The 13th century CE was a period of dramatic transformation for the societies of Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204), the Mongol conquests of the Seljuk Sultanate (1243) and Baghdad (1258) or the Mamluks coming into power in Egypt (1250) unsettling socio-political structures. While selected aspects have been addressed, a systematic comparison on how the polities of Anatolia tried to reconstruct their power networks within the framework of their perception of world order is missing.
The project ENCHANT, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (P 36403-G) for the years 2023-2026, aims to provide such a comparison based on a systematic survey of important artefacts of these efforts, i. e. the documents issued by the state chancelleries of the Byzantine “empires in exile” of Nicaea and Trebizond, Cilician Armenia and the Seljuk Sultanate. The project provides a digital catalogue, a corpus of those documents whose texts have been transmitted at least in significant parts, and a number of publications presenting a comparative analysis of these multifaceted acts of “world (re)ordering” after crisis.
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (PI, OEAW)
András Barati (project collaborator, OEAW)
Samvel L. Grigoryan (project collaborator, UCLA Los Angeles)
Ekaterini Mitsiou (project collaborator, University of Vienna)
Rustam Shukurov (project collaborator, OEAW)