Kingship is the dominant form of political authority in the Byzantine commonwealth and has accordingly received most attention in the study of political thought. But it was far from the only form that political authority could take. This workshop explores alternative modes of governance, presenting four case-studies from different linguistic and cultural milieux from Byzantium and beyond. Håkon Teigen explores elect-based groups through a case-study of the Egyptian Manichean communities (3rd-5th centuries). Coptic Manichean texts often evince strong hostility towards the world’s authorities, yet the church was also enmeshed in its power structures. By analyzing royal metaphors in these sources, the paper presents a new approach to Manichaean thinking about social power. Anna Giaconia explores how the Church of the East regulated sexuality by controlling women’s reproductivity and the formation of families. Through an analysis of 7th-c. legal documents from the East Syriac tradition and comparisons with Byzantine sources, she traces how ecclesiastical regulations shaped the lives of Christian women under the Sasanian and Early Islamic empires. Thomas Girault studies the naxarar system in Sassanian Armenia (428-646). The naxarark’, the highest elites that even triggered the end of kingship in Armenia, created legitimacy through collective decisions: authority emanated from unanimous consent. The paper illustrates that kingship could have been seen as something even undesirable for the ruling families of Persarmenia, and explains how the system continued to function without a king. Alison Vacca turns to ecclesiastical elites in late antique Armenia and Albania. She investigates the potentially controversial political role of bishops, working alongside the naxararkʻ, and studies their presence in the Hun Khaganate and the Byzantine Empire. Through the case-study of Movsēs Dasxurancʻi’s writing (10th c.), the paper suggests that bishops did not merely work across the Armenian-Albanian divide: they helped to construct it as they went.
Christian communities in the Sasanian Empire operated as one among several religious minorities, within a framework in which diverse traditions and legal systems often coexisted. Sources from the Church of the East, particularly from the sixth century onward, reveal a growing interest in regulating matters related to family law and sexual conduct, especially concerning fornication,…
This paper aims to analyse the functioning of the naxarar-system as an alternative way of exercising power after the end of the Arsacid kingship in 428 through several Late Antique Armenian sources, such as the Buzandaran Pat’mut’iwn, Łazar P’arpec’i, Ełišē, and Movses Xorenac’i. It investigates how those sources narrate the end of kingship in Armenia…
Ašot Bagratuni was crowned King of Armenia in the 880s, followed soon thereafter by the rise of Hamam, the King of Caucasian Albania. Writing in the tenth century, Movsēs Dasxurancʻi acknowledges the rise of these two kingdoms, “the rank of king having long since ceased to exist in the house of T‘orgom.” He refers here…