Download PDF | Lost Capital Of Byzantium The History of Mistra and the Peloponnese By Steven Runciman
168 Pages
Sir Steven Runciman (1903-2000) was the most acclaimed and influential historian of the Byzantine era. From 1942 to 1945 he was Professor of Byzantine Art and History at Istanbul University, where he began research on what would lead to his most famous work, the three-volume A History of the Crusades. He wrote several other highly-praised works, including Byzantine Civilisation, The Sicilian Vespers, The Fall of Constantinople and A Traveller’s Alphabet.
Foreword
I REMEMBER my first sight of Mistra in the spring of 1973, when we drove through the mountains of the Peloponnesus to find the ruins of the city that was once the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, one of the last outposts of Byzantium. We finally reached the site an hour or so before sunset, when we saw the conical hill crowned with the walls and towers of a crusader castle, with the ruins of the Palace of the Despots and a score of Byzantine churches clustering on the western slope below. The ghost city was shaded by spectral cypresses, the surrounding Vale of Sparta embowered in olive groves and fruit orchards, five snow-covered peaks of Mount Tagetus looming above the abandoned medieval capital to which we were making a pilgrimage.
Seven years later I read Sir Steven Runciman’s book on Mistra, which I wished I had with me when I first visited the site, because it told me much about the place and its history that I had not known before, evoking its past and bringing the city to life in a way that no historical text or guide-book could possibly do. This quality was remarked upon by Gore Vidal after finishing Runciman’s A History of the Crusades, when he remarked that ‘To read a historian like Sir Steven Runciman is to be reminded that history is a literary art quite equal to that of the novel.’ And so I was particularly pleased to learn that I.B.Tauris is reissuing Lost Capital of Byzantium, for it is a unique classic that should remain in print as a tribute to its author and his role in reviving interest in Byzantine culture. As he wrote in his own preface to Lost Capital of Byzantium: ‘It is not a guidebook, nor just an essay in appreciation. I have attempted to give a full history of Mistra, to explain how it came into being, to tell of its importance in the last two centuries of the medieval era, and to trace the sadder story of its long decline.’
This history begins early in the thirteenth century when Geoffrey de Villehardouin, a French crusader who had carved out a kingdom in the Peloponnesus, erected a palace in the Vale of Sparta. His son William built a fortress above the vale on a spur of Mount Taygetus, and the walled town that developed around it came to be called Mistra. When William was captured by the Byzantines in 1261 he was forced to surrender Mistra to the emperor Mchael VIII Palaeologus.
Mistra flourished under Byzantine rule and in 1348 it became the capital of the Despotate of the Morea, as the Peloponnesus was known at the time, ruled by Michael Cantacuzenus, son of the emperor John VI. Constantine XI Dragases, the last Emperor of Byzantium, was Despot of the Morea when he succeeded to the throne in 1449, four years before Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Mistra itself held out until 1461, one of the last two fragments of Byzantium to fall to the Turks, followed by Trebizond the year afterwards.
During the first half of the fourteenth century Mistra became an intellectual centre of the Byzantine Empire, which flourished in a last renaissance during the two centuries before its fall. Mistra’s cultural preeminence stemmed from George Gemistus Plethon, the greatest philosopher of the late Byzantine era, who lived there during most of the period 1407-52, his presence attracting many scholars to the city. Plethon, who was called ‘the second Plato’, was directly influential in bringing the revived Hellenic culture of Byzantium to the West, sparking the Italian renaissance.
Mistra declined under Ottoman rule, and then in 1770 it was sacked by the Turks after it had been occupied by the Russians. Then in 1824, during the Greek War of Independence, it was sacked again by Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, who left the town a smouldering ruin, its surviving people scattered throughout the surrounding communities of Laconia.
After the establishment of the Greek Kingdom in 1832 the government decided to refound the ancient city of Sparta as the administrative centre of Laconia. The former residents of Mistra for the most part resettled in Sparta, leaving the medieval city abandoned except for the southern part of the Exokhorion, or Outer Town, which, as Runciman writes, ‘survived to become the small and pleasant town known as Mistra’.
