The vicissitudes of Byzantium's naval strength were only one factor in the weakening of its ties with the west. Equally important was the blocking of the land route by the Avar and Slav invasions, which was only gradually reopened with the conversion of the Balkans in the ninth and tenth centuries. The reasons for the empire turning its back on the west were also psychological. A cultural and linguistic cleavage between east and west already existed in the Late Roman period. In the west knowledge of Greek was confined to a few intellectuals such as Boethius, and in their war with Justinian the Goths did their utmost to exploit the Italians' suspicions of the 'unmanly' Greeks. That the authorities were aware of the political dangers of such antagonisms is shown in a seventh-century show trial in Constantinople when a dissident theologian was accused of 'loving the Romans and hating Greeks'. In the east Latin ceased to be the official language of the administration, and the previously important Latin presence in the capital was thinned out by cultural assimilation and the executions of the Emperor Phocas. While historians of the mid-sixth century could still give exhaustive accounts of campaigns in the west and Germanic customs, their successors offered only occasional asides about the west and by the ninth century the interest of the main chronicler was confined to the hostility displayed by the Roman pontiffs against his bĂȘtes noires, the iconoclast emperors. The imperial government displayed a broader view, showing its continued commitment to the west by the dispatch of embassies and gold to the Franks and to renegade Lombards, but it was prevented from deploying adequate resources in men and money by more immediate pressures in the east. A further decline in involvement occurred in the 630s, when the empire's back-to-the-wall conflict with the Arabs led to a decline in the number of oriental troops recorded in Italy and the disappearance of Byzantine tribute from Frankish coin hoards.

A gradual contraction of horizons took place throughout the Mediterranean in response to immediate dangers and economic needs as much as the Arab advance and the disintegration of an increasingly remote and irrelevant empire. An illuminating example is Byzantine Italy where fusion took place between

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