Popular Political Agency in Byzantium's villages and towns

Abstract

While cotemporary work on the Byzantine polity presents Constantinople as a hub of a vividly polyphonic politics, much less has been said about the social and political identity of the empire’s smaller settlements. Following our field’s renewed interest in urban sociability, popular political agency, and collective identity I turn here to this larger world of villages and towns in order to examine the relationship of such social units with the Roman world around them during the middle Byzantine period. In doing so I trace village and town attitudes towards authority and follow evidence of collective action, which by all accounts should qualify as politics.