You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled “Binding Ties: The Performance of Exchange in 7th-Century Byzantium” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 26 February 2026, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 Seminar Room
Title: Binding Ties: The Performance of Exchange in 7th-Century Byzantium
Speaker: Rebecca Darley, Krea University
Abstract:
Coins are an incredible source, especially for the ancient and medieval past. They touched the lives of people up and down social hierarchies and across states. However, they are too often seen either as practical objects or as tiny messages sent out by states. There is some truth to both perspectives but they also create problems and obscure other, more exciting, ways to understand the role of coins in complex social relationships. In this talk, I look at the development of coinage and the way that particular stories have become embedded in scholarly literature and introduce a project using Anatolian coinage from the Middle Ages to propose alternative ways to understand these remarkable sources. I then turn to a specific example from the 7th-century Byzantine Empire, using textual, architectural and numismatic sources, and insights from the history of performance and emotions, to recreate an intense moment in political and military history and to talk about a wider pattern of exchange, used by medieval states across the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions to forge and uphold social hierarchies and emotional relationships between rulers and ruled.
Bio:
Rebecca Darley is a scholar of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE. Her work uses textual and material evidence, especially coins, to explore how political, economic, and cultural changes affected each other to produce long-term changes that influenced everyday lives over centuries. She is also interested in coins as a unique source for understanding social relations and has published on methods for approaching numismatic evidence, as well as the importance of museum display and collection histories for promoting and understanding these remarkable clues to the past. Currently, Rebecca is a Senior Research Fellow at ANAMED, the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilization, in Istanbul, examining medieval Anatolian coinage as a way to illuminate issues of coin design and audience reception across the medieval world. She has previously held faculty appointments at the University of Leeds and at Birkbeck, University of London, as well as working at King’s College London, the Warburg Institute (also London), the University of Birmingham, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C. In summer 2026, she will be taking up a position at Krea University, Andhra Pradesh, India.