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Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600–800)
Research on early medieval Cyprus has focused on the late antique “golden age” (late fourth/early fifth to seventh century) and the so-called Byzantine “Reconquista” (post-AD 965) while overlooking the intervening period. This phase was characterized, supposedly, by the division of the political sovereignty between the Umayyads and the Byzantines, bringing about the social and demographic dislocation of the population of the island. This book proposes a different story of continuities and slow transformations in the fate of Cyprus between the late sixth and the early ninth centuries. Analysis of new archaeological evidence shows signs of a continuing link to Constantinople.
Moreover, together with a reassessment of the literary evidence, archaeology and material culture help us to reappraise the impact of Arab naval raids and contextualize the confrontational episodes throughout the ebb and flow of Eastern Mediterranean history: the political influence of the Caliphate looked stronger in the second half of the seventh century, the administrative and ecclesiastical influence of the Byzantine empire held sway from the beginning of the eighth to the twelfth century. Whereas the island retained sound commercial ties with the Umayyad Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, at the same time politically and economically it remained part of the Byzantine sphere.
This belies the idea of Cyprus as an independent province only loosely tied to Constantinople and allows us to draw a different picture of the cultural identities, political practices and hierarchy of wealth and power in Cyprus during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Luca Zavagno received his BA degree in History from the University Ca’Foscari, Venice; he completed his PhD studies at the University of Birmingham on the society, culture, economics and politics of Byzantine cities. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Bilkent University. Dr. Zavagno is the author of many articles on the Byzantine and early Medieval Mediterranean and of the co-edited volumes Islands of the Eastern Mediterranean: A History of Cross Cultural Encounters (2014), Goods on the Move: Merchants, Networks and Communication Routes in the Medieval and Early Modern Era (2016) and of Cities in Transition: Urbanism in Byzantium between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2009).
Preface
Hannah Arendt once said that the best remedy to the unpredictability of fate, to the chaotic uncertainty of the future, lies in the human faculty of making and keeping promises. 1 Therefore, I tend to regard this book as the fulfilment of a seven-year promise made to many people and institutions, who since 2009 have believed in my capacity for fulfilling it despite my inability even to picture the final outcome of my research on seventh- and eighth-century Cyprus. To begin with and proceeding in a strict chronological order, I am enormously indebted to John Nesbitt and Cécile Morrisson, who accepted me into the 2009 Sigillographic and Numismatic Summer School at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Center; indeed, their insights and teachings gave me the inspiration to write a first article on the coinage of the island of Cyprus in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages and to start building up a serious bibliography on the topic.
Once back in Cyprus, I also benefited from the advice and guidance of former and current colleagues such as Özlem Çaykent, Jim Kusch, Can Sancar, Michael Walsh, Matthew Harpster, Bülent Kizildüman, and Mehmet Erginel, who encouraged me to broaden my horizons beyond numismatics and sigillography to pursue an all-encompassing book on seventh- and eighth-century Cyprus. This concept was developed during the two summers I spent at Dumbarton Oaks, first in 2010 as a bursary recipient and then in 2011 as a Summer Fellow. There I finally developed the guidelines of my project with the support and advice provided to me by the entire scholarly community. Here my deepest and warmest thanks go to Margaret Mullet (a unique and continuous source of positive energy), Jonathan Shea, Deborah Brown-Stewart, Alberto Rigolio, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Scott Johnson, Örgü Dalgıç, Juan Signes-Codoner, Ida Toth, and Vasileios Marinis.
I regard myself lucky to have had the opportunity to share some of my ideas with these friends and colleagues and to have received their feedback. I must also thank a second institution, which played an enormous role in finalizing the project and providing me with a welcome respite from my teaching duties at Eastern Mediterranean University and later at Bilkent University (which I also thank for their unwavering support). In granting me a Fellowship in the Fall of 2012, the Stanley Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, and in particular its executive director Dimitri H. Gondicas, gave me the opportunity to interact with an extraordinary constellation of local scholars from diverse walks of academic life and areas of expertise. Here my gratitude goes to John Haldon, Ravi Shankhar, Helmut Reimitz, Patrick Geary, Peter Brown, and Molly Greene for their invaluable criticisms and comments to my work in progress. As my research benefited enormously from these experiences, I at last reached the final stage of my project, the moment when the promise should have been fulfilled. However, writing the book was not easy and took me longer than expected. This should account for the fact that the period in which my evidence was collected stopped in 2014 with less systematic updating later on. During the writing phase I was lucky enough to have some local and long-distance support and encouragement on the part of colleagues (some of whom I am proud to call friends) who read and commented on sections of the book. First and foremost, I should thank Hawley Kusch and Lisa Shea for going through the rough draft of the book for a painful (due to my terrible English) editing process. I would like to mention Nicholas Coureas, Nikos Bakirtzis, Günder Varinliog˘lu, and Chris Wickham.
