Acceso usuarios
Yannis Stouraitis
It is a great honour to be invited by Paolo Tedesco to comment on John Haldon’s latest book on what the author, quite to the point, has called the paradox of East Roman survival in the period between the 640s and the 740s.1Almost twenty years after his classical study on the transformation of Byzantine culture in the long seventh century,2 Haldon has revisited this important period of Byzantine history seeking to answer a different but equally important question, namely how did the Empire manage to overcome one of the major crises in its long existence, the crisis triggered by the emergence and expansion of the Islamic Caliphate. My comments will focus on a certain aspect of Haldon’s major undertaking, specifically the author’s treatment of issues of ideology and identity in the period in question. These issues form the main topic of two chapters of the book, chapter 2 on “Beliefs, Narratives, and the Moral Universe” and chapter 3 on “Identities, Divisions, and Solidarities”, although they pervade other parts as well (e.g. chapters 4, “Elites and Interests”, and 7, “Organization, Cohesion, and Survival”).
