Vizantiyskiiy vremennik. Volume 101

The next volume of the oldest academic yearbook presents works on various issues of the history and culture of Byzantium and neighboring countries. The volume opens with an article by R. Shukurov, which offers an attempt at a general description of Byzantine culture in its attitude to multilingualism and willingness to master foreign languages. A new article by Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences S. Karpov, written on the material of Italian archives, is devoted to the slave trade in the Venetian Thane. Among other subjects that attracted the attention of the authors of the volume are various aspects of the interaction of Christianity and paganism in the late Roman Empire, the limits of the jurisdiction of the church departments of the East and West, the role of Byzantine gold in the value system of the nomadic "barbarians" greedy for it. The art history articles, which traditionally occupy a prominent place in the publication, this time are devoted mainly to the history of the handwritten book and the evolution of the decoration of Byzantine temples and are juxtaposed with similar research by historians and archaeologists. At the same time, the works of S. and A. Bliznyuk, D. Chernoglazov and A. Zakharova demonstrates the fruitful cooperation of specialists of different qualifications.