ABSTRACT
At the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century the Byzantine poet Manuel Philes wrote about one of the members of the imperial clan of the Palaiologoi. The indiction style employed in the colophon was that of the Byzantine imperial chancery and bore no traces of the Greek chancery of the sultanate. The Byzantines publicly tried the beliefs of the sultan. The very symbols of the sultan’s power, as well as ideas implicit in Seljuk Islamic inscriptions, differed from their Byzantine equivalents. The ‘Christian’ behaviour of the sultans, the titles conferred on them by the Byzantine emperors, were recorded almost exclusively in the Christian primary sources – Byzantine, Latin, Armenian, or Syriac. The earliest evidence in Byzantine documentary sources was that of Athanasios Soultanos, the noble husband of a certain Doukaina Angelina Komnena and father of Eudokia Doukaina Angelina Komnena, wife of the skouterios Theodore Sarantenos from 1279.
