Download PDF | Cultural Encounters on Byzantium’s Northern Frontier, c. AD 500-700_ Coins, Artifacts and History-Cambridge University Press (2018).
400 Pages
Cultural Encounters on Byzantium’s Northern Frontier, c. AD 500-700
In the sixth century Byzantine emperors secured the provinces of the Balkans by engineering a frontier system of unprecedented complexity. Drawing on literary, archaeological, anthropological, and numismatic sources Andrei Gandila argues that cultural attraction was a crucial component of the political frontier of exclusion in the northern Balkans. If left unattended, the entire edifice could easily collapse under its own weight. Through a detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence the author demonstrates that communities living beyond the frontier competed for access to Byzantine goods and reshaped their identity as a result of continual negotiation, reinvention, and hybridization. In the hands of “barbarians” Byzantine objects, such as coins, jewelry, and terracotta lamps, possessed more than functional or economic value, bringing social prestige, conveying religious symbolism embedded in the iconography, and offering a general sense of sharing in the Early Byzantine provincial lifestyle.
ANDREI GANDILA is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Ancient and Medieval Studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His numerous publications include articles in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Numismatic Chronicle, Revue Numismatique, American Journal of Numismatics, and Archaeologia Bulgarica.
Acknowledgments
An essay on frontiers could hardly pass over one’s own limitations. While researching this book I have incurred many debts, which I am happy to acknowledge. This project would not have been completed successfully without help, advice, and cooperation from a large number of people. I am particularly grateful to my mentor, Florin Curta, for his constant guidance and intellectual rigor. I would like to thank the readers of my dissertation out of which this book developed, Bonnie Effros, David Geggus, Susan Gillespie, and Andrea Sterk, for their advice and encouragement. The research for this study, conducted in Europe and the United States, was made possible with generous support from a number of institutions including the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Medieval Academy of America, the American Numismatic Society, the International Association of Byzantine Studies, the International Numismatic Commission, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida, and the Humanities Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
A book is a journey not a destination, if I may adapt a famous quote about life often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, this book is the outcome of a long and exciting intellectual adventure started almost a decade ago. My dissertation defended in 2013 marked the first phase of this project which then meandered through several more years of extensive revision. I wrote the first chapter at Dumbarton Oaks during a short-term predoctoral residency in 2011, building on two early papers presented at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. The text took its final shape in the summer of 2015 in the Art Deco building of the John Miller Burnam Classical Library (Cincinnati) where I was able to travel on a research grant provided by University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Humanities Center. Research for the second, third, and fourth chapters began in Florida in 2011 and continued in Romania in 2012 with generous support from the Medieval Academy of America. In the following years Florin Curta’s comprehensive archaeological database has provided a goldmine of information, without which the research period devoted to these chapters would have become agonizingly long. Archaeological research conducted at Capidava since 2001, as part of a larger team led by Ioan C. Opris from the University of Bucharest, has provided indispensable hands-on experience with archaeological material from the frontier region.
The fifth and sixth chapters, dealing with the numismatic evidence, are the result of several visits at the American Numismatic Society in New York from 2009 to 2015, where I have taken advantage of its unparalleled numismatic library. I have conducted additional research in Romania with generous funding from University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere and the Humanities Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Preliminary work for the seventh chapter required two stages. The beginnings of the project date back to my time as an Assistant Curator at the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest, where I have benefited from the guidance and advice of Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu who initiated me into the fascinating world of numismatics. My narrative took shape in New York during the 2009 Summer Seminar generously sponsored by the American Numismatic Society, where I had the privilege to study one of the largest collections of Early Byzantine coins in the world. I enjoyed much help and hospitality from the ANS curators and I still treasure the frequent numismatic conversations with Robert Hoge, Peter van Alfen, Elena Stolyarik, and the late Richard Witschonke. My growing interest in the numismatic aspect of the frontier question was fueled by animated discussions at an international conference in Cracow in 2007 where I discovered the intellectual potential of the subject as well as the significant misconceptions attached to it. The original structure of the numismatic chapters developed in the genial atmosphere of Dumbarton Oaks during my one-year Junior Fellowship (2012-2013), where I availed myself of its wonderful library with great gusto. Indeed, its unrivaled collection of books and journals invited a much more ambitious undertaking than initially planned.
As the project expanded I have benefited from close collaboration with scholars from Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Georgia, Turkey, and Israel who generously gave me access to unpublished data and offered precious advice and comparanda material. I would like to thank Georges Abou Diwan, Gabriela Bijovsky, Zeliha Demirel-Gékalp, Maja Hadji-Maneva, Stoyan Mihaylov, Péter Somogyi, and Alena Tenchova for sharing the results of their research. As a member of the project “Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy” (FLAME) directed by Princeton University I gained a deeper appreciation of the large-scale implications of monetary production and circulation in the Mediterranean world.
Numerous discussions with Alan Stahl and my enthusiastic colleagues have helped me contextualize my own research in the frontier region.
At Dumbarton Oaks, Princeton, and elsewhere I have benefited from numerous thought-provoking conversations about history, archaeology, and numismatics with Cécile Morrisson, Alan Stahl, Julian Baker, Bruno Callegher, Rebecca Darley, Kuba Kabala, and Axel Nielsen. I have presented early versions of most chapters at scholarly meetings in Europe and the United States. Conference audiences in Kalamazoo, Princeton, Glasgow, Cracow, Sofia, Varna, and Taormina have made many useful and thoughtful comments for which I am grateful. The numismatic chapters, which have been in many ways the most challenging and time-consuming, required the collection of significant material from elusive local journals as well as unpublished finds, now available in the companion Catalogue published on Cambridge University Press’ webpage (www.cambridge.org/ 9781108470421). I would like to thank Deborah Stewart, Librarian for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, David Hill, Francis D. Campbell Librarian of the American Numismatic Society, and Charlotte Olson, Librarian at University of Alabama in Huntsville and chief liaison with the wonderful world of Interlibrary Loan. Special thanks are due to my friend and colleague Alexandru Tudorie whose ability to locate obscure and seemingly unreachable publications continues to puzzle me.
Michael Sharp and Dave Morris at Cambridge University Press have been encouraging collaborators throughout the book’s editorial process. I appreciate their patient support as well as the helpful insights of the two anonymous reviewers, whose judicious comments and constructive criticism saved me from errors and pointed me in new directions. Family members always come last in the acknowledgment section of academic books and that is not really fair because their contribution is truly indispensable. I would like to thank my wife, Crina, and my mother, Virginia, for their love, unwavering confidence, and unconditional support. A pious memory to my father, Mircea, who taught me to love history and writing. Sit tibi terra levis.
Introduction
André Piganiol closed his Empire Chrétien with two sentences destined to become famous in the following decades: “La civilisation romaine n’est pas morte de sa belle morte. Elle a été assassinée” (The Roman civilization did not die a natural death. It was assassinated).' Half a century ago the frontier question was not really a question at all. The “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire was the dominant paradigm and had been firmly in place since the enlightened days of Edward Gibbon. Frontier drama loomed large in this fatalistic scenario which saw wave after wave of savage barbarians crashing through the Roman defenses and eventually plunging Western civilization into a dark cultural abyss. And yet there were important signs announcing a major historiographical shift. The articulation of Late Antiquity as an independent field and an unprecedented turn toward the study of social and economic phenomena forever changed our understanding of ancient frontiers. The Anglo-American school of Late Antique studies, the French “Annales School,” and indeed, the creation and expansion of the European Union have brought a renewed interest in frontiers as well as new and exciting vistas for the study of interaction between different cultures and civilizations.
Because of the uneven development of the field, only certain areas of the Late Roman frontier stretching on three continents have been thoroughly researched. The Western provinces enjoy the most privileged position as several generations of scholars painstakingly reassessed the dissolution of Roman structures and the transition to the Middle Ages. Important work has been done in other regions as well. The Early Byzantine frontier in North Africa has long been a central focus for historians interested in the transition from the Vandal to the Byzantine, and later Arab, domination. In the Near East our understanding of the role and function of the desert frontier is still very much influenced by the seminal thesis of Benjamin Isaac and the subsequent works built on his concept of an open frontier. On the other hand, there is still much to be learned about the evolution of the Danube frontier in Late Antiquity and its many functions, as it separated and at the same time brought together the Early Byzantine Empire and the northern barbaricum.
The argument in the following chapters operates on three different planes. The first is the broad debate surrounding frontier culture, the role of liminal spaces, and the creation of identities. Scholars have long been fascinated by Justinian’s work of fortification in the Balkans and have used archaeological and literary sources to emphasize the emperor’s efforts to create separation rather than foster communication between the frontier provinces and the world of “barbarians.” Drawing on anthropological models I will argue that natural frontiers like the Danube are in fact multidimensional. Their political, geographic, demographic, and cultural aspects are complementary rather than conflicting but their study requires different research questions and methodological tools. The Early Byzantine frontier on the Danube can be perceived as a political and military border of exclusion due to its strategic advantages, but also as a cultural frontier zone open to negotiation and facilitating the circulation of ideas, objects, and people. The cultural dimension, however, remained subservient to the political one. The chain of fortifications fastened on the southern bank of the river ensured that Byzantine emperors would continue to hold the key unlocking cross-cultural interaction. In the sixth century when the empire was no longer able to launch major campaigns north of the Danube, cultural integration became a complementary strategy of protecting the Balkans used in tandem with physical defenses.
The second theme is the archaeology of cultural contact on the periphery with special emphasis on the role of Byzantine money outside the frontier. I argue that cultural interaction was essentially non-economic and relied on barbarians recruited in the Roman army to act as cultural brokers transmitting goods and fashions from the northern Balkans to barbaricum. I am using the latest developments in world-systems analysis to describe the Danube region as a semiperiphery where a unique type of culture was created in relation to the Byzantine core and the “barbarian” periphery. This fertile ground of cultural negotiation and hybridization sustained the development of identities and social values in barbaricum in relation to the Byzantine world. Communities from the lands north of the Danube competed for access to Byzantine goods and one of the main observations is that several other cultural frontiers can be identified beyond the classical antithesis, “Empire vs. Barbarians.” Competition in barbaricum as well as the relative proximity to the frontier dictated what type of fashions would be adopted. Inclusion and exclusion are complementary rather than antithetical notions as they both generated an increasing demand for Byzantine goods. Although channeled by different tastes and preferences, the circulation of ideas and styles across the Danube was closely related to the militarized nature of the frontier and depended on a fragile balance of power.
The analysis of coin finds reveals a chiefly non-economic function of Byzantine money outside the Empire. The social value of Byzantine coins resided in their direct association with the Roman way of life and the emulation of Roman practices. Against current economistic interpretations of the numismatic evidence, I argue that low-value bronze coins had little or no monetary function. They did not sustain an exchange system fueled by coinage, nor did they support the development of a market economy. Communities in barbaricum treated coins like any other Byzantine object and invested them with social meaning. In addition, precious-metal coinage crossed the frontier through political channels. Early Byzantine emperors employing a well-honed Realpolitik used diplomatic gifts to create alliances or tilt the balance of power in their favor and lavished barbarian leaders with large quantities of solidi and ceremonial silver. Byzantine gold and silver coins were subsequently woven into the social fabric of communities from the frontier region, being melted down to produce jewelry and other objects which became an index of social distinction. Some were included in graves to highlight the social status of the deceased, while others were hoarded as symbols of wealth.
Finally, the third theme is an important historiographical question and, indeed, a highly politicized issue - regarding the creation of Early Medieval ethnicities, languages, and states in Eastern Europe. The debate is one of “continuity vs. discontinuity” or “autochthony vs. immigrationism,” best illustrated by the opposing views of the Romanian and Hungarian schools, although historians, archaeologists, and linguists across the Balkans had to grapple with this question in their struggle to understand an important formative period in their nation’s past. For it is political ideology that really stood behind this fierce polemic, from eighteenth-century enlightenment to nineteenth-century nationalism and twentieth-century communism. On the basis of linguistic and archaeological evidence, Romanian scholars have emphasized the continuity of Roman culture in the territory of present-day Romania, striving to demonstrate that the ancestors of modern Romanians successfully preserved their Latin language, Christian religion, and Roman identity against centuries of pressure from incoming barbarian groups. Under the aggressive nationalism promoted by the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s the discourse became radicalized into one proclaiming the cultural superiority of the autochthonous population and the inevitable assimilation of the newcomers. Unaware of the ongoing debate over the political and cultural function of Roman frontiers - a popular topic in western scholarship at that time Romanian researchers underscored the permeability of the Danube frontier for purely ideological reasons, because it served their chief purpose of proving the uninterrupted contact between “proto-Romanian” communities and the Byzantine Empire.
Such views continued to be opposed by Hungarian scholarship, and occasionally Bulgarian - to be sure, with equal bias. Nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian imperialism had described Transylvania as a terra deserta at the arrival of the Magyars, so no Romanic continuity could be accepted as it could undermine the Hungarian claims over this province. Still, medieval Romanians had to be accounted for somehow so an immigrationist solution was offered. The polemic was reignited during the communist decades when the Hungarian school felt compelled to provide an inflammatory response to the nationalistic distortions tirelessly cultivated by Romanian historians. Unsurprisingly, Hungarian scholars revived the “immigrationist” thesis stating that Romanian ethnicity (and the Romanian language, by extension) was a creation of the lands south of the Danube, exported north of the river much later in the 12th to 13th centuries.
Those who look for partisanship in this book will be disappointed. Furthermore, the present analysis will not attempt to establish a “golden mean” - for the theories are mutually exclusive — but to propose a different paradigm of interaction that cuts across ethnicities and sees the process of cultural interaction in light of the Empire’s pragmatic political agenda. This has less to do with ideology, propaganda, or the imperial rhetoric often invoked by historians. Byzantine emperors divided the world of barbaricum into friends and foes regardless of ethnic background - a fluid concept always susceptible to unexpected and radical change as dictated by political expediency. Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries the Empire fought and made up with the Gepids, the Avars, the Lombards, and the Antes, to name only the most conspicuous cases mentioned in contemporary accounts. Previous conflict never precluded future collaboration against common enemies and it often appears that aggression against the Empire was the necessary test for being taken seriously by the imperial administration (i. the extraction of tribute or subsidies). The Latinspeaking and Christian communities north of the Danube - the main obsession of Romanian scholarship - were hardly the only target for the Empire’s cultural tactic expressed in the surge of Byzantine goods across the frontier. While the descendants of the Roman colonists never disappeared from Transylvania and the Danube plain, Byzantine emperors did not pay special attention to their welfare. Elucidating the ethnic profile of communities living in the empire’s shadow is beyond the scope of this book - the author wonders if it can be achieved at all - but it seems clear that Romanization, in the wide sense of the concept, was available to anyone willing to help defend imperial interests on the Lower Danube. This is not a question of massive population movement (immigrationist thesis) or stubborn cultural survival against all adversity (continuity thesis); it is a political game whose cultural consequences transcend modern perceptions of frontiers, clear-cut ethnicity, and nationalism.
The source material which forms the basis for discussion in the following chapters combines evidence drawn from the written record, archaeological and anthropological data, as well as my own research in numismatic collections from various museums and the field work undertaken since 2001 at Capidava, an important Late Roman fortress on the Lower Danube frontier. The main methodological goal is to highlight the numismatic evidence as the primary source of a monograph which attempts to weave numismatics, archaeology, history, and ethnographic research into a homogeneous interdisciplinary narrative. In many ways this book is an invitation to dialogue. A common thread of all chapters is the realization that only by pulling together various strands of information, often the province of diverse disciplines and specializations, can we build a nuanced and multifaceted narrative of frontier history. The reader will not find a brand new theoretical framework for analyzing frontiers and crosscultural interaction but a long overdue fusion between concepts and definitions which often seemed mutually exclusive. Indeed, the frontier in its complexity and chameleonic nature defies total encapsulation by a single universal model.
