Mobility and Materiality in Byzantine-Islamic Relations, 7th to 12th Centuries

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Notes on transliteration

List of figures and maps

List of Abbreviations

Part 1: A bird’s-eye view

Chapter 1. Introduction: materiality and mobility as transformative processes

Koray Durak and Nevra Necipoğlu 

Chapter 2. An external perspective on internal matters: exchange systems, mobility and materiality in social sciences and Byzantine Studies

Koray Durak

Part 2: Mobile states, porous spaces, controlled exchanges

Chapter 3. Byzantines and Muslims in Crete before and after the conquest (ca. 824)

Salvatore Cosentino 

Chapter 4. ‘Encounters at the end of the world’: mobility and cross-cultural interactions on Byzantine islands from an archaeological perspective (ca. 550–850)

Luca Zavagno 

Chapter 5. Exchange and mobility in the Byzantine-Seljuk borderland of twelfth-century Asia Minor

Alexander D. Beihammer

Part 3: Moving objects that tell moving stories

Chapter 6. Islamic presence in the Byzantine Aegean: the numismatic evidence (eighth–twelfth centuries)

Pagona Papadopoulou 

Chapter 7. Mapping the movement of materiality: ceramics crossing the Byzantine-Islamic frontier (ca. seventh–eleventh centuries)

Joanita Vroom

Part 4: Ideology and identity made visible through the material

Chapter 8. Conveying valuable and bulky objects by diplomatic means between Byzantium and the Islamic world: some considerations

Nicolas Drocourt 

Chapter 9. The chalice with hares: Islamic art in the middle Byzantine church and court

Evan Freeman 

Chapter 10. Triangulating Umayyad mosaics between Byzantium and the Abbasids

Alexander Brey

Part 5: Travelling clergy, shared knowledge and consumed tastes

Chapter 11. Religious conflict and mobility in the early medieval Near East: Byzantium and the Melkites during the ‘Photian schism’

Federico Montinaro 

Chapter 12. The Melkites of Syria in the Ayyubid period: institutions, scholarship and elites between Byzantium and the Islamicate world

Johannes Pahlitzsch 

Chapter 13. Food mobilities between the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds: trends in high-value food consumption, seventh to twelfth centuries

Maria Leontsini and Ilias Anagnostakis

Part 6: Conclusion 

Chapter 14. Navigating the twelve contributions on exchange, mobility and materiality: assessing the present and envisioning the future

Koray Durak

Biography

Koray Durak is Associate Professor of history at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. He specialises in Byzantine-Islamic economic relations, the commercial history of Constantinople, Byzantine pharmacology and the history of Byzantine Studies in modern Turkey. His publications include ‘The commercial history of Trebizond and the region of Pontos from the seventh to the eleventh centuries’, Mediterranean Historical Review (2021), ‘Commercial Constantinople’, in The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople (2022), ‘Healing gifts: the role of diplomatic gift exchange in the movement of materia medica between the Byzantine and Islamic worlds’, in Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean (2024) and a monograph titled The Odyssey of Byzantine Studies in Turkey (2023).

Nevra Necipoğlu is Professor of history at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. She is a founding member and general secretary of the Turkish National Committee for Byzantine Studies since 2001. Her monograph Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire was published in 2009. She also edited and co-edited several books, including Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life (2001), and published numerous articles on late Byzantine social and economic history, Byzantine-Seljuk and Byzantine-Ottoman relations, and the urban history of Constantinople and Thessalonike during the Palaiologan period. She is currently working on a monograph on the social topography of late Byzantine Constantinople.