Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the Balkans and East-Central Europe PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Shepard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040237657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
According to Byzantium's leaders, their imperial order anchored in Constantinople was the centre of excellence - spiritual, moral, material and aesthetic. They rewarded individuals willing to join, and favoured outside groupings prepared to cooperate militarily or politically. Interactions with outsiders varied over place and time, complicated by the sometimes differing priorities of Byzantine churchmen and monks on or beyond Byzantium's borders. These studies consider the dynamics of such interactions, notably the interrelationship between the Bulgarians and their Byzantine neighbour. The Bulgarians' reaction to Byzantium ranged from 'contrarianism' to the systematic adaptation of Byzantine religious orthodoxy, ideals of rulership and normative values after Khan Boris' acceptance of eastern Christianity. For their part, Byzantine rulers were readier to do business with their Bulgarian counterparts than official pronouncements let on, occasionally even adopting aspects of Bulgarian political culture. Byzantium's interrelationship with other ruling elites was less intensive, but the process of Christianisation and the need to format this in readily comprehensible terms could make even distant potentates look to the template of effective Christian sole rulership which Byzantium's rulers embodied. Hungarian and Rus leaders were of abiding geopolitical interest to imperial statecraft, and the studies here show how during the generations around 1000 Byzantine political imagery resonated throughout the region.

Author: Mark Mazower
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781842124635
Category : Balkan Peninsula
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A dazzling short history of the Balkans from the Romans to the present, which provides vital historical and cultural background to contemporary Balkan politics

Author: Jonathan Shepard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351890050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
This volume aims to clarify the context for the expansion of Western Europe by focusing on what had been the greatest power in early medieval Europe, the Byzantine empire, and on the continuing strengths and expansion of the Orthodox world. Byzantine 'orthodoxy' offered a format for faith, hope and fear in various combinations, involving religious beliefs and an idealised world-order. Its multifaceted nature helps explain Byzantium's success - the resilience of the earthly empire and the appeal of its religious organisation and rites to other societies. The volume reprints a set of key studies, combining classic treatments of Byzantine and Slavic history with far-reaching explorations of the extent of those worlds. Part I focuses on the empire in its heyday: some studies illustrate the sense of manifest destiny bolstering the imperial order until - and even beyond - Constantinople's fall to the fourth crusaders in 1204. The spread of the Byzantines' cult enlarged their trading zone northwards across Rus, while Byzantine-based merchants were more active than is generally realised in the Eastern Mediterranean. Part II includes an overview of the 'fragmentation' following 1204. Studies show how Byzantine rites and ideals of rulership were adopted by Serb and Bulgarian dynasts. Particular attention is paid to Rus: although subjugated by the Mongols, Rus churchmen, monks and leading princes all drew on Byzantine religious texts and imagery. From the later fifteenth century Moscow's rulers began to be portrayed as new guardians of religious correctness, even as the World's End supposedly drew nigh. The Introduction contextualises the studies included here, highlighting the significance (and not just in terms of rivalry) of the Byzantine Orthodox world for developments in Western Europe.

Author: Dennis P. Hupchick
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319562061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This book provides an interpretive narrative of the wars fought by Bulgaria against the Byzantine Empire for dominant control of the Balkan Peninsula during the early medieval era. Over a span of two centuries, from the early ninth through the early eleventh, and under the leadership of the Bulgarian rulers Krum, Simeon I, and Samuil, those conflicts evolved from simple confrontations for territorial possession into a life-or-death struggle for imperial precedence within the Orthodox world then emerging in Eastern Europe—a struggle that the Bulgarians ultimately lost. The primary focus is on Bulgaria, rather than Byzantium, and an effort is made to provide a historically reliable chronology of the assorted campaigns. The various belligerents’ military organizations, defensive technologies, armaments, and tactics are surveyed in an introduction to the main narrative. A prelude chapter sets the stage for the hegemonic conflict, which was divided into three distinct phases by interludes of relative peace between the contending parties, during which Bulgaria’s domestic, foreign, and cultural developments shaped the nature and conduct of the fighting in each successive phase.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498513258
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This volume offers new perspectives on the history of the Byzantine Balkans and beyond--regions that lived for centuries under the long shadow of Constantinople--as well as unique insights into the complex world of late medieval and early modern southeastern Europe during a period of catastrophe.

Author: D. Hupchick
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0312299133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
The tragedies of Bosnia and Kosovo are often explained away as the unchangeable legacy of 'centuries-old hatreds'. In this richly detailed, expertly balanced chronicle of the Balkans across fifteen centuries, Hupchick sets a complicated record straight. Organized around the three great civilizations of the region - Western European, Orthodox Christian and Muslim - this is a much-needed guide to the political, social, cultural and religious threads of Balkan history, with a clear, convincing account of the reasons for nationalist violence and terror.

Author: Lena Holmquist
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book brings together articles based on papers given at the “Scandinavia and the Balkans: Cultural Interactions with Byzantium and Eastern Europe in the First Millennium” conference, held on 25 and 26 September 2012 at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia. The conference was designed to pave the way for studies on the connections between the Balkans and Scandinavia to develop within a broader context, to promote the successes of the researchers who have dedicated their efforts to this scholarly field, and to articulate the importance of this topic to scholarly investigations, education and society. The topic of this book is one that has rarely been discussed in academic studies, while it is almost unknown in social and cultural contexts. While it may seem to deal with a rather narrow historical frame, remote from today’s reality – the relationship between two distant geographical and cultural areas in the past – in fact, the focus, or rather multiple foci on this topic offered here explore a number of aspects of the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Balkans and Scandinavia.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004421378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued and transformed alongside local developments in the artistic and cultural traditions of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Author: Dimitris Stamatopoulos
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Dimitris Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. The idea of the continuity of empires became a kind of touchstone for national historiographies. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a "war of interpretation" as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon. Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval period (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, whether there exist continuities or discontinuities in these modes of making ideological use of the past.

Author: Panos Sophoulis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303055905X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This book explores the history of banditry in the medieval Balkans between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. While several scholars have recognized the problems which various outlaw groups caused in the region during the Middle Ages, few have given much attention to the bandits themselves, their origins, their reasons for taking up brigandage, and the steps taken by the central authorities to control their activity. Among other things, this book identifies three main sources of banditry: shepherds, soldiers and peasants. Far from being ʻlone wolvesʼ, these men operated within well-defined social networks. Poverty played a decisive role in driving them to a life of crime, but there is strong evidence to suggest that the growing economic prosperity in parts of the Balkans from the ninth century onwards may have also contributed to the rise of the phenomenon.