The book has seven chapters organized thematically. The first chapter is a reinterpretation of the Roman frontier in Late Antiquity. In the last decades historians have described frontier rivers as primarily facilitating communication and cultural contact and less as borders of exclusion; contrariwise, archaeologists still concentrate their efforts on the military dimension. Under the spell of the postmodernist turn the former have approached frontiers through a polysemic kaleidoscope of cultural, intellectual, and symbolic lenses, while the latter remained entrenched in the traditional focus on fortifications and lines of defense. In many ways this dichotomy was engendered by insufficient conversation between historians and archaeologists and has delayed the development of a conceptual model which could help bridge such disciplinary divides. The chapter is an attempt to offer such a model, drawn from the anthropological study of frontiers. By doing so it is necessary to intrude upon several of the major and still outstanding questions of Byzantine history. What was the Byzantine worldview on frontiers? Is there any change from the early Roman centuries? Was there a Grand Strategy in Late Antiquity? A careful comparative study reveals enduring literary topoi but also an ongoing concern to use reinforced natural obstacles as political frontiers able to act as convenient barriers against “barbarians.” This chapter reemphasizes the strategic role of the Danube in Late Antiquity and its political function of separation. This reality must be acknowledged before anything else if we hope to understand the cultural dimension of the Danube frontier in all its complexity.
Drawing on post-colonial theory and new directions in world-systems analysis, the second, third, and fourth chapters offer an archaeological interpretation of the Danube region as a cultural interface between Early Byzantium and northern barbaricum based on a variety of Byzantine goods found outside the Empire. The study of archaeological evidence confirms the fact that economic, cultural, and political borders are not coterminous; the Empire’s influence can be traced far beyond its administrative limits. The surge of Byzantine artifacts across the frontier, such as amphorae, lamps, brooches, and buckles, points to different channels of distribution and particular preferences associated with the creation of elite identity and social prestige in relation to Byzantium. This cultural dynamic reshaped the nearby barbaricum into a “negotiated periphery” due to the active agency of “barbarians” in taking control of their cultural identity, while interaction itself brought benefits to both sides. However, it also developed into a “bipolar periphery,” since cultural contact was equally the result of cooperation and conflict, of “barbarians” drawn into the empire’s service and “barbarians” drawn by the empire’s wealth and bent on plunder. In the end both helped spread Byzantine goods, fashions, and religious ideas in the northern world. More importantly, it becomes clear that the Danube’s political function of separation could not function unless there was sufhcient cultural interaction between the two sides of the river to avoid a permanent state of conflict. Byzantine emperors could not muster the material and human resources needed to support a 1,000 km-long frontier from Belgrade to the Danube Delta, if continuous pressure from barbaricum was not prevented through diplomatic action and the implementation of long-term cultural strategies.
The fifth and sixth chapters reevaluate the flow of Early Byzantine coins beyond the political border by analyzing their distribution on a wide geographical area from Central Europe to the Caucasus, with special emphasis on the Lower Danube. When properly placed in their historical and archaeological context coins can illuminate some of the outstanding issues regarding the nature of cultural contact in the frontier region often obscured by the limitations of the written evidence. The coin is not only the most widely and frequently circulated Byzantine object in barbaricum, but also the most reliable and chronologically sensitive. If conclusions drawn on the basis of other artifacts often command no confidence because of their erratic nature, the standardized and bureaucratic aspect of Byzantine coins, often dated with the regnal year of the ruler, provides a unique type of evidence. Notwithstanding its own limitations, numismatic material affords the rare opportunity to analyze vast frontier regions in comparison through the lens of a single historical source. Gold is most abundant in the Carpathian Basin where the Avars - just like the Huns in the previous century — received millions of gold solidi in the form of annual tribute; this immediately developed into the most potent symbol of the khagan’s power and the main instrument for maintaining the loyalty of the peoples under his suzerainty. In the Lower Danube region copper coins dominate the numismatic corpus, as a testament of the significant pressure exerted by the frontier system whose influence projected over wide regions south and east of the Carpathians. Finally, silver predominates in Transcaucasia where ceremonial miliarensia were used to buy the loyalty of Caucasian tribes, while the hexagram became the main unit of payment for the troops fighting against Persia in the seventh century, particularly in Armenia and Iberia where the Sasanian silver drachm had been for a long time the dominant coinage.
