Download PDF | Social Change In Town And Country In Eleventh Century Byzantium Oxford University Press ( 2020)
321 Pages
Introduction
James Howard-Johnston
This volume publishes, rather belatedly, the proceedings of a workshop on the social order in eleventh-century Byzantium held in Oxford in May 2011, the third in a series of workshops funded by the British Academy, on The Transformation of Byzantium: Law, Literature and Society in the Eleventh Century. It forms a pendant to the publication of the proceedings of the second workshop on Michael Psellos, the foremost intellectual of the age, and the circles in which he moved—to which have been added Michael Jeffreys’s invaluable summaries and analyses of the full corpus of his letters.’ A first workshop on law and legal practice in Byzantium prepared the way for the systematic study of the Peira, a collection of the judgements, opinions, and legal arguments of Eustathios Romaios, a judge who rose to head the judiciary in the reign of Romanos III Argyros (1028-34).”
The fundamental structures of Byzantium in the eleventh century have not been subjected to close and sustained scrutiny since the 1970s when Alexander Kazhdan published his sociological analysis of the aristocracy and Paul Lemerle, the de Gaulle of Byzantine studies at the time, organized a colloque on economic, social, and institutional history as well as publishing a collection of studies of his own.’ Forty years on, the Byzantinists of Paris and Oxford are reviving interest in the period.
For it was then that Byzantium reached its political apogee. It was acknowledged to be the leading power in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Latin Christendom, after a century-long drive to extend its authority over the Arab marches, western Armenia, and the Balkans.° At home the economy was growing, as is indicated, inter alia, by pollen evidence for agricultural expansion, archaeological evidence for the development of new ceramic industries, and growth in the money supply manifest in debasement of the gold coinage. There is no dearth of source material. It was a period of unprecedented literary and intellectual activity, which has left a comparatively voluminous and variegated body of textual evidence.°
There can be no doubt that the changes taking place were transformative, not least because of the sudden reversal of fortune and doleful record of defeat in the 1060s and 1070s. But much remains unclear. There are many texts crying out for close study, above all the Peira. Although it is quite unique, casting as it does a bright light on the justice system and the seamy side of life in Byzantium, it has never been subjected to thorough legal and historical analysis.
It is therefore far from clear whether there is solid grounding for the influential view, originating with Dieter Simon, that legal argumentation was simply one rhetorical strategy among others and that the justice system was amenable to pressure from powerful interests, rather than striving to apply Roman law equitably to the manifold cases brought before the courts. This issue is intimately connected to the larger, and very live, question as to whether or not Byzantium underwent something akin to the feudal revolution in Latin Christendom. For we do not, as yet, know how much of the old social order, based ultimately on the peasant village, survived the land-grabbing by elites in the tenth and early eleventh centuries; nor has there been a full, systematic calibration of the similarities and differences in the structural features of the power formations of the Byzantine and Western aristocracies.’
At the same time as these changes in land ownership, there were also profound changes in the intellectual culture of Byzantium. Writers revealed their individuality for the first time in the eleventh century. Reason began to play a larger role as intellectuals looked at the world around them. Literary creativity was on the rise. The nature of these cultural changes remains, however, imperfectly understood. Most of the specifics—of individual biographies, of the full corpora of authors’ works, of contemporary literary expectations, and of authors’ stylistic idiosyncrasies—have yet to be grasped and evaluated, and much of the best writing awaits proper critical appraisal.
Seven of the nine papers delivered at the workshop are being published. An additional paper, that of Pamela Armstrong on Greece, was commissioned to fill a gaping hole in the coverage. Some impressionistic introductory remarks have mutated into the final general survey of Byzantium’s condition (social, economic, and cultural) and its performance in the eleventh century.
The untimely death of Mark Whittow in a horrendous motorway crash on the eve of Christmas Eve 2017 has deprived us of his (delayed) contribution on the Feudal Revolution. He would have opened this collection of papers with a characteristically lucid and wide-ranging survey of the surviving evidence and some provisional conclusions of his. While the principal function of this Introduction is to introduce the individual papers which are included, it is only fitting to begin with a resumé of the paper which Mark delivered at the workshop back in 2011.
