This thesis examines the administration of the Late Roman or Early Byzantine Empire under Maurice (582-602). His reign is not commonly known, and he is often given brief mention only together with the other rulers following the reign of Justinian the Great, although his era spans twenty eventful years. / Indeed, his rule is of considerable importance since it is in his time that we first hear about new administrative structures such as the Exarchates of Carthage and Ravenna. / The focal point of this thesis is the military and civil administration of the Empire at the end of the sixth century. In order to arrive at a more precise picture of these subjects, different types of materials have been analyzed, such as military handbooks, numismatic data and laws, as well as the literary sources of the reign. Among the latter, the most valuable is the Histories of Theophylact Simocatta. It has been seen as important, or even essential, to relate the more technical material to this literary source. / The conclusions reached from this study are various. From the numismatic evidence we can see that there was considerably more stability in monetary matters in the East and the West than is sometimes assumed. By comparing expenditures in general, and subsidies paid especially, at different times in Late Roman or Byzantine history, we learn that the "gold drain" on the Empire's resources was not necessarily as devastating as is sometimes thought. With regard to the military administration, the malaise of frequent unrest among the soldiers is traced to problems of internal structure besetting the military establishment for various reasons, including bad choices of commanding officers. / Finally, changes in both military and civil administration are often seen as developments of an evolutionary kind rather than as arbitrary innovations established by Imperial fiat.

Leo VI (886-912) is an emperor who has suffered from a hostile and inadequate press. He has been portrayed as a weak and careless emperor, known mainly for his dubious parentage and marital exploits. This thesis questions these popular perceptions of Leo, and attempts to present a more realistic account of the emperor and the politics of his age. The aspects of the reign tackled focus on essential elements of Leo's life and rule, presented in a rough chronological framework, and the themes of personal relationships and political ideologies are recurrent. Chapter One examines Leo's relationship with Basil I and his attitude to his Macedonian heritage. Chapter Two considers the fate of the monumental figure of Photios at the emperor's hands. Chapter Three deals with the position and role of the 'all powerful' Stylianos Zaoutzes during the first half of the reign. Chapter Four ponders the origin and meaning of Leo's 'wise' epithet. Chapter Five focuses on the emperor's four marriages. Chapter Six turns to the course of foreign affairs during the reign, concentrating on Bulgaria and the Arab navy, and considers the emperor's attitude towards these military problems. Chapter Seven examines the emperor's relationship with his senatorial officials, focusing on two distinct groups, eunuchs and the generals who originated from families of the eastern frontier. Finally Chapter Eight addresses the tense relationship that existed between Leo and his brother and co-emperor Alexander. What emerges from a consideration of these aspects of Leo and his reign is that this is an emperor who does not deserve the popular perceptions that still persist about him. He was an emperor who forged a 'new' and distinctive imperial style, a style that should not deceive us; he may have been literate, sedentary and city-based, but he was also forceful, strong-willed and conscientious.

M.A. / A study is conducted into the roles of women living in the late Byzantine period between the 6th Century to 1453, using demotic or ‘popular’ poetry which can be quite significant in shedding some light into Byzantine history and society. An in depth analysis of these songs is carried out and compared to valid historical texts in order to create a proper account on history. Some questions that will be examined are as follows: How did women fit into society? What was their expected role? Did they ever go beyond their conventional role? Were they treated differently at different stages or circumstances in their life? Do the clues that are found in these songs correspond to the previously written historical texts that were predominantly written by men? It is no secret that, women portrayed in historical texts which refer to that period, were subjugated to the men in their lives and had very different roles to their partners, fathers, or brothers. Using demotic poetry, one is able to understand the voice of common folk and their worldview, thereby collecting accounts of the society’s ideas and ideals at grassroots level. A collection of about 20 songs has been gathered for this study and each song has been analysed in detail alone and in its contexts. It is tremendously interesting to discover how important women were in their society and how they often seem to have influenced men’s behaviour indirectly.

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This thesis examines Byzantine diplomacy and foreign policy in the round in the personal reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (945-959). This particular period has been singled out for investigation because Constantine had a keen personal interest in foreign affairs and two treatises from his reign, the De administrando imperio and the De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae, shed light upon the Byzantine view of the outside world and the workings of imperial bureaux charged with diplomatic affairs and the administration of military campaigns. After introducing the subject and the key sources, the thesis makes a clockwise circuit of all of the theatres in which Byzantine foreign policy was active. The first chapter looks at worldviews as documented in sources from Byzantium, Ottonian Saxony, and the Islamic Near East in order to determine how these key players saw their place in the world and systematised their relationships with each other. The second chapter discusses relations with the Islamic Near East and Transcaucasia and provides a survey of sources, historical reconstruction, and analysis of goals and processes. Chapter three examines relations with the Islamic caliphates of the central and western Mediterranean, and assigns them greater importance than generally acknowledged. Chapter four chronicles the nascent relations with Ottonian Saxony and Byzantium's re-engagement with the Transalpine Franks. Chapter five deals with the peoples of the Eurasian steppe and homes in on Byzantium's attempts to diffuse threats from this volatile world. Chapter six focuses on Italy as the region in which three strands of Byzantine foreign policy met and evaluates the empire's response to wholesale changes in power relations in the peninsula in the early years of Constantine's personal reign. The conclusion to the thesis interrogates whether Constantine's foreign policy kept the empire safe, enhanced its prestige, managed the military elites, and had an enduring legacy.

