EMPIRES AND COMMUNITIES IN THE POST-ROMAN AND ISLAMIC WORLD

This book deals with the ways in which empires affected smaller communities ethnic groups, religious communities, local or peripheral populations. It raises the question how these different types of community were integrated into the larger edifice of empire, and in which contexts the dialectic between empires and particular communities could cause disruption. How did religious discourses or practices reinforce (or subvert) imperial pretences? How were constructions of identity affected in the process? The time frame is roughly the fifth to tenth centuries CE, a period with a particular dynamic of empires in Europe and the Mediterranean. While successive parts of the Roman Empire eroded, its Byzantine core areas showed a surprising resilience. Islamic expansion led to a succession of caliphates in a wide area previously dominated by the Roman and Sasanian empires. The Franks attempted to recreate a Western Roman Empire, albeit with limited success. The period is thus exceptionally well suited to study the various expansive and erosive dynamicsof empires,andtheir interaction with smallercommunities. Edited by Walter Pohl and Rutger Kramer