We live in a world dominated by the West and by Western ideas. We admire those ideas and admit to their power. But there must be a way for us to do so, without betraying our own history. We must summon Clio to speak her truth, which is stronger than any power.

There is another factor at work here. Besides writing history, the West has also long dictated preferences. The interest taken in the Eastern Roman Empire and its Church by Renaissance scholars may have been lop-sided even condescending - but at least we were considered a legitimate field of study. But then came the Enlightenment, which made it fashionable to look down on anything "eastern" or "spiritual".

Voltaire called Byzantine history "nothing but declamations and miracles ...a disgrace to the human mind" - while Gibbon described the later Roman Empire as the "triumph of barbarism and religion". The Enlightenment set the stage for the national revolutions of the nineteenth century, and its any-clerical tone influenced all of them.