British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Eastern Mediterranean in the Thirteenth century:
identities and allegiances
Abstract
Cyprus and the Crusader States
Tassos Papacostas
For both Cyprus and the Crusader states in Syria-Palestine the 13th century signalled a crucial change of direction: for Cyprus it was the first century of Lusignan rule, a period of consolidation of the new regime established in the wake of the Third Crusade. Conversely, for the states of the mainland this was the century of their extinction. My presentation will be divided in two parts: first I shall be investigating an intellectual issue, and then I will discuss the source evidence with the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project in mind.
Selecting material from these geographical areas for a prosopography covering the period of the Latin empire of Constantinople is highly problematic in more than one respect. The chronological limits, 1204-1261, of course mean nothing in the context of either Cyprus or the mainland states. This proves to be an issue largely because both areas have grown into well developed independent fields of study in their own right. In addition, when seen from the perspective of the future integrated prosopography of the long Byzantine millennium, and taking into account how these areas have been treated by earlier projects, their prosopography for1204-1261 raises important questions of compatibility, consistency and relevance.
The actual source material itself presents few challenging practical problems. It is highly disparate, different types of text providing information on different groups of people. There is altogether little overlap in prosopographical information between texts belonging to the same genre, and even less so across genres. What will prove much more taxing than identification of and access to relevant sources is deciding who belongs to a Byzantine prosopography and who does not. There is, obviously, no straightforward answer. A determining factor to be taken into account is the fundamental difference in the cultural outlook of the areas in question: while Cyprus had been and remained throughout this period a predominantly Greek-speaking Orthodox land, maintaining its long established Byzantine heritage, this was never the case of the mainland regions under Crusader rule that operated in their own distinct environment, by this period well outside the Byzantine orbit.