Anyone who wishes to discover how the old Russian chroniclers pictured the Latin world of the West will immediately meet with serious difficulties. These are in part due to uncertainties in the transmission of their texts: there are centuries between the events which are described and the manu scripts that have been preserved concerning the Kiev empire. These difficulties are also to some extent due to the religious schisms that existed between the Eastern and Western church: Orthodox clerics who wrote the chronicles in Russia during the Middle Ages deliberately ignored any contact with the...