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588 Pages
Acknowledgements
The chapters in this volume are taken from the sources listed below, for which the editor and publishers wish to thanks their authors, original publishers or copyright holders for permission to use their materials as follows:
Chapter 1: André Grabar, ‘God and the “Family of Princes” Presided Over by the Byzantine Emperor’, Harvard Slavic Studies, 2 (1954), pp. 117-23.
Chapter 2: Paul J. Alexander, ‘The Strength of Empire and Capital as Seen Through Byzantine Eyes’, Speculum, 37 (1962), 339-57 repr. in Alexander’s Religious and Political History and Thought in the Byzantine Empire, (London, 1978), no. 3.
Chapter 3: Paul Magdalino, ‘The History of the Future and its Uses: Prophecy, Policy and Propaganda’, R. Beaton and C. Roueché (eds) The Making of Byzantine History. Studies dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, (London, 1993), pp. 3-34 [with postscript].
Chapter 4: Jonathan Shepard, ‘Emperors and Expansionism: from Rome to Middle Byzantium’, D. Abulafia and N. Berend (eds), Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 55-82.
Chapter 5: Paul Magdalino, ‘Isaac I, Saladin and Venice’, M. Kaplan (ed.), Byzance et ses confins, (Paris, forthcoming) [translated by the author as of January 31, 2003].
Chapter 6: David Jacoby, ‘Byzantine Trade with Egypt from the mid-Tenth Century to the Fourth Crusade’, Thesaurismata, 30 (2000), pp. 25-77.
Chapter 7: Thomas S. Noonan and Roman K. Kovalev, ‘Prayer, Illumination and Good Times: The Export of Byzantine Wine and Oil to the North of Russia in pre-Mongol Times’, Byzantium and the North. Acta Byzantina Fennica, 8 (1995-6), pp. 73-96.
Chapter 8: Thomas S. Noonan and Roman K. Kovalev, ‘Wine and Oil for All the Rus’! The Importation of Byzantine Wine and Olive Oil to Kievan Rus”’, Byzantium and the North. Acta Byzantina Fennica, 9 (1997-98), pp. 118-52.
Chapter 9: David B. Miller, ‘The Many Frontiers of pre-Mongol Rus”’, Russian History, 19 (1992), pp. 231-60.
Chapter 10: Sergey A. Ivanov, ‘Mission Impossible: Ups and downs in Byzantine Missionary Activity from the Eleventh to the Firfteenth Century’ [A fresh look at Byzantine missions, a specially commissioned article; drafted in English, deliberately focusing on post-1000. Final touches (mainly on English idiom) carried out by J. Shepard (based upon discussions and informal agreement conducted during Paris International Byzantine Congress, August 2001). Final version agreed January 2004].
Chapter 11: Robert L. Wolff, ‘The “Second Bulgarian Empire”. Its Origin and History to 1204’, Speculum, 24 (1949), pp. 167—206, repr. in Wolff’s Studies in the Latin Empire of Constantinople, (London, 1976), no. 3.
Chapter 12: Stephen W. Reinert, ‘Fragmentation (1204—1453)’, C.Mango (ed.), The Oxford History of Byzantium, (Oxford, 2002), pp. 248-83.
Chapter 13: Ivan Biliarsky, ‘Some Observations on the Administrative Terminology of the Second Bulgarian Empire (13th—14th centuries)’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 25 (2001), pp. 69-89.
Chapter 14: George C. Soulis, ‘Tsar Stephen DuSan and Mount Athos’, Harvard Slavic Studies, 2 (1954), pp. 125-39.
Chapter 15: Sima M. Cirkovi¢, ‘Between Kingdom and Empire: DuSan’s State 1346-1355 Reconsidered’, Byzantium and Serbia in the 14th Century (National Hellenic Research Foundation Institute for Byzantine Research, International Symposium 3) (Athens, 1996), pp. 110-20.
Chapter 16: Zaga Gavrilovic, ‘Divine Wisdom as Part of Byzantine Imperial Ideology. Research into the Artistic Interpretations of the Theme in Medieval Serbia’, Zograf, 11 (1980), repr. in Gavrilovic’s Studies in Byzantine and Serbian medieval art (London, 2001), pp. 44-69.
Chapter 17: Michael Cherniavsky, ‘Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Medieval Political Theory’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 459-76, repr. in M. Cherniavsky (ed.), The Structure of Russian History (New York), pp. 65—79.
Chapter 18: Charles J. Halperin, ‘““Know Thy Enemy”: Medieval Russian Familiarity with the Mongols of the Golden Horde’, Jahrbiicher fiir Geschichte Osteuropas, n.s. 30.2 (1982), pp. 163-175.
Chapter 19: Sergei Hackel, ‘Under Pressure from the Pagans? The Mongols and the Russian Church’, in J. Breck, J. Meyendorff, E. Silk, eds, The Legacy of St. Vladimir: Byzantium, Russia, America, (Crestwood, NY, 1990), pp. 47-56
Chapter 20: John Meyendorff, ‘Cultural Ties: Byzantium, the Southern Slavs and Russia’, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 6, pp. 119-44.
Chapter 21: Dimitri Obolensky, ‘Late Byzantine Culture and the Slavs: a Study in Acculturation’, XVe Congrés International d’Etudes Byzantines, Athénes 1976. Rapports et co-rapports, (Athens, 1976), pp. 3—26, repr. in Obolensky’s The Byzantine Inheritance of Eastern Europe (London, 1982), no. 17.
Chapter 22: Richard M. Price, ‘The Holy Man and Christianization from the Apocryphal Apostles to St Stephen of Perm’, J. Howard-Johnston and P. A. Hayward (eds.), The cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Studies in Honour of Peter Brown (Oxford, 1999), pp. 215-38.
General Editors’ Preface
This series began with a suggestion that a volume dealing with medieval European expansion would make an interesting prologue to the Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450-1800 series that was already appearing. Several of the volumes in that series did include articles dealing with aspects of the medieval background, but the medieval ‘expansion of Europe’ — within and along the frontiers of Latin Christendom — lay outside the terms of reference. So did an important part of the medieval prelude to the story of the ‘expanding world’: the growth of neighboring cultures with which Latin Christendom collided.
Motives, practices, and tools characteristic of modern European expansion were creations or developments of the Middle Ages. ‘The internal colonization of Europe’ was the basis of subsequent overseas colonization. Along the edges of Latin Christendom, expanding societies encountered Celts, Scandinavians, Slavs, and others who were organizing societies of their own that could block or redirect European expansion, initiate cultural exchange, and exercise varying degrees of influence on the way Europeans thought about themselves and the world. As medieval Christian society expanded further, Europeans encountered other societies with which they competed or cooperated.
The introductory volume for the entire series will deal with the expansion of European society during the Middle Ages in terms of the frontier experience, setting the stage for the entire series. Gradually or fitfully, with occasional reversals, between the late ninth and midfourteenth centuries, the culture of Latin Christendom spread outwards in all directions from the heartlands of western Europe. In spite of the contraction of Latin Christendom after the Black Death, the check to the outward growth of the frontier, and the continuing expansion of Islam, the basic motives for expansion remained, as did knowledge of institutional structures employed in developing overseas trade and colonization.
Other volumes will deal with the expansion of Europe in geographical terms. The first will examine the internal colonization of Europe that began around 1000 as the population began to increase, previously unfarmed areas were transformed into arable land, and new towns created. This period of growth provided impetus for acquiring new lands to settle and for developing the techniques of colonization, techniques that were to have a long history. Remaining volumes will deal with European expansion along specific frontiers. While European expansion possessed some general qualities, each frontier had its own particular characteristics.
The first external frontier to be considered is with the Muslim world. One volume devoted to the Muslim frontier deals with the crusades and related efforts to block or reverse Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean. The crusades were also early examples of colonization as the crusaders established permanent settlements and a kind of European feudal government in the reconquered territories occupied by an urban population of Christians, heretical and schismatic, Jews, and Muslims.
The second volume dealing with Christian expansion along the frontier with the Muslim world will examine the reconquista in the westward-facing parts of Spain and Portugal, aprocess that not only led to the creation of the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms, but also to Christian occupation of parts of the African coast, exploration of the Atlantic, and the discovery of several island chains. These efforts in turn led to Columbus’s voyages and to Portuguese explorations that eventually linked the Atlantic to the trade routes of the Indian Ocean.
Along other frontiers, European Christians expanded into lands occupied by a variety of societies, often employing religious motives to justify their actions as they had done in the crusades to regain the Holy Land. For example, expansion along the Celtic frontier brought Anglo-Norman conquerors of England into contact with Scots, Welsh, and Irish, all Christians yet, by continental standards, ‘uncivilized’. Expansion here meant not only conquest but also, as in the case of Ireland, a responsibility for reforming the Church as well. There was also the task of transforming the pastoral societies of the Celtic fringe into agricultural societies that the intruders assumed to be the basis for fully civilized society. On the northern, southern, and eastern shores of the Baltic where unevangelized Slavs and Baltic peoples dwelled, and — further south — along the Danube and inland from the Dalmatian coast, Christian Scandinavians, Germans, Slavs and Magyars faced a variety of intractable infidels who deployed modest levels of material culture in terrain classifiable, according to the values of the time, as savage.
English and Spanish medieval experience of dealing with the peoples encountered along the frontier shaped initial responses to peoples encountered in the Americas. When they came to the New World they came with perceptions about people who lived on the frontier and with institutions for dealing with them. Europeans saw, or thought they saw, in the Americas societies like those that they had encountered in the course of their medieval expansion so they attempted apply lessons learned from that expansion to the Americas. Within two generations, however, colonizers began to recognize that the Americas were different and that the lessons learned in the course of medieval expansion were not necessarily directly applicable to the New World.
The second set of volumes deals with two inter-related issues; first, the role of religion in shaping the medieval response to the world beyond Europe and the perceptions of nonEuropeans that circulated throughout Europe. The Christian responsibility for preaching to all mankind encouraged missionaries to move beyond the geographical frontiers of Christendom to preach to infidels who lived along those frontiers. Early modern overseas expansion, Catholic and Protestant, renewed this notion of mission on a large scale. A further volume in this category deals with European knowledge of the world beyond Europe. Much of this knowledge came from missionaries, especially Franciscan friars, and from merchants such as Marco Polo who had visited China, India, and the Islamic world. Missionaries and merchants subsequently wrote down their observations about these worlds, providing their fellow Europeans with the earliest first-hand information about the eastern world, information that shaped the fifteenth-century search for a new route to Asia.
