Global Byzantium : Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies by Daniel Reynolds

Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old `Byzantium and its neighbours' theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and toward the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium - as a concept - explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the empire's strategic geographical location. Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of `competitive sharing', not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they `looked out', and what others saw in Byzantium when they `looked in' and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism. Finally, we need to think about the empire's strategic geographical position: between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally, they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa, and Asia - effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world.
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