ABSTRACT

It is widely accepted that in the tenth and eleventh centuries the political frontiers of the Byzantine empire expanded considerably. Whereas imperial authority during the early seventh to early tenth centuries had been limited to the Anatolian plateau and the islands and coasts of the Aegean and southern Italy, the deployment of a mixture of force and diplomacy from c. 850 onwards led to the annexation of the Balkan land mass, the northern reaches of the Fertile Crescent, western Armenia, and the islands of Crete and Cyprus.1 In the same period Byzantium’s cultural and religious influence spread even more widely, as missionaries, artists and architects bore the spiritual message and physical accoutrements of Orthodox Christianity deep into Russia and the Caucasus mountains.2 Political and cultural expansion brought the Byzantines into contact with many new peoples of different languages and faiths. Some of those

1 For a narrative outline of this period see G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (Oxford, 1968), 210-98; W. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford, CA, 1997), 446-583.