Introduction

Byzantine Greece seems rather familiar because of its ubiquitous presence in modern Greece, where beautifully conserved monuments and gleaming new museums promote Byzantium, where placenames, surnames, and attractively crumbling ruins evoke it, and where the language recalls it. But if we try to tie those sites and monuments - those ubiquitous basilicas and small Middle Byzantine cruciform churches, those forts and town walls - into accounts of Byzantium, or into local histories of the kinds which are possible across much of the West, we quickly encounter a host of well-known problems. As a consequence, Byzantine Greece is not as familiar as it might seem at first glance. But is it inaccessible? Parts of Greece are relatively rich in regional archives. It is relatively rich in epigraphic and sigillographic material. And the archaeological exploration of Byzantine Greece is relatively intense. Specific categories of this material already enrich Byzantine Studies as a whole (studies of its art and architecture, of “the city”, of the economy, and of social classes, for instance). But these categories of data can often be correlated with each other, given their geographical or topographical aspect, to illuminate Byzantine Greece itself at regional and sub-regional levels.