The third group of volumes focuses on the other expanding societies that Latin Christians encountered in the course of expansion. These volumes demonstrate how expansion led to interaction with other societies, some expanding, others contracting. The Byzantine Empire ruled a Christian society that became increasingly estranged from the Latin West over theological and cultural issues between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. To some extent, the Byzantines found themselves caught between two expanding societies, the Latin Christians of Europe and the Muslims who had emerged from Arabia in the seventh century, eventually conquering a great deal of territory that the Byzantines once ruled. The crusades that Europeans launched at the end of the eleventh century aimed at assisting in the defense of the Byzantine Empire and at freeing the Holy Land from Muslim hands. As things turned out, however, the crusaders were not interested in restoring the lands to Byzantine control. They sought instead to carve out kingdoms for themselves at the expense of both the Muslims and the Byzantines.
Muslim expansion was not only at the expense of the Byzantines, however. From the mid-seventh century to the late seventeenth, Muslim expansion also had a serious impact on Western European development. Christian armies encountered Muslim societies in Iberia where a several-centuries long series of wars led to the creation of numerous small states. At the other end of Europe, Muslim expansion through the Balkans from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century blocked European expansion eastward and pushed the boundaries of Latin Christendom back as traditionally Christian kingdoms such as Hungary fell to Turkish armies. European expansion into the African Atlantic began in the fifteenth century partly in order to find a route to Asia that would outflank the Muslim-dominated eastern Mediterranean.
Another society whose expansion impinged on Europe was the Mongol Empire that Genghis Khan (1162—1227) created. On the one hand, the Mongols wrought a great deal of havoc on the eastern frontiers of Christian Europe as well as on the Muslims in the Near East. On the other hand, Mongol control of the routes between Europe and Asia made it possible for European merchants and missionaries to travel back and forth, thus providing Europeans with more accurate knowledge about the East than they had ever possessed before.
The collapse of the Mongol Empire in the fourteenth century made possible the creation of new states out of the Mongol domain. From the perspective of Western Europe the most important of these successor states was Moscow whose rulers embarked upon a policy of expansion that eventually led to the creation of a Russian Empire. This empire not only succeeded to the Mongol hegemony in Central Asia, it also took over the Byzantine Emperor’s role as leader and defender of Orthodox Christianity, identifying Moscow as the Third Rome and heir to the Byzantine tradition. Subsequent expansion brought the Russians into conflict with peoples of the Latin West, Islam, and China. Russian expansion eventually extended through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to the North American mainland.
The expansion of Europe between 1000 and 1492 provided the foundation upon which modern expansion built. This first stage of European expansion was a part of a larger process, global age of expansion. This series traces the origins of a vital aspect of modernity back into the Middle Ages and sets an early chapter of the rise of Europe in the context of the history of the world.
James Muldoon and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
General Editors
Introduction
Tides of Byzantium: The Many Forms of Expansion and
Contraction
One may well ask what a volume entitled ‘The Expansion of the Orthodox World’ is doing in a series like ‘The Expansion of Latin Europe’. Hopefully, the contents of this introduction will provide something of an answer. But, to tackle the question head-on, four points may highlight the mutual relevance of goings-on in eastern and western Christendom in the central and later middle ages. Firstly, the upswing in population, revitalisation of town-life and intensification of commercial exchanges discernible in Italy from the tenth century onwards owed something to the rerouting of the oriental ‘spice trade’ from overland routes to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and to burgeoning economic activity in Egypt in the tenth century. Byzantine shippers and traders were on the scene from the time Eastern Mediterranean commerce quickened, and it is against this background of Byzantine activities that Amalfitan and Venetian traders’ arrival in Egyptian markets should be viewed. Byzantium’s economic expansion underpinned its rulers’ willingness to embark on military offensives and contemplate greater territorial expansion than they had done for centuries. Economic growth was also bound up with the Byzantines’ mission work, most spectacularly in the land of Rus. The upshot was that in the mid-eleventh century the Byzantine world overlapped closely with Latin Christendom, and sometimes overshadowed it: this may partly account for the reform papacy’s alacrity in responding to emperors’ calls for assistance, once military disasters struck Byzantium in the second half of the century.' A hundred or so years later, the empire could still strike back in Latin-dominated areas in a variety of ways, as this introduction will illustrate (see below, pp. XXXVil, xl).
This brings us to a second point about the mutual relevance of Byzantine and Latin Christendom: Byzantium matters because it was different, as well as because it had significant similarities and directly impinged on the west. To define those differences is as difficult as it is to define ‘the Byzantine empire’ or, indeed, ‘Byzantine orthodoxy’. On the organisational plane, Byzantium’s characteristics mark it out from all sizable Latin polities before the twelfth century: Middle Byzantium functioned as a sovereign entity, with the institutions as well as the accoutrements of a unitary state — a stable coinage, a state-wide tax-collection, lawcourts operating by versions of Roman law, a standing army and, so far as force majeure was concerned a virtual state monopoly. These qualities were not lost on visiting westerners, and Byzantine court ceremonial presented tableaux and celebrations of the ‘sacred empire’ such as no western emperor or kinglet could hope to lay on so lavishly or persistently in one central city. Yet to picture an eastern Christian monolith, locked in a time-warp, in contrast with multiple and shifting Latin lordships and realms, would be misleading, since much about Byzantium was mutable or involved tacit divergences of interpretation. Different shades of opinion, scales of values and everyday devotional practice coexisted within the imperial envelope, even if certain fundamentals of doctrine laid down by the early church councils were non-negotiable. Questions over the interrelationship between imperial and church authority were never fully resolved, and although the emperor could generally see off a patriarch who proved turbulent or utterly recalcitrant, important elements in the eastern church were, in effect, ‘semi-detached’, regarding issues to do with the soul as transcending all earthly concerns, and categorising the fate of the empire among the latter. Monks were less amenable to disciplining than prelates and could be outspoken, while the monastic life was highly esteemed by well-to-do laypersons. This was not without political implications for an emperor who provoked hardline monks by showing excessive sympathy for Latin ways or by deferring to the papacy on a point of doctrine.” There was more to Byzantium than met the eye at the scenes of pomp and circumstance at the imperial court, fault-lines no less deep-seated for being seldom declared overtly or articulated systematically. The ceremonies’ emphasis on God-willed autocracy could mislead outsiders with their own agendas as well as the modern observer: the papacy seems to have been particularly willing to suppose that a compliant emperor could swing all his subjects with him, and accept active papal primacy. It is no exaggeration to say that this misreading of Byzantium on the part of ambitious senior churchmen who saw what they wanted to see gave impetus to Latin expansionism. One might add that emperors, anxious for papal sponsorship of military aid and for its other good offices, did little to disillusion them as to the constraints on their own role within orthodoxy and, from the later eleventh century on, they were laying emphasis on what Christians in east and west had in common.
Byzantium’s confrontation with the Christian west can, in fact, be quite revealing for students of Latin expansionism. Several chapters in this volume demonstrate the multitude of paths down which westerners advanced into what was, until the eleventh century, a more or less Byzantine-dominated sphere. Not that they formed a common front, and some of the more spectacular consequences of their moves were unintended. Those sometimes seen as ring-leaders of conquest take on a rather different hue when viewed from an eastern perspective. Prime candidates for reappraisal are the Venetians. Their commercial interests could align them with the imperial government of the day — to the point of willingness to contemplate Byzantine dominion over the Palestinian coast. It may have been the overthrow of one outstandingly sympathetic regime and the coolness of its successor that made the Venetian leadership look to alternative options at the beginning of the thirteenth century. What also emerges is the enormity of westerners’ potential for help or harm. Enlisting a few companies of western knights within his ranks could boost an emperor’s striking-power far beyond what numbers alone might lead one to expect. Western warriors were not without their shortcomings, and Byzantine aspersions about their stamina in battle may stem from experience.* Nonetheless, in the event of divisions within the Byzantine ruling family, a small force of western warriors could deal the deathblow, as the events of 1203-04 showed: the crusading knights who stayed on until the final assault on Constantinople may have been numbered in hundreds.* And the very passage of crusaders through the Balkans en masse could further destabilise a Byzantine overlordship already under challenge, as the Serbian and Bulgarian potentates’ attempts to exploit the approach of the armies of the Third and Fourth Crusades show.° The crystallisation of the Bulgarian and the Serbian realms is in some respects an unintended consequence of the crusades.
A final point is the far-reaching repercussions of the Latins’ feats of conquest and domination of Constantinople on the Byzantine church as an organisation, and on spiritual life in the orthodox world in general. There are many reasons why revised versions of the earthly Byzantine empire proliferated after the city’s fall, as also why so many outstanding figures emerged among the church leadership and rallied their flocks by tongue and pen. But one pressing concern was the almost ubiquitous spectacle of western power and prosperity, which gave material backing to the proselytising efforts of Latin Christians at large among orthodox populations. It was not only rigorist monks on Mount Athos and other bastions of orthodoxy who feared that higher educational or spiritual training of new generations of monks and priests would wither away, leaving ordinary layfolk prey to energetic and adaptable western holy men. The Franciscans, whose preaching of poverty and simplicity struck a chord with orthodox sensibilities, were quick to establish a presence in Constantinople: in fact, the earliest surviving major fresco cycle of St Francis’ life comes from a church in Constantinople.’ One response to this challenge was for Byzantine imperial and ecclesiastical leaders to proclaim the worldwide reach of their own home church, while also pointing out its unbroken tradition from the era of Constantine the Great and the early church councils. The imperial court at Nicaea became a hotbed of scholarship and fostered new libraries as well as pride in the Hellenic past.’ Another, rather less intellectual, response involved communal ritual and worship (including spectacular celebrations of saints’ feast days), while monks sought new means of direct communication with God Himself through prayer. These initiatives arose from essentially local difficulties in the Greek-speaking communities of the former empire. But acute rivalry with the Latins and a desire to halt their progress also gave a fillip to Byzantine monks’ and churchmen’s interest in protecting and regulating the spiritual life of orthodox brethren and congregations further afield, whether in the Balkans, around the Black Sea or across the vast land of Rus (see below, pp. xlvii—xlviii).
Byzantium’s impact on the religious and political culture of Slavic-speaking peoples in eastern Europe and Rus was most pronounced in the centuries following the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusaders in 1204. The City became the base of a ‘rightly-believing emperor’ (basileus orthodoxos) again in 1261, and for the next eighty years or so its rulers cut quite a forceful figure among the eastern Christian populations of the Balkans, the Greek-speaking Aegean, and also in the region of the Black Sea. The masterpieces of Byzantine art and architecture of this era owed much to the purchasing-power and patronage of the imperial elite in Constantinople. Thus between 1316 and 1321 the monastery church of the Chora was enlarged and embellished with frescoes and mosaics that can still awe the onlooker, all carried out at the expense of the ‘prime minister’, Theodore Metochites.’ Nonetheless the prevailing trend in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the diffusion of patronage and also of intellectual, artistic and spiritual endeavour across the Greek-speaking regions, from the southern Crimea to Mistra in the Peloponnese. The ancient imperial centre lost its hold, and this loosening of Byzantine governance made it easier for Slavic-speaking potentates, and wealthy population-centres, to attract Greek-born or -trained monks, churchmen, scholars and craftsmen.
South Slav rulers in the Balkans, and subsequently the Wallachian and Moldavian princes of what is now Romania, hoped to bolster their regimes through feats of technical excellence beyond the reach of their ordinary subjects. Byzantine know-how could assist with this. For example, the Serbian king, Stefan Uro& Milutin (1281-1321) probably employed craftsmen from Thessaloniki — perhaps also from Epiros — to build a monumental church at Graéanica that may have been intended to house his mausoleum.'° Far to the north in the land of Rus, Byzantine churchmen had been assigned to senior bishoprics since the tenth century, and painters and other craftsmen found employment there (see below, p. xl). But by the later fourteenth century individual artists of outstanding quality were heading for Rus, notably Theophanes ‘the Greek’, whose frescoes beautified churches in Novgorod, and also the churches and palace of Prince Vasilii I of Moscow (1389-1425).'' Theophanes’ work in Rus was a source of inspiration to Andrei Rublev, whose works show understanding of theology as well as an eye for colour and harmonious form.'* From the late fourteenth century on, Greek-born medical doctors, goldsmiths and other jewellery workers also turned to western Europe for patrons, or simply for patients or markets, some of them doing business in Paris and London."
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The chapters in our collection do not follow up all these avenues of Byzantines’ activity beyond the Greek-speaking world, although Part II — devoted to the period after 1204 — offers panoramic views of the Slavic-speaking world in the later middle ages (Chapters 20 and 21), together with a reconstruction of the late Byzantine jigsaw (Chapter 12). The rulers, regimes and societies adopting elements of Byzantine religious and political culture are mostly presented here in detailed studies. The focus is on church life, religious rites and writings, and on the interrelationship in most rulers’ eyes between keeping ritual correct, doctrine pure, and staying in power — or legitimising power newly gained. The subject-matter comprises mainly the political and ecclesiastical elites, not religious devotions at grass-roots. It is no accident that the efforts of ‘upwardly mobile’ potentates are illustrated by surviving source-materials. Byzantium’s arsenal of conspicuous godliness, political imagery and rites of rulership was precisely what attracted them.
The rhythms of Balkan rulers’ emulation, adaptation and aggressiveness towards the ancient empire emerge most starkly from the reign of Stefan Uro& IV DuSan, king (kra/) and later emperor (tsar) of the Serbs (1331-1355). DuSan was at once erudite, militarily formidable and pious. He also showed interest in administration, adapting Byzantine legal principles to his own heterogeneous dominions while enhancing his legitimacy through consummate political imagery. These qualities are the subject of two chapters in Part II, while a third demonstrates DuSan’s zeal to rally the monks of Athos, ‘the Holy Mountain’, to his cause.'* DuSan was laying down markers for a kind of ‘universal’ empire, underpinned by religious correctness — orthodoxy (see below p. xxxv) — and he likened his conquests to those of Constantine the Great.'° This invocation of the first Christian emperor who had (like Du8an) started out from the west reflects high ambition. Yet most rulers of eastern orthodox populations held back from following up the logic of their claims to universal dominion and trying to seize Constantinople by force. In practice these rulers, intent on creating new polities for themselves under divine protection, preferred co-existence and honorary association with the original ‘world-empire’ of the Romans. To attempt an assault on ‘the God-protected’ city and its formidable Roman-built fortifications would only highlight the differences between oneself and the first Constantine. Thus even Stefan DuSan, conqueror of extensive Byzantine territories, seemingly baulked at a direct attack on the capital.
The ambivalence and intimacy of Stefan DuSan’s relationship with the ancient empire of ‘the Romans’ owe something to the unusually volatile conditions of the mid-fourteenth century, when rival Byzantine-born claimants with plausible credentials were vying for the throne.'® But deference, emulation and appropriation in varying degrees characterise the relationship of all those at the head of societies forming on or beyond the periphery of Byzantium and drawing their religious and political cultures from it. The cross-currents between the Byzantine imperial-ecclesiastical establishment and Serbian, Bulgarian, Rus and Wallachian and Moldavian leaders are touched on in Chapter 21, and they are followed up in depth in Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth.'’ Paradoxes were inherent in the approach of potentates seeking goods, shows of respect and access to supernatural forces from the God-blessed centre: they were, essentially, devising nuclei of authority — ‘universes’ — on terms of their own; yet they needed to defer to Constantinople’s custodians in order to gain and maintain key building-blocks, correct texts and forms of Christian faith and worship. Such ‘acquisitional’ societies were aiming for the highest celestial backing, but association with a ‘superordinate centre’ was indispensable for this purpose. The dynamics of these interrelationships have been formulated by anthropologists, and attempts made to apply these formulations specifically to polities abutting on Byzantium and adopting its religious rites and doctrine."*
(IL) Part I: The Buoyancy of Byzantium before 1204
The juncture at which a potentate turned to Byzantium for baptism and organisation of his people within its church usually set the course for that people’s future. One might therefore have devoted Part I to the initial conversions of the Bulgars, the Serbs and the Rus. Relevant as these episodes are, they are well-treated in general surveys, notably in Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth, and more specialised works are readily accessible.'!? Recent findings also illustrate the geographical range of Byzantine missionary activities. For example, from the mid-tenth century onwards the realm of the Alans housed a Byzantine metropolitan. A complex of churches and monasteries was built at Nizhnyi Arkhyz in the northern Caucasus, with elaborate frescoes decorating these and other churches’ walls. Nizhnyi Arkhyz was probably the metropolitan’s residence.”
Instead of pursuing these enterprises further, the chapters in Part I deal with other aspects of the Byzantine phenomenon, less obviously connected with the impact of Byzantium’s culture on other societies and elites, and yet highly relevant. Their bias is towards the period before 1204, and they show up the varied, fluctuating, patterns of the Byzantines’ expectations of the future. They also illustrate the dynamism of Byzantine economic enterprises beyond the imperial borders, even after those borders contracted sharply in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries. Taken together, they demonstrate Byzantium’s capacity for metamorphoses. And they suggest how difficult it was for outsiders, whether visitors to Constantinople or potentates watching after their own thrones, to take the measure of Byzantium: the imperial order could draw on hidden reserves even when things looked bleak. These qualities, together with an ideology of divinely-guided hegemony and the buoyancy of its economy, help explain the aura still investing the ancient seat on the Bosporus in the eyes of occupants of other thrones in the later middle ages. For adherents to the eastern orthodox rite, at least, the basileus’ court was a kind of gold standard of legitimate rule. The ceremonies and liturgies performed there acted as a metronome attuned to the workings of the universe, pre-set by the creator of all things. They gave visible expression to imperial Byzantine ideology. Thus the notion of the emperor’s special relationship with Christ was reiterated in court acclamations and formalised in such rituals as leaving the senior (right-hand) seat on the imperial throne vacant on Sundays and feast-days: Christ himself was supposed to preside over proceedings on His days, and the basileus duly took the lesser seat on the throne, as Christ’s junior partner.’!
No chapter in Part I is specifically devoted to the Byzantine court or the ceremonies performed there: two important texts, the mid-tenth century Book of Ceremonies and a master of ceremonies’ guidelines for receptions and state banquets, are available to those with a reading-knowledge of French.” Several chapters in Part I are, however, devoted to the worldpicture encapsulated in the court and the city of Constantinople, to the Byzantines’ own ideas of their place in the grand scheme of things.
The emperor’s role as the representative or understudy of Christ, or God, coloured his dealings with other earthly rulers, and the quasi-familial relationship he maintained with them. He could the more plausibly lay claim to the high moral ground, standing at the head of an association of partners who were, if Christian, addressed as ‘son’ and even, if they or their predecessors had received baptism from Byzantine priests, ‘spiritual son’. Really substantial Christian potentates, such as the western emperor, were ‘brothers’, while non-Christians could still be ‘friends’. And God was all these things to the emperor, a kind of universal counterpart to the emperor’s associates on earth. Such, at least, was the conception of a late eleventhcentury intellectual, Theophylact of Ohrid. Chapter 1 draws attention to Theophylact’s text, and also to a certain asymmetry between the heavenly and the earthly kingdom: no other potentates on earth have a personal relationship with God, who ‘has only a single partner, the emperor of Byzantium’.
Nonetheless, the vocabulary of intimate relationships with Christian pastoral overtones was of utility in the constant parleying with other power-nodes which Byzantium’s geopolitical circumstances dictated. Ceaseless assuaging, negotiating or deterring at many levels — with up-and-coming individuals or families as well as acknowledged leaders — was the means by which units of military manpower could be enlisted, a formal alliance for jointoperations negotiated, or an attack bought off. A common ploy was to invite rulers, their sons, or other members of elites from regions of strategic concern to come and be feted at Constantinople as the emperor’s guests, ‘the diplomacy of hospitality’.** The assumption was that the visitors’ outlook would be transformed, to the empire’s advantage, the City itself offering a glimpse of a different world, complete with its own benign climate.”