M.A. (Greek) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

[Truncated abstract] My focus has been twofold. On the one hand I have highlighted and elucidated the events which Pachymerēs narrates, glossing with prosopographical and topological notes the people, places and things mentioned in the text, and explaining other esoteric details, such as the range of many and varied, ornate Byzantine court honorifics. On the other hand I have made a critical comparison between Pachymerēs and the other important sources for the period, Greek, Western, and Eastern, to provide explanations for differences in the various narratives, to suggest which source is the more accurate for any given event, and to fill up the narrative ‘gaps’ of Gomme .... I must stress that both by training and inclination I am an historian, not a philologist, so the commentary will be historical rather than philological. This is despite the importance Pachymerēs himself places in the clever use of language and his frequent use of allusions to and quotes from other works, Classical, Byzantine or biblical. The question of mimēsis, how much Pachymerēs is directly trying to imitate or incorporate older texts, has received limited attention, and only where Pachymerēs’ use of the earlier text is vital to the understanding of his own work. Similarly, questions of language, and the way in which Pachymerēs uses it, have not been explored except in those instances where it directly affects the historical point our author is making. Pachymerēs’ Historia is an important source for a pivotal period in Byzantine Imperial history, and many scholars have not used it as efficiently as they could due to the denseness of his prose and his “tortuous syntax” (Bartusis 1992:55) ...

This thesis is concerned with the editorial, printing and marketing history of four Byzantine historical narratives, published between 1556 and 1645, and soon collectively identified under the name Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ (hereinafter, 'Byzantine Corpus'). The four Byzantine historians - Ioannes Zonaras, Niketas Choniates, Nikephoros Gregoras and Laonikos Chalkokondyles - enjoyed considerable popularity in early modern Europe, with a peak of interest in the second half of the sixteenth century. This thesis aims at highlighting how these four texts, despite being so popular in a number of early modern European countries (particularly in the German-speaking area, in Italy and in France), did not do so for the same reasons: in fact, depending on the country in which these books were printed, they were marketed, perceived and read in very different ways. This element is particularly relevant in light of the fact that the Byzantine Corpus represents the earliest predecessor of the Corpus Fontium Historiæ Byzantinæ, the modern resource for the study of Byzantine historical sources. Chapter 1 analyses the early formation of the Byzantine Corpus and, in particular, the figure of Hieronymus Wolf, first editor of the Byzantine Corpus, often considered the 'father' of Byzantine studies; his relation with his patrons, the Fuggers of Augsburg; finally, his relation with his publisher, the Basel printer Johannes Oporinus. It then provides contextualised bibliographical and paratextual descriptions of the editiones principes of the Byzantine Corpus, all printed in Basel. Chapters 2-5 reflect the same comparative approach, used to investigate how the later editions of the Byzantine Corpus were prepared and marketed in different European countries: each chapter provides a bibliographical and paratextual analysis of the subsequent German, Italian, French and Genevan editions respectively. The Conclusions draw together all the information collected in the previous chapters and investigate three pivotal aspects of the Byzantine Corpus: i) the formation of the Byzantine Corpus and the individual popularity of each of the four Byzantine historians based on the frequency and popularity of both individual and collective editions; ii) the distinctive reasons of their popularity, analysed through a comparison of the different approaches with which editors and publishers have presented these texts to their respective audiences in Germany, Italy and France; iii) the reasons for the rise and decline in popularity of the Byzantine Corpus in the early seventeenth century.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The subject of this thesis is the Synopsis Chronike (or Synopsis Sathas), a Byzantine chronicle of the thirteenth century that conveys the history of the world, starting from Adam and concluding with the recapture of Constantinople in 1261. The study focuses on the first part of the text (Adam – Nikephoros Botaneiates), and more specifically on the comprehensive presentation and analysis of the whole corpus of its sources, passage by passage, in order to reconstruct the background of the chronicle and to determine its place in the Byzantine chronicle tradition. Following the introductory first chapter, which sets out the aims of the thesis and establishes its methodology, chapter two offers an overview of the chronicle itself, and a first discussion of the main issues it presents: the key characteristics of its narrative structure, its manuscript tradition, and – mainly – the problem of its authorship, with special reference to the commonly supposed author, Theodore Skoutariotes, bishop of Kyzikos. Chapter three conveys a detailed presentation of the results of our research; following the discussion of the sources and influences of the proem, it attempts to place each passage of the Synopsis Chronike in the context of any related texts, which are then identified as 'main sources', 'other sources' and 'parallel passages', depending on their link to the Synopsis Chronike. Chapter four discusses individually each text that appears as a source of the Synopsis Chronike, and locates its place amongst the whole corpus of the sources. Furthermore, it examines the passages for which we were not able to identify a main source, and suggests possible sources that have not survived. Finally, the concluding chapter of the thesis summarises the earlier discussion, and attempts to combine the different pieces of information, and to provide an overall picture of the background of the Synopsis Chronike in order to establish – to the degree that it is possible – its position in the Byzantine chronicle tradition.