Christian foreigners in Kekaumenos's Strategicon c. 1075-1078

The article analyzes the information about foreigners of Christian faith in the Byzantine Empire and neighboring areas from Strategikon written by Katakalon Kekaumenos. This work was written by a provincial officer Kekaumenos c. 1075-1078 (according to M. D. Spadaro). It belongs to the genre of “private histories” (according to the opinion of W. Treadgold). The Strategicon is preserved in a single manuscript of the 14th century. In his work, Kekaumenos expresses the everyday perception of Christian foreigners, typical for Byzantines, that often disagrees with the official empire’s ideological attitudes, replicated by diplomats and courtiers in Constantinople. When describing foreigners, the author is guided by the principle of serving the Empire, and he traditionally divides the society of people into “Romans” and “Christian foreigners”. The work contains 29 references of such Christian foreigners. Of particular interest is the description of the Christians from the “Latin-Romanic” world made by Kekaumenos. He does not pay any attention to their confessional differences from the Greeks of the Orthodox confession, despite the Great Schism of 1054. It may be caused by the fact that the separation of churches was ignored by the “middle” social strata of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s. It is also significant that Strategicon does not even mention the ethno-confessional term “Latins”.