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Peter Charanis (1908 – 23 March 1985), bornPanagiotis Charanis (Greek:Παναγιώτης Χαρανής), was aGreek-born American scholar ofByzantium and the Voorhees Professor of History atRutgers University. Charanis was long associated with theDumbarton Oaks research library.

Charanis was born inLemnos,Ottoman Greece. He immigrated to the United States as a pre-teen leaving his family in Lemnos and settling inNew Jersey in 1920. He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers and his doctorate from theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied underAlexander Vasiliev. He continued his studies as a postgraduate in theUniversity of Brussels under the eminent Byzantinist,Henri Grégoire. From 1936 to 1938, he participated in Grégoire's seminar where he met his future wife Madeleine Schiltz and befriended the likes ofNicholas Adontz andPaul Wittek. According to Charanis himself, during his stay in Brussels, he acquired a profound interest in theArmenians. That interest influenced both him and his studies, notablyThe Armenians in the Byzantine Empire (Byzantinoslavica, 1961) andA Note on the Ethnic Origin of Emperor Maurice (Byzantion, 1965).

Charanis also spent some time at theAristotle University of Thessaloniki 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 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.

Charanis is known for his anecdotal narrations about Greek Orthodox populations, particularly those outside the newly independentmodern Greek state, who continued to refer to themselves asRomioi (i.e. Romans, Byzantines) well into the 20th century. Since Charanis was born on the island ofLemnos, he recounts that when the island was taken from the Ottomans by Greece in 1912, Greek soldiers were sent to each village and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the island children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of the soldiers asked. "AtHellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" the soldier retorted. "No, we areRomans," the children replied.^[1]

• "An important short chronicle of the fourteenth century",Byzantion13 (1938)
• "Byzantium, the West and the origin of the First Crusade",Byzantion19 (1949)
• "On the Social Structure and Economic Organization of the Byzantine Empire in the Thirteenth Century and Later",Byzantinoslavica12 (1951)
• "Ethnic Changes in the Byzantine Empire in the Seventh Century",Dumbarton Oaks Papers13 (1959)
• Charanis, Peter (1969) [1955]. "The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century".A History of the Crusades. Vol. 1 (2nd ed.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 177–219.ISBN 9780299048341.
• "The Armenians in the Byzantine Empire",Byzantinoslavica22 (1961), Repr. Lisbon, 1963, London, 1972
• "Observations on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire",XIII International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, 1966

• American Byzantinists
• Armenian studies scholars
• 1908 births
• 1985 deaths
• People from Lemnos
• Greek emigrants to the United States
• Rutgers University alumni
• University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
• Rutgers University faculty
• Recipients of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece)
• 20th-century American historians
• 20th-century American male writers
• Scholars of Byzantine history
• American male non-fiction writers

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