This introduction outlines the key aims of the book and its genesis, including a definition of what political culture means – the rituals and explicit legitimisation of power, status and property-holding, alongside the unstated assumptions and customs that help to channel tensions and rivalries within polities. It situates the volume’s approach – a presentation of three neighbouring and overlapping political spheres – within the recent turn towards the global middle ages. Neither a work of systematic and explicit comparison nor an attempt at overarching synthesis or grand narrative – nor a shot at tracing trans-regional connections – the book aims rather to find a conceptual language applicable to all three spheres, attempting to make each sphere accessible to non-specialists. This pioneering survey of three spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world – should provide useful tools for learning, teaching and research today but is also an invitation to future study of medieval political culture.

After considering what is meant by ‘political culture’, this chapter looks at how such an abstraction can be applied to the long period between c.700 and c.1500, over vast stretches of the western Eurasian landmass. The author looks for recurring themes – not grand theory, but rather elements visible in and shared by societies in the three spheres of the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world in this period. Four such elements are suggested – religion, women, property and war – and the author only resorts to abstract analytic categories when they help in exploring these elements across the spheres. He suggests that alertness to them might help us find some fresh things to say about a number of long-established categories such as social hierarchy, loyalty, political legitimacy and the formation of political classes.

State violence was radically transformed in the Byzantine Empire during the period of the Komnenoi (1081-1185). At a time when the power of the reformed Catholic Church was growing, the Komnenoi implemented policies refining the notion of Orthodoxy. They sought to head off the threat to the established order of the eastern Mediterranean posed by repeated invasions from armies of Normans, Venetians and other Latins claiming to be crusaders waging holy war. Long-forgotten types of persecution re-emerged under the dynastic founder, Alexios I, who justified his actions through the reinterpretation of ancient Roman Law concerning the capital crimes of sacrilege and treason. Under Alexios, individuals and small groups with specific ethno-religious backgrounds were subjected to trials for heresy and confronted with burning at the stake. Subsequent Komnenian emperors continued to profess an attachment to these procedures, resorting to them with some regularity. But they also pursued alternatives. In the final years of the dynasty, a shift of emphasis occurred to mass arrests and, eventually, pogroms. These developments accompanied changes to imperial Byzantine authority in both domestic and foreign settings. Ultimately, the Komnenian mode of rule failed. The dynastic member, Andronikos I, was deposed and executed as a tyrant.