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FREE A HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE STATE AND SOCIETY PDF

Warren T. Treadgold | 1044 pages | 01 Oct 1997 | Stanford University Press | 9780804726306 | English | Palo Alto, United States A History of the Byzantine State and Society - Warren T. Treadgold - Google книги

Induring a war against the Persians in Mesopotamia, the emperor Carus was killed, allegedly by a thunderbolt but more probably by assassination. The proclaimed A History of the Byzantine State and Society son Numerian emperor. Soon it abandoned the Persian war and slowly withdrew into . When the army reached inDiocles, the commander of the imperial bodyguard, announced that Numerian himself had been murdered. After executing the supposed assassin, Diocles had himself proclaimed emperor. His claims were rejected by Carus's surviving son, Carinus, who had been ruling at and now led an army against Diocles. A civil war began, and early the next year the forces of the two emperors clashed at the Margus River in the middle of the . The battle went well for Carinus until he too was assassinated, leaving Diocles the temporarily undisputed ruler of the . Like most of his predecessors over the past fifty years, Diocles was a capable career officer from an obscure family in Illyricum. In comparison with similar emperors, he was a middling general but an excellent manager, with an education slightly better than average. He appears to have been around forty years old at his accession. According to plausible reports, he had been born at Salona on the Illyrian coast, to a father who was a freedman and a scribe. Appropriately for a scribe's son, he showed a liking for records and numbers, and wrote without literary pretensions. Salona was in -speaking territory, but A History of the Byzantine State and Society Greek name of Diocles suggests Greek origins, and he was equally at ease speaking Latin or Greek. Although in he Latinized his Greek name to Diocletianus, he was the nearest thing that the empire had yet had to an emperor of Greek stock. had no son, but decided he needed another emperor to share his powers and the dangers he faced. A preference for the Greek East may lie behind his decision to retain control over it and to entrust the Latin West to someone else. At Milan, in JulyDiocletian adopted his son one of his Illyrian comrades in arms, Maximian, giving him the rank of , or junior emperor. Henceforth the defense of the provinces west of Illyricum became the primary responsibility A History of the Byzantine State and Society Maximian, while the defense of Illyricum and the A History of the Byzantine State and Society remained that of Diocletian. The next year, when Maximian faced a usurping emperor in Britain, Diocletian strengthened his colleague's hand by promoting him to Augustus, the highest imperial rank. Diocletian still kept a formal precedence over Maximian. As an expression of their relationship, Diocletian styled himself Jovius, claiming the patronage of Jupiter, king of the gods, and titled Maximian Herculius, assigning him A History of the Byzantine State and Society patronage of Jupiter's son Hercules. A History of the Byzantine State and Society practice Maximian continued to defer to his senior colleague's judgment. But each emperor maintained his own court and ran his own army A History of the Byzantine State and Society administration, with a separate praetorian prefect in Latin, praefectus praetorio as his chief lieutenant. Although the empire remained juridically one, and on occasion was ruled by a single emperor again, after its eastern and western parts always had different prefects and separate administrations. From this time forward, we can follow the history of the East with only occasional attention to the West. Before Diocletian, jurisdiction over the eastern and western parts of the empire had sometimes been separated for a time, either by a rebellion in the East, like Diocletian's own, or as an emergency measure, like Carus's entrusting the West to his son Carinus before departing for Persia. But Diocletian's arrangement was more systematic than those temporary divisions. Although for an emperor without a son to adopt an heir and tide him Caesar had long been standard practice, Diocletian meant Maximian, who was only a few years his junior, to be a colleague rather than an A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Diocletian plainly realized that, at a time when internal rebellions and external invasions had become endemic, the empire was too big for one emperor to rule and defend. What remains striking is that Diocletian took as his own portion not the Latin West but the Greek East, to which he attached Latin-speaking Illyricum, his own homeland. Although his motives cannot be reliably reconstructed, he evidently believed that the East, with Illyricum, was at least as important a part of the empire as the West, and A History of the Byzantine State and Society appropriate domain for the senior ruler. Given the threat that the empire faced from foreign invasions and military rebellions, part of his reason was surely that the larger part of the army was stationed in the East — twenty — three of thirty-four legions as of the early third century — where it faced the empire's single strongest adversary, Persia. The East as Diocletian defined it also included the empire's best recruiting ground, in Illyricum, and its richest farmland, in . Leaving Maximian to defend the West, Diocletian concentrated first on strengthening the frontiers in the East. He began recruiting more troops. In two campaigns he drove some Sarmatian raiders back across the Danube frontier, and built new fortifications to keep them out. In he negotiated a peace with Persia, establishing a Roman protectorate over Armenia and securing the Mesopotamian border, which he defended with more fortifications. He established his principal residence at Nicomedia, where he had first taken power. On the coast of Asia Minor but facing Europe, Nicomedia was in the middle of Diocletian's eastern domains and midway on the road between the Balkan and Mesopotamian frontiers. Diocletian hardly supposed that naming a permanent colleague would be enough to solve the problem of the empire's security. He felt that the empire, including its western part, needed a bigger army and more fortifications, and more revenue to pay for them. Probably inhe introduced a new system for taxation and the requisition of supplies, which also applied to the western provinces ruled by Maximian. For centuries the Romans had levied taxes of different kinds all over the empire, at widely different rates. The inflation of the previous century had slowly rendered monetary A History of the Byzantine State and Society almost worthless, so that the government increasingly met its expenses by requisitions of labor or goods, such as uniforms for the soldiers and grain for city dwellers. Originally such requisitions had been paid for in money at fixed rates, but as inflation made the value of the payments nugatory they had gradually ceased to be made. Under this makeshift system assessment was inefficient and burdensome, and raising taxes was difficult. Diocletian realized that the best way of maximizing receipts while minimizing economic dislocation was to standardize the taxes and requisitions according to his subjects' ability to pay. Collecting taxes or requisitions that fell equally on each man, household, or measure of land had the obvious disadvantage that some men and households could afford to pay much more than others, and some land was far more productive than other land. Uniform rates that the rich could pay easily would ruin the poor, and rates that the poor could pay would be absurdly low for the rich and yield little revenue. Yet any assessment of land and other property according to their monetary value would rapidly become obsolete as the coinage continued to inflate. To make a reliable assessment possible, Diocletian defined two standard units to measure tax liability. One was the caput — literally meaning "head," but better translated as "heading" because it was a theoretical unit for varying numbers of taxpayers. It was supposed to stand for a set amount of wealth, which happened to be well above that of the average taxpayer; it could represent the resources of many poor households, the property of several middling ones, or a fraction of the fortune of a rich man. Seemingly the wealth taken into account was limited to real estate. The second unit was the jugum "yoke"representing a set acreage of first-class plowland; apparently it could also be a larger portion of worse land or a smaller portion of better land, so that each jugum would be of approximately the same value. The juga A History of the Byzantine State and Society to have been designed to assess requisitions of grain, and the capita to assess other taxes, in or in kind. Evidently regions that produced a large surplus of grain, notably Egypt, were assigned more juga and fewer capita than others. The quantity of grain levied per jugum; and tax per caput, could vary from year to year according to the government's needs. Yet the intent appears to have been that in a given year an equal quantity of grain should be levied per jugum and an A History of the Byzantine State and Society amount of tax per caput, at least within the jurisdiction of each emperor. This system must have taken some time to put into effect. Each city A History of the Byzantine State and Society assigned a quota of capita and juga for its territory, and the city councils, which had always been responsible for collecting taxes and requisitions, now had to collect the taxes and requisitions that corresponded to their cities' quotas. When the system began, the quotas must have been assigned somewhat arbitrarily, A History of the Byzantine State and Society the basis of current records. But the system at least allowed an accurate census to be made, and Diocletian seems to have planned for a regular revision of assessments in five-year cycles beginning inwith the beginning of a thoroughgoing reassessment perhaps scheduled for His plans for a reform of the coinage and of provincial administration may also have begun this early. Although Diocletian was now primarily ruler of the East, he continued to be aware of the problems of the West. He twice conferred with Maximian at the boundary between Illyricum and , where their jurisdictions met. Once the two rulers campaigned together against the Germans there. Maximian, who had taken Milan as his headquarters, maintained or restored order in most of the West, though he was unable to suppress the rebellion in Britain, which had spread to northwestern Gaul. The record of the two Augusti was by no means a bad one, particularly by the standards of the past century of disasters, but it failed to satisfy Diocletian. He therefore made another major change. In he arranged with Maximian to proclaim two junior emperors, so that each Augustus received a Caesar, sharing his epithet of Jovius or Herculius, to help rule his part of the empire. Maximian's Caesar was Constantius, his son-in-law and former praetorian prefect, while Diocletian's Caesar was his own son-in-law Galerius, who may also have been his former praetorian prefect. Like both Augusti, the new Caesars were experienced officers from Illyricum. Constantius was given the task of putting down the rebellion in Britain and Gaul, where he took Trier as his headquarters. At this time, Galerius's main headquarters seems to have been , and his main assignment to guard and Egypt against the Persians, while Diocletian finished A History of the Byzantine State and Society the Danube frontier. These Caesars, despite having praetorian prefects of their own, were subject to their Augusti even within their assigned regions, which in any case were not permanently fixed. Furthermore, though Constantius and Galerius were not much younger than Diocletian and Maximian, the Caesars were designated heirs to the Augusti, perpetuating the artificial dynasties of the Jovii in the East and the Herculii in the West. This system of four emperors has since been called the . In fact, it simply applied the familiar practice of appointing junior emperors to the existing dyarchy. It therefore tended to confirm rather than to confuse the twofold division of the empire. Around the time of the appointment of the new Caesars, Diocletian and his colleagues transformed the provincial administration, A History of the Byzantine State and Society had stayed much the same since the time of Augustus. The former provinces, which had been fewer than fifty and of very different sizes, were replaced by about a hundred new provinces of more nearly uniform extent, population, and resources. Some fifty-five of these provinces were in the eastern empire, which was smaller in area but richer and more densely populated. The former provincial governors, who had commanded whatever troops garrisoned their provinces, were replaced by purely civil governors, while the army became subject to separate military officials. The new provinces A History of the Byzantine State and Society further grouped into twelve large jurisdictions called dioceses, six of which were in the East. Each diocese was administered by a vicar vicariusan official who was the superior of the diocese's civil governors. Each vicar's superior was the praetorian prefect of one of the four emperors. Thus the emperors roughly tripled the number of their major officials, adding new prefectures, dioceses, and provinces and appointing military and civil officials to replace the old provincial governors. The number of lower-ranking bureaucrats also increased. The introduction of four A History of the Byzantine State and Society required approximately quadrupling the imperial court, which consisted of councilors, household servants, and several administrative bureaus. Besides the praetorian prefect, whose department was in charge of the army and the requisitions levied for it, each emperor probably received a public treasurer, whose department handled his monetary revenues and mints, and a private treasurer, whose department managed his imperial estates. Each emperor also had bodyguards, messengers, and several departments to keep government records, all soon put under a master of offices magister officioruman official probably created by Diocletian. By a rough estimate, the civil service doubled from about fifteen thousand men to about thirty thousand, of whom something more than half held posts in the East. Diocletian and his colleagues also greatly enlarged the army. Although the difficulty of recruiting and supplying soldiers probably forced them to increase it more gradually than the much smaller bureaucracy, most of the army's growth appears to have been rapid. The surviving figures that reflect it are open to some doubt, but the overall picture is clear. Starting with an army totaling somesoldiers inthe four emperors seem to have increased it by about half as much again, to someWithin the East, the increase seems to have been a good deal less, from aboutmen to , with most of the additions being made on the Persian frontier. A history of the Byzantine state and society

