Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison, 200–1100

Walter Pohl, Dr. phil. (1984), was formerly Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna and director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has published on the transformation of the Roman World, on the migration period, on problems of identity, on comparative history and on the world of the steppe, including his monograph The Avars (2018). Veronika Wieser, Dr. phil. (2015), is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research covers eschatology and apocalyptic thought as well as ascetic communities and historiography in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She has published Historiography and Identity: Ancient and Christian Narratives (with Walter Pohl, 2019) and Cultures of Eschatology (with Vincent Eltschinger and Johann Heiss, 2020).

Preface

List of Figures

Contributors



Introduction: The Emergence of New Polities in the Shadows of Empire

 Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser



PART 1: The Later Roman Empire and the Post-Roman Kingdoms in the West



1 When Did the West Roman Empire Fall?

 Ian N. Wood

2 The Role of Peoples in the Emergence of the Post-Roman Kingdoms

 Walter Pohl

3 In the Shadow of the Roman Empire: Layers of Legitimacy and Strategies of Legitimization in the Regna of the Early Medieval West

 Stefan Esders



PART 2: The Carolingian Empire and the Emerging Polities in Its Northern and Eastern Periphery



4 When the Bavarians Became Bavarian

 The Politicization of Ethnicity and Crystallization of Ethnic Identities in the Shadow of Carolingian Rule (8th to 9th Century)

 Helmut Reimitz

5 Peripheral Polities North of the Carolingian Realm: The Regnum Danorum

 Ildar Garipzanov



PART 3: Byzantium and Its Peripheral Powers



6 The Lagoons as a Distant Mirror: Constantinople, Venice and the Italian Romania

 Francesco Borri

7 Countering Byzantium’s Shadow: Contrarianism among the Bulgars, Rus and Germans

 Jonathan Shepard



PART 4: Between Byzantium and the Islamic World



8 Early Medieval Armenia between Empires (Fourth-Eleventh Century CE): Dynamics and Continuities

 Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

9 Strategies of Legitimation in the Shadow of Empires: Byzantine–Turkish Contact Zones in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Asia Minor

 Alexander Beihammer



PART 5: The Abbasid Caliphate and the Formation of New Dynasties



10 Communication between Centre and Periphery in the Early Tenth-Century Abbasid Empire

 Maaike van Berkel

11 Local and Imperial Rule: Examples from Frs (9th–10th Centuries)

 Jürgen Paul



PART 6: Medieval China and the Foreign Dynasties



12 The Huai Frontier and the Ethnicization of Difference in Early Medieval China

 Andrew Chittick

13 ‘Cultural China’ from the Eleventh Century: Legitimacy, Metanarrative and Historiography

 Q. Edward Wang

14 In the Shadows of Empires: The Tuyuhun and Khitans in Late Antiquity

 Michael R. Drompp

15 Post-imperial Polities: Concluding Observations

 Walter Pohl



Index