September 21, 1997 A 13th-Century Traveler to China Comes to Light By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF On an August day in 1271, if the story is to be believed, a four-masted sailing ship sailed into the crowded harbor of Zaitun in southeast China, carrying a gray-bearded Italian Jewish trader named Jacob. An account of Jacob's voyage, placing him in China four years before Marco Polo arrived, has surfaced in Italy. It provides extraordinary images of a civilization that was the most dazzling in the ...

Grubbs, Judith Evans, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. x & 390. ISBN 0-19-814768-6. Reviewed by Brent D. Shaw, Classical Studies University of Pennsylvania 'At a time when the spiritual sanctions of marriage are challenged by a so-called modernism . . . which doubts whether there can be a science of ethics seeing that right and wrong are matters of personal taste, it is good to have set out for us in a clear ...

INTRODUCTION: BYZANTIUM In the early fourth century, the emperor Constantine established a new capital for the Roman empire. This capital was situated on the site of a Greek colony called Byzantium. Thus, Constantine laid the foundations for the Byzantine -- or East Roman -- empire which, at its greatest extent in the sixth century, stretched from southern Spain in the West to the borders of Sassanian Iran in the East. This spectacularly diverse combination of ethnic groups, langua ...

Cyril Mango. Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome. Scribner's, 1980. [beginning with pg. 13] CHAPTER I PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES All empires have ruled over a diversity of peoples and in this respect the Byzantine Empire was no exception. Had its constituent population been reasonably well fused, had it been united in accepting the Empire's dominant civilization, it would hardly have been necessary to devote a chapter to this topic. It so happens, however, that even before the beginning of the Byza ...

Back to Medieval Source Book | ORB Main Page | Links to Other Medieval Sites | Medieval Sourcebook: The Farmer's Law, 7-8th Centuries After the attacks by Persians, Arabs and Slavs, there is some indication that the great landed estates of late antiquity gave way, in the Byzantine heartland of Anatolia, to a system of free peasant farms. These peasants paid taxes to the state and enabled a functional local army to operate throughout the empire. Although this might be overemphasized, th ...

Back to Medieval Source Book | ORB Main Page | Links to Other Medieval Sites | Byzantine Studies Page Medieval Sourcebook: Procopius of Caesarea: The Secret History Procopius: Secret History, translated by Richard Atwater, (Chicago: P. Covici, 1927; New York: Covici Friede, 1927), reprinted, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961, with indication that copyright had expired on the text of the translation. For information on the translator, see the note on Richard Atwate ...

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ROMAN VERONA We can start from Piazza Bra (from the old German word ´breit´ meaning ´wide´): it lies to the south of the Roman city, outside its town walls, and is dominated by the Arena amphitheatre, the third largest such building built in the time of Flavius (1st Century A.D.): it is a clear sign of the importance of ancient Verona, as it could hold more than 20.000 spectators. Today, it is the Summer home of great lyric opera, applauded by thousand of people. The outer circle, of w ...

The Byzantine Empire, Early Russia, and Muslim Expansion It is important to point that when we speak of the fall of the Roman Empire we are speaking about the fall of the Western part of the empire and not the eastern part. In the east the Roman Empire for almost 1000 years protected the West from Muslim expansion and invasion. By the time the empire collapsed in 1453 its religious mission had been accomplished and its political concepts had spread among the Slavic peoples of eastern Euro ...

Contents of this Page History . Conquest of Constantinople Part 1 Istanbul DOWN HISTORY According to Strabo, Istanbul is thought to have been founded by the colonists from Megara led by Byzas in the 7C BC. The popular legend has it that Megarians, before coming here, went to the oracle in Delphi and asked his instruction about the place to found their settlement. The answer was "opposite the city of the blind". When they came to the peninsul ...