Preserved in two Greek manuscripts of the Austrian National Library, the “Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople” contains more than 800 documents, which were written between 1315 and 1402 by or for the Patriarchate and the Synod of Bishops of Constantinople; it is one of the most important sources for the religious, political and social history of the Byzantine Empire in the last centuries of its existence. In 2009, an international congress assembled experts from Austria and abroad in Vienna, who illuminated various aspects of these texts from the perspectives of palaeography, codicology, sociolinguistics, church history, law, social and economic history, and history of diplomacy. The contributions collected in this volume (in German, English and French) open a new view on the medieval Patriarchate of Constantinople and its Register, but also in general on the continued significance of the Byzantine Empire as a spiritual centre in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and in the entire Mediterranean in an era in which its political power was already shrunk dramatically a few decades before the conquest by the Ottomans in 1453. Thus, the volume is of great interest both for experts from the field of Byzantine as well as Medieval Studies.
