ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interrelation between political power, space, and identities in the state of Epiros during the “long thirteenth century.” It counters much of the modern literature on the subject, which often pays too much attention to ethnic or even “national” criteria when it approaches the Byzantine discourses about “us” and “others”. Such approaches through a modern lens of identity and the modern nation-state risk anachronism. After all, the Byzantine state was not a well-structured bureaucratic machine like the nation-states of modernity, which intervene extensively in the everyday life of their subjects with the aim of producing stable and coherent national identities. Although, even in the Palaiologan period, the Byzantine state maintained a much more sophisticated administrative apparatus compared to most of the European states of the era, the main goals of the central government were to ensure military control over its territories, to collect taxes from the provinces and to administer justice.
