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Politics and Government in Byzantium

The Rise and Fall of the Bureaucrats

Jonathan Shea (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2022
I.B. Tauris (Verlag)
978-0-7556-4830-6 (ISBN)

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The eleventh century marked a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its start Byzantium was the paramount power in the Mediterranean world, by turns feared, respected and admired. By the century’s close the empire had lost half of its territory and had managed only a partial recovery under the leadership of the Komnenos family. How did a powerful and famously wealthy empire collapse so quickly?

The contemporary accounts of this turbulent ‘long’ century (taken here as c. 950–1100) attribute the empire’s decline to the emperors’ reckless and self-serving favouring of civilian bureaucrats and, while these sources are today widely acknowledged as biased and unreliable, modern assessments of the century have hitherto failed to suggest any tangible alternatives. To circumvent this dearth of archival material, Jonathan Shea has meticulously analysed 2,200 unpublished seals from the period (more than a third of the known total extant today) to uncover exactly whom the emperors were favouring and promoting, as well as developing a nuanced and revealing picture of the makeup of the much-chastised civilian bureaucracy. The sigillographic evidence is throughout measured against the written material to give a fresh account of this key transitional century and a rare insight into Byzantine politics.

Jonathan Shea is Associate Curator of Coins and Seals at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities at The George Washington University. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham and has published in peer-reviewed articles and edited collections

Part 1 Byzantium at the Turning Point
· Part 1.2 Byzantium in the Eleventh Century
· Part 1.2 Seals, Coins, and Lists

Part 2 The Byzantine Bureaucrat

Part 3 The Rise of the Civilians
· Part 3.1 Changing with the Times: The Logothesia and the Treasuries
· Part 3.2 Slipping Backwards: The Imperial Chancery
· Part 3.3 Governing the Capital
· Part 3.4 A New Bureucratic Elite: The Judiciary

Part 4 The Collapse of Civilian Government
· Reform and Consolidation: The Logothesia and the Treasuries p. 116
· The Chancery: A Part of the Imperial Household?
· The Administration of Constantinople: A Steady Decline
· Falling From Grace: The Judiciary
· The End of Civilian Government

Part 5 Changing Priorities and an Evolving Government

Appendix Chartoularioi, Notarioi, and Logariastai

Bibliography

Erscheinungsdatum	17.08.2022
Reihe/Serie	New Directions in Byzantine Studies
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Hilfswissenschaften
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
ISBN-10	0-7556-4830-7 / 0755648307
ISBN-13	978-0-7556-4830-6 / 9780755648306
Zustand	Neuware