Some books have long histories. This is also the case with the present volume, the roots of which go back to 2014 when Stefan Burkhardt, at that time researcher at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, developed the first draft for this volume’s structure together with Sebastian Kolditz, who had just joined Heidelberg University. The first contributions arrived already in 2016: those of Juan Signes Codoñer, Dominik Heher, Hans-Werner Goetz, Daniel Föller, Nicolas Drocourt, Jonathan Shepard and Saskia Dönitz. But several changes in the group of contributors emerged over the following years and led to some major changes in the structure of the volume as a whole. We are very grateful to a number of authors who readily joined the ongoing project and wrote comprehensive articles in a relatively short period of time. Their readiness to contribute helped us keep the basic structure of the volume and even enlarge its contents in a very fortunate way. Furthermore, Stefan Burkhardt unfortunately had to abandon his participation in the editorial activities due to new professional duties in 2017, and Nicolas Drocourt kindly stepped in. It is thus due to many troubled circumstances that the manuscript of this volume could only be finished in summer 2020.
Against this background we wish to express our deep gratitude to all the contributors whose cooperation and patience during a prolonged process of editing we really appreciate, as well as to the anonymous reviewer of this volume who provided us with many helpful suggestions, to Michael Mulryan for copyediting the manuscript and to Alessandra Giliberto for her invaluable support on the publisher’s part. We are particularly grateful to the series editor Wolfram Brandes for his kind advise and to our colleague Stefan Burkhardt whose conceptual ideas laid the basic foundations of this volume and the specific way it treats Byzantine-Western relations in the High Middle Ages.
Finally, we deeply regret that David Jacoby, an outstanding Byzantinist and scholar of Mediterranean history, passed away before this volume, which contains one of his last articles, could be published. It has been a great privilege for us to work together with him. We also want to commemorate the late Filippo Burgarella, a distinguished scholar of the Byzantine tradition in southern Italy, who initially had accepted our invitation to contribute but passed away before he could finish his article.
Sebastian Kolditz and Nicolas Drocourt
Heidelberg / Nantes, September 2020