Autorentext

Jonathan Shepard is a Research Associate at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford and was for many years University Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge.

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is also UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies and a Bye-Fellow at King's College, Cambridge.

Klappentext

Pinning down Byzantium (or East Rome) is as difficult today as it was for contemporaries during its 1,000-year-long existence. Dimitri Obolensky sought to characterize its impact on Eastern Europe in his classic The Byzantine Commonwealth, focusing on the elements of religious doctrine, rites, and law which ruling elites there took from the emperor acting in tandem with the Constantinopolitan patriarchate. Chapters in this volume, Revisiting the Byzantine Commonwealth, address such basic questions as who the Byzantines thought they were and how they managed to maintain their hegemonial stance for so long. Other chapters reappraise the uses of Byzantium to elites and also to other sectors of societies from the Upper Adriatic to the Volga. Surveys are offered of three spheres which functioned independently of (and in one case, expressly in antithesis to) Byzantium, yet which overlapped and were constantly interacting with it--the Latin west, the Islamic-Christian east, and the world of the steppes. Candidates for 'Commonwealth membership' can be found within these spheres, too, along with transregional networks which functioned regardless of political borders. Aspects of Byzantium appealed to the variegated societies and cultures around it in very different ways, with the imperial elite taking keen interest in neighbouring peoples and making the most of Soft Power as material resources dwindled from the thirteenth century on. Some periods of outsiders' engagement with the empire were short-lived, but others proved long-lasting, underpinned by ecclesiastical institutions and monastic networks. The volume aims to foster a more rounded approach to the phenomenon of Byzantium, and a better understanding of how and why it impinges on so many Eurasian cultures and polities to this day.

Inhalt

• 1: The Byzantine Phenomenon

• Part I. WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?

• 2: Byzantine Globalism: The Power of Attraction

• 3: Commonwealth, Empire, or Nation-State?

• 4: What Did It Mean to Be 'Roman' in Byzantium?

• 5: Commonwealth of Elect Nations: A Contradiction in Terms?

• 6: Identity through Language in the Byzantine Commonwealth

• 7: Keeping Up Appearances: Byzantine Perspectives of 'Legality' and the Italians

• Part II. HOW DO THEY DO IT?

• 8: Laying Down the Law in Byzantium: Law-Making and Adjudication

• 9: Identity, Law, and Beards: Judicial Shaving in Byzantium, c.600-900

• 10: A Taktikal Retreat?: Middle Byzantine Provincial Administration Revisited

• 11: Byzantium's Empires of Gold

• 12: The Patriarchate of Constantinople and Its Register: Documents, Agents, and Interconnectivity

• 13: The Byzantine Visual Commonwealth

• BORDERLINE CASES

• 14: Attracting Elites from the Empire's Periphery

• 15: Byzantine 'Zomia'?: Spaces of Refusal between Centre and Periphery, 500-1200

• 16: 'As Though from India Itself': Stories of Byzantium

• 17: Byzantino-Turkish Diplomacy and the Loss of Western Asia Minor, 1260-1335

• 18: Agents of Commercial and Diplomatic Exchange: Amalfitans in Byzantium in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

• 19: Imagining Byzantium in Norse Romance

• The Latin West

• 20: Frankish Commonwealth or Imperium Romanum?: The Empire in the West, 750-1500

• 21: Parallel Spheres: Monasticism East and West c.1000-1500

• 22: Alignment, Entanglement, and Antagonism: Byzantium and the West

• 23: The Byzantinization of the Roman Church under Innocent II (1130-1143)

• 24: Byzantium and the Crusades

• PART V. THE ISLAMIC-CHRISTIAN EAST AND BEYOND

• 25: Byzantium, Rum, and the bilad al-Islam

• 26: Looking East: Early Christian Art beyond Christian Hegemony

• 27: Melkite Translations of Byzantine Law-Books into Arabic

• 28: Art and Eschatological Empire between the Islamic East, Byzantium, and Latin Christendom: Sultan Baybars I's Mausoleum in Damascus

• 29: Romans, Egyptians, and the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717/18)

• 30: The Byzantine Commonwealth: A View from the East

• Part VIA. Obolensky's Commonwealth **

• 31: Reclaiming the Balkans: A Study in Byzantine Soft Power

• 32: Bulgaria-Prime Candidate for Byzantine Commonwealth Membership?

• 33: A Virtual Empire?: Byzantium and the Eastern Adriatic Coast

• 34: Before Byzance après Byzance: The Making of Wallachia and the Byzantine Political Toolkit

• 35: Languages of Art

• 36: Finding the Frontiers of the Commonwealth

• Part VIb. Obolensky's Commonwealth

• 37: On Rus and the Commonwealth: Old Questions in the Light of Some New Studies

• 38: Early Rus Political Culture versus Byzantine Law: Reconciling Two Contradictory Ideologies

• 39: The Reluctant Empire

• 40: Byzantine Literature in the Slav World: Serendipity or Intention?

• 41: Non-elite Church Contacts between Byzantium and Rus in the Palaiologan Period

• Part VII. Steppe Changes

• 42: The Typology of the Nomad State in Western Eurasia

• 43: From War to Peace in Medieval Steppe Empires

• 44: Boundaries and Bonds: Khazaria and the Commonwealth

• 45: Bargaining with Byzantium: The North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania and the Empire

• 46: Triangles into Spheres: Trade, Faith, and the Palaiologan Balancing Act after 1261

• 47: Epilogue