This paper explores ancient China’s perception and construction of the Roman-Byzantine Empire (referred to as “Daqin” and “Fulin”) from the Han to the Tang period (first to tenth centuries CE), grounded in the indigenous tianxia (all-under-heaven) worldview. Moving beyond positivist searches for “accurate” historical links, it argues that China’s engagement with the Roman-Byzantine Empire was…
The article investigates different phenomena of cultural transfer between the Byzantine sphere and Scandinavian countries during the High Middle Ages. Taking its cue from a twelfth-century wall painting of the Theotokos Hodegetria in Zealand (Denmark) which shows a remarkably Byzantine iconography, it traces different aspects of the appropriation of ideas and knowledge from the Rhomaean…
Was Byzantium ‘post-Roman’? And did Romanitas diffuse to South Asia? Addressing the questions posed by the plenary panel, ‘Romanitas beyond Byzantium’, this paper highlights the disjuncture between the pluricentric world of the first and early second millennium CE and a contemporary, global post-Roman imagining of the past. Exploring what I refer to as ‘revenant Romanitas’…
Despite the prominent role assigned to “Rome” in the Kǝbrä Nägäs´t, the founding epic of the Solomonic Dynasty of Christian Ethiopia, not a single Solomonic embassy was addressed to the rulers of Byzantium—even as close to a dozen missions were dispatched to the courts of Latin Europe between 1400 and 1530 CE. This article examines…