During the past century the Greek government has restored the surviving Byzantine monuments of Mistra and their works of art. Mistra is now a unique monument of Byzantine civilization, preserved as it was at the end of its golden age, dominated by the mighty ramparts of the Villehardouin castle and the surrounding walls of the Kastro, the upper town, a lower line of walls encircling the Mesochorion, or middle town, on the lower slope of the hill. The enormous shell of the Palace of the Despots stands between the upper and middle towns, and scattered on the slope above and below it are the clustered domes of fifteen Byzantine churches and two monasteries, some of them almost perfectly preserved. And, as Runciman writes, ‘as one wanders through the ruined streets and alleyways one begins to see what must have been the great houses of the nobility, the poorer houses, the shops and the barracks, though much remains unidentified.’
One of the restored monuments is the Metropolitan church of St. Demetrius, where Constantine XI Dragases was crowned emperor on 6 January 1449, the place of his coronation marked by a marble stone carved with the double eagle of the Palaeologus dynasty, the enduring symbol of Byzantium. He departed for Constantinople a few weeks after the ceremony, leaving his brothers Demetrius and Thomas to serve jointly as Despots of the Morea. Constantine’s reign ended on 29 May 1453, when he died defending Constantinople on the day that it fell to the Turks under Sultan Mehmet II, who within the next nine years would conquer all that still remained of the Byzantine empire.
Runciman evokes the vanished glory of medieval Mistra in the last paragraph of his epilogue, weaving it seamlessly into a vision of the modern town as he himself saw it in 1930, ‘journeying on foot, as we did in those days when I was young’.
The old city is deserted now, except for the kindly nuns who maintain, in the convent of the Pantanassa, the eternal traditions of the Orthodox faith ... But for those to whom history is not just a matter of dry and dusty records, the imagination offers a splendid choice, whether it be of warriors or artists, of gracious ladies or learned philosophers, of the Villehardouin lords revelling in the loveliness of the countryside ... or just of the simple craftsmen and artisans, and the peasants coming up to the marketplace, whose descendants we may still see driving their goats through the steep and narrow alleys, while behind them are the peaks and chasms of Taygetus and spread out before them the incomparable beauty of the hollow vale of Sparta.
Such is Sir Steven Runciman’s Lost Capital of Byzantium, a superb book about a last remnant of Byzantium that lives again through his evocative history. Runciman dedicated the book to the mayor and people of the modern town, and they in turn named a street in his memory. And now his book has been reissued, and so a new generation of readers will be introduced to the vanished world of Byzantium which he revived through his histories.
John Freely, Istanbul
Preface
Firry YEARS have passed since first I came to Mistra, journeying on foot, as we did in those days when I was young. From that moment the enchantment of the place has held me, to be enhanced by every later visit, and more recently the kindness of the modern Mistra, the friendly town that stands on the site of the old city’s furthest suburb, has strengthened my bonds. This book is intended as a gesture of gratitude for all that I owe to Mistra and to its people.
It is not a guidebook, nor just an essay in appreciation. I have attempted to give a full history of Mistra, to explain how it came into being, to tell of its importance in the last two centuries of the medieval era, and to trace the sadder story of its long decline. Mistra cannot claim the venerable age of most of the great cities of Europe. It was founded only some seven and a half centuries ago, and the days of its glory lasted for less than two centuries. A century and a half has passed since its final destruction. Yet while it existed it was a focal point. The history of Mistra cannot be understood apart from the whole history of the Peloponnese, in which it was set. Its fate was affected also by events further afield, by a battle in northern Macedonia, or by a massacre in Palermo. A history of Mistra must range over many lands.
Orthography presents a constant difficulty. Are we to use the name “Mistra’ rather than ‘Myzethra’, which seems to have been the earliest form, or ‘Misistra’, which was the form employed by most early Western travellers, or ‘Mystras’, which represents the correct transliteration from the modern Greek? [ use the form that seems to be most acceptable to the traveller of today. Are we to call the Peloponnese the Morea, the name that was current in Frankish and Venetian times but usually avoided by the official Greek world? I use either term, according to which sounds the more natural in the context. I cannot claim any consistency in the transliteration of foreign names, but have used whatever form seems to fit most naturally into a book written in English.
In a book such as this, full reference notes would be out of place. I have included at the end a list of the chief original sources and more modern works to which I am beholden; and I have tried to avoid controversial statements that need a detailed argument to support them. I am greatly indebted to Fani-Maria Tzigakou for her valuable help over the illustrations.
It is my hope that this book may encourage civilized travellers to visit Mistra and may perhaps enrich the understanding of those that make the journey.
