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Introduction Introduction Since the time of Constantine i (r. 306–337) until 1453 or alternatively until 1461, there had been constant fluctuations in the geopolitical and cultural bor­ ders of the Christian Roman Empire, what today is commonly called the Byzan­ tine Empire.1 The arrival, conquest, and settlement of Turkish Muslim groups from the east at the end of the eleventh century ultimately resulted in the em­ pire’s political demise in the fifteenth century, triggering one of the last chap­ ters in the history of cultural change in the Mediterranean basin.2 This cultural change—the Islamization and Turkification of Asia Minor (Anatolia) and the Balkans—was a highly complicated and non­linear process in the midst of a plethora of policies by the Byzantines, Latins, Franks, Arme­ nians, Georgians, Syrians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks, Persians, Arabs and Mon­ gols resulting in constantly shifting geopolitical borders (see maps 1–8).3 These groups all constructed their own political histories and interpretations of events in as many or more languages.4 The Turkish Muslims’ military and political conquest of Anatolia was swift­ er than the cultural incorporation of the territory and its people into the Turkish­speaking Muslim world. Islam achieved its dominance over Christian­ ity between 1100 and 1400. Significant evidence for the minting coins or literary production in Persian and Arabic, the established languages of Islam, dates to the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Turkish vernacular gained currency as a literary language only at the end of the thirteenth and the early fourteenth 1 Alexander Kazhdan, “Byzantium, History of,” odb 1:344–345. 2 Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamiza- tion from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley 1971), 1–2. 3 The maps summarize the geopolitical situation between the end of the eleventh century and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 to the Otto­ mans, two events that ushered in the political demise of the Byzantine Empire. 4 The complex political and cultural history of medieval Anatolia has been studied in various collected volumes in recent years: Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, ed. Andrew C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola, and Sara Nur Yıldız (London 2015); Islamic Literature and In- tellectual Life in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Anatolia, ed. Andrew C.S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (Würzburg 2016); Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500, ed. Patricia Blessing and Rachel Goshgarian (Edinburgh 2017). Recently, monographs on the Byzantine and Muslim Turkish relations during specific periods have provided a more sophisti­ cated perspective on the subject. See Nevra Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Dimitri Koro­ beinikov, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford 2014); Rustam Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 (Leiden 2016); Alexander Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim-Turkish Anatolia, ca. 1040–1130 (New York 2017). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415843_00� <UN> 2 Introduction centuries.5 It was a process in which peoples along the territorial, political, and cultural spectrum interacted across porous and permeable frontiers. Groups of people changed allegiances not only through conquest, raid, enslavement, and conversion,6 but also because they had ethnically or culturally mixed families or chose to live in polities and serve rulers different from their own political, ethnic, cultural, or social group. Hence integration and mutual influence be­ came inevitable.7 On the Byzantine land, which began to be ruled by Turkish Muslim groups, the Byzantines continued to live and speak their native lan­ guages including after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the con­ quest of Empire of Trebizond in 1461.8 Although called Byzantines today, they called themselves Romans. To the Turkish Muslim groups, they were Rum or Rumis. This study focuses on the Byzantines living under Muslim rule in Asia Minor and the Balkans and the broader political and cultural transformation of these areas. It examines 5 Andrew C.S. Peacock, and Sara Nur Yıldız, “Introduction: Literature, Language and History in Late Medieval Anatolia,” in Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 21. For a list of literary works written in Turkish in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Ali Akar, Türk Dili Tarihi. Dönem-Eser-Bibliyografya (Istanbul 2005), 231–274. 6 On the destructive nature of these processes, see Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization; idem, “The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization: The Book and Its Reviewers Ten Years Later,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 22 (1982): 225–285; idem, “The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the 11th through the 15th Century: The Book in the Light of Subsequent Scholarship, 1971–98,” in Eastern Approaches to Byzantium, ed. Anto­ ny Eastmond (Aldershot 2001), 133–145. Some general studies from the last decades of the twentieth century that base their arguments on Vryonis’s ideas include Alexios Savvides, Byzantium in the Near East (Thessalonica 1981); Ernst Werner, Die Geburt einer Grossmacht: Die Osmanen. Ein Beitrag zur Genesis des Turkischen Feudalismus (Vienna 1985); Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453 (Cambridge 1993); Michael Angold, The Byzantine Empire, 1025–1204: A Political History (London 1997). 7 On the mutual contacts and influences during the process of transformation, see Frederick W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, 2 vols. (Oxford 1929); Michel Balivet, Romanie byzantine et pays de Rum turc: histoire d’un espace d’imbrication gréco-turque (Istan­ bul 1994); idem, “Les contacts byzantino­turcs entre rapprochement politique et échanges culturels (milieu xiiie–milieu xve s.),” in Europa e Islam tra i secoli xiv e xvi, ed. Michele Bernardini et al., vol. 1 (Naples 2002), 525–548; idem, Les Turcs au Moyen-Âge: Des croisades aux Ottomans (xie–xve siècles) (Istanbul 2002); idem, Mélanges byzantins, seldjoukides et ottomans (Istanbul 2005); Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins; Koro­ beinikov, Byzantium and the Turks; Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461; Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim-Turkish Anatolia. 8 On the conception of permanence of Byzantine forms and the Byzantine cultural heritage in the post­Byzantine period, see Nicolae Iorga, Byzance après Byzance: Continuation de l’histoire de la vie byzantine (Bucarest 1935). <UN>.
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