Download PDF | Imperial lineages and legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean_ recording the imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman rule-Routledg.
231 Pages
The comparative study of empires has traditionally been addressed in the widest possible global historical perspective with comparison of New World empires such as the Aztecs and Incas side by side with the history of imperial Rome and the empires of China and Russia in the medieval and modern periods. Surprisingly little work has been carried out focusing on the evolution of state control and imperial administration in the same territory; approached in a rigorous and historically grounded fashion over a wide extent of historical time from late antiquity to the twentieth century.
The empires of Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans and the latter-day imperialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all inherited or seized and sought to develop overlapping parts of a common territorial base in the Eastern Mediterranean and all struggled to contain, control or otherwise alter the political, cultural and spiritual allegiances of the same indigenous population groups that were brought under their rule and administration.
The task undertaken in Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean is to investigate the balance between continuity and change adopted at various historical conjunctures when new imperial regimes were established and to expose common features and shared approaches to the challenge of imperial rule that united otherwise divergent societies and imperial administrations. The work incorporates the contributions by twelve scholars, each leading practitioners in their respective fields and each contributing their particular insights on the shared theme of imperial identity and legacy in the Mediterranean World of the pagan, Christian and Muslim eras.
Rhoads Murphey was Reader in Ottoman Studies at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, and is now Professor of History at Ipek University (Ankara), Turkey.
Contributors
Frederick Anscombe (PhD Princeton 1994) is Reader in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests lie in Ottoman Balkan and Middle Eastern provincial history, nationalism, religion and the rise of the modern state. Among his publications are State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and (as editor) The Ottoman Balkans, 1750-1830 (Markus Wiener, 2006).
John Bintliff (PhD Cambridge 1977) is Emeritus Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University, UK. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the (pre) history of human settlement in Greece and was appointed Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Bradford University, where he taught from 1977. He then moved to Durham University as Reader in Archaeology in 1990, where he taught until moving to Leiden in 1999. In 1988 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Since 1978 he has been co-directing (with Cambridge University) the Boeotia Project, an interdisciplinary programme investigating the evolution of settlement in Central Greece.
Beat Brenk (PhD 1960) served as Professor of Art at the University of Basel (1977-2002) and ‘professore di chiara fama’ for Early Christian and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’ (2002-2008). His publications include Tiadition und Neuerung in der christlichen Kunst des ersten Jahrtausends (Wein: Bohlau Verlag, 1966) and The Christianization of the Late Roman World: Cities, Churches, Synagogues, Palaces, Private Houses and Monasteries in the Early Christian Period (London: Pindar, 2011), as well as numerous articles on the development of art and art forms in the early Christian period.
Leslie Brubaker is Professor of Byzantine Art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on Byzantine cultural history, iconoclasm and gender.
Nathalie Clayer is Professor at the EHESS and a Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS (Paris). Her main research interests are religion, nationalism and state-building process in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman space. Her publications include Aux origines du nationalisme albanais. La naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe (Paris: Karthala, 2007), Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans (London: Tauris, 2011), co-edited with Hannes Grandits and Robert Pichler, and L’autorité religieuse et ses limites en terres d’islam (Leiden: Brill, 2013), co-edited with Alexandre Papas and Benoit Fliche.
John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History, Professor of Byzantine History & Hellenic Studies and Director of the Sharmin and Byan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the social, economic, institutional and cultural history of the medieval eastern Roman empire, in particular in the period from the seventh to the twelfth centuries; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and on the production, distribution and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world.
Aglaia Kasdagli (PhD Birmingham, UK 1992) is Associate Professor at the University of Crete. Her research interests include aspects of the economic and social history of the early modern Greek island societies, late medieval Europe, family, customary law, notarial culture and agrarian history. Her publications include articles and chapters in collective works and the monograph Land and Marriage Settlements in the Aegean: A Case-Study of Seventeenth-Century Naxos (Venice: Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, 1999).
Rosemary Morris taught Medieval History at Manchester University from 1974 to 2003 and more recently has been Visiting Fellow at the University of York and at All Souls College, Oxford. Her research has focussed on Byzantine monasticism, administration and law from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Publications include Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843-1118 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Hypotyposis of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis, Constantinople (11th-12th centuries) (with R.H. Jordan, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) and numerous articles.
Rhoads Murphey (PhD Chicago 1979) is Professor of History at Ipek University (Ankara). His research has encompassed Ottoman state structures, administration and the military, as well as cultural history and relations with the West, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. His publications include Studies in Ottoman Society and Culture, 16th-18th Centuries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007) and Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (UCL Press, 1999), as well as numerous articles and chapters in collective works.
Johann Strauss (PhD Munich 1987) teaches the history of Turkish and Ottoman literature, the history of the Turkish language, and Ottoman Turkish at the Département d’Etudes turques of Strasbourg University. He has previously held Lectureships at the Universities of Munich, Birmingham and Freiburg (Germany). He has published numerous articles in English, French and German on a variety of topics, in particular translations from Western languages into Ottoman Turkish, the history of printing and publishing, and on the linguistic and cultural contacts between the various communities of the Ottoman Empire.
Athanasios K. Vionis (PhD Leiden, 2005) is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Archeology and Art at the University of Cyprus. His research interests include landscape archaeology, settlement history, ceramic studies, material culture and everyday life in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean. His publications include A Crusader, Ottoman and Early Modern Aegean Archaeology (Leiden: Brill, 2012) as well as several papers on related topics in journals, edited books and conference proceedings.
Malcolm Wagstaff (Ph.D. 1975) is Professor Emeritus in the University of Southampton (UK), where he was a Professor of Geography before retirement. His research lies mostly in the historical geography of Greece and Turkey, especially in the development of land use and settlements. His publications include The Evolution of Middle Eastern Landscapes: An Outline to AD 1840 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Greece: Ethnicity and Sovereignty 1820-1994. Atlas and Documents (Slough: Archive Editions, 2002) and Geographical Studies on Modern Turkey and the Ottoman Empire (Isis, 2013).
Acknowledgements
The unifying concept that links the eleven chapters presented in this volume has its origins in a conference convened under the joint auspices of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies (University of Birmingham, UK) and the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Ko¢ University, Turkey). Thanks are due first and foremost to the Philip D. Whitting fund administered by the University of Birmingham, whose generous support covered the travel and accommodation costs of the twenty scholars who were brought together to take part in the International Conference on Imperial Legacies in a Cross-Cultural Context held in Istanbul in September 2011.
Special thanks are due to Scott Redford, then director of the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations for securing financial support from his university’s rectorate and for arranging meals and hospitality, not to mention the free use of his institute’s handsome and well-appointed premises, during the full extent of our tightly scheduled two-day meeting. As convenor of the conference as well as a participant in its proceedings, speaking both for myself and on behalf of the nineteen other participants, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks for his collegiality and support. I would also like to acknowledge the offer of financial support from the College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, whose support from the Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund made possible a more generous quota for illustrations than was originally envisaged.
Although the papers presented at the conference were of a uniformly high calibre, during the process of revision and finalisation for inclusion in the present volume, the authors, myself included, benefitted from suggestions on the final chapter drafts that were made by a group of volunteers from among the doctoral students in Byzantine and Ottoman studies working under the supervision of John Haldon, a former colleague at the University of Birmingham and currently Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of History at Princeton University. Professor Haldon also kindly agreed to offer some incisive remarks on the state of the field in the comparative study of empires for the introduction to the volume. As for his postgraduate students, with their agreement I am pleased to acknowledge their contributions individually and by name in alphabetical order: Merle Eisenberg, Vicky Hioureas, Rebecca Johnson, Sarah Matherly, Arianna Myers, Robyn Radway, Emily Riley, Morgan Robinson, David Walsh and Genie Yoo.
Finally, and certainly not least, 1 would like to express my personal thanks to John Smedley of Ashgate (now Routledge) publishing house for his unstinting help and support during the process of preparing the book for the press.
Rhoads Murphey
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, 1992-2014
Ipek University, Ankara, Turkey, 2014
Introduction
Recording the imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman rule
John Haldon and Rhoads Murphey
For some decades after the middle of the twentieth century, as the old empires that had arisen in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were dismantled and as European colonial possessions were released from the imperial networks within which they had become ensnared, the consensus grew that the world had entered a post-imperial era. Yet by the beginning of the twenty-first century it seemed that such a conclusion was both contestable and premature. And today imperialism as a concept, and often as a hidden agenda under a different name, is on the agenda once again, as contemporary international power politics readily demonstrate. Topical discussion about the unilateralist foreign politics of the USA, about post-Soviet Russian expansionism in eastern Europe or the Arctic or Chinese expansionism in the far east represent one aspect of the debate.
But notions of empire and imperialism also inform and shape many aspects of policymaking and of attitudes in other spheres. The legacy of the imperial and colonial past is evident in such phenomena as the ways in which the EU has evolved and continues to develop, in issues of neo-colonialism, in ethnic violence and rivalries in former colonies or in the debates surrounding humanitarian interventions by the nations of the developed world in the affairs of developing countries, often former colonies. No doubt the imprint and heritage of European colonialism is partly responsible for the ways in which ‘imperialism’ as both a concept and as a symbol, an evocation of the past in all its various forms, retains a contemporary currency and value.
