Download PDF | (New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture) Panos Sophoulis - Banditry in the Medieval Balkans, 800-1500-Palgrave Macmillan (2020)
194 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience.
The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies. The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies. The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
This book is the result of several years of research at a number of universities, libraries and research centres. During that time I have been fortunate to receive the advice and help of a great many people. I must begin by expressing my gratitude to Florin Curta, who read most of the text in draft and provided invaluable feedback. I am also greatly indebted to Kiril Nenov and Nella Lonza, who contributed significantly to this book, both with practical assistance and with information and suggestions. Aleksandar Uzelac, Yiannis Stoyas, Tsvetelin Stepanov, Efi Synkellou, Charis Messis, Yanko Hristov, Adrian Magina and Tsvetelin Stepanov have all offered valuable advice or helpful comments along the way. I also wish to thank Nebojiša Kartalija, Dimitrios Skrekas, Mila Krneta, Elmedina Duranović, Polydoros Goranis, Jasmina Ć irić, Mihai Hasan and Fleur Kinson for their various forms of support. Finally, I would like to express special appreciation to Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, who has generously offered to prepare the maps for this study.
Introduction It is generally accepted that from antiquity down to early modern times banditry was endemic in many parts of the Balkans. Although its impact was relatively marginal, it clearly constituted a considerable hazard to local safety and order. The activity of robbers and highwaymen often disrupted communications and trade, and could severely undermine the productive capacity of the countryside, especially in poor agricultural and pastoral communities. In fact, it was precisely these societies that provided the perfect habitat for the emergence of banditry during the Balkan Middle Ages. Hard pressed by the poverty-stricken life of the small landowner, the dependent peasant or the mountain herdsman, many men had little choice but to turn to crime. There can be little doubt that banditry was already festering in the Balkans during the early medieval period.1 The surviving sources provide some glimpses of the activity of local brigands and marauders, among them the Slav Skamareis, a notorious robber band that appears to have operated in the Lower Danube region from the sixth century onwards.2 Nevertheless, on the whole, the source material for this period is so scanty that we can scarcely make any general observations on the history of Balkan banditry. By contrast, the picture to be drawn from later texts and documents offers a far better guide to the subject.
For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular it may be argued that the available evidence is, in some cases, sufficiently detailed to allow the formation of firm conclusions about the problem of brigandage in the region. One of the main problems historians encounter when examining the sources of the period in question is that medieval writers often use the term ʻbanditʼ to express a variety of concepts. In this light, it is essential to establish a methodological framework from which we can approach the question of ʻrealʼ or ʻcommonʼ banditry in the Balkans, a task that is undertaken in Chap. 3. In view of the working definition adopted there, various acts of violence that are described in the sources as banditry will not be considered in this investigation. If the phenomenon of brigandage in the medieval Balkans is to be meaningfully analysed, attention needs to be paid to the geographical, economic and social context in which it developed. For the most part, bandits operated in rural settings, quite often in isolated and relatively inaccessible areas. In this inhospitable terrain, a well-organized network of roads, which medieval rulers had inherited from the Romans, provided vital links between towns and countryside, secured the spread of central authority and facilitated commercial activity. These roads attracted bandits for two reasons: first, because they were frequented by merchants, civil and ecclesiastical officers, artisans, monks and pilgrims, most of whom were expected to carry with them cash or other valuables. Second, because the impregnable locales traversed by many of these roads were sufficiently forbidding to prevent the effective penetration of urban institutions; effectively, they demarcated the limits of central authority.
Given the very weak structures of policing the countryside in Byzantium and the other Balkan states, even a small mountain or forest might suffice to offer a refuge. Next to be assessed are the general economic and social conditions attendant in the medieval Balkans—especially in rural areas—from the ninth century onwards. It is self-evident that the intensification of banditry during this period was predicated upon a substantial level of prosperity. To an extent, this was a result of the state of relative peace that had been established over much of the peninsula following the Byzantine conquest by the Macedonian emperors. The growth of regional trade, which was largely due to the activities of Italian merchants, was another contributing factor. But while there is little doubt that, overall, the rural population benefited from the expansion of wealth and the general rise in the standards of living, one suspects that many saw no noticeable improvement in their condition.
It is precisely to this segment of the rural society that historians need to turn their attention in order to sketch out the social background from which brigandage arose. Destitute peasants and herders are often assumed to be associated with banditry, and indeed the evidence provided by our sources seems to confirm this hypothesis. The latter in particular lived mainly in groups far removed from the towns and cities that represented centres of government control and, additionally, were on the move for significant parts of the year. This freedom, when combined with the need to be well armed to protect their herds and pastures, created a situation in which they could rather easily use their indigenous skills to prey on others for a livelihood.3 The social network within which these men operated may have complicated the situation. Much like their Ottoman or early modern counterparts, medieval bandits depended for survival on broader networks of local support, which was usually seen as divided into two basic types: the kinship links in which the bandits were enmeshed and, outside this, the broader community in which they lived. As will be shown in Chap. 5, the evidence drawn from the archives of the city of Dubrovnik has enriched our understanding of how these networks were formed and functioned in practice. A set of questions that arise in connection with brigand groups themselves are also discussed in that same chapter. A thorough analysis of the surviving sources may provide valuable clues as to their structure, size and methods of operation.
