The main sources concerning Heraclius’ first campaign against the Persians are : (a) The poem of George Pisides, known under the Latin title Expeditio Persica; Pisides, an eyewitness, composed and read his panegyric poem shortly after the end of the campaign, when the emperor returned to Constantinople.(b) A chapter of the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor (818) concerning the events of the year 622; the first part of this chapter, concerning the preparations and the beginning of the campaign (p. 302, l. 32-p. 303, l. 17) is based on sources that have not been preserved; the second part (p. 303, l. 17-p. 306, l. 8) depends almost completely upon the poem of Pisides. Of the other Greek sources, the Paschal Chronicle and the Chronicle of Patriarch Nicephorus do not even mention the campaign, while later chroniclers, such as Cedrenus and Zonaras, summarize and reproduce the account of Theophanes. The non-Greek chronicles have also a very limited importance for our research since most of them ignore this first campaign, or contain no chronological data.

Byzantine military technology remains to be examined thoroughly, despite its importance in demonstrating the Byzantines’ ability to absorb ideas and practices from areas outside me Empire as well as developing their own traditions. This article examines arms and armour from the mid-sixth century to the end of the tenth century and puts the military panoply into a wider context, that of the development of offensive and defensive military equipment in Europe and the lands to the north and east of the Empire. Finally, it examines die relationship between military affairs and the economic and political situation of the Empire and attempts to account for the use of particular weapons and methods of equipping die soldiers at particular times.

The fall of Constantinople on the night of 13 April 1204 to the Venetians and the soldiers of the fourth crusade is taken as the crucial turning point of the history of the later Byzantine Empire. For many the final period of Byzantine history is nothing but the pathetic survival of a state built on the memories of its former greatness. This is in many ways far too gloomy a picture. Constantinople was to be recovered by the Byzantines in 1261; and we should not forget that the last centuries of Byzantium saw a flowering of Byzantine art and scholarship. This achievement naturally directs our attention to the period of exile, when the foundations of this ‘Last Byzantine Renaissance’, as it has been called, were laid. In exile the Byzantine Empire was re-established and the Byzantine heritage preserved, at a time when both appeared to be in danger of being recreated in a Latin image, for a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch had been established in Constantinople in place of the Byzantine emperor and the Byzantine patriarch. The fall of Constantinople, indeed, produced a feeling of fatalism and despondency among the Byzantines. There was a tendency to accept the Latin conquest. The peasantry of Thrace even took pleasure in the discomfiture of the Byzantine aristocrats and intellectuals of Constantinople. Some Byzantine magnates attempted to organize resistance to the Latin conquest, but even this, at least in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, was probably done in the hope of securing a favourable bargaining position with the Latins. One of the great Byzantine magnates of Thrace, the Caesar Theodore Vranas, entered the ranks of the Latin aristocracy. Even Michael Angelos, the founder of what we have come to know as the Despotate of Epiros, was willing to submit for a short while to the authority of the Latin emperor.

The historian who is engaged in the study of Byzantine social history is faced with a problem common to pre-industrial societies, or societies in which the majority of the population is both exploited and illiterate. The sources, written as they are by an upper class and largely for an upper class, give relatively abundant information about a small segment of the population, leaving us in darkness about the rest of society. In Byzantine history this is particularly true about the peasantry, which has left us only a very few sources of its own, and rather uninspiring ones at that. The Byzantine upper class wrote its own history, but the Byzantine peasants did not, thus making the task of the modern historian more difficult. Despite these problems, work has been done on both the urban and the rural population of the Empire, and more will probably be done as monastic archives become available. The study of the Byzantine peasantry is of primary importance. For if we are to understand Byzantine society, we must study and understand what happened in the countryside. After all, the Byzantine economy rested on agriculture, and the social relations which determined the fate of the state were, primarily, the social relations prevalent in the countryside.

An apparently unpublished ballad originating from the village of Antissa in Lesbos tells the story of a foreign queen who was afflicted with leprosy and subsequently cured by bathing in a stream which possessed healing properties.

The lament of the Virgin at the Crucifixion of Christ is a theme which can be traced throughout Greek tradition, from at least the sixth century to the present day. It is also found in a wide variety of sources: in the hymns and liturgy of the Orthodox Church, in prose homilies, in learned and vernacular poetry, and in modern folk songs from most areas of the Greekspeaking world. We therefore have an opportunity to examine how different writers and poets responded to a single theme over a period of nearly fifteen centuries.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Constantinople continued to be the intellectual and religious centre of the Greeks despite rival flourishing educational and economic centres in such cities as Smyrna, Kydonies (Aivali), and Chios. Moreover, it was the ‘national’ centre of the Greek people. It was natural, therefore, that the subject of a new translation of the Scriptures, a project affecting all Greeks, should have arisen once more in the Ottoman capital.

In the space of a few years the small isle of Zante, one of the Ionian group, produced three important poets: Hugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, and the subject of this present study, Andreas Kalvos. Kalvos was born in 1792, fourteen years after Foscolo and six years before Solomos. His father’s family may originally have come from Crete. His modier’s family was one of the aristocratic families of Zante—the family name had been inscribed ever since the Venetian occupation of the island in the Gold Book of the island nobility. The marriage of the poet’s parents does not seem to have been a success, for not many years after the birth of his younger brother in 1794, the father, taking the two children with him, left Zante for Leghorn, where his bromer was consul for the Ionian Islands, and where there was a considerable Greek colony. In 1805 Andreas’ mother obtained a divorce fron her husband on the grounds of desertion, and shortly afterwards she married for the second time. She died in 1815, never having seen her children again after their departure from Zante.

Recent years have seen an increase in scholarly interest in the karamanli Christians, that sizeable population of Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians, who were mainly concentrated in Asia Minor, but pockets of whom were to be found in the Crimea-Azov region and in Turkey in Europe. In die absence of extensive written records for the history of these populations, inscriptions in karamanlidika (Turkish karamanlīca), or Turkish written with Greek characters, constitute an important source of historical data; places of origin and places to which they migrated in search of a livelihood; the names in common use among them; the occupations they followed; their membership of guilds; the state of literacy prevailing in the communities in which they lived; some indication of the relative prosperity of die community or the individual; indications as to dieir life span and, in some cases, the cause of death. Clearly, too, the study of inscriptions in karamanlidika has much the same value for the linguist interested in the historical development of the Turkish dialects, as has the study of printed books and documents written in karamanlidika.