Volume 72, December 2024, issue 2

The paper examines a hitherto little-known Greek prophecy of the late sixteenth century, which may be called the Vaticinium de restitutione Constantinopoleos (VatResCon). The prophecy was penned in reaction to the fall of Cyprus (1571) and predicts the imminent recapture of Constantinople through an alliance with Western forces. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I reconstruct the historical context in which this prophecy was composed by reviewing the factors that led to the unprecedented proliferation of Byzantine apocalyptic literature in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople (1453). To illustrate this remarkable development, I present three notable apocalyptic texts composed shortly after 1453. Second, I discuss the dating and manuscript transmission of VatResCon and introduce a demotic paraphrase of the prophecy, which has come down in a single Meteōra manuscript. I provide a diplomatic edition and translation of the paraphrastic version, which can be dated to the early seventeenth century. The edition of the paraphrase serves as a corollary to the recently published editio princeps of VatResCon. An examination of the manuscript environment shows that VatResCon ordinarily comes down in oracular collections that place it in the context of prophetic messianism and apocalyptic irredentism. Moreover, I argue that the prophecy’s pro-Western orientation can explain its short-lived popularity, as the expectation to receive military assistance against the Turks gradually shifted towards Russia. In essence, VatResCon signifies the transition from Venetophile to Russophile prophecies while demonstrating that the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition was alive well over a century after the Eastern Roman polity had come to an end.

The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of dynamic change in many fields of governance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. One of the aims of the reformers was to strengthen the state’s economy and to increase the revenue of the Treasury. In this context, reform of the customs (1764) system was of particular importance as it was meant to ensure efficient collection of customs duties. This article aims to answer the question of how the customs and border control infrastructure was created and developed, by focusing on the borderland between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Prussia over a period of several decades (1760s-1790s). Comprehensive and detailed reports (1769, 1788, 1793) on the border control infrastructure reflect the condition of the customs system, as well as the inspectors’ recommendations for how it could be improved. Sources such as these are not widely used in historiography, and until now there have been no attempts to compare different descriptions of the condition of the customs system. Analysing these sources allowed us to map, highlight and assess the changes to the border control infrastructure. In this article, GIS (Geographic Information System) was used as one of the analytical tools to demonstrate the interaction between border control infrastructure entities and the space of the Lithuanian-Prussian borderland. Results show that the that the development of the border control infrastructure was intensive, not extensive. It is evident that officials, even though they were well aware of illegal activities, rationally evaluated the cost-benefit ratio to the state’s resources and the potential for possible losses. The selected research approach can be applied to study other borderlands and reveals just how significant the spatial localisation of written source data can be in borderland research.

Following the Russian Revolution in February 1917 and the collapse of the imperial diocese of Riga, the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church sought to establish a new parish order for its ethnically and linguistically diverse communities. The order was based on reform plans devised in the empire’s last decades and adapted to the political and financial realities of the secular Estonian Republic. By placing an unprecedented amount of control into the hands of the laity, the new parish regulations overturned the imperial focus on central ecclesiastical organs. In the article, we seek to explain these reforms in terms of their origins and contemporary context before moving on to how they worked in practice, considering issues such as finances, administration, and relationships between parish organs and ecclesiastics. This we do through the case studies of Kergu, Alajõe, and Räpina parishes.