

Hieronymus Wolf’s
Silver Tongue
Early Byzantine Scholarship
at the Intersection of Slavery,
Colonialism, and the Crusades

Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff

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Scholars of the Byzantine world, like those in many other disciplines,

have only recently begun to interrogate the role of colonialism in shap-
ing the field’s past development and present practice. While the Byz-
antine Empire’s destruction in 1453 meant that it neither participated
in nor suffered from the colonial predations that followed Columbus’s
voyages, an incipient study of Byzantine history nevertheless emerged
in the sixteenth century—an age that witnessed the European conquest
of the Americas, the rise of global maritime empires, and the begin-
nings of the transatlantic slave trade. Hence one way to answer the
question posed by the present volume—“Is Byzantine studies a colo-
nialist discipline?”—is to assess the connections between European
colonial projects and early Byzantine scholarship, an investigation all
the more urgent for being underemphasized in other treatments of

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 40 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

the discipline’s formation. This essay proposes to consider such con-

nections, briefly and provisionally, by revisiting a moment commonly
cited as the “birth” of Byzantine studies in early modern Europe: the
publication, between 1557 and 1562, of Hieronymus Wolf’s Corpus His-
toriae Byzantinae.
The figure of Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580) bestrides the origins of
Byzantine studies like an ill-tempered colossus. Misanthropic by any
measure—“I hardly visit anyone unless I am summoned or forced to
do so,” Wolf grumbles in his autobiography—the Augsburg humanist
reserved special loathing for the people he sometimes called Byzan-
tini.1 “I marvel more than lament,” he writes of Constantinople’s fall in
1453, “that that dregs and bilgewater of an execrable people remained
so long unsubdued, and were not conquered earlier.”2 Yet despite his
disdain, Wolf devoted several years to the study of Byzantine texts,

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and his successive editions and Latin translations of the Byzantine his-
torians John Zonaras, Niketas Choniates, and Nikephoros Gregoras—to
which his printer added Conrad Clauser’s loose translation of Laonikos
Chalkokondyles—constituted “a complete corpus of Byzantine his-
tory.” Extending “from Constantine the Great to Constantine the Last,”
Wolf’s corpus made a coherent account of the Byzantine Empire avail-
able to a western European readership for the first time.3 For this rea-
son, Wolf numbers among the handful of early modern scholars whose
names remain known to most Byzantinists today, if not to a wider pub-
lic. Historical surveys of Byzantine scholarship often begin their story
with Wolf and his corpus. He has been lauded as the “father” of Byzan-
tine studies and has even been credited—somewhat dubiously—with
coining the terms “Byzantium” and “Byzantine” to describe the East-
ern Roman Empire and its inhabitants.
The reality, of course, is more complicated. Wolf never saw himself
as siring a new scholarly discipline, and paternity of Byzantine studies
might with equal justification be awarded to a half-dozen other claim-
ants. The term “Byzantine” in reference to the Eastern Empire, more-
over, has a long and complex semantic history, one that neither begins
nor ends in the sixteenth century. Still, as with any foundation myth,
the tale of Wolf and his Byzantine corpus reveals much about how pres-
ent-day Byzantinists choose to remember the origins of their field—and

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 41

what they choose to forget. Scholars have traced the provenance of

Wolf’s manuscripts, pried into his philological methods, weighed the
“success” or “failure” of his emendations, lauded the merits of his Latin
translations, regretted his classicist’s disdain for Byzantine Greek, and
assessed his intellectual pursuits within the context of the German
Reformation and late humanism. By contrast, the contemporary rise of
European colonial empires and their role in the creation of Wolf’s Byzan-
tine corpus have been mostly absent from such accounts, relegated to
separate compartments of early modern European history. To be sure,
no study of Wolf is complete without a nod to the fabulous riches of his
employers, the Fugger banking dynasty of Augsburg. A passing mention
of Fugger mining interests or a dark reference to “colonial enterprises”
may appear in a subordinate clause; at most, studies will note Fugger
preoccupation with the Ottoman Empire. But scholars often treat the

