Download PDF | Byzantium, Venice And The Medieval Adriatic Spheres Of Maritime Power And Influence, C. 700 - 1453
By : Magdalena Skoblar
425 Pages
Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic
The Adriatic has long occupied a liminal position between different cultures, languages and faiths. This book offers the first synthesis of its history between the seventh and the mid-fifteenth century, a period coinciding with the existence of the Byzantine empire which, as heir to the Roman empire, laid claim to the region.
The period also saw the rise of Venice and it is important to understand the conditions which would lead to her dominance in the Late Middle Ages. An international team of historians and archaeologists examines trade, administration and cultural exchange between the Adriatic and Byzantium but also within the region itself, and makes more widely known much previously scattered and localised research and the results of archaeological excavations in both Italy and Croatia. Their bold interpretations offer many stimulating ideas for rethinking the entire history of the Mediterranean during the period.
MAGDALENA SKOBLAR was a postdoctoral research fellow at the British School at Athens and the British School at Rome from 2013 to 2015. Specialising in Early Medieval art, she is also the author of Figural Sculpture in Eleventh-Century Dalmatia and Croatia (2017).
Foreword
JUDITH HERRIN
Several years ago, when the Directors of the British Schools at Athens and Rome, Dr Cathy Morgan and Dr Christopher Smith, considered ways of strengthening the links between their two institutions, they decided to inaugurate a collaborative venture. The aim was to bring together scholars working in their respective areas of interest to stimulate new research in regions shared by both Greece and Italy, whether in the distant eras BCE or during more recent historical periods.
My proposal of a topic focused on the Adriatic seemed to generate considerable potential, both as a threshold for those travelling to Byzantium in the East and as a point of entry to northern Italy and transalpine Europe for those coming to the West. It is a great pleasure to welcome the book that results from this investigation. Resembling a vast inland fjord, the Adriatic consists of three basins, the northern, central and southern one at the Straits of Otranto that leads into the Ionian Sea and on to the Mediterranean.
At its narrowest points, both north and south, it can be comfortably sailed in the summer with a fair wind on a long day, between eleven and twelve hours. As a thoroughfare, most north-south routes hug the Adriatic shores, which present major differences. On the Italian side, the western edge has long sandy beaches that traditionally did not provide much safe mooring, and its small natural harbours were inadequate for larger fleets. Julius Caesar’s construction of a much larger port at Classe on the east, matched by another at Misenum on the west, provided naval bases for the two Roman fleets attached to the eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean.
From Classe, established sea routes linked Ravenna and the Po Valley to Aquileia in the north, to Pula (Pola) in Istria directly opposite and further south to Split (Salona). As Bari and Otranto became more active ports in southern Italy they provided comparable links to Durrés (Dyrrachion) and Zadar (Zara) and to the major islands of Corfu (Kerkyra) and Kephalenia and Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. In Late Antiquity the western coast belonged to the Roman world and was closely related to its hinterland by the Roman road system.
In contrast, the eastern Adriatic is deeply indented and fragmented by numerous islands scattered along its Istrian, Croatian and Dalmatian coastline, with many harbours, hidden pirate bases and small independent communities. The dominant line of the Dinaric Alps that descend to the sea in karst cliffs along several inlets also isolated coastal regions from their hinterland. With much less stable land links to the mainland powers of the interior, inhabitants of the eastern coasts naturally looked seaward for their contacts and mariners and seafaring merchants practised a cabotage or carrying trade under sail between centres rather than using land transport.
Yet this geographical setting could be transformed, as when Narses, the Byzantine military commander, in 551 employed local people to build pontoon bridges across the many river indents around the northern head of the Adriatic that normally made it impossible to march an army along this route. As a result, he surprised the Goths when his forces appeared on the coastal road from Aquileia.
While the northern and southern parts of the Adriatic present equally striking differences, a sense of the maritime corridor’s unity in linking the provinces of Venetia and Histria with Epiros and Sicily was very clear to those who made ancient maps such as the Tabula Peutigeriana as well as the first portulan maps centuries later. This suggested additional reasons for examining the role of the Adriatic and activity within it from the crucial transitional period of the sixth to eighth centuries and on through the Middle Ages into the fifteenth century. Across this long chronological span, the papers collected in this volume demonstrate how the Adriatic served as such a significant link between West and East.
My own interest in the Adriatic stemmed from an exploration of the role of Ravenna in linking Constantinople to the West, as it did between 540 and 751 when it was ruled by the ‘Queen City’, capital of the eastern half of the Roman empire. In addition, from 402 Ravenna had served as the sedes regiae, the ruling city of the western Roman world and had developed a serious administrative capacity centred on the imperial court, which became in turn the court of the Gothic kings and then of the Byzantine exarchs appointed as governors by Constantinople. With all the trappings of a governmental hub, the city had attracted many ambitious young men and women to find employment and make a career, an advantageous marriage and a fortune. Ravenna was thus distinctly different from ancient Rome, which became a city almost entirely dominated by its bishops, who oversaw its Christian role.
In addition, through its port at Classe, Ravenna was intimately connected with the east Mediterranean. From Constantinople it received asteady stream of career diplomats and military commanders, who also brought news of new artistic fashions, architectural schemes, theological debates and scientific and philosophical developments.
From Cyprus it imported portable ovens (clibani); from the east Mediterranean amphorae used as acoustic measures in church domes; from Gaza and the Aegean sweet wines - also carried in amphorae - and from Alexandria, its writing material, papyrus, wheat and dates probably stored in baskets of woven palm fronds, as well as Eastern spices, glass, china and silks that entered the Mediterranean world via Egypt.
Ravenna was also well connected with the West, importing all manner of ceramic vessels with distinct functions from Carthage, the centre of African Red Slip ware, as well as grain and the famous fish paste, garum, which flavoured so many Late Antique dishes from places in the western Mediterranean like Carthagena. The church of Ravenna had profitable estates in Sicily, which provided grain, olive oil and wine and much of this imported grain appears to have been sold on to other distributors in northern Italy.
I was also intrigued by the description of the Adriatic provided by an anonymous cosmographer based in Ravenna around the year 700. Unlike other ancient geographers who wrote a Mediterranean periplous (a journey around the entire “Roman pond’) that started at the Pillars of Hercules and worked clockwise around the sea, the anonymous cosmographer began in the city of his birth, nobelissima Ravenna, moving down the western coast of the Adriatic, naming all the ports and cities familiar to the Roman world.
He proceeded through the Strait of Messina and followed the west coast of Italy around to Gaul and Spain, across to Africa, east to Alexandria and thence to Constantinople, moving anticlockwise. After a complete tour of the Black Sea, his route returned to the Mediterranean to hug the coasts of Greece and finally to enter the Adriatic from the south. In his report on the eastern coast from Durrés (Dyrrachion) to Ravenna, a distance of 16,000 miles, he stated that there were seventy-two cities and listed sixty-nine, many of them well known. He included some inland centres as well as a large number of islands, many with unfamiliar names such as Nisiris, Sarona and Malata, not recorded on ancient maps, others whose names, he said, were not known.
In adding to the lists of ports and centres familiar to Late Antique geographers, the anonymous cosmographer provided a base for comparison with later periods when different points became significant and new centres replaced older ones. It is, nonetheless, striking that when Venice gained dominance over the Adriatic, it was precisely along the eastern coastline that it sought to impose its rule, often in the same key places that had been noted by the Ravenna scholar.
The cosmographer’s considerable interest in the seventh- and eighthcentury Adriatic suggested that a much broader exploration of the sea as a vital link between Istria, Dalmatia, north-eastern Italy and the wider Mediterranean to the south might be a useful collaborative project. My hope that it might lead to new ways of investigating the unity or break-up of the Mediterranean world, theories that had long dominated historical analysis, as well as the much revised Pirenne thesis on the impact of Arab expansion in its trading patterns, is brilliantly summarised in the opening chapter by Richard Hodges.
The project also offered an opportunity to involve archaeologists who had been working in Albania, Dalmatia and Croatia together with those from much better-known sites in Italy and the east Mediterranean. This is demonstrated by the work of Richard Hodges and Joanita Vroom from Butrint and case studies by Sauro Gelichi on new settlements in the northern Adriatic, by Trpimir Vedri3 on Dalmatia and by Jean-Marie Martin on Apulia. It promised a confrontation of older and more recently elaborated theories of the rise of Venice and its role in the Adriatic, addressed by Stefano Gasparri, Sauro Gelichi, Peter Frankopan and Michael Angold.
It also raised the issue of the Byzantine failure to defend Ravenna, which fell decisively under Lombard control in 751 only to be conquered by the Franks, summoned by Pope Stephen II, developments that profoundly altered the formation of western Europe, as well as Constantinople’s determination to consolidate imperial loyalty among the inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Adriatic and its success in preserving influence in Apulia.
These aspects are addressed by Francesco Borri in his study of the eclipse of Byzantium’s imperial presence in the Adriatic, by Tom Brown in the development of Ravenna and other cities post-751 and by Jean-Marie Martin for the development of southern Italy. Here the use of seals, icons and coins by Pagona Papadopoulou, Magdalena Skoblar and Trpimir Vedris add considerably to our grasp of the material culture of the Adriatic.
Finally, towards the end of the period under consideration, this project addressed aspects of Venetian control over the Adriatic that demonstrated how Venice gradually broke free from its loyalty to Constantinople and the ideal of Christian unity was destroyed by the crusades, a process illuminated by Michael Angold and Peter Frankopan. Given the replacement of the Byzantine imperial capital by the Latin empire established after the Fourth Crusade, this development had to be examined from several different angles.
Analysing the evidence for Venetian activity in the eastern Adriatic, Oliver Jens Schmitt corrects the national perspectives that dominated previous research, employing the archive of Kortula, while Guillaume Saint-Guillain shows how the Venetians recorded their own conquests, though the surviving documents are copies and epitomes of original treaties. Christopher Wright looks at the changes in Venetian participation in the crusading venture and Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan draws attention to some of the consequences of Venice’s ambitions in the migration of Albanians and Dalmatians to the city.
The idea of a conference that would unite the interests of both British Schools of
Archaeology has now been realised in the extremely interesting contributions to this volume. I would like to record my special thanks to the Directors of the British Schools of Athens and Rome at the time, to the British Academy for funding the project and to Kirsty Stewart, who took on the major editorial role to bring the project into final form. Above all, I salute Magdalena Skoblar, who developed it into a practical realisation as the conference that took place in Rome in January 2015 and then persuaded the contributors to deliver their work. Without her insistence and dedication, the volume would never have found its printed form in such a fascinating collection of papers.
Acknowledgements
The idea for a volume about the medieval Adriatic was one of the main drivers of the Adriatic Connections programme, which was generously funded by the British Academy from 2013 to 2015. This area was identified as being worthy of research by Judith Herrin and her initiative resulted in a collaborative project that brought together the British School at Athens and the British School at Rome. The two research institutes, led by Catherine Morgan and Christopher Smith (their respective directors during that period), co-hosted my postdoctoral project on the cult of the Virgin Mary in the Early Medieval Adriatic. The chapters in this volume are based on a three-day conference - The Adriatic as a Threshold to Byzantium I organised at the British School at Rome in January 2015.
The meeting gathered historians, archaeologists and art historians, both established and emerging, who discussed the nature of the Byzantine presence in the Adriatic. This volume contains most of the papers presented, and over the course of the four years following the conference the contributors have refined their arguments and updated them with new research findings that have emerged since then.
I would like to thank John Bennet, the current director of the British School of Athens, for overseeing the completion of the volume with great patience and Kirsty Stewart without whom the editing process would have stalled. I am thankful for the helpful feedback I received from Liz James while preparing the proposal for this book and I am also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. I need to mention the superb work of Jean Birrel and Duncan Hardy, who translated two chapters from French into English. I am lucky to have benefitted from the advice of Judith Herrin and Chis Wickham while working on this volume. I feel privileged that they always replied to my queries with kindness and patience.
A special thanks goes to the authors of the chapters: I have learnt a lot from their contributions and communicating with them has been a pleasure. Michael Sharp, Hal Churchman and Katie Idle at Cambridge University Press have been extremely helpful - I am grateful to all three. I am indebted to Alessandra Cianciosi, Margherita Ferri and Andrea Ninfo for their help with Sauro Gelichi’s illustrations and to Bettina Schwartz and Christian Kurtze of the Austrian Archaeological Institute at Vienna for providing me with the permits for two of Joanita Vroom’s illustrations. Finally, I would like to thank Nikolina Uroda and Ivan Basi¢ for their help with obtaining literature and advice in general. A huge thank you is reserved for Paul Jones for his great patience and support.
Magdalena Skoblar
Note on Citation, Transliteration, Names, Titles and Dates
Throughout the book, I have used a slightly modified author-date referencing system of the Annual of the British School at Athens to conform to the prevalent style of the School’s publications. For this reason, primary sources are cited in the following manner: John the Deacon, Istoria Veneticorum 2.19, where the numbers refer to the relevant book and chapter, or, dependent on the edition, Niketas Choniates, Historia, 54-6, where the numbers refer to the pages of the edition used.
I have applied minimum capitalisation in the titles of articles and chapters, while maximum capitalisation is used for the titles of books published in English. The titles of non-English publications follow the norms of their respective languages, for example Archeologia medievale, Versus marini, Byzance et [Italie méridionale.
I have not transliterated the details of publications in Cyrillic and Greek provided in the list of references. For the transliteration of Greek words and phrases in the text, I thought the non-Romanised convention is more appropriate for a volume examining the exent of Byzantine presence in the Adriatic.
With regard to the geographical terminology, it follows the language spoken in the relevant country whenever possible and so there is ‘Zadar’, ‘Dubrovnik’ and “Durrés’ either instead of or alongside ‘Zara’, ‘Ragusa’ and ‘Dyrrachion’, that is, ‘Durazzo’. Exceptions to this rule are commonly accepted equivalents such as ‘Venice’ but also mentions of historic regions in the south Adriatic and the Balkans which did not give names to modernday countries, for example, “Diokleia’ instead of “Duklja’. For these geographical names and for Greek, that is, Byzantine names, I have followed the transliteration used in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, hence the appellative ‘Porphyrogennetos’ rather than ‘Porphyrogenitus.’
Titles such as ‘king’, ‘emperor’ and ‘bishop’ are capitalised when preceding a person’s name. Since this volume covers the period in which the inhabitants of Venice had a leader who bore the title of dux, I have used the title ‘duke’ when editing the chapters that mention Venice prior to the eleventh century and the usual ‘doge’ for the events form the eleventh century onward.
All dates mentioned in the book refer to the Christian Era except for the few which are marked as ‘BCE’. With regard to the regnal years of emperors and kings, I have maintained the contributors’ choice whether to use them or not; I have done the same for the pontificates of popes and bishops.
Introduction
MAGDALENA SKOBLAR
A complex, fragmented space in a complex, fragmented time, the Medieval Adriatic is often subsumed into grand historiographic narratives focusing on the great powers that governed it throughout this period. By taking a different perspective, centred on the Adriatic itself, this volume paints a more nuanced picture, which attends to and illuminates the realities of the local communities of this region and their entanglement, first with the Byzantine empire, and then with Venice. Despite being a major channel of communications between East and West in this period, long-standing political fragmentation and linguistic differences have led to a lack of dedicated scholarly attention to this region as a whole.
This volume addresses this gap by bringing together the work of an international group of sixteen scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, to generate powerful new perspectives on the Medieval Adriatic, and makes much material available to a wider audience for the first time, particularly new archaeological evidence and existing scholarship previously only published in Italian or Croatian. This introduction sets up the volume by outlining the broad context for the Adriatic in this period, before underlining the scholarly rationale for this volume in more detail and providing an overview of each chapter.
Positioning the Adriatic
Separated from the rest of the Mediterranean by the length of Italy, the Adriatic resembles an elongated lake, or a sea within a sea; it is only 70 km wide at its southernmost end, the Straits of Otranto, where it becomes the Ionian Sea and laps at the shores of Greece (Map 1). Through Venice, sitting at the top of the sea in the north, the Adriatic is a gateway to the Alps. The settlement that gave the sea its name, Adria near Rovigo, is also found in the north and Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and Thucydides referred only to the northern half of the sea as the Adriatic (6 ‘ASpias), while the southern section was called the Ionian Gulf. Conversely, Strabo and Ptolemy called the present-day Ionian Sea the Adriatic Sea and, in the sixth century, Procopius used the same name for the body of water between Malta and Crete (Rapske 1994; Smith 1878, vol. 1, 28).
The long east and west coasts could not be more different, prompting Jacques Le Goff (2001, 7) to call the Adriatic an “asymmetrical sea’. While the western, Italian side is gently undulating with very few offshore islands, the crenellated eastern shoreline (predominantly in present-day Croatia) features many inlets and island archipelagos with natural anchorages.
As ‘not only a sea with two shores, the western and the eastern, but also with two spaces, one northern and another southern’ (Sabaté 2016, 11), the Adriatic is a quartered sea, easily given to fragmentation and compartmentalisation. Only the Roman empire managed to claim the whole sea as a unified space and, even then, when Diocletian divided the empire the separation line split it in two down its east-west axis. Following shortlived unifications under Constantine I, Julian the Apostate and Theodosius I, the final division in 395 assigned the Adriatic to the western half of the empire. But this was only the brief endgame of Rome: in the fifth century the western empire collapsed and the Goths made their way into Italy and Dalmatia.
It would take two military campaigns, from 535 to 554, by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I to regain Italy and Dalmatia and bring them under the administration of Constantinople, that is, Byzantium. From this point onwards, what we call the Byzantine empire had a vested interest in the Adriatic. It established an exarchate at Ravenna (584-751), dispatched its own fleet when the Franks advanced too far into the Veneto and Dalmatia (805 and 808), battled against the Normans in Durrés/Dyrrachion (1081) and regained the eastern Adriatic during the reign of Manuel I Komnenos in the second half of the twelfth century. It also fostered the diplomatic practice of bestowing prestigious titles, gifts of luxury objects, money and relics on local rulers and elites in exchange for their support and loyalty.
Without this application of what Jonathan Shepard (2018, 4-5) termed Byzantium’s ‘Soft Power’, there would have been no Venice as we know it. This hybrid city, tied to the sea but open to the hinterland, neither western nor eastern, was never Byzantine, and yet has traditionally been perceived as such in the scholarship. Of all the Adriatic cities Byzantium wanted to keep in its sphere of influence, only Venice - a city of no Roman substrate - proved to be a long-term ally, albeit not without challenges.
The loss of the unified Adriatic space of the Roman empire created a vacuum filled by the memory of it, and it is this aspect of Byzantium Byzantium as the heir of Rome - that proved to be irresistible to the local communities once included in the western half of the empire. Despite this connection, the Latin-speaking men and women of Ravenna, which remained in the hands of Byzantium as the seat of its exarchate until 751, had different mores and concerns to those of faraway Constantinople, which too frequently remains the only yardstick for all things Byzantine.
The same can be said about Venice. In fact, in the early eleventh century, the difference between Venice and Byzantium was so great that when Maria Argyropoula, the Byzantine aristocratic bride of Duke Pietro II Orseolo’s son Giovanni, had to leave Constantinople for her new home in the lagoon, she did so with a heavy heart (John the Deacon, Istoria Veneticorum 4.71), knowing that she was leaving a society where food was eaten with a fork and regular baths were considered normal. In 1006, not long after she arrived in Venice, Maria, Giovanni and their small son all died of the plague.
Maria’s ways became the stuff of legends - another indication of a culture difference - and by the second half of the eleventh century St Peter Damian (Opusculum quinquagesimum, col. 744), the Ravennate reformer, was using her tragic story as a warning about the ‘decadent and sybaritic ways of the east’ (Nicol 1999, 46-7); in his interpretation she was a self-indulgent Byzantine princess who was punished for her vanity with an awful death. Her depravity consisted of collecting rainwater for personal hygiene rather than trusting the Venetian water supply, using cutlery and attempting to block out the stench of the canals in her rooms with perfume and incense.
Generating New Perspectives on the Medieval Adriatic
Following the lines of its historical complexity, the areas of the Adriatic and the region as a whole have been fragmented in knowledge, through the compartmentalising processes of different national historiographic narratives. The southern part can be regarded as an offshoot of the Ionian Sea with no focus beyond Apulia and Durrés. The eastern coast can be understood to be interchangeable with the Croatian shoreline and never to include the Albanian portion. The Adriatic as a whole can be understood and portrayed as nothing more than the domain of Venice. The Adriatic as a sea can be interpreted within the framework of the wider Mediterranean and, without specific discussion, subsumed into everything that is argued for the mother sea. In contrast, the work collected in this volume generates a new and different perspective. It draws attention to the complexities of the Adriatic during the period which coincided with the Middle Ages in western Europe and the existence of the Byzantine empire in the East. It challenges grand narratives and broad generalisations. By looking at different topics, periods and areas, it demonstrates that, after the sixth century and the stability of Justinian’s reign, the Adriatic entered a long phase of fragmentation during which local elites created their own power bubbles a situation that lasted into the eleventh century, when Venice began its expansion.
In illuminating the complex histories of different parts of the Adriatic and their relationship with Byzantium, the sixteen chapters collected here fill a gap in the scholarship. Despite being a major channel of communication between the East and West, this region has so far received little attention. There is more than one reason for that. For much of the twentieth century, political restrictions closed the majority of the eastern coast to researchers from western Europe and America. Extensive transnational projects require funding, collaboration and management that go beyond the remit of the national institutions in control of key collections of material. Sharing of information, often in minority languages, was cumbersome, especially before the advent of the digital age. With Croatia’s transition from post-Communist nation state to EU member (1991-2013) and the gradual opening up of Albania in the 1990s, followed by its application for EU membership in 2009, barriers facing Western scholars have diminished. A number of important archaeological excavations in the Adriatic also necessitated a re-examination of this region and its relationship with the transalpine world and the East. Excavations by Sauro Gelichi in Comacchio and the Venetian lagoon and by Richard Hodges in Butrint have yielded new finds and findings with which scholarship needs to engage.
This book therefore presents a considerable amount of new material and information that was previously inaccessible to a large English-speaking audience. It also brings together contributions from a group of international scholars whose work on the Adriatic has been produced in different linguistic and political contexts which often did not intersect. The contributors explore a wide range of specific topics, ranging from political, naval and economic history to trade and cultural exchange, in different periods and areas, and through this challenge grand narratives and broad generalisations.
Together, they create a picture of the Adriatic as a node between Byzantium, Italy and the West that was thoroughly transformed after the sixth century and the stability of Justinian’s reign. The region entered a long phase of fragmented local power until Venetian expansion began in the eleventh century. Cashing in on the fortuitous constellation of events, including the downturn in Byzantine political power after the loss of Anatolia following the defeat at Manzikert in 1071, the loss of Italy to the Normans and the launching of the crusades, Venice began integrating the Adriatic into its own possession — the Golfo di Venezia. As early as the twelfth century, the northernmost portion of the sea was known as the gulf of Venice: this is how al-Idrisi referred to it in the Book of Roger. By the end of the fifteenth, the whole Adriatic would be named after the northern city state.
Venice’s dogged pursuit of what she thought of as rightfully hers resulted in successes such as the renegotiation of a trade deal with Byzantium to include tax exemptions on Corfu and Crete in 1147, the acquisition of Greek territories and Crete after 1204 and the submission of Dalmatia, especially Zadar, which was finally claimed in 1409. What started off as just one of the settlements in a northern Adriatic lagoon had become a powerhouse by the fifteenth century.
The chapters of this book are arranged chronologically in order to provide an overview of these developments and enable readers to navigate easily the diverse range of times, places, topics and disciplinary approaches collected here. Inevitably, Venice looms large because of its historical and historiographic significance and the difficulty in balancing out this focus within this volume indicates a broader asymmetry in the scholarship. Apulia also features prominently (albeit to a lesser degree) and Dalmatia is interwoven into several contributions, as is the city of Ravenna, along with Durrés and Butrint. In fact, the volume opens with a chapter on Butrint (Richard Hodges), which starts with the sixth century before illuminating the Early Medieval dip and the eleventh-century revival of this port. The concluding chapter (Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan) takes us up to the 1510s with its reassessment of the integration of eastern Adriatic migrants in fifteenth-century Venice.
A number of chapters engage with dominant trends in scholarship, such as the uniformity of the Mediterranean, the Byzantine-ness of Venice and the asymmetric study of the Venetian Stato da Mar, which neglects Dalmatia. This zooming in and out of Adriatic subregions and coastal centres helps situate the Adriatic in the wider context of the relationship with the Byzantine empire and, even more broadly, as a part of the Mediterranean. Traits such as ecology, micro-regions and connectivity, identified by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in their interpretative model for the Mediterranean as a whole, are also found in the Adriatic. However, this volume demonstrates that their overarching framework does not fit the Adriatic, at least not in the Early Middle Ages.
The Contributions
As Richard Hodges argues in his contribution to this volume, the Early Medieval period was marked by the erosion of unity. He begins the volume by focusing on Butrint from the sixth to the eleventh century, as a case study for the issue of continuity versus discontinuity in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Drawing on his archaeological excavations and the research findings of the team associated with the Butrint Foundation project (1994-2010), Hodges gives an overview of this southern Adriatic port in present-day Albania. From its early origins as a marginal place during the Roman empire, Butrint grew in the first half of the sixth century, only to contract, significantly becoming almost a ghost town in the seventh. By the 840s life moved to its outskirts in the Vrina Plain, where an undefended settlement traded goods with Salento and the south-west Balkans. The town itself was renewed only in the second half of the tenth and the early eleventh century, which saw the construction of new fortifications and planned buildings.
By seeing Butrint as a representative example of a wider phenomenon, Hodges questions Horden and Purcell’s main argument that the Mediterranean was and remains a unified sea, enabling continuity and connectivity. He disagrees with their assessment of the Early Middle Ages as a one-off ‘dip’ in their longue durée model of continuity, arguing that the unified nature of the Roman Mediterranean was the exception rather than the rule, and that the Adriatic and the Mediterranean were affected by a period of serious discontinuity, beginning in the seventh century. At Butrint, this disconnection lasted until the mid-tenth century. Assessing the Adriatic as a whole, Hodges concludes that it was a unified region only in the first half of the sixth century, and then again in the eleventh.
Joanita Vroom investigates the links between the Adriatic and Byzantium from the perspective of pottery across the seventh to fifteenth centuries. She traces the distribution of imported amphorae and table wares found at Butrint, connecting them to sites in southern Italy, the Adriatic and the Aegean. As indicated by Hodges in his chapter, the contraction of Butrint during the period between the seventh and the ninth century did not mean the end of trade: pottery was still imported from the south and north of Italy, Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean. Relatively small, modest ships were a common sight in the eastern Aegean and the Adriatic. After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, the trade in Butrint shifted towards the west. Meanwhile, the table wares produced in Salento were exported to the Peloponnese, coinciding with the efforts of the Angevins to penetrate the eastern Mediterranean via the trade routes of Venetian ships in the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea.
Francesco Borri looks at Byzantine involvement with the Adriatic after the sixth century. Highlighting the turn of the eighth century as a point at which the Byzantine presence in the Adriatic starts to recede and becomes limited to the south, that is, Otranto, but pointing out that this did not halt commercial exchange, Borri investigates what may have been the reason behind Byzantium’s failure to maintain control over the majority of the Adriatic. He argues that the empire’s inability to punish local communities for not paying taxes resulted in their growing independence. At the same time, the fall of Ravenna meant that its rivals could develop rapidly. These eighth-century developments worried Byzantium but, despite the efforts of Emperor Leo III and his son Constantine V, Byzantine authority could not be re-established in the Adriatic without a military intervention. By the end of the eighth century and the turn of the ninth, the Franks encroached upon the northern Adriatic and although Byzantium did manage to muster a fleet to deal with the threat at this time, it was met with resistance from the local elites.
This northern area is discussed by Stefano Gasparri, who examines the relationship of the nascent duchy of Venice with the Lombard kingdom on the one hand, and Byzantine territories in Italy on the other. He draws attention to the fact that the Venetian lagoon was heavily militarised under the exarchate of Ravenna, which prevented it from forming trade relationships with the Lombards after they captured it. Instead, this opportunity was seized by Comacchio and Venice would have to wait until the ninth century to take the baton of mercantile primacy in the area. With the loss of Ravenna, Byzantium turned to Venice, Istria and Dalmatia and this Romano-Byzantine community in the Adriatic would eventually become Venice’s playground. The same area was at the top of the Carolingian list at the turn of the ninth century and it was only after the Treaty of Aachen (812) that things began to settle for Venice. The new duchy remained in the sphere of Byzantium, but Venice’s Byzantine character was far from pure and Gasparri contests the historiographical narrative about this, urging us to see Venice for what it was: a hybrid created by a continuing balancing act between Byzantium, the Italian Terraferma and the Adriatic.
That the Venetian lagoon was in a state of flux in the Early Medieval period is evident from its settlements, which Sauro Gelichi’s contribution elucidates. His archaeological excavations and research in general have shaken up traditional scholarship on the emergence of Venice and continue to challenge the grand historiographical narratives on the city state’s origins. In this volume he demonstrates that Early Medieval settlements were cropping up in the northern Adriatic arc and rejects the traditional explanation that this was caused by the mass migration of people from the hinterland in the face of barbarian invasions. Apart from Altinum, all the other Roman cities around the lagoon continued to be inhabited. The new settlements, in contrast, were determined by the interests of the emerging aristocracies.
Gelichi interprets these new sites as centres of local power and trade, which aspired to become city-like and refrains from judging them based on whether they succeeded or not. His focus is on the Venetian lagoon and the picture of it that emerges by the eighth century is one of a territory dotted with many sprouting settlements, none of which was dominant. Urban aspirations were fulfilled in those sites that became episcopal seats such as Torcello, Olivolo, Cittanova, Metamauco and Equilo, and later on, those that were centres of the political power of a duke, the most famous one being that of Venice (the future doge).
A site on the east Adriatic coast that has been continually inhabited well before Antiquity - Zadar - is discussed in detail by Trpimir Vedris. A Roman civitas that survived what Salona, the Dalmatian metropolis, could not - the raids of the Slavs and the Avars in the seventh century Zadar became a seat of a Byzantine official by the end of the eighth century, while simultaneously witnessing the settlement of the Croats in its hinterland and the creation of their principality in the ninth. The conflict between the Franks and Byzantium in the upper Adriatic at the turn of the ninth century led to the demarcation between the two empires as stipulated by the aforementioned Treaty of Aachen. Zadar and a handful of other coastal towns, all of them with a Roman past, were all that Byzantium received. After the treaty, at some point before the second half of the ninth century, Dalmatia was elevated to the rank of theme with Zadar as its seat. In arguing this, VedriS opposes Vivien Prigent’s opinion that this theme was located in the southern Adriatic and that, therefore, its governors could not have resided in Zadar. Vedris points out that, being home to the Latin Church and surrounded by the principality of Croatia in its immediate hinterland, it certainly was not a typical Byzantine theme and, indeed, it did not last long. However, the prestige associated with the imperial administration was readily embraced: Byzantine titles were received, gold coins circulated and letters with lead seals were opened. As was the case at Ravenna, the notion of Roman identity, especially in contrast to the new peoples settled in the hinterland, was embedded in Zadar thanks to the cultural cache of Byzantium as the new Rome.
The local elites bolstered their status by being associated with imperial administration, while nevertheless remaining on the fringes of the Byzantine sphere.
The local component was also a determining factor in the fate of Ravenna after its fall, when it ceased to be a Byzantine stronghold. Tom Brown reassesses the position of post-Byzantine Ravenna by pointing to new research; he gives an overview of the city’s transformation into an autonomous organism led by its archbishops, who sought favours from western kings and amassed land holdings. Trade links continued with the eastern Mediterranean, while new mercantile relationships were forged with the towns situated in the Po Valley. Brown emphasises the Late Antique, that is, Roman element of Byzantine Ravenna and states that, even with the rise of local autonomy, the empire remained in the collective consciousness as ‘the gold standard’ of culture. The rule of the Ravennate archbishops came to an end in the eleventh century with the Investiture Controversy and the growing importance of the neighbouring communes of Bologna and Ferrara.
After the fall of Ravenna in 751, Byzantium only managed to re-establish its rule in the Adriatic by regaining Apulia in the 870s, after a period of Lombard control and the brief existence of the emirate of Bari. Initially, Apulia was attached to the theme of Kephalenia, but at the turn of the tenth century it became the theme of Longobardia. Jean-Marie Martin makes it clear that this did not mean that the empire exercised sovereignty in all of Apulia in the first half of the tenth century, but shows that Byzantium was tempted to obtain loyalty through the concession of high dignities to the local elites rather than create a separate theme. However, the first thing it did was to found new ports on the Adriatic to enable communication with the opposite coast. Around 970, the theme of Longobardia was replaced by the katepanate of Italy, corresponding to the same territory, remaining Latin in character and adhering to the Lombard law. The new government set about establishing cities in the interior to populate these areas but managed to impose Byzantine taxation only in the eleventh century. Martin’s overview shows that the empire succeeded in integrating Apulia but that it took a very long time and required considerable efforts, something that was not done in the case of Dalmatia. The arrival of the Normans undid what the Byzantines had taken eighty years to achieve and Apulia passed into their hands over the course of two decades.
The next two chapters discuss networks of exchange and trade from the ninth to the eleventh century. Pagona Papadopoulou looks at the sigillographic evidence during this period to identify a communication pattern between the two southern Adriatic coasts, and between both of them and Byzantium. She includes in her examination the Greek coast of the Ionian Sea. Hugely important as primary sources, Byzantine lead seals tell us who communicated with who and in what capacity, but, as Papadopoulou remarks, only when their provenance is known and their inscription is read correctly. Papadopoulou observes an anomaly when it comes to the eastern Adriatic coast that only further archaeological excavations in Albania and Dalmatia might explain better. It lies in the fact that all the seals struck by the officials from this side were found in remote areas and none nearby. Exactly the opposite was the case with Apulia, where the seals of ecclesiastical and military officials tend to be found in the neighbouring areas, although, generally speaking, seals were not used much in Apulia itself.
My own contribution to this volume focuses on the evidence of icons in the Adriatic before 1204. Following the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in that year, an unprecedented amount of painted panels reached Italy and Dalmatia, where they were readily venerated. I argue in my chapter that the Adriatic was so responsive to this influx because it had already adopted Byzantine icons in the eleventh century. Although only three icons survive from this period (at Ravenna and Trani on the west coast and Rab on the east coast), textual sources record the existence of more icons, both painted and relief, most notably in Apulia. The record of a Marian icon that was carried around Otranto in an expiatory procession at the end of the eleventh century and the mention of two icons exchanged for a portion of a salt pan which the bishop of Siponto obtained from the Tremity Abbey for his church in the 1060s indicate that in Apulia icons did have a liturgical use, albeit not the same as in Byzantine churches.
The six chapters in the second half of this book focus on the Venetian Adriatic, the Golfo di Venezia, and showcase the expansion of the city state from the eleventh century to its dominant position in the fifteenth. Peter Frankopan’s contribution outlines how Venice came to be a major player in the Adriatic in the second half of the eleventh century and, eventually, to pose a threat to Byzantine interests by the second half of the twelfth. Following the fall of Apulia into Norman hands in 1071 and the crushing defeat the Byzantine army suffered at Manzikert against the Seljuk Turks in the same year, Byzantium was weakened. The Norman leader Robert Guiscard crossed the Adriatic and attacked the empire at Durrés in 1081. Asked to help, the Venetians eventually forced the Normans to retreat to Apulia and unblocked the Adriatic.
Frankopan argues that the trading privileges which Emperor Alexios I Komnenos subsequently gave to the Venetians in 1092 were not a reward for their help against the Norman threat. Not limited to Constantinople alone but including other Byzantine ports, the trade deal gave Venice the opportunity to grow a mercantile network, which is exactly what it did. The emperor also granted Venice authority over the cities along the Dalmatian coast, the same ones that were nominally Byzantine in the ninth century, and in doing so sanctioned the campaigns that the Venetians had been undertaking in Dalmatia since the turn of the millennium.
The involvement with the crusades also spurred Venetian economic growth. The shipping of supplies to the western forces in the Holy Land flowed smoothly down the Adriatic and through the network of ports with commercial concessions courtesy of Byzantium. By the late 1150s, in the eyes of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, Venice had become too big for its boots and he established a Byzantine base at Ancona in order to lessen the Venetian grip on the Adriatic. His anti-Venetian campaign culminated with the round-up and arrest of the Venetians living in Constantinople in 1171. However, it was too late to harm Venice, which was so strong that it sacked Zadar in 1202 as a prelude to the sacking of Constantinople two years later.
Michael Angold also highlights the arrest of Venetians in 1171 and addresses the question of why Venice did not break away from its relationship with Byzantium in the twelfth century when it had the opportunity to do so. He argues that there were two main reasons for this.
The first one was related to self-interest: the privileges guaranteed by Byzantine emperors, beginning with the chrysobull of Alexios I Komnenos, translated into commercial success and political power at home. Faced with trade competitors at Pisa and Genoa, Venice wanted a special relationship with the empire. The second reason for remaining loyal to Byzantium seems to have been ideological. Angold writes that the Venetians were proud of their loyalty to the empire or, as they called it, in their own words, ‘Romania’.
As the notion of ‘Romania’ changed to denote Venetian interests in the territory of Byzantium so did the perception the Venetians had of themselves as semper defensores Romanie. The defending of Byzantine interests came to mean the defending of what Venetians thought was best for Byzantium. Emperor Manuel I Komnenos did not appreciate this and wanted to curb growing Venetian self-confidence in general.
He negotiated with Pisan merchants, allowed the Genoese to expand their quarter in Constantinople and established a Byzantine presence in Dalmatia and Ancona. After his arrest of the Venetians in the empire, it does seem odd that Venice wanted to remain aligned with Byzantium, but Angold reminds us that the ties between the two ran deep. Peace was re-established in 1187, followed by a new chrysobull of 1198, issued by Emperor Alexios III Angelos, allowing Venetian representatives for the first time to have a degree of legal authority on Byzantine soil.
The next stage in Venice’s history, the turning point of the first half of the thirteenth century, is examined by Guillaume Saint-Guillain. In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, a document — the Partitio terrarum imperii Romanie - was drawn up outlining how the Byzantine territories were to be split between the conquerors. The Venetians were assigned those along the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea. However, this was no guarantee of actual control over these areas and Venice had to implement its assigned rights on a case-by-case basis.
The process was arduous and consisted of negotiating pacts with local elites, some of which, for example on the west Peloponnese coast, remained out of reach. The pacts did work in the southern Adriatic and by the second half of the century Martino da Canale could write that ‘the Adriatic Sea is part of the duchy of Venice’, confident that it rang true. By securing the Straits of Otranto, Venice held the keys to the eastern Mediterranean and Saint-Guillain rightly points out that this access point was the main reason why controlling the entire Adriatic made sense.
The openness of Venice to the east is also integral to Christopher Wright’s chapter, centred on Venetian involvement in the crusades. Noting that the route to the Holy Land was nothing new for Venice, given its commercial network of outposts already established in the eastern Mediterranean, he traces the process through which Venice extended its domination from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus by the late fourteenth century.
While the Adriatic remained a route that had to be secured in order to reach the final destinations in the east, following the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Venice gained a foothold in the Aegean and started treating it the same way as it did Dalmatia: as a traversing space it needed to control in order to arrive at a destination where it could trade. By benefitting from a set of historical circumstances, such as the change in the demand for its ships to transport crusading armies to the east, which was universal in the thirteenth century but no longer needed in the fourteenth, together with the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and the dwindling naval power of Byzantium, Venice forged its Stato da Mar.
The fifteenth-century integration of most of the Adriatic under the aegis of Venice is addressed by Oliver Jens Schmitt from a historiographic perspective. He stresses the importance of studying the Venetian Adriatic as a transnational region and examines the role played by the national historiographies of the countries involved. Focusing mostly on different approaches to Venetian rule over Dalmatia in the fifteenth century among Italian and Croatian scholars, Schmitt outlines how Croatian studies and archives were left out of Italian studies, while Croatian scholarship was engrossed in discussions about the colonial and exploitative nature of Venetian government. Given that the Fascist government utilised Venice’s past ruling of Dalmatia to justify its own occupation of the territory, it is not surprising that the topic was a no-go area for Italian post-war scholars and that academics writing in socialist Yugoslavia were tempted to interpret it through the lens of enforced Italianisation.
Following the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatian historians turned to the local archives, but although their findings shed new light on Venetian Dalmatia, until recently they remained unnoticed on the international stage. Schmitt also compares and contrasts the views of Albanian scholars and points out that, unlike Dalmatia, Albania was not seen as belonging to the historical Italian lands, but was viewed as a colony. Their criticism of the Venetian presence as that of a colonial oppressor was more hard-line and developed in a closed society under a severe Communist regime.
The way Schmitt points out the difference between Venetian rule in the Adriatic and the Aegean is particularly useful. The Stato da Mar did not encompass only the Venetokratia in the Greek world but also included the Adriatic. The Catholic communes along the eastern Adriatic became part of Venice through contracts rather than military might, as was the case in its Orthodox overseas territories.
The volume concludes with Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan’s chapter that illuminates the city of Venice in the fifteenth century as a destination for economic migrants from the east Adriatic with all the challenges that go with such a relocation, including housing, employment and social integration, striking a particularly resonant note for our own times. CrouzetPavan re-evaluates the position and contribution of Albanian and Dalmatian settlers in the Venice of that time.
Dismissing anachronistic views that lump immigrants together regardless of the length of time they lived in Venice and that interpret their presence as being strictly communitarian rather than being gradually integrated into the host society, she provides a fuller picture of the lives of Albanian and Dalmatian newcomers. Restricted to the run-down areas of Venice to the east of St Mark’s Square (Castello) and to the north of the city (Canareggio), the immigrants were mostly employed in shipping and naval roles. For skilled workmen, social mobility became a possibility and Crouzet-Pavan gives examples of Albanian glassmakers and Dalmatian printers.
She also emphasises that communities could be integrated as a collective, as demonstrated by the confraternities. These institutions were closed to the members of other nations and tend to be interpreted in the scholarship as fostering isolationism and mutual rivalries. Crouzet-Pavan argues that the fact that painted decorations on the walls of these institutions feature battles in which their members fought for Venice points to their loyalty to, rather than alienation from, Venice.
As indicated by the contributions to this volume, the flexibility of Byzantium towards the Adriatic communities fostered relationships through which a Byzantine presence - political in the case of Apulia, diplomatic in the case of Venice or cultural when it comes to the whole area — was felt on the shores of this sea for eight centuries. By being the purveyor of Roman-ness, Byzantium had no ideological competitors and this knowledge guaranteed its appeal.
When Emperor Manuel Komnenos rebuked Doge Vitale II Michiel for attacking Byzantium in 1171, he declared that what prestige the Venetians had, they owed to the Romans. It is the prestige associated with Byzantium that pulled the Adriatic regions, always responsive to the call of the Roman empire, into its orbit, at various times and to varying degrees.
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