The Oxford History of Byzantium Read online

  The pretence of Romanity began to wear thin only in the age of the Crusades when the eastern empire and the West were increasingly forced into a loveless embrace. From a western perspective the kingdom of Constantinople looked decidedly Greek in addition to being schismatic. For their part, some Greek intellectuals reacted by claiming for themselves the glories of ancient Hellas (see Chapter 11). It would be a mistake to say, however, that ‘ethnic identity’ attracted much attention at the time. The big issue, on which oceans of ink were spilt, was that of religion—of obedience to the Pope, the procession of the Holy Ghost, purgatory, clerical celibacy, leavened or unleavened bread in the eucharist. Those were the questions that separated the Greeks from the Latins. If only they could be resolved, Christendom would be reunited in a new Romanity under the Pope.

  Sir John Mandeville in the mid-fourteenth century could still speak of ‘the emperor of Grece’, but such a designation was no longer appropriate in the more scholarly climate of the Renaissance. Greece had come to mean ancient Greece or its territory, now occupied by the Turks. The kingdom of Constantinople, which had become extinct in 1453, needed a distinctive name, and that is how the adjective byzantinus came into being. It was less cumbersome than Constantinopolitanus and had a pleasantly ‘classical’ ring. One could now speak of scriptores byzantini, historia byzantina, imperium byzantinum, although the earliest large-scale treatment of ‘Byzantine’ history, by one Louis Cousin (1672-4), was entitled Histoire de Constantinople. The first book in English to use the word ‘Byzantine’ in its title was, if I am not mistaken, George Finlay’s History of the Byzantine Empire from 716 to 1057 (1853). The substantive Byzantium, meaning the empire, not the city, did not become common in English until the twentieth century, though used earlier in French, German, and Russian.

  Byzantium, then, is a term of convenience when it is not a term of inconvenience. On any reasonable definition Byzantium must be seen as the direct continuation of the Roman empire in the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin, i.e. of that part of the Roman empire that was Hellenistic in its culture and language. Being a continuation, it had no beginning, although a number of symbolic dates have been advanced as marking that elusive birthday: the accession of Diocletian (AD 284), the foundation of Constantinople (324) or its ceremonial inauguration (330), the adoption of Christianity as the all but exclusive religion of the empire (c.380), the division of the empire into separately ruled eastern and western halves (395), the abolition of the western empire (476), even the accession of Leo III (716), the last being still enshrined in The Cambridge Medieval History. To all of these dates more or less cogent objections have been raised. That, however, does not solve a problem that probably owes more to feeling than to the kind of ‘objective’ criteria that are supposed to underpin historical periodization. For us, Rome, the fountainhead of our civilization, belongs by definition to the classical world. We commune with the spirit of Rome as we gaze at the Ara Pacis, or the reliefs of Trajan’s column or the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. But when we contemplate the famous mosaic depicting Justinian in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, we find ourselves in a different world. It is no longer a naturalistic representation of a ritual act (the offering of a chalice), but an icon. Justinian wears a halo. He and all the members of his suite face us frontally against a gold background. We do not immediately understand that the artist intended to represent a procession moving to the right, which is why the figures, in spite of their frontality, appear to be stepping on each other’s toes. To our eyes, Justinian in San Vitale looks fully Byzantine; yet the real Justinian, a native Latin speaker, conqueror of Italy and North Africa, the greatest codifier of Roman law, considered himself a quintessentially Roman emperor and was so seen by posterity.

  The emperor Augustus, whom the Byzantines regarded as the founder of their monarchy, performing a ritual act. Relief of Ara Pacis, Rome, 9 BC.

  Where, then, do we draw the line? If we abandon the fruitless quest for a precise occasion when Rome was transformed into Byzantium and seek a broader period or periods that witnessed a profound shift, two such dividing bands suggest themselves. The first may be placed in the fourth century, the second roughly between 575 and 650. The two were not of the same character. The first mutation was more cultural than political and was associated with the adoption of Christianity as the official ideology of the state. That is not to deny that other, more tangible changes occurred roughly at the same time: a thorough overhaul of the state’s apparatus—administrative, military, and financial (already under Diocletian), the growth of a centralized bureaucracy, the move of the main imperial residence to Constantinople, the emergence of a new elite based on imperial service. Yet, when seen from a distance, what stands out is not the multiplication of provincial units or the introduction of a tax census or the reform of the coinage, but rather the imposition of a new ideology on all the empire’s subjects and the suppression of dissent.

  Successor of Augustus, Justinian presenting a paten to the church of San Vitale, Ravenna. He is preceded by bishop Maximian and two deacons. The identity of the other personages has been much debated. The bearded man to Justinian’s left may be the general Belisarius. Mosaic c.AD 545.

  The second coupure was more palpable and painful. It was marked not only by vast territorial losses in both the Balkans and the Near East, but also by the collapse of the urban life that had been the chief feature of antiquity (see Chapter 2). Many cities vanished off the map; others shrank to a defensible citadel or moved to a nearby hilltop. The elites that had been the mainstay of provincial governance as well as of polite letters disappeared. Life became ruralized and militarized.

  Between the two bands we have indicated lies the period we have learned to call Late Antiquity. Its distinctiveness has been recognized only in the past fifty years, during which time it has become a major academic industry. True, the chronological boundaries of Late Antiquity are themselves a little blurred: some scholars see its beginning in about AD 200, others make it extend to the year 1000. More usually, however, it is limited to AD 284-602, as in A. H. M. Jones’s monumental Later Roman Empire, or 284-641, as in the equally indispensable Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Such a definition fits very well into a Byzantine perspective.

  Late Antiquity embraces the whole Roman world, Latin and Greek. It includes Rome, Milan, Trier, Ravenna, and Carthage no less than Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Ephesus. It is represented by St Augustine as well as Gregory Nazianzen, by Ambrose as well as John Chrysostom, by Ammianus as well as Procopius. Apart from the difference of language, the cultural climate of Late Antiquity was reasonably uniform. It is true that the linguistic divide among members of the elite was a little deeper than it had been in the days of Cicero (Augustine knew little Greek, while few orientals ever stooped to learning any Latin), but a measure of cultural communication was maintained, elite education was based on the same principles and translations were made both ways. Ammianus, a Greek, chose to write in Latin. In the East knowledge of Latin was required for legal studies and service in some branches of the central administration down to the second half of the sixth century. The most authoritative handbook of Latin grammar, Priscian’s Institutiones, was composed at Constantinople. So were the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes.

  Late Antiquity provided the cultural soil out of which grew both the medieval West and the medieval East. The question to be asked is why they developed so differently or, to put it another way, why Byzantium, which was unquestionably a part of Europe, diverged from what we regard, rightly or wrongly, as the main avenue of European progress. That is not a question that will be directly addressed in this book, but one that the thoughtful reader may wish to keep at the back of his mind.

  There has been little debate about the terminal date of Byzantium, which is unanimously placed on 29 May 1453, a Tuesday. The curtain comes down as the Janissaries clamber over the breach in the thousand-year-old Theodosian walls and a supernatural light rises heavenwar
ds from the dome of St Sophia. If we regard Byzantium primarily as a state, i.e. as an independent political entity, 1453 does indeed provide an obligatory and suitably dramatic finale. If, however, we follow Arnold Toynbee and define Byzantium as a civilization rather than a state, the story does not end at that point. It expands geographically to include all the countries of the Orthodox faith—Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, as well as the subjugated Greeks—and extends in time if not to the present, at any rate until about 1800, when the spread of the European Enlightenment and European-inspired nationalism finally undermined what was still a recognizably Byzantine way of life. The story of Byzance apres Byzance, to quote the well-known title of a book by Nicolae Iorga (1935), remains to be written in all of its regional complexity.