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connection between patron and product as incidental to the “real” stuff
of Wolf’s Byzantine scholarship. The Fuggers paid and Wolf produced;
does it matter where the money came from?
The following pages move Fugger wealth, which provided both
material support and ideological impetus for this first Byzantine cor-
pus, from the margins to the center of our discipline’s paradigmatic
“origin story.” Doing so underscores the vital but overlooked relation-
ship between the European colonization of the Americas, on the one
hand, and Wolf’s Byzantine scholarship on the other. For if we are to
evaluate Byzantine studies as a colonialist discipline, we must not only
excavate the colonialist discourses that inform current mentalities and
methodologies nor focus solely on the by-products and tools of colo-
nialism—such as racism, nationalism, and imperialism—that continue
to visibly pervade the present. We must also ask new questions about
the field’s genesis in western Europe, questions that challenge notions
of the history of scholarship as a succession of solitary figures laboring
over their books and that compel us to consider how the development
of Byzantine studies was imbricated in the global history of European
conquest and colonization.

All three of Wolf’s editiones principes of Byzantine historians—two

(Zonaras and Choniates) published in 1557, and the third (Gregoras) in

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 42 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

1562—are dedicated ad magnificvm et generosvm virum, d. antonivm fvg-

gervm. The “magnificent and generous man” in question, Anton Fugger,
was the head of sixteenth-century Europe’s richest family, the Fuggers
of Augsburg.4 From their beginnings as minor textile merchants, the
Fuggers built a commercial empire through a combination of good luck,
Fig. 1.1 The
shrewd marriages, and a simple coat of arms
business of Johann
strategy. Jakob Fugger
Extending (1516–1575)
loans to from Das Ehre
Fugger (Augsburg, 1548). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 9460
leading princes in Europe,urn‌
most notably the Habsburg rulers of Austria,
:nbn‌:de‌:bvb‌:12‌
Fugger lenders demanded-bsb00042105
security in‌–6.the form of material resources.
When the indebted princes defaulted on their loans as expected, the
Fuggers seized ownership of the collateral—increasing the firm’s capi-
tal and allowing them to extend still greater loans in exchange for more
extensive securities. Fugger financiers favored collateral in the form of
mining privileges, and as the firm grew, its commercial interests shifted

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 43

from textiles to the copper and silver trade. In this manner, the Fug-
gers acquired control over mines in the Tyrol, Bohemia, Carinthia, and
Upper Hungary until, by the close of the fifteenth century, they had
come to virtually monopolize copper mining in central Europe.
Up to this point the Fugger firm remained rooted in Europe, despite
rom Das Ehrenbuch several
der attempts to invest in Portuguese trade with India at the turn
k, Cgm 9460, fol. 12,
of the sixteenth century. But two successive incidents in 1519 set the
stage for the Fuggers to stretch their commercial sinews across the
Atlantic. First, in June, the Habsburg king Charles I of Spain was elected
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, thanks to a staggering Fugger loan of
543,585 florins that allowed the Spanish monarch to offer more lavish
bribes to the imperial electors than his rival candidate, the French king
Francis I. A month later and an ocean away, the Spaniard Hérnan Cortés
landed on the coast of what is today Mexico, claimed the land in the

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name of young King Charles, and founded the city of Veracruz. By 1521,
Cortés and his Indigenous allies had defeated the Mexica (Aztec) Tri-
ple Alliance, sacked their capital of Tenochtitlán, and established the
kingdom of New Spain. The “empire on which the sun never sets”—
only the first of several to be praised in this fashion—was born.
Emperor Charles V owed his crown to the Fuggers, and he looked
to his new colonial possessions to pay off his largest creditor. In 1530,
Charles granted the Fuggers the right to conquer and colonize the
Pacific coast from the city of Chincha down to the Straits of Magel-
lan—a territory comprising much of modern-day Peru and all of Chile.
Fugger dreams of an Andean demesne would prove ephemeral; more
permanent and profitable access to America’s riches came indirectly,
through Fugger control over the mercury mines in Almadén, Spain.
In 1554, the discovery of the so-called patio process, a technique for
extracting silver from ore through mercury amalgamation, sustained
an upsurge in colonial silver production. At its center stood New Span-
ish mines such as those in the area of Pachuca and Guanajuato and,
eventually, the Andean boomtown of Potosí, which produced over 60
percent of the world’s silver during its heyday in the second half of
the sixteenth century. Converting Pachuca and Potosí silver from ore
into bullion for the Spanish royal fisc, however, depended on a steady

