'Late Byzantine Imperial Relatives: Roles, Activities and Political Culture, c. 1261-1461'

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Following the Sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist as a unitary, contiguous polity. Despite the Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople in 1261, throughout the Late Byzantine period (c. 1261-1461), the Balkans and Aegean were typified by cultural diversity, political instability and complex extra- and intra-regional alliances. As demonstrated by microregional case studies - most recently Wright (2014) - these conditions contributed to fractured ethnic, linguistic and confessional bonds and the emergence of kinship as a uniquely cohesive factor among the region's Greek, Latin (Western European), Slavic and Turkic polities. Byzantium was no exception: its emperors utilised kinship ties to maintain, refashion and expand their fragmented authority and influence in the region and the wider Mediterranean. However, little attention has been paid to Late Byzantine imperial kinship beyond prosopographical works, biographies of individual rulers and surveys of raw data.My doctoral project will make an original contribution to the field by providing a systematic analysis of the multifarious roles and activities of Late Byzantine imperial relatives in terms of their impact on the governance of the empire. My research is concerned with, and informed by, the mutually-inscribing interconnectivity of the premodern ruling family and 'political culture', that is, the framework of structures, practices and expectations within which a polity's political actors operated. Modern scholarship's treatment of Byzantine political history has largely focused on bureaucratic minutiae and has invariably privileged the imperial 'centre' (Constantinople) over the supposed 'periphery' (the empire's various provinces). The study of Late Byzantine imperial kinship is particularly well-suited to problematise this dichotomy. In this period, imperial relatives (male and, occasionally, female) governed and defended quasi-feudal 'appanages', participated in diplomatic missions and foreign adventurism, and contracted strategically advantageous endogamous and exogamous marriages with Christians (Latin and Orthodox) and non-Christians (Mongols and Turks). They performed their social status through monastic, literary and artistic patronage, and pursued their personal advantage through rebellion, court factionalism, religious controversy and private warfare. To explore the tension between the political culture envisioned by the centre and political culture in 'reality', I will juxtapose two bodies of evidence: (1) 'normative' texts reflective of the views of the imperial centre as regards the expected behaviours and duties of imperial relatives; and (2) sources reflective of the self-fashioning of imperial relatives, for example those connected to their philanthropic activities and epistolary networks. Attending directly to imperial relatives through select case studies, my approach will facilitate a clearer understanding of Late Byzantine political culture by revealing how imperial relatives interacted with the imperial centre and how such interaction in turn shaped the reality of governance.A particular facet of my approach will be to engage with scholarship on neighbouring regions and draw comparatively upon 'models' - for example, the Capetian, Piast, Ayyubid and Buyid 'family systems' - to illuminate Byzantine practices. By seeking to understand how power was conceptualised, negotiated and deployed in Late Byzantium, my doctoral research will contribute to an understanding of premodern authority with implications for and beyond the late medieval Mediterranean.