Social Change in Town and Country in Eleventh-Century Byzantium

The eleventh century saw both the heyday of Byzantium and its almost immediate subsequent decline following serious military defeats and extensive territorial losses. The political, economic, and intellectual history of the period is reasonably well understood, but not so what was happening in that crucial intermediary sphere, the social order. Authored by leading Byzantine historians and archaeologists, the papers in this volume view the social order as a prime determinant of change and examine it through both archaeological and documentary evidence, in order to deepen our understanding of the period and of the reasons for the vertiginous decline suffered by Byzantium.