This round table aims to explore the expansion and maintenance of diverse Christian communities to the north and southeast of ‘core’ Byzantine regions. Speakers will be asked to move away from traditional scholarly foci such as ruler conversions, imperially sponsored missions and tropes of historical narratives. Instead we will foreground grassroots processes and non-elite formations operating over the longue durée, for example monastic networks, pilgrimage, local missions, and the circulation of cult objects and other material hints of devotional culture at non-elite level. This should give an opportunity to further the globalising of Byzantine Studies, relating such concepts as ‘mobility’, ‘connectivity’ and ‘network’ to the growth and maintenance of non-elite Christian communities, especially those with apparently little official support from Constantinople or other high profile religious centres. Our leading questions will be: what do we know – and not know – of such processes? What are the best questions to ask of the evidence available? What is the significance of variation across space and time among different Christian groups? We will consider nomadic as well as sedentary populations.
A distinctive feature of the Melkite Church was its integration into an extensive network of interconnected communities spanning political borders. As Arabic-speaking Christians from the Middle East, they moved easily through the Islamicate world, travelling between monastic centres in the Sinai, the Judean Desert and the mountains around Antioch, as well as urban communities in…
This contribution will suggest that we should see the evidence for Christian communities in Khazaria within three contexts. The first is the evidence for other religious communities under Khazar rule, such as the Muslim communities mentioned in Arabic geographical writing. The second is the context of how Christian structures were incorporated into Muslim rule within…
Throughout the Middle Ages the Church of the East oversaw numerous communities across Central Asia, in mercantile and oasis cities, as well as among the nomads on the steppe. The origins of these communities, however, are somewhat mysterious, and I will look initially to establish what we know about how Christianity initially spread among them…
This contribution will focus on aspects of patronage and the promotion of monastic networks in Eastern Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries, with a particular focus on connections with Mount Athos among regions of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains. The discussion will touch on the development of new sacred landscapes connected with…
In the late Middle Ages, the island of Cyprus was a strongly hybrid religious space. Ruled by the Latin Lusignan dynasty since the end of the 12th century, the formerly Byzantine island housed not only a majority of Byzantine Orthodox people, but also a Latin church that catered to the Latin immigrants, as well a…