ИСТИНА

The author examines the role and significance of Anatolian Seljuk narrative texts, documents and epigraphy as a source for the prosopography of the Byzantine world in the thirteenth century. The paper focuses on Byzantine figures whose biographies were in this or another way linked with Muslim Anatolia. There could be drawn up a typology of such persons: 1) Byzantine political refugees seeking for asylum in the Seljuk Sultanate; 2) Christian Greeks who were former subjects of the Seljuk sultans and “repatriated” to Byzantium at a moment; 3) non-Greek émigrés from Seljuk Anatolia to Byzantium who formerly confessed Islam and adopted Christianity in the course of their naturalization on the Byzantine soil; 4) wandering groups and individuals who traveled to and fro the Byzantine-Muslim border such as teams of artisans, companies of mercenaries, merchants, and the like. The question of the presence in the Byzantine territories of Muslim individuals who could have become subjects of the Byzantine emperor will be posed and discussed. The reconstruction of the biography of the aforementioned categories of persons is impossible without an in-depth study of Persian and Arabic sources originating from Muslim Anatolia. In particular, methodologically paradigmatic cases exemplified by the biographies of Michael Palaiologos, the brothers Basilikoi, the brothers Kīr Khāya and Kīr Kadīd and the like will be discussed in more details.