The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 5 in the catalogue includes seals with place names from the East, Constantinople and its environs, and seals with uncertain readings. Each section begins with a short essay on the region’s history. Each seal is illustrated and is accompanied—where appropriate—by full commentary regarding the specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and special features of iconography. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

Dumbarton Oaks houses the largest collection of Byzantine lead seals in the world, with approximately 17,000 specimens. Volume 7 of the ongoing series of Dumbarton Oaks catalogues presents a distinct part of the collection: 572 anonymous seals bearing sacred images on both sides. The seals, almost all previously unpublished, are fully illustrated and accompanied by a detailed commentary that provides transcriptions of the identifying sigla. This volume represents the first attempt to analyze this group of seals chronologically and typologically.

The depictions of Christ, the Virgin, and a remarkably wide array of saints and narrative scenes offer rich and untapped material for scholars interested in Byzantine piety and culture. Discernible trends within this body of seals help to track the popularity of various saints and the changes in devotional images over time. The variety of these images, enhanced by reference to examples in other collections, will also enable scholars to compare the renderings of holy figures on lead seals to those appearing in other Byzantine religious images.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 6 in the catalogue presents the seals of emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople. Imperial seals are presented in conjunction with a representative coin of the appropriate emperor or empress to help the reader compare the iconography. Also included are select seals from patriarchs of Constantinople. More than 250 seals are illustrated and accompanied—where appropriate—by a full commentary regarding each specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and iconographic features. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

The vast collection of 17,000 Byzantine lead seals in the Harvard collections has long been recognized as an important source for the study of the Byzantine provinces. This volume is the fourth in the series of catalogues of geographical seals, and presents photographs, descriptions, and commentaries on the seals from the East.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 3 in the catalogue includes seals with place names from west, northwest, and central Asia Minor and the Orient. Each section begins with a short essay on the region’s history. Each seal is illustrated and is accompanied—where appropriate—by full commentary regarding the specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and special features of iconography. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 2 in the catalogue includes seals with place names from south of the Balkans, the islands, and the south of Asia Minor. Each section begins with a short essay on the region’s history. Each seal is illustrated and is accompanied—where appropriate—by full commentary regarding the specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and special features of iconography. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

The vast collection of 17,000 Byzantine lead seals in the Harvard collections has long been recognized as an important source for the study of the Byzantine provinces. This volume, the first in a series of catalogues of geographical seals, covers the Empire’s western territories and its possessions North of Thessaly.

The sections begin with a short essay on the region’s location and history. Each seal is illustrated and is accompanied—where appropriate—by full commentary regarding the specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and special features of iconography. These small seals are a large contribution to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine provincial administration, prosopography, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

This catalogue focuses on numismatic gold jewelry, from pendants set with coins and medallions to stamped pseudo-medallions, or a combination of both. Special attention is given to the technical issues of mounting techniques.

The De Administrando Imperio, compiled by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century, is one of the most important historical documents surviving from the middle Byzantine period, containing a wide variety of information on foreign relations and internal administration. The critical text of the De Administrando Imperio, edited by Gyula Moravcsik and translated by R. J. H. Jenkins (Dumbarton Oaks Texts), is now joined by the commentary, written in 1962 by a team of eminent scholars led by Jenkins. Long out of print, the Jenkins commentary remains the most thorough and authoritative study of this significant medieval text, and it is now republished as a companion volume to the critical text and translation. In addition to extensive commentary on the historical, geographical, and philological nuances of the Greek text, this volume contains a bibliography, map, indexes, and genealogical charts.

Recent decades have seen great progress made in scholarship towards understanding the major civic role played by bishops of the eastern and western churches of Late Antiquity. Brownen Neil and Pauline Allen explore and evaluate one aspect of this civic role, the negotiation of religious conflict.

Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church focuses on the period 500 to 700 CE, one of the least documented periods in the history of the church, but also one of the most formative, whose conflicts resonate still in contemporary Christian communities, especially in the Middle East.