There are, however, other elements in the story, and it is clear that it is not only the colonialism and imperialism of the recent past or of Europe that need to be considered. The Soviet Union, effectively an empire in its inner structure and in its administrative and political articulation, as well as in the mechanisms deployed to maintain and/or extend its political and economic control, has been replaced — as already intimated — by a Russian state in which a form of imperialist nationalism plays a key role in policy decisions at the highest level and which informs popular opinion and entails the evocation of an imperial past. In many respects modern Russia represents the continuation in a new guise of a traditional Eurasian land empire, just as the modern Chinese state maintains claims to the extensive multiethnic empire of the late imperial period.
The Middle East cannot be understood without a grasp of its imperial Ottoman past, no more than can the Balkans be understood without some awareness of what has been termed the ‘Byzantine commonwealth’ and its impact, nor again India without a grasp of the Mughals. And in both structural and administrative, as well as ideological, respects the Catholic Church still dimly reflects the basic features of the Roman empire in the west.
In light of this situation, then, it becomes all the more important and relevant to spend some time examining issues of imperial legacies and how they echo and impact the modern world. And although there is no explicit reference to it in the title of the book, this collection of essays — each chapter prepared by a leading specialist in one of the principal disciplinary fields or subfields relating to a particular empire — is dedicated to the overarching themes of fluidity, flexibility and heterogeneity in the organisation and realisation of empires of the Mediterranean world.
These characteristics represented a feature that all three empires studied in this volume shared in common, regardless of their makeup, territorial extent or dynastic longevity. The volume’s chronological scope is extensive, covering a span of nearly a millennium and a half of history and tracing the ups and downs of Mediterranean empires between roughly 400 and 1900 AD/CE. It goes without saying that each of these empires had a great deal in common besides the obvious fact of the coincidence in their territorial composition and extent. A starting point for their comparability is the fact that they displayed the same ethnolinguistic and cultural makeup and incorporated, at various times and with varying degrees of stability and permanence, the same populations, who became subjects of Roman and Byzantine emperors and in later centuries of Ottoman sultans.
How do we define empires? Scholarly debate focused on the study of empires has become especially active in the last two or three decades. To some extent this is a response to recent political debates about the nature of imperialism in the modern world. Themes such as the ‘benefits’, merits and demerits of imperialism and the contexts and origins of imperial systems have attracted particular attention. Yet there are almost as many ways of approaching empires as there have been empires themselves.' Comparative social history, invoking both historical research and political science perspectives on state systems and state formation, has been especially productive of questions and frameworks for analysis and discussion.
An alternative, perhaps less analytical but nevertheless profitable and informative approach has been to juxtapose a range of historically determinate imperial systems in a loose comparison, allowing those engaged in the debate to draw their own conclusions. Other approaches tackle the question through the elaboration of meta-historical models into which a range of historical examples are fitted and explained on the basis of a common causal logic. Depending on perspective and starting point, all of these can be useful and have an explanatory value.* This sort of larger-scale discussion is beyond the remit of our brief introduction.
But discussion of the structure of empires too frequently ignores the constitutive function of belief systems in determining or inflecting social praxis and hence cultural institutions of all kinds, from bureaucratic arrangements to religious structures. One aim of this volume is to underline the importance of beliefs, both as configured through official ideologies as well as through the symbolic universe or ‘thought-world’ of the ordinary members of the culture and society in which the imperial state was rooted, as well as in that of the conquered, assimilated or dependent populations and elites of empires.
Imperial systems have been both relatively simple as well as complex. On the one hand, they can be broadly identified through a small number of key elements that all share. Most have been territorial polities extended beyond an original central region, dominated by a core, usually with a substantial element of coercive power at its disposal. They have tended to entail the incorporation of local elites, and often local religious cultures, into a system dominated by the centre, while the language and culture of the core tends to dominate as the medium of imperial administration and elite culture. By the same token, they generally generate an imperial ideology through which the system of rule and domination can be legitimated. On the other hand, it is obvious that no single version or model of empire has ever existed, or exists. The observer and analyst is instead confronted by a wide range of empirically verifiable forms, and each set of forms originates, functions and evolves differently. Imperial systems and the economic structures that maintain them evolve, of course, while the succession of empires over time also demonstrates a succession of imperial forms that vary in terms of their patterns of ideological integration, their power over conquered lands, the degree of their integration of subordinate elites or the sophistication of resource extraction and redistribution. To a certain extent, indeed, we might envisage empires as historically determined solutions to managing networks of power-relationships and their extension or maintenance on the part of a specific dominant polity or power elite, solutions that function until the wider context in which they originated changes sufficiently for the arrangements and relationships in question to begin to fail.?
There are innumerable variations on the theme of the relationship between local and regional elites and the core, between imperial political ideologies and local elites, between different levels of elite activity and the imperial administration or military. Likewise, the relationship between imperial fiscal management and the collection and consumption of resources, between means of exchange, monetisation and market activity, all vary massively from case to case — although, of course, it is possible to reduce all of these to a smaller set of ideal-typical forms.
The origins of an empire generally determine a whole range of its key features — from its religious-ideological configuration to its forms of revenue and its resource base. For example, taxation, tribute and trade generally coexist in different proportions and occupy different positions within the imperial system according to geography, cultural tradition, access to precious metals, the political conjuncture, technological development and the structures of rule and administration. Such features reflect relationships, or sets of relationships, that involve all aspects of social power — as elaborated, for example, in Mann’s work on state systems: collective and distributive, intensive and extensive, diffused and authoritative.
It is on the basis of such categories that we can try to elucidate and understand the dynamics of imperial systems at different periods and in different parts of the world. Social power as thus defined can be seen as fundamental to the actual configuration of different networks of social relations and to the imperial structures that evolve out of them. Empires can be seen as ‘multilevel states’, constituting themselves at certain key levels — in respect of, for example, bureaucratic arrangements — as quasi-autonomous actors in respect of socialeconomic and political power relationships.°
A key aspect of the constitution of imperial ideologies 1s reflected in the practice and forms of imperial legitimacy and legitimation. In the case of the past traditions of the empires dealt with in this collection of essays, we can observe many features of continuity across the various dynastic boundaries and ostensibly distinct political eras. One example of the durability of tradition in the Mediterranean world can be seen in the fact that — despite the glaringly obvious contrast and seeming incompatibility between the former Christian emperors and a newly installed Muslim ruler — the new master of the city in 1453 proclaimed himself not just “master of the two continents and the two seas’, but also kayser-i Rum, that is Roman Caesar.
Such self-proclaimed continuities were part and parcel of the Ottoman understanding of inclusive politics and claim of universal sovereignty according to which titles as diverse and seemingly self-contradictory as han (khan) and shah (padishah) could, in their appropriate contexts and for their particular purposes, be invoked to appeal to diverse political constituencies, both internal and external. At the same time, other terms and titles of sovereign status such as sultan and Caesar could be used interchangeably as an invocation of the universal scope of the Ottoman ruler’s power and authority.
The incongruity of drawing on pre-Christian Roman traditions on the one hand, while at the same time at invoking the pre-Islamic rulers of Achaemenid and Sasanian Iran in Ottoman imperial titulature gave apologists for the Ottoman dynastic cause not the slightest pause or occasion for self-doubt. Successor regimes made a general habit of claiming not just that they superseded their predecessors in a chronological sense, but also that they outperformed them in the art of good government as measured in a diverse set of terms cherished by their predecessors, whose empires had been constructed in the same territory. As cohabitants of Anatolia during the Palaeologid interregnum in Nicaea between 1204 and 1261, the Turkic tribal elements whose immediate descendants founded the Ottoman empire had already undergone a kind of synthesis of traditions that left its own mark on the forms of political legitimacy that were formulated after the stable establishment of their own imperium.
Similar continuities in terms of self-reference and the transference of symbols, regalia and other material expressions of the imperial traditions carried over from a previous imperial era enabled the bridging of the seemingly unbridgeable gap between pagan Rome and the Eastern Roman empire of the early Christian era. These crossovers are explored in detail in the thoughtful contribution of Beat Brenk at the beginning of the present volume. In his contribution Brenk documents the incorporation and use in wholesale fashion of images, gestures, symbols, visual representations and iconography of power and authority in examples representing imperial art of the pre-Christian era and their counterparts in the early Christian era. The stability of cultural norms during periods of political upheaval and transition to new systems of belief, such as that from paganism and polytheism to Christianity in the first century AD and from a largely Christian-dominated Mediterranean to the multifaith world that emerged after the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century, represents an aspect of the increasingly multiethnic, multifaith and multicultural empires of Late Antique and Early Medieval times that the several contributors to the volume have sought to evaluate.
Coming to terms with the diversity of inherited traditions represented in its various constituent parts of empire, from the political centre to the margins and borderlands, required a constant adaptability, inventiveness and flexibility that expressed itself in different ways during distinct phases in the expression and manifestation of empire, from rise and consolidation to inertia and decline through the course of intermediate and repeated cycles of equilibrium and disequilibrium. These cycles, of varying duration and intensity — what some might call crisis and recovery — were an integral part of the life-histories of such longenduring entities as the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The character and forms of adjustment, adaptation and accommodation of change may have varied between empires, but the necessity of such accommodation for the survival of empire remained the same. Of course, such accommodations were not always — if ever — consciously planned, but reflected rather the degrees of resilience of the political and socio-economic structures that prevailed at any given moment, and in particular the various competing vested interests of the major stakeholders in each system (e.g., imperial family/dynasty and political power elites, including religious elites, identity groups and so forth).
Because of its extreme longevity, a kind of timeless quality, even immutability, is often falsely attributed to the Byzantine empire over the course of its thousand-year history between the mid-fourth century and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In practical terms and in terms of the limits of the possible in a constantly changing world, immutability was, of course, never achievable. New circumstances arising from political, environmental and epoch-making global economic change, such as the rise of market-orientated and monetised agrarian regimes in the sixteenth century which in turn affected Ottoman administrative arrangements and procedures — including their approach to such basic state institutions as the land tenure regime and attitudes towards the most beneficial division and distribution of its productive potential — always introduced themselves and challenged the social, political and economic premises supporting the existing imperial status quo.°
In the face of change on a monumental scale, empires of the Late Antique, Medieval and Early Modern periods devised different strategies for meeting the challenge posed by an unstable world. How flexibility, fluidity and hybridity were expressed in the specific historical circumstances, and the nature of the responses to change that were generated in each empire is documented in detailed case studies provided by each of the contributors to this volume. One level of challenge confronted by the two main empires whose experience accounts for the bulk of the volume’s content was the search for and struggle to gain and retain the loyalty of subjects inherited from a predecessor regime. The strategies deployed by the respective empires to attract supporters to their dynastic cause depended on an appeal to a variety of constituencies whose composition was subject to change as the empire expanded, contracted or wallowed in the doldrums over the prolonged course of their respective dynastic lifespans. The relationship between the governors and the governed and the rulers and the ruled was forged in the crucible of crisis and sometimes even cataclysmic change that affected all empires regardless of their longevity. The explanation for each empire’s longevity can be sought in the nature and thoroughness of its particular responses and its general responsiveness to the potentially destabilising changes it encountered.
The imprint left as one empire succeeded to another and the after-history or meta-history of a fallen empire during the tenure of a caretaker or successor regime naturally forms one dimension of continuity at the outset of a new imperial era. But how a successor regime exploited and/or realised the potential represented by such inheritances constitutes a field of study whose breadth and scope was perhaps first realised in Nicolae Iorga’s aptly entitled study Byzance apres Byzance, published in 1935.’
By and large, in its revisiting of Iorga’s conceptual vision of 1935, the present volume supports the contention that that there is no such thing as a tabula rasa or an absolutely new beginning in history, a point noted already. Intriguingly however, two contributors to the volume, Anscombe and Strauss, challenge the notion of the inevitability of a meta-historical influence or post-imperial ‘legacy’ of empire suffusing all levels and spheres of imperial self-expression. With regard to the after-life of Ottoman political institutions, Anscombe argues that in view of the fact that most of the political regimes that emerged in the nineteenth-century Balkans and post-WWI Middle East were imposed by the European colonial powers and represented their political values: “In the sphere of politics, there was practically no Ottoman heritage, let alone legacy, that survived the creation of nation-states on formerly Ottoman lands”. The imperceptibility of a lasting Ottoman cultural imprint on the former Ottoman lands in the Balkans and the Arab world is a theme taken up in the chapter by Strauss through his evaluation of the lack of literary and linguistic inheritances dating from the period of Ottoman rule. The absence of a self-conscious and consistently implemented policy of ethnic or linguistic Turkification or the formulation of an imperial culture based on Turkishness or Turkic identity raises the question of whether this was by accident or design. The fact that the Ottomans studiously avoided association of their imperial regime with policies of forced conversion or pressures to assimilate suggests that it was a deliberate choice whose aim was to promote feelings of loyalty and a sense of belonging among subject populations representing a wide array of different faiths, language traditions and cultural norms. Loyalty to the Ottoman regime was tested not in terms of conformity to predetermined ethno-religious norms or cultural expectations, but in a spirit very similar to that expressed in Executive Order 10925 issued by American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 6 March 1961: “without regard to the race, creed, colour, or national origin” of would-be participants in the Ottoman imperial venture. To this list one might add, in the Ottoman case, ‘and without regard to applicant’s/participant’s linguistic preferences’. Imperial governance encroached on many spheres of everyday life, including market regulation, maintaining law and order and other aspects of social cohesion, but tampering with individual identity remained outside the competence and purview of the state throughout the premodern era. Perforce premodern empires remained both unambitious and ineffectual in the task of shaping the thought worlds of their subjects and, until the era of mass education inaugurated in the late nineteenth-century, ill equipped with the means to create ‘imagined communities’ or to achieve cultural uniformity and/or hegemony to any meaningful degree.
