The Prosopography of the Middle-Byzantine Period
What is a prosopography?
A prosopography is a biographical dictionary of all
persons of a specified period, a defined geographical area
and/or an otherwise specifically defined group such as e. g. a
special social group. It reports all the information on such
persons that is contained in the different sources (such as
chronicles, letters, saints' lives, legal documents as well as
other texts like inscriptions and seals) and lists the
respective sources.
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of sciences and humanities project
"Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (= PmbZ)"
(Prosopography of the Middle-Byzantine Period) aims at creating
such a biographical dictionary for all people who lived between
641 and 1025 in the Byzantine Empire or were in contact with the
Empire and are mentioned in the sources of that period. The
individual articles offer the reader a summary of a person's
biography (where possible) and state all sources pertaining to
this person. For technical reasons, the period covered by
the PmbZ was divided into two sections ("Abteilungen"): the
first running from 641 to 867, the second from 867 to 1025. The
first section (641-867) comprises about 11,500 articles on
individuals (rarely groups) in alphabetical order. The second
section (867-1025) comprises about 10.000 items (but with an
amount of data similar to that of the first section, as people
in this later period tend to be more extensively documented in
the sources).
The PmbZ does not only record information on
the better known individuals at the top of the social pyramid
such as emperors, patriarchs, high officials and military
commanders, but on all people mentioned in the sources, i. e.
also on peasants, soldiers, ordinary monks (albeit these have a
much smaller chance than those belonging to the higher strata of
society to be included in the annals of history and therefore
are not represented in the PmbZ in true proportion to their
numbers). This comprehensive character of the PmbZ allows the
reader to study questions of social structure, of the
development of state and church institutions or offices and of
many other subjects. A prerequisite for such studies are good
indices which enable the reader of the PmbZ to quickly find all
the articles which could relate to his/her research
interest.
Traditional book indices, however, fall short
of the possibilities of electronic indices and databases, which
allow for combined searches. If e. g. you wanted to look up all
biographical articles on monastics in a specific geographical
area (say: Bithynia) in the printed indices, you would have to
compare all the index entries under "Bithynien" in the
geographical index and "Monachos" as well as "Hegumenos" as well
as ... in the index "Titel/Berufe" in order to find matches - a
very time-consuming process! More comfortable search tools are
highly desirable, especially for works of reference like the
PmbZ.
Here we are presenting a new electronic index of the PmbZ. You
are given full search options for all the indices
as well as for the complete texts of the articles and you can
combine searches in various ways. The results which you will be
given will contain the complete information of all the indices and the main descriptions.
The "TELOTA-Project of the Month" has transformed all the
prosopographical data of the PmbZ from the
original database format into an internet compatible
XML-structure, which offers new electronic search options.
Website of the
PmbZ
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