Mark Whittow was a Byzantinist who could and did range far afield, east into Muslim lands and west over the whole of Latin Christendom (as well as north towards the Baltic and north-east over the steppes). In his paper, he outlined developments in scholarly thinking about the fundamental structures of western Europe, north and south of the Alps, in the ninth-twelfth centuries. Starting with the work of Georges Duby on the archives of Cluny (La société aux XIe et XIle siécles dans la région mdconnaise (Paris, 1953)), he moved on to the syntheses of the 1980s, which brought into question several of Duby’s theses—about the break-up of the state, about the supersession of public by private justice, and about the presumption that changes in legal and administrative terminology signalled real changes in society.
He demurred and was inclined to stand shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Bisson, who revitalized the case for revolutionary change in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in Past and Present in 1994, and robustly defended his positions in disputation with four interlocutors in two subsequent issues.* Bisson’s conclusion that there was ‘a profound, and in some regions troubled, restructuring of power, hastening the displacement of official or bureaucratic action by lordship’ (PP 155 (1997), 225) was accepted by Mark, who, like him, was prepared, reservedly, to use the phrase Feudal Revolution.
Mark had no doubt that radical change came upon Latin Christendom in the later tenth and eleventh centuries. Violence was on the increase, as local elites competed and fought for authority and influence, initially within a framework of provincial government inherited from the Carolingians. The evidence was to be found in eleventh-century charters, longer than before and more informative (for example in the Vend6mois and Catalonia), and in a favourite source of Mark’s, the officially sponsored Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, put together in two stages in the first half of the eleventh century. The shrine of St Foy at Conques was attracting large numbers of pilgrims, including many who had suffered in the fighting and credited the saint with healing their wounds or freeing them from captivity.” The appearance for the first time of private castles, which spread like gangrene over the landscape of Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, also testified to the increasing prevalence of discord in the localities.
They provided secure bases for predatory local lords and their armed followings to secure their authority in the immediately surrounding localities and to compete with rival lords and their armed followings. It was again the evidence from Conques which Mark cited (from the rich archive of the Abbey as well as the collection of miracle stories), together with the documentation used by Dominique Barthélemy for the appearance of peripheral castles in the Venddmois.’® Castellans and the knights who served them in return for treasure or land, were the principal agents of disorder and constituted in aggregate the principal force which changed the social order in the localities. This process had already been analysed by Pierre Toubert, who showed, in his magnum opus on incastellamento, how the private castle changed the whole social order in Latium, how the landscape was reordered to enforce social control by local lords."’
This new prominence, strength, and assertiveness of lords and their armed followings in the localities manifested itself in the sphere of justice, where the formal hearing of cases in public, by properly constituted courts (themselves never entirely impervious to local nexuses of power), yielded to the informal exercise of social power. This was well documented from the 1040s and 1050s in Catalonia by Pierre Bonnassie. Like Bonnassie, Mark gorged on the rich archives of the region, which contain over 15,000 documents predating the twelfth century. They left Bonnassie in no doubt that there was an increasingly violent struggle between powerful predators for wealth and power between 1020 and 1060. It was, he saw, an era of growing economic prosperity (fuelled by gold from Andalucia) and of weakening public authority (that of the Counts of Barcelona). Greater and lesser lords set about attacking monasteries and imposing (by abuse of judicial process, intimidation, and armed force) their private authority on hitherto free, independent, allodial peasants. The resistance of the peasantry, no longer able to colonize wastelands behind a moving frontier, no longer providing a key component of the armed forces of Christendom (as cavalry superseded infantry as the main fighting arm), weakened in the face of lordly pressure. At the same time, the lords, great and small, began to conclude private agreements, convenientiae, to limit conflict with each other—through non-aggression pacts, defensive alliances, or straight peace treaties. Oaths, sworn acceptance of obligations, replaced the reference to public authority customary in the past. A new feudal order—of lordship, conditional tenure, and fidelity, underpinned by oaths—began to take shape, which was to be formalized in the twelfth century.’”
This new order—Mark agreed with Bisson—could be seen emerging all over Latin Christendom in the course of the eleventh century, the speed of change being most marked where the economy flourished—as in Catalonia—or where lordship was backed by intrusive monarchical power—as in post-Conquest Britain.’* Castles, nucleated villages, and open fields were unmistakable signs of the new relationship.
Mark then turned to Byzantium. The search for signs of seigneurial power analogous to that demonstrable in France, Italy, and Catalonia was hampered above all by the paucity of documentary material.’* Thus the archives of the great houses on Athos held relatively few documents compared to those of even small Pyrenean monasteries, let alone cathedral archives (which had no analogue in Byzantium). So the Byzantinist had to rely much more on literary sources, and to turn to material remains. Perhaps the most striking new insight into the social history of Byzantium was that of Robert Ousterhout, who reinterpreted the ‘courtyard monasteries’ of Cappadocia as lay residential complexes.
There was an aristocracy in Byzantium.’ It too was locally rooted, and predatory. As in Catalonia, the powerful were striving to gain control of the lands of the poor. But it differed in certain important respects. Its power derived primarily from government service, from the money earned and the connections gained in the course of a career. It was more numerous—comprising middling as well as high-ranking officials, both active and retired, and a large body of army officers, again including those no longer in active service.’® It was, above all, the context which was different. Byzantium was a strong state, centralized, with effective fiscal grip over the localities and with a functioning justice system. From the 920s, when the authorities took note of growing abuse of power in the provinces, successive imperial regimes countered with emotionally charged legislation, prohibiting the alienation of land owned by the poor, whether under coercion or not, to powerful individuals living outside their villages. Contracts of sale or gift or bequest were declared void, and land alienated after the issuing of the major piece of legislation in September 934 was to be returned without compensation. The legislative pressure was sustained for seventy years, details being clarified, loopholes closed, and time limits extended.’’ In the eleventh century it fell to the courts to uphold the law, and the signs are that they succeeded in curbing aristocratic depredation.
Mark cited four types of evidence. First there is the collection of the opinions and judgements of a great eleventh-century judge. They are recorded in a work, entitled the Peira (literally “Experience’), put together probably by a devoted clerk. The judge was the Magistros Eustathios Romaios, who had been highly regarded as a young lawyer in the reign of Basil II and who went on to become chief justice (Drungar of the Watch) in the reign of Romanos III Argyros (1028-34)."* This unique text which survives in a single late manuscript leaves us in doubt that the courts applied the tenth-century legislation and strove to hold social forces at bay.’® In the second place, the charter evidence from southern Italy, much richer than that from within the core territories of Byzantium, together with the archaeology of the region, showed that the coagulation of local power in seigneurial hands was a product of the Norman conquest.
In the days of Byzantine rule, fortified towns were the nodal points in the countryside, and even the leading notables of those towns and important local officials had difficulty consolidating their landholdings.”° Hagiography, the third type of source, a genre which attended to realities on the ground in Byzantium, supplied plenty of information about property and power in the localities. Mark picked out the Life of St Lazaros of Galesion, another of his favourite sources, indeed the original focus of his doctoral thesis, for its significant silence about aristocratic depredation.”* There were undoubtedly aristocratic estates dotted about the rich coastal plains of western Asia Minor. Some progress had been made towards their consolidation, as is demonstrable from the praktikon recording the land and personnel granted to Andronikos Doukas in the lower Maeander valley in 1073.77 But the varied clientele of the saint, whether from town or country, did not complain about encroachment or violence against peasant villagers.
The fourth and final type of evidence was provided by the landscape. As Mark himself demonstrated in an important article of his, the private castle was thoroughly alien to Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries.” There may have been many castles in Asia Minor. They had indeed played a vital part in the successful defence of Byzantine territory in the dark age. But they were military installations, garrisoned by local forces. They might be seized by rebels, but they were not owned by them. It was a fundamental principle of Byzantine government as of Roman that no fortification work should be undertaken without official sanction. So instead of the seigneurial castle, what we find in Byzantium is the fortified city and the castle, both statecontrolled, and the unfortified gentry residence, which kept its distance from the village of small peasant houses, and the attendant muck and animal life of the farming world. Gentry houses, an impressive facade perhaps fronting their courtyards, with reception halls and private chapels, have been preserved in Cappadocia, where buildings could be carved into the soft tufa. The bestknown collection of such houses is at Canli Kilise, where they nestle together around the base of a hill. Impressive and comfortable such residences may have been, but they did not dominate the landscape like seigneurial castles in the contemporary West.”*
Mark ended with some remarks on the gathering crisis in the last third of the eleventh century. He saw change gathering pace in Byzantium, largely because of the severe cut-back in annual salaries (rogai) for holders of titles instituted by Alexios Komnenos (1081-1118), after a first failed attempt under Isaac Komnenos (1057-9).?° As this coincided with Turkish advances in the east and the wholesale flight of aristocracy and gentry from Asia Minor, it led to a drastic reshaping of the social order: those aristocrats in favour with the Komnenian regime were able to retain status through imperial land grants, while others, including some of the greatest families, sank down the social order.”° As for the relations of aristocracy and peasantry, Mark held his counsel, leaving the topic to other speakers.
