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The Byzantine Neighbourhood contributes to a new narrative regarding Byzantine cities through the adoption of a neighbourhood perspective. It offers a multidisciplinary investigation of the spatial and social practices that produced Byzantine concepts of neighbourhood and afforded dynamic interactions between different actors, elite and non-elite. Authors further consider neighbourhoods as political entities, examining how collectivities formed in Byzantine neighbourhoods translated into political action. By both acknowledging the unique position of Constantinople and giving serious attention to the varieties of provincial experience, the contributors consider regional factors (social, economic, and political) that formed the ties of local communities to the state and illuminate the mechanisms of empire. Beyond its Byzantine focus, this volume contributes to broader discussions of premodern urbanism by drawing attention to the spatial dimension of social life and highlighting the involvement of multiple agents in city-making.
Fotini Kondyli is Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia.
Benjamin Anderson is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Classics at Cornell University.
Acknowledgements
The papers collected in this volume originated as contributions to two discussions that we jointly organized: a panel, and a colloquium.
The panel, “The Archaeology of Byzantine Neighbourhoods,” formed part of the Byzantine Studies Conference, 25 October 2015. The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture sponsored the speakers’ travel to New York City; we thank the Director, Brandie Ratliff, for her support. Benjamin Anderson, Fotini Kondyli, and Jordan Pickett offered preliminary versions of their contributions to this volume. In addition, Eric Ivison spoke on the Lower City Church Complex at Amorium, and Adam Rabinowitz spoke on Cherson (Crimea) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Kostis Kourelis chaired the session, and a lively discussion ensued between speakers and attendees. Our thanks to all.
The colloquium, “The Byzantine Neighbourhood: Urban Space and Political Action,” was hosted by the Program in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, 17 November 2017. We thank two successive Directors of Byzantine Studies, Michael Maas and Elena Boeck, for their support. Albrecht Berger, Beate Béhlendorf-Arslan, Fotini Kondyli, Nikos Kontogiannis, Leonora Neville, Amy Papalexandrou, and Christina Tsigonaki delivered preliminary versions of their contributions to this volume. We are grateful to all who attended and joined the discussion.
Thank you, finally, to the editors of Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies for accepting the volume into their series; to the anonymous reviewer for helpful remarks; to editor Michael Greenwood, editorial assistant Stewart Beale, and production manager Karthik S for shepherding the volume into print; and to Ayla Cevik for preparing the index.
Contributors
Benjamin Anderson is associate professor of the History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. His research addresses the visual and material cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent landmasses, the history of archaeology, and the urban history of Constantinople.
Albrecht Berger studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and received his PhD in 1987. He was assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin between 1984 and 1989, and researcher at the German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul branch between 1992 and 1997. Since 2002, he has been Professor for Byzantine Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and serves as editor of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift. His main research interests are the topography of Byzantine Constantinople and Asia Minor, as well as hagiography and church history.
Beate Bohlendorf-Arslan is a professor of Byzantine art and archaeology at Marburg University in Germany. Her researches focused on the daily life of the Late Roman and Byzantine Empire based on archaeological excavations and field work in Turkey. Since 2007, she has been researching the Byzantine city Assos, where she has been conducting a project on urban development since 2013. She has published five books, has co-edited four books, and written several articles on Byzantine Assos, landscape archaeology, pottery, and small finds, most recently a study on middle Byzantine daily village life in Bogazkéy (“Die Oberstadt von HattuSa: Die mittelbyzantinische Siedlung in Bogazk6y. Fallstudie zum Alltagsleben in einem anatolischen Dorf zwischen dem 10. und 12. Jahrhundert. Bogazkéy-HattuSa,” Berlin 2019).
William Caraher is a historian, archaeologist, editor, and publisher at the University of North Dakota who has worked in Greece, Cyprus, and the United States. He blogs at The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World (https://mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com/)
Fotini Kondyli is associate professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include the construction
of Byzantine spaces, landscape, and household archaeology, and the archaeology of Byzantine non-elites. Her first monograph, Rural Communities in Late Byzantium: Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Nikos D. Kontogiannis is an assistant professor of Byzantine archaeology and history of art, Ko¢ University. His interests lie in the fields of military and domestic architecture, ceramics and minor objects, industrial production, and commercial networks in the eastern Mediterranean. Having studied at the Universities of Athens (Greece) and Birmingham (UK), he went on to work for approximately 15 years at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. His current projects focus on the study of two extensive late Byzantine hoards at the British Museum (UK) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (USA).
R. Scott Moore is professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on trade and communication in the eastern Mediterranean from the second through the eighth centuries AD. Since 2002, he has been involved with a number of archaeological projects on Cyprus, including the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the Princeton Archaeological Expedition at Polis Chrysochous.
Leonora Neville studies the culture and society of the Eastern Roman Empire, particularly history writing, gender, and the importance of the classical past for medieval Roman culture. Recently, she has offered a new interpretation of how the rhetoric of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad worked to portray Anna as a good historian, even though she was a woman, and a good woman, even though she wrote history. She is the John and Jeanne Rowe Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Amy Papalexandrou is lecturer and adjunct faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to this she was Constantine George Georges & Sophia G. Georges Associate Professor of Greek Art & Architecture at Stockton University, where she taught Art and Architectural History for the Program in the Visual Arts in the School of Arts and Humanities. She is an Assistant Director of the Princeton-Cyprus Archaeological Expedition to Polis Chrysochous (Cyprus), where she works with a team of scholars on the Late Antique and Early Medieval levels of the site (fifth—sixteenth centuries) in the remote NW corner of the island.