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? A History of the Byzantine State and Society if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. It begins in a. Spannin This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. Spanning twelve centuries and three continents, the linked the ancient and modern worlds, shaping and transmitting Greek, Roman, and Christian traditionsthat remain vigorous today, not only in Eastern Europe and the Middle East but throughout Western civilization. Though in its politics Byzantium often resembled a third-world dictatorship, it has never yet been matched in maintaining a single state for so long, over a wide area inhabited by heterogeneous peoples. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and modern works, the author treats political and social developments as a single vivid story, told partly in detailed narrative and partly in essays that clarify long-term changes. He avoids stereotypes and rejects such old and new historical orthodoxies as the persistent weakness of the and the pervasive importance of holy men in Late Antiquity. Without neglecting underlying social, cultural, and economic trends, the author shows the often crucial impact of nearly a hundred Byzantine emperors and empresses. What the emperor or empress did, or did not do, could rapidly confront ordinary Byzantines with economic ruin, new religious doctrines, or conquest by a foreign power. Much attention is paid to the complex life of the court and bureaucracy that has given us the adjective "byzantine. Byzantine civilization emerges as durable, creative, and realistic, overcoming repeated setbacks to remain prosperous almost to the end. With illustrations and 18 maps that complement the text, A History of the Byzantine State and Society should long remain the standard history A History of the Byzantine State and Society Byzantium not just for students and scholars but for all readers. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published November 1st by Stanford University Press first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions 5. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Sort order. Mar 16, Artur Olczyk rated it A History of the Byzantine State and Society was amazing. If you're looking for a comprehensive book on the history of Byzantium, look no further: this is the book. Treadgold managed to write a book that critically examines almost every aspect crucial to the Byzantine history, including politics, society, theology and state- affairs. Each item covered by the author is elegant and versatile, and even though there are certain minor inconsistencies, the overall reception is one of awe due to the book's picturesque take on the subject. Instead of focusing so If you're looking for a comprehensive book on the history of Byzantium, look no further: this is the book. Instead of focusing solely on palace intrigues and on overemphasizing minor events, however appealing they might seem, Treadgold draws our attention to matters essential to functioning of a state. In this regard, he gives a very instructive description of a fiscal reform of under the emperor Anastasius, with its chief principle to substitute cash payments for most of the remaining payments in kind, a move first initiated by emperors Constantine I and Theodosius I. That, in turn, changed the A History of the Byzantine State and Society of frontier soldiers who weren't paid in food anymore and instead started to receive monetary allowances, which stimulated state's economy. Everyone interested in the reign of one the most skilled Roman emperors, , will surely be satisfied, as the emperor receives more than significant attention. The author provides an extensive description of his political, fiscal and theological reforms. Brilliantly described by Treadgold is the securing of the empire's borders, reconquering the former Roman territories and conquering the new ones temporary and straining though they might've been. Also, you might find interesting the Nika Revolt ofwhen a mob of two rivalling chariot racing factions, the Blues and the Greens, broke out in an open revolt against Justinian, who, after initial setback, managed to subjugate the rebels by use of force of his two loyal generals, Belisarius and Mundus, and cemented power within itself. One could only hope for a better treatment of Justinian's four-part legal codifications: the Codex Iustinianusthe Digestathe Institutiones and the Novellaethat - combined - constituted Corpus Iuris Civilislater reintroduced in its Greek translation A History of the Byzantine State and Society the emperor Leo VI the Wise as the important inasmuch as it was valid until the fall of the Byzantine empire. As you'll surely find out, even though Justinian during his reign spent lavishly on his projects, he proved himself to be a capable ruler, both externally and internally. His accomplishments might only be surpassed A History of the Byzantine State and Society that of Augustus' and Trajan's. After his death, and in some matters even slightly before that event, there had been noticeable decay in political as well as in everyday life. And yet, Byzantium still managed to prosper under other competent ruler, whose profiles are well-described in the book, alongside thrilling events, such as the by the Crusaders among many others. Treadgold also offers a riveting description of heated theological debates that in some cases seems to have shaken the empire to its very core. His account presents itself as a good exposition of differences between major sects and the official orthodoxy. What is the relation between God and Christ and A History of the Byzantine State and Society Holy Spirit in later centuries? That question sparked a debate that lasted for hundreds of years. If you think that Christ was created by the Father and had a beginning in time, you're a follower of a heretic Arian. If, on the other hand, your belief is that Jesus Christ had two loosely united natures, you're a Nestorian. On the other end of the extremity, there's , with a notion