Browsing by Author "Zavagno, Luca"
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Item Open Access Brief notes on the Byzantine Insular Urbanism between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages(Center for Cyprus Studies-Eastern Mediterranean University, 2020) Zavagno, LucaThis paper aims at reassessing the concept of peripherality of the Byzantine insular world. It is suggested that Sicily, Crete and Cyprus (and to a lesser extent Malta, Sardinia and the Balearics) acted as a third political and economic pole between the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean Sea in the Byzantine Mediterranean. This will shed “archeological” light on some parallel economic and political trajectories of the urban centers located on two of the abovementioned islands: Salamis-Constantia on Cyprus and Gortyn in Crete during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.Item Open Access The Byzantine city: a symphony in three movements(Palgrave Pivot, 2021-10-07) Zavagno, LucaThis chapter presents the reader with three preliminary and different themes that will recur across the book as taking their cue from the changes of some exemplary Byzantine cities like Ephesos and Euchaita. The first has to do with the importance of tracking the transformation of the urban functions across space and time. The second concern the methodological approach adopted in the book. Indeed, the changes in urban functions, landscape, structure, and fabric will be explored by bringing together the most recent results stemming from urban archaeological excavations, the results of analyses of material culture (ceramic, coins, seals), and a reassessment of the documentary and hagiographical sources. The third aims to explain how Byzantine urban sites located in different parts of the empire (Byzantine heartland vis a vis the coastal-insula koine) reverberated the changes experienced by the political, social, and economic imperial super-structure a regional and sub-regional levelItem Open Access A countryside in transition: The Galinoporni-Kaleburnu Plain (Cyprus) in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (ca. 600–ca. 850)(Akademie Ved Ceske Republiky * Archeologicky Ustav, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Archeology, 2018) Zavagno, Luca; Kızılduman, B.This paper aims to both tip the chronologically-unbalanced rural surveys conducted on the island of Cyprus in the last decades (as focusing almost exclusively on the Roman and Late Antique period) and re-assess the traditional historiographical interpretation of the fate of local rural settlements and population in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (i.e. between the late sixth to the early ninth century). Indeed, we cannot simply take for granted that at the time under scrutiny Cyprus was overwhelmed by Arab incursions turning the island into a no man’s land, severing commercial and shipping routes, bringing to an end any economic, social and cultural form of life in the countryside, causing massive depopulation and abandonment of prosperous rural villages along the coasts in favor of hastily built and fortified (often seasonal) hilltop settlements. In the light of the latter remark, the authors will use the preliminary results of a recent extensive rural survey conducted in the plain of Galinoporni/Kaleburnu on the Karpas peninsula to propose a picture of the Cypriot landscape as characterized by the early medieval resilience of the varied range of rural settlements (farms, hamlets and villages) dating back to previous centuries and by the lack of any catastrophic occupational gaps after the mid-seventh century.Item Open Access Editorial: the world of medieval islands(Routledge, 2019) Zavagno, Luca; Darley, R.; Jarrett, J.The articles accompanying this one study a range of medieval island situations, varying in size, location, internal complexity, economic potential and political loyalties. The geographical range is similarly broad, encompassing the length of the Mediterranean Sea and stretching onwards into the Indian Ocean. This article therefore extracts comparisons from the articles its authors have here edited. Against a broader historiographical and theoretical background, it aims to isolate the common characteristics of what is here termed “islandness” and the key gradients along which those characteristics vary. These are identified as size and internal complexity, location within wider spaces, relationship to a frontier, and social position between connectivity and isolation. While most islands fit in this matrix, the category remains fuzzy; not all geographical islands were always “island-like” and some areas not surrounded by water were. The article thus sets up models of thinking about islands for comparison with other areas and periods.Item Open Access General Conclusions(Palgrave Pivot, 2021-10-07) Zavagno, LucaThis chapter will sum up the nature and characteristics of the changes in urbanism in Byzantium show variations (in regional and sub-regional terms) which allow us to sketch different trajectories of development for the cities of the Byzantine empire. They should be pitted against each other to understand how different local needs produced different multifunctional real “urban” answers to the problems and challenges which presented themselves along with the ebbs and flows of the history of an Empire that would not die and indeed managed to navigate through streams of gold and rivers of blood until it fell (but not for the last time) with the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople.Item Open Access “Going to the extremes”: the Balearics and Cyprus in the early medieval Byzantine insular system(Routledge, 2019-04) Zavagno, LucaThis contribution mainly focuses on Cyprus and the Balearics, islands located at opposite geographical extremes of the Byzantine Mediterranean, during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Historians have often regarded these islands as peripheral additions to the Byzantine heartland of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau; this article argues that, in fact, archaeological and material indicators (such as ceramics, lead seals and coins), paired with the scarce textual sources, point to a certain degree of economic prosperity in the abovementioned islands during the period under scrutiny, suggesting that they continued to play an important role in the political, administrative and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire. A resilient insular economy and continuity of local production of artefacts was ensured by the persistence of demand from local secular and religious elites and regular, if infrequent, contacts with other areas of the Byzantine