Search results for ""author john haldon""

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM “Until now, the social history of Byzantium has remained a neglected field. Professor John Haldon has put together a team of leading international Byzantinists, each of whom addresses his or her own specialized area. The book will be a critical tool for anyone who wants to understand Byzantium.” Averil Cameron, University of Oxford “The great merit of this volume is its openness to larger methodological debates about socio-economic history and state structures. For the first time in a comprehensive study, Byzantine society is treated as an integral part of the world history of the Middle Ages.” Claudia Rapp, University of California, Los Angeles Western civilization owes an incalculable cultural and historical debt to the Byzantine Empire. Before falling to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century, the empire flourished for more than a thousand years, bridging the ancient and modern worlds. Byzantium profoundly influenced the pattern of cultural and political development in the lands it occupied and had an enduring influence on neighboring societies. A Social History of Byzantium delves into a crucial and often neglected strand of Byzantine studies – the social history of the eastern Roman Empire. Drawing on a wealth of new research and with original essays by leading scholars, this groundbreaking work addresses a wide range of interconnected topics and offers illuminating insights into our knowledge of Byzantine society. Exploring such issues as family life, social structure, religion, class, gender, and imperial power, this book reveals the complex social structure woven throughout the Byzantine world.

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The eastern Roman Empire was the largest state in western Eurasia in the sixth century. Only a century later, it was a fraction of its former size. Surrounded by enemies, ravaged by warfare and disease, the empire seemed destined to collapse. Yet it did not die. In this holistic analysis, John Haldon elucidates the factors that allowed the eastern Roman Empire to survive against all odds into the eighth century.By 700 CE the empire had lost three-quarters of its territory to the Islamic caliphate. But the rugged geography of its remaining territories in Anatolia and the Aegean was strategically advantageous, preventing enemies from permanently occupying imperial towns and cities while leaving them vulnerable to Roman counterattacks. The more the empire shrank, the more it became centered around the capital of Constantinople, whose ability to withstand siege after siege proved decisive. Changes in climate also played a role, permitting shifts in agricultural production that benefitted the imperial economy.At the same time, the crisis confronting the empire forced the imperial court, the provincial ruling classes, and the church closer together. State and church together embodied a sacralized empire that held the emperor, not the patriarch, as Christendom’s symbolic head. Despite its territorial losses, the empire suffered no serious political rupture. What remained became the heartland of a medieval Christian Roman state, with a powerful political theology that predicted the emperor would eventually prevail against God’s enemies and establish Orthodox Christianity’s world dominion.

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM “Until now, the social history of Byzantium has remained a neglected field. Professor John Haldon has put together a team of leading international Byzantinists, each of whom addresses his or her own specialized area. The book will be a critical tool for anyone who wants to understand Byzantium.” Averil Cameron, University of Oxford “The great merit of this volume is its openness to larger methodological debates about socio-economic history and state structures. For the first time in a comprehensive study, Byzantine society is treated as an integral part of the world history of the Middle Ages.” Claudia Rapp, University of California, Los Angeles Western civilization owes an incalculable cultural and historical debt to the Byzantine Empire. Before falling to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century, the empire flourished for more than a thousand years, bridging the ancient and modern worlds. Byzantium profoundly influenced the pattern of cultural and political development in the lands it occupied and had an enduring influence on neighboring societies. A Social History of Byzantium delves into a crucial and often neglected strand of Byzantine studies – the social history of the eastern Roman Empire. Drawing on a wealth of new research and with original essays by leading scholars, this groundbreaking work addresses a wide range of interconnected topics and offers illuminating insights into our knowledge of Byzantine society. Exploring such issues as family life, social structure, religion, class, gender, and imperial power, this book reveals the complex social structure woven throughout the Byzantine world.

Read more less

Originally the eastern half of the mighty Roman Empire, Byzantium grew to be one of the longest-surviving empires in world history, spanning nine centuries and three continents. It was a land of contrasts – from the glittering centre at Constantinople, to the rural majority, to the heartland of the Orthodox Church – and one surrounded by enemies: Persians, Arabs and Ottoman Turks to the east, Slavs and Bulgars to the north, Saracens and Normans to the west.Written by one of the world’s leading experts on Byzantine history, Byzantium: A History tells the chequered story of a historical enigma, from its birth out of the ashes of Rome in the third century to its era-defining fall at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

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The 10th-century treatise on the military provinces (the ‘themes’) of the medieval East Roman (Byzantine) empire is one of the most enigmatic of the works ascribed to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. A mix of historical geography, imperial propaganda, historical information and legend or myth drawn from ancient, Hellenistic as well as Roman and late Roman sources, it was one of the emperor’s earliest works, although the extent to which he was its author remains debated. Its purpose, and the emperor’s aims in commissioning or writing it, are equally unclear, since it offers neither an accurate historical account of the evolution of the themata nor does it appear to draw on available administrative material that would have been available to its writer. It has remained until now untranslated into English and thus inaccessible to many, in particular to students at all levels both within and outside the field of Byzantine Studies, as well as non-specialist readers. This volume is intended to rectify this situation with a translation into English, accompanying detailed notes, and three introductory chapters providing context and background to the history of the text, Byzantine ideas about geography, and the debate over the themata themselves.

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By the middle of the sixth century the Byzantine emperor ruled a mighty empire that straddled Europe, Asia and North Africa. Within 100 years, this powerful empire had been cut in half. Two centuries later the Byzantine empire was once again a power to be reckoned with, and soon recovered its position as the paramount East Mediterranean and Balkan power, whose fabulous wealth attracted Viking mercenaries and central Asian nomad warriors to its armies, whose very appearance on the field of battle was sometimes enough to bring enemies to terms. No book has ever attempted a survey of Byzantine wars, and few accounts of Byzantine battles have ever been translated into a modern language. This book will provide essential support for those interested in Byzantine history in general as well as a useful corrective to the more usual highly romanticised views of Byzantine civilisation.

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The 10th-century treatise on the military provinces (the ‘themes’) of the medieval East Roman (Byzantine) empire is one of the most enigmatic of the works ascribed to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. A mix of historical geography, imperial propaganda, historical information and legend or myth drawn from ancient, Hellenistic as well as Roman and late Roman sources, it was one of the emperor’s earliest works, although the extent to which he was its author remains debated. Its purpose, and the emperor’s aims in commissioning or writing it, are equally unclear, since it offers neither an accurate historical account of the evolution of the themata nor does it appear to draw on available administrative material that would have been available to its writer. It has remained until now untranslated into English and thus inaccessible to many, in particular to students at all levels both within and outside the field of Byzantine Studies, as well as non-specialist readers. This volume is intended to rectify this situation with a translation into English, accompanying detailed notes, and three introductory chapters providing context and background to the history of the text, Byzantine ideas about geography, and the debate over the themata themselves.

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Understanding the varied and dynamic interactions between environment and society in Anatolia. In recent decades, the influences of environmental and climatic conditions on past human societies have attracted significant attention from both the scientific community and the general public. Anatolia’s location at the conjunction of Asia, Europe, and Africa and at the intersection of three climatic systems makes it well suited for the study of such effects. In particular, Anatolia challenges many assumptions about how climatic factors affect the socio-political organization and historical evolution, highlighting the importance of close collaboration between archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists. Integrating high-resolution archaeological, textual, and environmental data with longer-term, low-resolution data on past climates, this volume of essays, drawn from the fifteenth International ANAMED Annual Symposium (IAAS) at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, showcases recent evidence for periods of climate change and human responses to it, exploring the causes underlying societal change across several millennia.

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