ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι μέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν.
Unfortunately almost nothing is known about the numbers of the population in Byzantine Anatolia and its towns, for little has survived in the way of comprehensive tax registers or population figures. Continue reading “Demography in Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Asia Minor on the Eve of the Turkish Conquest”
By late Roman and early Byzantine times there had developed in Anatolia a large number of thriving cities and lesser towns with a considerable commercial life and money economy. Continue reading “Towns and Commerce in Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Asia Minor on the Eve of the Turkish Conquest”
Since the fall of North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant to the Arabs and the occupation of Italy by the Germanic peoples and of much of the Balkans by the Slavs, Byzantium* had been restricted to the southern confines of the Balkan peninsula, Anatolia, the isles, and southern Italy. Continue reading “Administrative institutions in Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Asia Minor on the Eve of the Turkish Conquest”
Byzantine law evolved from limited recognition of marriages between Orthodox and non-Orthodox individuals (including pagan) to a total prohibition of such marriages. Continue reading “Marriages with Non-Christians in the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Empire”
Byzantine law did not know national and racial differences and was emphatically universalistic with regard to ethnicity. Continue reading “Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) perception of ‘Islam’”
The learning of foreign languages and their use in the Byzantine world was unsystematic and purely utilitarian. Although the idea of learning foreign languages as an intellectual practice was alien to Byzantine education, the Byzantines, of course, were aware of the fact that the surrounding people spoke their own languages and that the Turks among them were no exception. Continue reading “The Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) perception of languages of the Turkic peoples”
Novo Scriptorium 