Download PDF | Piotr L. Grotowski - Arms and Armour of the Warrior Saints_ Tradition and Innovation in Byzantine Iconography (843-1261)-Brill Academic Pub (2010).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present work came into being in its basic form as a doctoral dissertation at the Faculty of History of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland and was defended in June 2003. My tutor Prof. Dr hab. Anna Rdézycka-Bryzek (now deceased) was always ready to provide support and friendly advice, and I would like to dedicate this book to her memory.
I was introduced to the ‘arcana’ of arms and armour research methodology by Dr Irena Grabowska (now also deceased) of the Militaria Department of the National Museum in Krakow. The burden of reviewing the Polish version of the present work was undertaken by renowned specialists in their fields—the Byzantine historian and unrivalled numismatist, Prof. Dr hab. Maciej Salamon, and the expert on the military equipment of the ancient and Islamic worlds, Prof. Dr hab. Zdzistaw Zygulski, Jr. Meanwhile, Dr hab. Nicholas Victor Sekunda, of the University of Gdansk, was kind enough to prepare the publisher’s review. In turn, the English text was reviewed by Prof. Paul Magdalino and Dr. Maria G. Parani, who made a number of valuable comments. To all of these I wish to express my sincerest thanks.
Much other valuable advice, comments and bibliographic leads were provided by the great authorities on Byzantine weaponry and military studies: Professor Taxiarchas Kolias of the University of Athens, and Professor John F. Haldon of the University of Birmingham. Also of great assistance were Dr Miodrag Markovic of the University of Belgrade, Dr Mary Whitby of Oxford University, Teocharidis Plutachos of the 9th Ephoreia (Directorate) of Byzantine Antiquities in Thessaloniki, and not least Andrea Babuin of the University of Ioannina, Greece, who in a voluminous correspondence argued with some of my interpretations and approved of others, always citing pertinent arguments and providing useful leads for further investigation.
The present work was able to attain its final form thanks to financial support in the shape of grant no. 0687/H01/2000/19 awarded for my research by the Polish Committee for Scientific Research (Komitet Badan Naukowych), and the English translation by Richard Brzezinski financed by the Foundation for Polish Science (‘Translations’ programme). Also of great importance was a scholarship from the Gibson & Sikora Trust, which enabled me to undertake a four-month study visit to the University of St Andrews in Scotland, as well as a five-month scholarship from the Greek Ministry of Education, during which I carried out research at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki and collected iconographical data on the Peloponnese, in Macedonia and on the Athos peninsula. A two-month scholarship from the De Brzezie Lanckororiski Foundation allowed me to supplement the information gathered earlier in London’s libraries.
I would like to thank Prof. Paul Magdalino of the University of St Andrews for invitations to seminars during which he always provided professional and sound advice. My thanks also go to Prof. Teocharis Pazaras for acting as academic supervisor during my studies in Thessaloniki, as well as to Dr Athanassios Semoglou, who supported my efforts with great generosity.
During my visits to Veria, Mt Athos and the Peloponnese I was greatly assisted respectively by Dr Melina Paisidou, by Dr Joachim Papangelos, head of the 9th Ephoreia in Thessaloniki, and by the staff of the 5th Ephoreia of Byzantine Antiquities in Sparta. While assembling material I also made use of the generous assistance of the staff of a number of institutions: the Fachbibliothek fiir Byzantinistik und Neogrdzistik of the University of Vienna; the collections of the Zentralinstitut fiir Kunstgeschichte and the Bibliothek des Historicums of the Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat in Munich; the Institute for Byzantine Studies and the Centre for Balkan Studies in Thessaloniki; L’Ecole Francaise d’Archéologie; the American School of Classical Studies and the Gennadius Library in Athens; the New York Public Library, the libraries of the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and the British Library. I must also thank the staff of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington D.C., in particular the curator of the photographic archive, Dr Natalia B. Teteratnikov, and the institution’s director, Dr Alice-Mary Talbot.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, who patiently put up with my negligence towards them, yet kept up my spirits in moments of doubt.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The reputation of Byzantine history as complex and arcane has left this field a darkened void when compared with the history of medieval Europe as a whole. Hiding somewhere in this vacuum are centuries of half-forgotten tradition, linking ancient Rome with the early modern world in general and Eastern Europe in particular. Today, with the gradual ‘opening up’ of Central and Eastern Europe, this very neglect over centuries has made Byzantium one of the most dynamic and exciting fields of research, especially for military historians.
