By examining available demographic data and petitions submitted by non-Muslims for accepting Islam, this volume convincingly reconstructs the stages of the Islamization process in the Balkans and offers an insight to the motives and factors behind conversion.

For almost a millennium, a modest wooden ship lay underwater off the coast of Serçe Limani, Turkey, filled with evidence of trade and objects of daily life. The ship, now excavated by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, trafficked in both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds of its time. The ship is known as “the Glass Wreck” because its cargo included three metric tons of glass cullet, including broken Islamic vessels, and eighty pieces of intact glassware. In addition, it held glazed Islamic bowls, red-ware cooking vessels, copper cauldrons and buckets, wine amphoras, weapons, tools, jewelry, fishing gear, remnants of meals, coins, scales and weights, and more. This first volume of the complete site report introduces the discovery, the methods of its excavation, and the conservation of its artifacts. Chapters cover the details of the ship, its contents, the probable personal possessions of the crew, and the picture of daily shipboard life that can be drawn from the discoveries.

This volume offers a comparative approach to understanding the spread of Muslim culture in medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971 classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation from a Byzantinist perspective. Essays examine the Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, consider encounters between Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life, and focus on the process of Islamisation as understood from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence.

The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia forms an indispensable part of modern Turkish discourse on national identity, but Western scholars, by contrast, have rarely included the Anatolian Turks in their discussions about the formation of European nations or the transformation of the Near East. The Turkish penetration of Byzantine Asia Minor is primarily conceived of as a conflict between empires, sedentary and nomadic groups, or religious and ethnic entities. This book proposes a new narrative, which begins with the waning influence of Constantinople and Cairo over large parts of Anatolia and the Byzantine-Muslim borderlands, as well as the failure of the nascent Seljuk sultanate to supplant them as a leading supra-regional force. In both Byzantine Anatolia and regions of the Muslim heartlands, local elites and regional powers came to the fore as holders of political authority and rivals in incessant power struggles. Turkish warrior groups quickly assumed a leading role in this process, not because of their raids and conquests, but because of their intrusion into pre-existing social networks. They exploited administrative tools and local resources and thus gained the acceptance of local rulers and their subjects. Nuclei of lordships came into being, which could evolve into larger territorial units. There was no Byzantine decline nor Turkish triumph but, rather, the driving force of change was the successful interaction between these two spheres.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Byzantium was still one of the most influential states in the eastern Mediterranean, possessing two-thirds of the Balkans and almost half of Asia Minor. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the most prominent and successful of the Greek rump states was the Empire of Nicaea, which managed to re-capture the city in 1261 and restore Byzantium. The Nicaean Empire, like Byzantium of the Komnenoi and Angeloi of the twelfth century, went on to gain dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rum in the 1250s. However, the decline of the Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia, allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304, the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium's eastern defences; the Empire lost its Asian territories forever, and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Empire was a tiny, second-ranking Balkan state, whose lands were often disputed between the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and the Franks. Using Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman sources, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century presents a new interpretation of the Nicaean Empire and highlights the evidence for its wealth and power. It explains the importance of the relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks and the Mongols, revealing how the Byzantines adapted to the new and complex situation that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Finally, it turns to the Empire's Anatolian frontiers and the emergence of the Turkish confederations, the biggest challenge that the Byzantines faced in the thirteenth century.

During the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Islamic conquest and trade laid the foundation for a new type of Indo-Islamic society in which the organizational forms of the frontier and of sedentary agriculture merged in a way that was uniquely successful in the late medieval world at large, setting the Indo-Islamic world apart from the Middle East and China in the same centuries.

Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World is the first comprehensive study of warfare and the Byzantine world from the sixth to the twelfth century. The book examines Byzantine attitudes to warfare, the effects of war on society and culture, and the relations between the soldiers, their leaders and society. The communications, logistics, resources and manpower capabilities of the Byzantine Empire are explored to set warfare in its geographical as well as historical context. In addition to the strategic and tactical evolution of the army, this book analyses the army in campaign and in battle, and its attitudes to violence in the context of the Byzantine Orthodox Church. The Byzantine Empire has an enduring fascination for all those who study it, and Warfare, State and Society is a colourful study of the central importance of warfare within it.

Warfare, State and Society in the Byznatine World is the first comprehensive study of the warfare and the Byzantine World from the sixth to the twelfth century. The book examines Byzantine attitudes to warfare, the effects of war on society and culture, and the relations between the soldiers, their leaders and society. The communications, logistics, resources and manpower capabilities of the Byzantine Empire are explored to set warfare in its geographical as well as historical context. In addition to the strategic and tactical evolution of the army, this book analyses the army in campaign and in battle, and its attitudes to violence in the context of the Byzantine Orthodox Church.

The Middle East in the World offers students a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary entry point to the broader Middle East. After a brief introduction to the study of the region, the early chapters of the book survey the essentials of Middle Eastern history; important historical narratives; and the region's languages, religions, and global connections. Students are guided through the material with relevant maps, resource boxes, and text boxes that support and guide further independent exploration of the topics at hand. The second half of the book presents interdisciplinary case studies, each of which focuses on a specific country or sub-region and a salient issue, offering a taste of the cultural distinctiveness of the particular country while also drawing attention to global linkages. Readers will come away from this book with an understanding of the larger historical, political, and cultural frameworks that shaped the Middle East as we know it today, and of current issues that have relevance in the Middle East and beyond.