Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison, 200–1100

Walter Pohl, Dr. phil. (1984), was formerly Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna and director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has published on the transformation of the Roman World, on the migration period, on problems of identity, on comparative history and on the world of the steppe, including his monograph The Avars (2018).Veronika Wieser, Dr. phil. (2015), is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research covers eschatology and apocalyptic thought as well as ascetic communities and historiography in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She has published Historiography and Identity: Ancient and Christian Narratives (with Walter Pohl, 2019) and Cultures of Eschatology (with Vincent Eltschinger and Johann Heiss, 2020).

• PrefaceList of FiguresContributorsIntroduction: The Emergence of New Polities in the Shadows of EmpireWalter Pohl and Veronika WieserPART 1: The Later Roman Empire and the Post-Roman Kingdoms in the West1 When Did the West Roman Empire Fall?Ian N. Wood2 The Role of Peoples in the Emergence of the Post-Roman KingdomsWalter Pohl3 In the Shadow of the Roman Empire: Layers of Legitimacy and Strategies of Legitimization in the Regna of the Early Medieval WestStefan EsdersPART 2: The Carolingian Empire and the Emerging Polities in Its Northern and Eastern Periphery4 When the Bavarians Became BavarianThe Politicization of Ethnicity and Crystallization of Ethnic Identities in the Shadow of Carolingian Rule (8th to 9th Century)Helmut Reimitz5 Peripheral Polities North of the Carolingian Realm: The Regnum DanorumIldar GaripzanovPART 3: Byzantium and Its Peripheral Powers6 The Lagoons as a Distant Mirror: Constantinople, Venice and the Italian RomaniaFrancesco Borri7 Countering Byzantium’s Shadow: Contrarianism among the Bulgars, Rus and GermansJonathan ShepardPART 4: Between Byzantium and the Islamic World8 Early Medieval Armenia between Empires (Fourth-Eleventh Century CE): Dynamics and ContinuitiesJohannes Preiser-Kapeller 9 Strategies of Legitimation in the Shadow of Empires: Byzantine–Turkish Contact Zones in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Asia MinorAlexander BeihammerPART 5: The Abbasid Caliphate and the Formation of New Dynasties10 Communication between Centre and Periphery in the Early Tenth-Century Abbasid EmpireMaaike van Berkel11 Local and Imperial Rule: Examples from Frs (9th–10th Centuries)Jürgen PaulPART 6: Medieval China and the Foreign Dynasties12 The Huai Frontier and the Ethnicization of Difference in Early Medieval ChinaAndrew Chittick13 ‘Cultural China’ from the Eleventh Century: Legitimacy, Metanarrative and HistoriographyQ. Edward Wang14 In the Shadows of Empires: The Tuyuhun and Khitans in Late AntiquityMichael R. Drompp 15 Post-imperial Polities: Concluding ObservationsWalter PohlIndex