The project of studying the afterlife of empires and of tracing and discovering the meta-historical realities relating to imperial survival in a later imperial era or in a post-imperial world was made the topic of investigation for a symposium convened in Strasbourg in 1987.° Discussion of whether historical change is best understood as a process of historical accretion, as opposed to ab novum creation, is ongoing. In particular, the scholarly study of the Ottoman empire has made notable advances during the quarter century or so since the publication of proceedings of the Strasbourg symposium in 1991. It is thus perhaps high time that the topic of imperial residues, in its broadest dimensions, should be revisited in the light of new discoveries, new research agendas and new approaches to the study of the eastern Mediterranean lands as elaborated over the past several decades.
In the present volume are several aspects of the survival and/or aftermath of empires that were not fully explored in previously published works, including, for instance, study of survivals in the pattern of land use, analysis of the characteristics of land settlement and labour mobility and other long-term adjustments to environmental degradation and over-intensive exploitation of the soil. These topics are considered from the perspectives of both archaeological and geographical analysis, with an accompanying review of the surviving material and archival evidence in the contributions by Vionis and Wagstaff to the present volume. The evidence analysed in these studies is drawn from four distinct political or imperial eras, starting with the Romano-Byzantine, proceeding to the era of Latin rule in the Greek lands in the post-Classical era (as studied by Vionis) and concluding with the quick succession from Venetian occupation to the reimposition of Ottoman rule following the twenty-eight-year Venetian interregnum lasting between 1687 and 1715 (as studied by Wagstaff). Comparing the style of rule and the legacy of empire by focusing on confined geographical spaces over contrasting lengths of time brings into clear relief the impact of empire in the landscape. Such focus on regions and sub-climes as a way of assessing the influence and aftermath of empire in the Mediterranean was not something that was very much in scholarly vogue at the time when Nicolae Iorga’s volume of 1935 was conceived, nor was it very comprehensively covered when the theme was revisited from a multi-perspective approach in the publication of 1991. The conclusion that the content and methodological context of the present volume, in particular by its inclusion of an investigation of long-term changes in the landscape of the Mediterranean, contributes in a significant way to the broadening of the discussion on the phenomenon of empire seems incontestable.
The contribution by Vionis investigates the impact (cultural, religious and artistic) of successive political regimes over a long expanse of time in a confined setting, in his case the confined insular context of the Cyclades. Apart from the era of Latin rule when Naxos served as the pivot and political centre of the Latin Duchy of the Archipelago in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, this region stood at the periphery of empire and was spared the intrusive presence of direct imperial intervention. It is thus ideally suited for the investigation of the relationship between periphery and centre and for the purpose of tracking alternations in the image and perception of empire as they emerged across political eras. Wagstaff, on the other hand, takes under consideration the regional impact of regime change in the short span separating Ottoman from Venetian rule in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries based on a microcosm of empire consisting of the Aigio district in the northern Peloponnesus, whose demographic, fiscal and agrarian profile can be reconstructed comprehensively from the detailed quantitative data preserved in cadastres and other rural survey records preserved from both imperialist regimes, i.e. the Ottoman and Venetian. The contrast between the long-term and wider regional perspective offered by Vionis and the microscopic and highly detailed picture of the immediate onthe-ground effects and imprints left in a specific locality at the conclusion of particular political regimes studied by Wagstaff provides the reader with alternative ways of interpreting the imprint of empire on local and regional landscapes and rural settings. What’s more, it offers a welcome relief to the relentlessly Constantinople-centred and Istanbul-centric approaches to imperial legacy encountered in many accounts.
The contributions on legal and institutional frameworks operating within the Byzantine and Ottoman empires prepared by Morris (chapter 1) and Murphey (chapter 2) help clarify another aspect of the negotiated character of power relations as both authors independently reach a similar conclusion that central imperial administrations were perforce engaged in a constant process of bargaining and accommodation with custom, tradition and other entrenched means of problem-solving. Such alternative means might consist of local administrative or institutional structures or competing jurisdictional modes such as municipal, judicial, monastic or other ecclesiastical bodies. At the local level, state power was necessarily mediated and delivered by a host of different actors and agents, some of whom enjoyed a degree of independence from central imperial authority. In navigating these spheres of imperial governance where long-standing legal principles and precedents held sway, the emperor's ‘power’ was always filtered and refracted through the lens of accommodation and compromise with interests defined and defended outside the apparatus of the state and its institutions.
This gave a hybrid quality to solutions devised to resolve real world problems and to cope with social complexities. Such differences could never be resolved using the dogmatic and single-minded approach to decision-making to which an ‘autocratic’ ruler was theoretically entitled, nor could it solutions be dictated unilaterally by the application of the unbending philosophical or ideological commitments of either side in a jurisdictional dispute. By default, emperorship in both the Byzantine and the Ottoman contexts was not just defined by but also governed by compromise.
How the rule of law and imperial justice were applied and how such application of the law found, and needs must find, its reflection in the self-image as well as the comportment of the ruling authorities with respect to seekers of justice reveals a pattern of long-term continuity commencing in the Late Antique era that is preserved across dynastic and religio-cultural barriers and boundaries. On a wider front, perhaps one of the volume’s most consistent and unwavering conclusions — a conclusion shared by the archaeologists, art historians (e.g. Brenk and Brubaker), geographers as well as the historians who offer their reflections on the cumulative nature of imperial traditions and their legacy in contemporary times (e.g. Anscombe, Clayer and Strauss) — is that when reviewing the record and skeletal remains of empires which have come and gone, wholesale or radically transformational change is rarely encountered. Stated in other words: ex nihilo nihil fit.
The general axiom that while change may be perpetual, it is never fully pervasive, applies whether one examines the realm of material culture, cultural values or even such basic qualities as self-identification and self-representation. The terms of such qualitative and reflective choices were set outside the compass and control of central state bureaucracies and instruments of imperial governance. While there was no shortage of political and dynastic change over the period of AD 400-1900 treated between the covers of this volume, and while changes realised at the trans-societal level involved the adoption of new confessional, spiritual and intellectual identities, whose force and mobilising potential are undeniable, each empire under study received into its care relatively stable populations confirmed in their traditional habits and settled in their traditional habitats on and around the shores of the Mediterranean.
Transformatory events on the scale witnessed in modern times under the influence of mass migrations and redrawing of boundaries that involved the resettlement or permanent emigration in the aftermath of catastrophic wars are not encountered in the annals of imperial history prior to the internationalisation of imperial rivalries and balance-of-power conflicts on a global scale that began to occur around the time of the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century.
The scale of change witnessed with the passing of one empire and its succession by another in premodern times which constitutes the subject matter of the present volume was characterised by reconciliation, coming to terms with a new imperial master, building of new political identities on a basis of mutual compromise, accommodation and a renegotiation of personal identity, and the forging of a ‘sense of belonging’ was proven to be not just achievable but was routinely achieved.
The Ottomans, though sometimes cited or celebrated for their toleration and acceptance of religious and cultural diversity, actually built their imperium on a foundation not of toleration for but celebration of diversity. In addition to accommodating the community life of their own indigenous religious minorities, i.e. the zimmi, they also maintained an open immigration policy and welcomed members of any religious or ethnic minority group whose potential for contributing to the dynasty’s cause was discerned.
The brain drain on a global scale, though perhaps a modern and post-industrial phenomenon in its essence, also had its premodern equivalent, since no member of the top league of imperialists and governors of territorially extensive empires could afford to do without the services of skilled workers capable of operating in multilateral contexts. Some such workers entered the sultan’s employ as captives or prisoners of war, whereas others sought the sultan’s protection and entered his circle of patronage and employment as asylum seekers or so-called renegades. This later group should more properly be referred to as specialist advisers, technicians and artisans who possessed sought-after skills and talents needed for the smooth and efficient running of the empire.’
That political identity and loyalty to the state or dynasty were fluid and flexible and that faithful service to a sovereign was based upon a negotiated status whose terms were hammered out with input from both parties is clear, but what is not always recognised is that because terms of service were first negotiated and thus by definition also renegotiable, loyalty as a quality was never absolute or permanent, but personal and based on the nurturing of a relationship founded on mutual trust. Each succession to the throne required not only a transfer of loyalty, but also a renegotiation of its terms with the new ruler, whose ruling personality was unique to himself and whose criteria for recruitment and deployment of his officers and governors might differ from any given predecessor.
