Download PDF | The Byzantine City From Heraclius To The Fourth Crusade, 610– 1204 Urban Life After Antiquity
225 Pages
PREFACE
The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.” Indeed, this project represents a return to a topic I have explored on numerous occasions before and after my Ph.D. as I was preparing my first monograph, entitled Cities in Transition: Urbanism in Byzantium between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (AD 500-900) (BAR 2009). Since then, a score of contributions on the topic of Byzantine urbanism have appeared; however, no introductory survey of Byzantine urbanism and the changes its experience between 600 and 1204 has ever appeared. Three preliminary caveats should be set forth, though.
First, the main idea at the very basis of this book is to propose a regional and sub-regional overview of the transformations of urban contexts in a comparative perspective, taking into consideration the peculiar geomorphological and topographical varieties of each area under scrutiny; in other words, echoing the late Martin Harrison, the focus of this diachronic approach will also be the urban developments across the mountain, the plain, and the coastline as well as the islands. In other words, this book proposes a sort of examination of the blueprint of the Byzantine urban landscape rather than a simple map of the most important and betterexcavated sites.
Second, indeed, archaeology and material culture have pride of place in what remains a short and -of course- brief overview of the functional changes experienced by Byzantine urbanism. The changes in urban functions, landscape, structure, and fabric, have been explored by bringing together the most recent results stemming from urban archaeological excavations, the results of analyses of material culture (ceramic, coins, seals), and a reassessment of the documentary and hagiographical sources. They have hopefully allowed me to propose an all-encompassing analytical approach that set the sails from the urban economy and addressed political, social, religious, and cultural issues, which all played a role in morphing the Byzantine city.
Indeed, I also remain convinced that the Byzantine urban landscape can afford us a better grasp of changes to the Byzantine central and provincial administrative apparatus: the fiscal machinery, military institutions, socio-economic structures, and religious organization. Cities are, therefore, a sort of looking glass: a way of checking the reality on the ground in a world too often interpreted through the Constantinopolitan perspective. The Queen City was, of course, imitated and sought after as an architectural and urbanistic model; nevertheless, it was never reached; and as cities often remained central to the experience of many “Romans,” more often than not, it remained a distant thunder in the background noise of the actual flow of Byzantine city life.
The third and last point concerns the audience of the book. Indeed, it is meant and thought for a scholarly (and not) public as well as students. Therefore, it may be called a handbook. Personally, I would rather regard it as an attempt to paint a picture of the main historiographical trends, interpretative structures, and methodological questions concerning Byzantine urbanism with a broad brush. In other words, it should ideally be regarded as a starting point for further delving into issues like economic functionality of cities, their religious and socio-political role, as well as their architectural, urbanistic, and structural manifestations along the six centuries under scrutiny here. I can only hope that when turning the last page of this book, the readers will feel that their intellectual curiosity has been stimulated enough to pursue their own journey following the trails of Byzantium and its city. After all, as Sophocles concludes: “a city that is just of one man only is no true city.”!
Ankara, Turkey Luca Zavagno
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people to whom my gratitude should be extended, but it is often hard to mention them in one breath. This book has been written during extraordinary times in which the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the world as we knew it. During this immense tragedy, the “usual” and traditional academic activities and encounters came to a complete stop. Teaching turned into a bi-dimensional and virtual exercise with students perching from small windows on a screen.
However, and without glossing over the difficulties instructors and students experienced, nobody turned into a solitary soliloquist. Technology helped to reach out to colleagues (most of whom I am proud to call friends) no matter how far they were. Some of them were terrific sources of inspiration and support. They helped me with advice, suggestions, and references: sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly (as some even accepted to skim through the boring draft of the book). In particular, I would like to mention Nicholas Bakirtzis (who is like an elder and wiser brother to me), Owen Miller, Jonathan Jarrett, Rebecca Darley, and Maria Cristina Carile (it was a real privilege to put the last touches to my book while in Ravenna); to me, they are more than colleagues: they are invaluable mentors on top of being superb scholars.
I also had the good luck to discuss and debate some of the concepts and ideas included in this book with the students of some of the courses I held at Bilkent University. They also provided invaluable food for thoughts. I can name but a few of them (but to all goes my token of appreciation and gratitude): Harun Celik, Yunus Dogan, Aysenur Mulla, Humberto De Luigi, and Zeynep Olgun. To my “dottoranda” Fermude Gulseving goes a special praise for her patience with a supervisor like me and because she reviewed the manuscript and convinced me that Stravinsky’s was not too bad a metaphor after all.
Finally, I would like to mention my mum, my stepdad Mariangelo, my sister Marianna, Eddie Luca, my brother-in-law Antonio and -above allmy wife Federica, and my daughter Sofia, to whom this book is dedicated; cause without them, I would not have been able to write a single sentence of it or of anything I scribbled in the past fifteen years.
Praise for The Byzantine City from Heraclius to the Fourth Crusade, 610-1204
“This is a most welcome and important contribution in the study of Byzantine cities, a topic of growing scholarly interest. Drawing from a range of historical sources and archaeological results this book offers a compelling overview of the socioeconomic and cultural complexity of the Byzantine city and its significance for our understanding of the history of Byzantium.”
—Nikolas Bakirtzis, The Cyprus Institute
The Byzantine City: A Symphony in Three Movements
Abstract This chapter presents the reader with three preliminary and different themes that will recur across the book as taking their cue from the changes of some exemplary Byzantine cities like Ephesos and Euchaita. The first has to do with the importance of tracking the transformation of the urban functions across space and time. The second concern the methodological approach adopted in the book. Indeed, the changes in urban functions, landscape, structure, and fabric will be explored by bringing together the most recent results stemming from urban archaeological excavations, the results of analyses of material culture (ceramic, coins, seals), and a reassessment of the documentary and hagiographical sources. The third aims to explain how Byzantine urban sites located in different parts of the empire (Byzantine heartland vis a vis the coastal-insula koine) reverberated the changes experienced by the political, social, and economic imperial super-structure a regional and sub-regional level.
at the end of World War Two: The Symphony in Three Movements.! Stravinsky’s symphony overtly acknowledged the terrible events of the recent conflict as the source of inspiration: the massacre of the Chinese population by the Japanese army, the goose-stepping march of the Nazi soldiers, and finally, the victory of the Allies in 1945. Often referred to as a “war symphony,” the work is peculiar for being pieced together by reorganizing and reusing material and themes either left incomplete or meant for a somewhat different audience (including a movie) (Oliver 1995, 152-6).
As it would be puzzling to Stravinsky himself, I regard his symphony as a good starting point to describe the transformation experienced by the Byzantine city in the period between the end of Late Antiquity to the Fourth Crusade. It occurred to me how it could be seen as a convenient metaphor for the three historiographical and chronological frameworks, which encapsulate the trajectories of the urban phenomenon in the empire as it fully inherited the Roman ideological, cultural and social conception of a city-based polity (Sarris 2015, 7; Loseby 2009, 139-40). The “Allegro” could easily make us think of the late fourth-to-late sixth century period of economic and political expansion of the city; the Andante could infer to the changes experienced by the urban culture, image, and fabric in the so-called Dark Ages of Byzantium (Decker 2016, 81-122); finally, the “con Moto” would represent the economic growth cities in the Balkans and (partially) Asia Minor as paired with an economic and cultural “Renaissance” which started under the auspices of the Macedonian dynasty and de facto ended with the catastrophic Fourth Crusade.
Such a tripartition has the clear advantage of making Byzantine history more practicable (James 2010, 2); however, as this book will only focus on the second and third stages of this division -taking the cue from the rise of what Whittow (1996) labeled as Orthodox Byzantium — a tripartite chronology could be regarded a fancy disguise for proposing a rather traditional historiographic approach to the problems of the development of the Byzantine forma Urbis (Concina 2003). As will be seen, this approach has been labeled by scholars simply as a journey from Classic polis to Medieval kastron (Miiller-Wiener 1986; Brandes 1999; Dunn 1994) or as a sort of “Darwinian evolution” of the city cut short in the mid-seventh century and restarted in the mid-tenth century (Foss 1977; Angold 1985, 19).
Obviously, and before dealing with an historiography of Byzantine urbanism and its historical trajectories, one should focus on a definition of Byzantine city. How can we try to define and encompass the concept of urbanism in an empire whose territorial extension drastically changed over the six-century time span covered by this book? What is the real significance of the noun-adjective agreement between “city” and “Byzantine”? How can we track the changing interpretations, perceptions, and images of the city as swinging between the definition attributed to the urban animation in contemporary literary sources (like chronicles, encomia, and hagiographies) and the archaeological reality of urban structures and infrastructure on the ground?
Before try and answer these questions, I would like to start with a rather perfunctory observation. In a world where surfing the net is regarded as the essential and preliminary act to researching any subject, typing the words “Byzantine city” in any internet search takes researchers and students alike to a rather coherent but repetitive list of results. Constantinople captures the lion’s share of results as three cities shared the place of honor: Alexandria (lost to the empire in 644-6) (Sijpestejin 2007), Thessalonike and Antioch (also lost to the Arabs in the mid-seventh century and “reconquered” in the mid-tenth century only to be lost again one century later) (Kennedy 1992).?
Moreover, and more important for the timespan this book is centered on, the Wikipedia’s entry for “Cities of the Byzantine Empire” does not cover the period after the sixth century for its bibliography is seldom including scholarly works which covered the period posteighth century;* this despite several studies produced in the last two decades as centering on the history and archaeology of single urban sites as focusing exclusively or at least partially on the period spanning from the ninth to the early thirteenth century (Kiousopoulou 2012; Niewohner 2017). One could cite here, for instance, the works of Bouras (2010) on mid-Byzantine Athens, the short urban key-studies in the Economic History of Byzantium (Laiou 2002), the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium on Late Byzantine Thessalonike including the seminal article of Bakirtzis (2003) and Jacoby (2003), as well as the contributions on Corinth (Sanders 2003), and Monemvasia (Kalligas 2010).
As I will return to the chronological unbalance characterizing studies on Byzantine urbanism, it is important here to try and tackle the two intertwined questions: how can we define a city? How can we label the urban phenomenon as Byzantine? The two questions are inescapably intertwined for -as Tzvikis (2020) remarks- we are confronted with the lack of characteristics classifying a Byzantine city; although he refers mainly to the so-called Dark Ages, Tzivikis’ conclusion can be extended to the Byzantine millennium at large. Byzantinists have often tried to look for aone-size-fits-all model path of urbanism (a journey from polis to kastron and back again see Fig. 1.1). For instance, Quiroga (2016, 94) has concluded against the use of the term “Byzantine city” as it is a terminological and semantic problem that did not stem from the archaeology and material culture. “This is not because there is a specifically Byzantine [...] architecture or a Byzantine [...] city different one from the other; that terminology is due to the change of political contexts which qualify material evidence one way or another. Therefore, it is the political domain which gives a logical semantics to the terms Byzantine [...], then we should speak about post-Roman cities in Byzantine times.”.
Indeed, Byzantinists (historians and archaeologists alike) have repeatedly referred to the famous set of criteria set forth by Martin Biddle (1976), notwithstanding the fact they were developed with Anglo-Saxon cities in mind.* According to his scheme, a city should have 1. Defenses, 2. Planned street system, 3. Market(s), 4. Mint, 5. Legal Autonomy, 6. Role as a central place, 7. Relatively dense and large population, 8.
Diversified economic base, 9. Plots and houses of urban type, 10. Social differentiation, 11. Complex religious organization, 12. Judicial functions (Biddle 1976, 100). Taking his cue from Biddle’s list, Johannes Koder (1986, 156-67) defines a (Byzantine) city as a settlement with a considerable share of non-agricultural functions, and has a high concentration of buildings with close spatial zones forming specific neighborhoods; Arthur (1991) when examining the case of Naples as satisfying seven of Biddle’s criteria also builds on Richard Hodges (1982, 20-25) definition of an urban community as a settlement with a sizable demography larger than any area relying on pure subsistence for most of the inhabitants were not busy with agrarian pursuits. The community should also have one institution. Curta (2006, 430) also focuses on socio-economic criteria as he examines the trajectories of Balkan cities, which should be defined by the presence of non-agricultural activities and classes extracting income from them although they did not develop into an autonomous community of merchants and craftsmen. Some historians have labeled any attempt to circumscribe the notion of the city as pure abstract and merely evocative exercise, for they also denounced any attempt to define the very meaning of the concept of city as futile (Dagron 2002, 393-4; Bouras 2013, 44); others have implicitly conjured up the idea, ideal and image of the Classical polis as the Puskian “stone guest” of any definition of the urban phenomenon and the yardstick against which one should measure any successive form of urbanism (Angold 1985). As Decker (2016, 81) states, “the city was germane to Roman governance, identity and sense of belonging (the regular planning, similarity of public spaces and amenities, access to goods and representation of the Roman state helped to unify the empire at least at the level of elites).” Indeed, the Byzantine Empire was still a mosaic of cities in the sixth century (for it inherited the world created by Rome as organized around the city, their councils, and the devolved fiscal and political system they facilitated) (Foss 2001, 86-7; Zanini 2014, 196; Sarris 2015, 7).
Although I certainly see the merit of stressing the importance of GreekRoman poleis as the sinews of the imperial socio-political body, I found myself resistant to the idea of a ready-made set of monumental, spatial, ideological, ceremonial, and infrastructural characteristics which needs to be replicated in any region or area of the Mediterranean as inescapable markers of the urban (Decker 2016, 82). Such an analytical stance is prone to the risk of glossing over the complex socio-cultural, political, and economic interplay between city and countryside (Trombley 1993, 429; 438-40) or even to regard a polis as antithetical to its chora (Dagron 2002, 398-401); moreover, we can find ourselves prisoner to the concept and picture of a city as offered by the Classical authors and later by their enthusiastic Byzantine emulators (Saradi 2012). Finally, the long shade projected by the Classical polis obscures the fact that as Ward-Perkins (2008, 410) concludes, “describing the cities of the empire is like describing a moving target made up of different parts, all traveling in roughly the same direction, but at very different speeds and with different individual trajectories.”
As a result, we are encouraged to sail away from a ready-made concept of city and embrace functional regional outcomes of urbanism that did not entirely fall into any traditional categorization. One could regard a city as a conglomeration of administrative, economic, and cultural/cultic functions for the surrounding countryside and an intermediary to hierarchically bigger units. Vionis (2017) has cogently showed the validity of such a model for the region of Boeotia in central Greece for the period spanning between Late Antiquity and the arrival of the Franks in the thirteenth century. While encouraging us to use the archaeological record to question labels like “ruralized”, “shifting”, and fortified “cities”, he also assesses the political and economic circumstances impacting upon regional and subregional settlement pattern. In his view, cities and “microtowns” should be regarded as transformed entities rather than as degenerate versions of monumental late antique cities /polis with altered perceptions of scale and monumentality. For instance, the fact that some these settlements had bishopric status in the eleventh and twelfth century indicates that they were large and important although the archaeological record point to them as nothing more than villages (Vionis 2017, 170-3). This has led to stress the importance of a hierarchical system of central places with secondary settlements as the intermediary between the rural hinterland and the consumer cities (Koder 1986; Vionis 2018, 54-65). The latter are sometimes labeled as agro-towns (Arthur 2006, 32) as those excavated in central Sicily (Philosophiana) (Vaccaro 2013) and on the socalled Limestone Massif in Syria; both were large settlements, which did not have municipal status or bishops, but were on a larger demographic and structural scale than villages (Tate 1992; Foss 2001, 87-95).
These should also be included in what Alan Harvey describes as a rather complex geopolitical and economic syntax of the urban phenomenon as predicated upon provincial market centers with a modicum of commodity production, coastal towns funneling the production of their hinterland and cities in which local inhabitants were also agricultural producers (consolidating crash crop selling in the local market) (Harvey 1989, 261). Archie Dunn (1994), using the Balkans as his main frame of reference, has proposed a categorization including the civic urban settlements, as the upper level of any settlement system as followed by non-civic urban settlements and non-civic nonurban fortifications or fortified settlements; a categorization whose complexity can be examined only through archaeology and topography (Dunn 1994, 60).
In fact, one should admit that functions do not necessarily coalesce into a central place. In this light, a recent regional study on Epirus has allowed Veikou to elaborate upon the regional dispersion of the religious function as the seats of bishoprics were rather “hybrid” and “in-between” rural and urban settlement formations with both rural and urban features. In particular Episcopal sees in Southern Epiros do not seem to have corresponded to any clear, distinct type of settlement (Veikou 2009, 44-51). Other examples of areas where a functional variety of responses to the socio-political and economic changes at the Mediterranean scale determined the creation of different models of urbanism are represented by Amalfi and the so-called Adriatic rim between seventh to tenth century (McCormick 2001, 361-9; 795-8).
The former reveals as an example of “urban” mercantile conglomeration whose functions were once again framed by the overarching economic vitality of the whole Sorrentine peninsula lasting into the eleventh century (Abulafia 2019). The latter saw the foundation of both a new city (Civitas Nova Heracliana) and the rise of an Adriatic emporium (Comacchio): an eighth and ninth century site where the tempo of production and distribution of goods as well as imports and consumption was not dictated by the Byzantine army or bureaucrats (Gelichi et al. 2012; McCormick 2012). Located at the confluence of important waterways, both settlements boasted only limited monumental areas (mainly the important churches) as large parts of the sites were endowed with wooden platform-docks, waterfront, and embankments: a cityscape and fabric which reminds us of a typology of urbanism which developed and thrived in areas far away from the Mediterranean Sea like the so-called north-Sea emporia (Augenti 2011, 55-134; Hodges 2012, 93-115). Indeed, they both had a vital economy based upon trade relationship between western Europe and the Byzantine sphere of political and economic influence in particular after the fall of the capital of Byzantine exarchate (Ravenna) to the Lombards in 751 (Cirelli 2008). One can, however, object that neither of these examples of urban development can be fully characterized as properly Byzantine, for Amalfi remained under loosely direct Byzantine control only until the mid-ninth century (Skinner 2017), and the rise of Rivo-Alto/Venice led to a semi-independent path of the lagoons sublimated by the conquest and sack of Comacchio on the part of the Venetians in the late ninth century (McCormick 2001, 526-31; Wickham 2005, 690-2).
The abovementioned examples, nevertheless, point to the importance of tracking the transformation of the urban functions across space and time. Such a functional approach to the transformations experienced by urbanism helps us to illuminate the fluctuating use of public and private space, the conversion of the monumental landscape, the changes to spatial structures (streets and squares) where city life manifested itself (through political ceremonies, religious processions, or market activities) (Hartnett 2017, 1-22). As it will be seen later, spatial changes are integral to an archaeologically based model of intensification and abatement of urban settlements; the latter has indeed been used by Avni (2011) and -more conclusively- Whittow (2013) to interpret the changing appearance of the city as the result of long-term functional economic and social processes whose tempo was not dictated simply by political events. In this light, it is important to return to the importance of overcoming the historiographical narrative as based upon the juxtaposition of urban vs. rural (and ruralization of urban social fabric and structure vis-a-vis the Classical cityscape ); this by employing different and alternative analytical categories like nucleated and dispersed settlements or a more nuanced variety of settlement patterns (Veikou 2012, 163). Brubaker and Haldon (2011, 534) went as far as employing the oxymoron “ruralized city” to describe a separate type of urbanism where green spaces encroached upon the cityscape and enhanced the local economy.
This is why I have myself proposed a definition of the city as a “multifunctional” settlement must take into consideration the historical trajectories of the empire at large as well as the changing patterns of investments, socio-cultural attitudes, political roles, and social relevance of urban-based elites (Zavagno 2009, 7). Indeed, as the diachronic maps published by Michael Hendy (1985) and Haldon (2010, 79) clearly show, Byzantium remained an urbanized empire throughout its entire existence. Although, with regional social, cultural, and political variations across the empire, it is the resilience of cities as continuing foci of relative concentrations of population, monumental landscape, functional and ideological raison d’étre, and residence of the secular and religious elites that should be stressed (Dey 2015, 136).
In this light, one should also consider how each of regions boasted rather fluid and variable governmental structures and political allegiance to the center as local urban elites showed a unique understanding of the socio-economic, military, and cross-cultural dynamics characterizing the urban life in the Medieval Mediterranean (Valérian 2014). These were not indeed peculiar to the so-called periphery only, for an important city like Attaleia (mod. Antalya; see Fig. 1.2) -on which I will also return later- can be effectively be defined as a thematic capital of the Byzantine heartland and an imperial navy-base fully engrained in Constantinopolitan-centered hierarchic defensive network as set up in the late seventh century (Foss 1996, 4-13); but at the same time, the city could also be regarded as a liminal site exposed to diverse cultural influences, a fully developed mercantile harbor which remained operative until it was lost to Byzantium post-1204 and -as Demetris Krallis (2019, 66) cogently proved- as a citystate, operationally semi-independent, able to fend for itself and whose elites were deeply involved in the shipping and trading networks linking southern Anatolia with Cyprus and the Levant (Zavagno 2011). Sheltered by its imposing walls perching above a sea-bay -in a way that reminds us of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese and Cherson and Amastris on the Black Sea (on which I will all return in Chap. 3)- Attaleia could be pictured as belonging at the same time to two opposing Byzantine urban typologies. On the one hand, it was the capital of a naval theme and the seat of one detachment of the Byzantine fleet; on the other, it could easily be labeled as part of a “maritime koime” for it betrayed a rather peculiar fluidity of social-cultural environment and a rather vital economic life not fully determined by state-oriented elites.
