Ioannis
Stouraitis
On eastern Christians in Byzantine Sources:
Visions of Community
The current
paper aspires to deal with the subject of the image of eastern Christians in
post-eighth century Byzantine written sources. In the turbulent period from the
mid-seventh to the early eighth century, the Byzantine Empire was faced with
the danger of disintegration due to intensive Arab offensives that culminated
in two sieges of Constantinople. This situation changed after the second decade
of the eighth century through the consolidation of the Isaurian dynasty in
Byzantium and the ascent of the Abbasid dynasty to power in the caliphate; an
event that led to the culmination of the process of institutionalization of
Islam and the crystallization of the image of the Muslim religious-political
community.
This latter
development is also tangible in the change of Byzantine discourse on the
Islamic community as documented between the history of Nikephoros Patriarch and
the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor written in the late eighth and early
ninth centuries respectively. Within this framework, the scrutiny of the image
of Christians under Muslim authority in the post-eighth century Byzantine
sources goes beyond theological discourses and has a significant political and
cultural dimension. It pertains to the question of differentiated notions of
collective identity as opposed to the normative ideological conflation of
Romanitas and Christianitas in Constantinopolitan discourse as well as to the
relevant issue of representation of boundaries between pre-modern societies by
politico-intellectual élites, which often promotes a misleading image of those
societies as bounded totalities.
Wednesday
25.09.2013, Raum: F 229, 2. OG, Fürstenberghaus
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