  If we are able to tell the story of Byzantium, that is because there existed a more or less continuous tradition of Byzantine historiography, sketchy for some periods, much fuller for others. The nature of that historiography and its preservation or loss naturally determine the extent of our knowledge. As to its nature, it assumed three basic forms: the classicizing history (ultimately descended from ancient models such as Thucydides and Polybius), the chronicle, and the eccclesiastical history. The ‘history’ aimed at giving a reasoned and polished account of events, which, ideally, the author had himself witnessed, hence was limited to a fairly short timespan. The chronicle, which had a much wider readership, went to the opposite extreme: written in everyday language, it was meant to provide an overview of everything that had happened since the Creation of the world down to the compiler’s lifetime. Its entries, arranged chronologically, tended to be brief and did not present events in a causal nexus. The chronicle was considered an edifying rather than a literary work, which meant that it was progressively updated and re-edited, while older versions were often discarded. The ecclesiastical history, invented by Eusebius of Caesarea in about the year 300, was concerned with episcopal succession and especially doctrinal disputes, while including some secular material. It had the unique feature of quoting original documents, which made it the most scholarly kind of historiography on offer. Unfortunately, the ecclesiastical history in the Greek language died in about the year 600. The Byzantine world produced practically no local or monastic chronicles such as were very common in the West.

  The thousand years of Byzantium are very unevenly covered in surviving historiography. Some periods, like the brief reign of Julian (361-3) or the long one of Justinian (527-65), are brightly illuminated, others are quite obscure. Strangely enough, the fourth and fifth centuries, including even the reign of Constantine, are very poor in extant narrative sources other than the ecclesiastical histories. The seventh and eighth centuries are notoriously dark and even the ninth, when the empire was beginning to recover from its troubles, is narrated in texts composed a hundred years after the events in question. The record becomes a little fuller from about the middle of the tenth century onwards and is fullest for the Palaiologan period, which happens to be the least important segment of Byzantine history.

  Apart from unevenness of treatment, one finds in the narrative sources a good deal of deliberate distortion both for theological and dynastic reasons. Heretical emperors are routinely denigrated as in the case of the Monothelite Constans II (641-68) and that of the Iconoclastic emperors, who in fact struggled valiantly and successfully for the preservation of the empire, while the far from brilliant reign of Irene (780-802) is presented in glowing colours because she presided over the restoration of ‘orthodoxy’. Nikephoros I (802-11), an astute reformer, is painted black because he toppled Irene. Michael III (842-67) in particular is made into another Nero, a drunkard and debauchee, to justify his murder by Basil I, founder of the long-lasting ‘Macedonian’ dynasty. In all these cases the rewriting has been so thorough that we shall probably never know the true facts.

  All branches of Byzantine historical writing are largely concerned with the deeds of emperors and rebels, the conduct of wars, court gossip, and divisions among bishops. Inevitably, that remains the stuff of Byzantine history as it is written today. Of course, there are other sources that supply occasional bits of information: imperial decrees, Lives of saints (a very prolific if highly stylized and often mendacious genre), collections of letters, conciliar acts, polemical treatises, rhetorical declamations, poems, not to speak of historiography in languages other than Greek—Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian. Yet, even after making allowance for this miscellaneous input, it is the story of emperors, intrigues, and battles that remains in the forefront. That kind of narrative still appeals to many readers, but most professional historians, whatever their individual interests, would prefer to tell it differently by uncovering the hidden mechanisms—economic, social, and demographic— that underlay the histoire evenementielle that is alone visible. Rather than enquiring whether Michael III was or was not a drunken sot, it would be more instructive to explain what factors determined the revival of the empire in the ninth century.

  If in this respect Byzantine historiography appears the most backward sector of medieval studies, the fault does not lie with its practitioners. Our minute knowledge of the society and economy of western Europe is largely based on documents that have survived by the thousand—charters, parish records, tax registers, testaments, contracts, etc. For Byzantium we have only small pockets of documentary material, setting aside the plentiful but arcane evidence provided by Egyptian papyri down to the Arab conquest. When we come down to the Middle Ages, we have only some monastic archives relating to landholding (notably for Mount Athos, southern Italy, Chios, Patmos, and a few from Asia Minor), a small number of monastic founders’ charters (typika), Italian documents relating to the Levant trade, a register of the patriarchal tribunal for the years 1315-1402, and a few other bits and pieces. There is little hope that this meagre and haphazard body of material will ever be increased, nor can we remedy the near absence of inscriptions on stone, which for classical antiquity provide such a rich source of information for society, institutions, and religion.

