Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit
Available
Director
- Martin Grötschel
Description
From the project website (accessed 2019-08-30):
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of sciences and humanities project Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PmbZ) (Prosopography of the Middle-Byzantine Period) aims at creating such a biographical dictionary for all people who lived between 641 and 1025 in the Byzantine Empire or were in contact with the Empire and are mentioned in the sources of that period. The individual articles offer the reader a summary of a person's biography (where possible) and state all sources pertaining to this person.
For technical reasons, the period covered by the PmbZ was divided into two sections ("Abteilungen"): the first running from 641 to 867, the second from 867 to 1025. The first section (641-867) comprises about 11,500 articles on individuals (rarely groups) in alphabetical order. The second section (867-1025) comprises about 10.000 items (but with an amount of data similar to that of the first section, as people in this later period tend to be more extensively documented in the sources).
The Coronation of Michael I in the Madrid Skylitzes Traditional book indices, however, fall short of the possibilities of electronic indices and databases, which allow for combined searches. If e. g. you wanted to look up all biographical articles on monastics in a specific geographical area (say: Bithynia) in the printed indices, you would have to compare all the index entries under "Bithynien" in the geographical index and "Monachos" as well as "Hegumenos" as well as ... in the index "Titel/Berufe" in order to find matches - a very time-consuming process! More comfortable search tools are highly desirable, especially for works of reference like the PmbZ. Here we are presenting a new electronic index of the PmbZ. You are given full search options for all the indices as well as for the complete texts of the articles and you can combine searches in various ways. The results which you will be given will contain the complete information of all the indices and the main descriptions.
The "TELOTA-Project of the Month" has transformed all the prosopographical data of the PmbZ from the original database format into an internet compatible XML-structure, which offers new electronic search options.