Bizans gemi inşaasında ahşap tedariği

Timber selection for shipbuilding was influenced by many separate factors in the Byzantine Empire. Wood and timber were used as fuel and construction material and were integral to daily life and economy in antiquity. The supply of shipbuilding timber, however, required trees of specific qualities to be felled, and often means to transport them to the shipyards. Written sources such as legal documents, historians' and geographers' accounts, monastic foundational documents (typika), and hagiographies, and the material evidence of archaeological wood and pollen data, provide evidence of Byzantine timber exploitation. In recent years, the available evidence of shipwrecks in the Eastern Mediterranean has increased, which provides a new perspective for understanding the Byzantine timber procurement and use. In this thesis, I examine the written and material evidence regarding timber supply for Byzantine shipbuilding from the 4th to 11th century in the Eastern Mediterranean. I give an overview of timber in the written sources and evaluate how much it reveals about the patterns of timber movement in the Byzantine Empire. Furthermore, I discuss the role of shipbuilding timber in politics and naval conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean. Finally, I evaluate how archaeological material and the shipwrecks contribute to this broader picture, analyzing 45 shipwrecks dating to 4th–11th centuries, recovered from the Eastern Mediterranean. This thesis proposes that the supply of timber for shipbuilding depends on a variety of factors including the environment, the socio-political and economic conditions, as well as the types of timber necessary for the ship to be built.