Frammenti documentari di riuso: esempi dal mondo bizantino

In a brief review, fragments from Byzantine chancery documents are presented—i.e. primarily issued by the patriarchal chancery office or, in one case, getting out from an archiepiscopal see in Northern Greece—which provide a partial, albeit significant, specimen of the typology examined in this volume. In addition to a brief report on the material state of the fragments cut out and destined for a new life, an attempt is made to identify the original deed and reconstruct the historical circumstances that led to its discarding and subsequent reuse. From the fragments, now in Basel, of the original tomos of the Council held at Blachernae in 1351 (with the triumph of Palamism), to the Vatican fragment (from the age of Michael VIII Palaiologos and the patriarch of Constantinople Joseph I, i.e. in the sixties/early seventies of the thirteenth century), applied as the counterguard of a fourteenth-century manuscript of the patriarchal milieu, up to the fragment (today also in the pontifical collection) of a late sixteenth-century document bisected and transformed into a limp cover of a western volume, we offer examples certainly taken from deeds produced in the Patriarchate of Constantinople and recovered or disposed of in the same entourage of the issuing authority. The overview ends with a fragment of an archiepiscopal document from Northern Greece applied as a flyleaf to a manuscript from the circle of Maximos Planudes, which passed from Constantinople to Thessalonica.