Hagiographical writing, including the Lives of saints and martyrs and collections of their miracles, were one of the most popular, perhaps the most popular from of literature accessible to ordinary people in the medieval world. St. Theodore 'the Recruit' was one of the best-known of the so-called 'military saints' or 'soldier saints', particularly in the medieval eastern Roman, or Byzantine, and the eastern Christian world, where churches dedicated to him were to be found in towns, cities and in the countryside. While the cult of St. Theodore has been studied in the context of hagiographical...

The eighth century was a turbulent time for Byzantium. Beset by war, plague and religious division, this remnant of the Rome fought for survival. Severe decline and dislocation necessitated far reaching reform and soul searching. In particular, Byzantines asked why God had so punished the Chosen People they believed themselves to be.

Attempting to formulate solutions to these problems were the new imperial dynasty, the Isaurians. Taking power in 717 as Constantinople was under siege by the Arabs, they would rule until 802 when Irene, the first empress to rule in her own right, was...

The eighth century was a turbulent time for Byzantium. Beset by war, plague and religious division, this remnant of the Rome fought for survival. Severe decline and dislocation necessitated far reaching reform and soul searching. In particular, Byzantines asked why God had so punished the Chosen People they believed themselves to be.

Attempting to formulate solutions to these problems were the new imperial dynasty, the Isaurians. Taking power in 717 as Constantinople was under siege by the Arabs, they would rule until 802 when Irene, the first empress to rule in her own right, was...

The aim of this book is to make accessible to a wider audience the works of Nicholas Mesarites, who deserves to be better known than he is. He was an ecclesiastic, who from the turn of the twelfth century provides a vivid record from personal experience of his troubled times, which saw the descent of the Byzantine Empire into factionalism, the loss of its capital Constantinople in 1204 to the armies of the fourth crusade, and its eventual reconstitution in exile as the Empire of Nicaea.

Nicholas Mesarites is difficult to place, because the record he left behind was not that of a...

This book translates the mid-12th-century Synopsis Chronike by Constantine Manasses, covering a history of the peoples of the East, Alexander the Great's conquests, the Hellenistic empires, the Trojan War and early empire until the reigns of Constantine I in the East, finally focusing on New Rome and its emperors.

The 10th-century treatise on the military provinces (the 'themes') of the medieval East Roman (Byzantine) empire is one of the most enigmatic of the works ascribed to theemperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos.