This volume explores the political, cultural, and ecclesiastical forces that linked the metropolis of Byzantium to the margins of its far-flung empire. Focusing on the provincial region of Hellas and ...Peloponnesos in central and southern Greece, Judith Herrin shows how the prestige of Constantinople was reflected in the military, civilian, and ecclesiastical officials sent out to govern the provinces. She evokes the ideology and culture of the center by examining different aspects of the imperial court, including diplomacy, ceremony, intellectual life, and relations with the church. Particular topics treat the transmission of mathematical manuscripts, the burning of offensive material, and the church's role in distributing philanthropy.
Herrin contrasts life in the capital with provincial life, tracing the adaptation of a largely rural population to rule by Constantinople from the early medieval period onward. The letters of Michael Choniates, archbishop of Athens from 1182 to 1205, offer a detailed account of how this highly educated cleric coped with life in an imperial backwater, and demonstrate a synthesis of ancient Greek culture and medieval Christianity that was characteristic of the Byzantine elite.
This collection of essays spans the entirety of Herrin's influential career and draws together a significant body of scholarship on problems of empire. It features a general introduction, two previously unpublished essays, and a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader analysis of the unusual brilliance and longevity of Byzantium.
Unrivalled Influenceexplores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Written by one of the world's foremost historians of the ...Byzantine millennium, this landmark book evokes the complex and exotic world of Byzantium's women, from empresses and saints to uneducated rural widows. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, Judith Herrin sheds light on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters. She looks at women's interactions with eunuchs, the in-between gender in Byzantine society, and shows how women defended their rights to hold land. Herrin describes how they controlled their inheritances, participated in urban crowds demanding the dismissal of corrupt officials, followed the processions of holy icons and relics, and marked religious feasts with liturgical celebrations, market activity, and holiday pleasures. The vivid portraits that emerge here reveal how women exerted an unrivalled influence on the patriarchal society of Byzantium, and remained active participants in the many changes that occurred throughout the empire's millennial history.
Unrivalled Influencebrings together Herrin's finest essays on women and gender written throughout the long span of her esteemed career. This volume includes three new essays published here for the very first time and a new general introduction by Herrin. She also provides a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader views about women and Byzantium.
This is the first book to examine the late Byzantine peasantry through written, archaeological, ethnographic and painted sources. Investigations of the infrastructure and setting of the medieval ...village guide the reader into the consideration of specific populations. The village becomes a micro-society, with its own social and economic hierarchies. In addition to studying agricultural workers, mothers and priests, lesser-known individuals, such as the miller and witch, are revealed through written and painted sources. Placed at the center of a new scholarly landscape, the study of the medieval villager engages a broad spectrum of theorists, including economic historians creating predictive models for agrarian economies, ethnoarchaeologists addressing historical continuities and disjunctions, and scholars examining power and female agency.
This is a detailed analysis of Byzantine political attitudes towards the Ottomans and western Europeans during the critical last century of Byzantium. The book covers three major regions of the ...Byzantine Empire - Thessalonike, Constantinople, and the Morea - where the political orientations of aristocrats, merchants, the urban populace, peasants, and members of ecclesiastical and monastic circles are examined against the background of social and economic conditions. Through its particular focus on the political and religious dispositions of individuals, families and social groups, the book offers an original view of late Byzantine politics and society that is not found in conventional narratives. Drawing on a wide range of Byzantine, western and Ottoman sources, it authoritatively illustrates how late Byzantium was drawn into an Ottoman system in spite of the westward-looking orientation of the majority of its ruling elite.
Arguing it Out Cameron, Averil
2016, 20160130, 2016-01-01, 2016-01-30
eBook
The author’s argument starts from a kind of literature that has not so far seemed important enough to be included in this new wave of publications on the literary and intellectual culture of the day. ...The study contends that Byzantium deserves its place in the broader development of Europe, even as it also reaches out to the vast territories of Anatolia and the Caucasus, and to the eastern Mediterranean. The long twelfth century from the seizure of the throne by Alexius I Comnenus in 1081 to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is a period recognized as one of the most brilliant in Byzantine history in cultural terms, especially in terms of its literary production. The study focuses on the prose dialogues in Greek from this period—of very varying kinds—and on what they can tell us about the society and culture of the era when western Europe was itself developing a new culture of schools, universities, and scholars. Yet it was also one in which Byzantium felt the fateful impact of the Crusades, and which ended with the momentous sack of Constantinople in 1204. Despite revisionist attempts to play down the extent of this disaster, it was a blow from which arguably the Byzantines never fully recovered.
The Late Byzantine period (1261–1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine ...diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris and Moscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual. By questioning how political decline refigured the visual culture of empire, Dr Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires.
Comparative approaches to political rituals and ceremonies in Byzantium and other court cultures of the Mediterranean basin form the subject of this collective volume, which examines related topics ...from the viewpoint of transformation, succession, appropriation, and representation in art and literature.
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured ...behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
Examining a wide body of sources this book offers a comprehensive analysis of late Byzantine attitudes to warfare and places late Byzantine military ethos, thought and practice in the wider ...geographical, cultural and historical context.
The reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (527–65) stands out in late Roman and medieval history. Justinian re-conquered far-flung territories from the barbarians, overhauled the Empire's ...administrative framework and codified for posterity the inherited tradition of Roman law. This work represents a modern study in English of the social and economic history of the Eastern Roman Empire in the reign of the Emperor Justinian. Drawing upon papyrological, numismatic, legal, literary and archaeological evidence, the study seeks to reconstruct the emergent nature of relations between landowners and peasants, and aristocrats and emperors in the late antique Eastern Empire. It provides a social and economic context in which to situate the Emperor Justinian's mid-sixth-century reform programme, and questions the implications of the Eastern Empire's pattern of social and economic development under Justinian for its subsequent, post-Justinianic history.
