Ostrogorskii, Georgii Aleksandrovich

Born Jan. 6 (19), 1902, in St. Petersburg, died, Oct. 24, 1976, in Belgrade. Yugoslav Byzantinist. Member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences (1948).

Ostrogorskii became a professor at the University of Belgrade in 1933. In 1948 he became director of the Institute of Byzantine Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. He was an honorary member of many academies in Europe. Ostrogorskii wrote on the socioeconomic history of the Byzantine Empire and on the history of Byzantine-Serbian relations. His general course on Byzantine history enjoys considerable authority and has been translated into many European languages.

Unlike most Byzantinists of prerevolutionary Russia and of present-day Western Europe and the USA, Ostrogorski acknowledged the presence of feudalism as a socioeconomic system in Byzantium. He dated the radical change in sociopolitical relations—the consolidation of the free peasantry and the organization of the themes—from the seventh century, whereas many historians believe the change to have occurred in the eighth and the first half of the ninth centuries. Ostrogorskii was an advocate of the theory of the continuous development of the Byzantine cities from the period of the Roman Empire.