Continuation or change? Borders and Frontiers in Late Antiquity and Medieval Europe: Landscape of Power Network, Military Organisation and Commerce
This volume examines interdisciplinary boundaries, and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, not treated as mere barriers, but also places of exchange in the early Middle Ages.
Focusing on borderlands, Continuation or change uncovers what the changing political and military organisations were and what significance the functioning of former borderland areas had. The chapters answer how the fiscal and military apparatus was organised, what the turning points in the division of dynastic power were, and what the assimilation of certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition meant. Finally, the authors offer answers to what exactly was a “statehood without a state” when it came to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands.
Continuation or change is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in medieval warfare, Eastern European history, medieval border-regions and cross-cultural interaction.
Gregory Leighton is NAWA Ulam Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Archival Sciences, Nicholas Copernicus University in Toruń. Dr. Leighton studies the Teutonic Order and the Baltic crusades (13th – 15th century). He has published in The Journal of Medieval History, Zapiski Historyczne, and other leading periodicals. His first monograph will appear with ARC Humanities Press in 2022.
Piotr Pranke is an assistant professor and deals with the history of medieval Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe, working at the Faculty of Historical Sciences of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. His scientific interests include the history of trade in the Viking era and the history of the Otton Empire and its influence on the shaping of the areas of "younger Europe". His most recent book publication is Medieval Trade in Central Europe, Scandinavia, and the Balkans (2020).
Łukasz Różycki is history professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University. His main research interests include the study of Roman and Byzantine theory of warfare with particular focus on military treatises, and the study of the 6th century. He is the author of a number of books - most recent Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity (2021) - and articles related to the study of Late Antiquity and the history of the Byzantine Empire.