01/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Pola - A104

Contact: Alpi F.

Chair: Bianchi C.

In the crucial half-millennium between the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the First Crusade, an absolutely essential part in the origins of Christian-Muslim relations has been overlooked, namely how the normative regimes of Eastern Christians - including those of Byzantium, the Islamicate world and the space in between - grappled with the rise of Islam. Exploring this history has important implications for our understanding of the development of Christian-Muslim relations in the premodern period, the genesis of Eastern Christian legal regimes and the earlier precedents which Eastern Mediterranean states after the year 1100 might have drawn on in dealing with Islam. This is the focus of NOMOS, an ERC-awarded project, undertaken at the LMU university of Munich under the leadership of Prof. Zachary Chitwood. For the purposes of this project, the Eastern Christian regimes under scrutiny are those of the Byzantine empire, in Greek, and those of Armenian, Coptic, and Syrian Christians (in Armenian, Coptic, and Syrian respectively). By assembling a corpus of "Saracen law" provisions and utilizing cutting-edge, AI- supported technologies to create new editions of legal texts, NOMOS will examine how, within the realm of normative knowledge, the new religion was interpreted, circumscribed and defined and, moreover, how the encounter with Islam itself shaped long-term developments within Eastern Christian legal regimes. The aim of this panel is to present preliminary results of the project (which started in the last months of 2025). At the same time, the panel would welcome any attempt to go beyond the project itself, exploring for instance similar patterns of interaction or similar research approaches in the Christian West.