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 44 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

mercury supply, and the Fuggers, with their possession of Almadén,

commanded the Iberian peninsula’s principal source of the element.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Charles V’s endless wars kept
the emperor in perennial debt to Fugger financiers. Fugger loans con-
stituted nearly 20 percent of all those taken out by Charles V over the
course of his long reign—more than any other single lender. Ameri-
can silver was the principal means by which the emperor paid down
these huge debts. Thus, in a perpetual cycle of profit, Fugger middle-
men sold mercury to the Spanish crown, which it then used to extract
silver from New Spanish and Peruvian mines in order to pay off Fugger
loans. By the 1550s, the Fuggers maintained representatives in Vera-
cruz and Lima who regularly reported back to Augsburg on the state of
silver production, while Fugger agents thronged the wharves of Seville,
waiting to claim a cut of the precious metals from the Spanish treasure

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fleets as soon as they arrived. By trapping the House of Habsburg in a
web of debt and dependency, the Fugger firm had gone global.
The long arm of Fugger commerce embraced Africa as well as Amer-
ica. The firm’s direct involvement in transporting enslaved Africans
across the Atlantic remained minimal, at least when compared to the
Welsers, who were fellow Augsburg bankers. But the Fuggers’ wealth,
no less than that of the Welsers, was wrung from the bondage of Afri-
can and Indigenous American bodies. Unable to produce mercury fast
enough to the meet the Spanish crown’s new demands, the Fuggers
introduced convict laborers ( forzados) and enslaved Africans to the
mines of Almadén to bolster its traditional paid workforce. They soon
discovered in slave labor a highly profitable innovation—the average
price for an African slave in mid-sixteenth-century Spain was sixty
ducats, roughly equal to a miner’s wages for a year—and the Fuggers
began to employ enslaved Africans in more of their mining operations.
Between 1559 and 1560, for instance, the firm’s agents purchased one
hundred enslaved Africans from Portuguese merchants in Cape Verde
for use in the Fugger silver mines of Guadalcanal, near Seville; by 1575,
only five survived. Fugger mining interests in the Americas relied even
more heavily on slave labor and proved even deadlier. It has been esti-
mated that up to eight million enslaved Indigenous and African work-
ers perished in the silver mines of Potosí.

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 45

Recovering the ways that the Fuggers profited from traffic in African
slaves sheds new light on a striking detail in their coat of arms, seen
here in a deluxe genealogical manuscript commissioned by the family
and completed in 1548 (fig. 1.1). The top-right quadrant of the Fugger
escutcheon displays a dark-skinned woman with flowing hair, crowned
and holding a miter. This cryptic figure, representing the family’s hered-
itary county of Kirchberg, emerged as the Kirchberg sigil centuries
before the Fuggers acquired its lordship in 1507. In her pre-Fugger ver-
sions, however, the black woman bears flowing blond hair; under the
Fuggers, not only does she acquire black hair and a golden hoop earring
but other features also change. Above the crest, a so-called enhanced
figure depicts the same dark-skinned woman with characteristics differ-
ent from her escutcheon counterpart: a tightly-woven braid, noticeably
rounder nose, and larger lips, all of which follow European caricatures

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of sub-Saharan Africans. In other words, the Fugger family arms in this
manuscript seem to have “Africanized” the ambiguously dark-skinned
woman of earlier heraldic imagery, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment
of Fugger association with transatlantic slavery. Whether intentional
or incidental, the woman’s prominence on the Fugger coat of arms
stands as a permanent, if often overlooked, reminder of the centrality
of enslaved labor in creating and maintaining the riches that under-
wrote the family’s celebrated cultural patronage.
The head of the Fugger firm during the boom years of the 1550s was
Wolf’s “magnificent and generous” patron, Anton Fugger (1493–1560),
who used his family’s unparalleled wealth to subsidize artists and lit-
terateurs, acquire a vast library, and fund a variety of scholarly enter-
prises. Fugger agents from Persia to Peru collected not only business
information for their employers but also manuscripts, coins, antiquities,
and other exotica for Fugger Wunderkammern and libraries. Such enter-
prises required deputies who combined some education with experi-
ence in the affairs of commerce and diplomacy. In Hans Dernschwam
(1494–1568/69), the Fuggers found a model agent.
Dernschwam received his education in Vienna, Leipzig, and Rome
before finding employment with a series of prelates, civil servants,
and regional magnates in central Europe. After 1525, he became a Fug-
ger factotum—a kind of business manager, diplomat, mining expert,