The City was at once a sacral centre and a showcase for the material benefits flowing from imperially-policed religious order. We do not rely on Byzantine writers for these conceptions: Muslim observers held up Constantinople as a paragon of civilisation and governance,”* while the church of St Sophia, constructed by Justinian as a miniaturised version of the cosmos, was still making an impression on visitors hundreds of years later. Prince Vladimir of Rus’ emissaries reported back to him c. 988 their experience of a service in the Great Church (as St Sophia was called): ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth ... We only know that God dwells there among men’. It was this form of Christianity, as practised by ‘the Greeks’, that Vladimir eventually chose for himself and his people.
(IV)
In effect, the city of Constantinople was the empire in quintessential form, containing all that was needed for imperial hegemony to reassert itself after periodic setbacks and divinely-sent punishment for sins. The unique place of Constantinople in the thinking of the Byzantines and of other people receives attention in Chapter 2. Paul Alexander shows its centrality to suppositions about the future of mankind. The emperor had been assigned a mission from God and accordingly his divinely-protected seat on the Bosporus was a symbol of all that was good and pure. Hence, the labours of Basil I (867—86) to repair its buildings and carry out restoration-works are detailed in the biography commissioned by his grandson Constantine VII (945-59): they symbolise his reforms, rejuvenating the administration and eliminating corruption. ‘Renewal’ of the City represented moral regeneration of the empire as a whole.”’ The fall of the City would only be allowed by God when it fulfilled His grand design. Thus a late seventh-century Syriac text composed in the aftermath of the victories of the Arabs (‘Ishmaelites’) and of their conquest of Egypt and the Levant prophesied that ‘the Ishmaelites’ would carry all before them until the emperor arose ‘like a man from sleep after drinking much wine’ and put them to flight; his subsequent journey to Jerusalem would lead to confrontation with the Anti-Christ and, eventually, the end of the world.** This text, written in the name of the fourth-century bishop of Patara, Methodius, was soon translated into Greek. Alexander noted its relevance to Byzantine notions of their capital’s pivotal role in human history.” This encouraged in the Byzantines a sense of being God’s new chosen people and a certain selfimportance: ‘aprés nous, le déluge’.
The nature and far-reaching implications of such writings as Pseudo-Methodius’ are drawn out in Chapter 3. Paul Magdalino reviews the evidence of Byzantines’ persistent attempts at reckoning when the world would end. They drew on visions and prophecies in the scriptures and also consulted a medley of apocryphal texts, all on the assumption that triumph as well as trials lay ahead for God’s people. Byzantine forecasters — at least those whose texts survive — are mostly rather circumspect, and it is those discouraging speculation that the End is nigh who tend to be most forthright. A certain reluctance to commit to a particular date is understandable, given that milestones like the end of the sixth millennium since God’s creation of the world passed without incident. There was, in any case, no unanimity as to the exact status of the current empire of the Romans: was it the fourth kingdom of the Book of Daniel [4.23-4] fated to go the way of its predecessors before Christ returned in glory, or did it in fact embody Christ’s kingdom without end, merely awaiting the return of the Lord? As Magdalino observes, Byzantine expectations ranged across a broad spectrum, from the imperial-triumphalist to the dour prognostications of churchmen and monks that downfall must follow from the empire’s internal corruption and Christians’ sins. The colour-tones varied with the circumstances of the observer, but all assumed a vital interrelationship between empire, City and Christ. In the postscript written for our reprint,*° Magdalino notes further indications of the seriousness with which Byzantines viewed the onset of the year 1000, the millennium from Christ’s nativity. The thousand-year-kingdom of the saints envisioned in the Book of Revelation [20.1—6] was identified with the empire of the basi/eus by members of the establishment. This may not be spelt out in as many words by a surviving Byzantine text, but —as so often — the message was conveyed non-verbally through symbols and ceremonies at the emperor’s court, which served as a kind of portal for the extraordinary events that would unfold as the last days approached.*' The senior part of the throne left empty for Christ on His days has been noted above (p. xxxi).
(V)
Expectations of the End might, in theory, have made the conversion of the heathen a matter of urgency: they needed to be baptised and their souls given a chance of salvation before the time of ultimate trials. The emperor’s role in bringing ‘the gentiles’ within the Christian fold was, in fact, proclaimed in court celebrations of the feast of Pentecost and court acclamations declared him ‘equal of the apostles’. The missionary efforts of individual holy men can be viewed in this light. For example, St Stephen of Perm’s evangelising among the Finnic-speaking peoples of the Urals in the fourteenth century was spurred on by belief that the End was nigh. But as Richard Price demonstrates in Part II, holy men withdrawing to deserts and backwoods in east and west had long been wont to captivate those whom they encountered, and their zeal to combat demons and offer salvation to pagans was not fuelled solely by expectations of the End (Chapter 22). So far as the imperial establishment of Byzantium was concerned, mission work among outlying barbarians was more a matter of the emperor maintaining the role of a ‘new Constantine’, than of whole-hearted commitment to expanding the borders of Christendom. As Sergey Ivanov shows in Chapter 10, emperors and churchmen of the Byzantine metropolis were generally more interested and effective in baptising and assimilating new arrivals on imperial soil than in spreading the word beyond the borders.*” Only for the twilight years of empire is evidence more abundant of senior Byzantine churchmen engaging with far-flung enterprises. The initiative for the conversions of barbarian peoples in the ninth and tenth centuries seems to have come mainly from their leaders.
There are, then, paradoxes in the transmission of Byzantium’s blend of political culture and religious doctrine determined by early church councils — ‘orthodoxy’ — to external power-centres and societies: expansion was as much due to ‘barbarians’ seeking to better themselves as it was to the Byzantines themselves.*? The imperial-ecclesiastical complex literally went through the motions of world-rulership with its rounds of court ceremonial, an ethos of moral and cultural superiority being upheld. Yet the very position of Constantinople, chosen by Constantine the Great for its command of intersecting land- and sea-routes, left it exposed to sudden assaults, once the lucrative eastern provinces of the empire fell to the Arabs in the seventh century, and even the relatively poor territories of the Balkans and Asia Minor were only thinly shielded. That a certain siege-mentality developed among the denizens of Constantinople is unsurprising. The cross-currents of everyday apprehensions yet stubborn assumptions of an ultimately merciful providence presented in Chapters 2 and 3 are indispensable for understanding why Byzantium appealed to so wide a variety of external rulers, elites, fortune-seekers and soul-searchers. The basi/eus, God-protected monarch and ostentatious master of treasure, excited other potentates’ envy, and some sought to replicate his authority-symbols. At the same time, the Byzantine establishment’s sense of vulnerability on several fronts generated diplomatic initiatives, not only the ‘diplomacy of hospitality’, but also the frequent despatch of embassies, some on a grandiose scale. Their heads, acting on the emperor’s behalf, were equipped with elaborate baggage-trains, bearing furnishings from the basileus’ court back in Constantinople; sumptuously clothed and conducting themselves haughtily, they presented miniaturised versions of that court.*4
Even when such an embassy failed to attain its specific objective, its luxuriance, rituals and manifestations of Christian piety probably made an impact on beholders. Prominent members of the target-polity in addition to its formal leader were witnesses and benefited, directly or indirectly, from the emperor’s largesse. In other words, the very insecurity of Byzantium prompted myriad travelling road-shows beaming out the merits of the imperial order and orthodox faith to diverse peoples, some so remote that they might otherwise have been barely aware of the empire’s existence.
(VI)
A certain sense of beleaguerment informed the strategy of Byzantine statesmen in the earlier middle ages: whatever images of victory the court ceremonial and rhetoric might conjure up, aversion to lasting territorial commitments was the norm. They were hesitant and highly selective when the political disarray of Byzantium’s archrival, the Abbasid caliphate, opened up opportunities for regaining towns and cities. Humdrum reckonings about manpower and economic resources were supplemented by predictions that seldom found vent in the chronicles. In fact, the victories in the east won by the soldier emperors Nikephoros IT Phokas (963-969) and John I Tzimiskes (969-976) aroused unease. There were forebodings that the sensational victories would be followed by an Arab countersurge as far as the Bosporus, terrible natural disasters and then (at least implicitly) by the End of the world.** Eschatological angst was, in Byzantine statecraft, compounded with cautiousness, a preference for letting imperial interests beyond the Greek-speaking ‘Roman’ provinces be served by proxies. This predisposition, together with awareness of differences in the modus operandi of other societies, runs through the pages of the diplomatic handbook compiled by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus for his son and heir Romanos II c. 950.%°
Even when Byzantine armies did make lasting gains in Cilicia, northern Syria and the Balkans in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, there was a tendency to leave local elites and administrative structures in place, at least for the earlier stages of occupation. Imperial attention focused on points of particular strategic or economic value.*’ Nonetheless, as is pointed out in Chapter 4, the spectacular victories and conquests called to mind rhetoric from the Roman empire in its heyday — of bounds set ever wider and only natural barriers holding up the advance. Officers and men of the enlarged army showed enthusiasm for foreign ventures and in the mid-eleventh century currents of opinion in governing circles still favoured a forwards policy. The armed forces were well-equipped and in fair condition,** while clientprincelings on the borders were only too willing to hand over responsibilities to the emperor. But a sizable army was costly and from the 1050s a series of weak, divided governments had to cope with formidable foes on several fronts at once. There was inadequate opportunity to reorganise the armed forces and switch to effective defensive tactics in time. Southern Italy was under the control of the Normans by 1071 while Turkoman war-bands streamed into Asia Minor. Territorially, the empire was shrunken by the closing years of the century, for all the ingenuity shown by Alexios I Komnenos (1018—1118) in repulsing Norman attacks and coming to terms with the Turks.*”
Byzantine emperors from Alexios I onwards laboured hard to regain the initiative, seeking ways of harnessing the burgeoning western commercial enterprises, military companies and muscular Christianity to their advantage. They presided over an economy itself still expanding and thus capable of yielding revenues to the state. Population-size, too, seems to have been on the rise.*° Despite a tax-base of reduced territorial extent, funds could be raised for wideranging diplomatic and military demarches, and as late as the 1170s emperors could reasonably hope for the reconquest of Asia Minor: ‘the imperial army was still the strongest in Anatolia’ .*! Moreover emperors’ eyes remained alert for lucrative trading-opportunities, and for means of disenfranchising commercial partners who were proving recalcitrant or overmighty. Manuel I Komnenos’ (1143-1180) attempt to make of Ancona a counterweight to Venice and a kind of military outpost is only the most obvious example of this.“”
(VID)
Manuel Komnenos’ venture in Ancona is easily dismissed as an example of him overreaching himself, vainly countering the irresistible rise of commercially-driven powers such as Venice. What tends to be overlooked in general surveys® is the vitality of lower-profile enterprises overseas on the part of Byzantines below the level of the imperial court and its orators and historians. Once these are taken into account, the emperors’ schemes for reconquest look rather less quixotic. Three chapters in Part I illustrate this kind of commercial expansion. It was not only Italian merchants who took advantage of the waning of the jihad in the tenth century to operate a trading nexus between Egypt, the Levant and Constantinople. As David Jacoby shows in Chapter 6, the term a/-Riam in Arabic and Hebrew documents relating to the Eastern Mediterranean could denote not only western Christians but also Byzantines. Byzantine goods were a significant item of commerce in Alexandria and Cairo, many being brought by traders based within the empire: there was a suggestively-named ‘Market of the Greeks’ in Old Cairo. Venetian and Amalfitan boats were putting into Egyptian ports by the later tenth century, but they were probably heavily outnumbered by Byzantine-based vessels at least until the end of the eleventh century.“ Products and agrarian produce from the provinces — cheese, for example, from Asia Minor and Crete — as well as de /uxe textiles from Constantinople’s workshops were exchanged for high-quality Egyptian linen and oriental spices. In the twelfth century, the Greeks gradually lost ground to the Italian beneficiaries of privileges from the Crusading states that were now ensconced along the Palestinian and Syrian coastline, with the Venetians and other city-states dominating high-value exchanges between the west, Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet the axis between Egypt and the Byzantine lands remained economically significant — and of interest to emperors contemplating regulation of this traffic.
Byzantine economic enterprises also reached far north in this period, as Thomas Noonan and Roman Kovalev show (Chapters 7 and 8). These two chapters complement one another. ‘Prayer, illumination, and good times’ focuses on the finds in northern and central Rus of shards of amphorae manufactured in the Byzantine world, while ‘“Wine and oil for all the Rus’! concentrates on finds in southern Rus, taking in Kiev together with lesser-known sites between the Prut and the lower Don. Besides reviewing the find-locations, the chapters discuss the likely contents of the amphorae, wine and oil, assessing their uses among the Rus. They expressly leave open the question of where the original vineyards and olive-groves were situated. But they are unequivocal that the wine and oil can fairly be termed ‘Byzantine’, emanating mostly from the Byzantine lands.* Christian religious rites generated steady demand for wine and oil. But Noonan and Kovalev emphasise that wine was also imported for convivial purposes. They further note that amphorae shards occur in small rural settlements in north and south alike: ‘demand for wine was so strong that it could be found even in the most remote villages of northern Russia’.*® Olive oil was used for practical purposes such as lighting lamps as well as for benedictions in church services: ‘the import of olive oil into Kievan Rus was very big business’.
(VID
These trading activities involved more and more settlements in the land of Rus during the twelfth century. As David Miller posits in Chapter 9, trading and manufacture formed just one pattern — in his words, ‘transparency’ — in a kaleidoscopic series of communities: of towns and settlements, written culture and religious worship, spoken language and conscious membership of an ethnic grouping, and political allegiance. These affinities, some localised, others ranging vast distances, were partially in tension with one another and their dynamics were peculiar to Rus. Yet as Miller signals, Byzantium had a part to play in their workings. Citing the work of Thomas Noonan, he notes the significance of Kiev as arrival point for superior technologies such as building in brick and stone: ‘conversion to orthodox Christianity was the catalyst, foreign artisans, especially Greeks, were the carriers, and Kiev’s princes the transfer agents’.“* Byzantium also provided a church organisation. The metropolitan residing at Kiev was usually Byzantine-born, but the prevailing written language was a form of Slavic, not Greek, and the range of texts available in translation was quite narrow: ‘most were prepared for liturgical purposes’.””
The processes by which this religious culture filtered through to the populace in the urban centres are debatable, as is the nature of popular literacy. But literacy of a sort is attested by finds of birch-bark letters and also of characters and words scratched on pots and other objects. These items occur mainly in urban sites and townsfolk — women as well as men — were the most likely to find uses for writing, whether for marking ownership, listing creditors or other matters to do with craftsmanship and commercial exchanges.*° These mundane concerns do not, at first sight, have much to do with the religious culture of the Slavic texts deriving from Greek originals. Nonetheless a shared cult encouraged commercial trust. Besides, orthodox Christianity, prizing liturgical services, visual symbols and repetition, was attuned to the preoccupations of agrarian populations and provided compass-bearings, symbolic rather than textual, set against false spirits and damnation.*' Evidence is mounting for the veneration of Christian symbols, especially small metal crosses, at grassroots. Near Lake Kubenskoe in north-east Rus many, if not most, villagers wore a cross-pendant in daily life, implying widespread veneration of the cross as a personal talisman.** Equally, the distinctive pattern of settlement in pre-Mongol Rus has become clearer from systematic surveys. Settlements tended to form in ‘compact nests’, beside rivers or lakes. The clusters might be separated from one another by vast tracts of forest, but their inhabitants kept in touch. The main driver for exchanges was the fur-trade, which was both lucrative and constant enough to allow village- dwellers to rely on distant urban centres for items of jewellery, high-quality implements and small strips of Byzantine silk.°?
Many of the furs ended up in western Europe, and finds of German silver coins in rural Rus settlements show the importance of this trading-axis. However, goods from the Byzantine south carried with them a certain ‘charge’, as witness the oil and wine imported for purposes of religious ritual, and the ties of faith were reinforced by commercial links. These involved face-to-face encounters between Rus and Greeks in the markets of Constantinople and Black Sea ports, but also in Rus itself. Byzantine-born or Byzantine-descended craftsmen were a not unfamiliar sight in the cities. One such was Olisei ‘the Greek’, who presided over a studio for painting icons in later twelfth-century Novgorod.™ In an economy geared to intensive long-distance exchanges, the sprinkling of Greek craftsmen as well as churchmen offering guidelines on iconography and ritual may have had more impact at street-level than their numbers alone warranted. The inhabitants of the sprawling lands of Rus and of the Byzantine empire can hardly be said to have constituted a cohesive community. But the points of contact between them in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were vibrant.*°
(1X)
One cannot put figures to the contribution made by the ever-expanding markets of Rus to the Byzantine economy any more than one can quantify the monetary value of trade between Byzantium, the Levant and Egypt. But Mediterranean produce bound for the northern markets was taxable as it passed through the Bosporus and all these axes illustrate the width of Byzantine commercial horizons. They might yet metamorphose and take politico-military forms, a variant on Manuel’s experiment with Ancona. As Paul Magdalino shows in Chapter 5, there was method in the schemes of Manuel’s successors, Andronikos I Komnenos (1183— 1185) and Isaac IT Angelos (1185-95): by coming to terms with Venice and with Saladin, now master of Egypt as well as Syria, they might gain possession of the coastline of Palestine. As late as c. 1190 Byzantium could still manage an operational navy, and it was not without sympathisers among churchmen in the Holy Land, some of them Greek-speakers.*° These projects came to nothing but, as Magdalino shows, they did not look doomed. Isaac’s hopes were fanned by a series of predictions made by Dositheos, the churchman whose promotion he ensured firstly to the patriarchate of Jerusalem and later to Constantinople’s. This may be taken as an instance of shadow-chasing, but a certain sense of destiny, whether individual or collective, was what provided the Byzantines with resilience through times of military setbacks and material want.
(X)
By the time Isaac II was making his overtures to Saladin, the island of Cyprus was the powerbase of another member of the Komnenos dynasty, also named Isaac, who styled himself basileus, while some population-groups living to the north-west of Constantinople were up in arms. Their depredations would eventually lead to the formation of a second Bulgarian empire. However, as Robert Lee Wolff shows in Chapter 11, the prime movers of the insurrection in 1186 were two brothers of Romance-speaking — Vlach — stock, Peter and Asen. They had the support of fellow-Vlachs of the Haemus mountain region, while cavalry was provided by steppe-nomads, the Cumans.*’ Slavic-speaking Bulgarian agriculturalists were not prominent in the earliest stages of the revolt. In fact the Vlachs’ initial quarrel with the emperor was over taxation, with Peter and Asen reacting furiously after their petitions were rebuffed. These uplands herdsmen were objecting to unaccustomed tax-demands by a government reeling from the sack of Thessaloniki by a Norman army in 1185. Isaac Il Angelos, himself an accidental emperor, lacked the military talents to stamp down on the Vlachs’ raiding, while more competent generals sent to deal with them fancied the throne for themselves. The town of Trnovo became the main base of the rebellious brothers, a ‘throne town’. The relics of John of Rila, the most celebrated Bulgarian holy man of the tenth century, were solemnly translated there, in a bid to gain legitimacy for the Bulgarian polity resurrected.**
But for all its military successes ‘the loose conglomeration of Balkan peoples in revolt led by the Vlachs Peter and Asen and later by their brother Ioannitsa [Kalojan]’* was fissiparous. Rival warlords and local magnates began to proliferate in the eastern Balkans. It was the onset of the Fourth Crusade and its challenge to the reigning emperor, Alexios ITI (1195—1203) that provided fresh opportunities and Kalojan, who had outlived his brothers, duly seized them, negotiating for papal recognition of his imperial status. Eventually, in 1204, he gained from Pope Innocent IT] a crown symbolising his rule as king and recognition of his top churchman as ‘primate’.
Even while pursuing diverse agendas and themselves short of funds, the parties joining forces for the Fourth Crusade proved more than a match for the Byzantine government. Between the 12th and the 15th April 1204 the Crusaders stormed into Constantinople and sacked it, and the empire of the Romans dissolved. The resultant vacuum in unimpeachably legitimate authority of the traditional kind gave aspiring Balkan potentates the chance to vest their regimes in universal values, with newly-declared sacral centres and God-given missions to reign over their peoples. It was, in essence, the unruly expansion of the Latin west that created the conditions in which Bulgarian and Serb polities could work out their own forms. And yet, for all the opportunistic negotiations with the papacy on the part of Kalojan and the Serbian ruler Stefan ‘the First-Crowned’, it would still be the Byzantine church organisation and imperial order that provided building-blocks and models for their emerging structures.