When taking on this translation project, thumbing through the Polish typescript (expanded from a doctoral dissertation written at Poland’s premier academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Krakéw), it was at once obvious that the work shone a bright light into the dark hole that is Byzantium, providing tantalising glimpses of the warriors of the medieval Greek world, clad in their extraordinary gilded laminar and scale corselets, and elucidating one of the great art historical mysteries—how realistic are Byzantine depictions of military saints? The work deserved to be translated. Polish scholarship has long been on a high level, but in view of language problems, has seldom achieved the international recognition it deserves.
It has been a fascinating, though by no means easy, journey to bring this extraordinary work to a wider audience. My translation closely follows the Polish original, except that sentences have generally been shortened and, where practical, rephrased to suit an English readership. Every pair of eyes that reads a passage will see it in a different light, and I hope my views and comments made during the translation process have added, however minutely, to the rich content of this book. All factual changes were discussed with the author and integrated as part of his text.
My thanks go to Lidia Polubiec for her art historical expertise, and assistance with some of the more obstinate passages.in the Polish text; Dr Philip Rance for advice on use of Latin versus Greek forms; and Dr Nick Sekunda for guidance on some of the complexities of Greek terminology. The largest thank you must be reserved for my partner, Zofia Stepkowska, who besides her help with some of the more idiomatic nuances of modern Polish, has put up with my eccentricities and inattention throughout the extended gestation of this project with a degree of patience that can only be described as saintly.
CONVENTIONS USED IN THIS BOOK
As a guiding principle we have followed the fashion of recent scholarship and where possible used the Greek forms of Byzantine names and technical terms, in particular those given in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (ODB). However, personal names of well-known figures from before the Arab invasions have been left in the more commonly recognized Latin forms, for example Heraclius rather than Herakleios.
First names are given in the English equivalent where one is in common usage, thus John rather than Ioannes. For consistency, names of the warrior saints are generally rendered in the Greek forms: Bakchos and Merkourios in preference to (the more historically correct) Bacchus and Mercurius; this is, after all, how these names appear in Middle Byzantine art works, which constitute the main subject of this work.
The rendering of place names is complicated by the many forms in use even in Greece today. Our rule has been to use the form likely to be most familiar to the reader: thus Byzantium, rather than Byzantion and Thessaloniki rather than Thessalonike or Salonica.
For transliteration of Greek words we have used the Library of Congress Romanization with a few exceptions, most of which are explained below. For readability (following the ODB) we have not used macrons to distinguish eta from epsilon, and omega from omicron.
With some simplification and generalization it can be said that Medieval Greek contains a mix of words from Classical Greek! (some of which appear in Homer’s epic poems) and loans from Latin and other languages. Although the literary form of the language had ossified and often harked back to Classical models, Medieval Greek was, as a living language, subject to constant changes which took place independently of external influences.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THE LETTER B
One such change in Medieval Greek was the replacing of the phonetic value of the letter B, originally equivalent to b, by the vowel v. To make the etymology clearer for the reader, Latin borrowings which took place before this change have been left in the original form, e.g. tabula—taBaiov, and similarly from Persian, kaba—xaBdéuov, and from Arabic, jubbah—c¢apa.
For other examples where the loanword is known the letter v has been used, e.g. Lat. servus—ogePovda, Lat. verutum—Bnpvtrta.
While Medieval Greek uses the compound pm to express the b, it is often preferable to keep the earlier phonetic value; for example the Greek xapacyoc, which was adopted quite early from the Latin campagus, seems more useful to the reader as kampagos rather than kabagos.