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 46 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

and fixer—and helped administer their delicate relationships with the

Habsburgs and Hungarian monarchs for over two decades. He retired
in 1549, as the Fuggers confronted a series of commercial setbacks, yet
in 1553 he joined a legation of Ferdinand I, then king of the Romans and
of Bohemia, to Constantinople, and he left behind a journal (Tagebuch)
assiduously documenting his travels. Why Dernschwam emerged from
a comfortable retirement to undertake—at his own expense—this per-
ilous and physically arduous journey remains unclear. But while intel-
lectual curiosity was likely not his primary incentive, he did make two
critical contributions to scholarship. First, he accompanied the Flemish
diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in a visit to Ankara, among whose
Roman ruins they discovered the oldest extant version of Augustus’s
Res gestae. Second, he purchased three Byzantine manuscripts, con-
taining the histories of Zonaras and Choniates, which he brought back

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to Germany and “presented” (that is, probably sold) to the Fuggers in
Augsburg upon his return. Dernschwam himself apparently convinced
Anton Fugger to underwrite the expense of editing and translating
these two writers. It was only natural that the arduous task be allot-
ted to the Fuggers’ resident librarian: the accomplished Hellenist Hier-
onymus Wolf.
Wolf was one of the new “house scholars” employed by Anton Fug-
ger with the revival of the family’s fortunes in the 1550s. A native of
Oettingen in Bavaria, Wolf had lived the peripatetic life of a scholar
and teacher—in Basel, Paris, Nuremberg, and Tübingen—until his cel-
ebrated translation of Demosthenes (1549) brought him to the atten-
tion of the Fuggers. In 1551, he found stable employment in Augsburg
managing the correspondence and, most importantly, the library of
Anton’s nephew and successor Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1575). Johann
Jakob, who inherited all of his uncle’s love of learning and none of his
business acumen, was involved throughout the 1550s in building an
impressive (and costly) private collection of Greek manuscripts. Per-
haps Dernschwam, knowing his former employer’s passion for Greek
books, purchased the Byzantine manuscripts in Constantinople as a
kind of bibliographic speculation. In any event, he must also have rec-
ognized something of their value, since he encouraged Anton to sup-
port their publication.

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 47

Wolf leaves no doubt that he undertook the arduous task dutifully,

if not enthusiastically. He nonetheless found great value in these works
and in Byzantine history more broadly. First, Wolf—like one of his prede-
cessors in exploring Byzantine history, Johannes Cuspinianus (d. 1529),
who also relied heavily on Zonaras in his De caesaribus (Basel, 1540)—saw
a thorough account of Byzantine history as an essential ethnographic
weapon in ongoing warfare against the Ottomans. It was an ingredi-
ent in the recipe for a successful anti-Ottoman crusade. According to
Wolf, the importance of Byzantine history lay in reminding Germans of
their immanent crusading spirit—his preface to Choniates calls upon his
countrymen to imitate the example of Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1155–
90)—and warning them of dire consequences should they instead emu-
late the Byzantines and either ignore the Ottoman threat or pursue
internal vendettas rather than uniting against their common external

