Download PDF | The Byzantine Republic People And Power In New Rome By Anthony Kaldellis, Harvard University Press, 2015.
309 Pages
Preface
The goal of this book is to present an original argument regarding the nature of what we call “the Byzantine empire” as a political society. In discussing the Byzantine political sphere, scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the emperor and has tended to accept at face value the theological grounds for the legitimacy of his power often claimed by the court.
This picture, I will argue, is partial and even misleading. Byzantium must first be understood as a republic in the Roman tradition. As I will explain in Chapter 1, by “republic” I mean a regime in which only popular consent could authorize the allocation of power, which could be used only to benefit the totality of the Roman people (whom we call the “Byzantines”). According to this definition, and following most political theorists down to the Enlightenment, republics and monarchies were not incompatible.
By contrast, what we (and not the Romans) call the “Republic” was only one specific type of regime by which the res publica or res Romana was governed in one phase of its history, namely, by the senate, consuls, and popular assemblies. Byzantium was a republic in the broader sense. The Roman people remained the true sovereign of the political sphere, and they both authorized and de-authorized the holding of power by their rulers. The latter, “the emperors of the Romans,” must be understood in relation to the political sphere constituted by the totality of the Roman people. The politeia was the Byzantine Greek translation and continuation of the ancient res publica.
This project is part of a two-pronged effort to rehabilitate the Roman dimension of Byzantium and the Roman identity of the Byzantines themselves. The sequel and companion book will argue, according to both the evidence and theoretical models that have prevailed in the social and historical sciences since the mid-twentieth century, that the Byzantines not only “called themselves Romans” (as our field evasively and grudgingly puts it) but actually were that: Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian Romans to be sure, but Romans still.
The present volume, by contrast, will not focus on identity claims but will use political theory and the peculiar framework of Byzantine politics to argue that the Roman people in their Byzantine phase constituted a political sphere whose contours were recognizably republican. In my usage, which follows that of the Romans, “republican” refers to underlying ideologies of power and notions of popular sovereignty; it does not have to do with the structure of offices (“the Republic” was not called that by the Romans, but is a modern term for a period and a specific mode of governance).
George Ostrogorsky, who wrote a standard history of the Byzantine state (first published in 1952), unobjectionably claimed that “Roman political concepts, Greek culture, and the Christian faith were the main elements that determined Byzantine development.”! But while the field generally concedes that “Rome” had something to do with Byzantium, it has never been specified exactly what that was. What were those “concepts” that Ostrogorsky referred to? Part of the problem stems from the origins of Byzantine Studies as a field of research.
In western Europe, this research took place within the ideological parameters set by many political and religious institutions that hada stake in the Roman legacy. Since early medieval times the Byzantine claim to Rome had been rejected and polemically denied. The field of Byzantine Studies inherited the claims of that polemic as obvious facts and so had to devise ways of referring to the eastern Roman empire that were different from what it called itself.
Thus we have been saddled with “the empire of the Greeks,” “che empire of Constantinople,” and “Byzantium,” for Rome proper belonged to the (Latin) West. But Rome and Roman claims are written all over the Byzantine evidence. Given the extreme reluctance in the field to admit that the Byzantines were Romans, this evidence has been interpreted in one of two ways. The first is to equate those Roman concepts with the theology of empire applied by the bishop Eusebios of Kaisareia to Constantine the Great.
This effectively folds the Roman dimension into the Christian one; many leading historians today still maintain that Byzantium was Christian rather than Roman,’ not that it was both but in different ways. Thus Ostrogorsky’s three pillars have been reduced to two. According to a recent book, “it has also been common to regard Byzantine culture as based on two elements: the Greek... and the Judaic and Christian tradition.
The other option is to regard the Roman aspect as a function of imperial propaganda, limited to titles and diplomacy.‘ It survives in the view that the Byzantines were Roman insofar as they were the subjects of the emperor, as if they derived their Roman identity, such as it was, from his title (the exact opposite was in fact true).
This is a revisionist book: it aims to question established opinion and proposes alternative models that better explain the facts, or explain facts that established models avoid. To this end, it does not repeat things that are repeated often enough elsewhere. Readers who want to read about Byzantium as an Orthodox society should look elsewhere: there is no lack of books on that topic. But in my view the dominant Orthodox model is not only one-sided, it is not viable. This book, then, stems from a growing realization that the Byzantium described in most modern scholarship diverges from the society one encounters in the sources, sometimes widely.
A formulaic definition of “Byzantine political theory” has been constructed out of mostly modern concepts, projected onto the culture, and recycled since the 1930s. Scholars are content to recite this model as a general definition of the culture before they move on to study the particular aspects that interest them. The latter focused research is of high quality, but the general framework into which it is pressed has never been subjected to critical scrutiny. The field ought to be more worried than it is that the basic studies that are still cited as authoritative for Byzantine political ideology were written by European scholars coping with, or trained in, the crisis of the 1930s, and that they valorized theocratic over populist political ideologies.
Our “insidious governing image”® of Byzantine political ideology would have it that the emperor and the so-called imperial idea—a type of political theology—held absolute dominion within, and also completely filled up, the political sphere, and that the position of the emperor was understood and also legitimized in relation to God. To quote a leading scholar: “The empire was held together by a strong ideology based on its court and capital at Constantinople. This ideology revolved around two axes: the imperial power and the Orthodox religion.
“Ideology,” according to most versions of this position, played out in a metaphysical realm between emperor and God to which imperial subjects had no access and upon which they gazed in awe and submission. Historians also used to stress “the exalted position of the emperor, who dominated and controlled the entire life of the empire .. . The power he wielded was vast, unlimited, and subject to no higher authority.”” Recent scholarship has played down this absolutism by recognizing that the emperor was not quite so powerful in practice and his rule was not recognized as absolute by his subjects, even though the foundations for imperial power are still understood in religious terms.
An alternative view will be defended here, one that has been proposed in the past, albeit in a preliminary and underdeveloped way, by HansGeorg Beck in the 1960s and 1970s. This book will propose that Byzantium had a complex political culture in which different ideological systems were superimposed, one Roman, republican, and secular and the other late Roman, metaphysical, and eventually Christian, and they occupied different sites of the political sphere.
In itself this is not an original thesis,® but it will also be argued here that priority in terms of both the ideology of the Byzantines and the functioning of their political sphere should be given by historians to the Roman component. The theology of the imperial office, which has dazzled the field for too long, should be demoted. We should not be approaching Byzantine politics exclusively or even primarily through religion. Byzantium was in fact the continuation of the Roman res publica; and its politics, despite changes in institutions, continued to be dominated by the ideological modes and orders of the republican tradition.
This was Beck’s great insight, but he found few followers,’ and his alternate reading of the evidence has not been taken up by the field as an analytical or historical framework. Part of the problem is that he did not so much develop his thesis as sketch it in a few scattered articles and chapters, providing little documentation."° In my view the greatest weakness of his work, which ensured that few would grasp what he was saying, is that he did not explicitly challenge dominant views in the field, though he understood their flaws, and thus failed to explain the significance of what he was saying for what other scholars were thinking about the topic. As a result, he was folded into the background as yet another generic restatement of what everyone already knew. It thus became possible to tame Beck by citing him along with scholars who held more or less the opposite view, as if they were all saying the same thing. This creates a false image of unanimity and consensus in the field.
Our understanding of the Byzantine political sphere is missing a crucial element that has a prominent place in almost all the primary sources: I mean the concept of the politeia, an ancient translation of the Latin res publica, along with its cognates and synonyms (premodern terminology never being uniform in most literary or documentary genres). Beck’s version of the republican thesis suffered also because it failed to bring out the meaning and centrality for the Byzantines of this concept, to show how fundamental it was for their political thinking and behavior, though he was aware of its importance.
The politeia as a political sphere reflected the consensus of the Roman people that operated in a conceptual space that encompassed both the emperor and the community of whom he was the emperor. The importance of this concept should not be underestimated for the Byzantine view of politics, and yet it is entirely missing from our representation of their culture. This book seeks to restore “the mental map by which individuals oriented themselves politically,” first by revealing the logic about politics that pervades Byzantine texts in many genres, especially legal texts, military treatises, historiography, and others. Each of these presents and discusses the same core ideas, albeit from a different viewpoint, which enables us to form a rounded picture and to consider the interests of different parties within it.
After considering first the ideological framework, I will turn to the politeia as a historical entity in action (in Chapter 5). Only in the final chapter (Chapter 6) will the interaction of Roman and Christian ideologies be considered, for I will argue that what we have so far taken to be definitive of the political sphere—the theocratic imperial idea—was an attempt by the court to ameliorate rhetorically the vulnerable position in which it found itself always in managing a turbulent republic. Most of the book will, therefore, be devoted to presenting the latter model on its own terms, to see what political phenomena and discourses we can explain by it. Only at the end will I step back to consider the broader context of multiple discourses of power in Byzantium.
While the politeia has been effaced in the scholarship, it is pervasive in the sources. For this reason I cite many quotations from the sources and place the Greek in the notes and sometimes in the text. I use the transliterated form politeia when discussing the contents of a particular source but sometimes use the form “polity” in my own exposition; I often use the closest direct translation, “republic,” for reasons that will become clear. As an English word, “polity” does not carry the baggage of “commonwealth” (complicated by the British Commonwealth and Obolensky’s fictitious Byzantine Commonwealth, both worlds apart from what politeia meant), nor does politeia mean “state,” which is how it is often translated, with consequences that are sometimes disastrous.
