Byzantine Constantinople

This volume deals with relations between the West and Byzantium, from the accession of Otto I the Great in Germany in 962, until the Fourth Crusade when Constantinople was conquered by the Western crusading armies in 1204. The impact which these contacts and confrontations had on both sides is discussed in sections dealing with specific areas (such as the North, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) as well as in sections dealing with specific aspects of the process: the journey, the attractions of the East, and the idea of "autoritates" and "translationes" of various political and intellectual ideas. An extensive index will help readers to find specific topics. The book is illustrated with maps, and with a number of objects betraying Byzantine influence in the West, or Western presence in Byzantium.

Ross Dunn here recounts the great traveler's remarkable career, interpreting it within the cultural and social context of Islamic society and giving the reader both a biography of an extraordinary personality and a study of the hemispheric dimensions of human interchange in medieval times.

This book studies the Arabic-Islamic view of Byzantium, tracing the Byzantine image as it evolved through centuries of warfare, contact, and exchanges. Including previously inaccessible material on the Arabic textual tradition on Byzantium, this investigation shows the significance of Byzantium to the Arab Muslim establishment and their appreciation of various facets of Byzantine culture and civilization. The Arabic-Islamic representation of the Byzantine Empire stretching from the reference to Byzantium in the Qur'an until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is considered in terms of a few salient themes. The image of Byzantium reveals itself to be complex, non-monolithic, and self-referential. Formulating an alternative appreciation to the politics of confrontation and hostility that so often underlies scholarly discourse on Muslim-Byzantine relations, this book presents the schemes developed by medieval authors to reinterpret aspects of their own history, their own self-definition, and their own view of the world.

The book provides historians of Byzantine and Muscovite Russian culture with a superb edition of five travelers' descriptions of voyages to Constantinople. Taken together, these pilgrim tales constitute a treasure house of information about the architecture, life style, and topography of late Byzantine Constantinople...The introductory commentaries provide excellent historical settings for the pilgrim tales and for the evolution of the manuscript traditions pertaining to each text.

"This study consists of three parts: Part I is primarily concerned with the travellers; their personalities, their motives for travelling, their route and the accounts of their experiences they left behind are dealt with here. In part II the various reports about 'archaeologica' are given, arranged geographically. Part Ill contains those fragments from the travellers'tales which are important for this study.All the accounts which are published in English, French or German have been taken from existing editions of the texts; a number of the Latin texts are given in an English translation, to make these, too, accessible to a wider public."

Liudprand, the bishop of Cremona from 962 to 972, offers unrivaled insight into society and culture in western Europe. Since Liudprand enjoyed the favor of the Saxon Roman emperor Otto the Great, and traveled to Constantinople more than once on official business, his narratives also reveal European attitudes toward the Byzantine Empire and the culture of its refined capital city.

The contributions to this volume have been selected from the papers delivered at the 34th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Birmingham, in April 2000. Travellers to and in the Byzantine world have long been a subject of interest but travel and communications in the medieval period have more recently attracted scholarly attention. This book is the first to bring together these two lines of enquiry. Four aspects of travel in the Byzantine world, from the sixth to the fifteenth century, are examined here: technicalities of travel on land and sea, purposes of travel, foreign visitors' perceptions of Constantinople, and the representation of the travel experience in images and in written accounts. Sources used to illuminate these four aspects include descriptions of journeys, pilot books, bilingual word lists, shipwrecks, monastic documents, but as the opening paper shows the range of such sources can be far wider than generally supposed. The contributors highlight road and travel conditions for horses and humans, types of ships and speed of sea journeys, the nature of trade in the Mediterranean, the continuity of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attitudes toward travel. Patterns of communication in the Mediterranean are revealed through distribution of ceramic finds, letter collections, and the spread of the plague. Together, these papers make a notable contribution to our understanding both of the evidence for travel, and of the realities and perceptions of communications in the Byzantine world. Travel in the Byzantine World is volume 10 in the series published by Ashgate/Variorum on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

Seyahatnameler sadece bir gezi kitabı değil aynı zamanda dönemlerinin siyasi ve toplumsal yönlerine ışık tutan önemli birer tarihi belgedirler. Seyyah basit bir aktarıcı değildir. Gördüklerini kendi süzgecinden geçirip yorumladıktan sonra aktarır. Bunları yaparken belki farkında olmadan tarihi olgulara öznel bir boyut kazandırır ama bir taraftan da çok değerli bilgiler aktarır. İspanyol seyyah Clavijo'nun seyahatnamesi de dönemine ışık tutan bir belge olması nedeniyle önem arz etmektedir. Yaşadığı dönem ise gerçekten mühimdir. Timur Osmanlı Devleti'ne ağır bir darbe vurmuş, imparatorluğunu Marmara Denizi kıyılarından Çin sınırlarına kadar genişletmiştir. Osmanlı Devleti, fetret dönemi geçirmektedir. Anadolu'da nisbi bir kaos hakimdir. Seyyahımız ise İspanyolların elçisi olarak görevlendirilmiş ve İspanya' dan yola çıkmıştır.
İspanya'dan başlayan yolculuğunda Clavijo dönemin önemli şehirleri olan İstanbul, Trabzon, Erzincan'a uğramış; daha sonra ise bir İran kenti olan Huy'a varmıştır. Sırasıyla Tebriz, Merşhed, Merv ve Belh şehirlerini ziyaret eden seyyahımız sonunda Semerkant'a ulaşmıştır. Geçtiği yerlerdeki izlenimlerini özenle kaydeden Clavijo, mümkün mertebe objektif olmaya çalışmıştır.

Benjamin of Tudela, the twelfth-century Jewish traveler, is cast by author Sandra Benjamin as a guide to the peoples around the Mediterranean littoral, with special attention paid to their economic life.

Şairlerin güzelliğini anlatmak için yeterli kelime bulamadığı, tek taşına bile bütün Acem mülkünü feda ettikleri medeniyetler şehri İstanbul. Şüphesiz her dönemde olduğu gibi Bizans ya da bir başka değimle Doğu Roma İmparatorluğu’nun hüküm sürdüğü yıllarda da birçok sebeple İstanbul’a gelen yabancılar vardır. Fetihten önce çeşitli ülkelerden değişik sebeplerle buraya gelen veya başkalarından öğrendiklerini yazan seyyah ve yazarların günümüze kadar ulaşabilen hatıraları Ortaçağ dünyasının bu önemli şehrinin görünümünü bir dereceye kadar tanıtmaktadır. 1996 yılında başlayan bu çalışma ile Bizans döneminde İstanbul’a gelen Hacılar, Haçlı askerleri, seyyahlar ve elçilerin tarihe tanıklıkları eşliğinde 1453’den önceki Konstantinopolis’e ışık tutulmaktadır.(Tanıtım Bülteninden)