Some underlying reasons for this are implicit in the chapters already considered. By 1204 Byzantium had undergone cycles of expansion and recession on various levels, territorial, cultural and economic, and its political thought and religious expectations could accommodate abrupt reversals of fortune. Lurid as the events of 1204 and their immediate aftermath were, the self-belief and resilience of the Byzantines were far from exhausted. This was most palpable a hundred or so kilometres south-east of Constantinople, where a node of imperial and patriarchal authority formed. At the Nicaean emperor’s court, military virtues were promoted, doctrinal purity guarded and new thinking about orthodoxy and its ideal political order stirred.°' From embers such as these,” the orthodox Roman empire might yet flare up and re-configure: even the boldest non-Greek-speaking potentate had to reckon with this possibility. However legitimate and divinely-favoured they considered their own realms, they could not carry all their monks and churchmen with them, and ecclesiastical discipline and faith were vital to the political structures they were trying to form. The rulings made and precedents set by the Byzantine patriarchate and monastic figures were still touchstones of orthodoxy, and thirteenth-century Bulgarian and Serbian rulers generally found it prudent to remain in communion — the latter having a special stake in Mount Athos. Past and future could not be unscrambled.
(xD Part IT: After the Fall
Part II focuses on the uses to which Byzantine political and religious orthodoxy were put in the Balkans and Rus after 1204. Bulgarian and Serbian rulers sought to make their regimes more credible by aligning court rituals, titles and, more profoundly, laws and concepts of governance with Byzantium’s. Rus’ princes were differently placed, and less than forty years after the collapse of the Byzantine empire, they came under the thrall of a militarily superior people from the steppes, the Mongols. Their relationship with the Mongols served, paradoxically, to inculcate religious orthodoxy among Rus populations, while also facilitating travel between the northern forest regions and centres such as Constantinople, Athos and Trnovo, the circulation of texts and new forms of spirituality and prayer.
These developments, the consolidation of religious orthodoxy and its extension to fresh populations in the region of the Urals, were played out against conditions of flux in the former core-regions of the empire. Stephen Reinert, in Chapter 12, traces the ebb and flow of imperial Byzantine power. Constantinople, known to South Slavs and Rus alike as Tsargrad (‘Emperor-town’) became the seat of a Byzantine orthodox emperor again in 1261 after the Latin emperor’s flight aboard a Venetian merchantman. Michael VIII Palaiologos (1258-1282) had to contend with the hostility of westerners who had lost out from these events, and he attempted to head off a ‘crusade’ by submitting himself and his church to papal overlordship at the Council of Lyon (1274). This, however, earned him abiding execration from church leaders opposed to union with Rome, and even his son Andronikos II judged it impolitic to accord Michael’s body ‘a decent orthodox burial’ .®
The position of late Byzantine emperors, tossed between various emergent or occupying powers and the commercial interests of the Venetians, the Genoese and other western trading groups, was vulnerable and, as Reinert observes, often melancholy. The Palaiologoi somehow contrived to be their own worst enemies, grandfathers quarrelling with grandsons, and siblings vying over the apportionment of territory. But as the chapters below indicate, the patriarchate was a forceful advocate of the imperial order in Constantinople, and the reputation of the basileus rode high among Slavic-speaking peoples, perhaps higher than among his Greekspeaking subjects. Personal oaths of fealty to the emperor could bring the rulers of Epiros and Thessaly, urban elites, and masterful individuals from all quarters back into line, a kind of imperial confederation.“ And an able emperor such as Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425) could work the many strings to his bow to considerable effect, although it was fellowChristians in the west, not South Slavs or Rus, who held out the best prospects of effective military aid. Diplomatic and socio-cultural ties between the Palaiologoi in Constantinople and Mistra and western courts remained vibrant long after Manuel’s death, a sense of common Christian cause could still prompt military action and Byzantine embassies were appealing for help until the end.
(XID)
For all the empire’s mortal tatters, the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries rank among the liveliest in the history of Byzantine religious culture, and orthodoxy became deeper engrained across a wider area than ever before. To a great extent this was due to the initiative of non-Byzantine rulers, who tried to mould church organisations to their own needs. A patriarchate was established at Trnovo in 1235, with the consent of the Byzantine imperial and patriarchal authorities in Nicaea.® The training of priests and monks was now in the hands of Bulgarian church leaders fully committed to using Slavic as the language of worship and study of the scriptures, and Bulgarian patriarchs could the better supervise pastoral care precisely because their church organisation was small-scale. The ruling establishment had its reasons for fostering Slavic as a sacred language and inculcating it, given the heterogeneity of the population-groups — Vlachs as well as Greeks — within the Bulgarian borders. The texts copied in the scriptoriums — monastic workshops for book-production — were mostly religious in content. The premium was on diffusing correct doctrine, forms of worship and examples (through saints’ Lives) of godly living among the overwhelmingly rural communities. The texts also served the purpose of legitimising and extolling the revived Bulgarian empire.°’ Traditional — ninth-century and earlier — Byzantine techniques of physically assembling books were maintained, but more recent Byzantine styles of ornament were also adopted.®*
In depicting their newly separate status Bulgarian rulers and their encomiasts likewise treated the ancient empire as a point of departure. Their principal cities were extolled as ‘new Tsargrads’, and when Tsar Ivan II Alexander (1331-1371) commissioned a de /uxe manuscript of a translated Byzantine historical text, the chronicle of Manasses, he was shown in one of the illuminations standing between Christ and the chronicler, crowned and haloed and receiving a second small crown from an angel. This scene echoes Byzantine iconography.” The extent to which the hierarchy of Byzantine dignities and offices was taken as a model of political order is registered in the number of administrative terms of the second Bulgarian empire borrowed from Byzantine usage (Chapter 13). These borrowings were deliberate and systematic. The basil/eus’ court and the governance emanating from it served as a gold standard which no ‘upwardly mobile’ neighbour aspiring to legitimate ascendancy could ignore.’”? And not infrequently Bulgarian rulers in the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth century had to reckon with one or more rival members of their family, or virtually autonomous dynasts.
(XID
The Bulgarian rulers presided over populations that had been under Byzantine rule for nearly 200 years, while they could claim illustrious precursors, the Christian princes Boris, Symeon and Peter. In contrast, the core-lands of the Serbs had never come under intensive Byzantine occupation, nor could their princes lay claim to local precedents for the polity they were trying to establish. The grand Zupan who stamped his authority on the rest of his kin-group and made the region of Ra&ka his power-base, Stefan Nemanja, was a ruthless opportunist. Exploiting Byzantium’s disarray, and especially the passage of the Third Crusade through the Byzantine lands in 1189-90, he seized strongholds such as Ni8 and later negotiated with the emperor, obtaining recognition of many of his gains and the emperor’s niece as bride for his son, also named Stefan.”' Yet he subsequently joined another of his sons, Sava, on Mount Athos, became joint-manager with Sava of the monastery of Chilandar, had his rights over it confirmed by imperial chrysobull, and died there in 1199. Sava combined personal saintliness and intellect with concern for administrative order and his father’s name. In 1206 or 1207 the relics of Stefan Nemanja were borne from Athos to the monastery-church of Studenica he had founded, and the cult of this ‘holy ruler’ began to take hold. The translation of the relics was the work of Sava who also wrote a Life of his sainted father and became abbot of Studenica. Although no longer residing on Athos, he was still a frequent visitor. Such goingson were not to the disadvantage of Sava’s brother, grand zupan Stefan, who was in effect directing the secular side of the family concern, while also serving as honorary chief ‘founder’ of Chilandar.” The Serb ruling family’s commitment to eastern orthodoxy of Byzantine stamp was reinforced in 1219 when Sava was ordained ‘archbishop of Peé¢ and of all Serbia’ by the orthodox patriarch in Nicaea, his standing being confirmed by a synodal decree issued with the emperor’s authority. In this, as in other cases, coterminous ecclesiastical organisation gave territorial definition to an embryonic polity.”
Through harping on parallels with scriptural figures and reworking the sacred past, literary apologists for the Nemanjid dynasty (including its own members) sought to bring a sense of common purpose to disparate subject-populations, a new Israel with a mission from God.” The opportunities for ‘nation-building’ which orthodox political and religious culture afforded were more alluring than what was on offer from the Latin west, and grand Zupan Stefan’s receipt of a crown from the papacy in 1217 did not lead to re-alignment of Serbian religious faith or rituals with those of the Latin church. Of more enduring significance was the ruling family’s association with Athos and patronage of ‘the Holy Mountain’, its sacral rallying-point. The formidable prince Milutin (1282—1321) still looked to Athos as a source of senior churchmen and spiritual guidance after overrunning Byzantine territories as far south as Prilep and Ohrid. It was during his reign that the concept of the Nemanjid dynasty as holy family was fully elaborated in wall-paintings, showing their family-tree akin to that of Christ’s.” This did not, however, wholly resolve issues of succession, and Milutin’s selfaggrandisement occurred against a background of simmering rivalry with his brother Dragutin. It was here that the Byzantine template of monarchy was of use, and Milutin’s marriage in 1299 to Simonis, infant daughter of Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282-1328), greatly helped in his efforts to transform his court into a picture of harmony.’
Milutin’s grandson Stefan DuSan took this still further, aspiring to parity with his Constantinopolitan counterpart in rank and proximity to God. DuSan exploited Byzantium’s own internal power-struggle to seize more Byzantine territories, reaching as far as the Chalkidike peninsula, on whose northernmost promontory stood Mount Athos. Just before proclaiming himself ‘emperor of the Serbs and the Greeks’, DuSan made a compact with the monks of Athos: they accepted him as their overlord, offering prayers for his soul in return. Subsequently DuSan and his family gained sanctuary on the Holy Mountain at the height of the Black Death. DuSan was lavish with his gifts, and not only to the house which his ancestor Stefan Nemanja had founded, Chilandar (Chapter 14).
