The various groups of fortifications that were in use in Messenia during the period of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries are examined. Five categories are distinguished based on their position, size and defensive features. It is concluded that the fortifications were directly linked to the new social and political reality that prevailed in the area between the dismantlement of the Byzantine empire in 1204 and the Ottoman conquest in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The Aragonese Hospitaller Juan Fernández de Heredia, Master of Rhodes from 1377 to 1396, was an outstanding patron of historical compilations, all of them translated into Aragonese. He promoted the earliest translations into any western language of Plutarch’s Lives, of parts of Thucydides and of Zonaras’ Epitome of Byzantine history; he also produced a version of the Chronicle of the Morea with an entirely original section which covered much of the fourteenth century. These and other sources in his corpus formed the basis for a unique initiative, a continuous history of Greece.

In Ottoman Cyprus (1571–1878), social organization was based above all on the ownership and exploitation of agricultural land. The social relations, economic processes and daily practices of landowning elites and peasant farmers alike were structured by their relationship with the land. In this article, historical and archaeological data are integrated in order to investigate the development of social organization by focusing on landholding and landscape. In particular, it examines the role, identity and material culture of the new Cypriot/Ottoman elite, the commercialization of agriculture as expressed in the economy and the landscape, and the daily routine experiences of communities in the landscape.

Women in Ottoman Greece were present in a number of different courts of law, one being the so-called communal courts. These courts became increasingly important towards the end of the Ottoman period, especially in areas where there was little if any Muslim population, and they dealt with a great variety of cases ranging from property disputes to rape and crimes of morality. Women were very active in such courts, both as accusers and as accused, showing remarkable knowledge of the manner in which such courts functioned. They frequently chose to pursue cases in them, in part because communal courts were supportive of individuals in difficult circumstances such as widows, who form the bulk of the female petitioners. This was an outcome of the nature of these courts which were composed of the same individuals who exercised executive powers over their communities and who thus wanted to ensure tranquillity and the prosperity of their people. For that reason notables appear almost unconcerned with the stipulations of customary law in several of their judgments, seeking instead to achieve compromises, or what we could term the greater social good. Being local, easily accessible, and familiar to the members of each community, communal courts were attractive to women and men in the years leading to the emergence of the modern Greek state, forming one tier of the complex Ottoman ‘system’ of conflict resolution.

St Sebastian entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting from the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two main iconographic types are encountered in post-Byzantine wall-paintings, both of them popular in Western art: The Ordeal of the Arrows and St Sebastian after the Martyrdom. The influences of Italian models on the iconography are obvious. Nonetheless, the loans from Western iconography and Renaissance art concern a limited number of scenes and subjects, because the post-Byzantine painters tried to renew painting within the framework of Orthodox tradition and its doctrinal content.

The ‘doubling of the self’ is a phenomenon that appears in entries of private diaries and consists in the division of the diarist’s self into two: the self that acts and the self that observes and writes. This phenomenon can be found in Dragoumis’ Φύλλα ημερολογίου, Seferis’ Μέρες and Theotokas’ Τετράδια ημερολογίου. There are entries where the doubling of the self occurs in practice and entries where it is described, discussed or analysed. All these reveal the three Greek diarists’ contradictory feelings about the doubling of the self, but also the latter’s significance for the private diary.