This wide-ranging study examines the Byzantine Empire’s network of military fortifications from the Aegean to Asia Minor and Africa. The Byzantine empire was one of the most powerful forces in the Mediterranean and Near East for over a thousand years. Strong military organization, anchored by widespread fortifications, was essential for its defense—yet this aspect of its history is often neglected. Historian Nikos Kontogiannis corrects this oversight with this ambitious account of Byzantine fortifications, detailing their construction and development as well as their role in times of war. Byzantine Fortifications combines the results of decades of wide-ranging archaeological work with an account of the armies, weapons, tactics and defensive strategies of the empire throughout its long history. Fortifications built in every region of the empire are covered, from those in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Africa, to those in Asia Minor, the Aegean and the Balkan peninsula.
Professor Foss has been a leading figure in pointing out to Byzantinists the necessity of taking archaeological evidence into account when making any historical reconstruction. These studies have as their purpose, in large part, such an evaluation of the archaeological data, including the evidence of coin finds, weighing it against and combining it with the information gathered from written sources. They demonstrate the vital importance of such material for some of the central issues of Byzantine history, notably the question to what extent did towns and cities, the centres of civilised life in the classical world, perpetuate this into the Byzantine period. As Foss shows, the physical record makes it plain that the structures inherited from Roman times fell into decay, and that the land took on a new medieval aspect of fortresses and villages. The first articles in this volume deal specifically with this transformation in the Byzantine heartlands of Asia Minor, and attribute a key role to the destructive Persian invasions of the 7th century. The following pieces, based extensively on the results of survey work, explore how the patterns of settlement evolved in particular areas, from the Roman up into the Turkish periods.
The Byzantine empire was one of the most powerful forces in the Mediterranean and Near East for over a thousand years. Strong military organization, in particular widespread fortifications, was essential for its defense. Yet this aspect of its history is often neglected, and no detailed overview has been published for over thirty years. That is why Nikos Kontogiannis's ambitious account of Byzantine fortifications - their construction and development and their role in times of war - is such a valuable and timely publication.His ambitious study combines the results of decades of wide-ranging archaeological work with an account of the armies, weapons, tactics and defensive strategies of the empire throughout its long history. Fortifications built in every region of the empire are covered, from those in Mesopotamia, Syria and Africa, to those in Asia Minor, the Aegean and the Balkan peninsula.This all-round survey is essential reading and reference for anyone with a special interest in the Byzantine empire and in the wider history of fortification.
Through intensive surveys of three fortifications in late Roman Greece, Frey reveals the untapped potential of spolia in demonstrating the critical role played by non-elites in bringing about the architectural and social changes that mark the end of classical antiquity. As his analysis demonstrates, when studied less as displaced objects to be classified by type and more as evidence for the construction process itself, spolia offer a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which common builders met the challenge of using pre-existing building materials to meet their contemporary architectural needs. This “bottom-up” approach offers an alternative to the traditional view that attributes change and innovation only to the genius of prominent individuals known to us in historical sources.
This collection of essays on the Byzantine culture of war in the period between the 4th and the 12th centuries offers a new critical approach to the study of warfare as a fundamental aspect of East Roman society and culture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book’s main goal is to provide a critical overview of current research as well as new insights into the role of military organization as a distinct form of social power in one of history’s more long-lived empires. The various chapters consider the political, ideological, practical, institutional and organizational aspects of Byzantine warfare and place it at the centre of the study of social and cultural history. Contributors are Salvatore Cosentino, Michael Grünbart, Savvas Kyriakidis, Tilemachos Lounghis, Christos Makrypoulias, Stamatina McGrath, Philip Rance, Paul Stephenson, Yannis Stouraitis, Denis Sullivan, and Georgios Theotokis. See inside the book.
This book proposes a new interpretation of the transformation from Byzantine to Muslim-Turkish Anatolia. With the waning influence of Constantinople and Cairo, in Anatolia and the Muslim heartlands, local elites and regional powers came to the fore as holders of political authority and rivals in endless power struggles. Turkish warrior groups quickly assumed a leading role in this process because of their intrusion into pre-existing social networks and their successful exploitation of administrative tools and local resources. There was no Byzantine decline nor Turkish triumph but, rather, the driving force of change was the successful interaction between these two spheres.
Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness. Using one of the methodological tools associated with the global history movement, this volume aims to use connectedness to revitalise local and regional networks of exchange and movement. Its case studies collectively point caution toward assuming or asserting global-scale transmission of meaning or items unchanged, and show instead how meaning is locally produced and regionally formulated, and how this is no less dynamic than any global-level connectedness. These case studies by early career scholars range from the movement of cotton growing practices to the transmission of information within individual texts. Their wide scope, however, is nonetheless united by their preoccupation with transmission and circulation as categories of analysing or explaining movement and change in history. This volume hopes to be, therefore, a useful contribution to the growing field of a history of connectivity and connectedness. Contributors are Jovana Anđelković, Petér Bara, Mathew Barber, Julia Burdajewicz, Adele Curness, Carl Dixon, Alex MacFarlane, Anna Kelley, Matteo G. Randazzo, Katinka Sewing and Grace Stafford. See inside the book.
This book accounts for the tumultuous period of the fifth to eleventh centuries from the Fall of Rome and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire through the breakup of the Eastern Roman Empire and loss of pan-Mediterranean rule, until the Turks arrived and seized Anatolia. The volume is divided into a dozen syntheses that each addresses an issue of intrigue for the archaeology of Anatolia, and two dozen case studies on single sites that exemplify its richness. Anatolia was the only major part of the Roman Empire that did not fall in late antiquity; it remained steadfast under Roman rule through the eleventh century. Its personal history stands to elucidate both the emphatic impact of Roman administration in the wake of pan-Mediterranean collapse. Thanks to Byzantine archaeology, we now know that urban decline did not set in before the fifth century, after Anatolia had already be thoroughly Christianized in the course of the fourth century; we know now that urban decline, as it occurred from the fifth century onwards, was paired with rural prosperity, and an increase in the number, size, and quality of rural settlements and in rural population; that this ruralization was halted during the seventh to ninth centuries, when Anatolia was invaded first by the Persians, and then by the Arabs---and the population appears to have sought shelter behind new urban fortifications and in large cathedrals. Further, it elucidates that once the Arab threat had ended in the ninth century, this ruralization set in once more, and most cities seem to have been abandoned or reduced to villages during the ensuing time of seeming tranquility, whilst the countryside experienced renewed prosperity; that this trend was reversed yet again, when the Seljuk Turks appeared on the scene in the eleventh century, devastated the countryside and led to a revival and refortification of the former cities. This dynamic historical thread, traced across its extremes through the lens of Byzantine archaeology, speaks not only to the torrid narrative of Byzantine Anatolia, but to the enigmatic medievalization.
Byzantium's Balkan Frontier is the first narrative history in English of the northern Balkans in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Where previous histories have been concerned principally with the medieval history of distinct and autonomous Balkan nations, this study regards Byzantine political authority as a unifying factor in the various lands which formed the empire's frontier in the north and west. It takes as its central concern Byzantine relations with all Slavic and non-Slavic peoples - including the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Hungarians - in and beyond the Balkan Peninsula, and explores in detail imperial responses, first to the migrations of nomadic peoples, and subsequently to the expansion of Latin Christendom. It also examines the changing conception of the frontier in Byzantine thought and literature through the middle Byzantine period.
