Download PDF | (Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications, 5) Leslie Brubaker (ed.) - Byzantium in the Ninth Century_ Dead or Alive_ Papers from the Thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies.
288 Pages
Preface
Leslie Brubaker
The thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Dead or Alive? Byzantium in the Ninth Century, ran at the University of Birmingham from the 23rd to the 26th of March 1996. Elizabeth Bryer was alive when it was planned; she died on 16 December 1995. This volume is dedicated to her memory.
The genesis of the Symposium was simple. We felt that the thirtieth Symposium should in some way commemorate the past twenty-nine; planning in 1995, we returned to the 1975 Symposium, familiar from the now-classic Iconoclasm, edited by Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin. Instead of Iconoclasm-redux, however, we asked our contributors to consider the ninth century for itself, more or less stripped of the iconoclast /iconophile mind-set that has permeated much writing about the century, but which in many ways represents the (modern) imposition of eighth-century issues on ninth-century realities. The theme of the Symposium was prosaically listed as ‘Byzantium in the ninth century’ at the top of all of the planning committee’s agendas until (very) shortly before the preliminary mailing was delivered to the printer, when Bryer prefixed it with the query ‘Dead or alive?’. As the Symposium was envisaged to focus on the aspects of the century that had been too often ignored or minimalized — lost between the seductive lure of Iconoclasm, which ended in 843, and the so-called Macedonian revival of the tenth century — Bryer’s question almost seamlessly inserted itself as the appropriate epithet for a reappraisal of the evidence about the ‘lost’ century. While we all know that gauging the past by centuries ‘s an artificial imposition, it remains true that the events of the 800s in Byzantium have generally been seen less as indicators of their real context than as signifiers that perpetuated or anticipated events outside their own centenary framework. Not surprisingly, the chapters that follow demonstrate that to collapse the century in such a way distorts our understanding of Byzantium: the ninth century, as any of its inhabitants would no doubt have been happy to attest, was very much alive.
The thirtieth Symposium was organized into four sessions, with framing talks by Chris Wickham on Byzantium and the west and by Hugh Kennedy
on Byzantium and Islam in the ninth century, and with a concluding lecture by Paul Speck. ‘Byzantium on the ground’ focussed on archaeology; most of the papers from that session have not been included here for the flat-footed reason that archaeology moves faster than the academic press: the reports needed to appear sooner than our publication schedule allowed. The remaining three sessions have shaped the three sections of this volume: ‘The thought-world of Byzantium’ has become Section I on the Byzantine state; part of the session ‘The shape of Byzantium’ appears as Section II on Byzantine culture; ‘Beyond Byzantium’ has become Section III on Byzantine relations with the outside world. Each of these sections is introduced by a chapter intended to contextualize what follows and, to a more limited extent, to fill in at least sketchily some of the gaps that are an inevitable result of a Symposium publication.
As will be clear from the list of participants, the thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies relied on an international cast of scholars. This would not have been possible without the generous funding of the Hellenic Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, and the Whitting Bequest. We thank them all, profoundly. I am also grateful to the former and the current chairs of the publications committee for the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, Averil Cameron and Elizabeth Jeffreys, for their advice on this volume. On behalf of all involved in the Symposium, I thank the Symposiarch, Anthony Bryer, the Director of the Centre, John Haldon, the secretary of the Centre, Gaye Bye, and the students who made the Symposium run: Helen Tobler, who ran everything with extraordinary efficiency and even more extraordinary good humour, Julian Baker, Marian England, Andrew Livsey, Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Margaret Nicholls, and Anna Williams. Production of the volume has been handled with amazing grace by Ruth Peters; the index was compiled by Anna Williams.
1. The Byzantine state in the ninth century: an introduction
John Haldon
The four chapters that follow in this section represent four different aspects of the evolution of the Byzantine state during the ninth century. Significantly, however, they do not deal with the expansion of the so-called ‘theme system’, nor with fiscal administration and the state budget, all of which would certainly merit attention in a Symposium dealing with this period. They do not deal, in other words, with the institutional and administrative structures of the state, but rather with aspects of the state’s being which might be seen as part of its existence in the minds and beliefs of those who inhabited it, who thought about it as a thing, an object of political—religious discourse. The state as a concept was, of course, crucial to the identity of those who had the time, or the need, to consider it: imperial, orthodox Christian, and Roman were all terms which evoked for Byzantines at any period a specific group of notions and ideas about the world and their role in it. But the vocabulary employed to describe the state was derived from pre-Christian politics and philosophy or, in more restricted legal writing, classical Roman notions. And these following chapters all examine different ways in which these definitions were re-interpreted, enhanced, and given new meaning in the course of the ninth century.
This choice of topic is, it seems to me, no accident. Both in the consciousness of learned Byzantines and for the modern historian or informed observer, the ninth century marks a watershed in the evolution of the medieval Roman polity. We can see how, after the catastrophes of the seventh century, there occurred a gradual stabilization of the foreign and domestic situation in the eighth century. The Byzantine government at Constantinople was able to begin the process of expanding its economic base through improvements in the system of fiscal assessment, as well as through the recovery of lost territories (especially in the Peloponnese and central Greece). This was not just a result of political and military stability,
From Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive?, ed. Leslie Brubaker. Copyright © 1998 by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hampshire, GU11 3HR, Great Britain.
of course: cultural innovations in writing, such as the introduction of minuscule script in archival record-keeping, may also have contributed in important ways. We can also see how these resources began to affect the empire's ability to face up to and challenge the caliphate in the east, even though results were slow to follow. Furthermore, the effects of the later phases of the first period of Iconoclasm, in particular the conclusions reached by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, gave added impulse, if they did not create the need, to re-assess the immediate as well as the more distant past, and to provide a more self-conscious and ‘modern’ perspective on what had happened in the seventh and eighth centuries, something which does not seem to have existed, at least in a way which has left any obvious trace in the sources, before this time.
For the Byzantines themselves, the past needed to be explained in terms of the tangible results of the present, so that chroniclers and historians, churchmen and courtiers sought the causes of former ills and especially of Iconoclasm in order to clarify both why the empire protected by God and inhabited by the Romans, the ‘chosen people’, had suffered so many catastrophes, and why God had visited tyrants such as the iconoclast emperors upon them. From the perspective of a ‘search for identity’, the whole history of ninth-century Byzantine cultural evolution can be set against this backcloth.
But how precisely should we understand the Byzantine state in the ninth century? To begin with, we might perhaps offer a working definition of that much overused word ‘state’, a term which implies for the modern reader so many assumptions about how political formations work, the ways in which political élites are formed and operate, and the ways in which international relations between such political units evolve, that it is worthwhile perhaps to ask a few simple questions about how states are constituted, and whether we should use the word at all of pre-modern polities.
The debate about the origins and evolution of states and state-like political systems has its origins, in the western world at least, in ancient Athens, and can be traced through Roman and early Christian writing into the scholastic movement of the middle ages. But it was always primarily a moral and philosophical debate. In more recent European history those philosophical and moral concerns came to the fore once more in the Enlightenment and, with a more markedly social scientific aspect, in the writings of political philosophers before, during and after the French revolution. But it is especially in the last century, from Max Weber on, that social scientists, anthropologists and historians have embarked upon a debate which has involved all three different perspectives in an effort to arrive at some heuristically and descriptively useful ways of defining
‘state’ for the purposes of their different projects.! Definitions have been developed and dismissed, arguments about the issue of the permanence of bureaucratic institutions and the stability of the political formation as a whole during periods of transfer of central authority and power, of the nature and form of the extraction and redistribution of surplus wealth which political élites require to maintain their own position and the existence of the state they embody, and so on have filled countless pages. Ultimately, most definitions seem to reflect the functional requirements of a particular academic discourse (historical and diachronic, socio-anthropological and synchronic, and so forth), and one may reasonably wonder why such a simple question has produced so much literature and debate. The answer is, of course, straightforward: unless one begins with a reasonably well-thought-through working definition, locating causal relationships inevitably comes to rely more on the historian's (or anthropologist’s) intuition than on a clear idea of the connections between particular elements of the analysis, and no common ground for pursuing the discussion will be created.
A working definition which I have used elsewhere, and which seems to answer to the perceived structural realities of Byzantine structures of political power, runs thus: to qualify as a state, a political formation must be a more-or-less territorially unified political entity, with a ‘centre’ (which may be peripatetic, of course) from which a ruler or ruling group exercises political authority, and which maintains its existence over more than a single generation. In addition, such a political formation normally possesses a political/ideological system, expressed at a formal level in political— theological discourse; a degree of institutional reproduction of key administrative functions within the state, potentially (at least) independent of the ruler and of changes in personnel. States will thus be understood as establishing over time complex ideological and legitimating systems, and more impersonalized and institutionalized modes of surplus appropriation, than do clan or tribal territorial powers; they move away from administration based on kinship and lineage relationships, however important these may remain. They also evolve institutional structures for defence and offence and for raising resources which in turn evolve their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the practices of ‘ordinary’ society. States can thus create their own administrative class, for they are made up, toa degree, of sets of specialist institutions whose ‘interests’ lie in the furtherance and reproduction of those ways of doing things which assure their own continued existence. I leave to one side the moral-philosophical issues, such as whether or not states are inevitably oppressive, as belonging to a somewhat different arena.
There is, however, an important analytical distinction to be drawn, between ‘the state’ as an abstract political entity with ‘interests’ in respect of the appropriation and distribution of resources, and an appropriate ideological and symbolic structure — in other words, the state as an idea — and the actual institutional and physical establishment of the state machinery at any given time.“ It is the former which concerns the contributors to this first section of the Symposium volume, and in the remaining part of this introduction I will suggest why this should be.
When we look at the Byzantine political formation in the ninth century, there is no doubt that it possesses all the right qualifications for statehood: an established fiscal administrative bureaucracy, a government based in an imperial household which, in spite of often dramatic transfers of political power from ruler to ruler and their supporting factions and vested interests, remains fairly stable and continues to function even through the disruption of civil war or major foreign attack; a standing army which was paid, at least in principle, on a regular basis from a treasury whose resources were entirely independent of the imperial household (although in practice, as we know, imperial and ‘state’ or ‘public’ finances did indeed often overlap). Just as importantly, an imperial ideology and an effective machinery for establishing and maintaining a high degree of poltical-religious conformity existed in the tradition of imperial law making and in the institutions of the church. It was this, and the symbolic universe which it evoked for subjects of the emperors and the emperors themselves, which gave Byzantines, in differing ways throughout society, an idea of who they were, why they called themselves Romans, and also some notion of what duties were attached to the role with which God had endowed them.
Yet it is in precisely these later areas that Byzantines felt themselves most threatened in the ninth century. The army and the fiscal system functioned well, even if, when one examines their administration, on the one hand, and their tactical performance, on the other, the armies of the empire sometimes performed poorly just when the government most needed success. Yet even in the worst of crises, as in 811, with the emperor slain on the battlefield along with many key officers, with the government at Constantinople in a state of near panic, with coups d’état in the air and discontent in the ranks, the state is hardly shaken. The local armies, half militia and half professional soldiers, continue to function at the regional level regardless of the disaster which had befallen the imperial élite forces and the provincial units which had accompanied the emperor, illustrating the effectiveness of the localization of command and defence of strong points which had evolved. The state’s fiscal and administrative machinery continues to function with barely a murmur, while the various factions in the army and the Constantinopolitan establishment quickly reach a series of compromises and re-establish a common front. In other words, institutional stability was deeply rooted and the state and its apparatus were embedded in the socialpolitical order to the extent that a political crisis following a single defeat, given the resources still available to the new rulers or their advisers, was of no real long-term significance. Indeed, the strength of this institutional fabric can be seen in the results of the seventh century when, in spite of massive losses of territory and resources, a series of political crises, a serious decline in morale and a long string of military defeats, the state and its institutions were able to survive and evolve during the eighth century in new directions.
Institutional strength is necessarily only a part of the picture, for morale and ideological motivation were equally important for any effective longterm resistance to such pressure. It was that ideological strength which had carried the empire through the seventh and eighth centuries, and in its forms and expression was still evolving in new directions ~ the ‘Iconoclasm’ of Leo III and Constantine V was one manifestation of this.? Yet it is apparent from the proliferation of anti-iconoclast material in the later eighth and first half of the ninth century that a problem about the past was perceived, a problem which demanded explicit answers to questions which were intimately bound up with the Byzantines’ own view of themselves.