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enemy. For as he remarked in the preface to his edition of Gregoras,
one should study Byzantine history not for the same reasons one stud-
ied the ancients (as models of eloquence or exemplars of virtue), but
rather as a warning to avoid the Byzantines’ mistakes. After all, “the
same enemy who crushed, ravaged, and destroyed the formerly happy
territories of Asia and Greece now threatens our necks as well.”5
Such a didactic frame for historical inquiry, while conventional for
humanists, also reflects distinctly central European concerns. Since the
first transalpine attempt to write a history of the Byzantine Empire—
begun by Cuspinianus in the 1510s and also catalyzed, coincidentally, by
the discovery of a Zonaras manuscript—scholars regarded the empire in
Constantinople as an archive of instructive exempla for martial encoun-
ters with the Ottomans. Anti-Ottoman warfare was a goal shared by
all those who found themselves neighbors of the Great Turk. Emperor
Maximilian I (r. 1508–19) had yearned, and failed, to lead a crusade,
patronizing literary and scholarly celebrations of the endeavor instead.
His grandson and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, also
dreamed of a crusade to “reconquer” the eastern Mediterranean. The
Fuggers were less ardent advocates of holy war than their Habsburg
patrons were, but they too sought to repulse the Ottomans; after all,
the frontier lay not far east of Vienna, and the Ottomans’ rise had indi-
rectly deprived the Fuggers of their holdings in Hungary and jeopardized

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 48 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

the family’s interests further afield. Hence Anton Fugger proved all too
willing to expend the firm’s riches—secured in part by enslaved Afri-
can labor on both sides of the Atlantic—on the collection of Byzantine
manuscripts and the translation, publication, and circulation of Byzan-
tine histories. Scholarship on the Byzantine past was an investment in
the firm’s future, promising as it did to illuminate the persistence of the
Ottoman threat, reveal the secrets of the Sublime Porte, and unite the
Germans in crusading zeal. Far from a detached intellectual pursuit or
an antiquarian curiosity, Wolf’s Byzantine corpus emerges in this light
as an unrecognized artifact of colonialism, produced within interlock-
ing systems of domination and ideologies of cultural superiority that
extracted wealth from the New World to realize the crusader ambi-
tions of the Old.
Wolf’s editions were repeatedly pirated and reprinted across Europe,

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often in cities and contexts that had less to fear from the Ottomans,
vitiating the impulses that had informed their creation. But while Wolf’s
“corpus of Byzantine history” failed to unify Germany or turn the Otto-
man tide, it succeeded in ways that neither he nor Dernschwam nor
the Fuggers anticipated. For the first time, lettered men across Europe
enjoyed easy access to the rudiments of Byzantine history and con-
sequently discovered in the empire’s annals a storehouse of materials
useful for their own concerns—furnishing the French monarchy with
an imperial genealogy, contesting papal supremacy, or even debating
historical chronology and national origins. Wolf’s idea of a “complete
corpus of Byzantine history from Constantine the Great to Constantine
the Last” took root as subsequent scholars found profit in the study
of Byzantine history and renewed the project of his Corpus Historiae
Byzantinae on successively grander scales, from the Parisian Byzantine
du Louvre (1648–1711), to Bonn’s Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae
(1828–97), and finally to the ongoing Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae
(1966–). Each of these series emerged under distinct historical condi-
tions—from heady Bourbon imperialism to postwar international col-
laboration—but all are heirs, in their own ways, of Wolf’s first “corpus.”

By way of conclusion, we would like to highlight three provisional

insights to emerge from this brief case study that illustrate some of

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 49

the ways in which colonialism provided both material and ideological

support for scholarship in early modern Europe. The first insight speaks
to the challenges of presentism. Discussions of colonialism and decolo-
nization, much like histories of Byzantine studies as a discipline, tend to
focus—justifiably, in some regards—on the late nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries. Of course, all histories are histories of the present insofar
as they are inextricably linked with the present concerns and mental-
ities that inform their expression; universities, academic disciplines,
and museums were shaped, each in their own ways, by the colonialism
of the modern world. But there are earlier intersections between col-
onization and scholarship that have hardly begun to be explored, and
we risk impoverishing our understanding of colonialism as a historical
phenomenon if we ignore all but its most recent predations.
Tracing the material impacts of colonialism on Byzantine scholar-

