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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE «. 500-1492
Byzantium lasted a thousand years, ruled to the end by self-styled ‘emperors of the Romans’. It underwent kaleidoscopic territorial and structural changes, yet recovered repeatedly from disaster: even after the near-impregnable Constantinople fell in 1204, variant forms of the empire reconstituted themselves. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire tells the story, tracing political and military events, religious controversies and economic change. It offers clear, authoritative chapters on the main events and periods, with more detailed chapters on outlying regions and neighbouring societies and powers of Byzantium. With aids such as maps, a glossary, an alternative place-name table and references to English translations of sources, it will be valuable as an introduction. However, it also offers stimulating new approaches and important findings, making it essential reading for postgraduates and for specialists.
JONATHAN SHEPARD
was for many years a Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College and of Peterhouse. He is the coeditor (with Simon Franklin) of Byzantine Diplomacy (1992), co-author (also with Simon Franklin) of The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200 (1996), author of Nespokoini ssedi: blgaro-vizantiiska konfrontatsiia, obmen i s’zhitelstvo prez srednite vekove [Uneasy Neighbours: Bulgaro-Byzantine Confrontation, Exchange and Co-existence in the Middle Ages] (2007) and editor of The Expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia (2007). Shepard is Doctor Honoris Causa of St Kliment Ohrid University in Sofia.
PREFACE
This is a short preface for quite a lengthy book, but it is a means of paying tribute to those principally involved in the development, shaping and production of The Cambridge history of the Byzantine empire (or CHBE). Like the empire itself, the process of formation has been protracted, without a clear-cut starting-point, and such sense of direction as has been attained owes more to collaborative effort than it does to untrammelled autocracy.
Given the sizable number of persons contributing in one way or another, the preface’s brevity entails a mere sketch of those without whose help and advice CHBE would have been a far more onerous and lengthy task. It was Bill Davies who originally encouraged me to take on remodelling materials already available, and several anonymous readers helped structure the volume. Michael Sharp took over from Bill at Cambridge University Press and he has been an extremely patient and supportive editor, ably assisted at various times by Liz Davey, Sinead Moloney, Liz Noden and Annette Youngman. Particular thanks should go to the following key players: Bernard Dod, our indefatigable and eagle-eyed copy-editor, whose attention to detail and wise counsel averted many a mishap; to Barbara Hird, our expert indexer, whose care and clarity have created a valuable additional pathway to Byzantium; to Patricia Jeskins, our assiduous proofreader; and to David Cox, our cartographer, whose splendid maps are closely integrated with the text of our chapters.
For bibliographic help I have to thank the following colleagues, who have supplied references and answered tiresome queries with speed and good grace: Jean-Claude Cheynet, Florin Curta, Peter Frankopan, Judith Gilliland, Michael Griinbart, Paul Herrup, James Howard-Johnston, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Lester Little, Margaret Mullett, Angel Nikolov, Paolo Odorico, Maureen Perrie, Giinter Prinzing, Charlotte Roueché, Maciej Salamon, Alexios Savvides, Teresa Shawcross, John Smedley, Tsvetelin Stepanov, Alice-Mary Talbot, George Tcheishvili, Ida Toth, Vladimir Vavtinek and Mark Whittow. I should also like to thank the staff at the Bodleian, Taylorian Slavonic, Sackler, Oriental Institute and the other Oxford libraries, as well as the staff of the University Library in Cambridge.
Colleagues who clarified various points along the thousand-year trek, or who freely provided access to unpublished materials of value for this work include Jane Baun, Jeffrey Featherstone, Paul Fouracre, John Haldon, Rosemary Morris, Pananos Sophoulis and Monica White. Particular thanks are due to Catherine Holmes, Mike Maas and Andrew Roach, who read the introduction and some of the chapters that follow, and who warned of culs-de-sac and quicksands to be charted or — hopefully — avoided.
On the technical side, help with translation and transliteration was given by Lawrence Conrad, Jeffrey Featherstone, Tim Greenwood, Mona Hamami and Marina Kuji¢. Jenny Perry saved me on several occasions when Macs failed to talk to PCs, and vice versa, while Nigel James of the Bodleian initiated me into the mysteries of digital map-making. Locating and sourcing illustrations was made easier through the assistance of Nancy Alderson, Michel Balard, Theodore van Lint, Cyril Mango, Nicholas Mayhew, Dorothy McCarthy, Denys Pringle, Michael Stone and Robert Thomson. Particular thanks go to our neighbours, Vanessa and Peter Winchester, to whom I am indebted for several pictures of Constantinople. These thanks should be accompanied by apologies for a certain lack of sociability in recent years — and extended to all remaining friends.
It is a commonplace to thank one’s immediate family for their help and endurance in these endeavours. However, I must single out my wife, Nicola, who took on the role of editorial assistant on the project without, I think, appreciating the sheer scale of activity involved. As I have often pointed out to her, this could be seen as due penance for failing to attend my lectures on Byzantium and its neighbours all those years ago in Cambridge! Without Nicola, the volume would probably not have been published this decade, and I am profoundly grateful for her patience, counsel and support.
However, those most indispensable are the volume’s contributors. The chapters whose first incarnation was in The Cambridge ancient history or The new Cambridge medieval history have been joined by important new contributions expanding and elaborating on relevant themes. But it goes without saying that, notwithstanding all the help and advice received along the way, I take responsibility for such mistakes or errors as may have crept into the finished work.
