Shliakhtin, Roman

Central European University

Research Topic: The Byzantines and the Seljuk Turks in the contested landscape of Late Byzantine Bithynia: Case study on the Sakarya-Sangarius valley

Dr. Shliakhtin began his studies in the Department of History at Moscow State University and later moved to Central European University (Budapest) where he did his MA and PhD in Medieval Studies. Specializing in the literary history of the twelfth-century Mediterranean, his dissertation focused on the construction of the image of the Turks in Byzantine rhetoric. At ANAMED he will continue his research on the migration of Turkic pastoralists into Asia Minor and, more precisely, on the Byzantine response to this movement. His research will focus on the landscape of controlled communication that Byzantine emperors created in northern Bithynia and on the descriptions of this landscape in Byzantine literary sources. His aim is to study both the altered landscape in situ and the literary sources that describe the construction and use of these defensive structures in the Middle- and Late Byzantine periods. Additionally, he aims to work with twelfth-century coins and seals preserved in the collections in Istanbul. The study of the imagined landscape and surviving structures will constitute a chapter of his future monograph on the Byzantine perception of the Turks.