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 The study of Byzantium was inaugurated within the context of humanism, after the end of the Byzantine Empire. However, it is unclear what the concept of Byzantium meant during the 16th century, since research in Byzantine history and culture was usually a subsidiary means to investigate other fields of knowledge, such as classical antiquity, Orthodox Christianity, and the geographical space of the Ottoman Empire. The main goal of the project is to study the direct encounter of humanists from the Holy Roman Empire with the capital of the Byzantine Empire itself as an effective way to understand how the idea of Byzantium developed and affected humanist thought; this will reveal crucial links in the relations between East and West. In order to analyze how visiting the city of Constantinople affected the reception of Byzantium by humanists from the Holy Roman Empire, diverse types of evidence, which reflect the ways visitors experienced the city, are examined: a. references in texts (mainly travel accounts) and images (e.g. panoramic views of Istanbul) to the Byzantine monuments and landmarks of Constantinople as preserved in the 16th century and b. Byzantine manuscripts transferred from 16th-century Istanbul to collections in Central Europe by humanists from the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, the project explores how the scholars under investigation made sense of various elements of Byzantine culture and how their concept of Byzantium developed as a consequence of viewing the monuments, collecting the manuscripts, and meeting the Orthodox populations they encountered in the city. By taking into account this array of media it is possible to follow the multifaceted activity of humanists, which encompassed portraying Byzantine monuments in words and images and collecting Byzantine codices as parts of the same process of discovering Byzantium in 16th-century Istanbul.
 
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 ## Project details
 
 The DFG-funded project “Approaching Byzantium” was launched in July 2021 and its first phase ended in June 2024. The second phase began in October 2024 and is expected to end in September 2025 . It entails the creation of a detailed GIS database, published via this presentation website, and the publication of a monograph analyzing the above-mentioned evidence regarding the topography and the manuscripts. The project is being conducted at the department of East European History of the Historical Seminar of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. The research is also part of the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Mainz-Frankfurt “Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident”, a collaborative effort between the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie in Mainz, JGU-Mainz, the Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. Hosting of the database and of the presentation website, long-term archiving, as well as the appropriate technical support is provided by the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna), the developer of the specialized software OpenAtlas.
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+## Events and Publications