To uncover the hidden history of this period and its theological controversies, Neil and Allen have tapped a little known written source, the letters that were exchanged by bishops, emperors and other civic leaders of the sixth and seventh centuries. This was an era of crisis for the Byzantine empire, at war first with Persia, and then with the Arab forces united under the new faith of Islam. Official letters were used by the churches of Rome and Constantinople to pursue and defend their claims to universal and local authority, a constant source of conflict. As well as the east-west struggle, Christological disagreements with the Syrian church demanded increasing attention from the episcopal and imperial rulers in Constantinople, even as Rome set itself adrift and looked to the West for new allies.

From this troubled period, 1500 letters survive in Greek, Latin, and Syriac. With translations of a number of these, many rendered into English for the first time, Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church examines the ways in which diplomatic relations between churches were developed, and in some cases hindered or even permanently ruptured, through letter-exchange at the end of Late Antiquity.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan—Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the “modern” era.

This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the “Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

At the age of twenty-two, Andronicus II became sole ruler of Byzantium. His father, Michael VIII, had been a dashing figure--a good soldier, brilliant diplomat, and the liberator of Constantinople from its fifty-seven-year Latin occupation. By contrast Andronicus seemed colorless and ineffectual. His problems were immense--partly as a result of his father's policies--and his reign proved to be a series of frustrations and disasters.

For forty-six years he fought to preserve the empire against constantencroachments. When he was finally deposed in 1328 by his grandson and co-emperor, Andronicus III, almost all of Asia Minor had been lost to the Turks, Westerners had taken over the defense of the Aegean, and the Catalan army he had invited to help him fight the Turks remained to fight the emperor.

In this penetrating account of Andronicus' foreign policy, Angeliki E. Laiou focuses on Byzantium's relations with the Latin West, the far-reaching domestic implications of the hostility of western Europe, and the critical decision that faced Andronicus: whether to follow his father's lead and allow Byzantium to become a European state or to keep it an Eastern, orthodox power.

The author, who argues that foreign policy cannot be understood without examining the domestic factors that influence, indeed create, it, devotes a large part of her study to domestic developments in Byzantium during Andronicus' reign-the decline of the power of the central government; the spread of semi-independent regional authorities; the state of finances, of the army, of the church.

She concludes that, contrary to common opinion, Andronicus II sincerely desired the union of the Greek and Latin churches, when, in the last years of his reign, he realized that the political situation made such a union necessary. Maintaining also that the conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks was not a foregone conclusion when Andronicus II came to the throne, she discusses at length the errors of policy and the manifold circumstances which combined to precipitate that loss.

Deno John Geanakoplos demonstrates the fusion of Byzantine and Latin cultural and ecelsiastical relations in the Renaissance.

The Short History of Nikephoros of Constantinople is one of the key sources for our understanding of Byzantine history in the eighth century. This book offers a close look at that volume and its manner of representing the historical role of Byzantine emperors and ecclesiology, with particular attention to the use of images, an issue of central importance amid the period's first outburst of iconoclasm. When seen through this lens, the Short History is revealed to be more engaged with and burdened by contemporary political and ecclesiastical strife than has previously been thought.

The Taktika, ascribed to the hand of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI "the Wise" (886-912), is perhaps one of the best-known middle Byzantine texts of an official or semi-official genre. Presented in the form of a book of guidance for provincial generals, it served as both a statement of imperial authority and power, as well as a reminder of earlier "good practice" and the centrality of the values of a Christian society in the struggle against its enemies. In particular, the Taktika identified Islam, for the first time, as a fundamental threat to the very existence of the Christian Roman Empire and Christianity itself. Yet despite its significance for the history of Byzantine administration, culture, language, and society, no study has ever been devoted to this fascinating text. John Haldon offers the first critical commentary to appear in any language, addressing in detail the many varied subjects touched on in the treatise itself and accompanied by three introductory chapters that examine the context, sources, language, structure and content of the text, as well as the military administration of the empire in Leo's time.