Download PDF | Byzantium In The Year 1000 , Brill Academic Publishers ( 2002)
305 Pages
PREFACE
This volume grew out of the Byzantine session of the 19th Congress of Historical Sciences at Oslo. With the Congress scheduled for August 2000, it did not require much effort of imagination to find a theme. The subject of Byzantium at the end of the first millennium A.D. would have suggested itself even if the date had been completely devoid of historical significance. In fact, the choice was far from being purely arbitrary or symbolic.
The year 1000 A.D. marks the middle of a century which saw the medieval Byzantine Empire at the height of its military and political power. Between 950 and 1050, the empire of New Rome reconquered the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and went on to regain a substantial amount of continental territory in Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, the Balkans and Southern Italy, which it had lost in the seventh and eighth centuries, as well as annexing more of Armenia than had ever been ruled by the ancient Roman Empire.
Its political and cultural influence extended beyond its frontiers, not only to the principalities and tribes which were its immediate neighbours, and to the ancient centres of the Christian world, Rome and Jerusalem, which remained tantalisingly beyond its military grasp; with the conversion of Rus, symbolised by the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 989, its magnetism reached far to the north of the Black Sea, into what for the Romans had been the dark wastes of Scythia. The decades before and after the year 1000 also tend to be seen as the high point of Byzantine imperial absolutism, the period when centuries of administrative, economic and ideological centralisation came to fruition, and the Byzantine emperor controlled the resources, the lives and the beliefs of his subjects as never before or since.
The emperor in the year 1000 and the generations on either side of it was Basil Il (976-1025), whose name is emblematic of the greatness of the medieval Byzantine state. It is not just that Basil’s reign came chronologically at the end of a series of interrelated developments which characterise the political and cultural ‘renaissance’ of Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries: a long succession of strong and effective emperors, all more or less closely identified with the dynasty founded by Basil II’s great-great grandfather, Basil I the ‘Macedonian’; an ideology of restoration, recovery and renewal, expressed in an imperially-sponsored programme of collecting, codifying, excerpting and re-issuing the written legacy of the GrecoRoman past; a growing professionalism in the armed forces, backed by a revival of military theory; a closer identification of the Church with the interests of the State, and particularly of the ruling dynasty; a consistent effort to advance the cause of the imperial fisc by legislation and in the administration of justice.
Basil himself has gone down in history as the Byzantine ‘Pétat c’est mov’, the paradigm of efficient, successful state control—so much so that the problems of the Byzantine state in the late eleventh century have been blamed on his excessive insistence on the domination of the imperial periphery by the bureaucratic, Constantinopolitan centre. To some extent, his reputation was created after the eleventh-century crisis by nostalgia for the better times which he had seemed to incarnate.
Thus the Grottaferrata text of Digenes Akrites, a work dating from the twelfth century and set in the eastern borderlands which by that time had been lost to the empire, refers to him as ‘Basil who took imperial glory to the grave with him’. It was not until the late twelfth century, with the revolt of Peter and Asan and the establishment of the ‘Second Bulgarian Empire’, that Basil became known as Boulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer. But the idealisation of Basil as a model emperor began before the twelfth century.
It has been detected in the two main Greek sources for his reign, the Chronographia of Michael Psellos and the Synopsis of John Skylitzes, which can be seen, in their different ways, to reflect the agenda of imperial revival under the first two Comnenian emperors, Isaac I (1057-1059) and Alexios I (1081-1118), whose family had done well under Basil and had good reason to identify retrospectively with his regime. Both sources have enduringly shaped later perceptions of his reign. To Psellos we owe the portrait of Basil as the harsh, austere, parsimonious despot with no time for luxury or literature, while Skylitzes is responsible for the view that Basil concentrated on the Balkans and the destruction of Bulgaria at the expense of Asia Minor and the advancement of the eastern frontier.
Both historians have by their emphasis created the impression of a reign dominated at the outset by massive military rebellions, and dedicated thereafter to eradicating aristocratic faction and civil war. Ultimately, however, the image of Basil II the grim autocrat stems from his own publicity: from the threatening antimagnate rhetoric of his Novel of 996, and from the miniature of the Venice Psalter depicting him armed and triumphant with barbarians grovelling at his crimson-shod imperial feet.
The composite picture of Byzantium at the peak of its achievement under Basil IT was central to modern perceptions of Byzantium in the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century. This was not only because the different components fitted together so plausibly, but also because the composition represented what Byzantinists and the regimes or ideologies they served most wanted to find in Byzantium: the perfect moment of a state system with an impeccable Greco-Roman pedigree which was triumphant over Islam and northern barbarism, yet did not have—indeed, energetically resisted — the dark forces of feudalism and Catholic clericalism which were the bane of the Western Middle Ages.
This basic consensus united Greeks, Slavs and Western scholars with a classical education. It received its fullest articulation in the synthetic histories of the mid-twentieth century which remain among the most coherent and readable narratives of Byzantine history, and it continues to inform more recent literature. Yet the story has become progressively less clear in the light of three trends in recent scholarship. Firstly, the uncoupling of economic, social and cultural history from political and military history has led to the realisation that under Basil I, battles and borders apart, the peak of Byzantine achievement was still to come, in a pattern of development which was not simply imposed by the expansion of the Latin West but paralleled and shared in the dynamics of Western expansionism. In this, Basil could be seen less as the ruler who brought the medieval Byzantine system to perfection than as a reactionary who repressed its natural evolution.
But this might be to credit Basil with too much personal initiative and input. A second trend in recent scholarship has been to deconstruct the image of the grim autocrat by looking critically at each of the main sources in the context of its composition, and by questioning the key motifs which make up the myth of ‘Basil the Terrible’: his accumulation of untold surplus wealth, hoarded in specially excavated chambers; his disdain for culture; his blinding of 15,000 defeated Bulgarians. The idea that Basil persecuted the aristocracy has also come in for criticism on the grounds that several aristocratic families, including, as we have seen, the Komnenoi, did very well during Basil’s reign.
This is consistent with a third concern which certain recent and forthcoming studies of the period have in common: a tendency to emphasise that the expansion of the Byzantine state in the tenth century and its subsequent consolidation were achieved by methods which were not particularly ‘statist? in either an ancient or a modern sense. It has been argued that the Byzantine state had no coherent strategy of expansion in the east, and that its expansionism in the early tenth century was primarily concerned with securing the personal loyalty and co-operation of Christian elites in Armenia and the Caucasus, rather than with the annexation of Muslim-dominated territory to the south.
The subsequent military reconquest of Cilicia and northern Syria by a new model army driven by an official programme of holy war has been interpreted as the unpremeditated extension of an initially defensive and rhetorical reaction against the ageression of an especially formidable border emir. When new territories were annexed and their resources assigned to the imperial fisc, it is suggested that the imperial government relied for their exploitation on previously existing structures and local elites rather than on the imposition of fiscal bureaucracy. On the European side, the map that is now emerging of the northern Balkans after the liquidation of the Bulgarian kingdom no longer shows a solid, purplecoloured bloc of imperial provinces separated from the barbarian world by the hard black line of a fortified Danube frontier; rather it shows a permeable frontier zone where the permanent imperial military presence was restricted to the lower Danube and scaled down fairly soon after the initial occupation.
Further south, in the western heartland of the Bulgarian kingdom that Basil conquered from Tsar Samuel, his treatment of the Bulgarian church has been viewed as evidence that Basil initiated or promoted the policy of fiscal exemption which led to the growth of ‘feudal’ privilege in the late Byzantine period. ‘In other words, Basil II, the emperor who tried to break the powerful and to restrict the church, would sem at the same time to have permitted (if not introduced) policies favouring the formation of client retinues by certain magnates.”!
The contours of the peak of Byzantine achievement represented by Basil II are thus not as clear as they were fifty years ago. Yet on the map of Byzantine history, this remains an area of impressively high altitude. In military and political terms, it was undoubtedly Byzantium’s finest moment. Basil’s reign was one of superlatives: it was the longest in Byzantine history, and the one in which the emperor, the only Byzantine sovereign who never married, was most completely above private interests and personal relations. For the first ten years of it, the government was dominated by an extraordinarily long-serving, capable and versatile eunuch ‘prime minister’, the parakoimomenos Basil; the young emperor also faced not just one but two military rebellions, each on a scale not seen since 821.
Having overcome these internal threats to his power, he went on to terminate the existence of a formidable neighbouring state which for three hundred years had threatened the security of Constantinople and the empire’s hold on its European provinces. It is not only the rhetoric of Basil’s legislation and his historians which portrays him as extraordinarily devoted to the interests of the imperial fisc. Further evidence is provided by the eleventh-century judge Eustathios Romaios, who spent much of his early career under Basil. In one of his judicial decisions (analysed below by Ludwig Burgmann) Eustathios stated that the patriarch Sisinnios had issued his famous decree of 997 ‘with the emperor’s intention’.
The decree extended the degrees of relationship by affinity within which in-law relations were forbidden to marry; since it inhibited repeated intermarriage, and therefore the accumulation of inherited wealth, among small groups of aristocratic families, its promulgation in the year following Basil I’s Novel against the acquisition of land by the powerful cannot be coincidental. It seems to be a clear instance of the church serving the interests of the state at the emperor’s bidding. In the Pezra, the collection of case law based on Eustathios’ judicial decsions, the anonymous compiler records how Eustathios had remarked that the emperor Basil used to move the imperial paroikoi, the peasants who cultivated state land, around frequently, in order to prevent them from acquiring rights of ownership (15.2).
It could be objected that the imperial judge who articulated these ‘facts’ in such a pro-imperial sense was himself projecting, or reflecting, a rhetoric rather than a reality of imperial power. But when a rhetoric of power is so persistently articulated, at first and and second hand, does it not become part of that reality? The Peira shows Eustathios to have taken a consistently pro-fiscal line in his judicial pronouncements that upheld the land legislation of Basil H. His role in preserving and idealising Basil’s memory 1s a tribute to Basil’s effectiveness in imbuing his subordinates with a mentality corresponding to the emperor’s rhetorical image. Eustathios was not an isolated phenomenon, to judge from the way in which the interests of the fisc were also upheld by two of his contemporaries, John the Orphanotrophos and Isaac Komnenos, who had been close to Basil in their youth. What Eustathios represented for the judiciary, John and Isaac represented for the fiscal bureaucracy and the army respectively.
The shape, dimensions and quality of the Byzantine imperial achievement around the year 1000 thus continue to deserve attention and require interpretation. The following chapters focus the attention of ten scholars who specialise in the interpretation of Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The collection is not a synthesis, nor does it claim to be comprehensive—the church and the fiscal economy are among notable omissions—but it attempts to cover a broad spectrum. The first five chapters are concerned with imperial power. Jonathan Shepard analyses the context of two momentous foreign marriages which were arranged for Byzantine princesses in the late tenth century: that of Theophano to Otto II, and that of Basil II’s sister Anna to Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Catherine Holmes discusses aspects of the relationship between the image and the reality of Basil’s regime.
The next three chapters consider the empire’s territorial power base in Asia Minor (Jean-Claude Cheynet), along the Balkan frontier (Paul Stephenson), and in southern Italy (Vera von Falkenhausen). The transition from government and politics to culture is made in the chapter by Ludwig Burgmann, who analyses a judicial decision by Eustathios Romaios documenting a failed attempt to use the decree of Sisinnios to contest a marriage; it also provides a rare opportunity to study the hero of the Pea in unabridged and unexcerpted form.
The following three chapters look at developments in three types of literature which flourished under Basil II despite a general lack of imperial patronage and the tension which evidently existed between the emperor and the three main authors involved. Athanasios Markopoulos considers history writing, especially the work of Leo the Deacon. Marc Lauxtermann surveys the work of John Geometres and other poets. Christian Hogel reviews the evidence for the execution of the most ambitious project in medieval Greek hagiography: the improved, standardised edition of the complete corpus of Greek saints’ lives undertaken by Symeon Metaphrastes. The volume concludes with an essay by the present author which attempts to demonstrate that the year 1000 meant something to Byzantines as well as to modern academics on the lookout for round-number anniversaries.
Chapters 2-7 originated in papers delivered at the Oslo Congress.
Chapters 1, 8 and 10 were commissioned and written after the event, and I am deeply grateful to Marc Lauxtermann and Jonathan Shepard for rising to the occasion at short notice. Without their contributions, the volume might not have been viable, depleted as it was by the deaths of the two scholars to whose memory this collection is dedicated. Lenos Mavromatis was regrettably unable to revise for publication the paper which he gave at Oslo (‘L’éclosion de lidée de la Nation-Etat 4 Byzance autour de l’an Mil’).
By the time of the Congress, it was already too late for me to ask Nikos Oikonomides to contribute the chapter on Byzantine state finances under Basil I which only he could have written. It is a sad pleasure to record, however, that he made the volume possible in a different sense, for it was he, as secretary of the International Association for Byzantine Studies, who conveyed to me the Association’s invitation to organise its session at the 19th Historical Congress. I hope the final result is something in which he would have liked to participate.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Lupwic Buremann, Dr. phil. (1982) in Greek, Latin and Slavic Philology, 1s a member of the Géttingen Academy of Sciences research group “Byzantine Legal Sources”, which is attached to the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main. He has published critical editions of several Byzantine legal texts, at present concentrating on the 10th and 11th centuries.
Jean-CLAuDE CuHEyNet, Docteur d’Etat (1987) in History (Paris), is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne. His publications are about Byzantine society and sigillography and include Pouvowr et contestations a Byzance, 965-1210 (Paris 1990).
VERA VON F'ALKENHAUSEN is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Roma-Tor Vergata. She is the author of La dominaZione bizantina nell’Italia meridionale dal LX al XI secolo (Bari, 1978), and of many articles on Byzantine and Norman Southern Italy.
CuristiAN Hace, Ph.D. (2000) in Greek, University of Bergen, until recently assistant research professor at the University of Copenhagen, has published works on Classical and Byzantine literature, including Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization (Copenhagen, 2002).
CaTHERINE J. Hotmes, D.Phil (1999) in Modern History, Oxford, is Tutorial Fellow in Medieval History at University College, Oxford. She has published articles on Byzantium’s eastern frontier, is the coeditor of Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (Brill, 2002), and is currently preparing a monograph on the reign of Basil IL.
Marc D. Lauxtermann, Ph.D. (1994) in Humanities, University of Amsterdam, teaches Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the same university. He has published extensively on Byzantine poetry and metrics, including The Spring of Rhythm (Vienna, 1999).
Paut Macpatino, FBA, D.Phil. (1976) in History, Oxford, is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of St Andrews. His numerous publications include The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1145— 1180 (Cambridge, 1993), and Constantinople médiévale (Paris, 1996).
Aruanasios MARKOPOULOs studied in Athens and Paris, and is Professor of Byzantine Philology at the University of Athens. His research interests lie in Byzantine history-writing and epistolography under the Macedonian dynasty.
J. Saeparp, D.Phil. (1973), was for many years University Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge. Co-editor of Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot, 1992) and joint-author (with Simon Franklin) of The Emergence of Rus 750-1200 (London, 1996).
PauL STEPHENSON, Ph.D. (Cambridge, 1996), is John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Professor in Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and concurrently Research Associate at Dumbarton Oaks. He is the author of Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier (Cambridge University Press 2000, repr. 2002), and The Legend of Basil the Bulgarslayer (Cambridge, 2003).
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