The last in particular I will always regard as my mentor and source of constant inspiration. There will never be enough words to express my enormous gratitude to him for having been there at any important moment of my life. Finally, I must also thank all the people who have been followed and supported me during this long journey, family and friends alike. From my endless love Federica, wife and companion of a lifetime, to my daughter Sofia, who has always tried to convince me that an itsy bitsy spider should be included in one of my chapters; from my mum, who is always there to rally my morale with patience and infinite love, to my sister Marianna, whom I miss more than I like to admit; from S¸evin and her curly way of life to Marios, Aysu, my “only” brother in law Antonio, Massimiliano, David, Michele, and Steve, who all taught me that true friendship can travel across space and time; from Marcello and Mariangelo, who showed me what fatherhood really means to “my captain” Antonio Capitanio, who first introduced me to “History.” Finally, I would like to thank my beloved and best Teaching Assistant Zeynep, my “students” Harun, Asad, Humberto, Ela and Mert, as well as Minnie, Aedo, Nathalie, Ivanhoe, and Woody: “tailed” friends who did not all have the chance to see this long journey reach its conclusion. To all of the above this book is ideally dedicated. You will be in my heart always and forever. And this is another fulfilled promise. Ankara, July 2016
1 Mattia Pascal and the name of Cyprus
In the introduction to his masterpiece, Mattia Pascal, Pirandello writes that the only thing that the main character of the novel knew was his name. One of the few things, indeed the only one that I know for certain is that my name is Mattia Pascal. I used to take advantage of this. Every now and then a friend or acquaintance was foolish enough to come to me asking for some suggestion or advice. I would shut my eyes slightly, shrug, and answer: ‘My name is Mattia Pascal.’ – Thanks a million.
I knew that ‘Yes, yes I know that much.’ And does it seem so little to you.’ ‘To tell you the truth, it didn’t seem a great deal to me either.’ 1 When I started my research on Cyprus in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, I caught myself in the same state of mind as Pirandello’s character. Although a number of important historiographical syntheses on Cyprus in the period under consideration have been published, they seem to me not sufficiently concerned with a comprehensive approach and not fully focused on a systematic analysis and contextualization of the volume of information stemming from different types of primary sources (literary, documentary, and material). Rather, as will be seen, their concern has mainly been to describe the internal history and fortunes of the island in terms of a catastrophic decline and depopulation from the mid-seventh century onwards.
As a result of such a descriptive narration, however, they leave the reader to draw the most obvious conclusions about the patterns of discontinuity in the history of Cyprus. Furthermore, because they mainly wish to zoom in on the dramatic and disastrous events that shaped the lives of the local inhabitants, more often than not those calamities are identified, too easily, with the Arab incursions of 649 and 653. According to these sources, after these dates, what we supposedly know about Cyprus is a little more than its name. Indeed, the idea that the Arab conquest permanently broke the unity of the Mediterranean turning it into a permanent frontier is not peculiar to Cyprus and hearkens back to Henry Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. This idea has been challenged and reappraised (particularly in the light of new archaeological evidence) since its first appearance in 1936.2
In the case of Cyprus, the Arab raids have often represented a real watershed moment in the historiography of the island, which often assumes the chronological division of Cypriot early medieval history into three periods: the Late Antique “golden age” (late fourth/early fifth to seventh century), the so-called Byzantine Reconquista (post 965), and the period in between, which is more often than not regarded as the Cypriot Dark Ages. As most attention has been paid to the “golden age” and the Reconquista periods (although the impact of the Byzantine return to the island has started to be debunked), the narrative on Cyprus in the early Middle Ages has been limited to few general topics: above all, a forced (and in fact abortive) transplantation of population to the Hellespont, the encompassing political and religious role of the local autocephalous Archiepiscopal Church, and a treaty dividing the tax revenues of the island “betwixt the Greeks and the Saracens”, that is, between the Umayyads and the Byzantines.3 The treaty, dated to 686–88, supposedly brought about an era of shared political sovereignty between the Umayyads (and later the Abbasids) and the Byzantines. This period, sometimes called condominium, buffer zone, or no man’s land, was regarded by historians as tantamount to a sterile neutralization of the social, economic, and even cultural life of the island.
According to these authors, it is only after the Arab invasions and the condominium on the island from late seventh century to 963/4 that a real blossoming of architecture and religious painting can be traced.4 Long gone were the days in which “her [Cypriot] inhabitants toiling their land and trading with foreign nations, were growing in both prosperity and wealth [and] founding temples and churches, building magnificent dwellings”. 5 Indeed, in the last few decades, scholars like Andreas Dikigoropoulos, Konstantinos Kyrris, Arthur Megaw, Joannic Durand and Andrea Giovannoni, Robert Browning, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, Vassos Karageorghis, and (at times) Marcus Rautman and David Metcalf have drawn a picture of the period from the late seventh to the early ninth century characterized by repeated destruction, the end of urban life, relocation to inland settlements with fundamental changes in land-use patterns, increasingly rural economic life, and the social and demographic dislocation of the elites, the ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the remaining population of the island.6 In other words, the historiography of early medieval Cyprus often deliberately flirts with catastrophe.7
However, one must recognize that this long-established approach cannot be fulfilling if one wants to properly analyse the historical development of Cyprus in the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages through the new cross-disciplinary analysis of different documentary and archaeological materials.8 In my view, scholars who have focused their attention on seventh- and eighth-century Cyprus have been too influenced by the image drawn by the literary and documentary sources alone. It is not that archaeology is completely missing from these syntheses; moreover, a series of conferences held in the Republic of Cyprus in the last few years have indeed brought scholarly attention to the results of field surveys and of urban and rural excavations together with an up-to-date analysis of material evidence.9
However, more often than not the contributions on Cyprus in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages fail to notice the important ways archaeological conceptualization of the passage of time might contrast with that created by a textual historian. This is not to deny that cross-disciplinary boundaries between archaeology and history are very blurred, but simply to assert that one cannot engage with contemporary textual sources as a means to clarify patterns of data recovered from excavations and surveys or use numismatic and archaeological information to address gaps in the written sources.10 For instance, the reduction in coin finds and the dwindling of imported fine wares and amphorae in all excavated urban and rural Cypriot sites has been often interpreted simply as evidence for a retreat of the local population into a more localized economy due to the catastrophic Arab raids.11 Evidence from lead seals and coins has also been used recently to propose the existence of a real north–south divide in the “treaty centuries” (i.e.
from 688 to 965), which should help us explain how the condominium regime worked on the island.12 Here, the risk is that of bolstering a picture drawn by documentary sources, more often than not one concerned with raids and punitive expeditions against the island or the predominant role of the Church as a bulwark of the Cypriot religious (and partially political) independence;13 but it is a conclusion derived from these sources, and not independent from them. It is important to consider that the archaeological past seldom dovetails with the information retrieved from chronicles and other types of literary sources.14 The latter have often either escaped a real critique (for instance in the cases of the Byzantine hagiographies or the Arab sources commenting
upon the above-mentioned treaty of 686–88) or have actually been misinterpreted, like the pro-iconophile accounts of the orthodoxy of the island. In other cases, the literary accounts have been deliberately exaggerated, as in the reports concerning the transplantation of the whole population of the island to Nea Justinianoupolis on the Hellespont in 691 or those presenting the ruinous effects of the Arab raids. Moreover, the so-called Cyprus problem (that is to say the de facto partition of the island after the 1974 Turkish occupation of its northern part) has often impinged upon objective interpretations of the period under consideration, prompting the scholarly community to accept the idea that the mid-seventh century ushered the island into an age of deprivation and decline. I will return to this later. I am also perfectly aware that archaeology, too, has sometimes lacked a methodological critique.15 For instance, Tassos Papacostas stresses that archaeological surveys seldom pay attention to periods later than the Roman Empire and, therefore, rarely edge beyond the historiographical gap represented by the seventh century.
Other surveys remained unpublished, as geographical bias does not allow us to use more than a small amount of literature on sites located in the northern part of the island.16 In other words (those of Timothy Gregory), it is ironic that one of the most silent periods of the history of Cyprus is also one of the most recent.17 Uncritical approaches, however, pave the way to flawed generalizations, such as those eager to depict Cyprus simply as a maritime continuation of the Arab-Byzantine frontier.18 In fact, as Dominique Valérian, Ralph Bauer, and Thomas Sizgorich have showed, we should reappraise the entire concept of borders in the medieval Mediterranean. This in the light of a larger Mediterranean analytical approach, which points to the construction of a shared medieval Mediterranean, disputed particularly, although not exclusively, between Christendom and Islam; a sea that remained a border between Christians and Muslims but marked at the same time by conflict and exchange.19 Moreover, the very ontological essence of the term border has been redefined by Sizgorich, who states: Borderlands are often home to hybrids [which] incorporate and embody the tension of ungovernable and so irresolvable self-other dichotomies confined in a single entity.
[However] they also housed individuals and communities who exploited their liminal status and who engaged in economies of various sorts … which existed independently of the great powers between which they abided.20 Ninth and tenth-century Muslim cartographers like Ibn H. awqal enhanced this idea, for although they recognized the existence of political boundaries, they defined them as transition zones of uncertain sovereignty and identity where the force of one polity slowed faded away to be replaced gradually by the cultural, social, and political influence of the neighbouring state.21 As will be seen, these concepts of frontier and borderland resurface in the description of Cyprus as a middle ground, based upon the idea that cultures
stem from the creative interaction of human populations and never from isolation.22 This reflection takes on universal importance when one considers that this concept has been used to investigate the sixteenth-century interaction between the French and the native Algonquian-speaking people in the Great Lakes region of North America, describing a world that could not be further away from Byzantium and the medieval eastern Mediterranean in terms of geography, climate, social structures, economic infrastructures, cultural values, and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the concept of a middle ground has a resounding methodological and interdisciplinary echo, for it nurtures the creation of a model for understanding interaction as a cultural process – a process located in a historical place and made possible by the convergence of certain infrastructural elements. These elements are a rough balance of power, a reciprocal need for what the other possesses, and the failure by one side to gather enough force to coerce the other into change.23 Insofar as the elements in question may be replicated in other places and other times, the concept of middle ground can be aptly applied to Cyprus in the transition between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when, as mentioned, the island found itself on the border between the Byzantine Empire and the rising Umayyad caliphate.
This situation can also be regarded as quintessential of the medieval Mediterranean generally, which became a border between Islam and Greek and Latin Christendom while remaining a free sea because no one power could dominate the others.24 This is not to discount the violence of the period or to tell a utopian tale of peaceful multiculturalism, but rather to encapsulate Cyprus within a broader Mediterranean narrative. So one could therefore better grasp the political, military, and economic changes of balance, interpreted as moments of construction of modalities of interaction in a shared space controlling and regulating both exchanges and conflicts: a meeting point between two opposed political and religious spheres but also as a by-product of peculiar social, cultural and economic conditions.25 Indeed, the Cypriot middle ground was not simply a place of encounter but also the result of a creative process involving local elites, “foreign” Byzantine administrators, western pilgrims (like Willibald in the 720s [see note 3]), and Arab merchants, all of whom acted as cultural brokers helping to construct and reinvent a new society through deliberate acts of mediation.26 In this light, we are encouraged to look at Cyprus – and at islands in general – as a privileged zone of interaction and not simply as a cultural barrier between different empires. This view calls for a reassessment of the Byzantine insular world as a periphery.27 Indeed, it is possible to surmise that Cyprus, together with Sicily and, to a lesser extent, Crete, Malta, Sardinia, and the Balearics, acted as a third political and economic sphere between the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean Sea in the Byzantine Mediterranean.
However, the identification of some parallel economic and political trajectories among these islands will not be used to counter the differences in the political, economic, and cultural rhythms of transformation, which characterized different insular sites in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. On the contrary, this should allow us to reconsider the fate of Cyprus in light of the growing archaeological data produced from other insular contexts (like Sicily, Crete, and Malta), which seem to emerge as a distinct entity between the constitutive pillars (what Wickham defines as Byzantine heartland) of the eighth- to tenth-century empire: the Aegean vis-à-vis western Asia Minor28. Indeed, we must conclude that “when one writes of the region in the transition period, one should look for the nuances that differentiate between regions and sites and even between distinctive zones of the same sites.
One should focus on variations and not only common perspectives”. 29 The above-mentioned geographical division of the so-called Byzantine heartland proposed by Chris Wickham is a good example of analytical differentiation. The Byzantine heartland should be regarded as oxymoronic: on the one hand, it was the focus of one of the largest and most complex political systems in the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean; on the other hand it paired two wildly different geographical zones: the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean.30 In fact, this partition has been even reappraised in terms of the vitality of urban economies in the two macroregions (and even beyond). As more archaeologists focus their attention on inland Anatolian cities like Amorium (and partially Euchaita), once regarded always as disrupted, these reveal a previously unsuspected economic continuity and social complexity more in line with that of sites located along the coast or even on the islands (like Ephesus or Gortyn in Crete).31
Although there are some caveats – Amorium remained an exceptionally important military and political hub and some areas of the Anatolian plateau, like Cappadocia, did experience a real change of urban and rural life – one must admit that the earlier concept of uniform decline should be replaced with a more complex approach recognizing that societies deal with continuity or change “through the construction of successful adaptive strategies, which have the effect of transforming and re-equipping existing social structures to deal with new realities”. 32 This not only allows us to put a structural problem (a lesser degree of interconnection and more localized economies in the post-600 Mediterranean) in a regionally nuanced perspective but should also help to propose a more objective and functional definition of the very idea of transition. Rather than using the concept of transition to deny the idea of a crisis or to provide a synonym for transformation without tensions, I would rather use it to compare different social, political, and economic forms with no teleological implications, because “a transition is a time of passage between two periods, when conditions are ripe for a change in the socioeconomic system as framed within the changing political and administrative imperial superstructure”. 33 By adopting this analytical frame, Alan Walmsley has proposed a model of smooth transition to interpret the trajectories experienced by Syria and Palestine in the passage from Byzantine to Umayyad rule, that is from the 630s to the 730s. Basing his conclusions on a detailed assessment of material culture (mainly ceramics and coinage) yielded by urban and rural excavations across the whole region, Walmsley has demonstrated that the Islamic conquest of Syria and Palestine in 630 brought about only a minimal degree of socioeconomic disruption in both towns and countryside because cultural traditions reacted but gradually to the new political status quo.34
The concept of smooth transition proposed by Walmsley clearly owes much to the important comparison of regional and subregional exchange networks. Walmsley’s argument also grasps the resilience, functionality, and scope of regional trade networks, which mirror the development in social and political structures both at the elite and sub-elite level.35 Indeed, as John Haldon has recently stressed, from the early seventh century the whole Byzantine Empire was affected by the extreme militarization of the provincial fiscal system, while commercial networks and urban and economic life changed radically until, in the mid-eighth century, the situation balanced itself politically and economically. This change mirrors the material evidence of more local and regional productive and distributive networks and a highly regionalized hierarchy of settlement.36
With this in mind, and rather than considering Cyprus in its splendid isolation as most scholars have so far proposed, one should look at the island from a comparative perspective – a point of view that allows us to test and perhaps move beyond the conclusion that a localization of production combined with the ruinous Arab raids was tantamount to a regression of the Cypriot economy in the late seventh and eighth century. Additionally, we should be able to reverse this approach for the archaeological evidence, which seems to point to a less violent and disruptive phase in the island’s history than is presented in the traditional historiographic paradigm. To execute this examination, I have chosen to concentrate on three crucial themes. First, the chronological structure will move away from the conventional tripartite framework and focus on the period between 600 and 800. As a result, we will not walk the well-trodden paths of fourth- and fifth-century Cyprus, with its splendid early Christian basilicas and its high artistic achievements, like the famous mosaics of Salamis-Constantia and Paphos.37
Instead, our journey will start in the period of political calm and economic prosperity that followed the reign of Justinian I and move to the strategic role Cyprus played in events such as the Heraclian revolt (608–10) and the Persian War, as reflected in the literary and numismatic sources. However, as Peter Brown points out, we must remain aware that periods are subjective, as many of the basic dates scholars choose support a conventional narrative of the period.38 This is what has happened with the historiography of Cyprus, in which proposed dates favour a deceptive teleology. One should reject the perceived gaps brought about by the Arab invasions of 649 and 654, the treaty of 686–88, and the transplantation and return of the population from Nea Justinianoupolis in 691, which have often been used to build a picture of impoverishment, decline, and depopulation that supposedly lasted from 700 to 965. In fact, in the seventh and eighth century most of the Cypriot urban centres remained important foci of local demand, even though the former landscape of public architecture fell into ruins, because Cypriot elites continued to reside in the cities. Effective city-level economic infrastructures connected towns to their rural hinterland, and the wealth of the countryside supported the functional coherence of the urban fabric. My focus will then move to the so-called long eighth century (and briefly to the ninth and early tenth centuries) as a real turning point in the pattern of production, consumption, and distribution of resources and administration.39
In this way the situation in Cyprus will be linked once again to economic developments in the nearby regions of the eastern Mediterranean: Syria and Palestine. Indeed, in Syria-Palestine, as in Cyprus, scholarship has been challenged by an unresolved and puzzling dichotomy between the many types and frequencies of transitional coins known through the antiquities market and (in lower numbers) recovered through archaeological work. In Syria-Palestine, as in Cyprus, we have suffered from the practical limitations of poorly excavated and published material, which until recently impaired the creation of seventhand eighth-century ceramic typology and chronology.40 It is important to note that in Cyprus the full effect of a revised chronology of local ceramic production, although still in its infancy, has demonstrated that what was once thought to be an empty landscape after the seventh century was in fact part of long-reaching commercial exchange networks, although scale and frequency of such connections is difficult to quantify.41 In this light, the perceived “barrier” between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Cyprus (as defined by the gap between two prosperous trade cycles: the Roman one and the second one dated to the central Middle Ages) becomes just another effect of the traditional tripartite division of the island’s history.
In other words, it is almost entirely a construct of modern historians. Instead I propose a model of eastern Mediterranean regional, subregional, and interregional connectivity. The picture of Cyprus from the mid-seventh to the beginning of the ninth century will be drawn as a story of continuities and slow transformations: the stability of the economy which mirrored the coherent institutional and fiscal state order, and the vitality of commercial exchange, as linked with the Levant, Egypt, and southern Asia Minor as well as Constantinople and the Aegean. This in turn is reflected by the persistent importance of the local clergy and the archbishopric (as the island was also as a reference point along the pilgrimage routes of the eastern Mediterranean) and the endurance of the local elites (military and civic), who experienced the political pull of the Constantinopolitan court that affirmed and enhanced their social status and cultural self-identity. As a consequence, the long-standing questions about the treaty between the Umayyads and the Byzantines or the political status of Cyprus (as no man’s land or buffer zone ante litteram) 42
will become less prominent as we grasp fully the similarities with Walmsley’s above-mentioned “smooth transition” in terms of political structures and, above all, material culture. This introduces the second theme of the book. Attentive analysis of the patterns of production, consumption, and distribution of locally made and imported ceramics and the disappearance of Byzantine coins paired with the persistence of Arab-Byzantine coinage in the late seventh century to the mid-eighth century demonstrate not so much an economic catastrophe as a transformation of imperial fiscal structures. The presence of lead seals up to the mid-eighth century (and even beyond) and the incidence of glazed white wares in some excavated sites are both evidence of a continuing Constantinopolitan link. This disproves the very idea of Cyprus as an independent province loosely tied to Constantinople and more oriented towards natural output. It also proves that the localization of production, as shown for instance in the predominance of locally made table wares and amphorae, certainly points to a “ruralisation of production and use with less good quality, less costly products made by less skilled potters in a household production”. 43
However, this does not necessarily imply that Cypriot society during this period should be regarded as ruralized, de-urbanized, or rarefied in terms of settlement density or centred mainly on small residential foci in the hinterland as result of the dislocation caused by the Arab raids.44 What this book will try to show instead is that this view has more to do with the relative invisibility of Cyprus in the Byzantine sources, the underdeveloped analysis of the Arabic sources, the lack of a proper and comparative analysis of locally made and imported pottery, and the absence of proper archaeology in the northern part of the island in the last forty years than with the geographical range and complexity of exchange and the levels of local demand. Hence I stress the importance of Michael McCormick’s judgment: Geographic and chronological trends of structures of exchange [find their] mirror in an independently preserved series of data on communication with economic components (movements of individuals, ceramics, coins): where they converge, we find market and trade.45 In seventh- and eighth-century Cyprus, this convergence resonates with the material evidence: the diffusion of Arab-Byzantine, Byzantine, and Islamic coinage, the continuity in production and importation of pottery, and the travels of pilgrims, diplomats, and merchants. This should come as no surprise if we consider that even when the capacity of the economy wanes, areas with adequate local resources may be able to retain a substantial level of continuity.46
The fertility of Cyprus (celebrated by Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century as well as the Arab geographer al-Muqaddası - in the late tenth century) and its strategic role as a hub along the shipping routes crisscrossing the eastern Mediterranean obviously played an important role in this continuity.47 Indeed, we must consider that the fragmentation and localization of production and distribution provided Cyprus (as well as other islands, like Sicily, or coastal areas, like the southwest Anatolian coastline) with a unique chance to retain a far more complex economy as a middle ground between the economically coherent exchange circuits of Syria-Palestine and Egypt, the Byzantine capital, and the Aegean microregion (what I call three interlocking
regional economies).48 As Cyprus played an important role as a hub on the less frequented and complex regional and interregional exchange routes, its economy benefitted from military expenditure (at least until the very end of the seventh century), aristocratic wealth mainly predicated upon the administrative and ecclesiastical functions, and the stability retained by the Byzantine fiscal system. In addition to regional exchange, the island also played an important role for the Arabs, as reflected in ceramic, numismatic, and epigraphic evidence. To a certain and certainly provocative extent, what mainstream historiography interpreted as cause (the Arab raids) should be interpreted as correlation, that is, a measure of relation between variables (these being the regionalization of Mediterranean economic exchange, the localization of aristocratic spending power in the Levant, the advent of a more provincially-based fiscal system in Umayyad Syria-Palestine, and the political weight of the Byzantine Empire). The combination of these explain why “throughout the late seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, Cyprus enjoyed [and benefited from] an unique position between the Muslim and the Christian worlds”. 49
This encourages us to draw a different picture of the cultural identities, political practices, and hierarchy of wealth and power in Cyprus from the late seventh to the early ninth century; in delineating this distinctive feature, to paraphrase Peter Brown, one can never be circumstantial enough.50 The conventional narratives of political and ecclesiastical history, archaeology, evidence for circulation of coins and ceramics, inscriptions (like those found on eighth-century amphorae in Paphos bearing Arabic names), and tombstones (such as those yielded again at Paphos commemorating local Arab inhabitants) must be considered to create a complete portrayal of Cyprus in the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.51 Such a thorough examination reveals that the island was more of a piece with the fragmented eastern Mediterranean system of exchange and communications as shaped by the Arab conquest of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt than the simpler economic structure of the smaller Byzantine Empire. Hence the third and final theme of the book: a brief comparison with other Mediterranean islands under Byzantine sway in the period under discussion, mainly Sicily and marginally the Balearics, Crete, and Malta. As will be seen especially in Sicily, which provides us with the best archaeological records among large Byzantine islands, we witness the persistence of wealth within the local civic, military, and ecclesiastical elites.52 A similar pattern may be seen on Cyprus, which shared common administrative, fiscal, military, social, and economic features with the other islands of the empire.
Indeed, throughout Late Antiquity and beyond the large Mediterranean islands were characterized by favourable economic conditions. The possession by the Byzantines of a long insular corridor stretching from Cyprus all the way to the Balearics assured Constantinople a political and commercial waterway and a continuous link between the western and the eastern halves of the Mediterranean.53
Having spelled out the three main themes of the book, we should look at the overall framework of the socio-political, socioeconomic, and political-cultural developments of Cyprus from 600 to 800. My intent is to offer a comparative view of economic and social changes based around the essential interconnectivity of many of the Mediterranean regions and microregions, which could achieve prosperity only when they interacted and connected with the others.54 This is not to deny that the Mediterranean may have boasted a less intense and more fragmented level of interconnection in the seventh and eighth centuries than in the fifth and sixth centuries but to stress that the localized differentiation underpinned by access to commercial routes and the fertility of the landscape could have allowed certain regions (and microregions) to retain a good level of continuity in economic and social life.55 This may show that the transformations of seventh- and eighth-century Cypriot economic structures, institutional orders, and social identities were less pronounced than has been previously thought.
