Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer A (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul.

By adopting a...

The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia forms an indispensable part of modern Turkish discourse on national identity but Western scholars, by contrast, have rarely included the Anatolian Turks in their discussions about the formation of European nations or the transformation of the Near East. The Turkish penetration of Byzantine Asia Minor is primarily conceived of as a conflict between empires, sedentary and nomadic groups, or religious and ethnic entities. This book proposes a new narrative, which begins with the waning influence of Constantinople and Cairo over large parts of...

Research on early medieval Cyprus has focused on the late antique -golden age- (late fourth/early fifth to seventh century) and the so-called Byzantine -reconquista- (post-AD 965) while overlooking the intervening period. This phase was characterized, supposedly, by the division of the political sovereignty between the Umayyads and the Byzantines, bringing about the social and demographic dislocation of the population of the island. This book proposes a different story of continuities and slow transformations in the fate of Cyprus between the late sixth and the early ninth centuries.

The Sylloge Tacticorum is a mid-Byzantine example of the literary genre of military manuals or Taktika which stretches back to antiquity. It was one of a number produced during the tenth century CE, a period when the Byzantine empire enjoyed a large measure of success in its wars against its traditional enemy, the Arabs. Compiled to record and preserve military strategies, know-how, and tactics, the manual discusses a wide variety of matters: battle formations, raids, sieges, ambushes, surprise attacks, the treatment of prisoners of war and defectors, distribution of booty,...

Through case studies examined in a comparative East-West approach, this book analyses how Byzantine iconoclasm (ca. 720s-843) impacted on the West and how it shaped a papal reaction in Rome. The policy on the production and veneration of sacred images that was then adopted by the popes would only be challenged 700 years later by the Protestant Reformation. The key aims and contribution of this book are its demonstration of how a number of the most iconic ways of representing the Virgin Mary and Christ - crystallized over the long Middles Ages and the early Renaissance in Byzantine,...