Browsing by Author "Zavagno, Luca"

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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, Luca
This 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.
Open Access
The Byzantine city: a symphony in three movements
(Palgrave Pivot, 2021-10-07) Zavagno, Luca
This 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 level
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.
Open Access
Cross-cultural encounters on Byzantine Islands (ca.600–ca.900) : an archaeological perspective
(Routledge, 2025-01-02) Zavagno, Luca; Fregulia, Jeanette M.
From late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, it was on the islands of the Mediterranean that many of the important moments in Byzantine political history unfolded. 1 Despite their importance, the islands of the Mediterranean have been dismissed in Byzantine historiography as isolated and peripheral places. 2 Notwithstanding their importance for the histoire événementielle de Byzance (in other words, the evental history of Byzantium as based on a short-term timescale) more often than not Byzantine historians have focused their attention on the so-called Byzantine heartland, a region made up of the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean. 3 Because of this focus, other regions, particularly the islands, which remained under the rule of Constantinople, were regarded as marginal to any understanding of the political, social, and economic changes the Byzantine heartland experienced from the second half of the seventh century onward. This chapter seeks to reassess the role of islands as central to the administrative, military, economic, and religious trajectories of the Byzantine empire; Sardinia, Cyprus, Balearics, Crete, and partially Sicily did not simply guard the access routes to the central and eastern Mediterranean Sea, they also lay at the interface between different sociopolitical and economic systems, acting as important stages for cross-cultural encounters in a medieval Mediterranean understood in part by its connectivities. 4 First, however, an introduction to the role of some islands between 600 and 900 is useful.
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.
Open Access
General Conclusions
(Palgrave Pivot, 2021-10-07) Zavagno, Luca
This 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.
Open Access
“Going to the extremes”: the Balearics and Cyprus in the early medieval Byzantine insular system
(Routledge, 2019-04) Zavagno, Luca
This 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.
Open Access
Insular urbanism in Byzantium
(Routledge, 2024-01-31) Zavagno, Luca; Bakirtzis, Nikolas; Zavagno, Luca
Traditionally, islands have not attracted a good deal of attention on the part of Byzantine historiography. In truth, if one leaves aside the pulverized constellation of islets dotting the Aegean basin, which was regarded as part and parcel of the Byzantine heartland in the seventh to ninth century and the real economic pillar of the empire from the tenth century till 1204, the islands of Byzantine Mediterranean have been regarded as mere distant outposts and peripheral worlds. Although an all-encompassing alternative to the only existing systematic account on the history of the Byzantine insular world has yet to be produced, scholars like Salvatore Cosentino, Enrico Zanini, and Myrto Veikou have recently tried to re-assess the role of islands in the Byzantine Medieval Mediterranean. Indeed, it is important to stress the location of insular urban sites along the so-called maritime continuation of the “frontiers” of the Byzantine Empire.
Open Access
Introducing the Byzantine city, its histories, ideas and realities
(Routledge, 2024-01-31) Bakirtzis, Nikolas; Zavagno, Luca; Bakirtzis, Nikolas; Zavagno, Luca
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the history and the realities of the Byzantine city proposing a multifaceted overview of the Byzantine urban phenomenon rather than singling out the trajectories and development of specific sites and regions. It attempts to stress the resilience of urban lifestyle and the centrality of fabric and architecture to the political and social life of cities in the Medieval period and beyond. The book then points to the importance of addressing the regional diversity of Byzantine urban life as well as carefully navigating through what has been hastily labeled as the ruralization, militarization, and decline of the city in the so-called Dark Ages of Byzantium. It also looks at the last centuries of Byzantium through its cities, thus highlighting their central role through the arrival of the Ottomans and beyond.
Open Access
Introduction: A Mediterranean of traveling faces and ideas
(ICSR Mediterranean Knowledge, 2016) Çaykent, Özlem; Zavagno, Luca; Çaykent, Özlem; Zavagno, Luca
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, Luca
Byzantine 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.
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.
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, Luca
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.
Open Access
‘My name is Euphemios…. Euphemios of Amastris’: memories of a eunuch at his emperor(s)' service in the Byzantine insular and Coastal koine (ca. 680–ca. 740)
(Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Zavagno, Luca
This chapter will focus on the career of a eunuch of the Koiton or Cubiculum (the imperial bedchamber). Born in Amastris in Paphlagonia in the late seventh century, Euphemios's castration was arranged by his parents and moved to Constantinople, where he served at court under several emperors in the turbulent period following the arrival of the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean. As the Byzantine empire struggled for its life by drastically rearranging its political, administrative, bureaucratic, and military structures, Euphemios acted as a trustworthy agent and loyal servant to several Byzantine emperors. As he managed to go through all the stages of Byzantine education (from primary to high school), he secured a position at the imperial shipyards of the capital. As the emperor Justinian II rewards him for exposing a conspiracy, Euphemios starts globetrotting across the Mediterranean while at the same time managing to climb his way up the offices of the central Byzantine administration. As Euphemios's fictional life is based on hagiographical sources, Byzantine chronicles, material evidence (seals), and archaeology, this chapter will account for his travels, deeds, and encounters across some important gateway and urban communities of the so-called Byzantine koine. This encompassed liminal insular and coastal urban (and urban-like) communities while also promoting economic interaction, social contact, and cultural interchange. Euphemios's career path and travels on behalf of the Constantinopolitan court took him to Cyprus, Butrint (where he supervised the consignment of supply to the local garrison), Malta (where he helped local military authority in the negotiations with the rising Muslim power in north Africa), Sardinia (where he brokered appeasement between Sardinian political leaders and the Papacy), the Balearics, Amalfi (where he delivered messages granting a pompous Byzantine title to the local ruler), Syracuse (where he was appointed as local stratēgos), and, finally, Ravenna (where he occupied the prestigious role of exarch during the final decades of Byzantine rulership and died just a few years before the capital of Byzantine Italy fell to the Lombards in 751).
