29 research outputs found
The Duke of Istria, the Roman Past, and the Frankish Present
No full textItaly and the East Roman World in the Medieval Mediterranean addresses the understudied topic of the Italian peninsula’s relationship to the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, across the early and central Middle Ages.
The East Roman world, commonly known by the ahistorical term "Byzantium", is generally imagined as an Eastern Mediterranean empire, with Italy part of the medieval "West". Across 18 individually authored chapters, an introduction and conclusion, this volume makes a different case: for an East Roman world of which Italy forms a crucial part, and an Italian peninsula which is inextricably connected to—and, indeed, includes—regions ruled from Constantinople. Celebrating a scholar whose work has led this field over several decades, Thomas S. Brown, the chapters focus on the general themes of empire, cities and elites, and explore these from the angles of sources and historiography, archaeology, social, political and economic history, and more besides. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field
Bishops and Merchants: The Economy of Ravenna at the Beginnings of the Middle Ages
No full textThe temporary conquest of Ravenna by king Austulf (751 AD) and the end of the rule of the exarchate is the beginning of a new phase of this Imperial city moving its role towards a new position as centre of the new idea of power during the middle Ages. In the last fifteen years the excavations conducted in Classe, one of the main Adriatic ports, and the last excavations in the centre of the town, give us a new quantitative perspective for the period that follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Despite the fall of the Exarchal administration, the infrastructure and city services were still guaranteed, probably by the Episcopal authority, in the same way that was happening in many other Italian cities from the North to Sicily, and the same was true especially concerning the urban defenses. If we adhere to old-fashioned historical theories the final act of Late Antiquity is in fact during the seventh century, caused by Arab invasions. Certainly, the idea that north-western Europe was cut off from the newly-Islamic Mediterranean from this period, thereby causing it to develop a dynamic economic focus within the Frankish realm of Charlemagne, has been comprehensively disproved not only by archaeology but also by a more inquisitive reading of contemporary documents. In this lecture I will try to demonstrate with archaeological evidence that Ravenna and Classe played a fundamental role in the creation of a new economic system that laid the foundations for the following political asset
Hegemony, Counterpower & Global History. Medieval New Rome & Caucasia in a Critical Perspective
No full textThis chapter analyses Global Byzantium by situating the medieval empire of New Rome in the history of statehood’s generalisation worldwide. Arguing that statehood remains the implicit mental furniture of History at a macro-civilizational scale, and so more or less at the micro too, the chapter proposes the dual concepts of hegemony and counterpower as a critical and methodologically anti-state approach to global history. This ‘anarchist heuristic’ is explicated through the case study of New Rome’s interactions with the region of Caucasia, especially Armenian and Georgian polities, demonstrating both Byzantine and Caucasian studies’ potentials for radical interventions in the global turn
Towards a Historical Materialist Critique of Ethnicity: Armenianness between the Caucasus and Medieval New Rome
No full textIn this paper I outline a historical materialist framework for the transhistorical critique of ethnicity, providing a case study in the shaape of Armenian settlements in medieval New Rome. This is necessary since constructivism – the dominant theoretical tradition of the last forty years or so – has failed to dethrone common sense, methodologically nationalist assumptions over the ‘formation’ and ‘survival’ of apparently ‘constructed’ ethnic groups. The purpose is not to reject non-Marxist social theory, but rather to take certain principles as a given and situate them as the mechanisms of social dynamics in a broader materialist framework. I identify the pitfalls of previous approaches, and take the two most astute constructivist theorists – Rogers Brubaker and Andreas Wimmer – as the bases from which to develop a new historical materialist approach. Brubaker’s seminal 2004 Ethnicity Without Groups sounded the call for re-theorisations of ethnicity without recourse to groupist essentialism, and Wimmer’s 2012 Ethnic Boundary Making points towards a systematic understanding of ethnicity – not least by covering under that broad term the more specific phenomena of race and nationhood. Problems remain, particularly with Wimmer’s methodologically individualist and modernist positions, but his systematic model nevertheless forms the general outline of a systemic critique. This critique restores central roles to contingency, the conjuncture, and praxis, developing a framework for social systems that situates different causative factors at different structural levels – with a detour through Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to describe the micro – arriving at a model for the instantiation across time and place of different but linked ethnic discourses and cultural stuff. Ultimately, therefore, this paper argues that the issue is not so much the construction of ethnicity as its reproduction
Methodological Imperialism
No full textByzantinists have a tendency, implicitly or explicitly, to adopt the analytical perspective of the central state and its imperial class. We ask what helped the empire survive and/or expand, and we judge the success of a given ruler, official, or policy according to this criterion. I term this tendency methodological imperialism
Khoniates' Asia Minor: Earthly and Ultimate Causes of Decline
No full textA social-historical reading of historical causation in Khoniates' Khronike Diegesis, with particular reference to the information he provides on Asia Minor
City and Sovereignty in East Roman Thought, c.1000-1200: Ioannes Zonaras' Historical Vision of the Roman State
No full textAn analysis of Ioannes Zonaras' history, in particular its preface, in the light of recent debates over East Roman identity and republicanness, drawing a broad set of comparanda from the eleventh and twelfth centuries
REVIEW: Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean. Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou, & Maria Parani
No full textReview of the collected volume Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean
Hegemony, elitedom and ethnicity: “Armenians” in imperial Bari, c.874–1071
No full textMelus, rendered “Meles” in Greek sources, first appears in 1009 when he and a relative named Dattus rebelled against the east Roman governor-general, the katepano, taking Bari, Ascoli and Troia, before being defeated by a new katepano in 1011 and fleeing to the prince of Salerno. This chapter looks at the evidence for identified Armenians in east Roman Bari, and analyses their integration into local elitedom. In the most astute study to date Nina Garsoïan elucidated the many different forms of east Roman Armenianness, with the ethnic category able to cover often sharply differing actors and cultural stuff. There is no need to connect Barese actors to the inconclusive evidence for identified Armenians settling in imperial Italy and Sicily between the mid-sixth and mid-ninth centuries, since the late ninth-century east Roman revival provides the strongest conditions for actors entering the south
