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1. Constantine VII and the Historical Geography of Empire, Paul Magdalino

1. Constantine VII and the Historical Geography of Empire Paul Magdalino History and geography were fundamental to the identity of Byzantium as an ecumenical empire with a long existence in time and an outreach that extended to three continents. Yet while the Byzantine elite maintained a long and distinguished tradition of history writing, it produced no geographers and travel writers to compare with those of antecedent… Read more

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2. “Asia and Europe Commonly Called East and West: Constantinople and Geographical Imagination in Byzantium, Dimiter Angelov

2. “Asia and Europe Commonly Called East and West”: Constantinople and Geographical Imagination in Byzantium Dimiter Angelov Writing in the years shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Ioannes Kanavoutzes, a Greek teacher living in Genoese Phokaia in Asia Minor, addressed Palamede Gattilusio (1431–1455), the Genoese lord of Samothrace and Ainos, with a treatise on the ancient history of the island of Samothrace. In… Read more

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3. Cartography and the Ottoman Imperial Project in the Sixteenth Century, Pınar Emiralioğlu

3. Cartography and the Ottoman Imperial Project in the Sixteenth Century Pınar Emiralioğlu In the sixteenth century, Ottoman encounters with the Habsburg Empire in the West and the Safavids in the East turned violent as the Ottomans fought these rival empires on the battlefields. During this period, Ottoman ruling elites articulated the imperial claims of the Ottoman dynasty to universal leadership by representing the Ottoman sultans… Read more

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4. Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşeʾātü ’s-Selāṭīn (‘Correspondence of Sultans’) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World, Dimitris Kastritsis

4. Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşeʾātü ’s-Selāṭīn (‘Correspondence of Sultans’) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World Dimitris Kastritsis The question of Ottoman political geography has yet to be addressed in any depth. The place of the science of geography in the Ottoman Empire has received some attention in recent years, as has the cultural meaning of the geographical term “lands of Rūm,” broadly signifying the… Read more

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5. Imperial Geography and War: The Ottoman Case, Antonis Anastasopoulos

5. Imperial Geography and War: The Ottoman Case Antonis Anastasopoulos Premodern empires in southeastern Europe and western Asia, with the Ottomans being the last in a succession of empires that controlled territories in both regions, [1] were big territorial entities, and as such more diverse in terms of physical and human geography than the modern nation-states. Physical geography, which will be… Read more

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6. Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Property Rights and Spectacles of Statehood in Tanzimat Izmir, Sibel Zandi-Sayek

6. Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Property Rights and Spectacles of Statehood in Tanzimat Izmir Sibel Zandi-Sayek The relationship between modern state power and geographic space, as evidenced in monumental constructions, institutional buildings, public works, and spectacles, as well as surveys, cadastres, and other mapping technologies, has received scholarly attention across disciplines. [1] While these studies have significantly underscored the importance of material… Read more

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Chapter 14. Words and Things

Chapter 14. Words and Things The mental gymnastics of the deipnosophists are not only a mechanism that produces and combines quotations indefinitely. Despite its playful character, it is not an end in itself. It plays an instrumental role in the constitution and the enrichment of a field of knowledge and, more generally, in a project that is at the same time social, ethical, and intellectual: through the… Read more

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Chapter 15. The Deipnosophists as a Text: Genesis, Uses

Chapter 15. The Deipnosophists as a Text: Genesis, Uses In this strange path that associates banquets, a library, lexica, and insatiable scholars, we now need to ask what was the aim of the game. Is Athenaeus perhaps the victim of the most severe Alexandrine syndrome, that of a compilation mechanism destined to go indefinitely round in circles? Are the dialogue and its setup then nothing more than… Read more

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Chapter 12. Libraries and Bibliophiles

Chapter 12. Libraries and Bibliophiles The mention of Larensius’ rich library at the beginning of Book I does not fill out the portrait of the host of the banquets, a rich Roman bibliophile and philhellene. The library also plays an essential role in Athenaeus’ work. The link that unites text, banquets, and library is a link of analogy, of condensation, of mirroring, and of structural homology. Read more

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Chapter 13. Scholars’ Practices

Chapter 13. Scholars’ Practices The bibliographical knowledge of Athenaeus and his characters is of a cartographical nature; it organizes a space, subdivides it, and proposes different points of view, which lead from the literary genre to the text and to the quotation, or vice versa. This shift in the hierarchy between container and contained corresponds to a change of scale and to specific forms of articulation: the… Read more