Travel in the Byzantine World (review)

208 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) themselves. I also wonder about some aspects of Lambert’s prose. Students of thirty years ago may not have been fazed by such terms as ‘incontinent priests’ or ‘aunt sallies’ but is this still the case today? And are we meant to take his application of the adjective ‘pungent’ to arguments and articles as a term of praise or criticism? Despite such minor reservations this book remains an essential introduction to the study of medieval heresy. Sabina Flanagan History Department University of Adelaide Macrides, Ruth, ed., Travel in the Byzantine World, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. 316; 23 b/w illustrations; RRP £45.00; ISBN 0754607887. This volume is a collection of papers from the Thirty-fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at Birmingham in 2000. The collection takes a rather wide interpretation of the term ‘travel’, and might be better titled’Travel and Transport in the Byzantine World. The papers are divided into four sections, whose contents sometimes sit together a little oddly. Maritime travel makes up the dominant theme across the papers, and it might have been more coherent to have grouped these together. This would have allowed a similarly more thematically satisfying grouping of most of the other papers. ‘Going there – the technicalities of travel’ contains five articles discussing the construction and capabilities of ships, portulans (that is, descriptions of harbours and anchorages), roads through the southern Balkans, horses and veterinary medicine, and transmission of the plague. ‘Getting around – the purposes of travel’ is dominated by maritime subjects – trade and food supply to the capital, trade as evidenced by shipwrecks in the Sea of Marmara, and the Serçe Limani glass wreck. The fourth paper in this section addresses pilgrimages. The third section, ‘Being there’, consists mainly of the views of foreign visitors to Constantinople – two papers on westerners, and one concerning Arabs. The odd paper considers the purposes of the various bilingual word and phrase lists that have survived. The title of the fourth section is self-explanatory – ‘Going over it – representations of travel and space’. Of the two papers, one discusses pictorial representation and one literary. Reviews 209 Parergon 20.2 (2003) A few of the contributions in this collection stand out. John Pryor’s paper on shipping continues the work he has specialised in for many years. These matters of the carrying capacity and range of various vessels were also the focus of repeated bouts of intense discussion at the Centre for Medieval Studies Workshop on the Logistics of Crusading held late in 2002. The crucial issue of shipboard water supplies discussed here is revisited in the final paper on literary descriptions of peril at sea. One might hope that the trend for maritime reconstructions will one day encompass a Byzantine ship to counterbalance the overwhelming preponderance of Viking ships. The accounts assembled by K. Belke provide a most interesting insight into the experience of land travel in Thrace and Macedonia across several centuries, showing again how the state of roads fluctuated with the strength of the empire and the stability of life in those regions. This paper complements the maritime contributions by showing why sea travel, for all its difficulties and dangers, was generally preferable to a journey by land. For those interested in the social history of Byzantium, the paper on the early eleventh century Serçe Limani shipwreck is almost enough to justify this volume by itself. Despite being excavated in 1977–1979, a comprehensive publication of this wreck has been very slow in coming, and the piecemeal publications have been quite partial and very widely scattered. This article summarises the conclusions of the studies on this wreck, shedding invaluable light on aspects of commercial and daily life which would otherwise be unknown to us. The information made available already signals a great advance in our knowledge, and whets the appetite for the complete publication which is due to take place over the next few years. The value of the trio of papers on views of Constantinople lies mainly in drawing the reader’s attention to sources which could yield much to further study. The articles themselves tend to focus on correlating descriptions of...