Overview
- Uses the life and work of the state official and historian Michael Attaleiates to examine Byzantine bureaucracy and culture in the eleventh century
- Explores the links between various classes and institutions in the cities of and across the Byzantine Empire
- Casts fresh light on the world and lives of the mandarins who turned the Byzantine emperor’s word into policy
Part of the book series: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture (NABHC)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is a microhistory of eleventh-century Byzantium, built around the biography of the state official Michael Attaleiates. Dimitris Krallis presents Byzantium as a cohesive, ever-evolving, dynamic, Roman political community, built on traditions of Roman governance and Hellenic culture. In the eleventh century, Byzantium faced a crisis as it navigated a shifting international environment of feudal polities, merchant republics, steppe migrations, and a rapidly transforming Islamic world. Attaleiates’ life, from provincial birth to Constantinopolitan death, and career, as a member of an ancient empire’s officialdom, raise questions of identity, family, education, governance, elite culture, Romanness, Hellenism, science and skepticism, as well as political ideology during this period. The life and work of Attaleiates is used as a prism through which to examine important questions about a long-lived medieval polity that is usually studied as exotic and distinct from both theEuropean and the Near Eastern historical experience.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dimitris Krallis is Associate Professor at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He writes on questions of politics, society, intellectual culture, and governance in the middle Byzantine period.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Serving Byzantium's Emperors
Book Subtitle: The Courtly Life and Career of Michael Attaleiates
Authors: Dimitris Krallis
Series Title: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04525-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-04524-1Published: 18 February 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-04525-8Published: 31 January 2019
Series ISSN: 2730-9363
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9371
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 288
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Medieval Europe, Social History, Cultural History, History of Military