Salvatore Cosentino is Professor of Byzantine Civilisation at the University of Bologna. Former member of the Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici of Naples (1984-1985), he took his PhD at the University of Turin (1990), and he has been Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Cagliari, summer fellow at Dumbarton Oaks (1999), visiting professor at Montpellier (2002, 2010), visiting researcher at Princeton (2006) and at the Italian Academy at Columbia University (2011). His main fields of research focuse on the social and economic history of Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium, as well as on the Byzantine insular world; he is interested also in the history of Byzantine military institutions and Byzantine epigraphy.