Shorn it may be of this virtuoso piece of historical writing by our muchmissed colleague, nonetheless this volume aims to present penetrating analyses of the social order in town and country in eleventh-century Byzantium. The following brief abstracts will, it is hoped, provide useful guidance for readers.
1. Jean-Claude Cheynet sketches in what can be seen of the evolution of the social order in Constantinople. One phenomenon is well documented. From the reign of Basil II, aristocratic families were encouraged to base themselves in the capital, where, on the one hand, they could be watched, but, on the other, they could extend their affinities and strengthen their position through intermarriage with court and bureaucratic families. There was consequently a weakening of the traditional leadership of the provinces and growing aristocratic influence at the centre. Second, there is clear evidence of upward mobility among the bureaucracy and judiciary, for whom the Senate was enlarged and to whom honours were sold on an increasing scale (so as to recoup the growing cost of honorands’ salaries). To the traditional sources of wealth, members of these families were able to accrue income from managerial posts on crown and fiscal lands. Finally, as regards the middling classes, who constituted the active core of the ‘people’-—namely the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, palace personnel, merchants, artisans, leading retainers of aristocrats— there are indications that they were able to exercise considerable political influence, although it was never decisive, because they did not act in concert with the civil bureaucracy.
2. Dimitris Krallis likewise focuses on Constantinople, looking through the eyes of his subject, a self-made man who rose high in imperial service in the course of the century. Attaleiates was a lawyer from the provinces who came to prominence under Constantine X (1059-67). He believed in hard work and the unimpeded functioning of the market within a framework of state regulation and taxation. He succeeded in building up a substantial portfolio of business interests in the metropolitan region.
Like other members of the Constantinopolitan intelligentsia, he conceived of the Byzantine Empire as akin to the Roman state at the time of the Augustan settlement, which emperors were duty-bound to protect, whatever the fiscal cost, and which should incorporate the foreigners in its service into the body politic. Attaleiates’ ability to move effortlessly between regimes was characteristic of high-ranking officials and courtiers of the period, who shared his views on the primacy of the state.
. Kostis Smyrlis shifts attention to rural society, noting evidence for economic growth. Inevitably there is some conjecture in the picture of social change which he draws, since he must rely primarily on the documentary record, which is restricted largely to snapshots of western Asia Minor and views from a single vantage point, Athos, in southern Macedonia. Extrapolating from this evidence, he argues that large estates, both private and those owned by the state, grew massively at the expense of peasant holdings and that the tenantry (paroikoi) on such estates were worse off at the end of the century than they had been as independent smallholders or than they would be in the twelfth century when there was more competition for their labour. He notes the presence of middling landowners in the provinces, with city notables at their head, whose own self-aggrandisement (directed at land acquisition more than trade) clashed with that of the powerful lay and monastic houses of Constantinople. He also stresses the efficacy of action by the state to check the growth of large estates. He thus presents a picture of social change more nuanced than that which is generally accepted.
. Eva Kaptijn and Marc Waelkens summarize the findings of the Belgian team which excavated Sagalassos and surveyed its territory between 1990 and 2013. The initial results conformed to those obtained for other regions of Asia Minor, pointing to a collapse of urban life and concomitant denudation of the surrounding country in the seventh century. But everything changed with the renewal of excavation in the area of the classical city from 2000. Evidence of continuing habitation from the seventh through the eleventh century was found at two sites, one on the edge of the old monumental centre, the second to the south where the temple of Antoninus Pius had once stood. A third site, outside the classical city on a steep hill (Alexander’s Hill), was shown to have been turned into a fortified redoubt in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and to have been violently destroyed at the beginning of the thirteenth. A by-product of these excavations was the establishment of a ceramic typology for the dark age (seventh-ninth centuries), key indicators being local coarse kitchen wares (mainly closed round-bodied pots), and for the following middle Byzantine period. This made it possible to identify and date Byzantine settlements in Sagalassos’territory.
