Central European University (CEU)
Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS)
Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS)
December 5, 2013 - 18:00 - 19:30, Building: Nador u. 13, Room: 001
Ioannis Stouraitis (Vienna)
Imperial City-state and "Civil War": Typologizing
Byzantine internal armed conflict
If warfare is to be considered as a structural element of the
Byzantine socio-political order, this is primarily reflected in the consistent
recurrence of the phenomenon of internal armed conflict in the realm of the
Christianized imperial city-state of Constantinople between the fourth and the
twelfth century. In this period, at least 90 small-scale and large-scale war
conflicts that emerged from within the imperial state-frame can be documented.
For an answer to the question as to why the allegedly non-warlike Christian
Roman society fought so many "civil wars", we should rather look at
the Roman notion of the centralized state and the fundamental role of military
power in the reproduction of the system of empire. In the current paper I shall
argue that present-day analytical models of civil war can be heuristically
applied to provide an insightful typology of the phenomenon of Byzantine
internal armed conflict.
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