Crisis at Artanuji: Byzantium and the Caucasus in the Reign of Romanos Lakapenos, lecture by Nick Evans (Austrian Academy of Sciences), University of Vienna, June 14, 2017, 6:30 pm

The De Administrando Imperio of Konstantinos Porphyrogennetos tells the story of a narrowly averted crisis early in the reign of Romanos Lakapenos. A misjudged attempt to take over the important political and economic centre of Artanuji (now Ardanuç) in the southwest Caucasus from the Iberian Bagrationis had to be smoothed over with a concerted diplomatic effort. This lecture will consider the background, regional contexts and aftermath of this incident in order to explore the wider relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Caucasus, both North and South, during the reign of Romanos Lakapenos. This will also allow us to shed further light on the internal politics of the Byzantine Empire during the period in question, and on economic developments in the Caucasus, reflected in contemporary Arabic sources.

Nicholas Evans earned his PhD in Oxford with his dissertation on the early medieval North Caucasus and is collaborator of the Wittgenstein-Prize-Project "Moving Byzantium" of Prof. Claudia Rapp at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.