The results are important and, in some cases, surprising: (1) there was a sharp decline (by a factor of five) in the number of settlements after 650, a phenomenon which accords with palynological evidence of a shift from agriculture to pastoralism; (2) settlements continued to occupy sites in or near fertile plains until the tenth century, despite the insecurity provoked by Arab raiding; (3) despite palynological evidence for an increase in human activity, there was no significant growth in the number or size of settlements between the middle of the tenth and the middle of the twelfth century; (4) paradoxically, migration to more secure, hilltop sites occurred in this period, when large estates were expanding at the expense of peasant smallholdings; (5) even more surprising, there was a movement of population from the ancient hilltop site of Sagalassos to the valley of Aglasun in the twelfth century.
. Philipp Niew6hner complements the close focus of the Sagalassos study
with a broad view of building activity across the length and breadth of Asia Minor, before and during the eleventh century. He identifies two diagnostic features of tenth- and eleventh-century architecture in the East—extensive use of brick and recessed blind arcades. This enables him to demonstrate a marked decline in the amount of new church-building after the ninth century, and to stress the contrast with evidence for extensive construction of middle Byzantine churches in Greece and Constantinople. He homes in on the new churches at Ucayak in northwest Cappadocia, Islamk6éy in Pisidia, Celtikdere in Bithynia, the harbour chapel at Side (Pamphylia), Ihlara Kilise, and Canli Kilise (both in Cappadocia). The small size and rural siting of most of these churches he associates with aristocratic patronage in an era when the elite lived in country houses. There is evidence too, he notes, of patronage in the towns—the funding of carved marble epistyles of templon screen to replace earlier wooden ones—but he views the eleventh century as one of urban decline, manifested in the increasingly restricted areas fortified in the decades after the Battle of Manzikert at Aizanoi, Sardis, Aphrodisias, Miletos, and Patara.
Pamela Armstrong’s account of what is known from survey work and excavation in Greece, supplemented from written sources, confirms the impression that Asia Minor was something of a backwater in the eleventh century. The ceramic typology established in the past from the Corinth excavations (dating production of new styles of decorated glazed tableware towards the end of the century) made it possible to differentiate between early-middle eleventh century sites and Komnenian sites (late eleventh and twelfth century) in Greece. Demographic expansion through the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been well documented by a number of regional surveys, of which the most important were those of Laconia and Boeotia.
There was a fourfold increase in the number of sites in Laconia. Two important advances—phosphate analysis of soils around sites identified by sherd scatters and identification of mediumsized storage vessels, found without the usual domestic wares out in the country, as holding water for agricultural labourers—enabled archaeologists to differentiate between five types of site in Laconia—proasteia (estates), choria (nucleated villages), agridia (hamlets), farmsteads, and activity centres in the fields. These they could then map in relation to the local centre of demand, Sparta, and to the route system, noting that the apparently ordered expansion of the eleventh century (possibly influenced by the authorities) gave way to something of a rush for vacant land in the twelfth. New building testifies to a revitalizing of towns, as does the evidence for industrial activity and exports to distant markets. Two types of ceramic vessel are picked out as key indicators of trade, the rather oldfashioned-looking Giinsenin III amphorae made in Boeotia for the export of Greek wine, and the fine-glazed decorated tableware made at Euripos, the port for Thebes, which, Armstrong suggests, was used as ballast for cargoes of silk cloth made in Thebes. Rising prosperity, she concludes, spread out from the towns, to judge by finds of glazed pottery on rural sites.
. Dearth of source material, which all too often frustrates historians of Byzantium, especially those concerned mainly with Asia Minor, is not a problem for Ghislaine Noyé. For there is almost too much evidence—documentary, historical (from local chronicles), hagiographical, and archaeological—about the many localities—fortified towns (kastra) which are thickly scattered across the landscape, castles (kastellia), villages (choria), fortified refuges and monasteries—to be found on the plains of Apulia and in the hill country of Lucania and Calabria in the Byzantine sector of southern Italy. Further complexity is added by the troubled history of the region, under attack in the tenth and earlier eleventh centuries by Arab sea-raiders from without, disturbed by rebellion and factional conflict within, and only subjected to effective Byzantine authority at intervals.
