Basil Ii And The Governance Of Empire 976 1025

This is the first book-length study in English of the Byzantine emperor Basil II. Basil II, later known as 'Bulgar-slayer', is famous for his military conquests and his brutal intimidation of domestic foes. Catherine Holmes considers the problems Basil faced in governing a large, multi-ethnic empire, which stretched from southern Italy to Mesopotamia. Her close focus on the surviving historical narratives, above all the Synopsis Historion of John Skylitzes, reveals a Byzantium governed as much by persuasion as coercion. This book will appeal to those interested in Byzantium before the Crusades, the governance of pre-modern empires, and the methodology of writing early medieval political history.

Basil's Byzantium is revealed as a state where the rhetoric of imperial authority became reality through the astute manipulation of force and persuasion."--Jacket.

The reign of Basil II (976-1025), the longest of any Byzantine emperor, has long been considered as a 'golden age', in which his greatest achievement was the annexation of Bulgaria. This, we have been told, was achieved through a long and bloody war of attrition which won Basil the grisly epithet Voulgartoktonos, 'the Bulgar-slayer'. In this new study Paul Stephenson argues that neither of these beliefs is true. Instead, Basil fought far more sporadically in the Balkans and his reputation as 'Bulgar-slayer' was created only a century and a half later. Thereafter the 'Bulgar-slayer' was periodically to play a galvanizing role for the Byzantines, returning to centre-stage as Greeks struggled to establish a modern nation state. As Byzantium was embraced as the Greek past by scholars and politicians, the 'Bulgar-slayer' became an icon in the struggle for Macedonia (1904-8) and the Balkan Wars (1912-13).

The second edition of this major political history of the Byzantine Empire weaves social, economic, cultural trends and foreign affairs into a broad narrative

This book was first published in 2010. John Skylitzes' extraordinary Middle Byzantine chronicle covers the reigns of the Byzantine emperors from the death of Nicephorus I in 811 to the deposition of Michael VI in 1057, and provides the only surviving continuous narrative of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. A high official living in the late eleventh century, Skylitzes used a number of existing Greek histories (some of them no longer extant) to create a digest of the previous three centuries. It is without question the major historical source for the period and is cited constantly in modern scholarship. This edition features introductions by Jean-Claude Cheynet and Bernard Flusin, along with extensive notes. It will be an essential and exciting addition to the libraries of all historians of the Byzantine age.

This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres - the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic - roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

The acclaimed author of Byzantium and the Crusades “offers a fresh take on this fabled but hidden civilization” across 11 centuries of history (Colin Wells, author of Sailing from Byzantium). For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Rather than recounting the standard chronology of emperors and battles, leading Byzantium scholar Jonathan Harris focuses each chapter of this engaging history on a succession of archetypal figures, families, places, and events. Harris’s introduction presents a civilization rich in contrasts, combining orthodox Christianity with paganism, and classical Greek learning with Roman power. Though frequently assailed by numerous armies, Byzantium survived by dint of its unorthodox foreign policy. Over time, its sumptuous art and architecture flourished, helping to establish a deep sense of Byzantine identity in its people. Synthesizing a wealth of sources to cover all major aspects of the empire’s social, political, military, religious, cultural, and artistic history, Harris’s study illuminates the heart of Byzantine civilization and explores its remarkable and lasting influence on the modern world.

The life of Emperor Basil I (867–886), the founder of the Macedonian Dynasty, is the only extant secular biography in Byzantine literature; in its importance and as an instance of the genre it is comparable to Einhard’s Vita Caroli Magni. Composed in the circle of scholars around Basil’s grandson Constantine VII Prophyrogennitos and at his instigation as early as 957 and 959, the Vita Basilii is one of the main sources for the cultural and political history of Byzantium and its neighbours in the 9th and 10th centuries. Previous editions (whether from the 17th or 19th centuries) were based on secondary manuscripts; they are not reliable, because of their arbitrary conjectures and a large number of unjustified additions from a parallel source. The present edition is based on Vaticanus gr. 167, the source of all extant manuscripts, and the insertions made by the earlier editors are removed. In producing the new text, the editor also had access to the draft edition he rediscovered which the famous Byzantinist Karl de Boor prepared around 1903.