Thus, there is a cloudy realization that the Code of Roman Law was finally drawn up in Constantinople, but the historical significance of the past is not keenly appreciated. At the same time, anything that can be labeled Byzantine is either treated separately or not considered at all. There is even no realization that the Scandinavian Vikings extended their activities to the East as well as to the West and such striking evidence of this as the marriage of the daughter of Harold the Saxon, the last Saxon King of England, to Volodymyr Monomakh of Kiev, seems an incredible and isolated event. The scholars at Dumbarton Oaks and the Mediaeval Academy of America are indeed doing work on Byzantine history, culture and institutions but the other scholars working on the foundations and development of the modern Western World have not attempted to take their work into account, and are still limiting the modern Western World to the British Isles, France, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire and its descendants, ignoring the contacts of that world with Byzantium in the early and later Middle Ages. With a similar lack of understanding, the average student, though aware of the fight between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes, rarely knows that the Empire was then pushing into Slavic territory or that Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles to the Slavs, were in Rome as well as Constantinople. There is a scattered appreciation of such events as the Latin seizure, and the Turkish capture, of Constantinople but only for their impact upon the life of the West. The arrival in Western Europe of scholars from Constantinople is taught as a great influence in the Renaissance but no attention is paid to their origin or where they had studied. The situation is even worse for later periods. There has been an almost complete neglect not only of the history of the Balkan Slavs but of the Greeks as well. For years after the establishment of the Gennadeion in Athens, one of the few still unplundered collections of Greek and Slavic manuscripts, Slavic scholars were as unaware of the existence of this collection as the classical scholars were unaware of its importance. One result of this traditional lack of understanding of early Eastern history has been the tendency of American scholars to accept without hesitation either the German view of Eastern Europe as a relatively primitive region, or the Russian view that in some way everything in the East was Russian and that it was only natural that Catherine II of Russia should dream of becoming the Empress of the Byzantine Empire with her capital still at St. Petersburg.