Within the human landscape of mobility which characterised the Byzantine Empire, books and documents played a crucial mediating role. As Ronconi and Papaioannou (2021) have stressed, books set people in motion—scribes, owners, patrons, and customers moving within networks of book production and use, seeking materials and models—and they also travelled with those people, preserving traces of their itineraries. Shaped within the sociographic framework outlined by Maniaci (2002, 2015), Gastgeber (2024) and others (Bausi et al. 2015), the Byzantine book also emerges as an essential vessel of mobility: a container of social, cultural, and intellectual practices, of ideas and authority, that could be transmitted and re-embedded within and beyond the empire. 

In this context, translation offers an ideal vantage point from which to study both the human mobility and the mobility of ideas surrounding Byzantine book culture from a non-Greek perspective. On one level, translation stimulated the movement of multilingual agents—translators, scribes and patrons—who travelled to Constantinople, the Black Mountain or other centres to access Greek books. On another level, translation drove the circulation and reshaping of ideas, as the contents of Greek books were rendered into other languages and appropriated by communities outside the political and confessional core of the Empire. Translation from Greek thus becomes both a driver of human mobility and a catalyst for the circulation of ideas. 

My research within the framework of “Mobility and Migration in Byzantium: The Outside Perspective” explores the movement of people in Byzantium through the lens of translation activity preserved in Armenian and Christian Arabic sources between the tenth and twelfth centuries. The first case explores rhythmic translations of sacred literature into Arabic and Armenian in eleventh-century Constantinople, whilst the second focuses on the translation and rewriting of the Life of John Chrysostom in Greek, Armenian, and Arabic between the tenth and twelfth centuries.