"The Canon and the Sword: Byzantium and the Mediterranean, 9th–11th Centuries"

The lecture will seek to reframe Byzantium's role as a consequential global actor in the period under consideration by shifting attention to its conspicuous yet insufficiently weighed efforts to exert control and influence through the soft power of Orthodoxy. It will begin with a reflection on the uneven history of the recognition of the cult of icons, as enshrined in the decree of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, both among Eastern Christians and in the West—in Rome and among the Franks. From there, it will move to the emergence of competing Byzantine and Western interests in the Holy Land and, finally, to the formation of the confessional and social landscape that the crusaders would encounter upon their arrival in the 1090s.

Federico Montinaro is a Byzantinist and the principal investigator of the Emmy Noether research group on Religious Conflict and Mobility, 700–900 at the University of Tübingen. Before moving to Germany, Federico studied Ancient, Medieval, and Islamic history in Italy and France, and obtained his Ph.D. from the École Pratique des Hautes Études–Sorbonne. He is the author, with Richard Price, of The Acts of the Council of 869–870 (Liverpool University Press), and the editor of Studies in Theophanes, with Marek Jankowiak (Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015), and of the Companion to Procopius, with Mischa Meier (Brill, 2022), as well as several articles and chapters spanning philology, historiography, patristics, historical theology, and numismatics. An edited volume, Rethinking Conquest: Studies on the Late Antique Near East from Byzantium to Islam, and a monograph on Byzantium in the reign of Constans II are currently forthcoming.