However, these transformations can be fully grasped only if one first explores the complexity of the manifold theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches scholars have adopted to analyse the social, cultural, and economic conditions in Cyprus during the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. With this in mind, Chapter 2 tries to propose a historiographical framing and a backdrop against which a different history of the island can be viewed. This is achieved through the reconciliation of two opposing views: a long string of growth amid continuous Mediterranean connectivity (as enhanced by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, and also partially by McCormick) and levels of demand underpinned by aristocratic spending powers (as inferred by Wickham and Haldon).56 As already mentioned, one possible solution is to regard Cyprus as lying at the heart of a series of interlocking economies, which would in turn reflect and impinge upon the Cypriot levels of consumption and the intensity of local production and regional exchange. Indeed, this approach is anchored in a detailed critical and methodological analysis of the sources.
As will be shown in Chapter 3, this applies not only to literary sources written in Syriac, Arabic, and Greek (as Leslie Brubaker, John Haldon, David Robinson, Antoine Borrout, and James Howard-Johnston have pointed out) but also to the material culture regarded as essential to understanding the emergence of new cultural traditions and socioeconomic conditions.57 However, one should be aware that the latter concept can be fully grasped only within a detailed évenémentiel framework, which considers the major political events that occurred on the island in the period under scrutiny. These ought also to include the important role played by the ecclesiastical institutions (in primis the autocephalic archbishopric) in the history of the island.58 Thus Chapter 4 focuses on a more traditional narrative of the history of Cyprus, considering the development of the administrative and governmental structures of the Byzantine Empire and the local Church. Soon, however, the reader will move to a model and issues more archaeologically based, which sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Chapter 5 examines the rural settlement pattern and urban sites (not least those located in the northern part of the island). Here, comparison with Syria and Palestine serves as a measure to re-evaluate the results of different rural surveys conducted on the island and to appraise the change of urban centres in Byzantine-controlled Cyprus. Chapter 6 deals with the economy of the island in terms both of state oriented (fiscal) economic activities and commercial networks (intra- and extraregional). Here the importance of the two main cogs of the economic engine (the local elites and administrative-bureaucratic structure) will be examined, while contextualizing the economic and social resilience of Cyprus within the Byzantine insular system characterized as the above-mentioned third typology between the Anatolian plateau and the Aegean.59 In this regard, Chapter 7 shows how these peculiar trajectories developed in the ninth and tenth centuries. This is what I called the “aftermath”, which seems to demonstrate that the other extreme of the so-called Cypriot Dark Ages – the Byzantine return to the island – is more a perceived than a real caesura, evidenced by the continuous rhythm of local economy and the lack of changes in material culture.60 Finally, I should also stress that the term continuity will not be used to neutralize or discount the notion of change and transformation, but rather to counterbalance methodologically the dramatic catastrophism that has often gripped the history of Cyprus in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The radical downsizing and reorganization of the Empire stemming from the loss of the eastern Mediterranean provinces from 610 to 642, the breaking of the Egyptian tax spine, and the advent of a new ArabMuslim political power did not structurally undermine and determine the depopulation and de-urbanization of an entire island.61 Indeed, as Wickham states: Where population continuities can be assumed so will continuities of daily life practices (and material culture)…. These in themselves do not disprove the existence of crisis in other elements of a social system and political structures. One has to put them together and assess them as a whole, if one wants to get the sense of how social change as a whole has taken place.62
Once this concept is grasped, it be less surprising to see how Cyprus seems only partially to fit into the interpretative picture of marked regional decline in supraregional Mediterranean trade and exchange from the mid-seventh century (with a nadir in the mid-eighth) and slow recovery starting in the 850s. Although the island maintained strategic relevance for the Constantinopolitan administration (and most probably for the Umayyad polity), it also lay at the intersection of three regional economies that acted as stepping stones for cross-frontier and long-distance cultural and economic exchange as an island in transition at the periphery of two empires
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