INTRODUCTION
Ever since the human form has been represented in art, costume has been an important element that defines the depicted individual. The representation often carries additional information, not only concerning the person depicted, but also about the artist and the society for which he was working. This was already true in ancient Egypt, where pharaohs were depicted in a composite double crown, a covering for the head but also an inseparable attribute of power, symbolizing sovereignty over both the Upper and Lower Kingdoms.'
The medieval colobium worn by Christ in early scenes of the Crucifixion, a peasant’s tunic reducing his nakedness, informs us of the attitude of medieval society to His Passion. Even modern items of dress, such as the bowtie, neckerchief and necktie (which after all have little functional purpose except a semiotic one) reveal the wearer’s social status and the occasion he is attending. The inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire also attached special importance to costume and the messages it carried, as is perhaps best attested by the numerous sumptuary laws on the use of certain shades of purple in the manufacture of clothing as well as footwear.”
The importance of costume as an iconographical element increases when the individuals represented are part of a group that uses costume to differentiate themselves from the rest of society. Costume can then be treated as a sort of attribute—it does not always allow a specific individual to be identified, but it generally indicates a person’s membership of a defined social class or professional group. In Byzantine art it is possible to distinguish at least three such groups: the emperor with court dignitaries and state officials; the clergy; and members of the armed forces.? While the first two have seen extensive monographs dedicated to the methods of representation and meaning of their costumes,* attempts so far to analyze military ‘uniform’ in Byzantine art specifically in the context of the iconography of warrior saints have not yet produced satisfactory results.’
The ‘warrior saints’ or ‘military saints’ can be distinguished from the huge host of martyrs by the pictorial convention of cladding them in military attire.° The goal of this work is to answer the question of how far images of the warrior saints merely repeated antique models and were an artistic creation that differed from reality, and to what extent the iconographic canon was brought up to date under the influence of weaponry in use at the time the images were created.’ Solving this problem seems to be of value not only from the point of view of describing the rules determining the evolution of images of the warrior saints, and it may also bring answers on the nature of their cults. We can assume that when the costume of a military saint depicted on an icon or a church fresco was made up of traditional elements that sought their origins in antiquity, such costume might be interpreted by the medieval observer as harking back to the ‘old times’ in which the saint lived, but in extreme cases might also create a barrier of incomprehension.
On the other hand the use of common elements of clothing that the viewer saw on a daily basis reduced the distance between himself and the holy patron who mediated in his contact with God. It should also be remembered that military clothing has always carried a rich semiotic and symbolic message. Deciphering this code may allow us to verify current interpretations of the representations of military saints, who are seen both as heroes defeating evil and as the heavenly bodyguard of the Almighty.*
In a wider aspect, the issue of iconographical innovation in the military costume of the saints is linked with the general discussion on the nature of Byzantine culture and civilization, its traditionalism and constant reference to antique models on the one hand, and the search for its original features created as an independent value on the other.
Therefore, the basic research problems concerning the images of the military saints seem to be to distinguish costume elements that: (1) were not used in the Byzantine army but were borrowed from antique art as a result of iconographical inertia; (2) that were known already in antiquity and continued in use during the Eastern Roman Empire’s period of greatness; (3) new types of arms and armour which as a result of iconographical updating were introduced to reflect changes in medieval military technology; and finally (4) the fantastic and symbolic. A detailed examination of the military equipment on warrior saint images may therefore solve a question that has long been asked by Byzantine arms historians—how far is it possible to trust such images when attempting to reconstruct the arms and armour of the medieval Greeks.
SCOPE OF RESEARCH
Time-frame
For a full understanding of the phenomenon of armed saints in the art of the Eastern Roman Empire, especially its connection with Classical traditions, it is necessary to look back to representations from the era before Iconoclasm and even to the Hellenistic period. The changes that took place in how armour was depicted in art under Latin rule in the thirteenth century are the last examples of the updating of the clothing of military saints. For this reason the time-frame of the Middle Byzantine period adopted in the present work (customarily defined as the interval between the final suppression of the Iconoclast schism in 843 and either the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 or its recovery by Michael VIII Palaiologos in 1261) should be understood as the general time-span covered by this work, into which the majority of events described fit, although occasionally it is necessary to reach outside this period.