that Christ had only one nature: divine. If you think that Christ, after all, had two natures but only one will, it's not official Christianity but a heresy called Monotheletism. There's a delicate distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, and the author draws a fine line for anyone interested in the dispute. It's a pity Treadgold dismissed other influential heresies with only limited deliberation e. Manichaeism, Iconoclasm, , . What I can't agree with is Treadgold's claim that Christians were persecuted because their religion was distinct from the official one. Ancient Romans were really tolerant of other religions; they had to be since their empire was becoming more and more culturally diverse. Apart from obvious polytheism, they had encountered other monotheist religions before Christianity had become visible so it wasn't a fear of the unknown e. Judaism, Zoroastrianism. They were, however, highly intolerant of groups that tried to undermine the public peace by preaching to disobey earthly pagan authorities and scaring rural communities with images of eternal hell and damnation. As fascinating as the book clearly is, in the end, my image of the Byzantine Empire is somewhat negative: it seems to have been A History of the Byzantine State and Society the verge of financial catastrophe and military annihilation since its inception. Dotted with a fair number of skilled rulers , , Justinian, emperors of the Macedonian dynastyByzantium's history is one of constant struggle of its emperors to self-sustain themselves at all costs, without regard to the state's treasury or constant depredation of society. Oct 26, Aaron Arnold rated it it was amazing Shelves: historybiographywarread-in Surely the best A History of the Byzantine State and Society history of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire I've read, and perhaps the best one out there, despite being published in While the Roman Empire will forever be more highly esteemed by laymen for how they steadily assembled their pan-Mediterranean state everyone loves watching winners conquer one enemy after anotherover the course of the book I developed a grudging and then unabashed respect for how the Byzantines did their best to adapt that rigid, ethnocentric, coup-prone Roman governance model to maintain a surprising amount of coherent identity in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multifariously-threatening world. They may have failed eventually, but you try creating an empire that lasts for over a millennium! One of my main thoughts when reading was that I'd been previously been underrating the Great Man theory of history, or at least the ability of powerful individuals to redirect nations on different courses. Treadgold is scrupulously polite towards even plainly inept rulers - he will refrain from more than a few A History of the Byzantine State and Society critical adjectives of inarguably terrible emperors, and well-meaning emperors who had circumstances beyond their control wreck their reigns get "he did as best as could be expected given the circumstances" - A History of the Byzantine State and Society it's striking how even the vast machinery of an ancient empire could be utterly upended by the whims of its leader. In this the Byzantines were hardly unique, of course, but their exceptionally long existence gives you many more opportunities to watch one emperor carefully save money, reconquer land, and heal religious divisions, only for his idiot son to ruin everything and waste golden opportunities to defend against their enemies. This fundamental instability was exacerbated by their tendency towards conspiracy, famously memorialized today in the adjective "byzantine". Here was one of my favorite incidents of A History of the Byzantine State and Society, from the year AD, in the midst of the Iconoclasm debate: "Irene, an orphan in her mid-twenties from the shrunken provincial town of , had keen political instincts, a strong will, and some devoted allies in the bureaucracy. The precariousness of her position seems to have given her a sense of urgency. A month and a half after her husband's death, she foiled a plot, led by the postal and the domestic of the , to put 's second son Nicephorus on the throne. Now imagine that tended to happen every few decades! Every other major power struggled with the same issues of succession and legitimacy to some degree, but despite their impressive longevity the flaws of the Roman governance model were clearly key to Byzantine difficulties. It's no way to run a country. The Byzantine religious controversies, which have earned the rightful scorn of scholars going back to Gibbon, are another great example of unnecessary conflict, given the sheer amount of time wasted and blood spilled over them. So to some extent A History of the Byzantine State and Society would A History of the Byzantine State and Society to expect some major disagreements as diverse traditions chafed under a single unified theology, particularly as the Patriarchs determined orthodoxy more or less independently from the geographically and culturally distant in the west. But to a modern reader it's striking how frequently the empire was nearly brought to its knees at key moments by violent conflicts over arcane controversies that, one thinks, a calmer scholar like Thomas Aquinas would