The study of Byzantine military treatises is often fraught with obstacles due to the interpretation of technical terms which have lost their meaning through the passage of time. This paper is concerned with an obscurity called the menavlion and the soldiers who wielded that weapon: the menavlatoi . The menavlion has been identified as a heavy javelin or spear, a short hunting-spear and, more recently, as a pike comparable to that carried by the heavy foot-soldiers in the Byzantine army.

Any interpretation of Near Eastern history touching upon the sixth and seventh centuries must invariably come to terms with the numerous causes of mortality, destruction, and social and economic disruption that preceded the Arab conquests. One of these factors was undoubtedly the bubonic plague, which descended the Nile in the summer of 641, spread through the Delta and passed to Syrian ports in the winter of that year; by the summer of 542 it had reached Constantinople itself and infected, among many other places, large parts of inland Asia Minor and Syria.

Much of the evidence for the changes which scholars perceive in the Late Roman-to-Early Byzantine periods (the ‘Late Antique era’) and in the ‘Dark Age’-to-Middle Byzantine periods in the eastern empire, that is, changes occurring between the mid third and the eighth-to-ninth centuries, whether this evidence is textual, archaeological, or topographical, concerns in one way or another what might be called the upper levels of the settlement-system. These levels consist of settlements or sites distinguishable at various times from the undefended rural majority (or what in most areas forms the majority) of settlements by status (i.e., civic, that of a polis), form, size, situation, or associated functions. They may for present purposes be simply categorised as civic urban settlements, non-civic urban settlements, and non-civic non-urban fortifications or fortified settlements. To study the fate of such places, as settlements and as communities, is to confront the cultural, economic, and internal political history of the period in all its complexity, a task which in most respects is inconceivable without recourse to archaeology and topography. The following observations concern the need to rectify some imbalances in the emphases of research which distort some general analyses of the history of Late Antique and also Middle Byzantine settlements, and so distort our view of cultural, economic, and political change in the periods named.

‘Desire is death’, wrote Shakespeare, exploiting a commonplace of the sixteenth century love-lyric, which lies also at the crux of the anonymous sixteenth century Cypriot sonnets, published with an extensive scholarly introduction, French translation and notes, in 1952, by Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès. The collection comprises one hundred and fifty-six poems, in a variety of metrical forms, some of which translate or adapt Italian originals. Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès addresses the following questions: manuscript condition and origins; dating; authorship; influences, and versification. The poems are placed in categories according to metrical form, and a description of metre and rhyme-schemes is provided. More recently, Lucia Marcheselli-Loukas has made a detailed formal study arguing that the Cypriot sonnets show considerable originality of versification and made a significant contribution to the formation of the Modern Greek literary Koine. In this paper, we shall examine the themes and structures of one of the best-represented metrical forms in the collection: the sonnet.

The writings of Procopius have long been a subject of controversy. First there were disputes over the authorship of the Anecdota, which finally was assigned to Procopius. Then arose the question of when his various works were written, sparking a debate which still attracts scholarly attention; this paper aims to contribute to this debate, while extending the scope of the discussion to cover all Procopius’ later works. It may be noted further that the discussions over the dating of Procopius’ works takes place against the background of continuing reassessments of the latter half of Justinian’s reign: it has been argued that a fusion of classical and Christian culture took place in the sixth century, but the processes of this transition remain unclear. A key element in this discussion is the production of literary works, which appears to have tailed off markedly towards the end of the reign of Justinian; hence whether Procopius’ works should be placed in the early or the late 550s is of import to this wider field of discussion.

The history of Byzantine fiscal administration, as is well-known, is still an area in which many problems remain to be resolved. In 1880 the Russian Byzantinist V.G. Vassilievsky, one of the first historians to address them seriously, described Byzantine fiscal structures as labyrinthine; other scholars have not disagreed. But as a result of the work of successive generations, we are in a much better position today to understand the fundamental lines of development of late Roman and Byzantine fiscal arrangements, and in particular to follow the evolution of middle and later Byzantine fiscal administrative structures out of the situation that prevailed in the later Roman period, especially from the fifth and sixth centuries.