Thus, in the transfer of power at a succession within a dynasty — or even in the context of the substitution of one dynasty for another — what mattered most was the orderly and stable transfer of power. The stability and preservation of institutional and administrative structures and even of administrative personnel, as well as the detail of administrative practice across imperial regimes, constituted another dimension of long-term continuity to be explored when assessing the imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Rule in the Balkan lands and in the Eastern Mediterranean.
One of the volume’s contributors, Anscombe, devotes his chapter to a consideration of the post-imperial survival of such loyalty and patronage principles and practices in the era of national sovereignty that ensued with the gradually fading, but never entirely disappearing, Ottoman imperial presence in specific regions of the former Ottoman territories. Paradoxically, in some realms, i.e. the Arab lands following the Treaty of Berlin and the loss of Ottoman territories in the northern Balkans after 1878, the once imperceptible presence of rule from the imperial capital in Istanbul became ever more apparent in the waning years of empire.
Throughout the premodern era, even in the early phases of the era of the nation state post 1870, there was little opportunity for state leadership, whatever the colour, stripe and tone of its religio-ideological commitments, to reconstitute the thought worlds and cultural habits of its diverse subject base or to remake its citizen-subjects in its own image. Such thought worlds were impervious to that kind of influence, and each of the constituent communities making up the sprawling multinational and multidenominational entities which transregional empires represented had their own instincts, impulses and habits of self-expression that contributed to the pluralistic cultural mix.
It was beyond the power of the state — at least in the form that it assumed in the pre-print and pre-mass communication era — to influence the directional flow of cultural expression or to monitor, let alone control, its form. In this respect, the instruments of repression available to the premodern state were of limited efficacy and extent.
The fluid state of culture and cultural expression and the nature of inter-communal dialogue — all existing outside the realm of state manipulation and its directive scope — is captured in the contribution by Clayer, which devotes itself to the complex religious landscape of the Balkans in the nineteenth century. Clayer notes that, despite the dedicated missionary efforts of a number of players — both indigenous and international — to harness the loyalties and the confessional identities of the local residents of the peninsula to serve their own ideological or religious purposes, indigenous populations proved themselves to be impervious and stubbornly resistant to attempts at such manipulation. Clayer characterises this resistance to outside interference in the spiritual makeup of the premodern Balkans as ‘movements, oscillations, mixings and borrowings’.
This indeterminism and pluralism represented a process that was ongoing between representatives of diverse cultures and communities whose defining characteristics defy easy classification and elude attempts at analytical dichotomisation or categorisation. The determined heterogeneity and spiritual heterodoxy of the Balkans gives it a complexity that is perhaps inconvenient for the application of sociological analysis which relies on fixed and clearly defined categories. However, the indeterminate quality of Balkan spiritualism described by Clayer is highly suggestive of just how alien and antithetical to the notions of fixity, stasis, absence of movement or unchanging dogma and ‘essence’ the character and content of the thought worlds of the ‘subjects’ of empires remained until well after the dawning of the modern age.
It is the diversity and heterogeneity of empires expressed in terms of centreperiphery differentiation and in the multiplicity of the forms encountered amongst and between the various religio-cultural communities which they incorporated that provides the overarching thematic coherence connecting the essays selected for inclusion in the present volume. Essentialist, sometimes triumphalist, approaches to particular empires tend to avoid any discussion of the varied conversations taking place between cultures and the fusion and emergence of hybrid forms combining aspects of different imperial traditions that are clearly observable in both the Byzantine and Ottoman cases. By so doing they adopt an oversimplified understanding of empire that bears no resemblance to historical reality.
Such reductionist perspectives and essentialising understandings of culture provide only an abstract perspective, one that obscures the attempt to understand cultural development as a process of accretion, reinterpretation and restatement of diverse imperial legacies and inheritances in real time. The purist approach falsely regards each tradition as representative and expressive of a separate, exceptional and purely iterated civilisational form; pagan or Christian, Christian or Muslim.
As an antidote to essentialist approaches, if this collection of essays has accomplished no more than the reintroduction of complexity into the discussion of imperial tradition and prompted the reader to ponder the quality and character of the accommodation of diversity that empires of the past achieved, then that alone justifies the publication of the volume as a cohesive summary of imperial legacy.
If, beyond that, it manages to suggest viable ways and means for accommodating religious and sectarian difference and for encouraging the welcoming of cultural complexity and diversity in the modern age — whose character is now defined by transnationalism formed in the crucible of mass migration and the emergence of a global workplace — then its value is multiplied. Despite the transformational character of the revolutions in transport, population mobility, mass communications and a number of other fronts since the passing of the age of empires, the cosmopolitanism of empires in a bygone era still offers much that is worthy of study and reflection — dare one suggest even object lessons — for the contemporary world.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق