Cross-cultural encounters on Byzantine Islands (ca.600–ca.900) an archaeological perspective

Abstract

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.