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Author: Jonathan Shea Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755601955 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
The eleventh century marked a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its start Byzantium was the paramount power in the Mediterranean world, by turns feared, respected and admired. By the century's close the empire had lost half of its territory and had managed only a partial recovery under the leadership of the Komnenos family. How did a powerful and famously wealthy empire collapse so quickly? The contemporary accounts of this turbulent 'long' century (taken here as c. 950–1100) attribute the empire's decline to the emperors' reckless and self-serving favouring of civilian bureaucrats and, while these sources are today widely acknowledged as biased and unreliable, modern assessments of the century have hitherto failed to suggest any tangible alternatives. To circumvent this dearth of archival material, Jonathan Shea has meticulously analysed 2,200 unpublished seals from the period (more than a third of the known total extant today) to uncover exactly whom the emperors were favouring and promoting, as well as developing a nuanced and revealing picture of the makeup of the much-chastised civilian bureaucracy. The sigillographic evidence is throughout measured against the written material to give a fresh account of this key transitional century and a rare insight into Byzantine politics.
Author: Jonathan Shea Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755601955 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
The eleventh century marked a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its start Byzantium was the paramount power in the Mediterranean world, by turns feared, respected and admired. By the century's close the empire had lost half of its territory and had managed only a partial recovery under the leadership of the Komnenos family. How did a powerful and famously wealthy empire collapse so quickly? The contemporary accounts of this turbulent 'long' century (taken here as c. 950–1100) attribute the empire's decline to the emperors' reckless and self-serving favouring of civilian bureaucrats and, while these sources are today widely acknowledged as biased and unreliable, modern assessments of the century have hitherto failed to suggest any tangible alternatives. To circumvent this dearth of archival material, Jonathan Shea has meticulously analysed 2,200 unpublished seals from the period (more than a third of the known total extant today) to uncover exactly whom the emperors were favouring and promoting, as well as developing a nuanced and revealing picture of the makeup of the much-chastised civilian bureaucracy. The sigillographic evidence is throughout measured against the written material to give a fresh account of this key transitional century and a rare insight into Byzantine politics.
Author: Anthony Kaldellis Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674967402 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.
Author: Dimiter Angelov Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521857031 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 23
Book Description
This study investigates Byzantine imperial ideology, court rhetoric and political thought after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.
Author: Elizabeth Jeffreys Publisher: ISBN: 0199252467 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1053
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies presents discussions by leading experts on all significant aspects of this diverse and fast-growing field. Byzantine Studies deals with the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Late Roman Empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Its centre was the city formerly known as Byzantium, refounded as Constantinople in 324 CE, the present-day Istanbul. Under its emperors, patriarchs, and all-pervasive bureaucracy Byzantium developed a distinctive society: Greek in language, Roman in legal system, and Christian in religion. Byzantium's impact in the European Middle Ages is hard to over-estimate, as a bulwark against invaders, as a meeting-point for trade from Asia and the Mediterranean, as a guardian of the classical literary and artistic heritage, and as a creator of its own magnificent artistic style.
Author: Jonathan Shea Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755601947 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The eleventh century marked a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its start Byzantium was the paramount power in the Mediterranean world, by turns feared, respected and admired. By the century's close the empire had lost half of its territory and had managed only a partial recovery under the leadership of the Komnenos family. How did a powerful and famously wealthy empire collapse so quickly? The contemporary accounts of this turbulent 'long' century (taken here as c. 950–1100) attribute the empire's decline to the emperors' reckless and self-serving favouring of civilian bureaucrats and, while these sources are today widely acknowledged as biased and unreliable, modern assessments of the century have hitherto failed to suggest any tangible alternatives. To circumvent this dearth of archival material, Jonathan Shea has meticulously analysed 2,200 unpublished seals from the period (more than a third of the known total extant today) to uncover exactly whom the emperors were favouring and promoting, as well as developing a nuanced and revealing picture of the makeup of the much-chastised civilian bureaucracy. The sigillographic evidence is throughout measured against the written material to give a fresh account of this key transitional century and a rare insight into Byzantine politics.
Author: Anthony Kaldellis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 110821021X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1438
Book Description
This volume brings into being the field of Byzantine intellectual history. Shifting focus from the cultural, social, and economic study of Byzantium to the life and evolution of ideas in their context, it provides an authoritative history of intellectual endeavors from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth century. At its heart lie the transmission, transformation, and shifts of Hellenic, Christian, and Byzantine ideas and concepts as exemplified in diverse aspects of intellectual life, from philosophy, theology, and rhetoric to astrology, astronomy, and politics. Case studies introduce the major players in Byzantine intellectual life, and particular emphasis is placed on the reception of ancient thought and its significance for secular as well as religious modes of thinking and acting. New insights are offered regarding controversial, understudied, or promising topics of research, such as philosophy and medical thought in Byzantium, and intellectual exchanges with the Arab world.
Author: Leonora Neville Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521838658 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
The imperial government over the central provinces of the Byzantine Empire was sovereign and, at the same time, apathetic, dealing effectively with a narrow set of objectives, chiefly collecting revenue and maintaining imperial sovereignty. Outside of these spheres, action needed to be solicited from imperial officials, leaving vast opportunities for local people to act independently without legal stricture or fear of imperial involvement. In the absence of imperial intervention provincial households competed with each other for control over community decisions. The emperors exercised just enough strength at the right times to prevent the leaders of important households in the core provinces from becoming rulers themselves. Membership in a successful household, wealth, capacity for effective violence and access to the imperial court were key factors that allowed one to act with authority. This book examines in detail the mechanisms provincial households used to acquire and dispute authority.
Author: Agapetus (diacono.) Publisher: Liverpool University Press ISBN: 1846312094 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
This one-volume translation, with commentary and introduction brings together three important works. All three texts cast great, if generally neglected light on politics and ideology in early Byzantium. Agapetus wrote, c. 527-30CE, from a position sympathetic to Justinian, when he had still to consolidate his authority. He sets out what an emperor must do to acquire legitimacy, in terms of government's being the imitation of God. Read in context, his work is much more than a list of pious commonplaces. The Dialogue, written anonymously towards the end the same reign, comprises fragments from Books 4-5 of a philosophically sophisticated (lost) longer work, setting out requirements for the ideal polity, based on a similar concept of imperial rule, with extensive comment on matters of current political salience but from an implicitly hostile standpoint. Not only does the text reflect the nature of Neoplatonic political philosophy but it also penetrates with its ideas deep into the inner realities of the time, into the political problems of Constantinople during the first half of the sixth century. The third text was written by Paul the Silentiary to mark the rededication of the basilica Hagia Sophia, built thirty years earlier under the orders of Emperor Justinian I. Together the translations provide an important insight into the early Byzantine period.
Author: Jonathan Shea
Author: Jonathan Shea
Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Author: Dimiter Angelov
Author: Elizabeth Jeffreys
Author: Jonathan Shea
Author: Michael Angold
Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Author: Leonora Neville
Author: James Henderson Burns
Author: Agapetus (diacono.)