“Empire” is another confusing term, which has also been inadequately theorized. By “empire” in relation to Byzantium I mean that it was governed by a ruler whom we conventionally call an emperor, in effect a monarch, the basileus of the Romans. In other words, in my usage “empire” means “monarchy,” and I remain provisionally skeptical of other senses that are attributed to the word by scholars. For example, an alternative would be to call it an empire because it exerted imperial dominion over non-Romans, which at times it did, but this poses the danger of sliding into the concept of the “multiethnic empire,” about which Iam skeptical in the case of Byzantium. The latter is a misleading concept that intentionally or not disintegrates and elides the (Roman) homogeneity of the vast majority of the population of the “empire.” It is unfortunate that we use the same term to refer to such different aspects (namely, having an “emperor” and being a multiethnic empire), which did not always coincide. They did coincide in the early Roman empire, where our terms “imperium” and “imperator” originate, but less so in Byzantium.’? These are issues that I will explore more fully in the sequel to this study.
As this book will present a Byzantium considerably different from what is found in most surveys and specialized studies, the argument must be presented in steps. Not every lateral problem can be identified and examined at each step, for that would break up the exposition and create many digressions, some of which are separate topics in their own right. I hope that the general concerns of each reader are addressed at a later point in the argument, but I know that it will not be possible to cover everything at first.
It is customary to begin with a review of the scholarship, but in this case that would include most of what has been written by historians about Byzantium in general terms. I would have to write a History of Byzantine Studies. While we desperately need that, it cannot be done here or by me. It is at least possible to say this. Most of the misunderstandings about Byzantium that I seek to correct were set in place before the lifetime of any scholar now alive. Scholars today may have their own reasons for repeating them, but they did not invent them.
These core notions of ours about Byzantium, however, were not established by rigorous scholarly methods to begin with, were never actually “proven,” and have not been subjected to critical scrutiny in modern times. Some, including the denial of the Byzantines’ Roman identity, have been handed down to us from ages before the emergence of academic scholarship, and their origins are linked to political and religious interests that we would disown as historians, if only we knew of them. It is my hope that while we have grown comfortable with these notions, we also have no personal stake in them. From many experiences at conferences I gain the sense that the field is ready to begin exploring the Roman dimension of Byzantium, to move past the horror of the Roman name and the “obsession and... single-minded focus on Christianity.”!%
In the course of this book, I will be citing exponents of views with which I disagree. Most of these views are so pervasive that they could be illustrated from dozens or hundreds of modern publications. They are positions that everyone in the field has held at one time or another, myself included. I generally try to cite the works of leading scholars in the field, whom I respect immensely. But, as I explained above, they are not the original exponents of these positions, only their modern carriers. Sometimes I cite publications almost at random, since these positions can be found almost everywhere. So if you see your name in the notes, please know that it (usually) could have been anyone else. As I said above, most Byzantinists work on specific issues and produce excellent results. My targets are the broad abstractions that we use to define the culture and its political ideology. No one today is responsible for them, though we have all perpetuated them.
The argument in the book will draw on material from the late fifth century to the twelfth. The starting point is marked by the settling of the emperors in Constantinople and the dynamic resumption of populist republican norms after the intermission of itinerant military rule that started in the third century. The argument could have been based on material from the middle Byzantine period alone, but I wanted to show how these traditions were anchored in Roman late antiquity. As Walter Kaegi pointed out, “the reluctance of many scholars to combine their investigations of the seventh and eighth centuries with researches on the fifth and sixth centuries has contributed to an unnecessary obfuscation of many topics.”
I am not arguing that the Byzantine republic appeared suddenly in the fifth century and then just as suddenly disappeared when the Crusaders destroyed it. Its history actually extends back into the Roman Republic and forward to 1453, and aspects of that long trajectory will be presented along the way.’* History did not unfold always according to academic boundaries. But extending the argument fully in those two directions would complicate it unnecessarily; it would require further discussions of its messy rise and fall. There is enough to work with in the period 500-1200.
The argument will inevitably be faulted for not highlighting changes that may have taken place during this period, for presenting a monolithic picture of an unchanging Byzantium. My goal, however, is to define the baseline against which changes can be identified and interpreted. Given past views of the culture as locked in timeless decadence, Byzantinists have understandably embraced the slogan of change, but sometimes it seems to be for its own sake. Byzantium was a remarkably coherent society.
We take for granted how easy it is to recognize in the source-record and forget how tied its culture and society were to a specific political order. What Iam looking for are precisely the basic parameters of that identity and continuity, and these, I maintain, changed little over time. Lack of change on this fundamental level used to be taken as a sign of permanent decadence, but I take it as proof of dynamic stability and a source of strength.
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