There were several reasons for the choice of Middle Byzantine art as the field for research. During this period of revival after Iconoclasm, figurative and anthropocentric art once again redefined certain pictorial formulas. The emergence of a new canon was also favoured by the Second Council of Nicaea (787), which imposed the use of specified formulas to represent the various saints.’° On the other hand, the transformation of the Imperial army initiated by Constantine the Great led to the creation of a new military organization differing in organization and combat methods. The Roman legionary system gradually changed into one of limitanei frontier troops together with a mobile field army of comitatenses under the command of a Magister militum plus allied foederati.
The army’s reorganization continued after the defeat at Adrianople in 378," and in succeeding centuries, directed by such reformist emperors as Maurice (582~602) and Heraclius (610-641), and in the period under discussion by Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969)."? These factors all influenced the image of the warrior saint, determining its originality and distinctiveness. Also of significance is that numerous military treatises and documents have survived from this period, and these allow us to reconstruct the arms and armour employed in the imperial army of this period,’ which in turn permits us to examine the saints’ images in the light of actual Byzantine equipment.
Our end date is the thirteenth century, specifically the appearance of a new style of depiction in the era of the Palaiologan dynasty which referred strongly to Classical traditions and’ made extensive use of fantastical motifs.!° This process appears to have gone hand in hand with the decline and disappearance of native Byzantine military organization—replaced by mercenary bands and private formations of pronoiars,’* which deserves separate treatment.”
Selection of material
The term “Byzantine art’ once referred exclusively to the creative output of Constantinople, but in a broader sense covers works that came into being throughout the Eastern Roman Empire (in contrast to the wider term ‘art of the Eastern Church’). It encompasses works that are diverse in terms of artistic quality and style, as well as in the conditions in which they came into being. Alongside works created at the imperial court in the capital that were strongly based in the Classical tradition, it includes others that arose in monastic circles, murals in the rock-cut churches of Cappadocia, and provincial frescoes in churches on the Mani peninsula, which are often coarse in terms of style yet innovative in terms of iconographic solutions. Besides art created within the Empire’s frontiers, Byzantine art should undoubtedly include works executed by Greek artists under commission from foreign patrons; this includes mosaics adorning the Sicilian cathedrals of Cefali (1148) and Monreale (1180-89) as well as the churches of Martorana (c.1143) and the Cappella Palatina (1143-54) in Palermo; similarly it should also take into account the mosaic decorations of the cathedral of St Sophia (1037, 1061-67) and the monastery of the Archangel Michael (c.1108-13), both in Kiev.
To this group can be added smaller portable works such as manuscripts, icons, sculptures (which are normally of fairly modest dimensions), as well as minor items of applied art. These all make up part of the artistic heritage of Byzantium and are currently preserved in collections throughout the world. An example of one such collection assembled during the Byzantine period is the group of icons in St Catherine’s monastery on Mt Sinai; for a modern collection it is enough to mention the museum at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.™
When examining the iconography of the military saints one should not overlook artistic circles that, although not integral parts of the Empire, were directly connected with those in it. Such is the case with Coptic art in Egypt, the roots of which hark back to before the Arab conquest (AD 640-642), and also with works originating in Nubia, Syria, Armenia and Georgia. The first two of these circles are especially important in the early development stage of the iconography of the military saints. These regions were untouched by the activities of the Iconoclasts, and as a result a number of early warrior saint depictions have survived,” allowing the evolution of their iconography to be followed. Images of Syrian origin, especially those dating from after the formation of the Crusader states, provide an example of the intermixing of Latin influences with those of Byzantium, Cyprus, Armenia, and with local traditions.” Meanwhile in Armenia and Georgia, which maintained strong military ties with Byzantium,” the penetration of artistic influences is very clear.”
