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Review Essays : The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Review Essays : The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Author(s): Mehmet Efe Tuzcu / Language(s): English / Issue: 16/2012

THE GRAND STRATEGY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE* Edward N. Luttwak Massachusetts/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 512 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-03519-5. For scholars and policy makers interested in military history and strategic studies, the Roman Empire with its glorious army and wellstructured state apparatus has always been the center of attention. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire -despite having successfully survived for almost another millennium after the fall of Rome- has been mostly neglected by the same until recently. Edward Luttwak himself tells the reader that when he first began to study the Byzantine strategy, his intention was to write a sequel to an earlier work of his on the Roman Empire;1 but “[what] ensued instead was the discovery of an altogether richer body of strategy than the earlier Romans had ever possessed, which called for a vastly greater effort of research and composition.”2 Therefore, it took the writer some two decades to finish his work on the Byzantine strategy, and the product can be said to have quite surpassed his previous book on the Roman Empire, both as to its volume and content.

Bibliography on Byzantine material culture and daily life

Bibliography on Byzantine material culture and daily life

Author(s): Michael Grünbart / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2009

Byzantine material culture and daily life is one of the main topics in Byzantine studies since the 1980s. In a new open access database all relevant secondary sources concerning objects and topics of Byzantine daily life are collected and annotated. It should serve as a tool for all branches of study of the medieval period.

The Repertoire of Byzantine "Spiritually Beneficial Tales"

The Repertoire of Byzantine "Spiritually Beneficial Tales"

Author(s): John Wortley / Language(s): English / Issue: 8-9/2010

Keywords: Repertory of spiritually beneficial tales; motifs; indices

The article is print publication of the computer version of "Repertoire of pateric tales" available in Internet at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/intro.html

First Byzantine Colloquium of the University of Buenos Aires

First Byzantine Colloquium of the University of Buenos Aires

Author(s): Tomás Fernandéz / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2016

Keywords: report;

Report.

23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Belgrade, Serbia

23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Belgrade, Serbia

Author(s): Martina Čechová,Markéta Kulhánková / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2016

Keywords: Report;congress;

Congress report.

The Bulgarian-Byzantine Treaty of 927 (International Law Analysis)

The Bulgarian-Byzantine Treaty of 927 (International Law Analysis)

Author(s): Emil Aleksandrov / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/1993

Byzantine Cultural History

Byzantinische Kulturgeschichte

Author(s): Heinrich Gelzer / Language(s): German

Keywords: Byzanz;

The Byzantine Empire was judged extremely harshly in earlier times, and Byzantinism is considered by us to be the technical expression for a servile tail-wagging. According to the view of the time, Byzantium was the epitome of all wickedness and depravity. However, thanks to the penetrating research work of the past generation, as it was carried out by the leading men among the Byzantinists - I mention among the French: Cardinal Pitra, Rambaud de l'Institut, Legrand, G. Schlumberger de l'Institut, Duchesne de l 'Institut, Diehl, RP Louis Petit 0. SA, Omont, among the Germans: Cardinal Hergenroether, Gass, Ehrhard, Krumbacher, Treu, de Boor, among the English: Finlay, Bury, among the Austrians: Miklosich, Müller, Jirecek, among the Russians: Veselovsky, Vasilievsky, Golubinsky, Durnowo, among the Greeks: Hatzidakis, Lambros, etc. - at least among the more highly educated, the thick fog of limited and dull prejudices gradually began to dissipate. So in the past generation a completely new picture of the medieval Greek state on the Bosporus, which has been cleared of the stale prejudices and which is vastly different from the previous one, has emerged. (introduction)