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ship directs our attention to a second, more incisive point. Scholars,
critics, and activists have offered a number of ways to understand colo-
nialism and decolonization variously as political, material, and intel-
lectual endeavors. Some of these approaches are difficult to apply to
our discipline: Byzantium was not a historical participant in the “age of
colonialism,” whose inception is often dated to 1492. Moreover, as an
influential article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang has argued, decolo-
nization is a material project, not simply a metaphorical one: a demand
for the restitution of Indigenous land and life.6 In one sense, then, this
imperative makes decolonization a problematic paradigm for Byzantium
and Byzantine studies, since the empire has no surviving Indigenous
inhabitants to which its land and assets might be repatriated. In another
sense, however, Tuck and Yang’s attempt to direct our attention from
the metaphorical to the material can still inform the questions at the
heart of this volume. As we have tried to show here, the material ben-
efits of colonialism—slave labor, Indigenous subjugation, and resource
expropriation—fueled a critical intervention in Byzantine scholarship
in the form of the Fuggers’ patronage of Wolf’s labors. Even if one were
to dispute Wolf’s paternity of Byzantine studies, a kind of intellectual
colonialism remained at play in the development of the discipline: after
1453, the production and interpretation of Byzantine texts, the estab-
lishment of Byzantine narratives, the collection of Byzantine objects,

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 50 How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

and the appropriation of Byzantine symbols were tasks arrogated by

Westerners, many of whom evinced hostility to the empire on religious,
political, or cultural grounds. Even Byzantium’s sympathizers—of whom
there were far more than modern scholars tend to credit—were out-
siders, imposing foreign logics on their reconstructions and interpreta-
tions of the Byzantine world, from political culture to ecclesiology. As
a result, there is no easy cure for the colonialism embedded in Byzan-
tine studies, no primordial disciplinary purity to recover, and certainly
no return to a Byzantine scholarship untainted by either colonialism’s
material fruits or its mentalities. There was never a Byzantine stud-
ies—or even Byzantine scholarship—before colonialism.
Finally, we hope this case study can help dispel the myth of Byz-
antium’s marginality in early modern Europe. We have elsewhere
attempted to illustrate the vitality of Byzantine scholarship in the his-

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tory of European erudition and its utility for scholars, artists, and intel-
lectuals grappling with issues from religious authenticity to tyranny and
historical periodization.7 But as we acclaim the enduring relevance of
Byzantium to early modern Europe’s signal cultural and political dilem-
mas, we must also acknowledge the debt Byzantine scholarship owes
to Europe’s more baleful legacy. Understanding how Byzantine stud-
ies, even in its nascent forms, advanced through the colonialist proj-
ects of European statesmen, power brokers, and financiers such as the
Fuggers is an essential step in acknowledging, if not rectifying, that
legacy. We must recognize and confront the discipline’s colonial pasts
before we can discuss its future directions, let alone imagine what a
“decolonial” or “anticolonial” practice of Byzantine studies might look
like.

Notes
We are grateful to Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova for organizing the
webinar from which this piece emerged, to our various interlocutors during the
event, and to David Ungvary for insightful recommendations. We would espe-
cially like to thank Nathalie Miraval, who discussed the ideas presented here with
the authors and made many helpful corrections and suggestions to the piece.
1. Hieronymus Wolf, Commentariolus, coeptus quidem scribi anno 1564 sed ali-
quot annis post demum absolutus, de vitae suae ratione, ac potius fortuna, ed. and

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 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue 51

trans. Helmut Zäh (Heidelberg: Camena, 2013), 37: “neque conuenio fere quen-
quam, nisi aut vocatus aut coactus.”
2. Hieronymus Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, Romanae, hoc est Byzantinae historiae
Libri XI (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1562), Praefatio, sig. a2v: “& fecem ac sen-
tinam illam nefariorum hominum tam diu fuisse incolumem, nec citius oppres-
sam esse, mirarer potius quam miserarer.”
3. Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, title page: “integrum Byzantinae historiae cor-
pus a Constantino magno ad Constantium postremum.”
4. On the rise of the Fuggers, see in general Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of
Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 2012), 9–67.
5. Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, preface, sig. a2v: “Idem enim hostis, qui beatas
olim Asiae & Graeciae provincias oppressit, vastavit, evertit, nostris etiam cer-
vicibus imminet.”
6. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolo-
nization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
7. See Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, eds., The Invention of
Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research

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Library and Collection, 2022).

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