The conquest of Constantinople by the Frank and Venetian crusaders in 1204 marked the beginning of a new era for Venice in the Aegean and the Adriatic alike. The Partitio Romanie, the act sharing the spoils of the Byzantine empire between the conquerors attributed most of Byzantium’s former Adriatic possessions to the Venetians. However, Venice was able to secure this new influence in the area only through a process of negotiations with the local powers, most of them established after the collapse of the empire, embodied in a series of diplomatic documents. This chapter examines the range of modalities through which these relations were established and later textual history of the associated documents. The Venetian strategy initially achieved only limited success; however the preservation of the texts of those documents later assumed a political and historiographical function which strengthened Venetian ambitions in the Adriatic.

This study focuses on Ravenna during the period from its fall into the hands of the Lombards in 751 to the decline of Byzantine power in the West from the mid-eleventh century. It argues that Ravenna shared common features with a number of other cities in the upper Adriatic, for example Comacchio, Venice and Zadar. The city maintained its earlier economic and artistic ties with Istria and Dalmatia, but also with Constantinople. The ties to Byzantium were based on admiration, nostalgia or identity and were used as part of strategy of resistance to threatening outside forces. However, the increasing dominance of local landowning elite led to the local autonomy and the strongest Byzantine influence remained the social and cultural cachet of the empire.

The present study focuses on seals of known provenance that are related to the coasts of the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, with the exception of Sicily. A corpus of sixty-three seals was formed, dating mainly between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. It can be divided into two categories: seals found in the area under consideration (thirty specimens) and seals that originated from the Adriatic, but were found outside its limits (thirty-three specimens). On the basis of this evidence, the study comments on the circulation of seals, the trends observed in that respect and their conformity to the principle of territoriality, according to which seals tend to be found within, or in the vicinity of, the area in which they were issued. This principle, which seems to be prevalent to the rest of the empire, is not applied catholically in the case of the Adriatic, since the eastern, Balkan rim diverges from it. If this is not a consequence of the lack of published material, then perhaps it can be attributed to the significance of this region as a frontier zone in the periphery of Byzantium, linking the Italian possessions to the centre.

The fifteenth century was decisive for establishing Venetian rule along the Eastern coast of the Adriatic. For decades, historiography on the topic has been rather fragmented between national historiographies that barely examined the region as a whole and a few scattered attempts at international Mediterranean studies. This essay seeks to reflect recent discussions on Venetian statehood and current research in Croatian and Albanian historiography.

The crusading activity of Venice, more than that of any other participating society, was influenced by other activities and concerns, due to the range and depth of its commercial and strategic interests in theatres of conflict and along transit routes. Its role was reshaped over time by shifts in the geographical configurations of both crusading activity and Venetian interests. In the early decades of crusading, in which the forces of the maritime powers autonomously complemented the activities of other crusaders, crusading action was mingled with the assertion of Venetian prerogatives in the Adriatic and the Byzantine sphere. The shift from land to sea routes linked the role of the maritime cities increasingly to transport and escort of the armies of others, and hence to their geographical position as nodes on transit routes. The diversion to other routes of many of the crusaders from its natural catchment area as a port undercut Venice’s crusading prominence in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the signal exception of the Fourth Crusade. Venice’s participation in late medieval crusading was constrained to varying degrees by the distribution of its territorial and commercial interests in the areas dominated by different powers.

Recent publications on Venice have started looking at the history of the migration from Dalmatia, Albania and Greece to Venice. The migrants came from the Balkans ravaged by wars and poverty to the metropolis which needed men for its army and rowers for its galleys. The increased influx of migrants began in the decade between 1430 and 1440 due to the Turkish threat. This chapter concerns itself with the manner in which the migrants affected the urban tissue of Venice in the fifteenth century. Which parts of Venice were inhabited by which migrant groups and what can this tell us about the socio-anthropological makeup of the city? After all, the impact the migrants was demographic and socio-economic. More specifically, the foundation of particular confraternities can be linked to particular ethnic groups. This chapter demonstrates the manner in which the cult of certain saints and devotional practices including the translation of relics affirmed Venice as the Mediterranean powerhouse.

This paper aims to present a general overview of the distribution of Medieval pottery finds, such as fine wares, amphorae and coarse wares, in the southern Adriatic region. The focus will be on excavated pottery finds from sites on the Albanian coast (Butrint, Saranda and Durrës) and those from sites across the Adriatic in southern Italy, especially from the Salento region. The comparison between ceramics found on these opposite coastal regions with similar looking examples from other sites in the eastern Mediterranean sheds new light on trade and distribution patterns in the southern Adriatic from the seventh to the fifteenth century.

This essay uses the stratigraphic large-scale excavations of Post-Roman Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, on the Straits of Corfu as a new source of evidence to examine the economic history of the Adriatic Sea region between the seventh and the eleventh centuries. The archaeology depicts the measured transformation of one key site that permits new interpretations of the Adriatic Sea, its history and archaeology to made. Interpretations ofPost-Roman history of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole are discussed, showing how archaeology is beginning to reframe the nature and character of western Byzantine intervention in this region.

Despite the area being a major channel of communications between East and West in this period, long-standing political fragmentation and linguistic differences have led to a lack of dedicated scholarly attention to the Adriatic as a whole. This volume addresses this gap by bringing together an international group of sixteen scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, to generate powerful new perspectives on the Medieval Adriatic, and makes much material available to a wider audience for the first time, particularly new archaeological evidence and existing scholarship previously only published in Italian or Croatian. This introduction sets up the volume by outlining the broad context for the Adriatic in this period, before underlining the scholarly rationale for this volume in more detail and providing an overview of each chapter.

Apulia had formed a part of Longobardia minor until the ninth century. With the exception of the outer South-East, which the Greeks had reached from Sicily, it was a region of Lombard law, Latin language, and Roman rites, of which only the central part was heavily populated. The division of Longobardia minor between the empire and the principalities took place gradually. In 969–70, the theme became the catepanate of Italy. The gastalds were replaced by tourmarchoi; the empire sent officers of the tagmata and other troops. It created new towns in Basilicata. Finally, in the years 1010–20, the catepan Basil Boioannes founded the towns of Capitanata to protect the frontier with the principality of Benevento. In the central region the Byzantine fiscal system was implemented before the end of the tenth century.