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Romanland
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...
The Byzantine Republic
Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” Kaldellis shows that ...
The Christian Parthenon
Examines the history of Byzantine Athens, and especially the Parthenon, which became a Christian church and major site of pilgrimage.
The New Roman Empire
"This is the first comprehensive, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire (or Byzantium) to appear in over a generation. It begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and ends with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, covering political and military history as well as all major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy. In recent decades, the study of Byzantium has been revolutionized by new approaches and sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. The book's core is an accessible and lively narrative of events, free of jargon, which incorporates new findings, explains recent models, and presents well-known ...
A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities
Weird, decadent, degenerate, racially mixed, superstitious, theocratic, effeminate, and even hyper-literate, Byzantium has long been regarded by many as one big curiosity. According to Voltaire, it represented "a worthless collection of miracles, a disgrace for the human mind"; for Hegel, it was "a disgusting picture of imbecility." A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities will churn up these old prejudices, while also stimulating a deeper interest among readers in one of history's most interesting civilizations. Many of the zanier tales and trivia that are collected here revolve around the political and religious life of Byzantium. Thus, stories of saints, relics, and their miracles-from the hila...
The histories
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Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood
In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests, first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally in the Georgian and Armenian lands. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. It was also expanding economically, demographically, and, in time, intellectually as well. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in the west not only spelled the end of Byzantium's historical dominance of southern Italy, the Balkans, Caucasus, and northe...
The Argument of Psellos' Chronographia
This book is a philosophical interpretation of Michael Psellos' Chronographia, an acknowledged masterpiece of Byzantine literature. Anthony Kaldellis argues that although the Chronographia contains a fascinating historical narrative; it is really a disguised philosophical work which, if read carefully, reveals Psellos' revolutionary views on politics and religion. Kaldellis exposes the rhetorical techniques with which Psellos veils his unorthodoxy, and demonstrates that the inner message of the text challenges the Church's supremacy over the intellectual and political life of Byzantium. Psellos consciously articulates a secular vision of Imperial politics, and seeks to liberate philosophy from the constraints of Christian theology. The analysis is lucid and should be accessible to anyone with a general knowledge of Byzantine civilization. It should interest all who study the history of ancient and medieval philosophy.
Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians
The survival of ancient Greek historiography is largely due to its preservation by Byzantine copyists and scholars. This process entailed selection, adaptation, and commentary, which shaped the corpus of Greek historiography in its transmission. By investigating those choices, Kaldellis enables a better understanding of the reception and survival of Greek historical writing. Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians includes translations of texts written by Byzantines on specific ancient historians. Each translated text is accompanied by an introduction and notes to highlight the specific context and purpose of its composition. In order to present a rounded picture of the reception of Greek historiography in Byzantium, a wide range of genres have been considered, such as poems and epigrams, essays, personalized scholia, and commentaries. Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians is therefore an important resource for scholars and students of ancient history.
The Field Armies of the East Roman Empire, 361–630
This book presents a new history of the leadership, organization, and disposition of the field armies of the east Roman empire between Julian (361–363) and Herakleios (610–641). To date, scholars studying this topic have privileged a poorly understood document, the Notitia dignitatum, and imposed it on the entire period from 395 to 630. This study, by contrast, gathers all of the available narrative, legal, papyrological, and epigraphic evidence to demonstrate empirically that the Notitia system emerged only in the 440s and that it was already mutating by the late fifth century before being fundamentally reformed during Justinian's wars of reconquest. This realization calls for a new, revised history of the eastern armies. Every facet of military policy must be reassessed, often with broad implications for the period. The volume provides a new military narrative for the period 361–630 and appendices revising the prosopography of high-ranking generals and arguing for a later Notitia.