NOTES ON USING THIS VOLUME
Our approach to transliteration may induce unease among some colleagues — and invite charges of inconsistency — but we have tried to make proper names and technical terms accessible to the English-speaking world wherever possible. Greek has been transliterated and bars have been used to distinguish éta from epsilon and omega from omicron in the case of individual words and technical terms, but abandoned for proper names. Greek forms of proper names have generally been adopted in Parts II and III — Komnenos instead of the Latinised Comnenus, for example — in contrast to Part I, set in late antiquity, when Latinised names seem appropriate.
In general, we have adopted a ‘b’ and not ‘v’ when transliterating the Greek letter béta. However, where a name is more or less domiciled in English usage, we have let it be, e.g. Monemvasia and not Monembasia. Where the names of places are probably so familiar to most readers in their Latinised forms that the use of a Greek form might distract, the Latinised form has been retained in Parts II and III — Nicaea instead of Nikaia, for example. Familiar English forms have been preferred out of the same consideration — Athens not Athenai, for example — and in Part III, when the empire’s possessions were being taken over by speakers of other tongues, the place names now prevalent have generally been preferred — Ankara instead of Ankyra, for example.
Arabic diacritics have been discarded in proper names, with only the ayn () and hamza (‘) retained in the form shown, on the assumption that the diacritics will not help non-Arabic readers and may actually distract from name recognition and recall; however, full diacritics have been retained for individual words and technical terms. We have tried to be consistent yet accessible in transliterating other key scripts, such as Armenian and Cyrillic, using for the latter a modified version of the Library of Congress system.
Detailed notes on how to use the bibliography can be found below at pp. 936-8. Chronological sectioning for the secondary bibliography is — like the periodisation of history itself into mutually exclusive compartments — rather arbitrary. The bibliography of secondary works should therefore be treated as a whole and the reader failing to find a work in one section should try the others.
The Glossary and Tables are not intended to be comprehensive guides. The Glossary offers a selection of the technical terms, foreign words and names of peoples and institutions appearing in CHBE. But wherever possible, these are explained in the context of a chapter and only the more problematic proper names have a Glossary entry (see also Maps 3 and 52). Likewise, the lists of rulers and genealogies have been kept to a minimum, since they are available in more specialised works. The list of alternative place names is intended to help the reader locate some towns and regions which were known under radically different names by diverse occupants or neighbours, and to offer modern equivalents where known.
The maps are designed to reconcile accessibility for anglophone readers with a sense of the form prevalent during the chronological section of CHBE in question, not wholly compatible goals. The maps are intended to be viewed as an ensemble, and readers unable to spot a place in a map positioned in one chapter should look to adjoining chapters, or (aided by the list of alternative place names and the index) shop around.
INTRODUCTION -— PART i
APPROACHING BYZANTIUM
JONATHAN SHEPARD
Many roads lead to Byzantium, ‘the New Rome’, and guidance comes from dozens of disciplines, including art history and archaeology, theology and expertise in stone inscriptions, coins or handwriting. Indeed, those general historians who act as guides have themselves often majored in other fields, such as ancient Greece and Rome, the medieval west, the Slav or Mediterranean worlds, and even the Italian renaissance. The surest fact about the elusive ‘New Rome’ is that it lasted over a thousand years, albeit with a fifty-seven-year dislocation from 1204. Across this millennium, the questions of how, why and where the empire survived, receded and (most importantly) revived as a more or less functioning organism — and as an idea — underlie this book.
We take a narrower road than the one chosen by this volume’s predecessor, The Cambridge medieval history 1V," whose first part recounted political, military and ecclesiastical history in detail from 717 until the end of the empire, and devoted several authoritative chapters to neighbouring peoples and powers; its second part contained thematic chapters, on for example law, government, the church, music, the visual arts and literature. No such comprehensive treatment of Byzantium’s culture will be attempted here. Our chapters follow the fortunes of the empire, as shifting politicomilitary organisation and as abiding ideal and state of mind, but do not attempt portrayal of Byzantium and its civilisation from every angle; however, some important alternative approaches to its history are sketched in the third section of this introduction (see below, pp. 53-75).
Our narrative picks out those occurrences salient to the political organism, with an eye for the many problems, external and internal, facing the upholders of imperial order from their capital in the New Rome. Unfashionable weight is given to individual emperors’ characters, and to the statecraft of such giants as Justinian (527-65), Leo III (717-41), Basil I (867-86) and Basil II (976-1025), Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) and Manuel I Komnenos (1143-80). Their diverse, often successful, solutions to problems of governance are outlined, and a recurring theme is the pragmatism of Byzantium’ rulers in coping with plague, financial straits and the inroads of ‘barbarians’, and also with unexpected problems of success. The dynamics of these improvisations, abrupt overhauls and longer-term shifts are traced through the course of events rather than through detailed analysis of institutions as such, a justifiable approach given that the precise workings of so many of Byzantium’s institutions — from the army to provincial administration — are so hard to determine and highly controversial.
Topics of relevance to Byzantine political culture are brought into the narrative, from religious devotions to patronage of the visual arts, and the broader, provincial society revolving around that of the metropolis is outlined. Thematic chapters look at the economy and Christian missions, and there is treatment of several societies, elites and powers that had long-term dealings with Byzantium. Here, too, coverage is less than comprehensive: for example, no chapter is dedicated to ties between the empire and the lands of the Rus.
But enough is provided to demonstrate the impact of Byzantium on various cultures of world significance: the world of Islam, the Eurasian and the Slav worlds, and the Christian west. The aim is to outline and analyse interaction rather than to recount every known detail of relations with a particular state. The importance of Byzantium to neighbouring or newly forming societies and powers emerges more clearly when their individual situations and needs are taken into account. This is particularly true of the tortuous interrelationship with the Christian west across the centuries, and the vitality of the exchanges, cultural as well as ecclesiastical and political, between ‘Latins’ and ‘Greeks’ is brought out in full here.
The chronological range of our chapters spans from just after the formal termination of the western half of the Roman empire (476) to the fifteenth century, when the Christian west was viewed by some Byzantines as a potential saviour from the Turks. This broad yet careful sweep takes in the numerous communities and towns of Greek-speakers who came under new rulers after the empire’s collapse in 1204, sometimes Venetians or Frenchspeakers, sometimes Bulgarian or Serbs. The ebb and flow of the imperial dominions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is presented in more detail than is usual with this kind of survey, and it shows up qualities of the Byzantine body politic too easily overlooked: its ‘variable geometry’, a capacity to function quite effectively even without the use of apparently vital members; and resilience, its constituent parts realigning themselves with imperial dominion more or less of their own accord, without much prompting from the top.
The conspectus offered here, at once authoritative and unusually wideranging, should yield some fresh insights to specialists in, and postgraduate students of, the Byzantine world. But it also has something to offer newcomers to the enigma variations of Byzantium. No prior knowledge of the subject, or indeed of pre-modern history, is presupposed, and every effort has been made to provide guidelines for readers whose mother tongue or first foreign language is English. Translations of primary texts are cited in the footnotes where available, and a guide to sources in English translation is offered in the fourth section of this introduction (see below, pp. 76-90).
Our introduction is divided into four sections, The first — this one — looks at Byzantine notions of empire, their tenacity in the face of adversity and the significance of religious rites for believers at grass-roots, constituting Byzantium’s special blend of faith and power. It concludes with a discussion of the nature of the interrelationships between outsiders and insiders, and of their bearing on the broader question of the Byzantine identity.
The second section addresses the book’s time-frame and considers possible alternatives. It is followed by a survey of the book’s three main parts, which run from c. 500 to ¢. 700, ¢c. 700 to 1204 and 1204 to 1492. Themes running through chapters that may, at first sight, seem rather disparate are picked out, part by part. The chapters are not surveyed in strict order of their sequence in the book: thus the topic- or region-specific chapters of Part II are considered en bloc, after the chapters forming the main narrative spine. Part III’s contents, lacking a single fixed point, and encompassing a wide variety of populations and polities, receive fairly lengthy treatment without close adherence to the order of the chapters.
The third section outlines other possible approaches to those taken in this book, which mostly follow the course of recorded events of political, ecclesiastical or military significance for the empire. The outline draws attention to some more or less recent introductions to art, institutions and the human condition among the Byzantines. It is nonetheless slanted towards topics germane to the idea or substance of empire, whether political imagery, size of armies, or castration.
The fourth and final section of the introduction addresses some of the problems of approaching Byzantium without benefit of Greek and offers short-cuts that may help towards the study — and teaching — of the empire’s story: historical atlases covering Byzantium and neighbouring peoples, chronologies, art-historical lexicons and whole dictionaries devoted to the subject. Far more works penned by the Byzantines or about the Byzantines by contemporary outsiders are available in English translation than is generally realised and further translations are underway. These make aspects of Byzantium readily accessible to newcomers from the English-speaking world, and this section of the introduction points to some of the online guides to English-language translations now available.
NOTIONS OF EMPIRE, RESILIENCE AND RELIGION
The phenomenon of Byzantium has multiple connotations and even the name which its rulers used of their polity, ‘Roman’, was controversial.” ‘Greeks’ was the name by which they and their subjects were known to many of their neighbours. This was a reflection of the language in everyday use in Constantinople and provincial towns and in which most imperial business was done from the sixth century onwards. To Goths fanning Italians’ prejudices, ‘Greeks’ carried intimations of frippery and rapaciousness (see below, pp. 214-15). Yet a certain readiness to accept the empire’s claim to be ‘Roman’ surfaces spasmodically among Frankish courtiers, for all their fulminations to the contrary (see below, p. 397).
And while some Arabic writers in the Abbasid era stressed the Byzantines’ cultural inferiority to the ancient Greeks or Romans,? Rum (‘Romans’) was the name by which Muslims called the Byzantines, and the Turkish potentates who made themselves masters of south-central Anatolia from the late eleventh century became known as sultans of Rum.
The very terms Rome and Roman had overtones of unimpeachably legitimate sovereign authority, evoking the greatest empire the world had yet seen. Fantastic as popular notions might be concerning the imagery of classical monuments in Constantinople,’ Byzantine rulers still acted out triumphal parades through its streets and enlisted the citizens’ support in staging them, manifesting the classical Roman concept of ‘eternal victory’.° Less flamboyantly, the City’s water-supply kept flowing through an intricate network of pipes and cisterns established in the sixth century, to standards set by Roman engineers. The workings of this system, ensuring the pure water vital to Constantinople’s survival, were seldom if ever set down in writing,” and in fact the importance of this state secret features in a late thirteenth-century treatise on Byzantine political thought.®
In contrast to mundane matters of pipelines, the supernatural protection enjoyed by the ‘God-protected City’ of Constantinople was a leitmotif of imperial pronouncements from the seventh century onwards,? becoming engrained in the consciousness of Christians in the eastern Mediterranean world. The dedication of the new City by Constantine the Great in AD 330 symbolised his conversion to Christianity and was commemorated each year on 11 May.'° Constantine’s espousal of Christianity marked a new beginning not just for the emperor but for all mankind, whose spiritual salvation now became his avowed concern. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine’s counsellor and biographer, interpreted the turningpoint thus, laying the foundations for an ideology that would treat the history of the church as being coterminous with the bounds of the Roman empire.”