PHRAGMOS- THE BORDERLAND BETWEEN THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND THE PARADISE

PHRAGMOS- THE BORDERLAND BETWEEN THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND THE PARADISE

Author(s): Adriana Cîteia / Language(s): English / Issue: XIV/2017

Keywords: phragmos; hyperoria; peras; limes; horos; metaichmian

The space exterior to the mobile border of Byzantium was defined beyond any ambiguity, both from the perspective of the immediate politics of the Empire and from the symbolic perspective. Approached from the perspective of the ontological realism, the border separates a rigorously circumscribed space from the exterior world that is simply-present. In case of the Byzantine peratological system, the exterior world has meant a group of ethnois drawn to the Byzantine sphere of influence by missionary actions or pure political acts – in case of peoples with universalistic religious orientation: Persian, Arabian, Tatar-Mongolian. The mere ethnic, social and politic demarcation, and the management of the space in ethic terms was not enough in the byzantine history. Since the 4th Century the space management has gained an apodemic character. The border (peras) was not just a simple way of expressing the property feeling, yet a reference to the external space, the location where the adventure of defining the political and religious Ego in relation with the world (oikoumene) took place. Any foreign space (hyperoria) was approached by the Byzantine political theology from ecumenical perspective. The Byzantine peratological metaphysics has combined the constant overpassing of the own political limits with the spiritual epektasis, mandatory from the religious perspective. The Byzantine apodemic instinct (of crossing of the own geographical limits) has had as Christian analogon the crossing of the own spiritual limits, the evasion in ontological and cosmologic areas. The Byzantine political thinking was dominated by the need of an aperigraphic space, being permanently defined and meant- by vocation of the in perpetuum missionary activity - to communicate with the spaces that were non-congruent from political or religious perspective. In the morphology of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture, the border had a double role: to define the visible territorial limit, beyond which existed a foreign political and cultural space (hyperoria), and to define the margin, the extremity (peras), excluding the synonymy with the radical eshatos. Peras has represented the limit that can be crossed, with consequences for the consciousness. In the Byzantine reference system, the border has defined a “unique, different in itself” space. This synthetic unity was inherited by the modern and contemporaneous culture, from the perspective of which the border configures spaces without artificially segmenting them.

LEGAL HISTORY AT THE 23RD INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF BYZANTINE

LEGAL HISTORY AT THE 23RD INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF BYZANTINE

Author(s): Tamara Matović / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2016

This summer Belgrade hosted the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, which gathered more than 1200 scholars from different fields of research, directly or indirectly connected to Byzantine and Medieval studies. During the last five years, the main organizers – Serbian National Committee for Byzantine Studies and Association Internationale des Études Byzantines, with the Institute for Byzantine Studies of SASA, have envisioned and scheduled the Congress under the patronage of the President of Republic of Serbia and UNESCO, including the strong support and generous help of many institutions, among which is the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade.

Ideology, Symbolism and Representation through Byzantine Art

Ideology, Symbolism and Representation through Byzantine Art

Author(s): Cristina Gelan / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

Keywords: ideology; images - symbol; Byzantine art; symbolism; hieratism; transcendent world; dogmatism.

A research about symbolism and representation in the world of the Byzantine leads us to the identification of an aesthetic doctrine based both on the ideas of the important thinkers of the time and also on the artistic representations, which have created constitutive beliefs for memory and for social identity. We identify in this regard the ideological conceptions that have structured the collective mentality and determined the crystallization and the imposition of a cultural paradigm.An important role in this sense was played by the plastic representations of Byzantine art. One of the essential themes of this Byzantine art is to illustrate some aspects of the visible and invisible world. The Byzantine artistic representation does not reproduce or imitate earthly patterns, but tends to transcend the human world and to approach the divine. The subject of Byzantine art becomes the idea of the eternal and immutable world, which opens only to the soul or the mind, a world different from that of the perceptible phenomena of the senses. The perception of the human being changes: the human body begins to become more and more devalued, and the idea of the soul, whose perfection consists in delivering body and salvation, is glorified. We are talking about completing a theme that will contribute to shaping the Christian doctrine and will have an overwhelming role in the formation and structuring of the collective mentality for several centuries.

Bulgaro-Byzantine Treaties during the Early Middle Ages

Bulgaro-Byzantine Treaties during the Early Middle Ages

Author(s): Sava Penkov / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/1981

Byzantine Rank Hierarchy in the 9th–11th Centuries

Byzantine Rank Hierarchy in the 9th–11th Centuries

Author(s): Nikolay Kanev / Language(s): English / Issue: 8/2018

Keywords: Byzantine rank hierarchy; Middle-Byzantine administration; Byzantine aristocracy; Byzantine court; Middle-Byzantine state organization

The aim of the article is to present the Byzantine secular rank hierarchy of the 9th–11th centuries. During the above-mentioned period of time Byzantium knew not one but several distinct, relatively independent official hierarchical systems. All of them, however, were mutually interconnected to varying degrees and thus formed a single, pan-imperial hierarchical construct, expressed through the so-called system of palace precedence of ranks in the empire. It is this global and more general paradigm that reflects the Byzantine hierarchical model of the 9th–11th centuries; consequently, it seems fitting to refer to it as the rank hierarchy of the classical Middle Byzantine period, in the era preceding the reforms of Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118).

