IMC 2024: Sessions

This session has been grouped by the IMC Programming Committee from individually submitted paper proposals.

Paper a: Between 894 and 927 the Byzantine Empire was in crisis over its hostile relationship with the Bulgarian state. This was most obvious in the warfare with the Bulgarian ruler Symeon the Great that brought major military defeats, loss of territory and suffering to the peoples of the Balkan peninsular. But it was also a crisis of identity as the cultural superiority of the Roman Empire was challenged by an Orthodox state. The Byzantines overwhelmingly placed the blame for the crisis on Symeon. However, there was some contrition expressed by the Patriarch Nikolas I concerning one attack on the Bulgarians. This paper will approach the crisis of the inter-state struggle and then peaceful resolution, from a different approach by arguing that the Byzantines at least partly brought the crisis on themselves and failed to bring the struggle to a speedier conclusion than could have been achieved. It will also argue that this was a failure of the much-vaunted Byzantine diplomacy, a precursor to a long list of longue durée crises including the current crisis between the Orthodox Russia and Ukraine.

Paper b: In this paper, I will study the role of the Franks between Byzantium and Rome in the Early Middle Ages. In the Franks, the Roman popes found an ally against the attacks of the Lombards - but also against the Eastern Roman emperor’s claims to power in the West. The coronation of the Frankish ruler Charles (Charlemagne) as the emperor of the Romans by the Roman pope can be considered a sort of crisis - or can it? And if so, then a crisis for who: the Eastern Roman emperor, the Romans - whoever was meant by the term - or for Charles himself? I will examine these questions in my paper.

Paper c: This paper examines the role that the two popes prior to Honorius III played in the establishment of the Latin church on Cyprus and the subsequent restriction of the Greek church there. Previous scholarship has focused its studies of the papacy and Cyprus on the years following 1222, when Honorius III removed much of the Greek ecclesiastical hierarchy on Cyprus. The papacy’s earlier communications regarding the Cypriot church have been largely ignored, or subsumed into discussions surrounding the later deterioration of Latin-Greek relations. This paper utilizes both papal Latin sources and Greek sources prior to 1222 to argue that the papacy was not, in fact, restrictive of the Greek church on Cyprus at this time, and it further traces the changes in papal policy regarding Cyprus from Celestine III to Honorius III.