16 Currently, the claim that mobility was important in pre-modern societies is hardly controversial anymore, as we begin to realise that mobility is a constant in human history, rather than particularly characteristic for any one area or period.16 Obviously, human history includes the history of Byzantium, and this insight is now finally gaining ground in this field as well: from an Empire once characterised as stiff, immobile and obsessed with fixity, evidence for mobility of different societal groups, its causes and its effects and many other aspects of mobility are starting to reshape our image of the Empire. Especially in the last five years, this ‘emancipatory movement’ re-evaluating mobility has taken off in the field of ‘Byzantine Studies’.17 However, in these attempts to adjust our image of the Empire, one aspect of the traditional view of Byzantium with regard to mobility still needs to be re-evaluated: that is, the idea that the Eastern Roman attitude towards mobility is one of aversion. While major steps have been made in studying discourses on mobility in ancient Roman history,18 analyses of discourses on mobility in the later Eastern Roman Empire so far have been lacking in the recent resurgence of interest in mobility. Earlier studies mostly stressed negative associations with mobility and mostly present a dominant singular view on mobility.19 Although scholarship now recognises that there would have been plenty of people on the move, and that these movements were significant in the shaping and functioning of this past society, we have not yet addressed whether the traditional image of a deeply negative view of mobility in the minds of Roman subjects still holds. Conversely, a re-evaluation on views on mobility should also consider views on immobility: as two sides of the same coin, they are intertwined.20 Let me briefly illustrate the ‘traditional’ image of Eastern Roman views on mobility. Previous studies on attitudes to mobility stress a negative perception on mobility, particularly as being dangerous.21 These studies are not necessarily wrong. There were 16 See e.g., Leary (2014). Also observed by Woolf (2016), p. 439. Of course, fluctuations in the prevalence of mobility throughout history will have happened, although it is difficult as of yet to study these (as the conundrum ‘absence of evidence is no evidence of absence’ elucidates). 17 Most notably, but not exclusively, advanced by Vienna-based researchers in the context of the research project Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency in Byzantium led by Claudia Rapp (from 20152021). The main output of the project is a sourcebook that, at the time of writing, has only just appeared: Rapp et al. (2023). Many publications of affiliated and other researchers have preceded it, focussing on various aspects of mobility in the Eastern Roman Empire (and beyond). See e.g., Preiser-Kapeller and Mitsiou (2018); Preiser-Kapeller and Mitsiou (2019); Delouis et al. (2019a); Preiser-Kapeller et al. (2020b); Papavarnavas (2021a); Durak (2022). 18 See e.g., Isayev (2017); Foubert (2016); Foubert (2020); Foubert (2023). 19 For example, focussing on four 12th- and 13th-century Eastern Roman travel accounts, Catia Galatariotou discussed their xenophobia, their sense of cultural alienation when they were away from their immediate familiar milieu and their fear of dangers. Ewald Kislinger expressed in a 1997 publication that from the ninth until the mid-eleventh century generally Byzantines did not like to travel. He repeated this view in 2011. See also footnote 21. Galatariotou (1993); Kislinger (1997), p. 22; Kislinger (2011), p. 387. 20 Franquesa, for example, has argued that a one-sided focus on mobility in the ‘mobility turn’ is problematic, for in prioritizing one aspect – mobility – it obscures other factors relevant to understanding human societies, including immobility; he argues therefore that they should be studied in tandem, particularly the relations between them. Franquesa (2011). 21 For example in Kazhdan and Franklin (1984); Brubaker (2002).
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