Dionysios Stathakopoulos

The dialectics of expansion and retraction: recent scholarship on the Palaiologan aristocracy

In the first half of the fifteenth century a man donated an icon to the monastery of Mega Spelaion at Kalavryta; his name was less an instrument of identification than a manifesto of social association: John Tornikes Doukas Angelos Palaiologos Raoul Laskaris Philanthropenos Asanes.1 To judge from the chain of such resounding names of the leading late Byzantine families he clearly belonged to the dominant class of his time, and since nothing else is known of him, for lack of more precise social coordinates, we surely must count him among the aristocracy. Can we take an educated guess at what constituted a person of such social standing? He must have owned land; he probably held some office, while the accumulation of all his names points to marriage alliances between families of similar social standing. None of these assumptions suggests anything new about the aristocracy of the Palaiologan period, and yet, the overview that will follow aims to disclose exactly that: the points in which this era brought forth new developments that challenge the (thankfully dwindling) misconception of Byzantium as a state in which hardly anything changed. In 1973 Angeliki Laiou published her important article on the Palaiologan aristocracy. In twenty dense pages she made a number of remarks and reached several important conclusions that have influenced the direction of scholarship on the topic. As such it is worth summarizing these conclusions briefly. Late Byzantine aristocracy was decidedly not a nobility — it was not ‘a hereditary caste, whose rights and privileges are safeguarded by law’.2 Its members were landowners, active in the imperial administration, the army and the government of cities. It was not a homogenous group, but was divided into subgroups. At the top of the hierarchy were the few great families of the high aristocracy: ‘a small group of families, very rich, very active in the running of the government, linked by marriage alliances, and proud of their heritage, which they thought conferred on them all sorts of privileges as well as duties and

Discovering a military order of the crusades : The hospital of St. Sampson of Constantinople

When the Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204, they converted a Byzantine hospital, the xenon of St. Sampson, into a Western hospitale, a hostel for poor and/or sick pilgrims, which was soon organized as the basis of a military order, attracting numerous donations. Prominent among them was the property given in Douai (Flanders) by the Latin archbishop of Thessalonica, aiming to create a daughter institution that would serve the local poor. This house flourished throughout the thirteenth century, then faced serious problems that led to its incorporation into the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. When the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople in 1261, the brothers of St. Sampson fled to Corinth, where they built another hospital. This structure has been recently excavated, revealing a multi-purpose unit wherein people received medical care, while the house served the public in numerous (including commercial) ways.

Sticks and Stones: Byzantine Material Culture

Abstract Suddenly last summer, research on Byzantine Material Culture, La belle aux bois dormant, was awakened from a prolonged siesta. In the 20th International Congress of Byzantine Studies held in Paris two papers were given in an attempt to chart out the progress made in this particular field in the past decades. T. Kolias assembled the various projects undertaken by individuals or institutions dealing with the different aspects of Byzantine daily life and material culture. M. Mundell Mango focused more on the archaeological evidence at hand and illustrated through the examples of architecture and industrial products how these could be used to detect and explain the interaction between centre and periphery. Just two weeks later, in September 2001 a conference entitled ‘Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453)’ was organised in Cambridge. A number of suggestions were made during the conference, as for example to initiate a website to host a continuously updateable bibliography and to act...