| The Byzantines, Italians, and Germans were separate peoples with their own political histories, but they shared the idea of a universal Christian Roman Empire. This tradition linked their intellectual histories, but it also created discord between them. These three peoples reached a point in their respective histories when they began to fashion conceptions of themselves that were distinct from the universal Christian Roman identity they had shared for centuries. Their writings reveal the exchange of ideas, imagery, and texts, but there is no evidence that a model existed, which they consciously imitated to form a new type of "national" identity. A comparative study of their separate political histories and literature verifies, however, three versions of a single process, in which new, ethno-linguistically marked identities---Greeks, Italians, and Germans---superceded the universal Christian Roman imperial identity. |