The emperor thus became a pivotal figure in God’s grand design for believers and unbelievers alike, and the conception gained monumental expression in stone from Justinian’s building of St Sophia in Constantinople (see below, pp. 111-12, 114). Justinian’s building-works were undertaken when, for all the pressures from external enemies on several fronts, military feats could still bring confirmation that the Christian God conferred victory, and churchmen ranged far and wide on missions to bring remaining groups of pagans within the emperor’s fold (see below, pp. 307-12).
The association of the empire of the Christians with the future of mankind remained vital even when the tide abruptly turned and, followinga Persian occupation, the empire’s eastern provinces were overrun by bands of Arab warriors in the mid-seventh century. Formerly deemed poor, divided and readily manipulable by the Romans, these Arabs now acted in concert, united in responding to their own revealed truth, as conveyed by God to the prophet Muhammad (see below, pp. 173-95, 365—9). Little more than a generation later, Pseudo-Methodius” explained ‘the Ishmaelites” extraordinary victories as God’s punishment on the Christians for their sins. He prophesied that ‘the Ishmaelites’ would carry all before them until the emperor awoke ‘like a man from sleep after drinking much wine’, arose and put them to flight; the emperor would subsequently make for Jerusalem, and his arrival there would lead to the appearance of the anti-Christ and Christ’s second coming. The text was soon translated from Syriac into Greek and the surviving version contains an interpolation alluding to actual Arab expeditions against Constantinople of the late seventh or early eighth century.
It also represents the Ishmaelites as momentarily entering the City before the emperor’s resurgence."
The Arabs never did penetrate the walls of Constantinople and so these events were not, strictly speaking, relevant to Pseudo-Methodius’ prophecy. But the interpolation reflects widely held Byzantine beliefs: that they were acting out events foretold in sacred writings, and empire and capital were closely bound up with the fate of mankind.” Sudden strikes against the City by barbarians such as the Rus in 860 were interpreted as divine punishment for its sins," and after Constantinople’s fall to the Crusaders in 1204, many believed this was God’s warning that the Byzantines should mend their ways before He showed His displeasure terminally (see below, p. 735).
Faith and empire could no longer be held to be indissoluble to the same extent after 1204, yet eastern orthodox emperors remained at large and upon seizing control of Constantinople in 1261, Michael VII Palaiologos (1258-82) presented himself as a new Constantine: his success in occupying the City was in itself a mark of God’s favour towards him and of God’s mercy for His people. Apocalyptic writings and sayings, some deriving from Pseudo-Methodius, circulated widely among orthodox Greek- and Slavonic-speakers alike. The Byzantine emperors’ predicament in the face of Ottoman Turk advances from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, the collapse of other orthodox polities and then, in 1453, the City’s fall to these Ishmaelites, appeared to bear out the prophecies.
These developments could be aligned with other computations that earthly time would cease upon expiry of the seventh millennium from the creation, a date corresponding with the year 1492.7 Such computations were commonplace in the higher echelons of the church, and Patriarch Gennadios II Scholarios (1454-6, 1463, 1464-5) foretold doomsday on 1 September 1492. He thus assumed the City’s occupation by infidels could only be provisional, now that the empire was no more. Meanwhile, at grass-roots, orthodox Christian faith was integral to Roman identity; even today, a villager in north-eastern Turkey can explain that ‘this was Roman country; they spoke Christian here’ (see below, pp. 852, 853).
Thus Byzantium is best viewed as an amalgam of communities of religious ritual and faith in the power of God, and of administrative institutions and defence works, some kept to a high degree of efficiency. True believers, however far removed from the material protection of the imperial authorities, could hope for spiritual salvation and perhaps physical protection through prayer, regular celebration of the eucharist and access to the holy. As with the bread and wine bringing the body and blood of Christ to mankind, other rites of worship and also the decor and layout of the structure within which they were celebrated symbolised higher things, the medley standing for an infinitely superior, harmonious whole. Willingness to see providential design in the domed interior of a Byzantine church was articulated by Maximus the Confessor, and it was further elaborated upon by Patriarch Germanos I (715-30) in his influential treatise on the liturgy. Theological meaning was assigned to even the humblest example of ecclesiastical architecture and its interior furnishings: proceedings inside the church building mirrored those in heaven.”