Jordan Pickett is an assistant professor of Classics at the University of Georgia in Athens, in the United States. He took his PhD in Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan with the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and at Florida State University in the Department of Classics. Jordan has published articles concerning urban and environmental history in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers, the Journal of Archaeological Science, with the Frontinus Gesellschaft, Quaternary Science Reviews, Human Ecology, and in Fall 2021 with the Journal of Late Antiquity. Jordan is currently working on a monograph about the history and afterlives of Roman water infrastructure in the early Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean.
Christina Tsigonaki is assistant professor in Early Byzantine Archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology / University of Crete. She is also associate research fellow of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies / Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas. She completed her MPhil and doctoral studies at the University Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is the director of the excavation at Eleutherna, Sector II (Central Crete) and the co-director of the archaeological survey at Oros Oxa (Eastern Crete). Her research interests revolve around the archaeology of the East Mediterranean during the Early Byzantine period: landscape archaeology, monumental topography and topography of human activity, urbanism, architecture, and architectural sculpture.
Introduction
A neighbourhood perspective on Byzantine cities
Benjamin Anderson and Fotini Kondyli
This book advances a new perspective on Byzantine cities: the predominately Greek-speaking, Christian cities of the north-eastern Mediterranean between ca. 500 and 1500 AD. Our primary focus is on the east Roman (Constantinopolitan) state, but we are also concerned with cities ruled by the smaller states that emerged after the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204.
We approach these cites from the perspective of the neighbourhood. Following the work of Michael E. Smith, we understand “the spatial division of cities into districts or neighbourhoods” as “one of the few universals of urban life from the earliest cities to the present.”! As Paul Magdalino notes, the English “neighbourhood” is “an exact etymological and semantic equivalent of the Greek yeitovia,” which is “the usual Byzantine term for an urban locality.”* However, both to lend our analyses greater specificity and to situate Byzantine neighbourhoods within broader scholarly conversations on historical urbanism, we adopt Smith’s heuristic definition of “neighbourhood”: “a residential zone that has considerable face-to-face interaction and is distinctive on the basis of physical and/or social characteristics.”?
The neighbourhood perspective helps to correct persistent biases in the study of Byzantine urbanism, which result from the adoption of “the city” as the smallest unit of analysis. In his synthetic account of “the Byzantine city,” published in 2002, Charalambos Bouras posited that study must begin with “unification of all the surveys of the built evidence... into a single general plan,” followed by “reconstruction of the urban fabric during various periods.” Only after a general plan has been constructed can one consider “questions of demography, spatial planning, and the distribution and consumption of products.™
Viewed from the perspective of the general plan, the evidence for Byzantine urbanism will always be (as Bouras writes) “disheartening”: “only in a tiny number of instances is it capable of providing us with a satisfactory picture of a city.” The evidence will, moreover, only speak to actors who leave a mark on the general plan: “in many cases the only urban elements suitable for study are the fortification walls and the surviving churches.”° As a result, the biographies of Byzantine cities available in scholarship are dominated
by imperial (civil and military) and ecclesiastical officials, and other (e.g., hereditary) elites.°
This bias is compounded by the nature of the evidence. Written sources on Byzantine cities emphasize the activities of elite patrons in Constantinople. These accounts supply vague and ambiguous images even of imperial projects on the most prominent sites (e.g., the “Nea Ekklesia” of Basil I), and pay no heed to the remainder of the urban fabric.’ Furthermore, Constantinople is unique in terms of function, scale, and monumentality, and thus cannot serve as a proxy for the realities (demographic, spatial, and economic) of other (“provincial”) Byzantine cities.®
The elite bias is also rooted in the material evidence. Byzantine archaeology often requires study of the strata that classical archaeologists documented on their way to the Roman imperial and Greek layers beneath. Classical archaeology understands the city as a “parasite” on the countryside (in the evocative account of Moses Finley), or, more technically, as the location of “the secondary sector of the economy” (the phrase used by Bouras). In this view, cities result from the accumulation and redeployment of agricultural surplus by elite city-makers, who shape cities and the lived experiences of their inhabitants both by funding large-scale building projects and by promulgating laws.’ Such views promote a kind of confirmation bias, as archaeologists may only record the remains that conform to their idea of a city.!°
We contend that such top-down views of urban history obscure the practices of daily life.!' They underestimate the role of ordinary people in making, maintaining, and transforming urban spaces and obscure the dynamic interactions between different actors, elite and non-elite, who participate in city-making processes.!? When the contributions of non-elites are discussed, they are connected to informal urban developments that are defined, implicitly or explicitly, as unplanned and thus chaotic and undesirable.!*
The establishment of the “general plan” as the primary goal of study not only obscures the contributions of non-elites but also presents a misleading image of urban form as something fixed or static. In fact, the shape of the city is in constant flux, even as individual structures — shapes on the plan — are regularly employed to new purposes. Careful stratigraphic excavation of urban localities reveals (in the words of the excavators of the Lower City Enclosure at Amorium) “a complex succession of occupation layers, superimposed structures, and more ephemeral features that signify a continuously changing urban landscape.”"4 In this particular case, a neighbourhood at first defined by a monumental bath was subsequently built up by wineries, which in turn were re-purposed as domestic structures — all of this within a span of less than 500 years. Such recurring transformations in terms of architecture and function underline the necessity of flexible and dynamic definitions of neighbourhoods.
This volume contributes to a new narrative regarding Byzantine cities as built environments and as spaces of social and political interaction. It seeks, first, to expand the scholarly literature on Byzantine neighbourhoods as spatial and social units, and (by extension) to relate Byzantine neighbourhoods to better-studied neighbourhoods in other pre-industrial polities. In so doing, it both participates in an ongoing shift in the study of Byzantine cities “from monumental architecture ... to the study of smaller topographical units,” and seeks to supply that shift with a greater analytical specificity through the explicit adoption of a neighbourhood perspective.!> It also participates in a discussion of premodern urbanism informed by both the “spatial turn” and the “social turn,” thus drawing attention to the spatial dimension of social life and highlighting the involvement of multiple agents in city-making.'!© By considering the dialogue between urban form and social lives from the perspective of the neighbourhood, the contributors illuminate the complexity and diversity of the Byzantine city and, thus, its potential contributions to broader comparative studies.
What is a neighbourhood?
Neighbourhoods are multifunctional spaces that bring people together and thus facilitate face to face interaction beyond the level of the household.!” They are areas of limited extent that may encompass not only residences but also sites of religious and civic ritual (e.g., churches, porticoes, and fora, in the case of Byzantine cities), small-scale commerce (shops), contact with the state (notaries), education, healing (hospitals), and leisure (baths). Neighbourhoods host daily deeds and rituals that bring together men and women, elites and non-elites, from multiple kinship groups. In so doing, they blur the boundaries between “public” and “private,” and are, therefore, fundamental to the negotiation of communal identities. The study of neighbourhoods affords an intermediate perspective on urban development between the official (the monumental armature) and the domestic (“ordinary” housing). It thus captures the biographies of cities at the micro-level and offers a broader view of the socio-economic and political factors that contribute to the making of cities.
No single factor, spatial or social, defines a neighbourhood. Its spatial distinctiveness can be a result of physical geography, architecture, or both; its boundaries can be clearly delimited or ambiguous. Its social character can consist of socio-economic, professional, or ethnic diversity or homogeneity.!8 Nor do individual cultures generate unitary models of neighbourhood organization.
There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ pattern of clustering within, say, Medieval cities or Islamic cities and the explanation for variation must be sought in the social, economic and political contexts of cities, not in attributes of cultures or peoples.!”
Similarly, there is no such thing as a “typical” Byzantine neighbourhood. This holds true both from the etic and from the emic perspectives.
From the outside, we can observe variations in neighbourhood formation and organization, not only across regions and eras but even within fixed times and individual cities. This diversity is not an impediment to study. Rather, describing (and eventually explaining) the variations should be one of the primary goals of research. So too, when viewed from the inside, are neighbourhoods conceptualized and experienced variously by different groups and individuals and perceived differently by their residents and by city authorities. We should expect the residents of Byzantine cities to have worked with multiple, overlapping, and contrasting definitions of neighbourhoods.”°
Accordingly, “the Byzantine neighbourhood” of this volume’s title denotes a unit of analysis, not an ideal type. Some contributors highlight differences between administrative districts and socially bonded neighbourhoods. Others offer definitions based on the variety of activities, buildings, and natural features that informed how the residents of Byzantine cities both formed and conceptualized neighbourhoods. Some approach neighbourhoods primarily on the basis of textual sources, and others primarily on the basis of archaeology, whereby all draw to some degree on both literary and material evidence. Some explicitly engage in comparisons with other places and times, while others remain firmly focused on the Byzantine evidence.
We consider this multiplicity of approaches to be salutary. Instead of insisting on a single method of study, with an eye to producing a single model of Byzantine neighbourhoods, we support a methodologically diverse and multidisciplinary effort to produce a richly textured picture of Byzantine urbanism. Just as neighbourhoods promote interaction between diverse residents, thereby generating shared spaces, shared experiences and shared obligations, so, too, can the neighbourhood become a site of collaboration and debate between diverse scholars, with an eye to generating shared hypotheses and shared questions for future study.
Neighbourhoods as spatial and social entities
In his discussion of a socio-spatial dialectic in cities, E.W. Soja writes:
While it may be easy to grasp the idea that everything spatial is simultaneously, even problematically, social, it is much more difficult to comprehend the reverse relation, that what is described as social is always at the same time intrinsically spatial.”!
We could translate this observation into a question about Byzantine urbanism. It is obvious that the most dramatic aspects of the growth and development of cities are simultaneously social phenomena: for example, that the end of the “ancient city” had fundamental consequences for Roman society, or that the importation of Venetian architectural and urban models transformed the social structure of late medieval and early modern Crete. These are examples of the intrinsically social character of the spatial. But what about the reverse — the intrinsically spatial character of the social? Where in Byzantine cities can we perceive the interpellation of individuals into larger social entities? Where are the constituent elements of collective identity generated and fused, and where were the points of friction or resistance to these processes?
In a recent study of middle Byzantine history, Anthony Kaldellis concludes that “it remains” for scholars “to show in detail how the institutions and public ideology of the state could create, sustain, reflect, or be enmeshed with the Romanness of the majority of its subjects.””” We agree, and we would add two observations. First, any answer to the “how” will be insufficient if it does not also address where these processes occurred. This is because (second observation) a focus on the spatial aspects of Byzantine society reveals aspects of subject formation that do not depend upon (and may indeed resist, or simply ignore) state institutions and ideologies.
One answer to the “where” is the neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods facilitate as well as frame social interactions. They encompass shared spaces, actions, and experiences, and thus shape communities. It is at the microscale of the neighbourhood — in the streets, houses, workshops, churches, and open spaces around buildings — that state officials, “aristocratic” elites, and ordinary people encounter each other, form alliances, negotiate the layout and form of their cities, and decide on norms and accepted behaviours.”*
By adopting the neighbourhood as a unit of analysis, we draw attention to people’s actions within their social and material settings and account for the full range of social actors, not limited to officers of state and church, who impacted the built environment. Collectively, although not always in agreement, these actors defined what a city was and what it meant to live in one. Byzantine neighbourhoods could encompass significant differences in terms of class, occupation, and ethnicity; the resulting inequalities could lead to tension, or encourage cooperation, mutual support, and cohesion. The study of neighbourhoods thus necessarily includes consideration of a variety of social bonds, including conflict, competition, and collaboration; together with the opportunities that such interactions afford for gaining respect, wealth, and social capital.?+
The resulting spatial configurations are not homologous with administrative divisions of the city into smaller units. Smith draws a useful distinction between the “neighbourhood” (the bottom-up, organic unit) and the “district” (the state-drawn, administrative unit). Here we can make a general observation on the basis of the contributions to this volume: the middle Byzantine state showed remarkably little interest in dividing cities into districts. This seems to us peculiar, and worthy of further discussion. Whereas studies of, for example, Augustan Rome or fifth-century Constantinople need to distinguish between the state view and local perceptions of neighbourhoods,”> the Byzantine state barely saw neighbourhoods at all. As
Leonora Neville remarks in her contribution to this volume, “in a formal sense, neighbourhoods do not seem to have been particularly important to the Byzantine imperial government.”
If the state could not (or preferred not to) see neighbourhoods, how can we do any better? Here we arrive at the crux of the matter. Byzantine sources, both written texts and built monuments, will rarely seek to inform us where Byzantine society was produced. It is rather a question that we must pose ourselves, and to answer it we must read the sources, both textual and material, against the grain.
Reading the monumental evidence against the grain means pushing past architectural-typological categories to understand how manmade and natural features participated in the organization and conceptualization of the urban environment. The original builders of monuments are, from this perspective, less important than subsequent generations of users and viewers; a monument can stand for centuries after its construction, and its meanings and functions can change substantially in the interim. A good example is the Praetorium of Gortyn, discussed in this volume by Christina Tsigonak1. Another example is the previously mentioned bath complex in the Lower City Enclosure at Amorium, which, after the destruction of the surrounding neighbourhood in 838, remained substantially preserved and was subsequently transformed into a pretentious residence.*°
Contributors to this volume focus on three distinct types of nuclei that participated in the formation of neighbourhoods: public works (including streets, baths, facilities for the distribution of water, and fortifications); ecclesiastical architecture (both churches built to accommodate lay worshippers, and monasteries); sites of individual or family investment (houses and shops). Some contributors focus on a particular type or even a single monument: for example, hydraulic networks in general, as in Jordan Pickett’s contribution, or a single church, as in the chapter by Amy Papalexandrou, William Caraher, and R. Scott Moore. However, they always consider those constructions in relation to neighbouring monuments and (especially) the open spaces in-between.
Analysis across typological categories activates material evidence that belongs to no pre-existing typology. For example, Beate BOhlendorf-Arslan draws attention to a “small square, on which a stone block was laid down as a bench,” in between a xenodochion (guest-house) and a residential quarter in Assos (Figure 3.7). The square and the bench framed and facilitated interaction between locals and visitors. They therefore generated recognition both of differences and similarities, elements of civic and regional identity (in the former case), and supra-regional (e.g., Roman) identity (in the latter case). All of this happened without state intervention. Monuments form multifunctional networks that collectively foster interaction and community formation.’ By reading the material evidence against the grain, we produce a multi-scaled study that moves along a spectrum from individual to community, private to public spaces.
Reading the textual evidence against the grain means both collecting and analysing the totality of explicit references to neighbourhoods, and seeking literary representations that illuminate the formation and reproduction of neighbourhoods, but without using the term. Albrecht Berger, for example, draws attention to the importance of “focal points” mentioned in passing by historians, ecclesiastical writers, and patriographers. When these references are collected and placed on a map, an important conclusion emerges: focal points did not so much demarcate discrete spatial entities as generate a dense field of overlapping entities. These entities, Berger concludes, are “neighbourhoods in the social sense, but their borders (if indeed they had borders) were flexible.”