DuSan’s conception of his special relationship with God took multifarious forms, visual and legislative. Among the pictorial evocations of rulership that he commissioned at his church of Lesnovo is the ‘holy wisdom’ which enlightens the ruler, informing his guidance of his people. This is discussed in Chapter 16, where the Byzantine conceptual framework for DuSan’s sense of mission to lead his subjects from sin to purity and spiritual illumination is investigated. The images at Lesnovo were painted in the very year Du8an promulgated an elaborate law-code, 1349. The code was promulgated together with a Byzantine treatise synthesising secular and church law composed in Thessaloniki some years earlier and another Byzantine text, The Farmer s Law; both translations were in shortened form.”’ The ‘Charter’ accompanying DuSan’s code avowed his ‘desire to enact certain virtues and truest laws of the orthodox faith to be adhered to’, thus subsuming civil regulation within guardianship of the faith.”* The code was intended for practical purposes and an updated version incorporating DuSan’s most recent edicts was promulgated in 1354. Thus art, pious pronouncements and legal practices deriving from Byzantium were orchestrated to help consolidate DuSan’s realm. Duan was emulating the basi/eus at Constantinople, he was an opportunist and he may have been aiming to seize Thessaloniki just before his untimely death in 1355.” But it is unlikely that he was aiming to seize Constantinople outright, in the manner of a barbarian. Besides his well-known acknowledgement of the primacy of ‘the emperor of the Romans’ in the pecking order of prayers offered up by the monks of Athos, DuSan takes for granted the existence — and by implication the legitimacy — of ‘the Greek throne’ in the autobiographical note transmitted by one late copy of his law-code. Sima Cirkovié draws attention to this suggestive phrase in Chapter 15.*°
(XIV)
Important as were the initiatives of local rulers in implanting religious orthodoxy in their lands, the Constantinopolitan patriarchate showed tenacity and a measure of statesmanship in addressing the problems which political fragmentation brought its flock. The calibre of senior figures in the church during Byzantium’s last centuries receives due recognition in Chapters 20 and 21. The ‘guardianship of all’ which the patriarchate proclaimed for itself is borne out by the numerous instances of resolution of disputes, effective pastoral care and timely reorganisations of sees recorded in its register for the fourteenth century.*' Not all aspects of this can be addressed in our volume and one important reason for the vigour and rigour is left largely unexplored: rivalry with the church of the Latins, that is, the western church headed by the Roman papacy. Not only had the patriarchate suffered a crushing blow in being ousted from Constantinople in 1204. Orthodox flocks on former Byzantine territories were targets for evangelisers from the west, intent on luring or compelling them to adopt the Latin way. In regions such as the Balkans and in areas now under Mongol dominion western churchmen, monks and friars were also active in the thirteenth and earlier fourteenth century, establishing sees and religious houses and trying to gain fresh converts among eastern ‘schismatic’ Christians and infidels alike.” The orthodox church authorities’ response amounted to a hardening of the line, emphasising the differences between orthodox and Latin practices. Lists of ‘the errors of the Latins’ circulated widely, attempts by churchmen and monks to warn flocks in Greek-speaking regions and beyond against everyday intermingling with western Christians and adopting their devotional practices.*
The church leaders’ competitiveness with the Latins went hand in hand with adeptness at accommodating unsympathetic local powers: churchmen in sees that had long formed part of the Byzantine empire now had to fend for themselves. Sergey Ivanov notes an apparent shift in attitudes: the Constantinopolitan church’s assumption of community leadership and its experience of dealing with the western barbarians and Turkish infidels on its own doorstep had repercussions for more distant sees.™ A sense of urgency in demarcating church discipline and forms of worship could sharpen leading churchmen’s interest in goings-on in the furthest reaches of the eastern Christian world. First-hand experience rendered them better-qualified to offer ‘guardianship of all’ than in the days when the basileus’ writ ran unchallenged on home-ground.
(XV)
This is illustrated by the case of Rus. As emphasised in Part I, geo-political circumstances there were unique and Latin churchmen were only to be found in its western parts and major emporia such as Novgorod and Sarai (seat of the khan of the Golden Horde in the Volga delta). Nonetheless the Rus’ situation resembled that of most Byzantines in a significant way: they, too, came under harsh external overlordship. After the Mongols’ onslaught in the midthirteenth century, Rus princes and churchmen had neither means nor motivation to aspire to their own separate church organisation, in the manner of the Bulgarians and the Serbians. The senior churchman in Rus retained the rank of ‘metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’ although the political centres lay north of Kiev in the principalities of Tver and Moscow, or in the western regions of Rus under the domination of the still-pagan Lithuanians. It was Moscow that eventually, in the earlier fourteenth century, became the residence of the metropolitan, and Greeks were still being assigned to take up office there in the mid-fifteenth century.® In fact the two centuries or so of domination by aliens saw Rus culturo-religious ties with Byzantium tightening, while pastoral work by monks drew in outlying regions. To a large extent this can be put down to the compact leading churchmen and princes of Rus made with the Mongol leadership, to local Christians’ initiatives and to the Rus mindset, looking back to Byzantium as a place of cultural origin. But it also owes something to the qualities of ‘guardianship’ of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate and to the vitality of monastic centres such as Mount Athos, ‘the school of the monks, workshop of virtue’.*°
Several chapters in Part II illustrate the directions in which Rus political culture and Christian living evolved beneath the dominance of semi-nomads residing in the steppes to the south, yet long able to intimidate, and mustering hordes to menace Moscow even in the late fifteenth century. The directions are diverse, even contradictory, yet a rationale is discernible. Having witnessed mass-destruction, princes and churchmen bowed before the inevitable and acknowledged the authority of the Mongol khan as being worldwide and ordained by God. Michael Cherniavsky points this out in Chapter 17, observing that the khan is called in Rus sources ‘tsar’, a term equivalent to Greek basileus with connotations of unimpeachable legitimacy. He also draws attention to the charters (iarlyki) that khans issued to successive metropolitans: in return for their sweeping privileges, Rus churchmen must pray for the khan, and ‘if any clergyman prays with mental reservations, he commits mortal sin’.®’
The basileus in faraway Tsargrad was in eclipse. Yet the eclipse was not total, and contemporary Rus literary sources have several layers of meaning, as Charles Halperin makes clear in Chapter 18. Rus writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clergy almost to a man, seldom dilate upon ‘Mongolica’. Yet these chroniclers and hagiographers were knowledgeable about the geography of the steppes and the customs, hierarchy and personnel of their overlords. ‘Familiarity with the Tatar language’, concludes Halperin, ‘must have been far greater than the medieval Russian sources allow’.*® They observed a kind of selfdenying ordinance, taking for granted their readers’ all too close acquaintance with Mongols and leaving much unsaid. Such demonstrable reticence about the Mongols may also put in perspective Rus narrative sources’ tendency towards taciturnity about the Constantinopolitan patriarchate and indeed about Byzantine affairs in general. This was neither a mark of hostility nor of ‘airbrushing-out’ (as it was in the Mongols’ case); nor does it necessarily betoken blithe indifference towards a superseded superpower. If David Miller’s early Rus has ‘many frontiers’, these entail many layers in the literary sources — for the fifteenth century, as for the eleventh. Grim realities, together with distant affiliations taken for granted, tended to fall outside the fairly narrow scope of princely-oriented chronicles.
The material benefits which the church in Rus reaped from acknowledging the Mongols’ dominion are outlined by Sergei Hackel in Chapter 19. The church’s lands and their inhabitants were exempted from all military service and from taxation, while the khan’s writ ran far more effectively in Rus than any basileus’ or, indeed, most Rus princes’ ordinances had done. The lands of the monasteries were privileged likewise. The upshot was, as Hackel shows, a massive expansion of the properties owned by clergymen and monks: secular landowners made generous donations while peasants moved willingly onto estates whose landlords, themselves tax-exempt, could afford to demand less of them by way of rents and labour services. This process coincided with a general shift in settlement-patterns in Rus, away from the ‘compact nests’ of the pre-Mongol era. A new pattern emerged, of small settlements dotted across what had hitherto been wilderness. In regions such as that of Lake Beloe Ozero it seems that parish churches and churchyards did not keep pace with this process of diffusion: they tended to stay put on the sites of the earlier settlements near lakes and rivers. This would seem to reflect popular preference for traditional sacred places. Yet evidence of Christian proclivities in burial-rites even in the backwoods in the fourteenth and fifteenth century is quite full. This may have something to do with the pastoral care provided by monks, or simply the spectacle of their piety. In contrast to parish churches, the monasteries founded from the later fourteenth century onwards were mostly in ‘virgin’ lands, fostering when not following the opening-up of forests near Beloe Ozero and elsewhere, and in the 1420s a monk settled on the island of Solovki in the White Sea.* This was an era when individual holy men were inspired to seek out the unconverted, and St Stephen devised a special alphabet for the people of Perm and other Finnic-speakers in the vicinity of the Urals, translating the scriptures into their language (Chapter 22).
The precise interrelationship of all this with the Mongols’ privileging of the Rus church cannot be calibrated, and ascetics such as Stephen had little use for the things of this world. But a solid material base was now at the disposal of churchmen and the beautiful first church Stephen built for the Permians will have cost money, as also the later ones equipped with ‘icons and books’. Earlier, in the monastery in Rostov where he received his tonsure, Stephen had, according to his hagiographer, learnt Greek, always kept Greek texts in his cell and was himself good copyist of ‘holy books’.*° Such activities hint at the back-up for both scholarship and pastoral care which the church’s privileged landholdings could yield. It also brings us back to the question of the part played by churchmen and holy men from Constantinople and other orthodox centres far to the south.
