The importance of the Byzantine era in the history of the Romani people appears to be usually overlooked or misunderstood in modern scholarship. The source base seems too scanty and misleading, with no voice from within the ethnos it refers to. Thus, the majority of the researchers focus on the modern period, esp. the 19th…
Among the historical leasing contracts from San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, two are particularly valuable as they document the international property acquisitions of a female Venetian merchant named Abundantia. Her investments, dated 1187 and 1189, were executed within the Venetian quarter in Constantinople, potentially offering a hint on female foreign merchants’ involvement in the mercantile…
Through studying the afterlife of Roman slavery in Byzantine Italy, this paper engages with two wider historiographical issues, namely the relation between the classical and medieval modes of human dependency, and the structural shift of the ‘classical hinterland’, where slavery had been deemed as one of the most fundamental social institutions. In this way, it…