Download PDF | Streams Of Gold, Rivers Of Blood The Rise And Fall Of Byzantium, 955 A. D. To The First Crusade
Pages: 441
PREFACE
TT" BYZANTINES WERE not a warlike people. They did not typically raise their children to fight with weapons, as happened in many societies around them. Their strategy was famously cautious and defensive. They preferred to pay their enemies either to go away or to fight among themselves. Likewise, the court at the heart of their empire sought to buy allegiance with honors, fancy titles, bales of silk, and streams of gold. Politics was the cunning art of providing just the right incentives to win over supporters and keep them loyal.
Money, silk, and titles were the empire’s preferred instruments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies. And the Byzantine state and bureaucracy could generate a larger cash flow than any other Christian realm at the time. Even in 1080, with half its territory lost to the Turks, “fountains and streams of gold gushed forth” from the court of a new emperor desperate to establish his position.'
That desperation stemmed from the dark side of Byzantine politics: the emperor was always vulnerable to the ambitions of domestic rivals, who resorted to murderous plots and civil war. If gold failed to make an emperor popular, or if he was perceived as weak, the “hands of sons were stained with the blood of fathers, and brother would strike down brother.”’ Sitting on the throne in Constantinople was a dangerous and precarious business—but it was business-as-usual. Our period, however, was exceptional in two other ways. It began with a burst of violence aimed at the empire’s neighbors, as Byzantine armies went on the offensive and conquered more land and people than had ever been subjected to the Roman yoke since the conquests of Justinian in the sixth century. A new generation of aggressive soldiers, trained to fight from youth, slaughtered, sacked, and conquered until the empire no longer faced credible rivals. When Tzimiskes cut down the five thousand survivors of a battle, in 963, the blood ran down into the fields, and the site was renamed “the Mountain of Blood.” One emperor came to be known as “the White Death of the Saracens,” another as “the Bulgar Slayer.”
The tide would turn during the eleventh century. Three new enemies— the Normans, Pechenegs, and Seljuk Turks—would fall upon the empire and strip it of many of its conquests. It was now the turn of the Byzantines to suffer horribly, as “rivers of blood flowed through” their provinces.* The present book recounts this sudden rise and fall of an empire on the cusp of the millennium, an empire torn by its own contradictions and threatened by the powers that would fashion a new world. It tells the story of how the streams of gold were drowned by the blood of politics and war.
The years between 955, when the general Nikephoros Phokas was placed in command of the army and launched a strategy of aggressive conquest, and 1081, when the general Alexios Komnenos seized the throne amidst imperial collapse and political chaos, were a pivotal period in Byzantine history. During this time, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests, first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally also in Georgia and Armenia. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in its geostrategic environment and seemed to have no credible rivals. It was also expanding economically, demographically, and, in time, intellectually too. Yet imperial hegemony came to a crashing end in the third quarter of the eleventh century, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat by the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in the west forced Byzantium to fight for its very survival.
It gradually had to settle for being one power among many, and just over a century later it was conquered and dismembered by the crusaders. Byzantium fell behind the curve of history and would never catch up to its peers, especially in the west. Such dramatic fluctuations had not been typical of its past history. How did this happen? What strategies, policies, and personalities shaped the rapid rise and even more rapid collapse of Byzantine power in less than 150 years?
This story, which fascinates those interested in Byzantine history because of its dramatic qualities, has to be told anew. It seems to have fallen off the radar of historians. The last to reconstruct the events of this period in detail, by using the primary sources, was Gustave Schlumberger, over a century ago (1890-1905). Yet he did not cover the eleventh-century collapse, reaching only as far as 1056, the end of the Macedonian dynasty. Schlumberger’s work, moreover, which is outdated in many respects and tended toward a Romantic narrative style, has not been translated into English.
After him, we have mostly general surveys, many of which are good, but they tend to look at events from a greater distance than one would sometimes like and tend to recycle the view pushed by an early twentieth-century school of thought according to which the history of Byzantium in this era was driven by a particular socioeconomic transformation. That view, however, is highly doubtful. For these reasons, we need a new narrative history of Byzantium in this era. We now have more sources than were available to Schlumberger, we know more about their limitations, and we are hopefully free of many of the preconceptions that shaped past scholarship. Yet past conjectures with little support in the evidence have also become hardened facts or common wisdom. They need to be tested against the evidence. The problem is that much specialized research is now taking place against the background of an implied master narrative of this period that is recycled with minor variations from one survey to the next. This narrative frames and limits research into more particular areas, and often predetermines the scope of their methodology.
Here, then, is what Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood hopes to accomplish.
It offers a narrative reconstruction of the political and military history of the empire and points to a new understanding of the socioeconomic changes that took place in this period. The narrative focuses mostly on the decisions made by the court and their implementation on the frontier. As these decisions were not made in a vacuum, the narrative also tries to expose their structural constraints. On the domestic front, we are dealing not so much with “policies” as with attempts to reward supporters and protect each regime against potential rivals. Emperors in Byzantium were never safe; they needed to reaffirm their legitimacy constantly, and this governed imperial decisions on all levels.
This is also an “international” history in the sense that it tries to explain who the people were with whom the Romans of Byzantium were interacting, and what constraints operated along each stretch of the frontier. Though there are notable exceptions (especially Mark Whittow for this period), many of our surveys are excessively Byzantinocentric; they point the spotlight at Byzantium and do not illuminate what was going on around it. Enemies along the frontier are named, but little is said about them or the dynamics that were driving their relationship with Byzantium. After many years of heavy reading in Byzantine history, I found that I was still unable to explain to myself who the Hamdanids were or what Davit’ of Tao was trying to accomplish. We should no longer write history that way. This book, therefore, takes a different approach: as each area becomes central to the narrative, I introduce the internal dynamics and goals of the Hamdanids, Fatimids, Normans, or Seljuks. As I am not at all committed to Byzantine imperial projects, I have tried to avoid a pro-Byzantine bias.