While the initiative for turning for guidance to the Constantinopolitan patriarchate and to monks on Athos and elsewhere in the orthodox world came from northerners, the responses sent to them were often of inherent merit, making allowance for circumstances. When in 1276 the bishop of the see of Sarai consulted the patriarchal council on issues he was facing in the great encampment, the council made concessions on ritual, for ‘nomadic peoples have no settled place of their own’.?' Although appointed by the Rus metropolitan, Bishop Theognostos was a Greek-speaker, and he and his successors served as go-betweens of the khans and the Constantinopolitan authorities, while also brokering the frequent visits paid by the metropolitans and princes of Rus to the khan’s court. In fostering this Christian out-station, the patriarchs of Constantinople were acting in tandem with the emperors, who generally sought amicable relations with the Golden Horde, potential enforcers of stability on their northern approaches and allies against the Turks. Three illegitimate daughters of the first Palaiologan emperors were married to khans. Thus dynastic ties enlivened the Byzantine ecclesiastical presence on the Lower Volga through most of the later thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century, reaching across the pax mongolica. Similar diplomatic calculations informed Byzantine interest in the affairs of Rus itself, °? even as the Mongols’ privileges for the church served to consolidate Christian observance at grassroots in Rus.
The virtual ‘meltdown’ of the Palaiologan governance and treasury in the mid-fourteenth century’? made emperors less effective as partners for the Constantinopolitan patriarchate, while prolonged turbulence in the Golden Horde rendered the khans, for their part, less useful to Byzantium as guarantors of order in the north. And the Moscow princes’ longstanding deference towards the Mongols left them vulnerable in the face of rival claimants to leadership of the Horde.” Nonetheless the interest of senior Byzantine churchmen in the north remained close — and not only in Moscow. Some saw opportunities in the pagan Lithuanians’ expansion across Rus: the population was largely orthodox and certain members of the Lithuanian ruler’s court showed orthodox leanings.”°
(XVI)
The Byzantines were well-aware of the advantages, moral and potentially military, accruing to them from the adherence to their faith and church of vast populations to the north. It was in letters addressed to ‘the noblest kings’ of Rus that Patriarch Philotheos in 1370 described how he picked ‘the best men and those most distinguished in virtue’, consecrated them as pastors and bishops, and ‘sends them to the various parts of the inhabited world’.*® Here Philotheos put his finger on an asset of the Byzantine church that became all the more valuable as the empire’s material resources dwindled: its human resources, well-educated, highly-motivated personnel with few qualms about assignments to remote outposts — and who remained in touch with one another. Dimitri Obolensky drew attention to this, both in the chapter published here and in what became a chapter in his book, Six Byzantine Portraits. The chapter was devoted to Cyprian: Bulgarian-born, he served as an emissary for the Constantinopolitan patriarchate and ended up metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus, residing in Moscow.” Cyprian’s renown as diplomat, pastor and scholar tends to eclipse one simple feature of his career. He chose to align himself with the patriarchate even though there was, until 1393, a functioning Bulgarian patriarchate which he might have served instead. And the Constantinopolitan patriarchate soon put him to work in regions where Slavic as a mother-tongue would be of particular use. The recruitment and promotion of Cyprian says much for the patriarchate’s pre-existing stature, and for its talent-spotting capabilities.
That the Constantinopolitan church leadership had the acumen to enlist multilingual talents is merely one facet of the revitalisation of religious orthodoxy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The patriarchate was now well-geared to supervising pastoral work across huge tracts of steppe and forest. In addition, ample quantities of funding, translated texts and bilingual personnel were to be found on Athos, or in religious houses affiliated with the Holy Mountain in one way or another. Athos had had distant horizons since its early days as a monastic centre, reaching to the Georgians in Caucasia and to the land of Rus,** and we have already noted its importance as a sacral rallying point for the Nemanjids. Closer links were forged with the patriarchate, as imperial power corroded, and the Mountain came under its formal jurisdiction in 1312. The monks also had many personal ties with the patriarchate: several patriarchs of the fourteenth century had spent time on the Mountain, including Kallistos (1350-1353; 1355-1363), Philotheos Kokkinos (1353-1354; 1364-1376) and Anthony IV (1389-1390, 1391—1397).” A particularly strong current of spiritual contemplation and ascetic practices known as ‘hesychasm’'” gathered momentum in the milieu of Athos and swept across the orthodox world, gaining enthusiasts in the patriarchate and powerful sympathisers at the Constantinopolitan court. This kind of ‘triangulation’ provided additional channels for diffusion of a self-confident, even aggressively didactic, regime of psychophysical exercises and prayer. Figures such as Gregory Palamas were loud in their denunciations of alternative models of spirituality, advocating techniques for making visions of the divine light available to monks. As a kind of ‘fundamentalist’, Palamas saw little place for argument by means of reasoning, a malpractice of the detested Latins.'®'
The hesychasts’ concentration on key prayers and exercises, indifference to hardships and outspoken distrust of ‘worldly wisdom’ were well-attuned to Slavic-speaking milieus lacking in powerful political courts or centres for intellectual training. Not that there was total disregard for the written word. Dread of faulty manuscripts introducing false doctrine and ritual into worship stimulated demand for pure texts and (among Slavic-speakers) for translations of high quality to be made from them. A considerable number of liturgical and other religious works were retranslated from the original Greek or translated in full for the first time in the fourteenth century, and new saints’ Lives were written and older ones rewritten ina mannered style. This in turn stimulated further contacts with Mount Athos as copying-and translation-centre par excellence, while the patriarchate was highly regarded as the custodian of accurate texts and doctrine in Constantinople.'” Thus the new rigourism, though wary of reason as a route towards spiritual illumination, took advantage of the medium of books: texts and icons, as well as scholarly monks and pilgrims, circulated widely across the Greekspeaking and Slav-speaking world.'® There is, for example, evidence of quite heavy ‘traffic’ between the Byzantine lands and Rus in the fourteenth century, and a traveller like Ignatius of Smolensk took for granted the presence of Rus living in Constantinople.'™ Their interest seems to have been in religious texts currently used by the ‘Greeks’, not just in the shrines and relics of which they were custodians. Stephen, evangeliser of the Permians, had studied Greek texts while a young monk (above, p. 1).
Stephen’s mission work in the vicinity of the Urals extended the bounds of religious orthodoxy at a time when the Byzantine emperor was beleaguered in his capital by Turkish armies. Yet Stephen, or rather his contemporary hagiographer Epifanii, showed awareness of the empire as a point of reference. Stephen’s death in 1396 is placed ‘during the reign of the rightly-believing Greek tsar Manuel, reigning in Tsargrad, under Patriarch Anthony, archbishop of Constantinople ... under the pious grand prince Vasilii Dmitrievich of all the Rus’.'° Stephen’s evangelisation had been spurred on by expectations of the imminent End of the world; he may have shared widespread assumptions that the emperor would play a key role, that he was God’s agent in the grand scheme of things.
Thus an empire apparently moribund in material terms was not only compatible with the expansion of religious orthodoxy: its plight may even have fanned anxiety that the End was nigh and there were still souls to be saved. In practice the imperial-ecclesiastical complex in Constantinople outlasted the upstart patriarchate of the Bulgarians, and took formal charge of its flock: Trnovo became a mere metropolitanate.'°° And the Constantinopolitan authorities, acting in conjunction with leading monks on Athos and in apprehension of Latin churchmen’s initiatives from Hungarian and Polish-ruled regions, responded with alacrity to the requests of Wallachian and Moldavian princes, instituting metropolitanates for their respective regimes. The opening phases of the Moldavian church organisation saw wrangles between alternative candidates for the post of metropolitan. But the wishes of emperor and patriarch eventually, in 1416, prevailed, and the upshot was a network of orthodox monasteries and bishoprics offering closer supervision of Christians living between the lower Danube and the river Prut. The imperial-ecclesiastical complex was still supplying senior churchmen, texts and a model for rites of rulership for these new nodes of power when the Council of Florence in 1439 called into question the religious orthodoxy of the complex, in Wallachian and Moldavian as in Rus eyes.!°
(XVID
The prophets of doom were vindicated in that Constantinople fell to new ‘Ishmaelites’ in 1453. Although this did not trigger Christ’s Second Coming, the orthodox populations of the Balkans faced life on earth under Turkish occupation. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, moved swiftly to recognise the Greek-speaking orthodox as a self-regulating community under the direction of their patriarch; political submission was required in return.’ Comparable arrangements were made with church authorities in the Slavic-speaking regions, but the patriarchate of the Serbs was suppressed some time after 1463.'!°
Church leaders in the Balkans and the Aegean world had long been assuming greater responsibilities in their communities and had begun to pull their political weight, as the imperial order fractured and powers of enforcement waned.''® And well before 1453 monastic houses on Mount Athos were coming to terms with Ottoman military power, gaining confirmations of land-holdings and privileges from the sultans.'!' For all the lip-service monks and churchmen might pay to ‘the orthodox emperor of the universe’, most were prepared to render that which was caesar’s unto what was, in effect, the new caesar, a mark of the old imperial order’s passing. But one must remember that pliability is already discernible in the aftermath of Justinian’s victories, when the Roman empire lost face and ground to ungodly barbarians in the seventh century; and this era of spectacular expansion and setbacks is associated with the eschatological expectations set out in Chapters 2 and 3. The other-worldly realism of eastern orthodoxy, its capacity for enduring lengthy periods of subjugation from outsiders, owed something to the belief that the orthodox were God’s people and that His representative on earth would, against all the odds, re-emerge and prevail.
The compliance of church leaders in Rus towards the Mongol khans, their readiness to accord them the rank of tsars in lieu of the Byzantine basileus, are the themes of Chapters 17 and 19. They bowed to the inevitable, acknowledging the overwhelming power of infidel semi-nomads. However, when the princes of Moscow emerged as the main force in north-east Rus, they found advocates among their orthodox monks and prelates. By the late fifteenth century Rus encomia and ceremonial were beginning to depict Prince Ivan III (1462-1505) ‘who has shone forth in orthodoxy’ as leader of a new people of Israel, and Moscow as a new Tsargrad or Jerusalem; it thus became the centre of the rightly-believing world, a world the Rus expected to end in 1492, at the conclusion of the seventh millennium. This is, in effect, a variant on themes we have already encountered among the South Slavs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.'!* But it smacks also of eastern orthodoxy as practised by the Byzantines since their empire’s early years: the accommodation of both Christian imperial triumphalism and earthly catastrophe within their scheme of things. This amalgam allowed for ebb and flow — and even simultaneous recession and expansion — in a variety of dimensions, military, economic, religious and cultural. In short, the Byzantine orthodox world, combining qualities of an imperial order, church organisation and faith-zone, showed a talent for rebounds. And with cultural expansion came prospects of replication, of new centres claiming to be bastions of true religion.
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