This volume is the first systematic survey of the environmental and climatic history of the Byzantine empire.

How did humans and the environment impact each other in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean? How did global climatic fluctuations affect the Byzantine Empire over the course of a millennium? And how did the transmission of pathogens across long distances affect humans and animals during this period? This book tackles these and other questions about the intersection of human and natural history in a systematic way. Bringing together analyses of historical, archaeological, and natural scientific evidence, specialists from across these fields have contributed to this volume to outline the new discipline of Byzantine environmental history. Contributors are: Johan Bakker, Henriette Baron, Chryssa Bourbou, James Crow, Michael J. Decker, Warren J. Eastwood, Dominik Fleitmann, John Haldon, Adam Izdebski, Eva Kaptijn, Jürg Luterbacher, Henry Maguire, Mischa Meier, Lee Mordechai, Jeroen Poblome, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Abigail Sargent, Peter Talloen, Costas Tsiamis, Ralf Vandam, Myrto Veikou, Sam White, and Elena Xoplaki

This book illuminates Byzantines' relationship with woodland between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Using the oak and the olive as objects of study, this work explores shifting economic strategies, environmental change, and the transformation of material culture throughout the middle Byzantine period. Drawing from texts, environmental data, and archaeological surveys, this book demonstrates that woodland's makeup was altered after Byzantium's seventh-century metamorphosis, and that people interacted in new ways with this re-worked ecology. Oak obtained prominence after late antiquity, illustrating the shift from that earlier era's intensive agriculture to a more sylvan middle Byzantine economy. Meanwhile, the olive faded into the background, re-emerging in the eleventh and twelfth centuries thanks to the initiative of people adapting yet again to newly changed political and economic circumstances. This book therefore shows that Byzantines' relationship with their ecology was far from static, and that Byzantines' decisions had environmental impacts.

Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.

Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity brings together scientific, archaeological and historical evidence on the interplay of social change and environmental phenomena at the end of Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, ca. 300-800 AD.

This book offers a collection of essays on Byzantine Italy which provides a fresh synthesis of current research as well as new insights on various aspects of its local societies from the 6th to the 11th century.

Mobility and migration were not uncommon in Byzantium, as is true for all societies. Yet, scholarship is only beginning to pay attention to these phenomena. This book presents in English translation a wide array of relevant source texts from ca. 650 to ca. 1450 originally written in medieval Greek: from administrative records, saints’ lives and letters by churchmen to ego-documents by ambassadors and historical narratives by court historians. Each source text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, commentary and further bibliography, thus making the book accessible to both scholars and students and laying the groundwork for future research on the internal dynamics of Byzantine society.