Hélène Glykatzi-Ahrweiler was born Eleni Glykatzi on 29 August 1926 in Athens to a family of Greek refugees from Bursa in Asia Minor. She grew up in the refugee district of Vyronas, a childhood marked by the aftermath of the 1922 catastrophe and the displacement that shaped so many Greek families of her generation. That background of exile and interrupted belonging helped form her lifelong interest in history, identity, and the long continuity of Hellenism. During the Axis occupation of Greece she joined the Resistance as a teenager, taking part in EPON under the nom de guerre Niki. After the war she studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens under Dionysios Zakythinos.
In 1953 she left for Paris on a French state scholarship. There she trained at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and began work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1955. On 7 November 1958 she married Jacques Ahrweiler, a French naval officer; they had one daughter, Marie-Hélène. She completed a doctorate in history at the University of Paris in 1960 and a second doctorate, the doctorat ès lettres, in 1966. The latter became her landmark book Byzance et la mer, a study of Byzantine naval policy, institutions, and maritime strategy from the seventh to the fifteenth century. In 1967 she was appointed professor at the Sorbonne, succeeding to the chair once associated with Charles Diehl after Paul Lemerle moved to the Collège de France.
Her rise through French academic administration was rapid and unprecedented. She directed the history department of the Faculty of Letters, then helped found the new Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne after the post-1968 reorganization of the old University of Paris. She served as its first vice-president from 1970 to 1973 and as president from 1976 to 1981. In doing so she became the first woman to hold the presidency in the seven-hundred-year history of the Sorbonne. In 1982 President François Mitterrand appointed her rector of the Academy of Paris and chancellor of the universities of Paris, another first for a woman in that office. She held the post until 1989. From 1989 to 1991 she presided over the Centre Pompidou. Alongside these posts she served as honorary president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies, secretary-general of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, vice-president and later president of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, expert for UNESCO in the social sciences and humanities, president of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, and president of the National Theatre of Greece. She was also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Greece. Universities including Harvard, London, Belgrade, New York, Lima, Haifa and Fribourg awarded her honorary doctorates.
Ahrweiler’s scholarly work treated Byzantium not as a fading epilogue to Rome or a purely Eastern curiosity but as a durable, adaptable imperial system and a laboratory of political thought. Byzance et la mer established the importance of naval power and maritime administration in the empire’s survival. Études sur les structures administratives et sociales de Byzance gathered her research on bureaucracy, society and government. L’idéologie politique de l’Empire byzantin traced how imperial ideology shifted with circumstances: from Roman universalism, through the militarized and more Anatolian-focused policies of the iconoclast emperors, to the Greco-Orthodox patriotism and imperial assertiveness of the Macedonian age, and later to the aristocratic and defensive stance of the Komnenoi. Byzance: les pays et les territoires examined geography, settlement and the relationship between centre and provinces. Later books such as The Making of Europe and Why Byzantium? brought these arguments to a wider public, insisting that Byzantium belonged at the centre of European history rather than on its margins.
She emphasized institutions, law, diplomacy and the practical work of holding a multi-ethnic state together at the hinge of continents. For her, Byzantium was a case study in how a polity survives when outnumbered, surrounded and forced to negotiate as much as to conquer. She also wrote on the historical geography of the Smyrna region, on internal diaspora within the empire, and on the continuity between Byzantine and modern Greek identity, without collapsing the two into simple nationalist myth. Her work helped restore Byzantium’s place in Western scholarship after generations in which it had often been treated as decadent or alien.
Ahrweiler remained a public intellectual in both France and Greece, speaking on European identity, the Mediterranean and the uses of the past. She died in Athens on 16 February 2026 at the age of ninety-nine. Paris 1 named a new library after her. Greek officials praised her for illuminating the lasting dimension of Greek identity and for securing international recognition of Byzantium as a pillar of European civilization. Her career combined rigorous specialist research with institutional leadership at the highest levels of French higher education, at a time when those levels were still almost entirely male. She left a body of work that continues to shape how historians understand the administration, ideology and geography of the Byzantine state, and a personal example of a refugee’s daughter who rose to preside over one of Europe’s oldest universities.