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844 Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 821-868

Julian CHRYSOSTOMIDES, Byzantium and , 1204-1453, Michael Heslop and Charalambros Dendrinos eds. Variorum Collected Series: CS 972. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Variorum, 2011. xviii + 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4094-2370-6 (hbk.). £80.00 / $154.95.

The Byzantinist Julian Chrysostomides (1928-2008) was notable—as her former tutor and one of her oldest friends, Iris Murdoch, explained—for the ‘small fierce strength’ with which she lived her life. Born in , still then called , during the foundation of the modern of , she grew up in a Greek-speaking, Christian commu- nity that was under siege; sent abroad by her family, she spent most of her adult years as a refugee, first in France, then in England. Given her back- ground, it is scarcely surprising that she imbued millennium-old ethno- religious conflicts with a relevance that left many of her students almost convinced of her personal acquaintance with characters from the . As a teacher and a scholar, Chrysostomides was passionate, one might even say driven. Yet, somehow she managed to maintain in her work what colleagues of all stripes habitually pointed out was a ‘detached integ- rity’. This she achieved through an insistence on a calm, probing forensic investigation of the scattered debris left by a bygone era. Having acquired the requisite linguistic and paleographic skills, she immersed herself com- pletely in manuscript and archival collections, reading widely and subject- ing large numbers of texts—from chronicles to legal depositions to private correspondence to sonnets—to scrutiny under the microscope. She expended considerable time and effort in the production of textual edi- tions, such as Manuel II Palaeologus: Funeral Oration on His Brother Theo- dore (1985) and Monumenta Peloponnesiaca (1995),1 but she also advanced interpretations, marshaling her evidence and arguing her case with the utmost care in a series of short studies. Eleven of these studies have been collected together posthumously in the present volume. They deal with various aspects of relations between the Byzantine and the Republic of Venice in the period of Ottoman expansion. Studies I, II and XI are concerned with political history, and take as their main focus fourteenth-century diplomatic negotiations over

1) J. Chrysostomides ed., Manuel II Palaeologus: Funeral Oration on His Brother Theodore. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 26. Thessalonike: Association for Byzantine Research, 1985; and: Idem ed., Monumenta Peloponnesiaca: Documents for the History of the in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1995.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341264 Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 821-868 845 the possession of , an island whose strategic position in the north- ern Aegean made it a vital calling place for all shipping sailing between the Mediterranean and the , including Italian merchant vessels. Study III, the most important piece in the collection (and, at almost one hundred pages, by far the longest), more directly concerns itself with com- mercial matters, tracing the evolution of trading agreements. After exam- ining the privilege granted to the Venetians in 1265 by Michael VIII Palaeologus (r. 1259-1282), the founder of the last Byzantine dynasty to rule in Constantinople, the study compares the terms of that privilege with those set out in earlier documents and demonstrates the escalation of imperial concessions, especially with regard to taxation. According to Chrysostomides, under the Palaeologoi both the Venetians themselves and all those doing business with them became completely exempt from the commercium, a double sales and purchase tax normally imposed on trans- actions within the empire. This exemption gave the Venetians a competi- tive edge that allowed them not only to gain a virtual monopoly over the grain and the wine , but also to accumulate substantial private prop- erty. So great were the benefits of Venetian citizenship, indeed, that many others, among them Byzantine subjects, sought to become naturalized. The measures taken by such as Andronicus II (r. 1282-1328) and John V (r. 1341-1357) to reverse these developments and prevent Venice from dominating the economic system of the eastern Mediterranean were brave, but proved to be wholly inadequate. Even when discussing broad political and economic issues, Chrysosto- mides never succumbs to the temptation to offer reductive readings; instead, she allows us to observe the complexities of the evidence while leading us through these with a sure hand. Nowhere is her deftness more apparent than in studies IV-X, which take as their subject shifting identi- ties and allegiances in the late medieval Peloponnese, a region consisting of a patchwork of small states and colonies that different external powers, including the Byzantine and the Venetian , sought to con- trol. These seven studies begin with an exploration of the experiences of individual members of the highest ranks of the resident in the Peloponnese. They pull together material from a variety of sources in order to discuss not only men such as Nerio Acciaiuoli (d. 1394) and Carlo Tocco (d. 1429), the who became of Athens and Count of respectively, and Theodore II Palaeologus (r. 1407-1443), the Byzantine of Mistra, but also female relatives of theirs such as Francesca Acciaiuoli (d. 1429), Annesa de’ Saraceni (fl. 1389) and