Comparing Byzantine and Arabic Poetry: Introductory Remarks

Comparing Byzantine and Arabic Poetry: Introductory Remarks

Author(s): Maria Mavroudi / Language(s): English / Issue: 55/2018

Keywords: Byzantine poetry; Arabic poetry; Classics; orientalism; paganism

Older generations of modern critics pronounced negative assessments of both Byzantine and Arabic poetry for lacking originality and creativity. Further, medieval readers of Greek and Arabic presumably could not properly understand the content of this poetry because they were too focused on its vocabulary, grammatical points, and rhetorical tropes. On occasion, modern critics have suggested that medieval Arabic culture possessed no literary criticism and that Byzantine culture in effect possessed no belles lettres. Recent positive re-evaluations in both disciplines either propose to take medieval Greek and Arabic poetic and literary texts in their own terms or analyse them in order to show that they possess characteristics valued by modernity. Arabic poetry has been much more widely studied than its Byzantine counterpart because both medieval and modern Arabic literary critics were interested in it as a repository of Arab cultural heritage. Modern judgements regarding the relation between the poetry of the pre-Christian and the pre-Islamic periods and the poetry produced within the time of monotheistic belief were frequently influenced by modern political realities, and especially calls for increased secularization pronounced both in Europe and the Ottoman empire. Detecting analogies in how medieval Greek and Arabic literary cultures have been assessed by modernity can help identify modern prejudices that obstruct more productive approaches to the medieval literary material. The paper also examines the process whereby older pagan classics were preserved and made to serve the needs in two medieval monotheistic societies, the Byzantine and the Arabic one.

BYZANTINE HESYCHASM IN THE LIFE OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

BYZANTINE HESYCHASM IN THE LIFE OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

Author(s): Adrian Ignat / Language(s): English / Issue: 5/2019

Keywords: hesychasm; monasticism; heart’s prayer; hermit; Eastern Church; divine light;

In spite of the historical vicissitudes through which the Orthodox Churchpassed, monasticism represented for the Church a pillar of stability andfidelity to the Gospel teachings and Christian living. Practicing the prayer ofthe heart, of contemplation in complete silence, of a severe ascension give thepossibility to the hesychast monks to see the uncreated light that the HolyApostles saw on Mount Tabor, at the Transfiguration of Our Lord. The onewho strongly supported the hesychast doctrine was Saint Gregory Palamas.The present study attempts to make a short presentation of how the prayer ofthe heart (the hesychast prayer) has evolved over the centuries, but also acomparative analysis of the rationalist way of thinking, inspired by Catholicschooling, with the hesychast tradition, specific to the Orthodox Church. Also,the study presents some historical landmarks regarding the practice of thehesychast life in the Romanian lands.

BYZANTINE MILITARY STRATEGY IN THE BALKANS (976–1018)

BYZANTINE MILITARY STRATEGY IN THE BALKANS (976–1018)

Author(s): Dragan Ǵalevski / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2018

Keywords: Balkans; Balkan Peninsula; Samuel; Samuel state; Basil II; Byzantine Empire; military strategy; Byzantine military manuals; anonymous tactics book

Za vreme na konfliktot pomeѓu Vizantija i Samoilovata država, vizantiskata voena strategija može da se podeli na tri fazi. Prvata traela od početokot na sudirot i bila isklučivo defanzivna, nasočena kon odbrana na preostanatite imperiski posedi. Vtorata faza započnala po Sperhej, kade što vizantiskite voeni dejstva stanale ofanzivni i kako takvi ostanale sè do smrtta na Samoil. Poslednata, tretata faza traela od smrtta na Samoil do konečnoto osvojuvanje na negovata država četiri godini podocna. I pokraj toa, vizantiskata strategija ne pretrpela nekakvo suštinsko pomestuvanje. Dolgotrajnosta na konfliktot, sistematskoto osvojuvanje teritorii i postepenoto uništuvanje na Samoiloviot voeno-ekonomski potencijal ukažuvaat na toa deka vizantiskata strategija ne otstapuvala, odnosno go imala istiot princip na vojuvanje kako i prethodno – defanzivna vo svojata suština, toa bila tipična vojna na iscrpuvanje.

