Mapping Byzantium - the project “Macedonia, northern part” in the series Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB) of the Austrian academy of sciences

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to outline the history, development and current status of the project Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The TIB carries out systematic research on the historical geography of the Byzantine Empire, which existed from the beginning of the 4th century AD until the 15th century AD (i.e., from Late Antiquity to the Ottoman conquest), in order to create an atlas of the aforesaid empire. The project was founded in 1966. Since 1973 eleven volumes of the main series of the TIB have appeared. The main part of each volume of the TIB is comprised of a catalogue of the Byzantine names of towns, settlements, fortresses, churches, monasteries, fields, mountains, rivers and lakes in alphabetical order and extracted for each region / province of the Byzantine Empire from four categories of sources. The collected and sorted information is presented in headwords (i.e., lemmata). The results of each volume are presented to the reader on a map on the scale of 1 : 800,000 with the headwords marked onto it. Whereas the structure of the volumes of the TIB has remained nearly unchanged since the 1970s, Prof. Dr. Johannes Koder, director of the overall TIB project, has introduced new scientific methods and technical innovations in the last thirteen years [Central Place Theory, Global Positioning System (GPS), digital photography, Historic Landscape Characterisation, Geographic Information System (GIS)].