STEVEN RUNCIMAN Elshieshields, Dumfriesshire
The Vale of Sparta
THE BEAUTY of Greece lies mainly in contrast, the contrast between stark promontories and blue sea-gulfs and between barren mountainsides and fertile valleys. Nowhere is the contrast more marked than in the vale of Sparta, Lacedaemon, the ‘hollow land’ of the Homeric age.
Travellers who take the main road that ran from Tegea in ancient days and runs from Tripolis today, climb up over the spurs of the Parnon range; and suddenly, as they go round a hairpin bend, with the Spartan mountain citadel of Selassia, the guardian of the pass, high above them to the east, there lies below them a valley lush with olive-trees and fruit-trees, with the River Eurotas winding between oleanders and cypresses, and behind the valley, rising steep from the plain, the sternest and most savage of all Greek mountain ranges, Taygetus, with its five peaks, the Five Fingers, covered with snow till late into the summer. In front of the mountain wall, if the morning sun is shining, they will notice a conical hill, dotted with buildings and crowned by a castle. This is Mistra.
From the earliest times the rich plain of Sparta has been a centre of Greek life. It was here in Mycenaean days that Helen, the loveliest of the queens of history, lived and reigned till she eloped to Troy, and it is here that she lies, so tradition says, along with Menelaus, the husband whom she wronged and to whom she returned, together in the mausoleum on the hill top of Therapne. Before Christian saints replaced her, her tomb was a shrine at which one prayed to be granted beautiful children. Later, the Dorians came, to set up in Sparta a state unrivalled in history for its rigidity and its discipline.
The constitution was the work, it was said, of the law-giver Lycurgus, a dim mythical figure who may have lived in the eighth century Bc. According to the myth, when he had presented his code to his compatriots he departed for a journcy, having made them swear an oath not to alter it till he returned; deliberately he remained in exile and his constitution endured for half a millennium.
There were three classes: the Helots, probably the descendants of the old Achaean population — serfs who tilled the land and performed menial tasks for their Spartiate masters; the Paroikoi, the inhabitants of the towns and villages that fell under Spartan domination — farmers and shopkeepers, free men but without any voice in the government; and the Spartiates themselves, who elected their magistrates and the Senate, with two hereditary kings at their head, without any autocratic power but with a certain prestige.
The kings would be accepted as leaders in time of war, unless their age or known incompetence niade them unsuitable. Except for the elected magistrates and Senators everyone followed his father’s profession, as a lawyer or an armourer or a breeder of horses, or whatever it might be.
But all were liable to military service. Women enjoyed a freedom remarkable in ancient Greece. They had to bear children for the State, and they had no vote; but they mingled with the men, and in times of war they practically took over the administration. Everything was geared towards military efficiency. Education, even of girls, was primarily militaristic. Weaklings did not exist; unhealthy babies were exposed at once to die on the bleak slopes of Taygetus. It was a community that discouraged individual effort. It produced no important works of art and very little literature or music, apart from choral songs. But it offered security and stability. Sparta was the only city in Greece that had no need of fortification.
The whole valley was protected by mountain walls, Taygetus on the west, Parnon on the north and east, and the lower hills of the Vardounokhoria protecting the access from the sea to the south; and the prowess of the Spartan army provided an outer wall. To later philhellenes, dazzled by the superb achievements of Athenian genius, Sparta has always scemed deplorable in comparison with free democratic Athens. They forget that Athenian democracy was made possible by a vast slave population and that Athenian women were little better off than those slaves, while its individualism led to faction and turbulence and disaster. Many Athenians looked with envy at the steadiness of Spartan life.
But in the end Spartan rigidity broke down. Her very victories over Athens brought in the corrupting influence of rich booty. Her military machine declined; and the other Greek states, which had hated her for centuries, united against her. In the fourth century Bc the Spartans saw for the first time enemy troops come into their valley and attack their unwalled city. Attempts either to restore or to liberalize the old constitution all ended in failure. In the middle of the second century Sparta fell, after a brief struggle, under the domination of Rome.
Greece had already become a backwater, away from the mainstream of history. Her enterprising citizens moved away to the great cities of the Hellenistic world, or to Rome itself, or to the splendid capital that Constantine the Great was to build on the shores of the Bosphorus. Under the Roman emperors the Greek cities were little more than museums. In Sparta the fierce contests which had initiated boys into manhood were now enacted before tourists in a theatre. The severity had vanished from Spartan life; the valley of the Eurotas was noted for its indolent, easy-going luxury. The ghost of Helen had triumphed over the ghost of Lycurgus.
