Osswald, Brendan <br/><br/>
The notion of Empire in a separatist province: The case of Epirus (thirteenth – seventeenth centuries) 

 -  2019.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 6 
<br/><br/> A province of the Byzantine Empire that became independent in 1204, Epirus had—during the centuries that followed—a complicated relationship with the notion of empire. While constantly refusing to join the Empire of Nicaea, and then the restored Byzantine Empire, it attempted to become an Empire itself, before inventing a new political model, the Despotate, which combined a total political independence with a strong symbolic link to the Byzantine Emperor. The Serbian Emperor took the latter’s place in the middle of the fourteenth century, but this proved to be merely provisional. After the return to the Byzantine obedience, the link continued to weaken, while the Ottoman Empire managed, for its part, to exert a real influence in the area, before annexing it and making it one of its provinces in the fifteenth century.