heartland or the Muslim Mediterranean.Item Open Access Introduction: A Mediterranean of traveling faces and ideas(ICSR Mediterranean Knowledge, 2016) Çaykent, Özlem; Zavagno, Luca; Çaykent, Özlem; Zavagno, LucaItem Open Access “Islands in the stream”: toward a new history of the large islands of the Byzantine Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages ca.600-ca.800(Routledge, 2018) Zavagno, LucaByzantine historiography has often regarded the large Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Crete, Sardinia, Malta and the Balearics) as mere peripheral additions to the Byzantine heartland-defined as the coupling of two different geographical zones: the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean. As a result, Byzantinists seem not to have fully moved away from an interpretative framework which regards islands as either strategic military bulwarks along the Arab-Byzantine Mediterranean frontier, or as neglected marginal outposts soon to be lost forever. A partial exception to this historiographical periphericity of large islands is represented by Sicily, because of its relevance as a secure source for grain after the disruption of the Egyptian tax-spine in the 640s. In fact, by comparing material and archaeological evidence with literary and documentary sources, an alternative interpretation of the political, economic and cultural role played by large islands will be proposed, this by pairing two main themes: the first revolving around the economics of insular societies; and the second stressing the importance of islands as connective hubs with peculiar local political, social and cultural structures which remained within the Byzantine sphere of influence for longer than previously thought. This approach allows us to tip the unbalanced dialogue between margins and metropolis by pointing to a relatively higher welfare of the insular world as stemming from the uninterrupted, although diminished, “connective” role the abovementioned islands played within the Mediterranean shipping routes linking the eastern and western basin of the Mediterranean. In this light, the adaptive strategies of insular administrative structures as influenced by the political or military difficulties of the hour, as well as the urban socio-political and economic structures on some of the abovementioned Byzantine islands, will also be documented. This is because the construction of urban models, settlement strategies and infrastructures-although often based on diverse political and administrative policies-nevertheless point to the presence of common, cross-cultural insular developments such as: the role of members of urban-oriented aristocracies as cultural brokers; the creation of commercial and artisanal facilities; the construction or restoration of religious buildings as foci of settlement and regional as well as interregional pilgrimage; the resilience of local elites as catalysts of patronage; and the persistence of levels of demand often based upon regular if not frequent regional and sub-regional trans-maritime contacts.Item Open Access Islands: not the last frontier. insular model in Early Medieval Byzantine Mediterranean c. 650- c. 850(Institute of Mediterranean Knowledge, 2016) Zavagno, Luca; D’Angelo, G.; Ribeiro, J. M.The present volume aims at offering a less detailed but chronologically broader survey of the agents of the above mentioned matrix of communications across the Mediterranean basin from the early Medieval to the Modern era. Rather than indulging upon the supposed and catastrophic mid-seventh century caesura (as advocated by Pirenne), or moving from the second trade cycle (as described by Wickham) this collection of articles stresses the continuities in the dynamic connectivity of the Mediterranean. By observing the faces of those who continuously build these networks and goods which travel across, the reader will enact Penelope and her loom where endless threads and knots were made and destroyed in a fortnight. In a similar vein (loosely in tune with a Braudelian longue durée), the volume offers an interdisciplinary and encompassing digest over the manifold actors of this incessant weaving and undoing of communications across different periods of Mediterranean history.Item Open Access Laura Nasrallah, Annemarie Luijendijk and Charalambos Bakırtzıs (eds), from roman to early Christian Cyprus(Published by Cambridge University Press, 2022-01-28) Gülsevinç, F.; Zavagno, LucaItem Open Access Modelling the maritime cultural landscape of the Costiera Amalfitana: the first three seasons of research (2016–2018)(Taylor & Francis, 2021-08-10) Harpster, M.; Trakadas, A.; Denel, E.; Capriglione, V.; Lucarini, C.; Meranda, M.; Morselli, M.; Pelling, R.; Bennett, I.; Zazzaro, C.; Demirci, Ö.; Donadio, C.; Ferranti, L.; Stanislao, C.; Zavagno, Luca; Pecci, P.Human activity along the Amalfi coastline in Italy has been tied to the sea for millennia – for sustenance, migration, trade, warfare, and leisure. As a result, this region has an equally rich and extensive maritime cultural landscape composed of tangible and intangible elements. In 2016, a multi-disciplinary project began efforts to model and to understand changes within this landscape, and this essay presents the preliminary results of our first three seasons of work. Some efforts, such as the documentation of maritime cultural heritage in local museums, archival work, and geomorphological research proceeded smoothly. Unexpectedly, however, little material from the pre-modern era was found under water, adding questions to this study that future work in the Marine Protected Area west of Positano may answer.Item Open Access Preface(Springer Nature, 2021) Zavagno, LucaItem Open Access Urbanism in the Byzantine heartland and the coastal/ insular koine(Palgrave Pivot, 2021-10-07) Zavagno, LucaThis chapter will navigate through the many incarnations of Byzantine urbanism in three different geographical areas of the empire: Anatolia and Aegean (the two constitutive pillars of the Byzantine heartland) and the so-called insular/coastal koine. Each of these played a changing and diverse role in the political, administrative, fiscal, and military strategies of the empire, as well as betraying peculiar economies of scale. It will examine by proposing a brief historical and archaeological overview of a selection of urban centers in different geographical contexts. This should help the reader see through the various functional trajectories of the Byzantine city (sometimes contemporary, sometimes diachronic) from a comparative perspective. It allows to extrapolate the reality of Byzantine urbanism from the historiographical and terminological debate as presented by the literary sources.