The purpose of this Thematic Session is to explore the diverse aspects of cultural exchange between Byzantium and the world beyond its borders, in the Balkans, Italy, Scandinavia, East Central Europe and the Baltic region. While Southern Italy and the Balkans were two regions that traditionally fell within the political and cultural orbit of the Byzantine Empire, recent research has brought to the fore new evidence that helps to better understand and contextualize the reception of Byzantine influence there. Three experts in the field will thus focus on different facets of cultural exchange, namely in the art of naval warfare and diplomacy in 11th century-Italy, as well as in the artistic tastes evidenced in ecclesiastical art and architecture, in the use of titles, and in fashion in the Albanian-speaking territories between the 13th and 15th centuries respectively. On the other hand, further north, in East Central Europe, the Nordic world and the Baltic region, Byzantium’s presence was never particularly strong, although some avenues of cultural contact were clearly open until the 15th century. Three presentations will attempt to trace some of the evidence, especially in the archaeological record, pertaining to cross-cultural interactions involving societies in Scandinavia, eastern Poland and Lithuania. To be sure, the contacts between these remote lands and the Byzantine Empire resulted in an array of cultural phenomena, which very often pose difficult problems of interpretation for scholars.
For the most part of Byzantine history the Albanian-speaking regions of southeastern Europe were, for a good part, integral provinces of the Byzantine states, though not linearly. Since the fall of the Byzantine state in 1204, the control of these distant border provinces oscillated between the rapidly weakening Byzantine state and that by ‘Latin’ states,…
Legal, institutional, and cultural influences during the unification and formation of Norway in the late Viking era have largely been seen as coming from the west, especially England. Military organization has been regarded as an autochthonous development resulting from the invention of the longship and local power struggles. Yet most of its characteristics were only…
Until recently Byzantine studies were mostly the preserve of specialists in history, theology, art history, disciplines based mostly on evidence from literary sources. This was a major disadvantage for research in the reception of Byzantine Empire in East-Central, Eastern and Northern Europe where literacy is of a much later date than in Greece, Italy or…
This paper seeks to present an overall picture of Lithuanian-Byzantine contacts and relations over the period of the 14th and 15th centuries. These centuries saw a meteoric rise of Lithuania and the gradual decline of Byzantine fortunes: one country enjoyed a relative abundance of hard power, while the latter was still in possession of quite…