Neokastra (, "new fortresses", formally θέμα Νεοκάστρων; in Latin sources Neocastri or Neochastron) was a Byzantine province (theme) of the 12th–13th centuries in north-western Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Neokastra (, "new fortresses", formally θέμα Νεοκάστρων; in Latin sources Neocastri or Neochastron) was a Byzantine province (theme) of the 12th–13th centuries in north-western Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Its origin and extent are obscure. According to Niketas Choniates, the theme was founded by Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–1180) between 1162 and 1173. Manuel I scoured the region around three cities—Chliara (mod. Kırkağaç), Pergamon and Adramyttion—from the Turkish bands that raided it, rebuilt and refortified the cities and established forts in the countryside, and made them into a separate province called "Neokastra" (New Fortresses), due to the newly rebuilt settlements; it was under a governor titled harmostes ("supervisor") by the archaizing Choniates, but whose actual title in all probability must have been doux. The imperial chrysobull of 1198 to the Venetians on the other hand mentions Adramyttion apart from the Neokastra, and the Partitio Romaniae of 1204 mentions the province of Neokastra as being entirely separate from all three cities. The Byzantinist Helene Ahrweiler interpreted the evidence to suggest that Neokastra did indeed originally encompass the three cities, but that in 1198 Adramyttion may have formed a separate district, and that the separation between the cities and the province evidenced in the Partitio was the result of a copyist's error.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).