Keynote

The way that a symposium works is that various scholars in the discipline gather together to present academic papers that they have written.  Mostly they read the papers.  The better ones speak more directly to the audience.  They accept questions at the end.  Each presentation is 30 minutes long, and the papers are presented four at a time.  I attended three presentations on the first full day of the symposium together with a keynote speakers, who is one of the top Byzantine scholars in the world.

[A picture of the keynote speaker talking about Byzantine princess marriage alliances.  The guy right with the tan hat is my good friend Ron who I've known for years.  I convinced him to come to Istanbul with his wife.  The two people even closer are two folks that I hung around with most of the time.  On the right is the back of the head of the book burning scholar.]

The keynote was treated somewhat like a rock star by the rest of the Byzantine scholars, who are certainly a minority here.  Her talk was on how marriage alliances between Byzantine imperial families and powerful military groups outside the empire, such as the Mongols, swayed political events throughout imperial history.  My students know a bit about this topic.  A couple of weeks ago I gave a story lecture about the adventures of Ibn Battuta.  During the lecture I mentioned how Ibn Battuta escorted a pregnant Byzantine princess to Constantinople from a group of nomadic Central Asian tribesmen north of the Crimea.  She had married a Muslim khan but wanted to visit her folks and deliver her child in the big city.

Such was not an isolated event.  Judith Herrin described many such alliance marriages and their cultural impacts on history.  In one case a newly married Byzantine princess sent to western Europe brings the custom of eating with forks, which is originally a Byzantine innovation, to the rest of Europe.

She also mentioned how sometimes a powerful nomadic ruler would set up a "princess search" in which his representatives would have these auditions for princesses to find the right match based on their physical features.  Think Cinderella.