Socio-historical Studies on the Middle-Byzantine Society (7th to 11th C.) – Senate and Aristocracy, Racism and Tolerance, Family and Name

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Thomas Pratsch
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550632882

The essential objective of the project applied for is in general a socio-historical and historico-cultural analysis of the social composition of the Byzantine Empire of the middle period (7th to 11th c.) focussed on selected thematic subjects. This analysis is substantially based on the data material compiled in the framework of the "Prosopography of the Middle-Byzantine Period" (PMBZ), but also takes into account later knowledge such as the results of the European Research Council Starting Grant Project "Mount Athos in Medieval Eastern Mediterranean Society" (MAMEMS). The focus of the analysis rests especially on a more precise investigation and interpretation of certain social groupings and their structures, that is their internal hierarchization as well as their social localization and their networks, their internal connections and interactions, their links between themselves and with regard to the whole population in view of modern socio-scientific methods. The project herewith applied for has particularly taken into consideration the following social categories: Firstly, the Senate of Constantinople in the middle-Byzantine period, ist role and importance and especially ist relation to and ist localization in the larger Byzantine aristocracy. Secondly, the relation between a verifiable phenotypically based racism in Byzantium to a generally postulated tolerance in the polyethnic, polyglot and also poly-religious medieval political system. And thirdly, the increasing tangibility of family structures in the historical investigation of the middle-Byzantine society due to the emergence of family names, their genesis and typology. The overriding aim of the project herewith applied for is the more precise analysis of selected sections of the middle-Byzantine society, which shall supplement, but also modify and define more precisely our knowledge about this socio-histoical phenomenon.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants