Rural Communities in Late Byzantium

Late Byzantium faced economic, political, and demographic crises. This book argues for the ability of rural communities to transform their socioeconomic strategies and maintain resilience in the face of these, especially in the context of islands. It seeks to reinstate ordinary people in the historical narrative and reintroduce them as active participants in the events of the period, pointing to their ability not only to react to change, but also to initiate it. Combining new archaeological evidence with archival material pertaining to the islands of Lemnos and Thasos in the Northern Aegean, it provides concrete examples of Byzantine socio-economic strategies that successfully mitigated the various crises and thus contributes to a diachronic perspective on crisis management. The result is to rethink the nature of the Late Byzantine period, and to question the ways in which we have come to divide historical periods into 'good' or 'bad'.

Fotini Kondyli is Associate Professor of Byzantine Archaeology and Art at the University of Virginia. Her research deals with Byzantine social and spatial practices and the archaeology of non-elites. She is the recipient of fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology at Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.