ABSTRACT
Sicily and southern Italy hold a special place in the history of the Byzantine empire.Thanks to their geographic situation as middle Byzantium’s most western regions,1 separated from the Balkan mainland by the Adriatic Sea, they could well be considered a peripheral region. In what follows I will subject this to scrutiny. Much has been written over the past two decades on center-periphery relationships in matters of society, economy and most of all culture. I would like to examine the definition of Byzantine Italy and Sicily as a peripheral region in view of the special place that this region held on the general medieval map. I shall avoid, therefore, the definition of a periphery in relation to a center by focusing here not on the relations between Constantinople and Italy/Sicily, but on the particularities of the southern Italian and Sicilian region and the way in which they were perceived by the local population.
