The Prosopography of the Imperial Church of the Empire of the Romans in Antioch during the time of Nikon of the Black Mountain, circa AD 950-1100

This project, ""The Prosopography of the Imperial Church of the Empire of the Romans in Antioch during the time of Nikon of the Black Mountain, circa AD 950-1100"" (hereafter PICERAN), aims to produce a new historical account of the structures and networks of a historical religious community.

In the tenth to the eleventh centuries AD, the medieval city and region of Antioch (modern Hatay Province, Türkiye) was home to a dynamic frontier society and cross-cultural meeting place for heterogenous peoples, languages, cultural traditions, and religions, all under the political authority of the eastern Empire of the Romans.

The PICERAN project endeavors to characterize the dynamic social structures and networks of this frontier society by leveraging “big data” and computational analysis.

The project will gather and update prosopography data from scattered secondary studies and original analysis of primary source data including texts, inscriptions, seals, and manuscripts. The links within this data will be identified, interpreted, and visualized using the latest Digital Humanities tools.

This analysis will result in a dynamic understanding of the history of the Roman Christian community in Antioch.

PICERAN integrates an innovative approach to how this community is conceptualized and modelled, offering a framework to approach an institution which has largely and over-simplistically been treated as a subordinate topic to the state history of the Empire of the Romans.

Furthermore, the results of this analysis will be creatively communicated to a larger audience through a biography of Nikon of the Black Mountain (circa AD 1025—after 1100).

Nikon was one of the era’s most prolific writers, and most prominent and exemplary figures, who yet remains understudied.

Through his life and writings, PICERAN will contextualize the social networks revealed by prosopography data, illuminating the social structures of turn-of-the-millennium Antioch.