Medieval Prosopography

The book examines the moneyers, those men responsible for minting the king’s coinage, within developing urban society in England during the tenth and eleventh centuries to address both their status and whether the internal workplace organisation of the mints might reflect the complexity of an Anglo-Saxon ‘state’.  In reviewing the minting operation of late Anglo-Saxon England, and the men in charge of those mints, a better picture of the social history of pre-Conquest England is realised.  These men were likely part of the thegnly or burgess class and how they organised themselves might reflect broader trends in how those outside of the aristocracy acted in response to royal directives.  The book outlines a new and innovative method of analysing the organisation of labour in Medieval England.  These new techniques and methodologies provide support for a previously unknown level of complexity in English minting.
Accompanying the book are several digital downloads, including the Moneyers of England Database, 973-1086, consisting of information on 3,646 periods of moneyer activity derived from 28,576 individual coins produced at ninety-nine geographic locations.

This volume presents the first results of the TAKTIKON Research Project on the administration and prosopography of the Byzantine themata, which is realised at the Academy of Athens by Olga Karagiorgou (Principal Investigator), Christos Malatras and Pantelis Charalampakis, as well as the communications of a relevant One-day International Workshop.

The introductory chapter (Part I) describes the aims and the methodological principles of the TAKTIKON Research Project, addresses some key questions concerning the institution of the Byzantine themata in relation to the results presented in the volume, and offers a description of the TAKTIKON online database (O. Karagiorgou).

Part II includes a paper on the terms “Eoa, Anatole, Anatolikoi” in the Byzantine literary tradition (A. Kontogiannopoulou), and detailed studies on the strategoi of Hellas (O. Karagiorgou), and the prosopography and administrative structure of Opsikion (C. Malatras), the Anatolikoi (C. Malatras), and the Kibyrraiotai (P. Charalampakis), based on the evidence of sigillographic and non-sigillographic sources. The studies on Hellas and the three Asia Minor themata are accompanied by detailed chronological catalogues of thematic officials and complete records of a total of 1110 relevant thematic molybdoboulla. These were put together by the TAKTIKON research team during inspection of sigillographic collections and the meticulous study of relevant publications. More than 80 (published and unpublished) state and private sigillographic collections in 17 countries, as well as the (printed and online) sale catalogues of more than 40 auction houses have been studied, so far, for the purposes of the TAKTIKON Research Project. 

Parts III and IV of the volume present papers by the participants of the One-day International Workshop at the Academy of Athens: N. Alekseienko (Correspondents of Byzantine Cherson), O. Alf’orov (Seals of Eustratios Chrysoberges), V. Bulgurlu (Seals from the Museum of Miletos), J.-C. Cheynet (Sceaux parisiens; Sceaux dans la collection Savvas Kofopoulos, Lesbos), N. Elam (Seals from eleven museums in Turkey), E. Güzel Erdoğan and V. Prigent (Sceaux au musée d’Adana), E. Stepanova (Seals from the Hermitage), I. Jordanov (Byzantine Eastern armies in the Balkans), T. Kourempanas (Σφραγίδεςμε απεικονίσεις αετών), V. Stepanenko (The family of Artzruni) and Z. Zhekova (Thematic seals from Bulgaria). The authors discuss more than 230 Byzantine lead seals (in their overwhelming majority previously unpublished), kept in private and state collections in Bulgaria, France, Greece, Russia, and Ukraine, which are relevant to the administration and the prosopography of Byzantine Asia Minor.