The ‘corporate consciousness’ generated by rites revolving round the liturgy could hold communities of Christians together, so long as priests could be mustered to perform the church services. In a sense, therefore, imperial governmental apparatus was superfluous, and orthodox communities could carry on even under barbarian occupation. This was the case in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the populations under Frankish or Italian rule were still, in their hearts, ‘turned towards Greek matters’. Such ‘Greek matters’, which did not distinguish very sharply between this world and the next, gave Marino Sanudo, a fourteenth-century Venetian observer, grounds for unease (see below, p. 778). In similar spirit the eminent holy man, Neophytos, ignored the Latins’ occupation of his island of Cyprus, and as Catia Galatariotou has remarked, judging by his writings alone, one ‘would be forgiven for believing that Cyprus never ceased to be a province of Byzantium’.”°
Byzantine writings about the apocalypse offer little coverage of rebounds of imperial power before the final awakening from drunken sleep, but individual emperors showed resilience, sometimes recovering territories after generations of barbarian occupation. An emperor's expectations of acceptance and collaboration from the orthodox under outsiders’ rule could be misplaced, as in the case of Manuel I Komnenos (see below, pp. 716-17). But after the Latin occupation of Constantinople and the emergence of rival orthodox emperors, widely scattered populations still proved receptive to the idea of belonging to the original Christian Roman empire. Not even the well-organised, culturally accommodating regime of the Villehardouin lords of the Peloponnese could counteract this magnetism, and Marino Sanudo’s apprehensions were voiced at a time when the Palaiologoi were gaining ground on the peninsula (see below, pp. 803-33, 860). Only outsiders with overwhelming military might, bonded together by distinctive religious beliefs and able to count on numerous like-minded enthusiasts, had fair prospects of implanting themselves lastingly in the ‘God-protected City’. This conjuncture did not come about swiftly or inevitably: the subtle, tentative quality of Mehmet II’s (1444-6, 1451-81) measures even after his capture of Constantinople in 1453, suggests as much (see below, pp. 858, 865-72).
This is not to claim that the amalgam of faith-zone, imperial idea and state apparatus which the Byzantine empire represented was an unqualified asset, or that it was sustainable indefinitely. The bonds were coming apart as Athonite monks and some senior churchmen and officeholders denounced the overtures to the Roman papacy which beleaguered emperors, pressured by raisons d état, were constrained to make. The implacable opponents of ecclesiastical subordination to the Latins accused John VIII Palaiologos (1425-48) of betraying orthodoxy when he accepted a form of union with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439 (see below, pp. 862-3). Perhaps other, un-imperial socio-political structures could better have served the earthly needs of Greek-speaking orthodox in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, allowing for the development of their burgeoning urban centres, trading enterprises and /ittérateurs.”' But the plasticity, even virulence, of the orthodox Roman order during its protracted decomposition goes some way to answering the question of why the empire lasted so long.
INSIDE OUT: EMPERORS, OUTSIDERS AND ROMAN ORTHODOX IDENTITY
The relations of Byzantium with the Christian west loom large through the chapters that follow, tracing political, military and ecclesiastical encounters and exchanges. This does not necessarily mark over-simplification of the issues for the sake of narrative formatting. To recount Byzantium’s relationship with all the peoples and areas around it in equal measure would not be feasible, given the kaleidoscopic movement of the peoples and, in many cases, the dearth of source-materials for their relations with the empire. The only institution whose dealings with Byzantium can be tracked continuously across a thousand years is the papacy, offering an alternative universalist scheme of things. The minutiae of this relationship are not analysed or recounted here, but Byzantino-papal relations form a baseline for Byzantium’ relations with the Christian west, a story offering extensive windows on, if not a key to, the empire’s longevity. Time and again, they also show how ‘Old Rome’ and its adherents impinged on the empire’s domestic affairs.
There was an epic turning of the tables in the balance of power and wealth between Byzantium and the west from the sixth century, when Justinian’s armies restored most of Italy to his dominion, through to the eleventh century, when emperors could still harness western martial and commercial resources on their own terms, and up to the thirteenth and fourteenth century, when westerners often, but not invariably, had the upper hand. By the late Byzantine era, the empire was in many ways an economic colony of the west, the Genoese and Venetians controlling the islands and other strategically important vantage-points in the Aegean, backed up by formidable naval resources and exchanging manufactured goods for primary produce. The renown of western arms was such that Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425) spent years touring the west in hopes of military aid.** Yet by this time much of the Peloponnese had been restored to imperial dominion after decades of Frankish rule in the thirteenth century, and — against the Turkish odds —“hot-spots’ such as Thessaloniki still aligned themselves with the emperor in Constantinople under the encouragement of their church leaders (see below, pp. 857-9).
In tracing these shifts in power one glimpses the silhouette, if little more, of that ‘silent majority’ of orthodox Greek-speaking country-dwellers whose customs and beliefs stood in the way of occupiers’ maximal exaction of resources and consolidation of their regimes. In its way, the imperviousness of ‘Greek matters’ to land-based Latin warlords and churchmen offers as strong a clue as any to the reasons for the resilience of the Byzantine empire (see above and below, pp. 777-8). Yet it also stood in the way of Palaiologan emperors seeking some form of union with Rome (see below, pp. 829, 863-4).
This work pays pronounced attention to emperors’ dealings with nonmembers of their empire, those considered not quite ‘Romans’ for one reason or another, laying it open to the charge of undue attention to “Byzantium’s foreign relations with little regard for its internal history’.*? This plaint cited the then-published volumes of the New Cambridge medieval history and is pertinent, seeing that over half our chapters derive from contributions made to that series; the series’ framing of the middle ages is maintained in this work.** Moreover our chapters, in line with the New Cambridge medieval history, aim to present the interplay betweensocio-economic developments, the turn of events and vicissitudes of successive political regimes — the stuff of narrative. There are, as emphasised above, many roads to Byzantium, but the trails left by contacts with outsiders are numerous and quite well documented. They bear closely on Byzantium’s one undeniable characteristic, its durability, and on our opening questions: how on earth did the empire last so long, as political entity and as idea? The empire was continuously confronting armed outsiders, and constructing a balanced account of this requires frequent recourse to non-Byzantine sources. So attention to alternative polities seems not merely excusable, but advisable, particularly since those which veered between merging with and separating from Byzantium often provide invaluable information about the empire’s internal affairs. Four considerations may support this proposition.
