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

在专制政权中，那些设法影响统治者的决定和意见的人享有巨大的权力，这一事实激起了竞争和谣言。这种明显的但在很大程度上被忽视的相关性最好在古代晚期进行研究，当时影响的重要条件受到政治，社会和知识变化的影响。在移民时期导致罗马帝国分裂之后，皇帝继续存在于拜占庭东部。在西方，日耳曼国王崛起。许多代理人试图让统治者的耳朵：从宫廷太监，谁是非常接近皇帝，主教，谁是基督教的兴起。因此，这些不同的代理人之间存在着激烈的竞争，导致了冲突并促进了论战文学。那些对统治者施加影响的主角还没有被彻底调查，因为他们形成了一个异质的群体，既不能从制度上完全理解，也不能从他们与皇帝的接近程度上把握。而且，他们的手段不仅仅是言语，还有手势。有偏见的来源，其中影响代理人是基于角色模型（警告或妖妇），对信仰的影响（如宗教）及其在叙述中的代表性（好国王/坏顾问），要么被学术界视为理所当然，要么被完全拒绝。最后，无论是古典文学还是中世纪历史都没有研究人际影响的传统。本项目采用社会心理学家伯特伦·瑞文的人际影响的权力/互动模型，旨在分析影响代理人的资源和策略以及影响尝试的模式和条件，从而绕过通常塑造或塑造对影响的理解的共同对立，比如男/女异教徒/基督徒罗马人/日耳曼人与此同时，话语分析的工具，代理人和互动的表征进行审查。通过对历史动因、文学人物和社会刻板印象的相互关系进行新的阐释，有可能区分真实的和感知到的权力转移。分项目（284-395，395-565东，395-568西）的时间和地理分布是为了强调影响力及其话语如何与上述变化相关，从而说明其历史和文化层面。该项目的目标是将人际影响确立为历史研究的主题，并通过分析对统治者的影响，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.