Identity and Continuity: Sources of Byzantine Philosophy in Patristic Theology

Identity and Continuity: Sources of Byzantine Philosophy in Patristic Theology

Author(s): Ioan Dura,Rudian Borcan,Ştefan Lazăr,Petre Pandele,Ion Apostu / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

Keywords: Byzantine philosophy; Patristic theology; Saint John Chrysostom; knowledge;

The analysis of a spirituality, such as the Byzantine one, and the revealing of theaspects that mark the profile of philosophy within this horizon could represent for thepostmodern human being a necessity in understanding the dynamics of EasternChristianity. In a culture dominated by reactions to previous philosophical systems, ofpostmodernist deconstructivism, a rediscovery of what we can call “Byzantinephilosophy”, as a successor of the evangelical message, specified and developed withinthe patristic theology and accessible in the form of a completely spiritual philosophicaldiscourse. This is the main aim of the article: to explore the sources of Byzantinephilosophy in the theology of Saint John Chrysostom.

The Theology of Redemption Mirrored in the Byzantine Hymns

The Theology of Redemption Mirrored in the Byzantine Hymns

Author(s): Nicuşor Tucă / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2014

Keywords: redemption; ontological; sacrifice; summative; Church hymns;

Jesus Christ, our Saviour, has carried out His redemptive activity on several levels: in heaven – as pre-existing Logos; on earth – from His incarnation up to Hiscrucifi xion and burial; in hell – as victorious King, while His Body was in the grave;in heaven again, in His body glorifi ed after His Resurrection and Ascension; and,fi nally, from a sacramental perspective, as Eucharistic Christ and invisibly participating to the Holy Mysteries – in the Church. Our Saviour’s redeeming activity hasthree aspects: ontological, directed to human nature itself; summative, directed to themankind of all times and to the whole creation; and the aspect of offering given tothe Father, by which the submission and obedience rejected by Adam were realized.The hymns of the most important liturgical books used in the Orthodox Church emphasize the fact that our Saviour Jesus Christ is present in the Church through all Histhree missions: His mission of bishop (priest), related to His sacrifi ce on the Crossand lying at the heart of His redeeming activity (Lenten Triodyon hymns, characteristic for the seven-week period that precedes Easter); His mission of teacher,preaching the Gospel (Octoechos hymns, sung throughout the year, except for theperiod of the Tryodion and the Pentecostarion), and His mission of king, related toHis defeating death, His resurrection and His ascension to heaven (Pentecostarionhymns, characteristic for the period beginning with Easter and ending with the fi rstSunday after the Descent of the Holy Spirit).

Byzantine Rites: From St. James to Slavic Spirituality

Byzantine Rites: From St. James to Slavic Spirituality

Author(s): Kęstutis Žemaitis / Language(s): English / Issue: 104/2020

Keywords: rites; Byzantine liturgy; slavic spirituality;

The Byzantine liturgy in Eastern Christian Churches has come a long way from the time of apostles to baptized Slavic lands. The texts of the rites and rules of performance were influenced by both theologians and by the character of the faith of baptized peoples who have survived. Although the Byzantine liturgy itself has reached modern times as a whole family of separate and somewhat different rites, there has been a continuous thread from St. James’ Jerusalem to Slavic-Russian spirituality.

Conceptual Representations of Byzantine Music in Contemporary Romanian Culture

Conceptual Representations of Byzantine Music in Contemporary Romanian Culture

Author(s): Gabriel Zamfir / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2021

Keywords: Romanian culture; Byzantine Culture; Byzantine Music; Romanian Orthodox Music;

Romanian culture, understood in a general sense, in all its constituent elements, isintertwined with Byzantine culture since its dawn; the appearance of the two inapproximately the same historical period, their proximity, the orthodox faith assumedby the Romanian people are just some of the reasons why we cannot talk about thehistorical route of Romanian culture without taking into account the Byzantine culturalelements taken by it. This paper proposes a short presentation of the way in which anextremely important element of Byzantine culture, its religious music, manifests itselfin the Romanian culture as the latter perceives and theorizes it in contemporary times.

A New Approach to the Study of the Byzantine Physiologus

A New Approach to the Study of the Byzantine Physiologus

Author(s): Ivan P. Petrov / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2022