"This book traces 150 years' worth of scholarly interpretations of relations between Byzantium and various North Pontic nomads, with particular attention to how colonialist or national aspirations often triggered, hampered, biased, or otherwise influenced these interpretations. Original in its interdisciplinary approach, Mykola Melnyk's book highlights an overlooked topic: the history of non-historic peoples. Going beyond the well-studied written sources for nomadic history, the author incorporates insights provided by archaeology, linguistics, and the natural sciences, bringing forth promising avenues of research into the subject of nomadic cultures in the medieval world"--
The author traces 150 years of the study of relations between Byzantium and various North Pontic nomads, with particular attention to how colonialist or national aspirations often triggered, hampered, biased, or otherwise influenced scholarship.
In The Pechenegs: Nomads in the Political and Cultural Landscape of Medieval Europe, Aleksander Paroń offers a reflection on the history of the Pechenegs, a nomadic people which came to control the Black Sea steppe by the end of the ninth century. Nomadic peoples have often been presented in European historiography as aggressors and destroyers whose appearance led to only chaotic decline and economic stagnation. Making use of historical and archaeological sources along with abundant comparative material, Aleksander Paroń offers here a multifaceted and cogent image of the nomads’ relations with neighboring political and cultural communities in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Using new methodological and theoretical approaches, A Companionto Byzantium presents an overview of the Byzantine world fromits inception in 330 A.D. to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Provides an accessible overview of eleven centuries ofByzantine society Introduces the most recent scholarship that is transforming thefield of Byzantine studies Emphasizes Byzantium's social and cultural history, as well asits material culture Explores traditional topics and themes through freshperspectives
In The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 Rustam Shukurov offers an account of the Turkic minority in Late Byzantium including the Nicaean, Palaiologan, and Grand Komnenian empires. The demography of the Byzantine Turks and the legal and cultural aspects of their entrance into Greek society are discussed in detail. Greek and Turkish bilingualism of Byzantine Turks and Tourkophonia among Greeks were distinctive features of Byzantine society of the time. Basing his arguments upon linguistic, social, and cultural evidence found in a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, Rustam Shukurov convincingly demonstrates how Oriental influences on Byzantine life led to crucial transformations in Byzantine mentality, culture, and political life. The study is supplemented with an etymological lexicon of Oriental names and words in Byzantine Greek.
One thousand years ago, the Byzantine Empire was reaching the height of its revival as a medieval state. The ten contributions to this volume by scholars from six European countries re-assess key aspects of the empire's politics and culture in the long reign of the emperor Basil II, whose name has come to symbolise the greatness of Byzantium in the age before the crusades. The first five chapters deal with international diplomacy, the emperor's power, and government in Asia Minor and the frontier provinces of the Balkans and southern Italy. The second half of the volume covers aspects of law, history-writing, poetry and hagiography, and concludes with a discussion of Byzantine attitudes to the Millennium.
In Khazaria in the Ninth and the Tenth Centuries Boris Zhivkov offers a new view on Khazaria by scrutinizing the different visions offered by recent scholarship. The paucity of written sources has made it necessary to turn to additional information about the steppe states in this period, and to analyze exceptional cases not directly related to the Khazars. In re-examining the Khazars, he thus uses not only the known documentary sources and archaeological finds but also what we know from history of religions (comparative mythology), history of art, structural anthropology and folklore studies. In this way the book draws together a synthesis of conclusions, information and theory.
A long overdue and thrillingly paced narrative of one of the most dramatic periods in Medieval history, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood provides an engaging chronicle of the various imperial upheavals, from the conquests of Basil to the collapse of Constantinople, concluding with the First Crusade.
In this book, the distinguished writer Edward N. Luttwak presents the grand strategy of the eastern Roman empire we know as Byzantine, which lasted more than twice as long as the more familiar western Roman empire, eight hundred years by the shortest definition. This extraordinary endurance is all the more remarkable because the Byzantine empire was favored neither by geography nor by military preponderance. Yet it was the western empire that dissolved during the fifth century. The Byzantine empire so greatly outlasted its western counterpart because its rulers were able to adapt strategically to diminished circumstances, by devising new ways of coping with successive enemies. It relied less on military strength and more on persuasion—to recruit allies, dissuade threatening neighbors, and manipulate potential enemies into attacking one another instead. Even when the Byzantines fought—which they often did with great skill—they were less inclined to destroy their enemies than to contain them, for they were aware that today’s enemies could be tomorrow’s allies. Born in the fifth century when the formidable threat of Attila’s Huns were deflected with a minimum of force, Byzantine strategy continued to be refined over the centuries, incidentally leaving for us several fascinating guidebooks to statecraft and war. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire is a broad, interpretive account of Byzantine strategy, intelligence, and diplomacy over the course of eight centuries that will appeal to scholars, classicists, military history buffs, and professional soldiers.