There were two principal consequences—growing autonomy on the part of urban notables, who might have to fend for themselves when attacked, and the emergence of anti-Byzantine factions among the notables, which culminated in open rebellions in the eleventh century. Initially the exercise of hard power appears to have been welcome. It took different forms at different times—(1) the dispatch of large expeditionary forces (notably in late ninth century and the third quarter of the eleventh); (2) investment in military infrastructure, to create mini-limites to secure southern Calabria and its mines (middle tenth century), around the bay of Taranto (late tenth century), and along the northern frontier between the Apennines and Monte Gargano (third quarter, eleventh century); and (3) installation of garrisons of tagma soldiers in the principal coastal cities of Apulia and Calabria, toward the end of the tenth century. Office-holding joined ownership of land and investment in trade as a prime source of notables’ local influence. This locally rooted power, focused in the towns, in due course, because of distance from the governing centre, instilled self-reliance in the notables’ leaders and made them less susceptible to firm action by the authorities. Refractoriness on their part, along with the presence of secure bases on neighbouring Lombard territory, opened the way for successful Norman intervention.
Tim Greenwood turns his attention to a key sector of the eastern
periphery of Byzantium, the large Armenian principality of Taron, once a centre of Mamikonean power, subsequently taken over by members of the ramified Bagratid family, which was annexed in 966-7. It lay to the west of Lake Van between the Armenian Taurus and the Arsanias river, immediately beyond the western districts of Armenia over which Byzantium had gradually, by a subtle combination of force, diplomacy, and propaganda, extended its authority over preceding decades. The context for the annexation was the age-old interplay between Byzantium and Armenia, ‘pulses of Byzantine influence being transmitted simultaneously from different foci, engendering a spectrum of receptions and reactions across the regions and districts of historic Armenia’. He argues, on the analogy of the later annexation of Vaspurakan, that the lay and ecclesiastical leadership emigrated when the two sons of Ashot ceded sovereignty over Tar6n in return for the high rank of patrikios and estates on Byzantine territory, and that there was consequently ‘severe disruption, if not complete collapse, of local networks of power and authority’ within Taron. Tar6n was incorporated into the provincial administrative system of western Armenia. The Byzantine system of raising troops from designated military lands was probably introduced. Crown estates were established. Most significant of all, though, was the reorganization of the church into two or three episcopal sees under the oversight of the metropolitan of Keltzene, Kortzene, and Taron, and a concomitant reshaping of historical memory about the coming of Christianity in the deep past.
The final editorial reflections are not intended to serve as some sort of judgment on various arguments put forward by individual contributors, nor to provide definitive conclusions about important aspects (cultural, economic, social, and political) of eleventh-century Byzantine history. They simply present the response of one Byzantinist to Ostrogorsky’s negative appraisal current fifty years ago. Ostrogorsky did not, indeed could not, deny that the eleventh century witnessed considerable economic growth and intellectual uplift, but argued that two fundamental structural components of Byzantium, the peasantry and the system of military lands, were seriously eroded and that successive governments, dominated by the civilian bureaucracy, opposed the military interest and succeeded in weakening the armed forces. He was undoubtedly right to observe that the great and not-so-great acquired land at the expense of smallholders, but not to take it as far as he did, arguing that the peasant ceased to be a significant element in rural society. A spectrum of contrary views is on offer, from that of large-scale but not thoroughgoing social change (Kostis Smyrlis) to a substantial shift in the balance of landed power (Jean-Claude Cheynet, Pamela Armstrong, and Ghislaine Noyé) to the idiosyncratic editorial stance which conjectures that peasants were to be found everywhere and formed the dark matter of the Byzantine social order in the eleventh and later centuries. As for policy, there is explicit testimony about continuing imperial concern with defence (Attaleiates may be viewed as expressing a prevailing consensus). The prime explanation for the catastrophes which befell Byzantium in West and East in the second half of the century should be sought in the strengths of its adversaries and in the particularities of the two sectors of the periphery which were overrun.
A single volume cannot do justice to the complexities of a subject as large as the social history of Byzantium in its heyday. There is much more to be said about Asia Minor, heartland of the state in previous centuries. It is true that the general trend in the tenth and eleventh centuries was for the peasantry to yield up land to those termed the ‘powerful’, whose status and leverage in the localities derived more from public office and connections than from landed or liquid wealth. We have tackled the contentious issue of the pace of change, but have sidled away from the impact of geography, climate, and human factors on the different, distinct regions which make up Asia Minor and were recognized as such in antiquity. It should not be imagined that Bithynia and Roman Asia (the Aegean coastlands) developed in the same way and at the same pace as Phrygia, Galatia, Lycaonia, and Cappadocia in the interior or Pontus in the north or Isauria in the south-east. Distance, from the governing centre and principal market in Constantinople, or from the coast and easy access to maritime exchange networks, was one differentiating factor. Another was relief —we cannot expect similar rhythms of social change in the highlands and adjoining lowlands, or on the rolling country, largely given over to ranching, of the interior plateau and on the larger and smaller alluvial plains scattered across this mini-continent. War, of course, was another important differentiating factor and the consequent growing insecurity of the frontier zone in the East from the middle of the century, all too susceptible to Turcoman raiding, and of settlements along the main lines of invasion into and across the interior plateau.
