The Byzantine Republic
Download The Byzantine Republic PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Byzantine Republic book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Byzantine Republic
Author: Anthony Kaldellis
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 2015-02-02
Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.
Romanland
Author: Anthony Kaldellis
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 2019-04-01
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
The Byzantine Theocracy
Author: Steven Runciman
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2004-06-03
A study of the theocratic constitution of the Byzantine Empire.