The Liber chronicarum that was written by the humanist Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514) from Nuremberg, and which appeared in 1493, is one of the most sumptuous printed works of the fifteenth century, largely because of its wood-cut illustrations by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. Among these wood-cuts there is a panorama of Constantinople on fol. 129v and 130r(fig. 1) that is repeated later in the chronicle three times in a slightly simplified form with small variants. The panorama appears where the chronicle describes the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great, although the text also gives some information about the history of the city until the conquest by the Ottomans in 1453. Since the account is of little interest and contains a number of incorrect details, we will confine ourselves to an analysis of the illustration.

The material aspect of the Byzantine army is a field which has always been the poor relation of scholarship on its organisation and logistics, and publications of the last decade have unfortunately confused the issue as much as elucidated it. Byzantium had a rich tradition of military literature, in unbroken continuity with the already sophisticated practice of the western empire of Rome. Manuals from late Antiquity to the tenth century provide considerable detail of the equipment a Byzantine soldier should ideally have, and in doing so show in the armed forces of the empire a pragmatic willingness to absorb useful equipment, as much as effective tactics, from its neighbours and enemies. The quality of its equipment must also have been a factor in the remarkable success of the army and navy in preserving the empire as much as they did against so many foes for a thousand years. In view of this, the relationship between the ideals of the manuals and the reality is an important issue, one which demands a laborious search for evidence beyond literary sources. Economic conditions impinged on more than the amount of manpower to be mobilised. They also influenced the quantity and even the very type of equipment that could be supplied to the troops. We shall look here at three items of armour which were essential elements of middle period panoply, the kremasmata, the kabadion and the klibanion with the aim of establishing their nature more precisely.

In 1554 a Franciscan friar of Angoulême, André Thevet, published at Lyons his Cosmographie de Levant. The author had recently returned from a three year journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land, and the Cosmographie was the first of a number of geographical works. Although he did not visit Athos, he saw it from near the Hellespont and included a few lines in his book:

Modern studies dedicated to the semantics of Byzantine ceremonies seem to agree on at least two points: (a) that the Byzantines had an elaborate ceremonial for every possible occasion and (b) that even the tiniest element of this ceremonial was loaded with multiple layers of meaning. Whether it took place in the streets of Constantinople, in the Hippodrome, in the Forum of Constantine or at various places in the palace, this lavish ceremonial always pursued the same ultimate goal: to impress, and intimidate, both the capital’s citizenry and the visitors. The Byzantine ceremonial invariably had a religious dimension to it, which was to make everybody — Christian, pagan, and infidel alike — believe in the eternal glory and splendour of the Empire of New Rome. Sometimes, the observer was supposed to get this idea through watching, or partaking of, ceremonies that represented a magnificent blend of acclamations, music, light, colourful costumes, meaningful gestures and ample decoration. On other occasions, the same idea was propagated through the public humiliation of captured domestic rebels, high-ranking foreign captives, or other rulers’ diplomatic agents; to make the picture complete, the act of humiliation could be extended to include a possible ill-treatment of the foreigners’ servants and horses. Whether openly manifested or buried in subtle gestures, flattery and ridicule often went hand-in-hand in the language of Byzantine ceremonies. While foreigners may not have always been able to understand what was going on, no variation in the ceremonial could ever escape the sharp eye of the Byzantine courtier, to whom being in tune with the slightest change in the prevalent mood was simply a question of survival.

The perspective of this paper could certainly be judged as somewhat narrow by urban historians of ninth-century Constantinople. For the sake of clarity we should like to stress from the very start that it is the Bulgarian aspect of the problem that interests us. Whatever the answer to the question whether Byzantium was ‘dead or alive’ at the time, for Boris (who forced Bulgaria into Christendom), for his son Symeon (who became Bulgaria’s first tsar), and for Symeon’s son Peter (who took the first Byzantine princess to Veliki Preslav), the empire was certainly very much alive. These three rulers of the first Bulgarian kingdom lived at the time when the renovatio encapsulated by Theoktistos and Theodora in A.D. 843 was taken over by the usurper Basil; when, subsequently, the ascending genos of the dysgenes killer recreated — and at the same time distanced itself from — the broader framework of the Justinianic age; and, finally, when eugenes usurpers triumphed within the already established ‘Macedonian’ universe. Among the three of them, however, only Symeon had the rare opportunity of living in Constantinople, for fourteen years or so — between 872/4 and 887 — and in its First Region at that. Symeon became no Theodoric but what was it that he saw which made him ‘half-Greek’ and could have moulded or influenced some of his policies that led to the establishment of a new empire in the Balkans?

The five papers which follow are the outcome of a Conference on Greece and its role in the European Union sixteen years after its accession, hosted by the University of Birmingham. It took place on the 16th of May 1997 at the Institute for German Studies which kindly offered its facilities for this event. The papers of the Conference which have been substantially revised for publication in this journal had as a purpose to explore not only the political, military, economic, and cultural role of Greece since it became a full EEC member but also the contemporary role of the only Balkan state that is an EU member, in the tremendous changes that take place in Europe in the 1990s.

