This chapter assesses the significance of a variety of genres of written and material sources for an understanding of political culture in Byzantium, including narratives and chronicles, encomia, orations, ceremonial handbooks and lists, monuments, silks, coins, archival documents, lead seals and letters. It distinguishes between narratives produced at the centre of Byzantine political life and those produced by outsiders: the former not simply windows into Byzantine political culture but integral elements of that culture, projecting the norms and expectations of the governing elite; the latter offering alternative perspectives, valuable for plugging chronological gaps but also as correctives to the propaganda that characterises so much Byzantine historiography. Few administrative records survive from Byzantium, especially compared to the Latin west, although legions of lead seals point to archives once far richer. Our surviving sources, particularly speeches, suggest that only in the later period were alternatives to the prevailing political order countenanced, and even then, despite a loss in territorial reach, the emperor’s court still formed the focal point of political life.

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.

The chapter explores the paradoxes of the abundant sources for the west, where only a limited proportion of the population understood the dominant written language of communication, Latin; and until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reams of fiscal and judicial records which survive come mostly from a fairly narrow band of senior clerics. But the clergy were not monolithic, and their impact on the actual practice of governance varied north and south of the Alps. Much depended on the extent to which principles of Roman law and the habit of living in towns persisted. Yet there is striking consistency both in the prerequisite virtues of a ruler propounded by clerical writers and in the essentials of inauguration ritual. The law which a king swore to uphold at his coronation was not made at will: he was expected to govern consensually and heed good counsel. Who could give such counsel and what constituted reasonable constraints on the king’s volition changed over time. In some realms, assemblies developed the authority to approve taxes and become law-makers in the late middle ages: the monarch’s exercise of his authority was tempered by popular demand.

The spheres’ fifteenth-century political cultures are compared with earlier periods. The west was catching up, with increasingly complex and documented administration. It also saw more lay literacy and political participation by broader bands of actors, with assemblies approving general taxes. Debate was possible in the other two spheres: Islam generally allowed for multilateral discussion on religious law, while ideals of governance were debated in late Byzantium. The west fractured along religious lines to an extent not seen elsewhere: once the clerical monopoly of divine mediation had been fundamentally challenged, the plethora of arms-bearing, landed elites perpetuated conflict. State monopoly of violence characterised Byzantium, while in the Nile-to-Oxus region, ‘men of the sword’ tended not to wage sectarian war. Around 1500, women seldom exercised formal sovereignty. But the centrality of the household as a basic social unit gave them extensive informal power. Charitable foundations were another stabiliser across the spheres. Byzantium’s Muscovite offshoot would expand, but the Ottomans’ disciplined militarism looked invincible against the fractious westerners.

This chapter considers the differences between the sources available for our three spheres (the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world), notably the unevenness of source survival. It attempts to explain why surviving western archives are so abundant in comparison with those of the other two spheres. This has to do with the concern to preserve records of property rights in the west and the interconnections between landed families and ecclesiastical institutions. Petitioning is another area where surviving western sources can help illuminate the dynamics of political culture which existed, but for which fewer records survive, in the other two spheres; what petitions tell us about monarchical authority and expectations of the ruler by those governed; and the relationship of the ruler to the law and law-making.

The Qurʾan, and the problems of its interpretation, is even more central to Islamic political culture than is the Bible to the Latin west and Byzantium. It became accepted in the mid-ninth century that interpretation of the law and many case rulings should be the preserve of the ʿulamaʾ. So although the caliph was revered as the guardian of the faith and supreme leader, his rule was not engrained in the courts of law and the maintenance of property rights and inheritance in the manner of western or Byzantine rulers. This partly accounts for the relatively poor survival rate of archival holdings. Yet narratives and prescriptive texts can shed light on actual practices and help chart change over time, from the caliphate’s imperial palaces to the predominance of Turco-Mongol warlords in the later middle ages. Evidence is particularly full for the Ilkhan rulers of Iran and those of Egypt and Transoxania. Their entourages brought new ideas and practices to Islamic political culture without abandoning core elements of Islamic ideology. The Ottomans’ conquest of Asia Minor and, above all, of Constantinople created the most enduring blend of Islamic traditions and new modes of rulership.