Firstly, a geopolitical fact no less important for being obvious: Constantinople lay at the hub of many routes by land and sea. Constantine the Great chose Byzantium because major military highways converged there and because its accessibility by sea would facilitate provisioning of the increased population he envisaged for his new residence. For almost 300 years corn supplies were regularly shipped from Egypt, free of charge. But the assumption that overwhelming advantage would lie with the emperor against all comers already needed qualification in Justinian’s era. Once Byzantium became a kind of empire sans frontiéres, the very accessibility of Constantinople and its environs exposed citizens to abrupt arrivals of aliens. Even lulls were apt to be rudely interrupted by the onset of ‘barbarians’, as for example the appearance off the City walls of 800 Rus or Scandinavians who refused to disarm and whose ships had to be dealt with around 1025.”° And the speed with which Suleiman ibn Qutlumush (1081— 6) and his Turkomans advanced north-westwards along the military road towards the Bosporus in 1075 shows the mixed blessings of the highways inherited from ancient Rome.*° The state of emergency generated by the Arabs’ onset eased after the seventh and eighth centuries, but the challenge posed by potentially formidable foes on two or more fronts at a time never wholly lifted.*” Goings-on among outsiders were therefore of keenest concern to imperial statesmen. Through maintaining a stance of eternal vigilance against barbarians, they could hope for loyalty and order among the City’s inhabitants.
The capital was, in effect, permanently in a frontline position and this raises a second aspect of the empire’s involvement with outsiders: every generation or so Constantinople’s citizens faced a major ‘barbarian’ incursion or at least an alert.** The more fertile tracts of territory in the provinces were mostly either at risk of raids from Muslims or juxtaposed to Slavonicspeaking populations. Those few which were not, such as the inner sanctum around the Sea of Marmara or the north-eastern Peloponnese (see below, p. 501), were of considerable economic and fiscal value to the empire, enabling it to carry on. In fact the very fragmentation of Byzantium’ territories from the seventh century onwards made it the harder for marauders to hit all the prize areas simultaneously. With a modicum of naval capability, the imperial government could tap these fertile areas’ resources and maintain an administrative infrastructure and armed forces of a sort. Revenues reliant on agrarian produce, porous borders and painstaking (and therefore slow) methods of assessing and collecting taxes in consultation with locals were not wholly incompatible with one another (see below, p. 63). But in such circumstances the government could seldom afford very large, full-time armed forces, and the more convincing estimates favour a generally modest scale.”?
This brings us to a third aspect of the emperors’ ready recourse to external regimes and keen interest in direct dealings with them: the value of military manpower from other societies, whether as individuals in the imperial forces, companies serving alongside them, or self-sustaining hosts attacking Byzantium’s enemies on home ground. Sizable field armies recruited from ‘Romans’ and geared to combat were not only costly to equip and maintain. They also posed a standing temptation for ambitious generals. Military coups, apprehended and actual, formed part of the empire’s heritage from ancient Rome and the double-edged qualities of glorious victories won by generals, however trustworthy, underlie Justinian’s differing treatment of Narses, who as a eunuch was debarred from the throne, and Belisarius (see below, pp. 206, 208). During the Byzantine emperors’ centuries-long confrontation with their Muslim counterparts they were ever watchful of their stratégoi (see below, pp. 259, 266, 380-1, 394). These provincial governors had sweeping powers, but neither the revenues nor high-calibre manpower sufficient to make a bid for the throne easy.
Themselves disposing of finite military resources, emperors had good reason to concern themselves with elites and power structures other than their own. It was not merely a matter of cost-effectiveness, substituting battle-hardened ‘barbarian’ brawn for that of Christian Romans, nor even that outsiders were generally less likely to show enthusiasm for attempts on the throne. Diplomacy amounted to negotiating arrangements with external or subordinate powers and with other elements not quite — or not at all — Roman. This was an activity that an emperor could direct from his palace, relying on court counsellors and hand-picked agents, notably the basilikoi who often acted as his emissaries to another potentate or notable. In this way the emperor could swiftly mobilise armed units, even whole armies. They served his ends but with minimal employment of his administrative apparatus, and payment was at least partly conditional upon results. Thus the ‘flat-management’ style discernible in central governmental bureaus of middle Byzantium suited the emperor’s dealings with outsiders particularly well.
And in this special relationship of the emperor with barbarians lies a fourth reason for our paying particular attention to un-Roman peoples beyond the City walls. It is in the field of diplomacy that Byzantine statecraft can claim responsibility for a text without any known precursor from the ancient Roman epoch. The title of De administrando imperio (‘Concerning the governance of the empire’) given by a seventeenth-century scholar to Constantine VII’s handbook addressed to his son Romanos II (959-63) has been criticised as a misnomer, since internal affairs feature only briefly, far more coverage being devoted to ‘the nations’ (ethné), outsiders beyond his direct dominion. But the highly personal nature of the text does not make it unrepresentative: Constantine’s order of priorities registers where palace-bound emperors saw their strengths lying. Constantine’s rhetoric in his preface demonstrates the way in which workaday considerations of costeffectiveness could be dignified into positive affirmations of the emperor's ascendancy, couched in biblical tones: God has raised up Romanos ‘as a golden statue on a high place’, ‘that the nations may bring to thee their gifts’ and bow down before him (Psalms 17.34, 71.10, 32.14)2° Through the incessant reception of embassies from other potentates, the emperor could demonstrate his authority in majestic form and signal his hegemony to subjects as well as to outsiders. In addition, and with less ceremony, he dealt directly with individual foreign notables.
