Abstract:

While the last centuries of Byzantine is known as a period during which the empire lost its economic and political power, the period has been accompanied with a revival and change in cultural and political sense. During the period, the policies maintained by Byzantium for financial and political concerns brought the empire closer to the Eastern and Western cultures. Also, the empire thus became a transit route between these two different cultures both in geographical and cultural sense. The diplomatic and cultural relations that developed between the Empire and Venice and Genoa in the West and the Islamic and Turkish states in the East contributed to the emergence of new habits on glassworks as well as in other forms of art. The luxurious glass objects produced in the palace glasshouses in Constantinople and well-established techniques and secrets of glass making in Byzantine were carried to Venice through Italian city states that monopolized over the trade in Eastern Mediterranean. Likewise, the Crusaders produced glass objects which have Islamic form but decorated with depictions from Christianity. Through excavation findings, it is understood that the Islamic states ruling in Syria and Egypt during the period played an important role in glass production and trade at the time. Especially, the glass objects produced in Syria are known to have been exported to Anatolia. The fact that imitations of the Islamic style have been found in layers of Byzantine should lead one to the interpretation that this has been a consequence of cultural exchange

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