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34 results

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  • The Making and Breaking of Kinetic Empire: Mobility, Communication and Political Change in the Eastern Mediterranean, c. 900–1100 CE
  • Catherine Holmes
  • Journal: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society / Volume 32 / December 2022
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2022, pp. 25-45
  • Print publication: December 2022
  • View abstract

    This paper applies the concept of ‘kinetic empire’ to the eastern Mediterranean world in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The term ‘kinetic empire’ is borrowed from Hämäläinen's analysis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century north American Comanche Empire. It refers to the way in which trans- and supra-regional power could be created, expressed and enforced through mobile means. The article focuses primarily on the role of mobility in the expansion of the Byzantine Empire between c. 900 and 1050, but also makes comparison with the contemporaneous Fatimid caliphate and other regional polities which we might usually regard as sedentary states. Recovering the role of the kinetic not only extends our understanding of the modalities of power in this crucial region of the medieval world, it also allows us to question the nature and degree of transformation wrought by mobile newcomers, such as Normans, crusaders and Turks in the later decades of the eleventh century. In this sense of developing and exploring concepts useful for the study of the transregional in premodernity and questioning standard periodisations, this article is also a practical exercise in medieval global history.

  • 8 - Byzantium
  • from Part II - Historical Contexts
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, University of Oxford, Jonathan Shepard, University of Oxford, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler, Aberystwyth University
  • Book: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021, pp 178-211
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter outlines the geographical and chronological contexts of the Byzantine sphere, stressing the role that terrestrial and maritime geography played in the relationship between the imperial centre at Constantinople and the frontiers, as well as in diplomacy. It charts gradual territorial expansion, growth in the economy and flourishing of the church, particularly monasteries, between c.700 and 1050, followed by imperial collapse in the eleventh century, the consolidation of a smaller imperial space in the twelfth and political fragmentation thereafter. It considers the role played by societies and polities beyond the empire in the wider Byzantine sphere, a sphere far from culturally homogeneous. Attention is paid to the principal political formations within the empire itself, emphasising the relationship between formal and informal power. The key co-ordinates of formal Byzantine political society – emperor, palace, eunuchs, bureaucracy – are identified, but attention is also paid to those whose agency in political life was highly significant, if less frequently discussed: kinship and friendship networks, women, urban communities and charismatic holy figures.

  • 1 - Political Culture in Three Spheres
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, University of Oxford, Jonathan Shepard, University of Oxford, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler, Aberystwyth University
  • Book: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021, pp 1-16
  • View extract

    Summary

    This introduction outlines the key aims of the book and its genesis, including a definition of what political culture means – the rituals and explicit legitimisation of power, status and property-holding, alongside the unstated assumptions and customs that help to channel tensions and rivalries within polities. It situates the volume’s approach – a presentation of three neighbouring and overlapping political spheres – within the recent turn towards the global middle ages. Neither a work of systematic and explicit comparison nor an attempt at overarching synthesis or grand narrative – nor a shot at tracing trans-regional connections – the book aims rather to find a conceptual language applicable to all three spheres, attempting to make each sphere accessible to non-specialists. This pioneering survey of three spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world – should provide useful tools for learning, teaching and research today but is also an invitation to future study of medieval political culture.

Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021
  • View description
    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.

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