  If there are few documents left, we have a considerable number of lead seals (roughly 50,000) that were once attached to documents and these are being slowly published and exploited as a historical source. The information they yield is largely limited to names and titles, but occasionally we gain a glimpse into other domains, e.g. trade, as with the seals of the commerciarii, assuming these were customs officials (for a different view see below, p. 146). Numismatics, too, have been put to excellent use. The metallic purity of the coinage, the near disappearance of small change during the Dark Age (see p. 147), the geographical distribution and composition of coin hoards and the incidence of Byzantine coin finds beyond the borders of the empire are data that the historian of Byzantium is learning to exploit.

  Finally, there is archaeology, perhaps the most promising avenue for the eventual enlargement of our knowledge. Thanks to archaeology we have already gained what may be called a visual apprehension of urban life during Late Antiquity in many centres of the eastern empire—some major, like Ephesus, others of the middle rank, like Stobi in Macedonia or Scythopolis in Palestine, others fairly minor, like Anemurium in Isauria. The cities in question had a classical past and the primary aim of excavating them has been to uncover antique monuments, whether Greek, Hellenistic, or imperial Roman. In many cases, however, the imperial Roman phase has been found to continue into Late Antiquity, the temples and gymnasia being abandoned or converted to other uses, churches and episcopal palaces being built, baths and theatres continuing to function. What today’s visitor sees at Ephesus is the city as it was in the reign of Justinian. We know less about villages, although those of northern Syria, which were built as durably as cities and have remained standing to this day, have attracted a fair amount of attention from archaeologists.

  By contrast, the archaeology of medieval Byzantium is still largely a blank. Of the four cities we have mentioned by way of example, Stobi and Ane-murium had no medieval phase, while Scythopoli
s passed, of course, under Arab rule. Only Ephesus survived as a Byzantine town, but it is almost impossible to visualize, except for its reduced walls and shrunken cathedral. It incorporated many standing ruins and its houses appear to have been mean and poorly built. We expect to find a scattering of small churches and monasteries, but only a couple are discernible. We do not even know how much of the defended area was built over. For a somewhat fuller picture of a Byzantine town we have to go to Corinth and Athens, even Cherson in the Crimea, but we are still a long way from a comprehensive overview. Lack of monu-mentality and poor masonry do not preclude a lively economic activity, although undoubtedly they do not stimulate the archaeologist’s attention. We can only hope that one day the reality of medieval Byzantium will be more fully revealed by the spade instead of being mediated only by the written word.

  ‘Great Byzantium … where nothing changes,’ wrote Yeats. That is an illusion that professional historians have been trying to disprove for a long time. Of course, there is no denying that Byzantium did change—socially, economically, militarily, both through an internal dynamic and in response to ever-shifting realities beyond its borders. It is no easy matter, however, to correctly describe and understand the nature of those changes. We used to be told, for example, that the empire’s ‘healthy’ condition in the ninth-tenth centuries was due to the prevalence of agricultural smallholding, with sturdy yeoman stratiotai defending their country when they were not tilling their fields, and that this excellent system was subverted by the greed of land-hungry magnates, thus leading to a loss of morale and general decline in the eleventh century. It is true that the emperors of the tenth century did attempt by their legislation to limit the encroachment of ‘the powerful’ on village communes, but how widespread and economically important was smallholding? How is it that in c.860 the widow Danelis could be said to own ‘no small part of the Peloponnese’, including many hundreds of slaves? Why is it that there was demonstrably more intense economic activity and greater wealth in the eleventh-twelfth centuries than there had been previously? Did the Byzantines commit economic suicide by surrendering international shipping to the Italian republics or did they profit from this arrangement? Given the nature of our documentation, there is no clear answer to such questions and discussion of them will doubtless continue for a long time. We can only hope that one day we shall have a proper economic history of the empire in which both written and archaeological evidence will be given due weight.