Material Matters: The Horizons of Byzantine History in 16th c. Venice and Vienna

This article examines two little-known scholars attempting to reconstruct Byzantine imperial chronology in the early sixteenth century: Johannes Fuchsmagen in Vienna and Giovanni Battista Cipelli, or Egnazio, in Venice. Comparing the work of Fuchsmagen and Egnazio shows how different materials (such as coins and manuscripts), no less than the cultural and ideological context for scholarship, shaped the range of available interpretations of Byzantine material. Fuchsmagen, relying on his collection of gold coins, drew the eastern emperors into a common framework with ancient Roman and western emperors that emphasized imperial continuity. Egnazio, in contrast, used Byzantine manuscripts to write a new history of eastern and western emperors as a school text, but reproduced medieval hierarchies in which the eastern rulers were inferior their counterparts in the West. Though Fuchsmagen and Egnazio are relatively minor figures in the history of Byzantine scholarship, their frameworks established prototypes for later scholarly engagements in Byzantine scholarship.