Download PDF | Serving Byzantium’s Emperors The Courtly Life And Career Of Michael Attaleiates, Palgrave Macmillan ( 2019)
310 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies. The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies.
The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ENTWINED
Byzantine writers apparently loved lush meadows. To the encomiast writing about the virtues of an emperor, his object of praise was like a meadow teeming with flowers, each virtue representing a different blossom. For the historian too, a book could be a meadow; its pages bundled pleasant vignettes, all together constituting an appealing landscape. Michael Psellos tells us that people jump with joy as they walk through meadows. Then again, lest the association of history with pleasure offend the more austere among us, the flowers in meadows also attracted bees and those were useful, utility being a central concern of the historian.
Like Emperor Konstantinos Monomachos, who was known in the eleventh century for his gardening prowess and his efforts to replicate nature on the palace grounds, I have sought to create a meadow of words out of carefully selected and deliberately arranged materials. The flowers in this meadow are sometimes my ideas but more often than not the assemblage of other scholars’ wisdom—both medieval and modern—the plan is mine. Taken as a whole, like a grand vista on a meadow teeming with flowers of all kinds, this book offers what I hope is a coherent, academically useful and altogether pleasing way of reading Byzantine history. In its particulars, it offers vignettes and detail, which may in turn lead us to the consideration of the whole and spur broader reflection on the nature of Romanfia, the polity of the people we call the Byzantines.
This book has been a long time coming. It was conceived in late 2006 as parergon, a side project. It was a distraction from the stressful duty to my professional self, the completion of the first, tenure-granting monograph. And yet, for all that working on it over all these years has given me hours upon hours of pure joy—a smirk and smile often marking my face, as I wrote biography and pondered on the reactions of audiences to Attaleiates’ journey—it also raised a number of uncomfortable questions. Was another book on this medieval judge necessary? Was returning to the man I have studied for so long evidence that I was running out of ideas? Was what is discussed in here derivative?
You hold the book in your hands, which suggests that over time I came to the following answers to these three questions: yes, no and no. The book—I tell myself and I hope the reader agrees—is not really about Attaleiates per se but more broadly about Romania, its mandarins and high court officials, and the culture of the Byzantine eleventh century in general. For all that historians and audiences remain fascinated with Byzantium, we rarely think about what truly made it different from other contemporary polities. Its noblesse de robe, to which Attaleiates belonged, was one such crucial distinguishing characteristic.
Attaleiates did not leave us all that much for a detailed biographical sketch to emerge from his writings alone. His voice sometimes echoes loudly in his writings, yet more often than not his silences are deafening. What you have in your hands is therefore the result of a peculiar form of Byzantine crowdsourcing. A number of Attaleiates’ contemporaries (do they really make up a crowd?) and their experiences are selected and creatively bundled to produce a historically plausible approximation of what was. Creativity may raise an eyebrow or two, hence the discomfort discussed above.
This book relies heavily on the painstaking, meticulous, funny, often brilliant, and at times frustrating work of my colleagues in the field of Byzantine Studies. From their pages, I liberally and with gratitude borrow as I relate Attaleiates’ life. The past few years have seen established ideas scrutinized even as new ways of understanding the polity of the Romans, its people, and its culture have taken hold. Like the monarchy of the medieval Romans, Byzantine Studies appears eternal and stable. While, however, in conferences and in our own work we celebrate the past and pay our respects to genealogies of knowledge that provide comforting stability to what we know, in the pages of journals and books a gradual, subtle, but tangible repositioning of the field has taken place. Attaleiates’ life, as it emerges from the pages of this book, is an attempt to reflect on these changes and relate them through the accessible medium of biography to both colleagues and, hopefully, a broader audience.
Well before it could be considered for any reader, let along a broad audience, this book has for years existed as ideas circulated, discussed, and tested among friends, colleagues, and students. Former and current graduate students at Simon Fraser University patiently endured my excited monologues and hand waving, showing keen interest in the project. Alex Olson, Chris Dickert, Aleks Jovanovic, and Jovana Andjelkovic have spent hours in conversation over food and drinks on this or that aspect of the story. John Fine’s Michigan cohort—Anthony Kaldellis, Adam Shor, Young Kim, Alex Angelov, and Ian Mladjov—have always been willing to exchange ideas, Ian ever ready to improve our work with his stunning works of cartography. Ray Van Dam’s storytelling and sense for historically significant minutiae is always with me. I owe my Ann Arbor colleagues thanks for the opportunity to discuss and further develop my ideas on Attaleia as a Byzantine city-state by attending a symposium at the University of Michigan in honor of Diane Owen Hughes.
During my sabbatical year, Catherine Holmes’ intercession offered me three stimulating months as a Visiting Fellow at University College, Oxford. Her hospitality was invaluable, while conversations with college veterans George Cawkwell and Alexander Murray proved stimulating and endlessly whimsical. James Howard-Johnston and Mark Whittow welcomed me back into the uniquely lively Oxford Byzantine community. Mark’s knack for the unexpected question and openness to new, curious ideas was a reminder of what I had so enjoyed during my studies at Oxford in the 1990s. I am profoundly saddened by his passing and by the fact that I will not be able to get his reaction to this book.
For years, I have been sharing with Leonora Neville this or that aspect of my project during our annual meetings at the Byzantine Studies Conference. Her enthusiastic interest in Attaleiates’ tale helped me bring this project to fruition. I have to thank her and the editorial board of the New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture series at Palgrave Macmillan for the trust they put on this book. And so we come to Nicole, who for more than a decade has offered support, companionship, and ceaseless questioning of all ideas and certainties. I set the first words of this book on a word processor’s luminous white page while sitting on her couch at Heather Street. A few blocks west and to the south, the last taps on the keyboard ring from the living room in ovr apartment as this project comes to an end.
Vancouver, Canada Dimitris Krallis
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
In a time of culturally sensitive readers, scholars should phase out the distorting Anglicization and Latinization of Byzantine names. Mostly following the Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, | have adopted the actual Greek forms of proper names—for example, Konstantinos Monomachos rather than Constantine Monomachos (or, perish the thought, Monomachus).
In deference to his Latin cultural background, the first Christian emperor will still appear as Constantine. Keeping a clean text while conveying phonetically the long and short etas and iotas of the Greek is nevertheless tricky. I have thus kept unaccented ¢etas, as in Ioannes, Diogenes, and Maleses, and opted for zota () when rendering accented forms, as in Digenis. The dignities and offices of the men and women who populate the pages of this book have been transliterated directly and italicized. The reader should, however, note that it is sometimes impossible to offer an accurate translation given our lack of knowledge regarding certain titles (e.g., vestes). Since no policy can remain fully consistent, I have retained some first names and place-names more widely used in Anglicized form outside the field of Byzantine or classical studies, such as Menander, Antioch, Constantinople, Cyclades, or Trebizond.
Introduction
A stunning panorama of the thickly forested Pontic Alps rising sharply as backdrop to Trebizond impresses to this day travelers that set sail from this ancient Black Sea port-city like modern age Argonauts on their way to myriad destinations.
And yet on a hot day early in September 1071, the judge of the Hippodrome and the velum Michael Attaleiates had little time to think of nature’s flare for the picturesque. Bleak thoughts surely run through his mind as he left Asia Minor behind him on his way to Constantinople. Beyond the Pontic mountain range, days upon days of frantic horseback riding, to the south and east of Trebizond in the vicinity of Lake Van, lay an apocalyptic landscape littered with the swelling bodies of Roman soldiers. Attaleiates had only narrowly escaped the fate of these men during the bloody aftermath of the imperial army’s crushing defeat at the hands of the Seljuq Sultan Alp Arslan. Some of his colleagues had not been so lucky and the emperor himself had been captured, a first in centuries of Roman history.
Usually judges like Attaleiates are mere shadows on the dimly lit canvas of the empire’s long legal and administrative history. We know the names of numerous members of Byzantium’s judicial class and yet, more often than not, their names alone do not tell us much. Most survive as inscriptions on lead seals that reveal little about their careers on the judge’s bench or their lives beyond the hustle and bustle of the lively byzantine courts. A smaller number of judges left us their writings on law from which we glean information regarding their profession and even, sometimes, a sense of their approach to justice. Attaleiates, however, was reasonably well known in his own time. The sources at our disposal are richer and while only small ciphers from the much larger mosaic of his life actually survive, what emerges from those is colorful and illuminating. In fact, Attaleiates was likely a household name in Constantinople at the time.
A few years prior to the aforementioned catastrophe, Attaleiates was one of the presiding judges during what in his time must have registered as the trial of the century. He joined empress Eudokia and a number of his colleagues in legal drama that in 1067 consumed the attention of the body politic. The general Romanos Diogenes, a respected warrior who had openly expressed his frustration with the empire’s handling of Seljuq incursions in Asia Minor, was arraigned for sedition and conspiracy against the throne. Roughly a decade after the fact Attaleiates penned a short account of the event in which he explained that the court condemned Romanos despite a sense, shared by every single one of its members, that the general’s motivation had been irreproachable and his intentions noble. Alas, sedition against imperial authority could under no circumstances be condoned, patriotism notwithstanding.
In a turn of events that contemporaries attributed to cupid, whose arrows many thought had struck Eudokia in the course of the trial, the empress spared the condemned man.! Romanos had proven too handsome to kill and but weeks later he became Eudokia’s husband and emperor. Little ink has been spilled on this tantalizing bit of historical trivia. Buried in Attaleiates larger History of his times it is quickly sidestepped by readers who itch to leave behind them Constantinopolitan intrigue and follow Romanos and his army on his campaigns against the Seljuqs in Asia. And yet discussions no doubt raged in Constantinople, a fecund ground for political gossip, regarding every detail of the trial.2 The people in the streets surely pointed at the judge as he rode from the courts to his home and back, dressed in his best silk fabrics.
Such notoriety rarely came without direct material rewards. Two decrees bearing golden imperial seals, issued by Emperors Michael VII and Nikephoros III in 1075 and 1079 respectively, indicate that the man who tried Romanos Diogenes turned fame into real political dividend and tangible material benefits in the years after the trial. Here is how the secretariat working for Michael VII recorded what their emperor wished to say about Attaleiates: There is nothing at all which can render the generous soul of a ruler even more generous than the sincere loyalty of a grateful subject whose heart is eager to serve his master.
If this man is also adorned with learning of general usefulness and a good disposition and intelligence, this encourages his master to even more generosity. For this man attracts his master to himself as a magnet does iron, and he asks, as is reasonable, to enjoy abundant favors from him. Indeed an example has been revealed right before our eyes and very close at hand that this is so and that these words are true, namely the anthypatos and judge, Michael Attaleiates, a man venerated for the dignity of his bearing and his good character, a very serious individual of great learning and admirable experience, and even more admirable is his loyalty to my majesty, a man who is prouder of this [loyalty] with which he is adorned than he is of his other accomplishments, as a long period of time has clearly revealed.
The parsing index finger stops at the very middle of the paragraph above, where the emperor notes that right before his eyes, very close at hand Attaleiates stood as a model of loyalty to his rule. This document is testament to Attaleiates’ social and political success. The judge, who first tried and then served Romanos Diogenes loyally, figures here as a respectable and trustworthy servant of the very regime that in time toppled the warrior emperor and ordered his blinding.
A second imperial decree was issued by the successor to Michael VI, Nikephoros HI Botaneiates, to whom Attaleiates eventually dedicated his historical work. As with the document cited above, the language on this one suggests that the judge remained within the charmed circle of imperial confidants. In the tumultuous 3rd quarter of the eleventh century, Attaleiates successfully navigated courtly intrigue over four successive administrations from Konstantinos X to Nikephoros III and with every upheaval and change at the helm of the state increased his influence and wealth, while at the same time carefully shepherding his one and only son into the ranks of the empire’s officialdom.
This book then is about this one man, a respected judge, effective courtier, and active politician. In a sense, it is a micro-history: a study of Byzantium’s pen-pushers, a look at the role of highly educated officials in the empire’s politics through the focused engagement with one man’s life. Men like Attaleiates produced laws, framed imperial ideology, promoted some imperial reformist initiatives while undermining others, and interpreted the Roman past in ways compelling for both emperors and citizens. The medieval Roman polity, the state that the Byzantines themselves called Romania (the land of the Romans), was an imagined community created on parchment by Attaleiates and his peers and defended on land and sea by the very same men who populated the pages of their histories.
Courtiers and bureaucrats are what distinguished Romania from feudal polities and emerging republics in the west. They were such a prominent aspect of Romania’s social and political life that thirteenth-century Crusaders mocked Byzantine officialdom by pretending to write in ledgers while holding quills. And yet, ironically, there is perhaps only one accessible study of this influential class of men. Members of the empire’s erudite officialdom no doubt cast an unimpressive shadow when placed next to warrior emperors, rebellious generals, and hardy warriors. It is to them, however, that we must turn in order to understand the distinct nature of the medieval Roman polity and state, since the quill of the bureaucrat often trumped the sword of the empire’s soldiers, shaping, for better or for worse, the fate of the empire and the way that its history is remembered.
This then is a biography of a man, whom we know by the three texts he left us, all of them little read and yet important in their own right for the study of Byzantium. It may appear disingenuous that as a historian I write about a medieval “colleague,” yet it should be clear from the outset that this is not a study of Attaleiates as a writer of history. Our subject was after all a judge, a member of the court, who only incidentally dabbled with history. In that, Attaleiates differs from my colleagues all around the world and of course he differs from me.
Unlike him, we write history to earn a living. Unlike us, he did not pay his bills by crafting historical narratives and he was by no means expected to instruct students in a classroom. Different, however, as his career path may have been from that of most academic historians, he nevertheless sought to fulfill an aspiration as true today as it was back in the eleventh century. As an educated individual Attaleiates partook in a vibrant debate on politics and culture and aimed to instruct future generations, much like his modern counterparts who teach in university classrooms.
Still, one can take such comparisons only so far. Attaleiates’ audiences were unlike ours and, as a result, his narrative techniques and ours are distinctly different. We are supposed to be self-effacing and keep our biases under control, or at least clearly stated, as we process information with academic rigor. He, on the other hand, wore some of his biases on his sleeve, while expressing some others more discreetly, trying not to step on the toes of too powerful a court rival. He also made cameo appearances in his own historical narrative in an attempt to highlight his role in the events described and used his own deeds as examples for his readers. Modern scholarship on Byzantium has noted this “autobiographical impulse” of the historians and chroniclers who wrote in the period from the tenth century onwards. It is this phenomenon that I exploit here in order to reconstruct aspects of Michael Attaleiates’ life, not as a historian, but as judge, courtier, and member of the empire’s bureaucratic elite.
One man then becomes a fellow traveler on a journey through the eleventh century. His trajectory, from provincial birth to Constantinopolitan burial, takes him from a bustling provincial harbor to the palace in Constantinople and the Byzantine army in the battlefield. In examining the details of his life, as those emerge from the diverse texts he left to posterity, we visit the empire’s territories, we walk the streets of Constantinople, we invest on land and real estate, and we take his advice on how to craft an effective tax haven for our fortune. We even face the prospect of death at the hands of the empire’s barbarian enemies.
In proposing such a journey back in time, I seek freedom from the historical presumption that as scholars we may only commit to paper what can be strictly verified by the sources. Such exigency, while in theory ensuring historical accuracy, rarely allows an accessible image of an era to emerge. Our sources, if only they are treated imaginatively, though by no means uncritically, offer a peek at exactly such an image. Whether Attaleiates stared at the sea on a breezy summer afternoon, while sitting at the pier of his hometown harbor, cannot be confirmed by his writings. Yet the fact that he was born in the Mediterranean port town of Attaleia where he spent his childhood makes it an absolute certainty that he had indeed felt the sea breeze in his hair. As a piece of information this little detail may appear speculative and devoid of significance. It does, however, open a window into the mind of this one medieval man and it is up to us to look into it and examine the implications of what we see inside.
The reconstitution of Attaleiates’ experience necessarily also relies on information, which only indirectly deals with him, such as evidence from the historical footprint of other known members of his class. Eustathios Romaios, Michael Psellos, Christophoros Mytilinaios, Symeon Seth, and Basileios Maleses are Attaleiates? contemporaries whose experiences and worldviews become ciphers in the latter’s portrait. By focusing on a single person’s life, as distilled from his own writings and from the experiences of his contemporaries, this book aims for a semblance of chronological order. However, as anyone who has ever attempted to relate such a story knows all too well, strict chronological sequence is difficult to achieve without sacrifices in the fluidity of the narration. People recounting their lives rarely do so in straight lines. The inevitable ebb and flow of events and memories lead one back and forth and disrupt the neat linear scheme of the storyteller.
What is more, the story of Attaleiates’ life resembles, in a way, a damaged wall painting. There are areas of the composition where the colors are bright, where lines are clearly discernible and patterns visible to all, while in others whole pieces of plaster have fallen off the wall leaving large gaps. Still elsewhere we reconstruct the image by recourse to what we know about similar compositions. As any conservator of art would admit and any archeologist would confirm, a fair degree of uncertainty is involved in the process of restoration. Yet, as with any restored piece of art or architecture, the end result, even if speculative to a degree, will excite our imagination and spur further research in ways that academic caution might not.
What would Attaleiates have made of the notion itself of academic caution? How much was truly at stake for men of his stature and erudition in the field of letters and ideas? Did this seasoned judge, who survived cold marches on rough campaign trails and hails of arrows in far-off battlefields, have cause to fear the “poisoned” quill of a court rival? Decades before the trauma of Mantzikert, a rather different type of war had prepared Attaleiates and his peers for the competitive world of the imperial court.
In the capital’s schools, in private halls, and even at the palace, aspiring young men wielded turns of phrase and sharp retort as weapons during intense duels for rhetorical supremacy. At times, the emperor himself set up those contests through decrees written in vermilion ink.® The poetry on Christophoros Mytilinaios, Attaleiates’ elder contemporary and fellow judge, captures this exhilarating time in Constantinople’s educational scene.
In his verses “the young... gathering eloquence defeat all the other youths in the dictation contest.”° Students from competing schools take flight before the strongest of the young orators “and as [they] flee let paper, ink pen fall to the ground.” They “take flight before all others, for [they] will not bear the wound [a] pen inflicts.” These “peerless paragon[s] of cowardice” are seen “deserting like a coward before the battle.” Crushed before the emperor by others “trained to do battle with words,” and wielding “word spears” these victims of pedagogical violence get to “know the dreaded defeat in dictation’s art.
The price of failure was dear, exclusion from the charmed circle of imperial officials and confidants at the court. In truly evocative verses about social inequality the very same poet and judge noted: “among a thousand rich men, myriads even, just one unfortunate joins the lowly, while of the countless wretched poor, just three prosper.”® Even though Attaleiates and his fellow contestants in the battle of words were by no means poor, letters and a good education had all the potential to help them join a world of privilege.
Furthermore, despite the poet’s emphasis on the unshakeable social position of the rich, a battle royal among the courtiers and officials who operated in the deeply competitive Byzantine court kept everyone on their toes. Mytilinaios’ contemporary, the well-known teacher, Ioannes Mauropous, felt compelled to respond to critiques of his grammar, in a poem titled “Against the man who criticized the verse ‘sold of gold’ because the preposition is not rightly construed.
In our time, as White House officials regularly misspell words in official communiqués, such emphasis on correct language use may appear quaint. And yet in Attaleiates’ universe bad grammar could ruin careers. There were no “safe spaces” in Constantinopolitan schooling. Unlike the empire’s enemies, who were more often than not beholden to age-old rules of war and diplomacy, the Byzantine courtier took no prisoners when it came to the battle for reputation, the only currency truly valued in Romanja’s public political culture.
Having successfully maneuvered schoolyard wars, courtly machinations, and battlefield sorrow, Attaleiates lived a comfortable life of a widower in the last years of the 1070s. He divided his time between the capital, with its busy courtly schedule and responsibilities, and his lands in the Thracian city of Raidestos, where he played landlord and patron to the local townspeople. In this period his political and war notes, compiled over a lifetime of active service, slowly morphed into the work that we recognize today as the History. By now Attaleiates had achieved the status of an insider. He was apparently advisor on legal affairs to Emperors Michael VII Doukas and Nikephoros III Botaneiates and was even occasionally asked to deliver public orations at court.!° And yet this was precarious success.
At a time of hyperinflation, numerous armed rebellions, military defeats, and catastrophic loss of territory to all manner of barbarian foe, he surely wondered how long his own good fortune could last. With first-hand experience of his imperial patrons’ ineptitude, Attaleiates kept hoping that a man would emerge to guide the sinking ship of state in safe waters. This person was to be the young generalissimo Alexios Komnenos, whom Attaleiates rather slyly cast as a flawless Roman leader in the midst of the History’s patently dishonest encomium to Nikephoros III. The judge could not, however, count on fortune to produce the great man who would save the Romans from their troubles. In times of crisis, he did what he could to shield himself from instability.
Attaleiates did not live to experience the momentous events unleashed by Alexios when—in an effort to recruit Western warriors for the empire’s depleted and demoralized armies—this emperor offered pope Urban II an opportunity to deliver his unprecedented call to Holy War at Clermont (1095 CE).!! We cannot know what this judge steeped in republican ideology would have made of the myriad knights marching east with God’s army. We do, however, know what he felt about Latin soldiers in Byzantine service.
The History speaks admiringly of the indefatigable Rouselios, a Norman warrior who defended Roman lands and raised the standard of rebellion against Constantinople’s inept emperors. Attaleiates knew Rouselios personally from his days as military judge and clearly respected him. He was in fact critical of Emperor Michael VII, who failed to see Rouselios’ potential as a defender of the polity and instead maltreated him. A few years later another able Norman, the unscrupulous Robert Guiscard, invaded the empire’s territories in the Balkans having completed his lightning conquest of Byzantine Italy.
To Alexios I Komnenos’ young regime this was a stark challenge that Romania’s armies struggled to repel. And yet, Guiscard had only a few years back agreed to a dynastic alliance with the emperor then reigning in Constantinople. This foreign menace appeared all too keen to be domesticated or, as the case may be, Romanized. Years later, as the armies of the Crusade marched toward Constantinople Robert’s son Bohemond, a bilingual giant of a man, approached Alexios seeking to join the Byzantine army command. Alexios declined and relations with this Norman reached breaking point in the months that followed. Yet, it is interesting to ponder on what may have been.
What would Attaleiates have made of Bohemond’s request had he been alive in 1096? Was this Byzantine republican ready to open the empire’s fold to the fiery foreigner, much as Romans had done since the first days of Old Rome, or would he have closed ranks, like Alexios, faced with a dynamic world of inflexible faith, militant entrepreneurship, and political opportunism? Let us turn then to our Byzantine mandarin and the life of the Roman polity in the century before the Crusades as we contemplate the answer to this question.
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