"For many of us, Byzantium remains "byzantine"--obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. In this book, renowned historian Averil Cameron presents an original and personal view of the challenges and questions facing historians of Byzantium today.The book explores five major themes, all subjects of controversy. "Absence" asks why Byzantium is routinely passed over, ignored, or relegated to a sphere of its own. "Empire" reinserts Byzantium into modern debates about empire, and discusses the nature of its system and its remarkable longevity. "Hellenism" confronts the question of the "Greekness" of Byzantium, and of the place of Byzantium in modern Greek consciousness. "The Realms of Gold" asks what lessons can be drawn from Byzantine visual art, and "The Very Model of Orthodoxy" challenges existing views of Byzantine Christianity.Throughout, the book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a forthright and compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination"--

Was there ever such a thing as the Byzantine Empire and who were those self-professed Romans we choose to call "Byzantine" today? At the heart of these two interlinked questions is Anthony Kaldellis's assertion that empires are, by definition, multiethnic. If there was indeed such a thing as the Byzantine Empire, which rules bounded majority and minority ethnic groups? The labels for the minority groups in Byzantium are clear - Slavs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Jews, Muslims. What was the ethnicity of the majority group? Historical evidence tells us unequivocally that no card-carrying Byzantine ever called himself "Byzantine." He would identify as Roman. This line of identification was so strong in the eastern empire that even the conquering Ottomans saw themselves as inheritors of the Roman Empire. In Western scholarship, however, there has been a long tradition of denying Romanness to Byzantium. In the Middle Ages, people of the eastern empire were made "Greeks," and by the nineteenth century they were shorn of their distorted Greekness and turned "Byzantine." In Romanland, Kaldellis argues that it is time for historians to take the Romanness of Byzantines seriously so that we can better understand the relations between Romans and non-Romans, as well as the processes of assimilation that led to the absorption of foreign groups into the Roman genos.--

"This handbook brings together work by leading scholars of the archaeology of early Christianity in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. The 34 essays to this volume ground the history, culture, and society of the first seven centuries of Christianity in the latest currents of archaeological method, theory, and research."--

Vols. 1-8, 1880-87, plates published separately and numbered I-LXXXIII.

He traces the actions of Byzantium Emperors in the twelfth century as they sought to keep control of the crusading armies within their territories and to maintain their positions with respect to the west, and shows how mutual suspicion and attempts at co-operation ended in downright emnity.