Open Access
Preface
(Springer Nature, 2021) Zavagno, Luca
Open Access
The Byzantine city and its historiography
(Routledge, 2024-01-31) Zavagno, Luca; Bakirtzis, Nikolas; Zavagno, Luca
This chapter offers an overview of the most important historiographic contributions on the Byzantine city as they encompass a wide methodological and disciplinary array of scholarly expertise: from history to archeology, from literature to hagiography, from material culture to legal studies. Lopez Quiroga stresses the importance of Christianization in molding the post-Roman urban socio-economic and structural landscape.48 He also compares specifically regional outcomes of urbanism in the West and East to conclude that the archeological record does not allow to talk of any break or abandonment but rather of an adaptation transforming classical urban areas in “Byzantine cities.” Zanini also questions the terminological and semantic aspect of the word city in defining a new conceptual model of post-sixth-century Byzantine city. This allows him to describe both the new characteristics and old features of Byzantine urbanism: small, fortified, Christian, and imperial centers.
Open Access
The Byzantine insular countryside in the early middle ages (ca. 600-ca.900): The cases of Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete in (partial) light of environmental archaeology
(Routledge journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd., 2024-09-17) Zavagno, Luca
This paper provides an overview of rural surveys and environmental archaeology studies on Sicily, Cyprus and Crete during the Byzantine Empire. It re-evaluates traditional interpretations of agricultural settlement patterns, ecosystems and populations from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (late sixth to late ninth century). The prevailing narrative that these islands were devastated by Arab incursions, leading to widespread depopulation, economic collapse and abandonment of rural sites in favour of fortified hilltop settlements, is questioned. Instead, the study employs a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, combining environmental and climatic data with historical and archaeological evidence. This method offers a more nuanced understanding of how insular rural societies adapted to changing environmental and human conditions during the Byzantine Empire's transition from an economically unified region to a fragmented Medieval Mediterranean. The findings highlight the resilient nature of land use and rural settlement patterns amidst the transformation of the empire's political, military and administrative structures.
Restricted
The Routledge handbook of the Byzantine city: from Justinian to Mehmet ii (ca. 500 – ca. 1500)
(Routledge, 2024-01-01) Bakirtzis, Nikolas; Zavagno, Luca
The Byzantine world contained many important cities throughout its empire. Although it was not ‘urban’ in the sense of the word today, its cities played a far more fundamental role than those of its European neighbors. This book, through a collection of twenty-four chapters, discusses aspects of, and different approaches to, Byzantine urbanism from the early to late Byzantine periods. It provides both a chronological and thematic perspective to the study of Byzantine cities, bringing together literary, documentary, and archival sources with archaeological results, material culture, art, and architecture, resulting in a rich synthesis of the variety of regional and sub-regional transformations of Byzantine urban landscapes. Organized into four sections, this book covers: Theory and Historiography, Geography and Economy, Architecture and the Built Environment, and Daily Life and Material Culture. It includes more specialized accounts that address the centripetal role of Constantinople and its broader influence across the empire. Such new perspectives help to challenge the historiographical balance between ‘margins and metropolis, ’ and also to include geographical areas often regarded as peripheral, like the coastal urban centers of the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as cities on islands, such as Crete, Cyprus, and Sicily which have more recently yielded well-excavated and stratigraphically sound urban sites. The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City provides both an overview and detailed study of the Byzantine city to specialist scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike and, therefore, will appeal to all those interested in Byzantine urbanism and society, as well as those studying medieval society in general. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Nikolas Bakirtzis and Luca Zavagno; individual chapters, the contributors.
Open Access
'The sublime objects of liminality': the Byzantine insular-coastal koine and its administration in the passage from late antiquity to the early middle ages (ca. 600-ca. 850)
(Cambridge University Press, 2024-03-08) Zavagno, Luca
This paper focuses on the historical development and dynamics of political and administrative structures in regions of a fragmented empire that cannot be simply described as marginal 'mouseholes'. Rather, it should be acknowledged that these spaces were part and parcel of a wider area (the Byzantine insular and coastal koine), which encompassed coastal areas as well as insular communities promoting socio-economic contact and cultural interchange. More importantly, they also boasted a peculiar set of material indicators suggesting a certain common cultural unity and identity. The koine coincided with liminal territories and the seas on which the Byzantine Empire retained political and naval rulership. Such liminal territories showed varied - yet coherent- administrative infrastructures and political practices on the part of local elites.