The narrative was also written out of a direct and critical engagement with the primary sources, including literary texts, documentary records, inscriptions, coins, and seals. Modern surveys of this period often rely on previous reconstructions, and they in turn on their predecessors. This sometimes makes it hard to find what primary source ultimately buttresses specific claims. Here, by contrast, the sources will be cited directly, so that readers know the basis for any assertion and can follow the trail. By returning to the sources and starting anew there, this history clears away a number of fictions and misunderstandings that have entered the record. Like most Byzantinists today, I make extensive use of both western and eastern sources.
The “foreign” ones ate sometimes better for Byzantine history than the Byzantine ones, but they must all be used critically and skeptically. There is too much gossip, political bias, and rhetorical invention in them. Some Byzantine sources reflect specific authorial projects as well as the influence of subsequent events and the pull of classical models of writing. There is less factual history in them than one might assume, and some of them are too focused on the capital and Roman politics rather than on foreign lands, or even the frontier. I will not survey the main sources here (a guide to the main ones appears at the end of the book). No mere summary can do justice to the problems and temptations that they pose to scholars, so I have written a separate study outlining the many ways in which these literary texts are both more and less than an accurate recounting of facts.* One device that they use, and that still tempts modern historians, is to psychologize the actions of individuals or groups. This definitely makes histories more exciting, but resisting it, as I have done here, hopefully makes them more sober, fair, and accurate. Unlike most of our sources, I try not to take sides, glorify, or condemn.
By following a// the sources in detail and in tandem, I saw clearly for the first time patterns of imperial behavior that shaped both domestic and foreign policy. I also came to surprising conclusions, sometimes the opposite of what I expected to find. This was especially the case regarding the imperial collapse of the eleventh century. For example, I was forced, against a Psellos-induced bias, to rehabilitate the military leadership of Konstantinos IX Monomachos. I also came to a completely different understanding of the behavior of the patriarch Michael Keroularios during the fateful summer of 1054. But more importantly, beyond the actions of specific individuals, I came to question a particular model of socioeconomic transformation that some historians sought to impose on this period. According to this model, the imperial “state” ruled by the Macedonian dynasty was challenged by the landowning “magnates” of Asia Minor, who were powerful “families” that were eating up peasant lands and angling to run the empire in a way that benefited their own class. As far as I can tell, this picture is fictitious. It leads to tendentious interpretations of events and individuals that serve a modern agenda, specifically to show how and when Byzantium became “feudalized.” When we view those events and individuals against the narrative patterns of Byzantine imperial history, a different picture emerges, one of emperors systemically vulnerable to potential enemies and rivals, including most prominently their own courtiers and generals. In sum, political-military history will here point to a different understanding of the socioeconomic history of this period. This is elaborated in the Introduction and the General Considerations that conclude the three parts of the book.
This book does not focus on general cultural, literary, intellectual, artistic, religious, or economic developments that took place during this period, to which a narrative approach is not ideally suited, but it does include material from those categories. Trade, painting icons, and sending embassies were always occurring in the background, but do not need to be mentioned in banal instances (which are the majority). Major changes in trade policy (especially with the Italian cities) occurred only after the period covered here. And although I am fascinated with the rise (or return) of the scientific study of the climate and of environmental history, which will contribute new insights in the coming decades, it is unclear how its conclusions can interface with the history of events, as at some point they must. Recent efforts to write narrative history from a climatological angle seem to be reductive and fail to explain Byzantine expansion in an age of supposed regional collapse.
During our period, Byzantium flipped its geographical presence. In 955, it controlled most of Asia Minor, southern Greece, and the corridor from Greece to Thessalonike and Constantinople. By 1081, it was an almost entirely Balkan state, having in effect exchanged most of Asia Minor for Bulgaria, holding both only briefly (1018-1071). The gravest domestic threat to the emperors at the beginning of our period was the armies of Asia Minor and their officers, such as Phokas, whereas toward the end the greatest threat came from the armies and officers of Macedonia, such as Bryennios. In this sense, little changed in the underlying structural dynamics of imperial power, only their geographical orientation. Thus this history will focus on the assets and vulnerabilities of imperial authority, on how emperors sought to win support and stave off enemies, first, in a phase of rapid imperial expansion; then during a phase of consolidation and equilibrium; and finally during a sudden defeat and rapid decline.
As with the title of the book, the chapter titles have also been borrowed from expressions in contemporary sources that seemed strikingly relevant.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM GRATEFUL to many friends and colleagues whom I consulted during Le writing of this book. I thank Ilias Anagnostakis, Cliff Ando, Scott Kennedy, Dimitris Krallis, Eric McGeer, Gerasimos Merianos, Charis Messis, Christian Raffensperger, Paul Stephenson, and Denis Sullivan. Audiences at many universities, including Ohio State, Chicago, Cambridge, Oxford, and Birmingham, provided thoughtful comments, corrections, and suggestions. Ian Mladjov deserves special thanks for reading through the entire book carefully and correcting many mistakes and infelicitous expressions. In addition to his detailed knowledge of history, he is also the best cartographer and genealogist a Byzantinist could know. I thank also Paulos Kosmetatos for decades of prodding (even if this is not exactly the book he had in mind), and Stefan Vranka at Oxford University Press for his interest in this project, invaluable guidance at all stages, and wit.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
A S A RULE, I transliterate Byzantine names from the Greek (e.g., Ioannes and Theodoros) rather than Latinize or Anglicize them, which is a mildly offensive practice that persists almost uniquely in the case of Byzantium. Public discourse in recent decades increasingly strives to recognize cultural distinctiveness and use foreign names out of respect. Renaming everyone for convenience projects cultural dominance (or, worse, assumes it).
Thus filling Byzantium with people falsely named “John,” however innocuous it may have once been, is a convention whose time is up. (Note that transliteration captures spelling, not phonology.) I have tried to do the same with names from all the cultures that appear in this book, only I do not mark long vowels in Arabic (just as I do not in Greek either). One exception to this approach is for individuals who are already well known by the English forms of their names, such as Justinian and Basil II (a rough standard for “well known” is whether that name is used in two or more English book titles). The same goes for place names. Another exception is for the western leaders of the First Crusade, for whom I have also used conventional names.