Byzantine hagiographers frequently represented neighbourhood life, but such accounts are complex in intent and may even delight in misdirection.”® Take, for example, the law code embedded in the tenth-century Life of Gregentios of Taphar (BHG 705), here discussed by Berger and Neville. This purports to regulate the affairs of the sixth-century Himyarites, but its Draconian strictures on neighbourhood life in fact represent (as Neville writes) “the fantasy of a sex-obsessed monk.” Another remarkable example, discussed in the contribution of Papalexandrou, Caraher, and Moore, is the Life of Symeon Salos (BHG 1677). This was composed by a mid-seventh-century bishop of Neapolis, on Cyprus, but set in Syrian Emesa in the preceding century. The text makes only a single explicit mention (albeit a highly revealing one) of “neighbourhood” (yewtovia);?? but includes numerous representations of neighbourhood life. Consider, for example, the barkeeper who employs Symeon to entertain his customers. “When the townspeople were ready for a diversion, they said to each other, “Let’s go have a drink where the Fool is,” and there they would find Symeon “dancing outside with the members of a circus faction.”>° The new popularity of the tavern activated the open spaces of the surrounding neighbourhood, thereby engaging multiple levels of society.
One might ask whether this is a datum about Emesa or about Neapolis; indeed, viewed from a strictly empirical perspective, it is neither. However, as a literary image embedded within a rhetorically complex text, it engages broader discourses both about how neighbourhoods do function (a representational discourse) and how they should function (a normative discourse).*! In this sense it resembles the (superficially more straightforward) representation of a Constantinopolitan neighbourhood in the seventhcentury Miracles of Artemios (BHG 173), discussed by Benjamin Anderson in his contribution to this volume.
The study of neighbourhoods entails parallel analysis of such disparate sources, textual and material, in order to comprehend the spatial aspects of Byzantine society. We will never excavate the tavern outside of which Symeon danced with the circus partisans, just as we will never find a text that describes the interactions between visitors and locals outside the xenodochion in Assos. Nevertheless, the life of Symeon and the square in Assos illuminate each other, by reinforcing the social complexity of apparently modest areas between monumental constructions.
It may be true that, as Bouras writes, “the concept of the agora as the meeting place of the citizens... had long since died away” in Byzantine cities.** But the disappearance of a single, state-sponsored meeting place was accompanied by a proliferation of smaller, informal meeting places as the results of large-scale excavations confirm. For example, at Frankish Corinth, an internal courtyard with benches surrounded by shops and a public market street in the same area point to spaces of intense social and economic interaction.** The network of open courtyards and alleys discovered in a winemaking district at Amorium might have served similar purposes.** This volume offers further examples: the small chapels set between houses in Athens and Thebes that are discussed by Fotini Kondyli and Nikos Kontogiannis in their respective chapters; the open spaces outside churches discussed by Papalexandrou, Caraher, and Moore on the basis of their excavation in Cyprus, and by Anderson on the basis of the Constantinopolitan Miracles of Artemios; the sites for collection and distribution of water discussed by Christina Tsigonaki in her study of two Cretan cities, and by Jordan Pickett in his comparative account of late Roman water networks in the eastern Mediterranean. These, we argue, must count among the places where individuals became members of Byzantine society. They are also sites in which the east Roman state expressed little interest, and in which it had no official presence. This forms a striking contrast to the strong presence of the Roman imperial state in provincial fora and agorai.*»
We wish to emphasize especially the recurring appearance in the literary and the archaeological evidence of open spaces, with minimal architectural articulation (small squares, benches, wells, fountains, porticoes, tombs, etc.), as sites of social interaction. This should in turn prompt a reconsideration of the morphological development of cities between late antiquity and the middle Byzantine period, in particular the shift from a continuous urban fabric to a more dispersed settlement pattern. Scholars of medieval Italian urbanism describe this more dispersed pattern as the cittd a isole, the “city of islands,” and the term has been usefully applied to eastern Mediterranean cities as well: for example, to Hierapolis, where “residential areas... sometimes centred on small ecclesiastical buildings” were “scattered around the ancient urban landscape and linked by a relatively well-preserved road network.”*°
The interpretation of this morphological phenomenon depends in large part on the interpretation of the open spaces between neighbourhoods. If they are viewed negatively — as blanks on the general plan, absences of monumental architecture — then the interpretation will emphasize urban decline (“ruralization” of the city). If, by contrast, they are viewed positively — as sites of encounter between residents of distinct neighbourhoods — then the interpretation will emphasize a shift in the primary scene of social interaction: from the formally planned, official space (the agora) to the informal clearings and paths.
The spatial nature of social life is not merely a question of “where,” but also one of “what”: those common practices that activate the spaces in which they occur. One obvious example is gossip, or (more neutrally) exchange of information with and about others, especially those outside of one’s immediate kinship group. By establishing both criteria of newsworthiness and shared moral judgments, such exchanges enact and negotiate social norms, while simultaneously forming in-groups and out-groups (‘us’ and ‘them’).
Daily interaction in shared spaces frequently leads, moreover, to collective problem-solving: regarding the management of behaviour (as in the case of the theft discussed in Anderson’s chapter below), of space (as in the case of the gated street discussed by Kondyli), and of resources (as in the case of the neighbourhood wells discussed by Pickett). Even interactions as mundane as sharing a well or passing by on the street become significant when repeated regularly and help to form shared mental maps of urban form.
Common spatial practices may also transcend the present moment and establish communities across time: most obviously in the case of the shared remembrances practiced, for example, at tombs or icons, and also through the continuing use of visibly ancient structures. An example, discussed in this volume by both Kontogiannis and Neville, is the Theban confraternity whose shared veneration of a single icon established links not only between neighbourhoods but also beyond Thebes to a remembered past in Naupaktos. All of these various practices share in common the ability to forge communities out of individuals. The resulting communities need not be political, but they can under certain circumstances become political, a process to which we now turn.
The political character of Byzantine neighbourhoods
Thus far in this introduction, we have sought to emphasize the social aspects of Byzantine neighbourhoods that escaped the direct intervention, or indeed even the notice, of the state. Recognition of these aspects does not entail a strict division between the social and the political; rather, it sustains the possibility that collectivities of various sizes may exercise political agency in a fashion not wholly determined by the institutions and public ideology of the state.
Byzantinists have not always admitted the existence of political collectivities situated between the family and the state. In their account of People and Power in Byzantium, Alexander Kazhdan and Giles Constable claimed that
the average Byzantine, deprived of any form of social relationship, consciously kept within the narrow circle of the nuclear family and, lacking the means of collective defense and help, felt alone and solitary in a dangerous world, naked before an incomprehensible, metaphysical authority.°”
We contend that adoption of a neighbourhood perspective falsifies this claim by revealing the existence, not only of various forms of social relationship but also of collective defence and help, and thus ultimately of a means by which citizens could make sense of, and intervene with, state authority.
A failure to recognize the agency of ordinary people in political processes renders their places of dwelling and business irrelevant to political action and change.*® That makes the political nature of neighbourhoods invisible, if not unimaginable. There is, however, ample evidence of the range of political activities that non-elites undertook. They belonged, for example, to those city councils that represented the city in legal matters, managed city properties, and made decisions about the city’s defence, including surrendering in case of attack or supporting different rulers.*° Representatives of professions and local guilds actively participated in the councils, as did other groups of citizens who could be elected as long as they owned property and resided in the city.4° These groups’ political agency is also echoed in middle Byzantine texts where tradesmen, manual workers, and street vendors are often identified as political agitators and rioters.*! Such political expressions suggest the existence of urban collectivities, distinct from both the aristocracy and the (imperial and ecclesiastical) “service elite,” that sought power in both local and central government as a means to pursue their own interests.” In this light, social bonds forged in neighbourhoods, in streets, shops, and open spaces could achieve political salience.
More dramatic cases of the political activation of neighbourhoods involve revolt against imperial authority. Paul Magdalino draws attention to an example in the chronicle of John Skylitzes.
When the proedros Theodosios attempted a coup d’état in 1056, he marched on the Great Palace from his house at the Leomakellion at the head of a following that included many of his neighbours along with his family and household: an interesting indication that urban residents could feel a sense of solidarity with their neighbourhood aristocrat, no doubt because he invited them to his parties and used his influence to improve their living conditions.”
A march from the neighbourhood to the palace is the simplest and most direct means by which the local social bonds become politically salient. At the same time, the simplicity of the story must conceal a more complex dynamic at the neighbourhood level. As Leonora Neville remarks in her contribution to this volume, residents of the Leomakellion “could choose to stand in solidarity with that man as a neighbour or to stay away, either in opposition to his agenda or avoidance of his troubles.”
A recent study by Yannis Smarnakis of the Zealots’ Revolt in Thessaloniki (1342-1350) reveals a more complex interface between urban space and political action. Indeed, the Zealots’ Revolt is a kind of encyclopaedia of the elements of Byzantine neighbourhood politics, which it mobilized in an unusually dramatic and concerted fashion during a moment of extreme political polarization. The city was divided between supporters of John VI Kantakouzenos and supporters of John V Palaiologos (the “Zealots”). The Zealots originated in and controlled the neighbourhood of the harbour in the southwest. The harbour neighbourhood was distinguished by its physical characteristics, by the maritime occupations of its inhabitants, and by the substantial presence of migrants from the Venetian-controlled Cyclades.4 The supporters of Kantakouzenos, meanwhile, were based in the Acropolis, at the opposite, north-eastern end of the city. The central neighbourhoods between harbour and agora “were contested spaces whose control was continuously claimed ... through the exercise of religious violence and the imaginative use of religious rituals.”
The Zealots’ Revolt was an extended political action that originated in a specific neighbourhood, sought to extend its reach through direct spatial intervention in noncommitted neighbourhoods, and ultimately aimed at greater local autonomy from imperial government. It was exceptional in many ways: in its stridency, in its duration, and its violence. But its use of neighbourhood practices to advance political goals was not exceptional. Moving beyond the study of highly visible and large-scale events such as revolts and riots, contributions in this volume investigate the evidence for more modest forms of grassroots action, self-governance, and collaboration and conflict between local and imperial powers. If the occupation of an arterial street was a political act in fourteenth-century Thessaloniki, so too was the construction of a gate across a street in middle Byzantine Athens, considered by Kondyli in her chapter — even if, in the latter case, we can no longer name the agents responsible. The violent conflicts between harbour and Acropolis in Thessaloniki recall the ritual fighting between neighbourhoods of eighth-century Ravenna discussed by Tsigonaki — even if the latter was not explicitly ideological. And the public enactment of religious rituals, both within the harbour neighbourhood and in the city at large, recall the icon processions in medieval Thebes discussed by Kontogiannis and Neville — even if the latter did not oppose the state.
Not all forms of neighbourhood politics are “bottom-up.” Although the Byzantine state did not formally recognize neighbourhoods as political units, it did directly intervene in their formation and development, particularly through public works. As Tsigonaki discusses in her contribution, some city walls constructed during the transitional period required material investment and expertise on a scale that only the state could muster. These directly influenced the formation of neighbourhoods, in particular, by drawing a line (in Tsigonaki’s words) between “residents who have the right to security and those who do not.™® Provision of arterial water via aqueducts, a major function of the Roman state, was maintained in some Byzantine cities, notably Thessaloniki (whose water supply Pickett discusses in his chapter) and Constantinople, with repercussions for neighbourhood formation in both.
Nevertheless, many amenities once supplied by the Roman state became local responsibilities in Byzantine cities. The eighth-century Ravennate neighbourhoods discussed by Tsigonaki were defined by their responsibility for the upkeep of city gates. Ine Jacobs has collected attestations of local responsibility for the maintenance of streets and walls.4” Hugh Barnes and Mark Whittow distinguished between the state-built walls of medieval Anatolia, the product of military engineering, and the more ad hoc circuits constructed by communities to provide for their own defence.*® As Pickett writes in his chapter, the transitional period is marked by a sharp reduction in the number of functioning aqueducts, which are gradually replaced by more local (often church-based) wells and cisterns. When Byzantine neighbourhoods assumed traditional state functions, the result could be (as Pickett observes) “more equitable access to a broadened portfolio of... resources.” This is a political phenomenon of considerable interest.
Between “bottom-up” and “top-down” forms of interaction between the neighbourhood and the state, there lies a grey area of more ambiguous encounters. Neighbourhoods can make use of state institutions to their own ends, and this certainly happened in Byzantine cities. Anderson, in his contribution to this volume, discusses the use by a Constantinopolitan neighbourhood of the urban prefecture to regulate its own affairs; the technique used was perjury, but all parties are depicted as happy with the result. State-built works could be re-purposed by local populations. For example, the citadel of Sardis, built by military engineers in the transitional period, housed an agricultural community by the fourteenth century.*? Similarly, at Butrint, two Late Antique towers from the city’s Western Defences were transformed into dwellings and spaces of minor industrial activities by the eighth and ninth centuries.” Likewise, states can use neighbourhood institutions to their own ends.*! The range of relevant phenomena is broad, and stretches from enlistment of community organizations to distribute resources in a crisis, to the recruitment of police informants. But it remains to be shown that the Byzantine state was sufficiently well informed about the neighbourhoods of its cities to practice this form of politics.
While very few Byzantine neighbourhoods opposed the state through outright rebellion, many could manage local affairs without state assistance, and some were, thus, able to outlive the Roman state. The foreign concessions in Constantinople might seem an obvious example. However, as Berger demonstrates in his chapter, these were never neighbourhoods in the heuristic sense that we employ here. Moreover, the character of the community in Galata changed dramatically after 1453.°7 In general, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople entailed a drastic depopulation of the city followed by repopulation through forced migration.>> As Berger remarks,
Introduction 13
resemblances between the neighbourhood structure of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople are superficial and misleading.
To find Byzantine neighbourhoods that survived the Byzantine state, we need to turn to the provinces. The examples of Chalcis and Thebes, discussed by Kontogiannis in this volume, are especially interesting. While the general plans of both cities were modified by their new (Venetian and Catalan) rulers, Kontogiannis shows that the neighbourhoods “managed to preserve their formation and basic functions.” Indeed, the cities’ “notorious” willingness to accept new rulers may be seen as a pragmatic strategy to maintain prosperity based on neighbourhood industry.
Volume organization
This book is divided into three parts that address three distinct topics, which correspond to the three sections of this introduction: the definition of neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods as social spaces, and neighbourhoods as sites of political action. As these three topics are intrinsically connected, each individual contribution necessarily reaches outside the immediate remit of the section in which it has been placed. Nevertheless, if read in order, the essays present a cumulative account and collectively demonstrate the contributions of a neighbourhood perspective to the study of Byzantine urbanism.
The first section, on the definition of Byzantine neighbourhoods, contains two chapters: one by Albrecht Berger on the contribution of textual evidence, and the other by Fotini Kondyli on the contribution of archaeological evidence. Both essays consider both emic and etic definitions. Berger draws a firm distinction between administrative and “social” definitions of the neighbourhoods of Constantinople. While the former may be delimited by lines drawn on a map, the latter radiated outwards from “focal points” (in particular churches and aristocratic houses); their boundaries were not fixed, and frequently overlapped. Kondyli’s account of medieval Athens also considers churches as focal points, while emphasizing the range of monuments that the category “church” can embrace, and the different roles that they play in neighbourhood foundation. She furthermore presents evidence for the occupational diversity of medieval neighbourhoods and draws attention to the varieties of political action that they might undertake. Both essays, taken together, establish that the neighbourhood was a spatially flexible and demographically heterogeneous element of Byzantine cities, which nevertheless (or indeed precisely because of its diversity and flexibility) attained political salience.
The second section, on the spatial and social characteristics of Byzantine neighbourhoods, contains three chapters. Each adopts a primary focus on an architectural type (house, church, and hydraulic network, respectively), while simultaneously setting examples of that type in dialogue with their surroundings. Beate B6hlendorf-Arslan focuses on the well-preserved residential architecture of Assos, a city that was completely rebuilt following
14 Benjamin Anderson and Fotini Kondyli
the earthquake in 460 AD. On the basis of typology, construction, scale, inventory, and adjacency to other monument types (churches, monasteries, hostels), she considers the social characteristics of individual neighbourhoods, and draws attention to the shifting foci of social life. The reconstruction of Assos was marked, namely, by an expansion of interior gathering spaces (“courtyards”) and by the contraction of exterior gathering spaces (streets and squares). Amy Papalexandrou, William Caraher, and R. Scott Moore, by contrast, consider a single church in Cypriot Arsinoé, which was constructed in the sixth century and expanded in the seventh century with the addition of a portico. Although the adjacent domestic architecture has not been recovered, the collaborative effort involved in the construction of the church and its integration into an open ensemble (portico, street, tetrapylon, fountain) illuminate the community that worshipped and buried its dead there.
While the first two chapters in this section focus on individual cities, Jordan Pickett’s essay adopts a comparative, multi-regional approach to hydraulic networks between late antiquity and the middle Byzantine period. He identifies a general trend from city-wide distribution via aqueducts to the more localized collection and distribution via wells and cisterns. Nevertheless, the specific manifestations of this shift varied widely, with significant implications for neighbourhood formation. Whereas a period of drought at Caesarea Maritima provoked a semi-privatization of water distribution, the developments in Thessaloniki and Ephesos were more gradual, marked by greater participation of the church, and may have resulted in more equitable distribution.
The third section, on neighbourhoods as political agents, contains four chapters, of which three are regional case studies (focusing on Constantinople, Crete, and central Greece, respectively), and the fourth is a concluding, multi-regional synthesis. Instead of focusing on a single type of monument, each contribution attempts to comprehend neighbourhoods in their totality. Benjamin Anderson considers the network of houses, churches, shops, and baths that made up the Oxeia, a neighbourhood of Constantinople vividly depicted in the seventh-century Miracles of Artemios. He argues that the Miracles advance a consistent point of view regarding the conduct of the residents and the proper means of its regulation. While the latter rarely required state interference, it could, in extreme cases, employ state institutions to its own ends. Christina Tsigonaki, by contrast, illustrates the central role of state interventions (especially the construction of walls and aqueducts) in the formation of neighbourhoods in two Cretan cities, Gortyn and Eleutherna. Tsigonaki demonstrates the particularly rich character of the archaeological evidence for these cities, both of which were abandoned after the Arab conquest of the island, and both of which have been extensively excavated in recent decades, providing a rare snapshot of a moment of transition between the late antique and the medieval city.
Nikos Kontogiannis also focuses on long-term changes in the urban fabric of two cities, Chalcis and Thebes: beginning with the large-scale state
Introduction 15
interventions of the transitional period, moving through the economic prosperity of the middle Byzantine period, and continuing beyond the changes attendant upon the collapse of Constantinopolitan rule in 1204. Kontogiannis depicts neighbourhoods marked by strong local identities that enabled collective action in times of political change, with the result that Byzantine neighbourhoods outlived the Byzantine state.
The final essay in this section also serves as a conclusion to the volume as a whole. Leonora Neville considers the lack of Byzantine-era theorization of neighbourhoods alongside the ample evidence for the importance of neighbourhoods in Byzantine society. She argues that the apparent tension between these two bodies of evidence reveals the distinct configuration of Byzantine politics. Neighbourhoods both facilitated and impeded the formation of collectivities in Byzantine cities.
While this volume does present a cumulative account of the Byzantine neighbourhood, one greater than the sum of the individual contributions, it is not comprehensive. We consider it important to ground the study of the Byzantine neighbourhood in the urban developments of late antiquity. Nevertheless, this volume, like most studies of the Byzantine city, remains disproportionately weighted towards the sixth and seventh centuries, particularly as regards the exploitation of archaeological evidence. It does demonstrate the utility of a neighbourhood perspective in reconceiving the late antique-middle Byzantine transition (especially through the contributions of Pickett, Anderson, and Tsigonak1), and in describing the distinctive characteristics of the middle Byzantine city (especially through the contributions of Kondyli and Kontogiannis; and note Bohlendorf-Arslan’s discussion of the excavations at Bogazkéy). However, with the notable exception of Kontogiannis’ accounts of Catalan Thebes and Venetian Chalcis, its image of the late Byzantine city is rooted primarily in texts: the patriarchal documents on Palaiologan Constantinople briefly discussed by Berger, for example, and the references to the neighbourhoods of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Thessaloniki found in the Athonite archives and discussed here by Neville.
In other words, this volume is meant to initiate a conversation, not to present a definitive statement. We will consider it a success if it prompts readers to approach additional sets of evidence from the perspective of the neighbourhood, and to compare the results to those presented here. We believe that the result of such a collective enterprise would be a richer and more accurate account of the nature of Byzantine society, in particular as regards its complex and shifting relation to the east Roman state and its successors.
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