Notes on Contributors
Axel Bayer
studied history and Byzantine studies in Cologne and Rome and obtained his Ph.D. in 2000. He is a historian and Byzantinist. His main field of research is the history of the schism between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople. His publications include the monograph Spaltung der Christenheit. Das sogenannte Morgenländische Schisma von 1054, several articles on Byzantine-Western ecclesiastical relations, such as “Die Byzanzreise des Erzbischofs Gebhard von Salzburg” (Byzantinische Zeitschrift 96 (2003)), and the lemma “Schisma, 2. Orthodoxe Kirchen” (Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit 11 (2010)).
Juan Signes Codoñer
was Professor of Greek at the University of Valladolid (1996–2020) and is currently a professor at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (since October 2020). He is president of the Spanish Society of Byzantine Studies. He studied classical philology at the University of Salamanca and Byzantine studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin (1987–89) and spent research stays at the Universities of Vienna, Paris, Birmingham, and Oxford and at the Dumbarton Oaks Centre in Washington. He has published monographs and contributions on Byzantine history and historiography, Byzantine law, Greek grammatical tradition, Homer, the origins and diffusion of the Greek alphabet, and Hellenism in the Early Modern era.
Saskia Dönitz
is a researcher at the Institute for Judaic Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She specializes in medieval Jewish history and literature, Byzantine Jewry, cultural transfer, reception history, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her relevant publications include: Überlieferung und Rezeption des Sefer Yosippon (2013); Transkulturelle Verflechtungen im mittelalterlichen Jahrtausend (as co-author, 2016); and “Jüdisch-christliche Begegnungen in verschiedenen Kulturräumen des Mittelalters: Byzanz und Ashkenaz im Vergleich” (Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 38 (2013)).
Nicolas Drocourt
is Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He published Diplomatie sur le Bosphore. Les ambassadeurs étrangers dans l’Empire byzantin des années 640 à 1204 (Leuven, 2015), and numerous articles on Middle Byzantine diplomacy. He also edited or co-edited different volumes on medieval diplomacy, notably La figure de l’ambassadeur entre mondes éloignés (XIe–XVIe siècle) (Rennes, 2015) and La diplomatie byzantine, de l’Empire romain aux confins de l’Europe (Ve–XVe siècle) (Leiden-Boston, 2020).
Leonie Exarchos
studied at the University of Heidelberg and at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and has held academic positions at the Department of History (Byzantine Studies) at the University of Mainz and at the University of Göttingen, where she was a member of the DFG-funded Research Group “Cultures of Expertise from the 12th to the 18th century”. In 2016, she was a visiting researcher in Oxford. She gained her Ph.D from the University of Göttingen, and is currently preparing a monograph investigating Western experts in Byzantium between 1143 and 1204. Her research interests include Western-Byzantine relations, Mediterranean history, cultural exchange, and transculturality in the Middle Ages.
Daniel Föller
is a historian working on medieval Europe, with a special interest in Viking Age Scandinavia and its relations to Byzantium. Currently, he is finishing his habilitation on Carolingian military culture at Frankfurt University.
Christian Gastgeber
is senior research associate and group leader of the research group “language, text, and script” of the division of Byzantine Research in the department for Medieval Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; he is editor of several Byzantine texts (Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Cartulary of St Paul on Mount Latros, Chronicon Paschale) and conducts research on Byzantine manuscripts, documents, and text transmission.
Hans-Werner Goetz
is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Hamburg, where he held a chair from 1990–2012. He is specialized in the history of medieval concepts. His recent publications include Gott und die Welt. Religiöse Vorstellungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (3 vols, 2011–16) and Die Wahrnehmung anderer Religionen und christlich-abendländisches Selbstverständnis (2 vols, 2013).
Dominik Heher
is a freelance exhibition curator. Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, his main research focus is on rituals of power and punishment in Byzantium, historical geography, and material culture of the Byzantine Empire. He co-edited the exhibition catalogues Das goldene Byzanz und der Orient (2012) and Byzanz und der Westen. 1000 vergessene Jahre (2018). His further publications include the monograph Mobiles Kaisertum: Das Zelt als Ort der Herrschaft und Repräsentation in Byzanz (10.–12. Jahrhundert) (2021), as well as several articles on harbours and port cities in the Byzantine Empire.
Klaus Herbers
is Senior Fellow for Medieval History at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg as well as a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, plus a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. His areas of research include papal history of the Early and High Middle Ages, pilgrimage and pilgrim reports, along with hagiography and the veneration of saints. His most recent publications are Prognostik und Zukunft im Mittelalter. Praktiken – Kämpfe – Diskussionen (2019), Papsturkunden in Spanien III. Kastilien (2020), the fourth volume of the Regesta Pontificum Romanorum (2020), and the anthology Das Buch der Päpste: Der Liber pontificalis. Ein Schlüsseldokument europäischer Geschichte, which he published with Matthias Simperl (2020).
Christopher Hobbs
completed his doctoral thesis in 2017, a historiographical study of the 15th-century historian Doukas. Thereafter, he was a Teaching Fellow in Byzantine and medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research area is Byzantine historiography with a focus on identity, East-West relations, and Byzantine responses to the fall of Constantinople.
