The fall of Constantinople was not the birth of the Renaissance. Constantinople was one of the institutions through which the classical, Byzantine, Islamic and Mediterranean worlds were continuously recombined—and through its commercial networks, Byzantium also helped create the conditions from which the Genoese-centered first systemic cycle of accumulation emerged.

Orientalism invents the category of centralized “eastern” power; Byzantinism transforms that category into a Roman-Christian imperial form; Prussianism selectively Europeanizes and normatively reverses it, turning centralized administration from an alleged mark of despotism into an ideal of disciplined collective organization.