For all the comparative abundance of source material by comparison with preceding centuries, the Byzantinist is hamstrung for lack of archival documents and local saints’ lives away from the Marmara and Aegean coastlands of Asia Minor. The same is true of the Balkans north of Greece and away from the penumbra of Mount Athos. We cannot expect town and country (the emphasis being very much on country) to have followed the same course of development in the open plains of Thrace as in the agglomeration of upland basins and wooded hills which constitutes Macedonia in the heart of the Balkans or in the mountains of Epirus or in the more open country settled by Serbs and Croats or, finally, in the core territory of the early medieval Bulgar state in the north-east— not least because it was only in the eleventh century that everyday use of money was percolating into former Bulgar-controlled lands in the northern and western Balkans.
The archaeological contributions to this volume also make it plain that there were differences at least as great between the main component parts of Byzantium as within them. Most striking is the much higher density of fortified towns in Calabria, Lucania, and Apulia than in Greece and the Balkans or Asia Minor. This may be explained in part by greater investment in defence in the tenth and eleventh centuries on the part of the imperial authorities, but economic buoyancy surely mattered more. Southern Italy benefitted from a privileged position commanding the narrows between the two basins of the Mediterranean and from proximity to the flourishing markets of Muslim North Africa and Lombard Campania. Then there is the much more plentiful evidence for demographic growth, intensification of rural settlement, and industrial development in Greece than in Asia Minor. Part of the explanation may lie in the greater involvement of Greece in the Aegean exchange system, but migration from east to west may also have had a role. Apart from the appearance of new decorative motifs on glazed ceramics, traceable to production centres in the Caliphate, which, Pamela Armstrong conjectures, may have been brought by migrant artisans, there is independent evidence of migration on a large scale of Armenians into eastern Asia Minor and Cilicia, which may have had a knock-on effect, and of the movement west into the metropolitan region of the gypsies who would be attested throughout the Balkans by the fourteenth century.”
It is only archaeological survey work, both extensive and intensive, which can compensate for the lack of local written sources (outside southern Italy). From the few pools of light cast by such surveys—on Pisidia by the Sagalassos survey together with other less fine-grained surveys in Asia Minor,”* on Greece south and north of the Isthmus of Corinth by the Laconia and Boeotia surveys—historians and archaeologists must try to feel their way into the enveloping darkness. Extrapolation is the key to understanding, despite all its risks. It should be carried out with a delicate, sensitive touch, but without too much hesitancy and with close attention to circumstantial evidence.
The most important single circumstance was that the diverse regions and major component parts belonged to a single body politic. They were incorporated into the same imperial governmental structure and were, to varying degrees, suffused by the same Christianized classical culture. Government postings to provinces near and far, a fiscal system with grip, tribunals applying Roman law and answerable to appeal courts in the capital, relatively good communications, and a single official language (a clear, slightly archaic, semi-mandarin Greek) united the ramified territories under Byzantine rule. A polyethnic, multilingual empire, with substantial minorities speaking Armenian, Arabic, Slavonic, Vlach, Albanian, and Latin, was bound together and firmly subordinated to a superordinate earthly authority located in a politically and economically dominant metropolis.
Enlargement, far from weakening these ties, provided solid, earthly testimony for the emperor’s divinely sanctioned rule, and imparted new impetus to trade (1) within the nexus of regional exchange networks—in the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea—which constituted the Byzantine economic arena and (2) between it and the neighbouring arenas of the Tyrrhenian sea in the far west and, closer to hand, the east Mediterranean fronting Egypt and the Levant.” It follows that it makes sense to treat eleventh-century Byzantium, for all the regional variations, as a single great social space within which change might vary in pace but was proceeding in the same general direction.
I hope that this volume will add to understanding of the process of social change in town and country and the factors impinging upon it. The enterprise is of more than parochial interest since Byzantium in the eleventh century occupied a central place in the affairs of the westernmost segment of Eurasia and deserved its place among contemporary imperial powers.
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