Lecture

Central European University (CEU) 
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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New Book!

Adam Izdebski, A Rural Economy in Transition. Asia Minor from Late Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages (JJP Suppl. xviii), Warsaw 2013

A Rural Economy in Transition deals with one of the most important periods in the history of Europe and the Middle East – the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. In his monograph, Adam Izdebski focuses on the economic history of Anatolia between the fifth and ninth centuries AD, a period which has traditionally posed great challenges to the historian. Because there are very few written sources from which a detailed economic and rural history of the period might be constructed, A. Izdebski has made extensive use of archaeological material in his study; however, he has also been able to integrate a vast amount of new scientific evidence into the traditional debates. This book offers the first major analysis of all the available palynological data -- coming from the investigation of pollen samples taken from lakes and marshes over the last fifty years -- pertaining to the Anatolian region, with comparative data drawn from the entire Mediterranean and Middle East. In addition, it includes a discussion of recent research on the climatic history of both Anatolia in particular, and the Eastern Mediterranean in general. For historians in any field who might wish to engage with the fascinating and under-utilised discipline of palynology, this book provides an easily accessible introduction to the uses of palynological evidence in the construction of historical interpretation. Furthermore, A. Izdebski has succeeded in presenting the history of late antique and Byzantine Anatolia with a new, environmental perspective – and in doing so, he has introduced Byzantine studies into the burgeoning field of environmental and climatic history.