This koine has been described as encompassing an insular/coastal society and united through a long-standing framework of resilient urban centers (Wickham 2012, 504). Indeed, as Arthur (2012, 339) states, we are confronted with “a series of sites and artifacts that have come to light across the Mediterranean that suggest a certain common intent and cultural unity on a number of different levels across and within Byzantine controlled territory.” This chimes with Jonathan Shepard’s idea the idea of an Imperial territorial structure of power working along a low-maintenance and variable geometry empire’s lines (Shepard 2017, 11). He focuses on the so-called peripheral outlets of the empire and stresses the importance of both bunkers/kastron and open cities/gateway communities as essential to the long political game Byzantium continued to play in the Western Mediterranean (Shepard 2018; Zavagno 2018).
So, in this book insular and coastal urban sites will also be examined as ideally bridging gap between what traditional historiography has regarded as the two major chronological markers in the history of Byzantine urbanism in the Balkans and Asia Minor: the early seventh and the tenth century. The former ushered in the beginning of the general crisis of the post-Late Antique city; the latter heralded the accelerated pace of revival and growth of cities and towns (Bouras 2002, 501).
Incidentally, these moments coincide with what Wickham (2004) has famously labeled as the two Mediterranean trade cycles (Antiquity and Middle Ages). The first had a fiscal motor which led to the unification of the Great Sea, along the longer-distance sipping routes; in the second, more consistently commercial reasons linked with regionally tax-based systems of exchange to restitute a good level of complexity to the Mediterranean economy. Islands, in particular, seem to have been places where the gap between the aforementioned cycles was bridged, for throughout the seventh and eighth-century islands, they were an economic space relatively more developed than northern and central Italy, the Balkans or Anatolia (Cosentino 2013, 73; Horden and Purcell 2020, 138). So, the Byzantine koine should act as a reminder of the importance of considering how the different geographies and exchange networks influenced the diverse typologies and morphologies of Byzantine urbanism. Two further considerations related to the urban facies of Byzantium could be proposed here as inspired by Stravinsky’s musical work.
The first has to do with the changes experienced by the political, social, and economic imperial super-structure in the period under scrutiny. As Haldon (2011) cogently remarks: the changes in the political forms of appropriation, consumption, and redistribution of social wealth, the transformation of the imperial elites, the changes to the fiscal and administrative structures, the territorial losses, the reorganization of the army, the advent of Christianity and the socio-political preeminence of the bishops all had enormous repercussion on the urban fabric, planning, and infrastructure, as well as the way city life, was experienced, perceived and imagined. As Stravinsky’s Symphony reverberates different moments of the world conflict for it morphed them into various musical movements, so each city echoed and embodied the changes of the historical context at the imperial level. In other words, as Jean-Michael Spieser remarks, “the transformation of the city is only one aspect of a broader evolution [...] and we can see how a sub-system, that of towns or cities. depended for its evolution on the evolution of a whole system of civilization but at the same time fed into the whole.” (Spieser 2001, 14). Although the sociological penchant of Spieser’s analysis taps into the idea of an evolutionary pattern of the urban phenomenology, one can see that Stravinsky’s sheet music (enthused by external events) is used by single instruments and performers as a guide to play together. So, the changes at the socioeconomic level as paired with historical occurrences (like wars, natural disasters, or recurring plagues) were the overarching “melody” single cities constantly tried to adapt their urban functions, landscape, structure, and fabric to (Zavagno 2009, 1-7).
In this light, and in tune with the second point I would like to drive home here, one should consider the sheets for single instruments as well as the inclinations, abilities, and level of music literacy of single performers. In other words, when playing a symphonic piece, the single-player or singer can adjust and “interpret” their own instrument’s tone and pitch in the same way as cities can do when facing the transformations experienced by the socio-political and economic system, they are part and parcel to. So one should pay attention to the variety of urban solutions to the problems of the post-Late Antique period the regional and sub-regional trajectories each urban site experienced when the Medieval Mediterranean went through the fragmentation and simplification of the Roman and Late Antique unified economic system, political structures and communication routes from the seventh century on (McCormick 2001, 115-22; Wickham 2005, 780-94).
But if the Medieval Mediterranean did not represent a unified political and economic system any longer, this did not imply that urbanitas did not pass away, as showed for instance by Dey (2015, 65-124) with regard to the continuity of ceremonial and processional routes as often staged in the colonnaded, orthogonal street grid. For instance, we should indeed be cautious when proposing a generalized picture of the complete lack of urban vitality resulting from the dismantling of monumental urban buildings (Quiroga 2016, 92). In fact, this may somewhat entail a rearrangement of the urban functionalities and identities as influenced by the reorganization of the state fiscal machinery, administrative organization, and military structure as well as the priorities of local elites at regional and supra-regional level; that this phenomenon remains more visible in the so-called maritime Byzantine koine help us to better grasp the kaleidoscope of diverse and changing functions as arranged in a typology of urban settlement which (partially) differed from the thematic capitals of the Anatolian plateau or the Aegean.