The last chapter explores the problem of economic vs. non-economic functions performed by coins. While precious-metal coins have been connected with political payments, current interpretations of Byzantine copper coins found outside the frontier are chiefly economic. Given the fiduciary nature of Byzantine bronze coinage, the question therefore ineluctably arises as to how they could act as monetary media of exchange outside the confines of the issuing authority. Previous arguments have been couched in preconceived notions regarding the Early Byzantine monetary economy and the untested assumption that parts of barbaricum followed the same conditions prevailing in the imperial provinces. Ethnographic research assessing the impact of money on traditional societies in the colonial period can shed some light on the Byzantine case. Although set in a different time and space, the situations discussed in this chapter are brought together by a common denominator, which is cultural contact between monetized empires (“world systems”) and small rural communities (“mini-systems”). Drawing on such anthropological parallels for the use of monetary instruments by traditional communities, I argue that coins served mainly non-economic purposes. From an economic, but nonmonetary, perspective coins were more attractive for their intrinsic value as raw material for the production of jewelry. As one moves farther from the border, the social appropriation of coins as amulets, souvenirs, and objects of prestige increases.
A note on terminology is required. Historical periodization can be notoriously confusing and Late Antiquity makes no exception. The book covers its final phase from the late fifth to the late seventh century, or the spatere Spdtantike as Peter Brown defined it. The weight rests on the “long sixth century,” from the accession of Anastasius (491-518) to the reign of Heraclius (610-641), which roughly corresponds to the renewal of the Byzantine frontier on the Danube and its ultimate demise, respectively. Depending on region, language, and intellectual tradition Late Roman, Early Byzantine or Byzantine may be used as labels for the period covering the sixth and seventh centuries. Archaeological terminology such as Roman-Byzantine in the Balkans, Late Byzantine in Near East, and Early Medieval or Late Migration for cultures from the Central European barbaricum only add to the general confusion to which the non-specialist may easily succumb. In the following chapters only Roman and Early Byzantine will be used, the former for general statements (e.g. Roman way of life, Roman tradition, “Romans and barbarians”) and the latter for chronologically sensitive contexts and in relation to the fact that sixth-to-seventhcentury coinage is universally described as Early Byzantine. I am using Latin terminology for names or the English equivalent long established in scholarship (e.g. Anastasius, Justinian) and Latin or Greek terms for coinage, reflecting the evolution of this technical vocabulary during Late Antiquity (e.g. solidus; hexagrammon). “Copper” designates the low-value Byzantine coinage, although the metal itself is a copper alloy, sometimes described as “bronze” in the numismatic literature, where the terms are used interchangeably.
Since this is a work about frontiers, the reader may be puzzled by the variety of seemingly synonymous words used to describe them. I am using “frontier” as a general term which has been unofficially applied to this academic subfield (frontier studies), while “border” specifically designates a linear political demarcation (ie. the Danube river). “Danubian borderlands” signifies a region corresponding to the cultural semiperiphery described in the second chapter, while barbaricum is a northern periphery outside the empire’s direct political control. No clear cultural delimitation exists between these two regions as they were constantly negotiated and subject to change. For the sake of brevity, barbaricum will therefore be used to designate lands outside the Byzantine provincial administration, although no uniformity must be expected. Throughout the book regions beyond the frontier are sometimes labeled Gepidia, Avaria, or Sklavinia, but their political and cultural boundaries are hard to define in the everchanging world of barbaricum. On the other hand, the term “barbarian” will be used sparingly and only in generic contexts, lest the reader should be left with the impression that various groups may be lumped together under the same cultural umbrella. Finally, I am using Romanization to describe the adoption or imitation of Roman practices; this venerable concept no longer fashionable in many academic circles should be understood here in light of more recent developments in post-colonial theory and archaeological research.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق