Project description
Unveiling Byzantium's resilience
For centuries, Byzantium repelled powerful enemies through a well-structured system of military districts, the themes. Yet very little is known about the officials who operated this administrative machinery. The ERC-funded Byz-GOVAG project seeks to 'restaff' these units by combining information from literary sources with evidence from seals, the small lead disks used to secure official correspondence. The legends on these seals, which record the issuing officials’ names, titles, offices and jurisdictions, shed light on the layers of authority, networks of power and channels of communication that once held the empire together. These insights are reshaping our understanding of Byzantium’s political system, military organisation and the society that sustained it while also offering civil-service narratives of enduring relevance.
Objective
Crucial to Byzantium’s survival against several post 6th-century external foes was the introduction of the theme-system (military-territorial units), which sealed its provincial administration for five centuries. The long debate on this institution, often biased by anachronistic evidence from literary sources, has gained new impetus through the study of seals, the tiny lead disks that the Byzantines used to secure and authenticate their correspondence. The plethora of irrefutable evidence that seals provide on the administrative nomenclature and the prosopography of high- and (the otherwise unattested) low-ranking officials, allow the in-depth analysis of a special group of individuals directly linked to the state, whose professional performance and unobstructed succession in office was a prerequisite for the Empire’s cohesion and well-being.
An international team of researchers will apply a well-tested methodological model on the recording and analysis of seals to study relevant material in more than 100 collections worldwide (including hundreds of unpublished seals from Cyprus, Greece and Turkey) and offer in-depth prosopographic analysis of the officials who manned the themes and contributed to Byzantium’s long-lasting endurance. An innovative geo- and chrono-referenced database of seals with secure findspots will, for the first time, visualise the Byzantine correspondence network, and data on the iconography of the seals and the historical, archaeological and sigillographic profile of the thematic headquarters will further revolutionize our hitherto perception of the military, social and cultural history of Byzantium. Printed and online publications, three open access databases, an updated manual on dating criteria for seals, scientific meetings, exhibitions, and an educational programme (designed also for people with special needs) will disseminate the results of the project and guarantee their future use in the study of the European Middle Ages.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology governance
- natural sciences computer and information sciences databases
- humanities history and archaeology history
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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106 79 ATHENS
Greece
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