The problems which were thought to have been generated by Iconoclasm and by the rule of the emperors of the Isaurian dynasty were not, it is clear, problems of state institutions (if we exclude the question of the iconoclast attitudes attributed to some of the soldiers recruited by Constantine V). On the contrary, they were problems of a moral and theological nature, and the resolution to these problems was outlined in the decisions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. Yet the implications raised by these problems did not go away. For having at least provisionally resolved the question of holy images and their status, the question arose as to why they had become the focus of an imperial heresy in the first place? What influences had played a role, and how? And what did all this mean in terms of the imperial idea, the Roman past, and the claims of ninth-century Byzantines and their emperors to be both Roman and orthodox, protected by God and destined to restore the rule of orthodoxy and expand their oikoumené, their (civilized) inhabited world?
Study of the texts which provide us with most of our information about the iconoclast controversy and the iconoclast emperors has been intensified recently as awareness of the extent to which anti-iconoclast theologians and others in the later eighth and ninth centuries rationalized the past in constructing their narratives of what happened. Paul Speck in particular has placed great emphasis on showing, not that iconophiles tampered with ‘the facts’, or that they deliberately manipulated ‘the truth’ — for it is apparent that no-one really knew what the facts or the truth were in any objective sense — but rather that they made sense of what they knew or could hypothesize had happened through the prism of their own common sense assumptions about the past and about the values and morality of their own culture. One of the results of this perspective is to realize that Byzantine views of the past were, so to speak, ahistorical: the fundamental modes of Christian behaviour and practice had been established in the time of the Fathers of the Church (Gust as the fundamental institutions of the state had been established by Constantine and reaffirmed by Justinian), and on this basis change away from these practices (or what was assumed to have been such practices, as they had evolved by the ninth century) was a deviation from the true faith and, therefore, heretical. Thus if it was accepted that holy images had always been venerated in the form defined by the Seventh Ecumenical Council (and the sessions of the council went to great lengths to show that this was indeed the case), the policies of the Isaurian emperors were clearly heretical and a deviation from the norm. Any explanation which could throw light on why this deviation had occurred was therefore plausible, so that Jewish and Islamic influence, diabolic intervention and similar causes were ascribed as motivating the emperors and their evil henchmen. These rulers could thus be made responsible not only for the schism in the church; they could also be blamed for the ‘disappearance’ of classical education (the well-known passage in the chronicle of George the monk) and a whole range of other evils.*
But this process of interpretation did not happen all at once: on the contrary, it is important to recognize that it was a cumulative and, indeed, almost opportunistic, and certainly multi-stranded development, through which different elements within Byzantine society in the ninth century, including the rulers and their advisers, could both justify their own actions and explain any weaknesses or failings in their own policies or the actions of their forebears. The four chapters which follow mark different aspects and phases of this process. Marie Theres Fogen thus argues that the effort to recover and re-animate Roman law from the time of Basil I follows the recognition by that emperor or his closest advisers (in particular, Photios) of the inadequacies of Byzantine claims to ‘Roman-ness’, and of their knowledge of both the Latin language and of Roman culture, an awareness which seems to have grown following the receipt of the sharply-worded, even mocking reply received from Pope Nicholas I in 865 to his own letter by Michael HI, which pointed out in the clearest terms east Roman inadequacies in these and other areas. Claudia Ludwig similarly is concerned to show how Byzantine concern with the Paulician question — which had, in fact, been an issue for some time before the Paulician rebellion in the 860s and 870s — reflects their own preoccupations, and that the unduly harsh attack on this group at that particular time is particularly significant in this respect. The attempt to reconstruct the dynastic history of the Amorian dynasty through the character and personality of the emperor Theophilos played a similar role, according to Athanasios Markopoulos, in the process of re-assessing the past and making sense of the second period of iconoclast rule; while Shaun Tougher’s analysis of the thought-world of Leo VI exemplifies in many ways the results of this process. For Leo VI expresses the confidence and authority of a ruler fully aware, and able to justify and account for, his position as a divinely-appointed ruler of the God-protected empire, attitudes fully borne out and given voice in his compilation of novellae, in his military treatise, the Tactica, and in his actions during his reign. If the disaster which befell Nicephorus ] in 811 and, more importantly, the re-introduction of imperial Iconoclasm by Leo V in 815, characterize the troubles, both political and ideological, which faced the Byzantine empire at the beginning of the ninth century, then the re-animation of Roman law and the self-confidence and imperialist claims of Leo VI almost a century later are suitable testimony to the changes which had taken place in Byzantine awareness over that time. On the basis of this evidence alone, it would seem that the answer to the question posed in the title of this symposium is a resounding ‘Alive!’
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