Warfare and Resilience in Byzantine Anatolia, 600-750CE

The main part of the project will comprise a historical reconstruction of the raids. This will involve a detailed comparison of historical texts and a source critical consideration of their biases, narrative discourses, and underlying sources of information. Project leader Alexander Sarantis hopes to show that, because these accounts often misdate and, in many cases, exaggerate the impact of historical events, the invasions were not as regular or intensive as often suggested by modern scholars. He will set his reconstruction of the military events against a geographical and infrastructural context to establish temporal and spatial patterns of raiding.

The next part of the project will demonstrate that there is little correlation between these patterns and archaeological evidence for long-term economic recession. Instead, Sarantis will argue that these longer durée developments were caused to a greater extent by broader political and socio-economic changes within the Byzantine empire. However, he will acknowledge that raiding caused short-term destruction and disruption, mostly invisible in the archaeological record and mentioned only rarely in the historical texts.

The ability of Anatolian communities to recover from these traumatic events will be explained in the final part of the project. This will consist first of a study of the textual evidence for these societies’ historical, social, and cultural backgrounds and varying relationships with the Byzantine authorities. Modern resilience theories will be used to explain the adaptability and survival of both the Byzantine empire and local communities. Finally, the project will compare trends and conditions in Anatolia with those in the Balkans, the other core region still controlled by the Byzantine government. This will highlight the greater economic resources, and deeper-rooted urban tradition and local cultures of Anatolia.

The outputs of the project will be a published monograph and a database of the raids, and an edited collection culminating from a workshop.