Indeed, the importance of considering regional trajectories echoes with the categorization of cities between successful and unsuccessful, or better natural and artificial (Arthur 2006, 29). The former benefitted from their location as central settlements to a fertile hinterland and nucleation points for a population focusing on non-agricultural activities and nodes of effective communication networks. Such a definition of successful cities stems from a quintessential archaeological methodological approach to the problem of urbanism as paired with a familiarity with a geographical urban epistemology (Koder 2006; Vionis 2017). In other words, Arthur’s urban taxonomy is rooted in the idea that city and town had its own individual character and direction even within general trends of developments (Christie 2016, 229). For instance, Martin Harrison (2001), Hendy (1985), Haldon (2010), and, more recently, James Howard Johnston (2019) have alerted to the importance of considering the relationship between urbanism (and its socio-political and economic structures) and the diverse regional landscapes (coastlands, mountain ranges, and Anatolian plateau).However, we should consider that the so-called Byzantine heartland, which as famously defined by Wickham (2005, 29-32), included the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau, experienced a deurbanization of roughly 80% in the early Middle Ages.
Indeed, the cities which survived often acted as music players whose cultural and musical background can impinge upon their ways of interpreting their sheet even when performing in an ensemble. In the case of a Byzantine city and its inhabitants, it is also essential to consider that Constantinople acted as a constant and continuous reference point for all the cities of the empire as they molded elements of their city fabric and ritual life on those provided by the “Queen of Cities.” (Jacobs 2012). However, the imitation of Constantinopolitan life was not the only factor in modulating the response of a single urban entity to the transforming political, ideological, economic, and cultural priorities at the Imperial level. Cities are mainly characterized by the wide range of functions they fulfill. Functions dictate the tempo of city life, set the boundaries of the social interaction and lifestyle while at the same time determining the role each urban settlement plays within the spatial organization and settlement pattern at large (Grohmann 2005, 44-5).
For example, environmental, geographical, and even cultural and religious factors vis-a-vis the post-Arab political and military geography of Anatolia explain why a city like Euchaita changed its morphology and function in the period between the eighth and the twelfth century (Haldon 2018, 210-56). Located on the north of the central section of the Anatolian peninsula, Euchaita (see Fig. 1.3) was nothing more than an average provincial town granted a civic status only by emperor Anastasius (491-526) (Elton 2018, 187). Until three decades ago, Byzantinists would have simply dismissed as a typical Roman middle range settlement which disappeared as engulfed by the twirls of the Persian (Foss 1977) and later Arab invasions (Mango 1980, 60-87). Although endowed with a city wall and boasting a bishopric, the city was neither the capital of any Late Antique province nor later developed into a capital of a strategia (later a theme).° In this light, the fate of the urban settlement was also molded by local environmental dynamics. The Anatolian plateau experienced shifting and unstable climatic conditions (Izdbesky 2013), leading to a dramatic change in the agrarian production to cater to the needs of the government, the army, and the provincial producing population (Haldon 2016, 249-77). Environmental pressure should be paired with the important role the city continued to play as a pilgrimage center. It lodged the relics of one of the most famous Byzantine military saints: Saint Theodore the Recruiter. The saint was celebrated by two collections of miracles and a well-known panegyrion (market fair) (Brandes 1999, 48-49).
Contrary to centers like Ancyra or Amorium (on which I will return later), Euchaita never had a large population or benefitted from a commanding position along the land routes crisscrossing the Anatolian plateau; nevertheless, from the mid-seventh century onwards, it fulfilled a variety of functions military, religious, economic, administrative, and agrarian varying according to the local political and economic conditions (Haldon 2018, 248).
Euchaita represents a good example (although, of course, not the only one) of an urban settlement that experienced a “successful” development in the aftermath of the Arab invasions. Nevertheless, its relative success should be projected against a backcloth of a changing functional role of cities and scaling down of urbanization in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (Sarris 2010, 35). So, the political, military, economic, and cultural urban functions of Euchaita developed and morphed as they did not entirely depend on a deliberate imperial effort aiming at exalting the role of this settlement in the centrally-planned defensive strategy against the Arab incursions which seasonally wreaked havoc moving across the Arab-Byzantine frontier (Kennedy and Haldon 1980; Eger 2014).° In other words, Euchaita was not simply an “island of refuge” (Haldon 2006, 614-20; Veikou 2012). The local population, as well as the inhabitants of the villages and households dotting its immediate surroundings, could indeed find occasional shelter behind its fortified acropolis; they depended on its walls as well as on the role Euchaita played as pilgrimage center which sustained a rather vital urban economy (Crow 1996, 31).
Indeed, as ramparts bespeak of retrenchment and shrinkage of Late Antique urban centers as they moved into the Middle Ages, they also enhanced different patterns of wealth investment and functionality; they could act as a temporary refuge or enhance administrative and religious foci of settlement as documented in the showcase new city of Justiniana Prima (Ivanievié 2016). In fact, more often than not, walls did not encase the whole city-life experience (as briefly seen in Euchaita). As a result, and although cities shared common planning, structural and conceptual tools -and above all rather sophisticated defensive structures- it is rather difficult to regard them as encapsulating a one-size-fits-all model of urban settlement. In this light, a look from the coastal and insular koine allows us to restrain from suggesting that only urban sites relevant to the state (and its military and political needs) or to the greater part of the ruling elite survived, as other cities were simply abandoned or became refuge (kastra) (Mango 1980, 73).
As I will return to the latter point later, I would like to stress here that the multi-functional interpretative approach to the issues of transformation and adaptation of the urban “carapace” in terms of architecture, landscape, identity, spatial use, and spatiality, allows a better and comprehensive explanation of the changing relationship between social and human fabric and the urban structures of the same cities (Zanini 2016, 132). Economic criteria are helpful as based on the vitality of urban-oriented elites, which dictated the tempo and the level of demand and therefore of the production and productivity, while at the same time structuring the urban environment along political and administrative as well as religious and cultural lines. From the Late Antiquity onwards, there was always a biunivocal relation between urban economic activities and administrative centrality. The scale of private exchange depended on aristocratic spending power (Wickham 2005, 594). Nevertheless, the open cities, urban-like, or thirdspace functional sites and islets as characterizing a hierarchy of settlement in an insular-coastal koine, enhance a rather resilient level of inter and intra-regional shipping and trading networks and point to the transformation of the socio-economic, political and cultural profile of those same aristocrats now labeled as potentiores (Zanini 2007, 27).
These have been defined as a new-macro class made of civic, military, and religious authorities and characterized essentially by the ownership of locally entrenched social and economic power mainly based on extraurban landed properties (Zanini 2016, 137-9). As these elites remained urban-oriented, they acted as the engine of urban economic resilience and the activity of men and women who lived and worked in smaller and more fragmented, although economically lively, urban housing units (Zanini 2019; Veikou 2019). In this light, archaeology and material culture help us to fully grasp the new patterns of investment on the part of these new elites (as converging more on ecclesiastical buildings), as well as the scale of demonumentalization of the former Classic cityscape as encroached by artisanal and commercial activities.
An interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach pairing literary and material sources is essential here. Urban archaeology has drastically developed over the past decades, and analysis of material indicators has shed light on previously unsuspected avenues of connectivity (Arthur 2018; Decker 2018). So, stratigraphically aware excavations, extensive or intensive urban surveys, ceramics, coins, inscriptions, seals, and metalworks are essential to assess the developments of urban economy, socio-cultural life, and political-administrative identity as well and military functions as reflected in the diversity of regional urban forms, fabric, and townscape (Decker 2016).
This final methodological assertion is indeed in tune with a coda of this introductory chapter. Although a search for different but coherent models and types of Byzantine urbanism in the period between ca. 600 to 1204 will be pursued in the next pages, the discussion of urban trends and developments will be heavily based on archaeology. This not to diminish the importance of literary and documentary sources or simply regard them as a corollary to material evidence. On the one hand, it is true that -as Wickham (2009, 12) states- “early medieval history-writing is a permanent struggle with the few sources available, as historians try, often over and over again, to extract nuanced historical accounts from them.” On the other hand, one should be aware that Byzantine sources were written in the capital by authors who were members of the inner circle of power and deeply enmeshed in Constantinople-centered politics (Kaldellis 2015, 150). Finally, as partially mentioned already, one should take into consideration the limitations and biased perspective offered by Byzantine documentary, legal, and literary evidence as the writers have to abide by the specific rules of a certain tradition (Sarris 2010, 25-8); a good example is offered by hagiographies who produce and advertise a distorted image of the city and urban culture. Saradi, for instance, presents us with a compelling analysis of hagiographical texts from the seventh century to the end of the Byzantine millennium, which highlights how “the setting of most of the Lives is [initially] rural, and this feature has been evidently interpreted as pointing to urban decline [whereas] in the Middle Byzantine era a medieval image of the city and its culture is presented, with detailed descriptions of the poor and of scenes of violence and the public humiliation of pious men” (Saradi 2014, 442).
Here one should, however, not allow the methodological pendulum to the other extreme. Indeed, Byzantine archaeology has long moved from a quest for documenting the narrative of literary sources and acknowledged that the relationship between text and material culture is more complex and more enriching than often thought (Rautman 1990, 146-51; Crow 2010). Jean Roussel (1986), Dunn (1994), and more recently Sarris (2010, 25-31), Decker (2016, 2018), and Tzvikis (2012, 2020) have nevertheless stressed some of the drawbacks of archaeological evidence as they suffered from the reality of research on the ground (Bouras 2002, 498-500). Without any pretense of exhaustivity, one can list here: the little excavation conducted in cities which remained frequented and relevant to the Empire and as a corollary the selective results produced by modern excavations (often conducted in emergency or rescue situations); the misinterpretation of stratigraphy as often stemming from the Classical focus of previous excavations (Wickham 2005, 626; Jacobs 2012, 116); the augmented focus offered by monumental archaeology often centered on major ecclesiastical buildings or prominent fortifications (Dunn 1994, 79; Crow 2010); the predominance of a positivist approach to excavations as opposed to the need for post-processualism in the study of urban sites (Rautman 1990, 158-62; Zanini 2016, 129; Decker 2016, 38-9); and finally, the importance of regarding any gap (as for instance, lack of ceramic finds or coins) as an absence of evidence rather than evidence for absence. Indeed, since any “absence has long been viewed as reflecting real demographic and social change and a reflection of profound reorientations of the nature of urban life in the empire, this model derived from archeology [often] served to reinforce the notion of the decline of Roman civilization and the otherness of Byzantium.” (Decker 2018, 3).
Bio-archaeological, environmental, digital, and archaeometric tools of analysis (Quiroga 2016, 88-91; Haldon 2016, 215-48), and the extensive and stratigraphically aware excavations conducted on continuously frequented Byzantine sites like Amorium, Corinth, Gortyn and Pergamon appeared to have offset abovementioned issues (at least partially). More important, if material culture and archaeology are part of the perceived space whereas literary sources show us the conceived space, we remain in the dark when it comes to urban lived space and spatial experiences particularly. Therefore, one cannot but recognize that we can outbid the invisibility of the urban population and, in particular, its elites by embracing an archaeology of people and their everyday life instead of an archaeology of monuments (Horden and Purcell 2000, 88-122). Indeed, De Certeau (1984, 94) sees a city as a combination of buildings and streets as well as the movements and actions of its inhabitants. It is, therefore, essential to consider those creative strategies of adaptation urban dwellers employed as they navigated throughout urban spaces and society for this entails a dialogic and polyphonic relationship between the urbanites and the cityscape (Hartnett 2017, 14).
In this light, it will be possible to look at phenomena like the encroachment of colonnaded streets or public spaces by residential (or commercial) structures as a part of a bottom-up view of the urban entity with the inhabitants assigning new meanings, use, and function to existing buildings. For instance, Veikou (2020, 25) has recently stressed the importance of reconsidering spatial practices of encroachment and subdivision of residential buildings as read less in simple terms of crisis, fear, and increase insecurity. In this light, one can consider the less conspicuous (archaeologically) but nevertheless essential role played by the infrastructures related to the supply of water and bread (Giorgi 2017). Following the flow of urban waters (aqueducts, fountains, and pipelines) and tracing the location of those structures deputed to baking and distributing bread are formidable tools to understand how the way urban spaces were structured and organized; investigating the traces of bread production instead helps us to fathom the ways in which those spaces functioned on daily basis (Zanini 2015, 373). In this way, archaeology further allows us to overcome the distorting effects of a large number of bifocal perspectives (state / local elites, capital/provincial cities, polis/kastron, city/countryside), which scholars have used to grasp with the trajectory of Byzantine urbanism between the end of Late Antiquity and the fall of the Byzantine empire in 1204. After all, as Christie (2006, 19-20) concludes, “archaeology offers an alternative and complementary tapestry of the past in terms of the buildings, material, and lifestyle of those people [elites and not] who populated [...] periods of historic transitions [...] Thus if historical data might allow us to perceive why and how such changes occurred; the archaeology allows us to view how individuals, [urban] settlements and the state responded, tried to respond or adapted to ever-changing circumstances.”
Indeed, it is my intention to unravel a tapestry as composed by the abovementioned themes in the following chapters of the book. As this conclusive part is, therefore the third and final movement of this introductory symphony I would like to briefly introduce the reader to the structure of the book. Chapter 2 will try to follow the trail of Byzantine historiography and the methodological implications the main sources different scholars have used to interpret the transformation of Byzantine cities in the period under scrutiny. It will try to move away from the traditional historiographical debate on continuity vs. discontinuity in the Roman and Late Antique city into the Middle Ages. Indeed, one should realize that this dichotomic paradigm of rise and fall hinges on both a superficial notion of decline that can only impede a full consideration of the dynamics of urban functional change and renewal, and the idea that for the two centuries after Phocas (602-10) Byzantium was in a state of constant crisis (Cormack 1990, 26). This not to gloss over the struggle for survival which the Byzantine empire faced for natural catastrophe and warfare dominated a large part of the seventh-to-ninth century (Auzépy 2009), but rather to stress that chronological and geographical variations do not entail any generalization cause the whole state did not disintegrate overnight (Bouras 2002, 501).
In this light, a diachronic approach will be proposed as it will be framed first and foremost by the fragmentation of the Mediterranean shipping routes and networks of exchange, the demographic consequence of the Arab and Avar-Slavic invasions- as paired by forced migrations and transplantation of population across the empire, and -more importantly- the reorganization of the administrative, military and political Imperial structures which (for the most part) remained in place through the eleventhcentury crisis and the arrival of the Norman and the Seljuks until the Fourth Crusade.
As a result, Chap. 3 will offer a regional —-or perhaps even subregionalviewpoint presenting the reader the various and mutable incarnations of Byzantine cities. As mentioned, and as the exceptional Constantinopolitan urban history and life will not be but sporadically included in the present overview (Magdalino 2007), this book will comprise the so-called periphery of Byzantium (as part and parcel of the abovementioned Byzantine koine) since heretofore urbanism on Byzantine islands (and distant coastal outlets) has too often been regarded as irrelevant to the transformations happening in the Byzantine heartland. Indeed, urban structures, infrastructures, and functions always developed according to local and peculiar practices as well as expedient needs. In this sense, Anatolia, the Aegean as well as the insular coastal koine reflected their multifaceted and diverse, although in general resilient, fiscal and political bonds with the capital and its court. Nevertheless, key studies will be singled out in tune with a regional /sub-regional approach, for, in my opinion, it will allow the reader to better grasp the common traits as well as the peculiarities of urban development across different territories and local geo-morphologies of the empire.
The period under scrutiny clearly reflects the ebbs and flows experienced by imperial Byzantium: after the Fourth Crusade, its political control over large swaths of territories was basically non-existent, and other polities became major players in the regions formerly under Constantinopolitan sway; nevertheless, it must be emphasized that regardless of the variegated and changeable forms of Byzantine urbanism, cities always remained the foci of political and social attention on the part of both secular and religious authorities and furthermore the center of the economic interests of local landowning elites. I am positive that the transformation experienced by the Byzantine urban landscape in the six centuries under scrutiny here can afford us a better grasp of changes to the Byzantine central and provincial administrative apparatus: the fiscal machinery, military institutions, socio-economic structures, and religious organization. Indeed, and echoing Stravinsky, we should remember that the principle of the endless melody (urbanism) is the perpetual becoming of a music (played by the state, its elites, and its populations) that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
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