For the last decade or more, domestic political debate in Greece has focussed on the nature and role of the state. The debate has raised questions about the extent of the state’s role in the domestic economy, and the state’s domination of civil society. New liberal economic philosophy has pressed for greater market freedoms, on the one hand, whilst separate criticism has been made of the corruption and inefficiency of the ‘party-state‘. On both fronts—political and economic—the domestic role of the state has appeared to be under more serious challenge than for many years previously (Featherstone, 1994).

In order to fully grasp the dynamics of the trilateral relations between Israel, Turkey, and Greece today, one must look first to the history of their mutual interrelations in the last 50 years, that is, from the time of the establishment of the State of Israel.

Lying astride the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, Greece is geographically simultaneously European, Balkan, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean, while politically it has projected itself as a western European and even as a north Atlantic state. Its position has inevitably involved it with all the Great Powers, and all have interfered in Greek politics well within living memory. Greece‘s foreign policy during the years of the Hellenic Republic has occasionally flirted with a variety of options, though in the end it has remained constant to its relationship with the western alliance. This reluctant adherence is due in large measure to the constraints placed upon Greece by its location on the world‘s geopolitical map. Its geographical position has proven to be one of the prime determinants of Greece‘s foreign policy since the Second World War, and at no time has this been more evident than in the years of the Hellenic Republic.

For Greece, to be part of the European Communities/European Union, it has always been a constant challenge to the country’s international position. Sixteen years of EC membership have had a remarkable political, diplomatic, socio-economic and cultural effect on the country’s internal domain. Indeed, EC membership has contributed to the consolidation of democratic internal processes, it has influenced the administrative capacity of the state, it has affected the external political orientation of the country’s foreign policy objectives, it has benefited the economy from substantial financial community transfers and it has brought the Greek culture closer to the other western European cultures. Seen from a more critical perspective, EC membership has also produced severe shock effects, as the Greek economy has been increasingly exposed to European trade and the subsequent single market and it keeps on breeding social tensions in the process of economic and monetary integration.

For those teaching and researching in Modern Greek Studies outside Greece, discussion of the eighties and nineties is characterised by reference to changes in Greek political life, as well as in the Greek educational system and policy making directly connected with Greece’s entry into the European Union. Greece became a member of the EU as recently as 1981. PASOK, viewed membership as temporary but these claims were dropped after 1985. In the same period changes introduced into the linguistic system of the Greek language led to discussions of educational and cultural interest.

The Conference on Greece as a Member of the European Union: Sixteen Years after its Accession was the result of intensive work and commitment for a successful event. It gave the opportunity to both scholars and experts to contribute to high level discussions on the role of Greece in the EU from the point of view of political, economic as well as cultural developments.

In the introduction to her newly published edition of the Life of St. Stephen the Younger, M.-F. Auzépy spares no effort in her attempt to uncover the original motives and intentions underlying this fascinating hagiographic work. Her results, though not the first or only word on this matter, are nonetheless provocative and original. This brief note will raise some questions about those findings and offer an additional point of view on the VSJ in connection with the contemporary writings of Theodore of Stoudios.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it is an appropriate time to consider the evolution of art-historical scholarship during this century; recent publications on this topic indicate its current interest. In particular, the discipline of manuscript studies, which has been flourishing and changing in its methodology over the last two decades, deserves re-evaluation and assessment. Rumination on the past is a fundamental process in our attempts to define new approaches and necessary to the positioning of our own approaches in relationship to what preceded them, especially methodologies that had conspicuous impact on the history of the discipline.

It is some time since the late Alexander Kazhdan undertook a private crusade under the title ‘Do we need a new history of Byzantine law?’ Of course his answer was in the affirmative. In one sense one would be unable to disagree; in another sense, however, one ought to answer that the history Kazhdan was asking for would not so much be new; rather it would be a novelty, as it had not been written before.

In his review of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s ‘Europe. A History of Its Peoples’, Paschalis Kitromilides lamented that in most general accounts, Europe has been reduced to a history of Visigothic Europe. In these two volumes reflecting his oeuvre until 1994 — one a valuable monograph on a crucial figure of the Balkan Enlightenment, the other an updated collection of essays written in the course of fifteen years and covering some of the central processes of the past two centuries — Kitromilides is rectifying this short-sighted view of Europe. What he shows is a Europe as a common playground of ideas where elements from the core regions are transmitted and transformed to other, adjacent and peripheral territories. His focus is on the Balkans (or Southeastern Europe in his preferred nomenclature). What he also shows admirably is the reverse relationship of core and periphery in scholarship. Even good scholars of the core are parochial in their exclusive confinement to the centre. Conversely, good scholars of the Balkan region are, as a rule, deeply knowledgeable and conversant with ideas and trends outside their immediate geographic sphere of expertise (immensely complex in itself). Paschalis Kitromilides happens to be not simply among the good scholars of and from Southeastern Europe; he is one of the best.