The logothete of the Drome was the first official to have an audience with the emperor in the Chrysotriklinos each morning, and he had a further session every evening. External affairs and matters arising from them were the logothete’s principal brief, and one reason for his close attendance on the emperor was probably the steady flow of outsiders through this hall. The Book of ceremonies treats the reception there of ‘several foreigners’ as routine." These were not necessarily ambassadors, representing another potentate, but individuals. Such face-to-face encounters enabled the emperor to forge personal ties with a wide range of notables, encounters which might involve bestowal of a court-title but had no necessary institutional framework. Through his ‘diplomacy of hospitality’ the emperor could make the acquaintance of individuals who might return to a position of prominence in their home society — or might return to acquire as much. Besides, there was always the possibility that a visiting ethnikos would opt to remain at Constantinople, becoming the emperor’s doulos, even ultimately a Roman. Young barbarians from across the steppes or from the other end of Europe were apt to spend stints at court.” The princely and noble families among the Armenians offered particularly rich pickings for talent-spotters at Constantinople, and lower-born individuals could rise through merit, usually initially military, in the emperor’s service. The families of the Kourkouases and the Lekapenoi are examples of such recruitment. Instances of Armenian princes and, still more strikingly, of middle-ranking notables holding court-titles while resident in their homeland will feature in chapters below.
The Armenian lands and their multifarious links with Byzantium were to an extent a special case, but similar processes were underway on most approaches to Byzantium other than central and south-eastern Anatolia in the era of the jihad. They underline the way in which governance shaded into dealings with separate societies and cultures. During the earlier middle ages military governors supplemented central officials in treating with Slavonic-speaking and other non-Roman notables on the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Dyrrachium and other fortresses and strongholds on the Balkan and Peloponnesian coast, while headmen of Slav groupings such as the Belegezitai were termed archontes and given responsibilities as well as titles. In this way, and complemented by ecclesiastical organisation, imperial enclaves very gradually extended their reach to the point where taxes were imposed or services exacted.*# In the western portions of the Byzantine ‘archipelago’ what might be termed ‘internal diplomacy’ was continually in play, operating by devices not dissimilar to the higher-profile encounters of the emperor with potentates and notables in the Chrysotriklinos or Magnaura at Constantinople.
Thus encounters and negotiations of many kinds between the emperor and his senior officials and outsiders — whether informal meetings, ties solemnised by a court-title, or actual administrative posts — were the sinews of Byzantine governance. This networking process was necessarily unending, occurring at many different points and social levels across the imperial dominions, not merely the capital. This is one reason why the question of Roman identities is so complex. A senior army commander, Philaretos Brachamios, could carve out a power structure having markedly Armenian characteristics to the point where he was dubbed first of the Armenian rulers of Cilicia by a later Armenian chronicler.®* And a century earlier the sons of an Armenian omés in the imperial armed forces had transmuted into leaders of a Bulgarian insurrection against Byzantine occupation, the Kometopouloi (see below, p. 522). Collation of Byzantine with western sources shows several persons prominent in the imperial service, intellectual life and even the Byzantine patriarchate in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to have had close Italian connections, if not actually to have been of Italian origin.3°
It is by considering some of the other elites with which the imperial court had so much to do that one may hope to understand the workings of the Byzantine empire. If this attention to ‘foreign relations’ appears excessive, such is the price of prying into the human, and not very institutionalised, organs of that empire. Byzantium’s workings involved compromise and accommodation on the part of both outsiders and imperial authorities. The latter were in practice willing to make concessions. For example, the Rus trading in Constantinople in the tenth century were allowed to have their disputes with Byzantines resolved partly in accordance with Rus custom,*” while the Armenian princes allocated territories in eastern Anatolia had commands over sizable communities of fellow Armenians, maintaining their own culture and church organisation.3* At any stage in the course of these encounters, individual outsiders could opt for Roman ways and religious orthodoxy in their entirety. Hence the need to keep orthodoxy clear and pure, and to be on guard against deviance. It is no accident that lists of ‘the errors of the Latins’ (i.e. western Christians) began to be circulated at the very time when westerners were becoming a familiar sight in the larger Byzantine towns and on highways, and when social intercourse with them was on the rise.*?
