Bøger om Det Byzantinske Rige

The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of Modern Greek literature.

Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography explores the literary, religious, and social functions of monastic mobility in Byzantine hagiography, touching on aspects of space, narrative, and identity.

The New Roman Empire is the first full, single-author history of Byzantium (the eastern Roman empire) to appear in a generation. It begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and ends with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, presenting those twelve centuries in an accessible narrative of events, free of jargon. The book focuses on political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, administration, demography, and economy.

In der vorliegenden Ausgabe wird die im Kodex Vaticanus gr. 1889 (13. Jh.) anonym uberlieferte Weltchronik mit dem Titel Chronica, die in gedrangter Form uber die Ereignisse von Adam bis zum Tod des byzantnischen Kaisers Alexios I. Komnenos (Reg. 1081- 1118) berichtet, erstmals kritisch ediert. In der Einleitung wird u. a. ihr Verhaltnis zur Synopsis chronike des Theodoros Skutariotes (13. Jh.) diskutiert und die Chronica als Vorarbeit des Theodoros (Autograph) zur Synopsis chronike ausgewiesen. Durch die vergleichende Lekture der beiden Texte bietet sich die Moglichkeit, den Blick auf die Werkstatt eines byzantinischen Chronisten zu richten. Die kritische Ausgabe orientiert sich an der modernen Editionspraxis von Autographa byzantinischer Autoren und wird durch umfangreiche, den Text erschlieende Indices abgerundet.

The legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages¿as cults and retellings attest. These Byzantine Greek stories, translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal fears and desires.

Fully illustrated, this enthralling study explores how the Vandals in North Africa attempted to defend their kingdom against the resurgent Byzantine Empire during 533-36.In AD 533, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I launched the first of his campaigns to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. This effort began in North Africa (modern Algeria and Tunisia), targeting the Vandal kingdom established there a century earlier, which also included Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearic Islands. Featuring full-colour artwork and mapping alongside carefully chosen archive illustrations, this book shows how the Byzantine general Belisarius established his formidable reputation in the lightning-fast campaign that ensued, exploring the origins, tactics and reputation of the two sides' forces as they fought for control of North Africa.The landing of Belisarius' forces took the Vandal king, Gelimer, completely by surprise; in September 533 the two sides met in battle near Carthage in an encounter known to posterity as Ad Decimum, with Gelimer ambitiously attempting to trap Belisarius' forces as they advanced. In December, the two sides fought again in a momentous clash at Tricamarum, where the fate of Gelimer's regime would be determined. A third battle ensued in 536, when the rebel Stotzas' Byzantine and Vandal troops confronted Belisarius' forces, the outcome sealing the Byzantine general's standing as the foremost soldier of his age.Featuring specially commissioned artwork and mapping alongside archive illustrations and photographs, this vivid account compares and assesses the two sides' fighting men as they vied for supremacy in North Africa.

This volume reflects on the motivations underpinning the writing of history in Late Antique Iberia, emphasising its theoretical and practical aspects and outlining the social, political and ideological implications of the constructions and narrations of the past. The volume includes general topics related to the writing of history, such as the historiographical debates on writing history, the praxis of history writing and the role of central and local powers in the construction of the past, the legitimacy of history, the exaltation of Christian history to the detriment of other religious beliefs, and the perception of time in hagiographical texts. Further points of interest in the volume are the specific studies on the historiographical culture. All these issues are analysed from an innovative perspective, which combines traditional subjects with new historiographical topics, such as the configuration of historical discourse through another type of documentation like councils, hagiography or legislation.

Anna Komnene describes the political and military history of the Byzantine Empire during the reign of her father, Emperor Alexios I. The text documents the Crusades and the conflicting perceptions of East and West in the early 12th century.

St. Gregory Palamas (ca. 1296-1357) is among the most well-known and celebrated theologians of late Byzantium. This book provides a comprehensive account of the essence-energies distinction across his twenty-five treatises and letters written over a twenty-year period.

'The Rise of Byzantium' expands the original @three Ages of Rome' ruleset beyond the collapse of Rome's Western Empire. It covers the Early Byzantine wars of Belisarius and Narses, and ends with the wars of Mauricius. The six new historical scenarios span three centuries of warfare in the eastern Mediterranean.

The volume - whose chapters originated at panels at the International Byzantine Congress in Belgrade and at the IMC in Leeds - seeks to offer an introduction into various aspects of social and geographical mobility, and the intrinsic relationship between the two, as well as into the microstructures of social action in the Byzantine world during the high and late Middle Ages. Based on a balanced approach to the role of personal agency and social structure, the authors of the individual chapters seek to clarify how and why various kinds of people mobilized to either change place and/or social position, or to form groups whose actions shaped social reality both at the imperial centre and the provincial periphery.

'The Last Viking is a masterful and pulse-pounding narrative that transports the reader into the middle of the action.' Carl Gnam, Military HeritageHarald Sigurdsson burst into history as a teenaged youth in a Viking battle from which he escaped with little more than his life and a thirst for vengeance. But from these humble origins, he became one of Norway's most legendary kings. The Last Viking is a fast-moving narrative account of the life of King Harald Hardrada, as he journeyed across the medieval world, from the frozen wastelands of the North to the glittering towers of Byzantium and the passions of the Holy Land, until his warrior death on the battlefield in England.Combining Norse sagas, Byzantine accounts, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and even King Harald's own verse and prose into a single, compelling story, Don Hollway vividly depicts the violence and spectacle of the late Viking era and delves into the dramatic events that brought an end to almost three centuries of Norse conquest and expansion.

Mobility and migration were not uncommon in Byzantium, as is true for all societies. Yet, scholarship is only beginning to pay attention to these phenomena. This book presents in English translation a wide array of relevant source texts from ca. 650 to ca. 1450 originally written in medieval Greek: from administrative records, saints' lives and letters by churchmen to ego-documents by ambassadors and historical narratives by court historians. Each source text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, commentary and further bibliography, thus making the book accessible to both scholars and students and laying the groundwork for future research on the internal dynamics of Byzantine society.

The volume presents a comparative perspective on victors and vanquished according to the categories of remembering victory and defeat, practices of celebrating victory and triumphs as well as the culture of dealing with the vanquished. Specifically, the representation of victory and defeat in Byzantine literature of the 10th-12th centuries is contrasted with commemorative practices in early Russia, and the reflection of military events in courtly music of the 15th century is examined. In addition, the practices of celebrating victories in England in the High and Late Middle Ages are explored, as is the treatment of the defeated and the subjugated in the Frankish Empire of the 9th century, in Norman southern Italy and in Byzantium.

The palaeography of the first Slavic script - the Glagolitic script - is being published in English language for the first time. Unlike former historiography-based palaeographic textbooks, this study is linguistically substantiated. After presenting the elemental historical and philological knowledge on the creation of the script and its relation to the parallel Slavic script - the Cyrillic - the author goes on to distinguish the development of those linguistically-based segments (e.g. graphemes) from the means that optimize the transfer of linguistic message through the visual writing system. The evolution of letter forms is being observed in the long process of minusculization. The coordination of letters in lines and the readjusting of their forms to the four line system turned out to be the 'spiritus movens' of the changes not only in the letter forms but in the script's entire visual appearance as well. At the focus of interest, there are the oldest Macedonian, Bulgarian, Czech and Croatian Glagolitic texts of the 10th and the 11th century.