Rural Communities in Late Byzantium
Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean

Argues that Late Byzantine rural communities were resilient and able to transform their socioeconomic strategies in the face of crisis.

Fotini Kondyli (Author)

9781108845496, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 March 2022

302 pages
25 x 17.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.73 kg

'Kondyli offers an alternative to the prevailing narrative of late Byzantium as a period of decline and stagnation. While candid about the limitations of her approach in detecting abrupt changes in the historical landscape, she reinterprets villages previously considered abandoned or deserted as dynamic and wisely managed communities … Kondyli's book offers a model for studying ordinary people's coping strategies and site-specific responses to political and economic disasters; throughout, she showcases the potential of small-scale archaeological projects. It is time to apply this paradigm to other locations.' Georgios Makris, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

Late Byzantium faced economic, political, and demographic crises. This book argues for the ability of rural communities to transform their socioeconomic strategies and maintain resilience in the face of these, especially in the context of islands. It seeks to reinstate ordinary people in the historical narrative and reintroduce them as active participants in the events of the period, pointing to their ability not only to react to change, but also to initiate it. Combining new archaeological evidence with archival material pertaining to the islands of Lemnos and Thasos in the Northern Aegean, it provides concrete examples of Byzantine socio-economic strategies that successfully mitigated the various crises and thus contributes to a diachronic perspective on crisis management. The result is to rethink the nature of the Late Byzantine period, and to question the ways in which we have come to divide historical periods into 'good' or 'bad'.

1. In Search of Late Byzantine Rural Island Communities
2. Who is Who in the Rural Landscape: The Makeup of Late Byzantine Rural Communities
3. Pathways of Resilience
4. Defending the Realm
5. Community Building in the Face of Crisis: A Landscape Approach
6. The Return of the People
Appendix I
Appendix II
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD], History [HB]