It was, in fact, their ongoing accommodation of exogenous groups and individuals within the empire in varying degrees of assimilation and their flexibility in dealings with them and with externally based traders, elites and potentates that made Byzantine rulers so adamant concerning certain prerogatives. So long as key marks of uniquely legitimate hegemony were reserved, all manner of concessions — jurisdictional, territorial, honorific — might be vouchsafed according to circumstances. Foremost among these ‘brandmarks’ was the name of ‘Roman,’ with all its connotations of cultural and moral superiority, antiquity, rightful sovereignty and, from Constantine the Great’s time on, manifest Christian destiny (see above, p. 6). It is no accident that the Byzantines reacted promptly to those external rulers and their emissaries (usually western) who impugned their monopoly of Romanness, whether by terming the basileus ‘Greek’ or by purporting to brand their own regime Roman (see below, pp. 417, 432; 540, 545). From the same considerations, efforts were made to maintain consistent protocols, terminology and, even (for centuries at a time), media in formal communications of the basileus with other rulers. As Anthony Bryer observes, John VIII was still styling himself ‘emperor and autocrat of the Romans’ and signing in purple ink at the council of Florence in 1439.4°
Court ceremonial and indeed the whole ambiance of the emperor's ‘sacred palace’ in Constantinople, its orders of precedence, titles, vestments and other trappings, were likewise presented as quintessentially ‘Roman’. As the chapters below suggest, the style of the court could alter as new emperors sought to distance themselves from immediate predecessors, and certain authority symbols changed appearance over time. Yet even emperors invoking ‘renewal’ to legitimise their regime tended to present themselves as ‘new Constantines’, harking back to the very first Constantine. Conscious efforts were made to use de luxe baths, antique dining styles, buildings and other monuments, together with chariot-racing and spectacles patently associated with ancient traditions for the grander state occasions.*” Such observances seem mostly to have continued until the twelfth century. Some involved sizable numbers of Constantinople’s citizens as well as the elite,* and the games and races occasionally yet regularly held in the Hippodrome symbolised the emperor’s ‘marriage’ to his City as well as his other attributes, such as eternal victory (see below, p. 521). Even banquets in the palace drew hundreds of invited guests, and the purpose of official orders of precedence was to maintain ‘good form’ and order (taxis) against the ever-present risk of confusion and loss of imperial composure.*+ But there was also a sense that the imperial court was the repository, breeding-ground and citadel of true Romanness, the place where those ‘born in the purple’ would first see light of day.*
The conviction that being raised in the palace conferred moral qualities as well as legitimacy was volubly expressed by a prime (and far from disinterested) beneficiary, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Decrying his former co-emperor, Romanos I Lekapenos (920—44) as ‘common and illiterate’, he opined that only ‘those raised up in the palace’ were imbued with ‘Roman customs from the very beginning’, as if the court were a kind of crucible of Romanness.*° Classical, Attic Greek was also prized by Constantine, aware as he was of his own deficiencies in writing it.47 Attic was the dialect in which orations and other formal statements were composed for delivery at court occasions, and in which official accounts of emperors’ deeds were composed. Thus the Byzantine court, with its regard for ‘good form’ and preoccupation with continuity, religious orthodoxy and linguistic correctness might seem to epitomise a ‘mandarin’ political culture. Literary works from this quarter are among the readiest sources for the general history of the empire (see below, p. 58).
Such priorities and shibboleths are, however, best viewed against a background of barbarians frequenting the imperial court, ad hoc arrangements continually being made with useful potentates, and titles bestowed on outsiders with barely a smattering of spoken Greek. The proportion of families in the ruling elite comprising first-, second- or third-generation immigrants probably made up around a quarter of the total.4* The number of persons of external stock who made it, or almost made it, to the imperial throne is striking. Romanos Lekapenos’ uncouthness made an easy target for Constantine VII’s jibes since he was of quite recent Armenian origins. But the Porphyrogenitus was himself the grandson of a low-born opportunist, conceivably of Slavonic stock; the tendentious ancestry claimed for Basil ‘the Macedonian in the Life of Basil composed under Constantine’s auspices even represents him as of Armenian kingly descent.*?
Once sole occupant of the throne, Basil I had displayed his orthodox piety and staged triumphs to parade his supposed qualities of victorious generalship.°° He also undertook spectacular works to restore churches in and around Constantinople and to refurbish the Great Palace, the setting for imperial ceremonies.” Basil’s measures were designed to legitimise a palace coup, but they demonstrate how certain ‘core values’ such as doctrinal orthodoxy and regard for palace ceremonial lent themselves to assimilation by highly ambitious, capable outsiders. Basil’s adaptation and manipulation of establishment forms and conventions was extraordinarily skilful, enabling him to work, charm and perhaps sleep his way to the very top. But his career pattern was played out less spectacularly — and through more straightforward merits such as military talent — by many individuals intent on merely attaining the higher reaches of the imperial establishment, or gaining a footing there for their offspring. Many were members, if not from the dominant family, of elites beyond Byzantium’s borders, external or internal.°* Thus one of Basil’s early patrons, the widow Danelis, appears to have belonged to the ruling family of a Sk/avinia in the Peloponnese. Basil’s way of thanking her upon seizing power was to confer a court-title on her son and to stage a reception in the Magnaura, befitting ‘someone of substance and distinction who is at the head of an ethnos’.%
The concern with ‘form’ and general inclination to stand on ceremony of imperial Byzantines were, unquestionably, obstacles to casual infiltration by outsiders belonging to different cultures. Their presence in sizable numbers in the imperial milieu was predicated by the ‘diplomacy of hospitality’. An abiding apprehension was that this might lead to dilution of the ‘Roman customs’ which were integral to Byzantium’s credentials for hegemony. Such apprehensions are seldom vented in as many words in extant written sources. But they go far to explaining the limitations of the historical sources emanating from the Byzantine establishment, their preference for a classicising prose style and tendency to present events in terms of antique or scriptural precedents. The insistence on taxis in the more functional works composed in palace circles is, in fact, an index of the pressures making for the reverse. Prominent among those pressures’ drivers was the steady stream into Constantinople — and, often, out again — of outsiders, whether from the ‘outer territories’ beyond the City walls*+ or out-and-out ethnikoi. The maelstrom of constant interaction between the imperial leadership and significant outsiders and alternative power structures underlies the glassy surface that establishment-derived literature tends to present to us. This interaction, the opportunities as well as the problems it posed for Byzantium’ rulers, is a theme running through the chapters of this book and it has a bearing on the empire’s longevity.
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