De-centring 12th-century Constantinople

This chapter offers a new network-based reading of Byzantine-Latin relations in the decades before the Fourth Crusade. Archbishop Eustathios’s account of the Norman attack on Thessalonica in 1185 is deployed to argue that by the twelfth century Byzantium’s second city had become a crucial meeting point for peoples and cultures from both East and West. The city was not a pale reflection of Constantinople, but was instead a point of intersection in its own right, in which the binary ethnic and religious distinctions all too often considered fundamental to Byzantine-Western relations were difficult to discern.