In the latter half of the eleventh century, Byzantium faced a new, and rapidly solidifying Mediterranean political, economic, and religious order. Amidst this transforming and turbulent sea, increasingly dominated by Italian city-states, the papacy, and crusaders to the west, and Seljuk Turks to the east, the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire began to irreparably change. As this world continued to evolve, Byzantium lived on by adopting new strategies for survival and maintaining other long-established traditions, thereby holding out against the Normans, Seljuks, and crusaders, reconstituting itself after the Fourth Crusade, and only slowly falling to the nascent Ottoman Empire. The purpose of this panel is to offer new perspectives about the peoples, structures, and ideas that existed on later Byzantium’s frontiers, zones which were at the forefront of new developments, and which proved crucial for the state’s enduring existence. We will begin with Marven Corrielus, who will argue that Norman Sicily should be described as a Byzantine frontier, where local groups, Norman political power, and Constantinopolitan cultural and economic prowess created a unique melting pot society. We will then move on to a series of papers about late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century Anatolia. In them, Furkan Çaglan, Doğuş Bayazıt, and Zekeriya Efe Antalyali will respectively discuss various aspects of the political transformations in cities on the Byzantine-Anatolian frontier, local defections between Byzantines and Turks, and the concept of ‘frontierilization’ in Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea through the lens of rebellions. Next, Ian Storey will transition us to the mid-fourteenth century and talk about the ways in which Kantakouzenos, alongside other contemporary sources, described identity and local organization in the Balkan borderlands (methoria). Finally, we will finish in the fifteenth century with Justin Smith, who will offer a re-examination of Mark Eugenikos’ exchanges across theological frontiers at the Council of Ferrara-Florence.
Scholars have long studied John VI Kantakouzenos’ Histories for the text’s military matter, character portrayals, and, more prevalently, its author’s overwhelming self-bias. Just like many other aspects of this long and detailed work, Kantakouzenos’ descriptions of his state’s power structures and his representations of identity, despite being recurring themes throughout the Histories, remain under-examined. This…
Southern Italy was a frontier region politically, culturally, and spiritually between Rome and Constantinople. In the pre-modern World, there were not hard borders between states but rather frontiers of cultural and political influence and diffusion. There were countless polities in this region with varying levels of autonomy and dependence upon Constantinople. The lines between independence…
This paper examines how Late Byzantine cities in 13th-century Anatolia transformed as a result of frontier dynamics. After the Fourth Crusade, the relationship between the Byzantium and the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum impacted the socio-political, economic and cultural adaptations of Late Byzantine cities in Anatolia. In this paper, the frontier is an indeterminate area of…
This paper delves deep into the two major social upheavals that the region witnessed in the second half of the century, namely the rebellion of Cimri in 1277 in the Seljuqs of Rum and the rebellion of Alexios Philanthropenos in 1295. The presentation, first, reconstructs the socio-political and demographic implications of Baiju’s second expedition into…