By the same token, attention should be drawn to the victims of bandits. In many cases, our sources provide sufficient information about them, thereby enabling a classification according to their professional background. An essential part of this investigation concerns the measures taken by the authorities to enforce law and order in areas affected by banditry. Despite the fact that during the period under discussion the Balkans were dominated by powerful, centralized governments (most notably in Byzantium and Serbia), it is clear that the latter were not always able to keep peripheral regions firmly under control. In fact, the impression one gets from the available evidence is that most brigands showed a clear understanding that the state’s weakness created numerous opportunities for profit. How, then, did the authorities attempt to control banditry, and how effective were these efforts? These questions will be dealt with in Chap. 6, where both the legislative and on-the-ground responses to outbreaks of banditry will be investigated. While brigandage in the medieval Balkans developed within its own unique historical, social and economic circumstances, it would be interesting to place it into a broader European context. To this end, a comparison between Balkan and western European evidence is attempted in Chap. 7. The parallel patterns of criminal activity that are uncovered are extremely instructive. Two points in particular stand out. The first concerns the general conditions under which banditry arose in these two regions; in both instances, poverty appears to have played an important role. In addition, it is clear that rural violence tended to spin out of control during times of political, military and social unrest. The second point concerns the people involved in banditry.
As in the Balkans, peasants, soldiers and members of the nobility feature prominently in reports of criminal activity in western medieval kingdoms, and this cannot be wholly coincidental. The second part of Chap. 7 is devoted to the ʻsearchʼ for real or fictitious bandits in Balkan oral tradition. Numerous ballads and heroic songs celebrating the deeds of such figures survive from the Ottoman era, so there is every reason to believe that bandits should also have been the subjects of song and story during the Middle Ages. To be sure, while the heroes of many outlaw legends never actually existed, the background of these accounts is undoubtedly historical. The inspiration behind them is the everyday oppression and dreadful poverty to which the mass of common people in the Balkans were subjected during the period under consideration. While medieval Balkan bandits are truly fascinating objects of study, historians have not given them the amount of attention that they deserve. This may have something to do with the absence of large and diverse source material before the fourteenth century. In any case, only a handful of publications—most of them articles in journals—have dealt with the topic, and none explores in depth the fundamental questions related to it. The best survey published thus far was that by Mark Bartousis (1981) on brigandage in the late Byzantine Empire.
Although focusing his discussion on a relatively small number of incidents (some of which took place in the Balkan provinces of the empire), Bartusis made a significant contribution to the understanding of the workings of banditry in Byzantine society, highlighting in particular the role played in it by soldiers. Catherine Asdracha (1971) provided useful insights into the phenomenon of brigandage during the second Byzantine civil war (1341–1347), much of which was fought on Thracian and Macedonian soil. More recently, Elena Gkartzonika (2012) turned her attention to the career of Momčilo, a Bulgarian bandit-chieftain, to whom Vasil Gjuzelev (1967) had also devoted a monograph more than fifty years ago. Particularly important for the study of banditry in its Balkan context is the vast body of documentary evidence contained in the State archives of Dubrovnik. The medieval material that has been published over the past several decades casts an entirely new light onto many aspects of brigandage, thus enhancing our overall understanding of the phenomenon. The work Esad Kurtović (2012, 2014, etc.) has brought to the surface a wealth of information concerning the activity of Bosnian and Dalmatian bandits in the 1300s and 1400s. His pupil Elmedina Duranovič supplemented his findings in a doctoral dissertation defended in 2017, which dealt with the history of highway robbery in medieval Bosnia. Two essential studies for the history of banditry, which sparked widespread debate in academic circles and inspired a great deal of fresh research, are Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959) and Bandits (1969).4 There, Hobsbawm constructed the concept of social banditry, a primitive form of class struggle and class resistance in agrarian and frontier societies. Although criticized as methodologically unsound or theoretically flawed, the central notion of social banditry still serves as a referential starting point for any discussion of the social history of crime in general.5 Nevertheless, in a study of brigandage in the medieval Balkans such as this, the question of the appropriateness of this model should inevitably be raised. Indeed, as will be seen in Chap. 3, the concept of social banditry is hardly applicable here, even though some of Hobsbawm’s criteria for its appearance are clearly present.
In view of the various methodological and other problems associated with the study of Balkan banditry, the primary aim of this book is not to produce a detailed history of the phenomenon, but to discover how bandits bear on the history of the medieval Balkans. The analysis undertaken below will hopefully make a significant contribution in this direction.
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