The coming of Christianity brought a tightening of morals. But it seems that the Spartans were not over-eager to embrace the new religion. It is not till well into the fifth century ap that we hear definitely of a bishop of Lacedaemon — for the Church reverted to the older and more melodious name for the city. By the end of the fifth century all signs of paganism were gone. The temples were deserted or had been transformed into churches.
The games and contests were abandoned; and expectant mothers no longer climbed up the hill of Therapne to pray at the tomb of Helen. But already the tranquillity of life in the valley had been interrupted. In 376 the Imperial government allowed the barbarian nation of the Visigoths to cross the Danube into the Empire. Nineteen years later, under their restless leader Alaric, angry that they had been given no lands in which to settle, they forced their way into the Greek peninsula.
Athens was spared, as Alaric, good Christian though he professed himself to be, had a vision of the goddess Athena and the hero Hercules guarding the walls. So they pressed on across the Isthmus of Corinth into the Peloponnese, pillaging as they passed, and eventually in the late summer of 395 they fell upon defenceless Sparta. For the first time in its history the city was sacked. It seems that Alaric contemplated the establishment of a kingdom for himself in the Peloponnese; but after a few months the approach of an Imperial army induced him to move northward, into Illyria, and to resume the restless career that was to bring fire and the sword into Italy and to the city of Rome itself.
Peace returned to the vale of Sparta for nearly two centuries. But confidence had been lost. Walls were built at last to protect the city itself. These centuries saw a decline in the whole prosperity of the Greek peninsula. With the triumph of Christianity the cities of Greece lost their ancient prestige and their more enterprising citizens left for livelier provinces. Trade across the Mediterranean now passed Greece by, and there was little industry there. The weight of Imperial taxation, particularly in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, fell heavily on a province that had few natural resources. The Emperors’ attention was occupied by worries along their frontiers or by dreams of reconquest of Western provinces from the barbarians. But worse was to come.
In the last decades of the sixth century, when the Empire was distracted by a bitter war against the Persians and the huge Turkic empire of the Avars was pressing into the Balkan peninsula, a new racial element made its way into Greece. Since early in the century the Slavs had been pouring into the Balkan peninsula. Now, partly encouraged by the Avars and partly to escape from direct Avar domination, parties of them came down into Greece. Before the end of the century they were crowding into the Peloponnese; and in the first decade of the seventh century, when the incompetent Phocas was reigning in Constantinople, their numbers so vastly increased that it seemed to alarmed onlookers that the whole of Greece was in the hands of barbarian and pagan Slavs.
The pleasant vale of Sparta was to their liking; and the Greek inhabitants fled. Many fled southward, to the wild hills of the Mani peninsula, where they revived the stern martial virtues of the Spartan of old.
Some fled to coastal towns which the Slavs were unable to capture, in particular to the fortress rock of Monemvasia, jutting out into the Aegean Sea. Many more fled across the sea, westward to Sicily, to found a new Lacedaemon, which they called more briefly Demona, in what seemed to be a safer land. Some must have stayed, to intermarry with the invaders and to bring them a modicum of culture. For two centuries the vale of Sparta, and the mountains around, were in the hands of the barbarians; and Christianity and the cultured standards of Byzantine life well-nigh disappeared.
The recovery of Greece for the Greeks began in the last years of the eighth century, under the Empress Irene, herself an Athenian by birth. But the Peloponnese was rescued under her successor, Nicephorus I. A series of campaigns undertaken by his governor of the Peloponnese, Leo Sclerus, drove the Slavs into the mountains and cleared the valleys for the Greeks to return to them. As so many Grecks had emigrated during the Slav occupation, the Emperor found it necessary to bring in settlers from other parts of the Empire.
It seems that the colonists whom he sent to the vale of Sparta came mostly from Asia Minor, Greeks, together with a few Armenians, while many of the descendants of the earlier Spartans must have returned to their homes. In about 810 a bishopric was re-established in Sparta — the Bishopric of Lacedaemon — under the authority of the Metropolitanate of Patras.
