Suchergebnisse

This paper discusses written historical documentation and paleo- environmental evidence in order to explore connections between climatic and socio-economic change. It focuses thereby on the Byzantine Empire and the eastern Mediterranean more generally in the period between the collapse and "restoration" of Byzantine rule in Constantinople (1204–1261) and the beginning of Ottoman expan-sion in the Balkans in 1352, which roughly coincided with the outbreak of the first wave of the "Black Death" in 1347. The paper entails juxtaposing various older scenar-ios of "fatal" social and political developments in Byzantine history with new studies based on proxy data from regions across the Balkans and Asia Minor and comparing these events with developments in other polities of the region during the transforma-tion from the "Medieval Climate Anomaly" to the "Little Ice Age."

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.