In many places, Byzantium continued beyond the political confines of Byzantium. Even after Eastern Roman sovereignty had ended in a region, Byzantine cultural production surprisingly did not. Over the course of its 1000-year existence, the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire changed dramatically; early on, large parts of the territory were conquered by the Arabs; in the West, areas such as Venice and Southern Italy were lost; Cyprus, Crete, and the Morea were conquered by Crusaders; and Anatolia successively came to be ruled by the Seljuks. But even after administrative change, Byzantine culture tenuously prevailed. This roundtable, therefore, critically questions the heuristic model of a close relationship between a political power (Eastern Rome) and its cultural production; instead we ask where and when Byzantium continued after Byzantine political rule over a region had ended. This question is first and foremost a historiographic one. The boundaries of modern disciplines, and the idea of periods, historic developments, and (national) borders often create the illusion that visual and material cultures share these constructed boundaries. Each of the speakers focuses on one region and examines the extent to which this region engaged with Byzantium beyond the limits of Byzantine political sovereignty.
The Islamic-Byzantine frontier, dividing Anatolia and Syria, changed hands from Byzantine to Islamic c. 638 (covering four dynasties: Rashidun, Umayyad, ‘Abbasid, then Shi‘a Hamdanid), and back to Byzantine c. 969, where it remained until c. 1085 before falling under brief Saljuq rule for 14 years, then longer Crusader occupation until 1268. Despite the dating precision…
Byzantine culture persisted in southern Italy long after the Norman conquest of ca. 1071, especially in Calabria and the Salento, the toe and heel of the Italian boot. This paper focuses on the latter, where a regional dialect of Greek, Griko, is still spoken in a few places even today. A notable number of grammars…
My paper assesses the cultural perseverance of traditional Byzantine forms in Greece in the early modern period in relation to the European Baroque elements that take center stage in mansions and churches in the 18th century. By juxtaposing socio-political realities in Ottoman Greece and Venetian-held islands, I investigate how the Baroque was wedded with the…
In this presentation, we once again turn to Anaia, a multi-period mound settlement located opposite Samos on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Famed for signing the trade agreements in 1261 with the Genoese and 1265 with the Venetians, Anaia became a major hub for the production of ceramics, glass, metal, and bone, which was…