Paul Magdalino – författare

The reign of Manuel I (1143-1180) marked the high point of the revival of the Byzantine empire under the Comnenian dynasty. It was, however, followed by a rapid decline, leading to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. This book, the first devoted to Manuel's reign for over eighty years, re-evaluates the emperor and his milieu in the light of recent scholarship. It shows that his foreign policy was a natural response to the western crusading movement and the expansionism of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. It also shows that what he ruled was more than the impoverished rump of a once great empire, or a society whose development had been arrested by a repressive regime. The twelfth century is presented here as a distinctive, creative phase in Byzantine history, when the empire maintained existing traditions and trends while adapting to a changing world.

The reign of Manuel I (1143-1180) marked the high point of the revival of the Byzantine empire under the Comnenian dynasty. It was, however, followed by a rapid decline, leading to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. This book, the first devoted to Manuel's reign for over eighty years, re-evaluates the emperor and his milieu in the light of recent scholarship. It shows that his foreign policy was a natural response to the western crusading movement and the expansionism of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. It also shows that what he ruled was more than the impoverished rump of a once great empire, or a society whose development had been arrested by a repressive regime. The twelfth century is presented here as a distinctive, creative phase in Byzantine history, when the empire maintained existing traditions and trends while adapting to a changing world.

The way people see the past tells us much about their present interests and about their sense of identity. This book examines both what men of the day knew about their past, and in particular about the Roman Empire, and shows how such knowledge was used to authenticate claims and attitudes. These original essays, by distinguished scholars, are wide-ranging both geographically, from Russia to Iberia, and in scope, dealing with legal, ecclesiastical, noble and scholarly attitudes.

Perhaps because of the fact that modern Greece is, through the Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Byzantine heritage, the precise meaning of this heritage, in its various aspects, has hitherto been surprisingly little discussed by scholars. This collection of specially commissioned essays aims to present an overview of some of the different, and often conflicting, tendencies manifested by modern Greek attitudes to Byzantium since the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The aim is to show just how formative views of Byzantium have been for modern Greek life and letters: for historiography and imaginative literature, on the one hand, and on the other, for language, law, and the definition of a culture. All Greek has been translated, and the volume is aimed at Byzantinists and Neohellenists alike.

Constantinople originated in 330 A.D. as the last great urban foundation of the ancient world. When it was sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 it was the greatest city of the European Middle Ages. Its transition from the one to the other was determined partly by its continuous function as an imperial capital, partly by the steady proliferation of churches, monasteries, and Christian philanthropic institutions, and partly by the widespread urban disruption and depopulation that affected what was left of the Roman Empire in the east from the sixth to the eighth centuries. The studies in the present volume examine aspects of this long and complex process as reflected in the topography, monuments, self-image and political status of medieval Constantinople. They include a revised English version of a monograph published in French ten years ago, nine reprinted articles, and two published here for the first time.

Perhaps because of the fact that modern Greece is, through the Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Byzantine heritage, the precise meaning of this heritage, in its various aspects, has hitherto been surprisingly little discussed by scholars. This collection of specially commissioned essays aims to present an overview of some of the different, and often conflicting, tendencies manifested by modern Greek attitudes to Byzantium since the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The aim is to show just how formative views of Byzantium have been for modern Greek life and letters: for historiography and imaginative literature, on the one hand, and on the other, for language, law, and the definition of a culture. All Greek has been translated, and the volume is aimed at Byzantinists and Neohellenists alike.

Perhaps because of the fact that modern Greece is, through the Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Byzantine heritage, the precise meaning of this heritage, in its various aspects, has hitherto been surprisingly little discussed by scholars. This collection of specially commissioned essays aims to present an overview of some of the different, and often conflicting, tendencies manifested by modern Greek attitudes to Byzantium since the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The aim is to show just how formative views of Byzantium have been for modern Greek life and letters: for historiography and imaginative literature, on the one hand, and on the other, for language, law, and the definition of a culture. All Greek has been translated, and the volume is aimed at Byzantinists and Neohellenists alike.

The way people see the past tells us much about their present interests and about their sense of identity. This book examines both what men of the day knew about their past, and in particular about the Roman Empire, and shows how such knowledge was used to authenticate claims and attitudes. These original essays, by distinguished scholars, are wide-ranging both geographically, from Russia to Iberia, and in scope, dealing with legal, ecclesiastical, noble and scholarly attitudes.

This book studies the research perspective in which the literary inhabitants of Late Antique and medieval Constantinople remembered its past and conceptualised its existence as a Greek city that was the political capital of a Christian Roman state. Initial reactions to Constantine’s foundation noted its novel Christian orientation, but the memorial mode of writing about the city that developed from the sixth century recollected the traditional civic cultural heritage that Constantinople claimed both as the New Rome, and as the continuation of ancient Byzantion. This research culture increasingly became the preserve of the imperial bureaucracy, and focused on the city’s sculptured monuments as bearers of eschatological meaning. Yet from the tenth century, writers progressively preferred to define the wonder and spectacle of Constantinople in the aesthetic mode of urban praise inherited from late antiquity, developing the notion of the city as a cosmic theatre of excellence.