The Byzantine Republic

Kaldellis, Anthony

doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674735866

Cited by 258 publications

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“…They were no more interested in provincial politics […] unless they impacted the capital. 30 On the other hand, if for the two main regions of the Byzantine heartland we have good syntheses incorporating archaeology and material culture (hand in hand with the available literary evidence), the same cannot be said for Byzantine islands for they suffer from the lack of a systematic account. 31 In fact, Byzantine historiography has not yet produced an allencompassing alternative to the only existing account on the history of the Byzantine insular world that is the volume written by Elizabeth Malamut in the late 80s.…”

Section: Islands and Byzantine Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“No Island is an Island”: The Byzantine Mediterranean in The Early Middle Ages (600s-850s)

Zavagno¹

2020

legends

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Large islands of the western and eastern Byzantine Mediterranean are often caught in a historiographical vacuum because they are regarded as isolated and marginal places at the peripheries of Constantinopolitan empire. In fact, although literary and sources dismiss them simply as places of exile or distant military outposts along maritime frontiers, archaeology and material culture have recently shed light on the role they played as "spaces of connectivity". This is due not only to their strategic locations along the commercial shipping routes crisscrossing the Mediterranean but also because islands often presented peculiar adaptive administrative strategies molded by the military and political exigencies of the hour. In fact, this paper will argue that archaeology and material evidence (like coins, lead-seals and above all ceramics) as paired with the rather scarce literary and documentary sources give us enough evidence pointing to a certain degree of economic prosperity on the abovementioned islands during the period under scrutiny as they continued to play an important role in the political, fiscal, administrative and religious structures of the Byzantine empire. Indeed, this paper will also try to show that a resilient insular economy paired with the continuity on local production of artefacts entailed by the persistence of levels of demand on the part of the local secular and religious elites and regular if not frequent regional and sub-regional contacts with other areas of the Mediterranean (Carolingian or Muslim) as well as remaining part and parcel of the a Byzantine political, sociocultural and economic "coastal" koiné.

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Section: Islands and Byzantine Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“No Island is an Island”: The Byzantine Mediterranean in The Early Middle Ages (600s-850s)

Zavagno¹

2020

legends

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“…3 Represented by more recent work in literary studies and art history especially, I believe this shift also facilitated a much greater degree of crossdisciplinary reading, comparative thinking, and in respect of historical context and setting, a generally more open approach to the medieval west and the Islamic world in terms of both material and method. 4 The result is that there are some fascinating discussions currently regarding both how we define our field, where it stands in relation to other historical studies, 5 how we should define our subject matter (is it appropriate to talk about Byzantium at all, or should we speak rather of medieval eastern Romans, and so forth) 6 , and what it means to describe oneself as a Byzantinist, even whether that is a useful term at all. One question that has recently exercised some scholars is that of the chronological terms of reference of the subject, in particular, when does 'our period' begin?…”

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confidence: 99%

Res publica Byzantina? State formation and issues of identity in medieval east Rome

Haldon¹

2016

Byz. Mod. Greek stud.

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It is a great pleasure and an honour to be writing for the fortieth anniversary volume of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. As editor of the journal for some twenty years, from 1984 until 2004, I have watched the journal grow in stature and in esteem over that period, and I am delighted to see it continuing to do so in the hands of its current editors. In the first issue I edited, I also contributed an article that attempted to reconcile some very different approaches to the history of Byzantine society and culture, or at least, to show that such different approaches were not necessarily mutually exclusive. If now rather out-of-date in its content, that article remains a useful baseline for discussing the relationship between empirical research and writing and theoretical reflection. ‘“Jargon” vs. “the facts”‘? was a comment about the confrontation that at the time appeared to exist between, very broadly speaking, those who were interested in questioning the theoretical assumptions underlying and informing their research, and those who were not interested in such debates, preferring to see them either as irrelevant or as inaccessible. In my concluding remarks, I suggested that Byzantine Studies in the mid-1980s was in the process of what T. S. Kuhn would have called a ‘paradigm shift‘, that is to say, a process through which a traditional set (or sets) of assumptions and priorities, as well as theories and approaches, is replaced by different sets of ideas. While the changes in the nature of the subject that have occurred since then have not been particularly marked, there have nevertheless been some interesting and important developments that have altered the framework within which some ways of looking at the medieval eastern Roman world are carried on. The so-called ‘linguistic turn‘, for example, pushed Byzantinists, in particular, scholars of Byzantine literature and visual culture, to grapple with various aspects of what might very broadly be termed post-modernist and post-structuralist theory. This is evident in some of the writing and publishing of the later 1980s and 1990s in particular, and in some respects has now been incorporated into our ‘ways of seeing’ the Byzantine world.2 In particular issues of intertextuality, of authorial intention, of reception, and of the relativizing of cultural interpretive possibilities (in respect of our own perspective) have become part and parcel of scholarly discourse, thus greatly enriching our discipline.3 Represented by more recent work in literary studies and art history especially, I believe this shift also facilitated a much greater degree of cross-disciplinary reading, comparative thinking, and in respect of historical context and setting, a generally more open approach to the medieval west and the Islamic world in terms of both material and method.4

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“…Regardless of intent, however, the role of centuries of Western hostility to the Eastern Empire has been extremely corrosive to our current ability to accept and analyze the Byzantines on terms relatively free from such biases. 209 The term 'Byzantine' itself is the example par excellence of this problem, for the people of that empire never called nor considered themselves anything of the kind, and the etyma of the word itself in Greek texts tend to refer specifically to Constantinople and to its inhabitants; this itself, moreover, was likely an archaizing touch typical of a literary culture that exclusively privileged the vocabulary of the classical age. Nor does the term 'medieval Greek' do justice to their identity, for while Latin Europe certainly knew them as Greeks (Graeci), 210 the Byzantines themselvesand many in the Greek-speaking world ever since 211 called themselves simply Rhômaioi, or Romans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 94-9 (on the 'super-rich'), 76 ('heroic démesure'),[208][209][210][211][212][213][214][215][216][217][218][219][220][221][222][223], 291-307 (on Melania and Pinianus).…”

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The Roman Middle Ages: Aspects of Late Antique-Medieval Cultural Continuity in Old French Hagiography

Chekin

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The third chapter synthesizes the approaches of the first two with the aid of one of the earliest extant Old French texts, the Vie de saint Léger, which is preserved in a single late tenth-century manuscript. Here, I examine the ways in which a Roman-based identity would have negotiated the period of Frankish rule (496-843), when Romanity contended with a new and inferior sociopolitical role. Seeing in the Vie de saint Léger the descendant of a mostly unwritten popular oral-poetic tradition, I claim that it uses the memory of St Leudegar's martyrdom (c. 679) to discuss sociopolitical questions in a situation where a legally subordinate 'Roman' population could most readily find recourse with the episcopate. The poem reflects an undercurrent of Roman identity throughout the Frankish period and beyond, an identity maintained and expressed in vernacular hagiographic poetry.

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The Byzantine Republic

Cited by 258 publications

References 0 publications

“No Island is an Island”: The Byzantine Mediterranean in The Early Middle Ages (600s-850s)

“No Island is an Island”: The Byzantine Mediterranean in The Early Middle Ages (600s-850s)

Res publica Byzantina? State formation and issues of identity in medieval east Rome

The Roman Middle Ages: Aspects of Late Antique-Medieval Cultural Continuity in Old French Hagiography

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