The vale was now again to enjoy a period of comparative peace. The Slav tribes which had retired into the Taygetus range and into the Arcadian mountains still occasionally tried to raid the valleys; and now and then military expeditions had to be sent against them, to restore obedience and to extract fromm them such meagre tribute as they could afford to pay. Soon they were persuaded to adopt Christianity, chiefly owing to the efforts of a tenth-century saint, Nikon, surnamed Metanoeite, or ‘Repent ye’, a man of Armenian origin, born at Argos, who tramped round the Laconian mountains firmly preaching the Gospels. He was a man of forceful personality, but unattractively intolerant.
When Sparta was smitten by the plague he refused to enter the city until all the Jews who had settled there in recent years had been expelled. Then he came; and the plague ceased at once. When a little later Bulgarians threatened the Peloponnese, the governor of the province summoned him to Corinth. The prestige of his presence there restored morale; and the Bulgarians prudently withdrew. He was an indefatigable founder of churches, especially in or near to Sparta. On his death he was canonized; and the grateful Spartans adopted him as their patron saint. He had certainly made the city the liveliest religious centre in the province: though it was not tll 1081, about a century after his death, that the Bishopric of Lacedaemon was raised to Metropolitan rank.
The vale enjoyed a growing prosperity throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Slav tribes of Taygetus, known now as the Milengi and the Ezerites, were no longer a threat. An attempted rising in about 925 had been suppressed by military action; and, thanks to St Nikon and his disciples, they were now Christian. So long as they paid their tribute regularly they were allowed autonomy, under a district officer appointed by the governor of the Peloponnese. The Greeks of the Mani and the Tzakones — probably of mixed Greek and Slav origin—of the Parnon range, were now pious and fairly orderly citizens.
There were Spartans wealthy enough to visit the Imperial capital. The lovely Empress Theophano, wife of Romanus II, came from Sparta. Later gossip declared that her father was a Spartan innkeeper. But if he was, the hotel trade must have been flourishing; for he could afford to send her to Constantinople, where she moved in circles frequented by the young Emperor. If his father, Constantine VI, was distressed when the youth fell in love with her, it was only because he was negotiating to betroth his son to a German princess, Hedwig of Bavaria, niece of the Western Emperor Otho I, a lady who, later, as Duchess of Swabia, became one of the great termagants of medieval history.
But Constantine did not forbid the marriage with Theophano. Some fifteen years later she was an accomplice in the murder of her second husband, Nicephorus II, a grim general whom she had married to preserve her sons’ throne; and rumours began to circulate that she must have been responsible for the deaths of Constantine VIII and Romanus II. The accusation is unjustified. Constantine was an ageing man of very poor health, while the death of Romanus endangered her whole career. Her son, Basil II, was the greatest of Byzantine warrior-emperors. It was perhaps from his mother’s Spartan ancestors that he inherited his austere disregard of culture and comfort and his devotion to military prowess.
Sparta and the neighbouring Laconian lands were not exposed to direct harm in the wars against the Turks and against the Normans that nearly wrecked Byzantium in the later eleventh century. But prosperity declined. In the chaos piracy returned to the Aegean Sea, and trade suffered.
The taxes imposed by the emperors of the twelfth century were higher than ever before; and the peasants could not pay them. As had happened already elsewhere in the Empire they were obliged to hand their lands over to some magnate who could afford the burden, or afford to defy the tax-collectors, and to become his employees. By the later years of the twelfth century the Peloponnese, except for the tribal areas, was in the hands of a few great families, who paid little respect to the Imperial government, even when their members were appointed to local posts of authority; and, indeed, the Imperial government of the last two decades of the century, under incompetent emperors of the Angelus dynasty, was deserving of no respect.
In Sparta, which the writers of the time now always called Lacedaemon or Lacedemonia, the dominant family was the Chamareti. We know the names of three of them, Michael, his nephew John and John’s brother Leo, who was ruling the whole province of Laconia, with the title of proedros, at the time of the Fourth Crusade. The Peloponnese, or the Morea, to give it a name that was coming into popular use, had been bypassed by the earlier Crusades.
The invasion of Greece by Roger II of Sicily in 1146 spared it after his troops had failed to capture the fortress of Monemvasia. No one in the peninsula noticed when in the summer of 1203 the great army of the Fourth Crusade sailed in Venetian ships round the coast on its way to Constantinople. No one realized that the simple greed of the Crusaders and the calculated greed of the Venetians were to result in the capture and looting of the Imperial capital. News of the disaster reached the Peloponnese in the late spring of 1204. There was consternation and apprehension; but no one in the vale of Sparta foresaw that this was to lead to the two most brilliant centuries in the history of Lacedaemon.
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