By Jonathan Shepard

Byzantium lasted 1000 years, governed to the top through self-styled emperors of the Romans. It underwent kaleidoscopic territorial and structural adjustments, but recovered many times from catastrophe: even after the near-impregnable Constantinople fell in 1204, version varieties of the empire reconstituted themselves. The Cambridge heritage of the Byzantine Empire tells the tale, tracing political and army occasions, spiritual controversies and financial switch. It bargains transparent, authoritative chapters at the major occasions and sessions, with extra targeted chapters on specific outlying areas, neighbouring powers or facets of Byzantium. With aids equivalent to a word list, an alternate place-name desk and references to English translations of assets, it will likely be necessary as an advent. even if, it additionally bargains stimulating new techniques and significant new findings, making it crucial analyzing for postgraduates and for experts.

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301). But churchmen and monks had stood up for icons, some earning the status of ‘confessors’, persons who had suffered persecution for true belief, albeit not death. One such churchman was Theophanes Confessor, the author of a chronicle that is one of our main sources for eighth- and early ninth-century Byzantine history. Commemoration of the restoration of icons to favour was celebrated annually at the Feast of orthodoxy (see below, p. 290). The gradual expansion in the material and demographic resources available to the emperors from the mid-ninth century onwards was therefore tempered by the esprit de corps and general repute of churchmen as orthodoxy’s guardians.

99–106; see below, pp. 60–1. i. approaching byz ant ium 15 at all – Roman. This was an activity that an emperor could direct from his palace, relying on court counsellors and hand-picked agents, notably the basilikoi who often acted as his emissaries to another potentate or notable. In this way the emperor could swiftly mobilise armed units, even whole armies. They served his ends but with minimal employment of his administrative apparatus, and payment was at least partly conditional upon results.

By the seventh century, the Armenians had long been Christian. The inventor of their distinctive script, Mashtots‘, based it on the Greek alphabetical model. He had received a Greek education, and Christian Armenia’s literary culture drew heavily on the fourth-century Greek fathers as well as Syriac writings (see below, p. 161). But the Armenians had their own church hierarchy, headed by a catholicos, and the princely and noble families in mountain strongholds debarred Romans and Sasanians alike from outright control over their respective sectors in Caucasia.

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