Power and influence. Personal Influence on the Rulers of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

在专制政权中，那些设法影响尺子决策和观点的人享有巨大的权力，这一事实引发了竞争和谣言。这种明显但在很大程度上被忽视的相关性最好在晚古代的情况下进行研究，当时重要的影响条件受到政治、社会和智力变化的影响。在移民时期导致罗马帝国分裂后，皇帝继续存在于拜占庭东部。在西方，日耳曼国王兴起了。许多代理人试图听取统治者的意见：从与皇帝关系非常密切的宫廷太监，到基督教崛起使之成为可能的主教。因此，这些不同的代理人之间存在着激烈的竞争，这导致了冲突，并促进了争议性的文学。创造历史的通常是当时流行的观点。那些对尺子产生影响的主角还没有被彻底调查，因为他们形成了一个不同的群体，既不能从制度上完全理解，也不能通过他们与皇帝的亲近来把握。此外，他们的手段不仅包括文字，还包括手势。有偏见的来源，其中影响因素是基于榜样(华纳或诱惑)，对信仰的影响(如宗教)及其在叙事中的表现(好国王/坏顾问)，要么被学术界视为理所当然，要么完全被拒绝。最后，在古典史和中世纪史上都没有研究人际影响的传统。本项目利用社会心理学家伯特伦·雷文的人际影响的权力/互动模型，旨在分析影响因素的资源和策略以及影响企图的模式和条件，从而绕过共同的对立，这些对立经常塑造或塑造对影响的理解，如男性/女性、异教徒/基督教、罗马/日耳曼人。同时，对施事和互动的表述也要用语篇分析的工具加以审视。通过对历史动因、文学人物和社会刻板印象之间的相互关系的新认识，有可能区分真实的和感知的权力转移。分项目(284-395、395-565东部、395-568西部)的时间和地理配置是为了突出影响及其论述如何与上述转变相关联，从而说明它们的历史和文化层面。该项目的目标是通过分析对尺子的影响，将人际影响确立为历史研究的主题，并为政治史和思想史做出贡献。

The fact that in autocratic regimes, those who manage to influence the decisions and opinions of rulers enjoy great power, stirs up rivalry and rumors. This evident but largely neglected correlation is best studied in the case of late antiquity, when important conditions of influence were subject to political, social and intellectual change. After the Migration Period caused the Roman Empire to split up, emperors continued to exist in the byzantine East. In the West, Germanic kings arose. Many agents tried to have the ear of the ruler: from court eunuchs, who were very close to the emperors, to bishops, who were enabled by the rise of Christianity. As a consequence, there was bitter rivalry between these various agents, which led to conflicts and promoted polemic literature. It was usually the opinion of the prevailing one which made history.Those protagonists who exerted influence on rulers have not been investigated thoroughly yet, as they formed a heterogeneous group of people that can neither be entirely understood in terms of institutions nor grasped by their proximity to the emperor. Furthermore, their means not only comprised words, but also gestures. Biased sources, in which influencing agents are based on role models (warner or temptress), influence on beliefs (like religion) and its representation on narratives (good king/ bad advisor), have either been taken for granted by scholarship or wholly rejected. Finally, neither in Classics nor in Medieval History is there a tradition of studying interpersonal influence.This project, by employing the Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence by social psychologist Bertram Raven, aims to analyse the resources and strategies of influencing agents as well as the modes and conditions of influence attempts, bypassing thereby common oppositions, which often shape or shaped the understanding of influence, like male/ female, pagan/ Christian, roman/ Germanic. At the same time, representations of agents and interactions are to be scrutinized with the instruments of discourse analysis. By casting new light on the interrelation of historical agent, literary figure and social stereotype, it is possible to distinguish between real and perceived power-shifts. The chronological and geographical disposition of the sub-projects (284-395, 395-565 East, 395-568 West) is to highlight how influence and its discourse correlate with the aforementioned shifts, thereby illustrating their historical and cultural dimension. The goal of the project is to establish interpersonal influence as a subject of historical research and to make a contribution towards political history as well as the history of mentalities by analyzing influence on rulers.