The twenty-one sermons translated here were not, as was so often the case, exercises in belles-lettres but a sustained effort to bring about both social and moral reform as a precondition for the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins.
This translation of the sermons of the Patriarch Germanos II (1223-40) draws attention to an unfairly neglected source for a critical period when the survival of Byzantium was in the balance. They support the patriarch's enduring importance as an architect of the Byzantine recovery from the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.
