Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies, volume 2, issue 1–2 (September 2023).

CONTENTS INCLUDE

Ruling Separately but with the Same Mind: The Partition of Territory as Power-Sharing Projects between the Tenth and the Twelfth Century in Byzantium
João Vicente de Medeiros Publio Dias

This article is a study on projects of jurisdictional division of imperial territory from the tenth to the twelfth century. For that, modern concepts of “power-sharing” and “power settlement” will be adapted for the analysed context. Initially the history of territorial power-sharing in the Roman Empire will be summarised to underline the long tradition upon which the studied projects lay. Then the political strategies behind those projects are also analysed, as well as how sources present them.

The Silk Lampas in the Binding of the Great Meteoro Codex 301: Material Evidence on Late Byzantine Textile Culture
Nikolaos Vryzidis and Marielle Martiniani-Reber

In the library of the Monastery of the Transfiguration (Great Meteoro) is a Byzantine manuscript, the binding of which is decorated with a patterned silk fabric. By contextualising this late medieval remnant, this article aims to address the issue of late Byzantine weaving beyond the mainstream narrative of decline. This is because its weaving structure and association with Palaiologan and Serbian ornament perhaps points to a local workshop in tune with the wider artistic context of its time. Although a relatively modest finding, the Great Meteoro fabric raises important questions regarding the prevailing views on late Byzantine textile culture.

Special Issue: Byzantine Linguistic Pluralism Revisited 
    
Byzantine Linguistic Pluralism Revisited: An Introductory Essay
Arietta Papaconstantinou

This introductory essay discusses the historiographical background of Byzantine multilingualism against which the contributions that follow can be read. It focuses at more length on Gilbert Dagron’s ‘Le pluralisme linguistique à Byzance’, which remained until recently the only proper exploration of the subject, and argues that it reflects a concept of the Byzantine empire that differs in significant ways from that proposed by other scholars, including the contributors to this issue.

Sicily and Southern Italy: A Long-Lasting Byzantine Multilingualism
Cristina Rognoni

The aim of this paper is to examine the literary and documentary sources produced in the ninth- and tenth-century border contexts of Sicily and Apulia, two western regions still central to imperial policy at the time. The former between Byzantium and Islam, and the latter almost reconquered by Latin Lombards, these regions appear as an excellent field for revisiting the Greek-speaking turn of the empire in the middle centuries. The monolingualism of the state was adapted to the plurilingualism of society by means of various strategies that ensured a long western history for Byzantine Hellenism.

Speaking Persian in Byzantium
Rustam Shukurov

The earliest instances of Byzantine interest for the New Persian language date from the ninth century. The most notable example is provided by Photios who was especially curious about the Persian roots of Greek words. However, in the eighth-to-eleventh centuries, the knowledge of Persian was not common among the Greeks. The situation changed in the second half of the thirteenth century, when the practical knowledge of foreign languages spread outside the small circle of professional scholars and diplomats and became rather common among the native Byzantines. The status of the Persian language increased dramatically for two reasons: first, because of the rise of the political and cultural prestige of Anatolian Muslims in Byzantine eyes; and secondly, due to the rediscovery of Persian science by the Byzantines.

Byzantine Translations from Arabic into Greek: Old and New Historiography in Confluence and in Conflict
Maria Mavroudi

Scholarly demand to re-evaluate underappreciated cultures has grown since the 1980s. This generated a call to re-write the nineteenth-century narrative on the transmission of knowledge from the ancient Near East to the Graeco-Roman, Islamic, Western medieval, and early modern European world. The paper surveys the modern study of Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek in order to propose a new narrative frame, no longer linear but attentive to continuous and bi-directional contact between medieval civilisations. The paper offers the contact between Byzantium and various parts of the Islamic world as an example. It discusses the presumed insularity of Byzantine literary culture and its relationship with ancient Greek literary heritage. Problems of dating, localising, and socially contextualising the translations (through information on their authors and patrons) are also examined.