Die byzantinischen Bleisiegel in Österreich, Band II

The submitted manuscript contains the second part of an opus planned for three volumes. The first part, published some years ago, contains the seals of the imperial court (emperors, their families, staff of the court including honorary titles), the second brings into focus the seals concerning the administration of the Byzantine empire, divided into central and provincial administration, with special sub-groups for civil and military staff. The work is the result of the FWF-project P13561, now prolonged by P15319-G02. About 350 types of lead seals are worked up; as only one third belongs to the central administration, the greater part deals with provincial administration According the scientific goals of the Centre for Byzantine Sigillography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences we were much concerned of methodological progress in this discipline. One purpose was the dating of the seal as narrow as possible, according our most recent results in this field, the other the problem of identifying, that means of elaborating criteria to attribute similar or somewhat related seals to one single person or to different persons, and to check the possibilities of attributing seals to persons known from other sources. Of course the new material was integrated into the bulk of our information according modern research; sometimes it was necessary to correct or precise current hypotheses as result of the new evidence. Only in cases like that we discussed the problems of a special office or command more thoroughly, but often it was enough to mention the modern literature. Some seals or only parallels of such a type were edited already earlier, but even there it was valuable to rework them, as there were sometimes mistakes or misinterpretations, not to mention the dating. To present a commentary as valuable as possible we used much additional material, sometimes even unpublished seals; all that is also considered for the rich indices. The book is valuable for the administrative history of the Byzantine empire, and in a high degree also for prosopography and historical geography; in some cases we included predecessors or successors of a magistrate, using the method of relative chronology. To reduce the price of the production of the volume the patterns of the plates will be prepared by a professional bureau, that is still working on the amelioration of the digitalised photos. So the now existing photos are included as a CD ROM.