Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Historical Significance of the Islamic–Byzantine Border: From the Seventh Century to 1291
- 2 The Byzantine–Muslim Frontier from the Arab Conquests to the Arrival of the Seljuk Turks
- 3 The Formation of al-ʿAwāṣim
- 4 Caucasian Elites between Byzantium and the Caliphate in the Early Islamic Period
- 5 Byzantine Borders were State Artefacts, not ‘Fluid Zones of Interaction’
- 6 A Christian Insurgency in Islamic Syria: The Jarājima (Mardaites) between Byzantium and the Caliphate
- 7 The Character of Umayyad Art: the Mediterranean Tradition
- 8 Byzantine Heroes and Saints of the Arab–Byzantine Border (Ninth–Tenth Centuries)
- 9 A Cosmopolitan Frontier State: The Marwānids of Diyār Bakr, 990–1085, and the Performance of Power
- 10 Byzantine Population Policy in the Eastern Borderland between Byzantium and the Caliphate from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries
- 11 The Islamic–Byzantine Frontier in Seljuq Anatolia
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Historical Significance of the Islamic–Byzantine Border: From the Seventh Century to 1291
- 2 The Byzantine–Muslim Frontier from the Arab Conquests to the Arrival of the Seljuk Turks
- 3 The Formation of al-ʿAwāṣim
- 4 Caucasian Elites between Byzantium and the Caliphate in the Early Islamic Period
- 5 Byzantine Borders were State Artefacts, not ‘Fluid Zones of Interaction’
- 6 A Christian Insurgency in Islamic Syria: The Jarājima (Mardaites) between Byzantium and the Caliphate
- 7 The Character of Umayyad Art: the Mediterranean Tradition
- 8 Byzantine Heroes and Saints of the Arab–Byzantine Border (Ninth–Tenth Centuries)
- 9 A Cosmopolitan Frontier State: The Marwānids of Diyār Bakr, 990–1085, and the Performance of Power
- 10 Byzantine Population Policy in the Eastern Borderland between Byzantium and the Caliphate from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries
- 11 The Islamic–Byzantine Frontier in Seljuq Anatolia
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The academic study of borders and borderlands, especially the historical study of the subject, has been a well-tilled field in recent decades, resulting in a plethora of conferences and studies. To a certain degree, of course, anyone studying an empire with the history and geopolitical situation of Byzantium, or one with the expansionist drive and history of the Islamic oecumene, has always of necessity to some degree treated the relevant empire's borders and their historical significance and influence. But the historical study of borderlands in recent years – and certainly collaborative efforts in volumes such as the one you are now reading – has tended to take one of two forms: either the overly atomised, divorced from a larger historical context and the tradition in which it was embedded, or the overly generalised and amorphous.
The study of borderlands today has also seen its task as something different from that of traditional frontier history; this intellectual trend is given voice in the following passage, written in the context of American history:
If frontiers were the places where we once told our master … narratives, then borderlands are the places where those narratives come unraveled. They are ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads, peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road. If frontiers are spaces of narrative closure, then borderlands are places where stories take unpredictable turns and rarely end as expected.
One might say that whereas the study of borderlands in the past often involved seeing only the forest at the expense of the trees, today's practice of borderland history runs the danger of committing the opposite error: of failing to see any forest at all, and of focusing only on isolated trees and groves. Obviously, a careful historian should, ideally, not only examine minutely the individual grove within the forest, but also not lose sight of the greater context of the forest, and even the larger region in which the grove finds itself.
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- Information
- The Islamic-Byzantine Border in HistoryFrom the Rise of Islam to the End of the Crusades, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023