In 1932 Kassandra Kostan (Aleksandra Konstantinovna Gargala, 1897-1939), published a book on the literature of the Greeks living in the Donetsk region of Southern Ukraine. It was a worthy undertaking because in her short anthology Kostan, a pioneer researcher in the history and folk traditions of the so-called ‘Roumaioi’, collected several poems and songs composed in the Greek dialects spoken in the various villages and communities around Mariupol. In her anthology she included old folk songs and poems, some of them dating from as early as 1778 or even earlier. One of the oldest songs composed before 1778 is about the city of Kaffa and another about the exodus of the Greeks from Crimea and their subsequent settlement around Mariupol under Catherine II in 1778-1779. It is only unfortunate that Kostan did not publish this interesting selection of songs and poems in their original Greek form, but instead translated them into Ukrainian. Now the loss is probably permanent, since most of these songs have been forgotten and, to make matters worse, nothing has survived to this day from the papers of Kostan, who died in St. Petersburg in 1939.

Since the mid-1970s a number of rural areas on the periphery of Southern Europe have undergone rapid economic growth and structural transformation. They appeared to be following the earlier and much celebrated experience of the Third Italy. The major form of industrial organisation which emerged in these regions was the small ‘flexible’ firm, and this was widely regarded as an alternative to the Taylor-Fordist paradigm which lay at the heart of the industrialisation process of the more favoured regions, both within Southern Europe and beyond. However, almost from the outset, the idea that Flexible Specialisation presents an all-embracing, coherent robust organisational model was controversial. Several important disputes concerning the precise meaning of the term and the causes, processes and its prospects arose. Most attention was directed to Iberia, and Greece has only attracted a very limited degree of scholarly interest — despite its earlier accession to the EC.

Our study, which is based upon primary data obtained through extensive fieldwork investigation, focuses upon a particular county (eparkhia) — that of Peonia (located in Macedonia) which, we argue, exemplifies rural industrialisation. The recent history of the county illustrates a complex articulation of exogenous and local factors in generating growth. Driven by the remarkable expansion of garment manufacturing since 1978, Peonia was characterised by what we call a cost paring and cost evading regime; a feature depressingly common to sweatshop garment producers the world over. Rather than suggesting the emergence of a brave new era of Flexible Specialisation, the case of Peonia is more akin to that of an ‘informal’ or ‘underground’ economy facing a highly uncertain future.

Justice in an Islamic state was administered primarily by the kadis and their representatives, applying Islamic law, the sharia. In most Islamic states, including the Ottoman empire, there existed a number of special jurisdictions besides that of the kadis. The most significant of these were the jurisdictions of the various non-Muslim groups under Islamic rule, the dhimmis, applying their own, Christian or Jewish, religious laws. Apart from such jurisdictions limited to particular (religiously defined) groups, general jurisdictional powers lay in the hands of the Muslim head of state, such as the Sultan, who could delegate his jurisdictional powers to his representatives, the Grand Vizier or the kaymakam, his deputy in the capital.

The appearance of Paul Hollingsworth’s book of translations, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Hollingsworth 1992), provides the pretext for this survey. Tales of saints, or of candidates for sainthood, constitute a substantial proportion of the extant native literature of pre-Mongol Rus, comparable in volume only with the chronicles. This in itself has ensured that the study of hagiography has had a prominent place in the study of early Rus literature and culture, and hence in the wider field of byzantinorussica. In recent years native saints have benefited additionally from changes in the cultural and political climate: the advent of glasnost (from 1985), one of whose main themes was the recovery of the past; the millennium of the Conversion of the Rus, whose celebration in 1988 became a test and a manifestation of glasnost; and eventually, at the end of 1991, the collapse of the USSR and the sharpening of competition between national mythologies (competition for the same cultural space) both within and between the newly independent East Slav states of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The surge of ‘native’ interest has been matched, only in part fortuitously, by an increase in western publications.