Moving Hands: Types and Scales of Labour Mobility in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean (1200–1500 CE)

Abstract

Mitsiou and Preiser-Kapeller offer a unique study of subjects, objects, motives and consequences of labour mobility in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Middle Ages focusing on the Byzantine Empire. Based on recent tools for the mapping of mobility (such as HGIS) and the entanglements of communities (such as network analysis) they conclude that a flexible approach towards a survey of types, ranges, scales and networks of labour mobility in the pre-modern period can map both the entanglements emerging from micro-histories of individuals and accumulate these individual trajectories into complex networks across spatial and temporal scales up to the “systemic macro approach”.

The final version of this paper was written within the framework of the Wittgenstein-Prize Project ‘Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency in Byzantium’ (headed by Prof. Claudia Rapp, Vienna: http://rapp.univie.ac.at/).