Italy and the East Roman World in the Medieval Mediterranean: Empire, Cities and Elites, 476-1204

Italy and the East Roman World in the Medieval Mediterranean addresses the understudied topic of the Italian peninsula’s relationship to the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, across the early and central Middle Ages. The East Roman world, commonly known by the ahistorical term "Byzantium", is generally imagined as an Eastern Mediterranean empire, with Italy part of the medieval "West". Across 18 individually authored chapters, an introduction and conclusion, this volume makes a different case: for an East Roman world of which Italy forms a crucial part, and an Italian peninsula which is inextricably connected to—and, indeed, includes—regions ruled from Constantinople. Celebrating a scholar whose work has led this field over several decades, Thomas S. Brown, the chapters focus on the general themes of empire, cities and elites, and explore these from the angles of sources and historiography, archaeology, social, political and economic history, and more besides. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field.

About the Author

Thomas J. MacMaster is teaching at Morehouse College, Georgia. His research focusses on the slave trade and human trafficking in the early medieval Mediterranean, the topic of his forthcoming monograph Slavery and the Making of the Medieval World . He has also published more generally on the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages.

Nicholas S.M. Matheou is programme manager at the Armenian Institute, London. His research focusses on the social, political and economic history of the medieval Middle East and Mediterranean. He has published on East Roman political thought, has a forthcoming study and translation of an eleventh-century Armenian historian and his current research project focusses on the medieval city of Ani.