Byzantine Studies Lecture: Luca Zavagno (Bilkent University), "'No Island is an Island': the Byzantine Mediterranean between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-ca. 900 CE.)"
About the Talk
This paper will analyze the historical trajectories of large islands of the Byzantine Mediterranean (Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, Crete, Cyprus, and the Balearics) in the passage from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (ca.600-ca.900 C.E.). During this period, the Mediterranean turned into a more fragmented playing field (although not necessarily always a leveled one) between competing powers (the Byzantine and Carolingian empires as well as the Umayyad Emirate (and later Caliphate) of Spain, the Umayyad, and later Abbasid Caliphate) compared to its exceptionally unified political and economic Roman Imperial configuration.
Islands are unresolved places of a paradox, as Byzantine and Arab authors have repeatedly set forth: on the one hand, they evoked an idea of remoteness and marginality; on the other hand, their function in trade and trans-marine communication could seldom be ignored. In fact, the book hopes to challenge this misconception while at the same time tipping the methodological imbalance that has affected the interpretation of the historical, economic, political, and social trajectories of the abovementioned islands of the Byzantine Mediterranean; this by dealing with transversal themes revolving around the peculiar political, military, religious, and economic structures of insular societies as also part and parcel of a wider Byzantine administrative and socio-cultural “coastal” koine as well as areas of cross-cultural, political, (and military) interaction with the Umayyad and later Abbasid Caliphate.
In this light, this paper will reassess the space historiography on Byzantine islands has traditionally granted solely to literary, documentary, and hagiographic sources, for archaeological evidence instead points to a less violent and disruptive phase in the history of large Mediterranean islands under Byzantine sway in the period under scrutiny; this mainly by exploring the development of the insular urban landscape as well as stressing the role of islands as hubs of connectivity where the Islamic and the Byzantine cultures encountered and heavily influenced the local “insular” political, economic and social structures across the centuries.
About the Speaker
Luca Zavagno is Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department of History at Bilkent University, where he has recently completed his third monograph entitled The Byzantine City from Heraclius to the Fourth Crusade, 610-1204: Urban Life after Antiquity (published by Palgrave- Byzantine Studies Series). He is currently working on the Routledge Companion to the Byzantine City (a volume co-edited with Nikolas Bakirtzis to appear by the end of 2023) and on his fourth monograph entitled The Byzantine Insular Worlds between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c.a. 600–c.a. 900) (to be published in 2024 with ARC Medieval Press).