David Jacoby
(1928–2018) was Professor of Medieval History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research covered a broad range of the central topics in Mediterranean history, among them transmediterranean trade in numerous objects, and transcultural relations in the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, landholding in Frankish Greece, and the history of traders based in the Italian maritime republics. He published extensively on these issues, and his numerous articles have been collected in several volumes, among them Travellers, Merchants and Settlers in the Eastern Mediterranean, 11th–14th centuries (2014), and Medieval Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (2018).
Sebastian Kolditz
has been Academic Assistant at the Chair of Medieval History at Heidelberg University since 2013. His research interests focus on diplomatic relations in the Middle Ages, Church councils and the maritime history of the Mediterranean. His publications include the monograph Johannes VIII. Palaiologos und das Konzil von Ferrara-Florenz (1438/39). Das byzantinische Kaisertum im Dialog mit dem Westen (2014), as well as articles on Christian-Muslim diplomacy (together with Nikolas Jaspert) and Byzantine-Western contacts. He has also written on the Carolingians and the Mediterranean, and on Byzantine-Venetian treaties in the later Middle Ages.
Savvas Neocleous
BA (University of Cyprus), MPhil and Ph.D (Trinity College Dublin), LMS (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto), is an independent researcher focusing on relations and interactions between the Byzantine Empire, Latin Christendom and the Muslim world. He is the author of Heretics, Schismatics or Catholics? Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century (2019). He has also published several articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Crusades, Journal of Medieval History, Medioevo Greco, Al-Masaq, and Byzantion. His papers focus on aspects such as the question of the so-called Byzantine-Muslim alliances against the Crusades, the blame game for the failure of the Second Crusade, the motives behind the diversion of the Fourth Crusade and the crusader conquest of Constantinople, the representation of Andronikos I Komnenos’s tyrannical rule in 12th-century European narratives, and the image of the Latins in Byzantine accounts.
Johannes Pahlitzsch
studied medieval history, Byzantine studies, and Arabic studies and is Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). He wrote a monograph on the history of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Jerusalem in the crusader period, is co-editor of Christian-Muslim Relations. A Historical Bibliography and published the edition of the Arabic translation of the Byzantine law book Procheiros Nomos. He is the author of numerous articles on the situation of oriental Christians under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages, and the relations between Byzantium and the Islamic world. He was awarded fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Dumbarton Oaks, and was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is a member of the board of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Mainz project “Byzantium between Orient and Occident”, and is spokesperson for the Research Training Group 2304 “Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War. Exchange, Differentiation and Reception”.
Annick Peters-Custot
is full Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes. Her research is mainly devoted to the history of southern Italy from Byzantine rule to the Swabian period (8th–13th century), and focuses in particular on the interactions and connections between the Byzantine Empire and the Western world in the religious field (monasticism, liturgy, hagiography) as well as on the notion of “imperiality” of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. She is currently working on the circulation of the so-called regula S. Basilii in the Western world from the 5th to the 15th century. She led several research programmes for the École française de Rome, notably “L’héritage byzantin en Italie, VIIIe–XIIe s.” with Jean-Marie Martin and Vivien Prigent (four volumes published between 2011 and 2017), and is the main coordinator of the programme “Imperialiter” (2017–21). Her publications include the monographs: Les Grecs de l’Italie méridionale post-byzantine. Une acculturation en douceur (IXe–XIVe siècles) (2009); and Bruno en Calabre. Histoire d’une fondation monastique dans l’Italie normande: S. Maria de Turri et S. Stefano del Bosco (2014).
Miriam Salzmann
is Academic Assistant at the Chair of Byzantine History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her research focuses on cultural contacts between Late Byzantium and the Latin world, the social and cultural history of Medieval Cyprus, and late Medieval translations. She has recently published her dissertation under the title Negotiating Power and Identities. Latin, Greek and Syrian Élites in Fifteenth-Century Cyprus (2021) and is currently working on a fifteenth-century Venetian translation of the Doukas chronicle.
Jonathan Shepard
was University Lecturer in Russian History at Cambridge. With S. Franklin he co-authored The Emergence of Rus (1996) and co-edited Byzantine Diplomacy (1992), and 12 of his studies appear in his Emergent Elites and Byzantium (2011). Edited volumes include The Expansion of Orthodox Europe (2007), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (rev. ed. 2019); Byzantium and the Viking World (with F. Androshchuk and M. White, 2016); Imperial Spheres and the Adriatic (with M. Ančić and T. Vedriš, 2018); and Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland (with J. Gruszczyński and M. Jankowiak, 2020).
Eleni Tounta
is Associate Professor in Medieval History at the Aristotle University of Thessalonica. Her research interests focus on the history of medieval political thought, medieval historiography, identities and power relations, and social history, especially in the Holy Roman Empire and southern Italy in the High and Late Middle Ages. Her publications include the monograph Medieval Mirrors of Power: Historians and Narratives in Norman Southern Italy (2012) [in Greek], an article on “Conflicting Sanctities and the Construction of Collective Memories in Byzantine and Norman Italo-Greek Southern Calabria: Elias the Younger and Elias Speleotes” (Analecta Bollandiana 135 (2017)), and an article on “The Italo-Greek Courtiers and their Saint: Constructing the Italo-Greek Elite’s Collective Identity in the Twelfth-Century Norman Kingdom of Sicily” (Mediterranean Studies 28.1 (2020)).