have wasted barely a few pages resolving with some choice Aristotle quotes. It's poignant to watch the East and West churches slowly squabble each other into the permanent Great Schism for no real theological reason, periodically attempting half-hearted reunions like a broken-up couple that can't quite bring themselves to move on, repeated Crusades and ecumenical councils achieving nothing but greater recrimination. But again, whatever criticisms you have of the Byzantines, you have to be impressed by their surprising resilience in the face of continuous threats from all directions. While the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed and faded fewer than two centuries after the division under Diocletian, the eastern half maintained its heritage for a millennium. And what the Byzantines did was arguably harder than what the Romans did: it's very common for a single high-asabiya warlike group to expand their empire until there are no more worlds left to conquer, but it's far more difficult to then stably administer that empire, particularly if it's much more heterogeneous as it should be, A History of the Byzantine State and Society your wars have gone wellparticularly if you're not interested in further expanding your territory, and particularly in a high-risk area with multiple vulnerable frontiers. The Byzantines never really tried to conquer outside of what the Romans had built during the Augustan Age, and aside from occasional attempts like Justinian's to reclaim parts of the ancient west, for the most part they simply tried to maintain their territorial integrity against fairly staggering odds. In some ways the flexibility of Byzantine identity was actually a strength; most but not all Byzantines were Greek, or Orthodox, or followed , or were even necessarily under Byzantine rule, so the movement of the frontiers back and forth was not as immediately traumatic as it could have been. When Greece finally won its eventual independence in the 20th century, that its capital was not at Constantinople and its borders excluded the Ionian coast was due to the expulsion of the Greeks after the war with Turkey, which easily could have turned out differently, and thus had the collapse of the Ottoman Empire unfolded slightly differently, the entire Aegean might still reflect the political, cultural, A History of the Byzantine State and Society ethnic boundaries of a thousand years ago. There are also other legacies, less prominent but just as enduring, in Russia, , Turkey, Armenia, Italy, and everywhere else that was once part of the empire. There's too much more to say about the Byzantine A History of the Byzantine State and Society, so I will just compliment Treadgold on his intensive research many of the photos of Byzantine churches are credited to him and his family and skill at presenting a coherent narrative out of nearly a millennium and a half of history, much of which was built out of inherently unreliable ancient accounts. A History of the Byzantine State and Society - Warren Treadgold - Google книги

This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. It begins in A. Spanning twelve centuries and three continents, the Byzantine Empire linked the ancient and modern worlds, shaping and transmitting Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions—including the Greek classics, Roman law, and Christian theology—that remain vigorous today, not only in Eastern Europe and the Middle East but throughout Western civilization. Though in its A History of the Byzantine State and Society Byzantium often resembled a third-world dictatorship, it has never yet been matched in maintaining a single state for so long, over a wide area inhabited by heterogeneous peoples. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and modern works, the author treats political and social developments as a single vivid story, told partly in detailed narrative and partly in essays that clarify long-term changes. He avoids stereotypes and rejects such old and new historical orthodoxies as the persistent weakness of the Byzantine economy and the pervasive importance of holy men in Late Antiquity. Without neglecting underlying social, cultural, and economic trends, the author shows the often crucial impact of nearly a hundred Byzantine emperors and empresses. What the emperor or empress did, or did not do, could rapidly confront ordinary Byzantines with economic ruin, new religious doctrines, or conquest by a foreign power. Much attention is paid to the complex life of the court and bureaucracy A History of the Byzantine State and Society has given us the adjective "byzantine. Byzantine civilization A History of the Byzantine State and Society as durable, creative, and realistic, overcoming repeated setbacks to remain prosperous almost to the end. With illustrations and 18 maps that complement the text, A History of the Byzantine State and Society should long remain the standard history of Byzantium not just for students and scholars but for all readers. He is the author of, most recently, Byzantium and Its Army, Stanford, Drawing on the latest scholarship and written for both the general reader and the scholar, this work may well become the standard English-language history of Byzantium. A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Description Desc. More in History—World.