The Byzantine Insular-Coastal Koine in the Early Middle Ages

When conceptualizing the role of Byzantium in the passage from a unified “Roman” Mediterranean to a fragmented Great Sea, Byzantine historiography has often conjured up a gravitational pole that left other regions (and, in particular, the coastal and insular spaces in the central and western Mediterranean) out in the cold, with the only partial exception being Sicily. Indeed, this approach has clearly overlooked those areas of the empire located away from the so-called Byzantine heartland. In this paper, I will try instead to address the problem of the supposed economic, cultural, and socio-political peripherality of those imperial territories simply regarded as marginal (due to their geographical distance from the Queen of cities) or expendable military strongholds along a supposedly static maritime or terrestrial frontier with the Caliphate or the Frankish. My attention will focus on a wider Byzantine koine that encompassed liminal coastal spaces as well as insular communities, and particularly those regions which lay beyond the Aegean heartland of the empire like the Byzantine Tyrrhenian, the Adriatic as well as the archipelago of the Balearics at westernmost “extremes” of the Byzantine Mediterranean. As commanding the sea and controlling the complex networks of routes remained at the heart of the military, political, and economic interests of the empire, this paper will explore the resilient trajectories of the regions of the Byzantine Mediterranean insular-coastal koine as they responded to variations in the political, military, and economic configuration of the Great Sea as well as the environmental and climatic changes in the passage from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.