This research strand explores the significance of Byzantium as a cultural and socioeconomic phenomenon within the context of the Global Middle Ages – beyond political, linguistic or religious borders and beyond disciplinary boundaries. It focuses on the mobility of people, texts and ideas, but also of objects, crops, animals or pathogens – and on the borderlands between Byzantium and neighbouring imperial, cultural or religious spheres, which thereby become visible as “central peripheries” of interaction and exchange. These contact zones include the Danube Lands (and the impact of Byzantium on Austria from the Middle Ages until today), Byzantine and post-Byzantine Anatolia and the Christian and Muslim Near East, as well as Crimea and the Caucasus as interfaces to Inner Eurasia.
Furthermore, Byzantium is not analysed in isolation, but in comparison with polities and communities across AfroEurAsia from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (and beyond in its cultural heritage). This comparison also includes the interplay between human and non-human actors, landscapes and climates across the various ecozones from the Danube to the Nile and from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus and Central Asia.
At the core of the working group “Byzantium and Beyond” is a network of interconnected projects and digital text corpora in various languages of medieval Western AfroEurAsia, targeting a diversity of genres of texts and documents. These include charters and historiographies in Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Persian (András Barati, Ephrem Aboud Ishac, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Rustam Shukurov), medical and other scientific literature in Syriac, studied as a bridge between the Classical Greek tradition and the Islamic world (Gregory Kessel), Syriac manuscripts and palimpsests, especially the Melkite collection of Sinai and its cross-connections with other Christian manuscript traditions (Gregory Kessel), liturgical texts in Syriac (Ephrem Aboud Ishac) as well as colophons (as important sources for the histories of manuscripts and the communities in which they emerged) in Armenian (Lewis Read), and Syriac with Garshuni-Arabic (Arabic written in Syriac script, Ephrem Aboud Ishac).
The research on these materials integrates digital tools beyond data collection, such as AI-supported Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR, especially for Syriac script by Ephrem Aboud Ishac and Armenian majuscule script by Lewis Read) or the adaptation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the exploration of text corpora, but also network analysis and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). New methods of data sciences are developed in cooperation with the Complexity Science Hub (Vienna) and the Data Lab of the Ludwig Boltzmann-Institute for Network Medicine. Furthermore, the collected evidence serves as a basis for digital prosopography (the systematic survey of individuals of the past) within the PLAS-Database and the PROSOPON-Initiative (in cooperation with Ekaterini Mitsiou, University of Vienna).
Explorations of the environmental and climate history of Byzantium and the Global Middle Ages are the starting point for interdisciplinary and international cooperations with specialists from natural sciences, such as palaeoclimatology, vulcanology, epidemiology and palaeogenetics. Some of these activities are coordinated within the “Climate Change and History Research Initiative”, originating from Princeton University, for which the working group “Byzantium & Beyond” serves as the anchor point of the Vienna Node.
By combining these layers of textual transmissions, historical evidence and natural scientific data with a constantly expanding methodological toolkit, “Byzantium & Beyond” is a laboratory for the exploration of the interaction and interplay between Byzantium and its cultural, geopolitical and natural environment and the long-term impacts of these dynamics up until today. The research strand is also closely connected to research networks such as the FWF-Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformations” and participating in a wide range of outreach activities and media cooperations.
Mobility and Intercultural Contacts
Borderlands and Contact Zones: Byzantium, the Caucasus and the Danube Lands
