Peter Charanis was a Greece born American scholar of Byzantium

Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

 and the Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. Dr. Charanis was long associated with the Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks is the conventional name for the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, situated on a historic property in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The institution is administered by the Trustees for Harvard University. Its founders, Robert Woods Bliss and his wife...

 research library.

Dr. Charanis was born in Lemnos

Lemnos

Lemnos is an island of Greece in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within the Lemnos peripheral unit, which is part of the North Aegean Periphery. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is Myrina...

, Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

. He immigrated to the United States as a pre-teen with his brother James leaving his family in Lemnos and settling in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

 in 1920. He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

, where he studied under Alexander Vasiliev

Alexander Vasiliev

Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev was considered the foremost authority on Byzantine history and culture in the mid-20th century. His History of the Byzantine Empire Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev (1867-1953) was considered the foremost authority on Byzantine history and culture in the mid-20th...

. He continued his studies as a postgraduate in the University of Brussels under the eminent Byzantinist, Henri Grégoire

Henri Grégoire (historian)

Henri Grégoire was an eminent scholar of the Byzantine Empire, virtually the founder of Byzantine studies in Belgium.Grégoire spent most of his teaching career at the Université libre de Bruxelles...

. From 1936 to 1938, he participated in Grégoire's seminar where he met his future wife Madeleine Schiltz and befriended the likes of Nicholas Adontz

Nicholas Adontz

Nicholas Adontz was a prominent Armenian historian, specialist of Byzantine and Armenian studies, and philologist. Adontz was the author of the Armenia in the Period of Justinian, a highly influential work and landmark study on the social and political structures of early Medieval Armenia.-Early...

 and Paul Wittek. According to Charanis himself, during his stay in Brussels, he acquired a profound interest in the Armenians. That interest bore abundant fruit in various studies, notably The Armenians in the Byzantine Empire (Byzantinoslavica, 1961) and A Note on the Ethnic Origin of Emperor Maurice (Byzantion, 1965).

Charanis also spent some time at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is the largest Greek university, and the largest university in the Balkans. It was named after the philosopher Aristotle, who was born in Stageira, Chalcidice, about 55 km east of Thessaloniki, in Central Macedonia...

 in Greece, and upon his return to the United States joined the Rutgers faculty in 1938, becoming Voorhees Professor of History in 1963. At that time, Byzantine Studies

Byzantine studies

Byzantine studies is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the history, culture, costumes, religion, art, such as literature and music, science, economy, and politics of the Byzantine Empire. The discipline's founder in Germany is considered to be the philologist Hieronymus...

was still at its infancy in the United States. Charanis persuaded the history department to begin a course in Byzantine Studies, which eventually became one of the most popular courses at Rutgers. From 1964 to 1966, he served as chairman of the university's history department. He retired in 1976.

Selected bibliography

• "An important short chronicle of the fourteenth century", Byzantion 13 (1938)
• "Byzantium, the West and the origin of the First Crusade", Byzantion 19 (1949)
• "On the Social Structure and Economic Organization of the Byzantine Empire in the Thirteenth Century and Later", Byzantinoslavica 12 (1951)
• "Ethnic Changes in the Byzantine Empire in the Seventh Century", Dumbarton Oaks Papers 13 (1959)
• "The Armenians in the Byzantine Empire", Byzantinoslavica 22 (1961), Repr. Lisbon, 1963, London, 1972
• "Observations on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire", XIII International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, 1966