Article of the Month - October 2023
 “Mobility and migration in Byzantium: who gets to tell the story?”
(Claudia Rapp: Byzantine Studies, University of Vienna)

Claudia Rapp, "Mobility and migration in Byzantium: who gets to tell the story?," Early Medieval Europe 31 (2023 31): 360–3.

Read the article here.

Keywords: Byzantium • mobility • migration • historical sources.

Abstract:
This article underlines the importance of approaching written sources for what they are: authorial constructs. This is true also for depictions of mobility and migration. Byzantine authors instrumentalized these for their own purposes beyond the event at hand. Authorial focus, along with the requirements of the chosen literary genre, is also the reason for the different scales of actors that appear in these texts, whether large blurry masses of nameless people, smaller groups with a distinct profile, or finely drawn individuals.

Nomination Statement:
Byzantium is the great absence from discussion of pre-modern mobility around the Mediterranean and indeed across Eurasia more widely. What work that specialists have done on Byzantine mobility is often unnoticed by historians of other areas. It tends, moreover, to be based on a predictable range of sources. The archaeology of material culture of course has its contribution to make. So too do such techniques as strontium isotope analysis. But we rely for the most part on written evidence, and we need more of it. We also need sustained attention to the question of agency and to the scale of the movements involved. This short but wide-ranging paper, by a world leading Byzantinist, presents some of the fruits of a large collaborative project to assemble the written evidence for personal movement, voluntary and involuntary, in Byzantium from the seventh to the fifteenth century, and to interpret each text in the light of its genre and purpose. Read it in conjunction with the wonderful open access source book that the project has generated.

Author’s Comment:
The article emerged from my work, with a team of fine scholars and financed through the Wittgenstein-Award of the FWF, on creating Mobility and Migration in Byzantium: A Sourcebook (2023). For that purpose, we worked hard to identify a wide range of source texts that represent the experience of the widest possible range of people, according to gender, social status, regional, ethnic and religious identity and so forth. Given the fact that mobility of all kinds is frequent in Byzantine society, it is puzzling that it is relatively rarely addressed in the written record. This is the starting point for the article, which has its origin as a lecture at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds sponsored by the journal Early Medieval Europe, where it is published (vol. 31/3) along with other relevant contributions by Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold, Paraskevi Sykopetritou, Grigori Simeonov, and Christodoulos Papavarnavas.

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