Introduction The Byzantine Empive in the Tenth Century
Romanta
In the tenth century, what we call Byzantium was still just the eastern Roman empire, with Constantinople as its capital. After the invasions by Arabs, Avars, Slavs, and Bulgars in the seventh century, its territory had been reduced to Asia Minor, Thrace, southern Greece, and southern Italy. But it was still the Roman empire. More accurately, it was “the empire of the Romans.” It had a proper name, Romania, which had been in use since the fourth century. Its ruler was the basileus of the Romans, which in Greek just meant king, but we call it an empire because it was descended from the ancient imperium Romanum. The Byzantines also ranked themselves and their ruler as superior in standing, prestige, culture, antiquity, and world-historical importance (even on a theological level), a claim that was often accepted by their neighbors, especially smaller Christian powers. The Byzantine basileus was not like any other king.
By the tenth century, however, Byzantium was not much of an empire by the most common modern definition of that word, namely rule by one ethnic or religious group (a minority of the population) over a multiethnic majority of subjects. In Byzantium, a Roman was anyone who was raised speaking Greek, was Orthodox Christian, and considered himself a member of the polity of the Romans as defined by its laws, customs, religion, and state institutions. This accounted for the majority of the population, approximately ten million people, though not everyone: there were still unassimilated Slavic groups in the Peloponnese and Greece, Armenians and Georgians in the eastern provinces, foreign contingents in the army, Paulician heretics, and Jews, all of whom could be more or less assimilated to the dominant cultural norms. Overall, Romanfa looked more like a Roman kingdom that had minorities than a true multiethnic empire, though in the later tenth and eleventh centuries the balance would shift toward imperial rule over recently conquered or annexed foreign territories.
Still, the boundaries between Roman and barbarian were never as stark as our sources suggest. The Byzantines were xenophobic and generally prejudiced against outsiders, but at the same time it was easy for foreign individuals and groups who entered the empire to assimilate to Roman ways and, by the second or third generation, to become Romans with no distinguishing traits. Over the centuries, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and people from many other backgrounds were assimilated, usually through military service or land settlements. Being Roman was a cultural-political identity that could be taken on. In addition, the emperors claimed hegemony over smaller Christian states in Italy, the Adriatic coast, and the Caucasus. In practice, these were mostly autonomous, but in the eyes of Constantinople they were satellites, and some would be ceded or just annexed in the age of conquest.
By ancient or medieval standards, and for a realm of its size, Byzantium was culturally homogeneous, socially integrated, and unified by exclusive and sovereign state institutions. It is important to stress how different it was in this respect from western medieval kingdoms. Unlike the lands of the former western Roman empire, the core territories of the realm were not quasi-autonomous domains ruled by hereditary local lords, with whom the emperors had to engage in internal diplomacy to obtain support, tribute, or soldiers. They were rather administrative provinces governed by magistrates sent out from the capital for brief periods in rotation. Taxes, recruitment, law, religion, and salaries were fairly standardized and administered across imperial territory by bureaus that were headquartered in Constantinople. These grids of administrative coherence (including the Church) were parallel, hierarchical, and centralized, and they bound the provinces to the capital in overlapping ways. In the tenth century, Byzantium was second to none in the efficiency of its taxation, the resources that it could generate for use by the state, the sophistication and complexity of its bureaucratic apparatus, and the authority that the state could claim in governing the lives of all Romans.
The Roman people, moreover, were not divided by law or custom into castes or fixed classes; nor was nobility claimed as a right of blood by a handful of families. The same law—a Greek version of Roman law—applied to everyone, and families became powerful only when they succeeded in court politics and managed to retain imperial favor. Thus, even though some benefited from inherited connections, prestige, and wealth, there was also considerable political mobility and turnover. In a law, the emperor Basil II speculated that the life span of a powerful family was between seventy and one hundred years (though some lasted longer), but at the same time a poor man could become powerful by rising up and obtaining court titles.! In Byzantium, then, “nobility of family” was a rhetorical way by which to praise the rich and powerful for as long as they remained in power. It corresponded to no legal fact or fixed social reality but rather reflected a desire for a certain kind of social image. It is probably better to speak of a ruling elite who were powerful because they held offices at the court, in the army, and in the Church, and whose membership changed over time, often due to shifts in imperial favor. It was an aristocracy of service, not blood, despite the occasional rhetoric, and it “organized power through title and office rather than through family.”? Likewise, imperial power itself was as much institutional as based on personal relations, a fact that historians have forgotten recently. We will see, for example with the Paphlagonians, that nobodies could step into positions of authority and command obedience—until they became unpopular, like anyone else.
This picture so far gives the impression that emperors were all-powerful. The monarchy did control all institutions of the state and could usually impose its will on the Church as well, so long as it did not try to change fundamental aspects of doctrine or ritual practice. There was no independent court of appeal, no legal limit to an emperor’s power. But in practice, the emperors were highly vulnerable and insecure for reasons relating to the nature of the monarchy since its creation by Augustus and stemming in part from its elective ideology; there was no hereditary or absolute right to power. Accession to the throne was accomplished politically or militarily, but either way one had to obtain the consent of the Roman people, especially the populace of Constantinople, the army, magistrates, court, clergy, and whatever special-interest groups were powerful at any time. Emperors were created when those elements of society agreed to acclaim them publicly. If an emperor was popular, he could arrange this on behalf of an heir or successor. But if the emperor was unpopular, it was only a matter of time until someone else rose up, through a palace coup or military rebellion, to take his place. Thus, both emperors and rivals, i.e., potential emperors, looked to the legitimating power of Roman society, a broad social field. They always tried to remain popular and monitored public opinion as closely as they could, for it could promise opportunity—or spell doom. Legitimacy was not won once and for all; it had to be maintained politically in an ongoing process.
Dynasties were only provisional arrangements of power, vulnerable to challenge and liable to be suspended or overthrown. There were no guarantees in the transmission of imperial power, as no one had a right to inherit the res publica (politeia in Greek), the public affairs of the Roman people, which could not be privately owned. This was the “republican” basis of the imperial monarchy: the emperor was answerable to the polity (the po/iteia).’ To mitigate this systemic insecurity, the monarchy promoted the narrative of divine election, and most Romans were happy to regard their basileus as God’s favorite. But when their mood soured, God never rescued any emperor. Thus, the throne was up for grabs and the emperors were always trying to preempt or suppress rivals and protect themselves against plots and rebellions.