Of lesser value in studies on the weaponry of the warrior saints is the art of Rus” and the Balkan countries,“ where such depictions appeared comparatively late, and should be treated largely as a derivative borrowing from Byzantine art. For this reason works originating from the artistic circles of Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia and Kievan Rus’ have not been taken into account in the present work, except for comparative purposes.
The author’s aim has not been to create a complete catalogue or corpus of preserved works depicting warrior saints from the entire territory of the Empire. In view of the considerable gaps in the material, the creation of such an oeuvre might seem pointless, and may even give a false impression of the phenomenon. On the other hand a multitude of images of military saints exist in various media: in monumental painting (where as a rule they appear in the western part of the church); in miniatures, particularly in the decoration of menologia and psalters;°
images of military saints exist in various media: in monumental painting (where as a rule they appear in the western part of the church); in miniatures, particularly in the decoration of menologia and psalters;° even in architectural stone sculpture.** This reservoir of data should permit us to establish a representative group of depictions, with typical, oft-repeating elements of arms and armour, as well as to identify examples that differ from them. The chosen selection should allow us to discuss the methods of depiction of the military equipment in the representative group without having to refer to all the known representations of the military saints.
STATE OF RESEARCH
Research on the development of the cult and iconography of warrior saints*
Interest in the group of warrior saints in the Eastern Church and in Byzantine culture dates back to the start of the twentieth century although its roots should be sought in the works of the Bollandists, an association of scholars of hagiography, who alongside their interest in the ‘lives’, ‘passions’ and ‘miracles’ of the saints and martyrs also verified and published much material on the military saints.” It was a distinguished representative of this group, Hippolyte Delehaye, who in 1909 published the first monograph devoted to the most popular military saints, which also mentioned the existence of their likenesses in art.27 His primary research was continued by Karl Krumbacher, Paul Peeters, Francois Halkin and many others.*
Alongside the trend for analysing and publishing hagiographic texts,” by the late nineteenth century interest had arisen in the links between the iconography of the warrior saints and Classical representational formulas.” Laying stress on the compositional similarities in art, all these authors ignored the material links between the Christian images and their pagan predecessors. It was only Ernst Kantorowicz who examined this problem from the angle of the ancient gods, and gave what seem to be satisfactory answers on the relationship between the two types of representation.*!
Among the works devoted to the warrior saints, studies soon began to appear that were concerned with various aspects of their cults and their uniqueness, and even the social and political role of the saints in the life of the Eastern Roman Empire.” These works were exploited in the monographic descriptions of various saints which discuss their iconography, as well as the hagiographic sources and characteristics of their cults.*? A subgroup among these works covers studies on the cycles of lives, which are generally preoccupied with the martyrdom of the various saints.“ A series of successful attempts have also been made to identify more unusual iconographic themes relating to the warrior saints.® The custom of combining several military saint depictions into a single work of art (usually a mural, icon or ivory triptych) has led to the writing of monographs on these groups, which are treated as a unified whole of joint significance. Research has also been undertaken on the iconography of the military saints and how it varies artistically in individual regions.”
Despite the varied and extensive literature, because of the diversity of issues associated with military saints’ images, there remain many unsolved puzzles. In recent years this has encouraged a number of scholars to tackle the subject of the warrior saints in the art of the Eastern Church.“ Along with the new works have come suggestions on useful methodologies. Christopher Walter’s proposal of the need to return to the hagiographic texts in order to study the images of the military saints” would seem insufficient for an adequate analysis of their appearance and attire in art. In hagiographic works descriptions of their arms and armour are usually limited to isolated terms of the type 36pv, conic, Qapa* (describing respectively, lances, shields and cuirasses), or the even more general éxAa.*! When removed from their context these do not provide full answers on the character of their military attire as it appears in artistic depictions. For this reason it is necessary to look to other primary sources and to the critical literature that concentrates on the arms and armour of the Byzantine army.
Research on the military equipment of the Middle Byzantine army
Scholarly interest in Byzantine arms and armour is a relatively new phenomenon, especially when compared to the arms and armour of ancient Rome and medieval Western Europe, subjects that have both generated a vast array of literature. Undoubtedly, a major reason for this state of affairs is the very small number of preserved artefacts that can be reliably linked with the Byzantine army.”
