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This is a (first attempt at a) diplomatic game meant for seminar-sized classes to strengthen their grasp of early medieval geo-politics. Please feel free to correct, adapt, or otherwise modify as you wish—it is hardly perfect, though my students were unanimous that it was both fun and educational. I adapted it myself from the Napoleonic diplomacy game created by my colleagues at West Point, and used by some instructors to simulate coalition warfare in 1813. In the medieval case, of course, there are no clear coalitions, complicating things considerably. I happened on 821 CE somewhat by accident, but I think it turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence, since as you can see in the “country” overview below a number of interesting political developments were taking place in this year. Hence the title of the scenario is deliberately evocative of Traina’s brilliant book 428 AD. I framed the title in both Roman Christian and Islamic calendars to stress the multiple cultures of the (European) Middle Ages, especially around the Mediterranean.
This book is intended for any person interested in history of the beginning of Europe in Caucasus and place of Georgia in modern Europe, for students, tourists and others.
This dissertation argues that the slave trade can be seen as providing a critical framework for understanding the economic and cultural developments of a time of rapid and dramatic changes within the cultures and economies of what had been the Roman Empire. To make this case, it will be demonstrated that neither the ascendance of Christianity nor the barbarian invasions nor even the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had changed the fundamental role of slavery in the centuries after Constantine. While slavery was vital to all the economies and societies of the period, it will be argued, a large-scale slave trade was necessary for the continued prosperity of the most developed economic regions as internal sources for slaves were insufficient to meet demand. By demonstrating the economic necessity, a crucial driving mechanism for long-distance systems of exchange within the Mediterranean world after the collapse of the western Roman fiscal system and its economy of bulk-exchange will be provided. Changes in the slave trade during the seventh century will be shown as being one of the key forces in the disintegration of Mediterranean cultural unity. New patterns would ultimately emerge that would lead to the beginning of the medieval trading cycle. These ideas are demonstrated by re-reading Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources and searching for the connections between them, by re-examining archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic data and placing them in context, and by using analogous evidence and arguments from other periods and using them to investigate possibilities. Together, these allow for an innovative and bold reappraisal of the slave-systems and trade in a critical period that has not been previously argued. Prior scholarship has not attempted to address either the ubiquity of slavery or the extent of the slave trade in the period nor has anyone examined the slave-trading systems of the long seventh century itself by bringing together materials from the whole of the post-Roman world into a single coherent account. By doing so, this dissertation breaks new ground while creating an original synthesis and reconciliation between the interpretations of the economics of the end of the Roman Empire and the formation of the medieval world.
The current chapter represents a first effort to map the research field of civil war as a distinct political and military phenomenon that marked the history of the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages. If the majority of the rebellions that resulted in a civil war in the Constantinopolitan emperor’s realm between the 4th and the 12th century aimed at the usurpation of the imperial throne, that is, the reproduction of the imperial system, the increasing number of internal conflicts after the late-11th century whose aim was provincial autonomy or semi-autonomy from centralized rule points to the phenomenon’s importance in explaining the process of political fragmentation of the East Roman world that culminated in 1204.
This paper aims to discuss the importance of diplomacy as a major factor in the survival of the Byzantine Empire for 1123 years – from the inauguration of the empire’s capital, Constantinople on May 11, 330 CE, until the fall of Constantinople and, consequently, the Byzantine Empire to the hands of the Ottomans on May 29, 1453. It was one of the longest lasting social organisations in history. Byzantium survived through adaptation and diplomacy. The backbone of Byzantium’s longevity was its administration, which managed to adapt to frequent changes of rulers, and ongoing crises on its borders. With a very limited military force and ongoing crises on its borders, diplomacy was the key for the empire’s survival.
This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry… The Khazars' sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain. In the second part of this book, " The Heritage, " Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term " anti-Semitism " would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based " on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated. " ISBN 0-394-40284-7
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