This framework for the exercise of power shaped the empire’s military and foreign policy for, in effect, there were two main political arenas in Romania: Constantinople and the frontier armies. The emperors had to be watchful of both, which feature prominently in our sources. Given that the armies, especially ambitious officers, posed a great threat to the survival of any regime in Constantinople, military policy aimed as much to mitigate that threat as to defend the empire from foreign enemies. The history of Byzantium was to a great degree shaped by the tension between the court and the armies, which played out against a backdrop of foreign war. Let us look more closely at these two major sites of contestation.
Imperial governance
Constantinople, also known as New Rome or just the City, was the beating heart of the eastern empire, situated on the Bosporos at one of the most strategic and beautiful locations in the eastern Mediterranean. As a city and imperial capital it surpassed in size, power, and sheer magnificence any other place in the Christian world. Its monumental architecture and core layout were still those of the late antique capital built by Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian, though damage from fires, riots, and earthquakes would everywhere have been apparent. Still, the Byzantines spared no praise for it. For them Constantinople was The Eye of the World and the Reigning City, monumental visual proof that the empire itself occupied a higher place in the cosmic order. Between the massive walls, paved boulevards, tall spiral columns, sprawling palace, and golden dome of Hagia Sophia, foreigners who came to the City were left speechless by what they saw, an impact skillfully exploited in Byzantine diplomacy. As a poet enthused in the midtenth century:
After a long and wearisome journey, the traveler sees from a distance towers rising high into the air and, like strong giants in stride, columns that rise up to the highest point, and tall houses and temples whose vast roofs reach to the heights—who would not become instantly filled with joy? ... And when he reaches the wall and draws near to the gates, who does not greet the City, lower his neck, kneel to the ground, grasp the famous earth, and say, “Hail, Glory created by the Cosmos”? And then he enters, full of joy.‘
The City did not impress only foreigners and provincials. Its public spaces and monuments were effectively a series of stages on which imperial power was performed in full sight of the City’s populace. The Book of Ceremonies compiled at the court of Konstantinos VII (d. 959) provides directions for many processions, ceremonies, acclamations, and public acts that together defined the civic and ecclesiastical calendar. The population of Constantinople, too, was enormous by medieval standards, perhaps around 250,000 or more. Given the high mortality rates of medieval cities, to maintain this population and to grow, as it did during our period, the City needed to import thousands of people every year from the provinces along with massive quantities of food. People were constantly moving to the capital to make their fortune, and the bureaucracy and ruling class there were admitting new men from the provinces. Constantinople was a magnet for the most talented and well-connected, but also the most destitute, for it was there that imperial and Church philanthropy was most bountiful. It was a place of opportunity. The founder of the reigning Macedonian dynasty, Basileios I (867-886), was a peasant who went to the City to escape poverty, and maneuvered his way to the throne.
To remain safely on the throne, emperors had to ensure that they were perceived by their subjects as just, pious, merciful, and compassionate, and by potential enemies, both domestic and foreign, as formidable; they had to defend the empire from barbarian attack, enforce the law fairly, and maintain support among the ruling elite. To a considerable degree this was accomplished through propagandistic images, but it also required the skillful use of the mechanisms of imperial governance. Roughly speaking, these were of three types: permanent institutions that operated in the background regardless of the degree of interest an emperor showed in them; the cultivation of political support through the system of court titles and offices, which shaped the upper echelons of imperial society; and personnel decisions that created a regime around the emperor. Let us consider these in turn.
The three permanent institutions that were most important in terms of their administrative apparatus and impact on the rest of society were the army, the Church, and the tax system. We will discuss the army in more detail below, but we should note here that it was by far the most dangerous concentration of power in the empire. In the midtenth century, the (nominal) rolls may have included 140,000 men, a number that grew during the age of conquest, though expeditionary forces were normally small, around 5,000. Even so, at more than 1 percent of the population, the army accounted for roughly 5 percent of adult males and consumed the largest part of the imperial budget (though figures are lacking). Simply keeping up its numbers would have required the recruitment of about 5,000 men each year, or more if additional units were being created. Its demographic impact was major and its organization required a complex bureaucratic apparatus that linked the court to the provincial headquarters.
The Church also had a large bureaucracy, for managing its extensive properties and personnel and for resolving the legal questions that arose from the application of canon law to society. The clergy numbered in the thousands, with thousands more in the monasteries that were scattered across the empire, some of which had extensive properties and trade interests. The Church was heavily involved in providing ideological support for the imperial order, and some bishops and even monks were deeply involved in politics. The emperor generally dominated the Church on the mundane level of administration. He could depose or appoint patriarchs of Constantinople, who, in our period of interest, were mostly administrators serving at the emperor’s pleasure. The exceptions were Polyeuktos, who actively lobbied for episcopal prerogatives, and Keroularios, who meddled in regime change, to his undoing.
Whereas the army was the most expensive and dangerous institution in the empire, the tax system produced most of the revenue, though it could make an emperor unpopular if its power was abused. The emperors generally liked to keep tax collecting out of the hands of the local generals, to limit their options and keep them dependent on the court for funding. We need not discuss here all the bureaus involved in the collection of a complex array of taxes, fees, imposts, and such, not all of which are well understood today. Suffice it to say that they formed the basis for the imperial order, enabling the emperor to pay the army, magistrates, titulars, and other expenses, and it also tied local populations and their lands to the imperial organization of society.
Taxation was efficient, if not ruthless. The system ultimately rested on a census of taxable properties that, periodically updated, created yet another bureaucratic grid linking the capital to the provinces. The tax collector was a ubiquitous figure and emblematic of an inevitable order. He appeared in the Byzantines’ dreams, and the definition of a remote place was one that he did not visit in his rounds, such as mountaintops. There were no “isolated” peasants untroubled by dealings with the state. Lobbying at the court by all classes of society mostly aimed at obtaining tax exemptions.’
The court also shaped the upper echelons of imperial society, through its assignment and distribution of offices and titles. The two must be distinguished. Offices were salaried positions in the administration or army that required the performance of specific functions (e.g., a strategos or general; protasekretis or head of the secretariat). Titles, by contrast, were salaried honorifics that fixed one’s status in the court hierarchy, but had no functions and were for life. To simplify to those that we will encounter, there were ranks associated with the emperor himself, such as Aaisar (Caesar), nobelissimos, and kouropalates (the latter also bestowed on foreign rulers viewed as clients), followed by titles such as proedros, magistros, patrikios, and protospatharios. The holders of the higher ranks together formed the senate. Both offices and titles entailed a salary, or roga, personally paid to the highest ranks by the emperor at a special ceremony in the palace: he literally handed out bags of gold coins and silk garments. They also entitled bearers to additional gratuities, perks, and privileges.° Generals were expected to maintain their retinues and guards from these salaries.
The emperor thus not only selected but financially maintained a courtly, senatorial, and military elite. Titles (and their salaries) were also given to foreign rulers, both local lords and even kings, to bind them to the empire. The court system thus extended beyond the frontier, blurring the lines between court politics and foreign policy. It was also possible to purchase titles from the court, pending approval by the emperor, by paying a sum of gold and then receiving the annual salary. Even though one would likely not recoup the original sum, titles conferred valuable social advantages.’ We do not know all the titles for which this could be done, though the system probably resulted in a net gain for the fisc. It was crucial for the maintenance of the imperial order, and its apparent abuse in the eleventh century exacerbated the state’s fiscal problems, as we will see.
The social value of court titles and the sheer presence of these overlapping layers of bureaucracy across the provinces is strikingly reflected in the Byzantine lead seals (Figure 1). These were hammered shut on a string that bound a folded document. They typically featured an inscription of the offcial’s name, office, and ranks, thereby establishing his status, along with an image, usually a saint or the Virgin. The documents have been lost, but the lead seals tend to survive. More than sixty thousand have been recovered, from all provinces, and each seal represents an instance of a transmitted document. This was an empire with busy lines of communication and a robust bureaucracy. (Lead seals are also important to historians because they preserve the names, offices, and titles of officials in a more comprehensive way than do the literary sources. They provide not only “big data” but also the “metadata” of the imperial bureaucracy.)
Sitting atop these instruments of governance, emperors faced two main dilemmas. First, they needed competent men to fill the highest positions, especially the army, but the most competent men tended to be ambitious and so posed a danger. Second, they needed to govern through formal and impersonal institutions but also had to find ways to assert personal control over them so as not to be sidelined by them. In response, emperors had developed a range of strategies, which we see in our period. Generally, they marginalized collateral relatives, especially brothers and sisters, who were nuclei of potential challenge from within the dynasty. Byzantine emperors did not traditionally rule through their families. The exceptions in our period were Nikephoros Phokas, Michael IV, and Konstantinos X Doukas, whose regimes were extremely different from each other, though after Alexios I Komnenos (1081) family rule became the norm.
Military commands were gradually divided into smaller regions and assigned in rotation, and generals were usually not posted to their home province, so that no one person or family could build up a power base. Multiple commands meant that powerful officer families could be used to check each other, as for instance the Argyros and Kourkouas families against the Phokas and Maleinos families, or, later, Phokas against Skleros.8 The smaller professional armies (tagmata) were used to check the larger provincial forces (themata) and non-Roman mercenary armies used to check regular Roman forces. Of course, it was possible for an emperor to form a relationship of trust with a general and then give him or his family extraordinary power. This is how our story begins, with Konstantinos VII and Nikephoros Phokas, but it was rare. Another solution was for the emperor to take command of the armies in person, an option taken to an almost paranoid extreme by Basil II.
In addition, emperors needed to ensure their popularity among the people of the City and the political class, because that made it difficult for usurpers to justify their cause. In the eleventh century, as emperors enjoyed dwindling dynastic continuity, this resulted in the fiscally disastrous policy of distributing expensive gifts at the beginning of every reign to buy political support, including state salaries. Emperors also preferred to give extraordinary powers to men who could not take the throne, especially eunuch administrators.
Many emperors had a eunuch “prime minister,” who often held the position of parakoimomenos (i.e., chamberlain) and was placed in charge of the civilian administration, but in the end emperors could appoint any member of their cabinet to this role, even their personal eunuch-stewards, who did not hold formal office in the administration. This “informal” flexibility at the top was a mechanism by which emperors could dominate the bureaucracy, which could use inflexibility to otherwise limit the power of emperor. Alternately, they used bishops for this role, or even eunuchmonks. During the eleventh century, emperors increasingly used such figures to command the armies, so great had imperial insecurity become. Let us turn, then, to the Roman army of this period, a constant protagonist in our story.
The army and war
The Byzantine emperors excelled at projecting soft power. They allowed foreign rulers to compete for the privilege of marrying into the Byzantine elite; they bestowed court titles and prestige items of Byzantine culture as tokens of favor; educated foreign princes in Byzantine ways; overwhelmed ambassadors with elaborate ceremonies, gifts, and monuments; and used spies, suborned foreign notables, and harbored defeated rebels from foreign states. State receptions in particular were meant to be overwhelming. To receive the envoys of Tarsos (in Cilicia) in 946, the reception hall and its surroundings were decked out with silk hangings, laurel wreaths and flowers, and silver chains, and the hall was covered with Persian carpets and sprinkled with rose water. The entire court, thousands of people, stood in a prescribed order in full ceremonial regalia, acclamations were chanted to the accompaniment of organs, and the emperor sat on a throne that was imagined to be a replica of that of the Old Testament king Solomon. It was flanked by mechanical moving animals, including roaring lions and warbling birds, and could be lifted up into the air while the envoys were prostrate on the floor.? This was soft power, and it also served to introduce Konstantinos VII as the new sole ruler of the empire. But the tenth-century empire was also prepared for war.
The tenth-century Roman army had two tiers: the themata, local defense forces based in the provinces (called “themes”), and the tagmata, the smaller, elite, professional units that were originally posted around Constantinople but, over time, came to be posted closer to the frontiers as well. The thematic armies were the descendants of the late Roman field armies that were pulled back into Asia Minor during the crisis of the seventh century. Hence the old big themes were named in the plural genitive after those armies, e.g., Anatolikon (“of the Orientals,” i.e., the army of Oriens). Each of these armies was under a general (strategos), who gradually took on the functions of a provincial governor too. But over time the themes were divided up into smaller units, so that there were more and more of these general-governors, each with smaller jurisdiction and forces.
As the empire began to regain ground in the east during the tenth century, each small new acquisition was made into a separate district around a fort or fortified town, whose general commanded only a few hundred men. Some of these new districts were settled by Armenians colonists and so were called “the Armenian themes” (as opposed to the large, older Roman themes). By 970, this process had reached its logical conclusion and a new system had to be devised, which we will examine in due course. In 955 the forces of the Anatolikon, Armeniakon, and Cappadocia remained the backbone of the army in the eastern provinces.
The thematic armies contained a core of full-time, salaried soldiers as well as a majority of soldiers on the rolls who were supported by the military lands. We are not concerned here with the (controversial) origins of this institution. By the tenth century, certain lands in the provinces had come to be designated as military in that their proceeds contributed to the upkeep of a soldier. A greater extent or quality of land was pegged for the upkeep of a cavalry soldier than for an infantryman. Local communities were expected to support and supply the armies near them in a number of ways, but this was counted toward their regular tax obligations.
The “military lands” were a different arrangement: in exchange for supporting a soldier linked to this land (strateia), its owners paid only a basic tax and were free of additional impositions. The burden was thereby linked to the land, not the person. The soldiers themselves also received salaries (smaller in comparison to their full-time counterparts), campaign pay, a variety of one-off gifts, and social privileges. Military lands could be divided up among owners, who need not have included the soldier himself, but it may have been common for thematic soldiers to engage in farming when they were not serving. In the tenth century, it became ever more possible to fiscalize the strateia, that is pay full taxes in exchange for not providing a soldier. We do not know how widespread this option was. The idea was that the state would use that money to hire full-time soldiers, who were fewer but presumably better, i.e., the tagmata.'°
The tagmata consisted of full-time soldiers and contained a higher ratio of elite cavalry. They had been formed in the eighth century as a counterweight to the large thematic armies of Asia Minor, which too many generals had used in their efforts to gain the throne. There were a number of tagmatic armies, such as the exkoubitores, hikanatoi, and, the most important one, the scholai, each of which had only a few thousand men. The most important offcer of the tagmata was the captain of the scholai, called a domestikos, who often assumed the overall command of campaign operations. This is the position from which, as we will see, the Phokas family dominated the armed forces for almost half a century. In addition, the Roman army always employed foreign soldiers, either barbarian mercenaries or units lent by or hired from neighboring client states. We have to be careful with these. Our sources, Roman and foreign, love to enumerate the colorful ethnic names of these units, partly in order to caricature Roman armies,'! and this has misled many historians into thinking that the Byzantine army was fundamentally multiethnic. Yet these units rarely had more than a few hundred men, and were useful because they practiced specific types of war.
A long list of such units does not mean that all claimed an equal fraction of the army as did Romans. In a speech to the army in 958, the emperor Konstantinos VII reminds his officers (of both tagmatic and thematic forces) that there are “some units” of barbarians fighting alongside them, so the rest should fight bravely to impress these visitors with the courage of “our people ... the Roman people.”!* A military manual of that period imagines a large campaign force as consisting of 11,200 heavy infantry (including both tagmatic and thematic forces, both Romans and Armenians), 4,800 light infantry archers, 6,000 cavalry (500 heavy cavalry), and a few hundred Rus’ auxiliaries (some of these groups overlapped).'* Most expeditionary forces, however, would have been much smaller, usually only a few thousand. This was not an age of massive armies.
The present narrative begins in 955 when the empire’s high command, meaning primarily Nikephoros and Leon Phokas, had decided to switch from a primarily defensive posture to an offense aimed at permanently conquering territory in the southeast (i.e., Cilicia and Syria). For centuries, imperial military doctrine prioritized safety and defense by generally avoiding battle with equal-sized armies of raiders, harassing them from the hills, and ambushing them in passes. Leon Phokas specialized at this type of warfare, which is codified in the treatise On Skirmishing. But starting in 955, a strategy of conquest was put into motion against the most dangerous enemies in the southeast, the Cilician cities (such as Tarsos) and the Hamdanid emirate of Aleppo under Sayf al-Dawla.
The exponents of this brutal new phase of war wete Nikephoros Phokas and Ioannes Tzimiskes. Their approach is partly reflected in a treatise attributed to the former, called the Praecepta militaria.“ Historians often assume that the conquests were carried out by the tagmata, whereas the themes were the defense forces of the past. Yet as we will see repeatedly, the offensive armies were mixed, and the themes likely still provided the majority of the soldiers. However, if the strateia was increasingly commuted to cash, generals in offensive operations may have come to rely more on full-time soldiers, whether tagmatic or thematic. The distinction between the two would have gradually become moot, and we lose sight of it during the long reign of Basil II (976-1025) as tagmata came to be posted in the provinces.
How did palace-based emperors control this powerful war machine? First, their decisions were not bound by a rigid chain of command. Emperors managed the army with the same flexibility and ad hoc appointments that they used for the civil administration. They could, and did, appoint anyone to take overall command, including eunuchs, courtiers, or even former monks, in addition to the “bearded” officer class, and could create extraordinary positions for them to fill (e.g., stratopedarches for eunuchs, stratelates for noneunuchs, both of which just mean generically “army commander”).'? When we begin, Konstantinos VII was using the domestikos of the tagma of the scholai, Nikephoros Phokas, as the commander-in-chief of both the tagmata and themata in the campaign, even though the domestikos technically ranked beneath the general of the Anatolikon. Alternately, these command positions could just be left vacant. They were filled (or not) depending on what the emperor thought was expeditious and safe—safe for himself as much as for the empire.
Rather than survey them here, we will discuss the empire’s geostrategic challenges and neighbors individually as they become important in the narrative. Each front was different and emperors reacted according to evolving situations. A word is necessary here on the cultural aspects of war, especially the religious aspects. Much attention has been paid recently to the question of whether the Byzantines had a concept of Holy War. The question is somewhat distracting, as it requires us (again) to view Byzantium through a western prism, one that is itself derived from a particular (and problematic) view of the Crusades. This is not to say, of course, that religion did not color the practice of war. Orthodoxy was a fundamental aspect of Byzantine identity and shaped the perception of history and current events. War was certainly viewed in religious terms and provoked religious reactions.
The military defense of Romania was accordingly suffused with religious associations, images, and practices, and understood as a defense of the faith, especially when the enemy was a pagan or Muslim. The armies were sent off with prayers and litanies, accompanied by priests and religious symbols, and exhorted with strongly religious rhetoric. However, religion did not predetermine or even shape imperial strategy and military objectives. There was no difference in how Roman armies treated Muslims or Christians (though the former were often expelled from conquered territories). The Byzantines never thought of freeing the Holy Land or destroying Islam by force, and they were as likely to wage war against each other as against the infidel. They were not encouraged by either secular or religious authorities to take up the sword against the infidel, but defending the empire was a patriotic duty. Orthodoxy was the rhetoric or cultural style in which otherwise pragmatic policies were expressed. This book will focus on the latter.
“Landed aristocracy”? “Anatolian magnates” ?
The military history of this period had a different trajectory from the economic. On the military side, the empire expanded dramatically after 955 and quickly lost ground between 1064 and 1078. But the period overall witnessed economic and demographic growth. More land was probably brought under cultivation and trade increased, resulting in more production and revenues for the state.'° There were occasional downturns within this picture of otherwise steady growth, such as droughts and famine (localized in time and space), and the loss of Asia Minor caused extraordinary hardship in the 1070s. It might one day be possible to write a history of this period in which the political and the economic are more closely and horizontally integrated.
For now, however, we must push back against a specific socioeconomic metanarrative that was imposed on the political history of Byzantium and still holds sway in some quarters. In the first half of the twentieth century, prominent Byzantinists sought to normalize the empire’s history within its broader medieval context by finding the point when it became “feudalized” and thereby joined the mainstream of western history by moving from a bureaucratic-Roman statist mode of existence to a proper medieval one. They fixed that point in the tenth and eleventh century on the basis of two assumptions. The first is that there was a tension, or open war, between the central bureaucratic state and aristocrat-landowners in Asia Minor, the latter providing also the empire’s “military families.
This phenomenon is described as the “takeover of the state by the aristocratic families,” resulting in the regime of the Komnenoi and the feudalized empire of the Palaiologoi. The second is that these rich men or the socially “powerful” (dynatoi) were gobbling up the lands of smaller landowners and thereby also imperiling the basis of military recruitment. By 1081, these “Anatolian magnates” or “aristocracy” owned much or most of the land and had imposed feudal orders on the Byzantine countryside. Two of the leading proponents of this picture, the Russian historians A. Vasiliev and G. Ostrogorsky, embedded it into the standard histories of Byzantium that they wrote, which were translated into many languages. The idea was picked up by scholars in the west (especially France) who wanted to approach Byzantium as a medieval society, with an emphasis on land and socioeconomic relations rather than politics and “mere” narrative.
“Feudalization” lies at the core of this paradigm and infects the whole of it. I say infects because, in the end, feudalism turned out to be more trouble than it was worth in the Byzantine context, and has now even been rejected by many western medieval historians too. Even if scholars avoid the term and use only its surface concepts, such as the “landed magnates” who ran the army, these notions too make sense only within the narrative provided by feudalization, which they were designed to push historically. In the rest of this introduction, I will argue that most of this paradigm is a modern fiction, in both its hard and “lite” forms.
The political history of Byzantium certainly played out against a background of socioeconomic structures and transformations, as all societies always do, but there is little proof for this specific one. The feudalization paradigm becomes especially problematic the closer it is brought to bear on the events that it aims to explain. Those events are better explained within the known features of the Byzantine political scene, where potential rivals financially maintained by the court were always looking to seize power within a stable system, rather than as symptoms of far-reaching socioeconomic changes.
There were definitely wars between the emperors in Constantinople and their rivals in the provinces, but there is no warrant for calling the latter “landed magnates”; nor were the “emperors threatened on many occasions by powerful Anatolian landowners.”'’ The emperors were threatened not by landowners but by army officers. Some were no doubt landowners, but there is no evidence that they were dangerous because of their property—in other words, that they were so rich that they could challenge the imperial state by means of personal resources, something that was possible in the West. Instead, they were dangerous because they could subvert the loyalty of the armies through the military prestige that they had acquired through service.'8
In the revolts that we know the most about (963, 1043, 1047, 1057), we see nothing but officers canvassing support among the army. These officers did not have private armies, as is often implied. They had retinues, but this was expected of generals, to be maintained from their salaries. Their household staff could never threaten a regular army unit.'? Nor did they have private forts, only army installations in the territories that they controlled as generals or rebels. To seize power, they had to act subversively from within the imperial system, not leverage it from the outside.
And we need to be completely honest about this: apart from a dubious anecdote,” we have no idea of the scale of the properties of the officers or “families” in question. They may have owned most of Asia Minor, or had more modest holdings, “wealthy” only in relation to poorer neighbors. Recent studies have even suggested that the wealth of the officer class may have derived from their salaries, not their lands.*' There is only one high official (not a general) whose properties we can estimate, the judge and historian Michael Attaleiates, and he tells us that he bought them with his state salary.” As Mark Whittow put it already in 1996, “landownership was relatively divorced from political power.”*’ He too found no evidence for provincial power bases that could challenge the government.
Social scientists would be surprised to learn that Byzantinists have been postulating fundamental socioeconomic conflicts and transformations based on such meager—in fact, nonexistent—data. It is so dire that we sometimes resort to data from literary fiction, yet we still confidently call these alleged aristocrats a “conquering socio-economic force.”*4
Aristocracy” is another problematic term. Byzantinists have produced no model in which this term adds anything to what we already know existed: a ruling elite of state and Church office holders. This elite was marked by high turnover and had no hereditary right to office or titles, and no legal authority over persons and territories except that which came from office. Ultimately, historians use the term aristocracy just because in the eighth century our sources begin to record second names. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also in the late eighth century that we begin to have sources.
But sporting a surname does not necessarily make one an “aristocrat” according to any specific social model; nor can we prove that Byzantium in 950 was more aristocratic than it had been a century earlier. We have more family names for later periods, but the numbers are small and subject to the limitations of our sources. As suggested above, “aristocracy” better describes the rhetoric used by some of these people while they held power. But taking it at face value as a socioeconomic category, we risk turning the political ambitions of generals and courtiers into a narrative of class conflict against “the state” that led to feudalization—a fiction.
A powerful refutation of that narrative is the fact that, whenever these “surnamed” types (whether generals or “aristocratic” courtiers) seized power, they pursued the same policies as the Macedonian emperors, that is, protecting small landholders and distrusting the “powerful” (dynatoz). Nikephoros Phokas followed the same policies as Basil II, the enemy of the Phokades. And later, when the Komnenoi seized power in 1081, they had already lost all their lands in Asia Minor. They could not have leveraged private assets to take control of the state, as is so often implied, but the reverse: they used their positions in the army to take over the state because they had no other recourse against extinction. And Alexios ruled through his family not because he was an “aristocrat” (and that, presumably, was what aristocrats did) but the reverse: an aristocracy of family emerged in the twelfth century precisely because Alexios, for contingent reasons, had decided to rule through his extended family.
What, then, about the land legislation and the grasping of the so-called powerful?Ӣ In the famine of 927-928, some small landowners and members of village communes (taxed as units by the state) were compelled to sell their land cheaply to owners of larger estates (which were taxed outside the commune system), including to monasteries and the churches. The emperor Romanos I Lakapenos (920-944) sought to protect the weak by passing two laws that made it difficult for the powerful to acquire such lands and gave villagers the ability to reclaim them under certain circumstances. This legislation was maintained and progressively strengthened by subsequent empetors, who also took care to ensure that the service function of the military lands was fixed and inalienable.
It is on the basis of these laws that historians have postulated a narrative of agrarian transformation in Byzantium, with the “aristocracy” gobbling up the lands of the villages and small landowners. But we have to be skeptical about this alleged transformation, as no sources prove or even indicate that it actually happened. We have no data about the size, shape, or internal articulation of the economy, or how the population was distributed into economic categories. We do not have figures for the extent or distribution of land ownership, whether in absolute or relative terms, or how it changed over time. Socioeconomic changes require some evidentiary basis, but here there is none. Large estates may have grown, but how much? Some scholars estimate that small holdings remained the norm, whereas others think that large ones expanded dramatically.*’ These are guesses.
Ultimately, it all rests on the testimony of Romanos I and the decision of his successors to maintain and add to his provisions. Romanos, moreover, was dealing with a unique crisis caused by a famine, so we have to ask: How many cases would induce him to issue this law? Ten? Five? We do not know what data the emperors had, or the degree to which their actions and policies responded to data rather than to anecdotal evidence or personal experiences.
This is a sobering amount of ignorance. Moreover, the emperors may have had more than practical legal issues in mind, for the situation allowed Romanos to pose as a protector of the weak against the strong, a traditional theme of political paternalism; in the Christian Roman empire, the strong were always understood to be oppressing the poor. Romanos was echoing previous imperial rhetoric and legislation that sought to protect the weak against the powerful, with Justinian as a prominent precedent for using the same language.”* This stance made emperors look good, and the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty in particular modeled themselves on the ancient lawgivers. And the emperors—our sole source for this problem—may also have had an interest in exaggerating the scope of the problem in order to check precisely those elements of society that could potentially give them the most trouble. So even though we should not deny that abuses were taking place, there are limits to how much actual history we can extract from the rhetoric of such laws. We need to approach them with greater caution.
The nature of the powerful must also be considered. They were not some private interests newly created by inscrutable and unstoppable economic forces operating “out there” in the provinces but, as defined in the laws themselves, state officials, title holders, high-ranking churchmen, and rich monasteries.*? In other words, the emperors were facing a socioeconomic problem that the imperial order itself had created and was maintaining, an old story. Moreover, I suspect that the worst offenders among the land-grasping powerful were in fact the monasteries and Churches, not individuals, families, and the officer class. Emperors repeatedly tried to check the expansion of the wealth of religious institutions above and beyond their general attempts to limit the problem of the dynatoi, and sought ways to ensure that churches and monasteries contributed their fair share in taxes (e.g., Basil II’s a/lelengyon). Even in the case of powerful individuals who are said to have amassed much land, for example, the eunuch chamberlain Basileios Lakapenos, those acquisitions usually took the form of endowments for a monastic foundation (and Lakapenos was not an “Anatolian magnate”).
In other words, the two pillars of the feudalization narrative may not have been connected after all: the wars between the emperors and the generals had little to do with the emergence of a feudal aristocracy, while the growth of large estates was caused more by churches and monasteries. Yet Byzantinists have not developed ways of talking about tensions between the court and religious institutions. For ideological reasons, we are too accustomed to seeing them as conjoined pillars of the same imperial “Orthodox” regime. But it turns out that the emperors of this period tried to keep them at arm’s length.
In sum, this narrative will not replace socioeconomic history with political and military history. Rather, it will challenge one specific reconstruction of the socioeconomic history of Byzantium—a view according to which vast private forces arose from nebulous sources in the economy and life of the provinces, and then “took over” the state—and it will replace this view with a different model of the economic and political workings of Byzantine society. The imperial state lay always at the heart of any transformation taking place, both enabling emperors to rule and funding their potential rivals. The state structured society on so many levels that it could give rise to contradictory forces. Finally, when Asia Minor was conquered by the Turks and its former “aristocracy” had lost their lands and wealth, it is to the late Roman state that they turned, once again, to ensure their own survival.
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