As with every field of knowledge, the study of Byzantine weaponry has required the creation of its own terminology, and early research was dominated by works intended to reconstruct this terminology from the written sources.™ In parallel with this linguistic research, and sometimes closely connected with it, attempts were made to define the relationship between the arms of Byzantines and those of the barbarian peoples, and on transfers from one to the other.* Especially fruitful in this respect was the work of Peter Schreiner, who discussed the northern literary and iconographic sources for Byzantine arms and armour research.
As the next stage of research one can regard works that sought to provide a synthetic presentation of the whole range of Byzantine military equipment. ‘The first of these was by Ada Bruhn Hoffmeyer in 1966; as her main source she used the miniatures in the manuscript of the chronicle of John Skylitzes in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid (Vitr. 26-2).*” By examining the equipment depicted in the battle scenes in this codex, in conjunction with archaeological and literary sources, she was able to create the first full study of the arms and armour of Byzantium in the light of the weaponry of medieval Europe and the Near East. Her findings were verified and expanded in an article by John F. Haldon, who analysed the written sources, particularly the Byzantine military manuals.™
The fundamental work for Byzantine military equipment studies was the monograph of Taxiarchis Kolias, the first work to discuss in detail all the individual items of arms and armour of the Byzantine warrior.” Although some of his proposed interpretations have since been challenged in brief articles discussing narrow topics, his study, on the whole, remains to date the most essential and complete work on arms and armour in the Middle Byzantine era.
Among the works devoted to reconstructing the full martial equipment of the Byzantine soldier from the various available sources, an important role is played by studies on the equipment of specific branches of the army. For understandable reasons, researchers’ interests have concentrated on troop-types that are specifically Byzantine, such as the heavily armoured cavalry—the kataphraktoi and Klibanarioi"— and the artillery, in particular ‘Greek fire’. Although the artillery has no great relevance to the iconography of warrior saints, the cavalry is of great significance, especially in the interpretation of equestrian representations. The weaponry and uniforms of palace guards and army units based in the capital is discussed by John Haldon in his monograph on the organization of the tagmata,® while a prosopographic list of officers of the tagmata from the tenth and eleventh centuries was compiled from the sources by H.J. Kahn.“ Of the works concerned with specific military formations also worthy of note is an article by Eric McGeer on the menaulatoi, an infantry formation that employed heavy spears as a defence against enemy cavalry charges.”
The increased interest in military aspects of Byzantine civilization over the last few years has brought a series of general works that also tackle the problem of arms and armour.® In defiance of earlier judge- ments on the traditionalism and calcification of Byzantine art, Maria G. Parani returned to an examination of iconographic works as a reliable source for reconstructing the ‘realia’ (secular contemporary artifacts) of everyday life in the Empire. She devoted a major part of her monograph to military equipment, recognizing that it is often possible to observe a mimetic tendency in the work of Byzantine artists when depicting arms and armour.”
The recent monograph on the imperial navy by Pryor and Jeffreys cannot be overlooked in view of its monumental character, although the work is less useful in a study of warriors who are mainly depicted on foot or on horseback.* A number of publications of popular character have also appeared,” and these are not without value in attempts to reconstruct the appearance of Byzantine arms and armour.
Many items of Byzantine military gear were at first reconstructed erroneously.” The sheer diversity of Byzantine military terminology, borrowed on more than one occasion from foreign languages, the changes in meaning of various terms over the course of the centuries,”! and ultimately, the unique character of Byzantine war gear has meant that discussions on the appearance of various items continue, although the emphasis now is on adding more detail to knowledge of individual items of equipment and studying their use at specific moments in the history of the Empire.”
In ending this survey of the present state of knowledge on Byzantine military equipment it is not possible to overlook the emerging science of vexillology, which attempts to reconstruct the appearance and typology of Byzantine flags and standards on the basis of literary and iconographic sources.”
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