Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies 2.1-2 (2023): 202-214 Edinburgh University Press https://doi.org/10.3366/jlaibs.2023.0020 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/jlaibs Speaking Persian in Byzantium RUSTAM SHUKUROV * University of St Andrews Abstract The earliest instances of Byzantine interest for the New Persian language date from the ninth century. The most notable example is provided by Photios who was especially curious about the Persian roots of Greek words. However, in the eighth-to-eleventh centuries, the knowledge of Persian was not common among the Greeks. The situation changed in the second half of the thirteenth century, when the practical knowledge of foreign languages spread outside the small circle of professional scholars and diplomats and became rather common among the native Byzantines. The status of the Persian language increased dramatically for two reasons: first, because of the rise of the political and cultural prestige of Anatolian Muslims in Byzantine eyes; and secondly, due to the rediscovery of Persian science by the Byzantines. Keywords: Middle and Late Byzantium, multilingualism, Persian language, cultural history, prosopography In recent decades, there has been a keen interest in the problem of multilingualism in Byzantium, prompted by a natural desire to test, detail, or completely revise the prevailing axiom about the essential monolingualism of Byzantine culture. 1 However, the study of multilingualism in Byzantium is still at its initial stage. Even a superficial survey of the relation between Byzantine monolingualism and multilingualism shows how insufficiently and irregularly the problem has been explored. The issue of the relation of the Byzantines to foreign languages is quite extensive and deserves a detailed monographic study. In this paper, I will discuss its least studied aspect: the place of the Persian language in Byzantium from the seventh-century Muslim conquests to the fifteenth century, an aspect which has not been problematised by the relevant academic studies yet. 2 The subject of my piece is also related to another major problem of the role of the Persian element in middle and late Byzantine culture. According to our modern interpretation, the long period of relations between the Greco-Roman and Persian civilisations ended with the Muslim conquests. From the seventh century onwards, Byzantine-Persian relations were replaced by Byzantine-Arab ones, and later, from the eleventh century, Byzantino-Arabica was replaced by