New Paper!

'Just War' and 'Holy War' in the Middle Ages 

Rethinking Theory through the Byzantine Case-Study 

Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 62 (2012) 227-264

open access

The current paper examines the issue of medieval war ethics from the perspective of the Byzantine case-study. The starting-point is a critical approach to the theoretical understanding and the methodological employment of modern analytical concepts, such as ‘war ideology’ and ‘holy war’, in the study of war ethics in the late antique, early and high medieval period. The main goal is to circumscribe the modern theoretical distinction between ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’ and to demonstrate the applicability and the limits of its heuristic employment in the analysis of medieval source material. The first part contains a discussion of theoretical approaches to the terms ‘war ideology’, ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’. The second part is subdivided in two chapters: The first chapter attempts a historical re-evaluation of the religious discourse of the Byzantine sources through the prism of the proposed theoretical model. The second chapter contains an analysis of the socio-political role of peace discourse in the justification of imperial war policies.