Download PDF | Archibald Dunn (editor) - Byzantine Greece_ Microcosm of Empire__ Papers from the Forty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies),Routledge 2023.
349 Pages
Byzantine Greece: Microcosm of Empire?
This volume offers a structured presentation of the progress of research into the internal history of a part of the Byzantine world — Greece — in the centuries before the multiple changes induced or accelerated by the Fourth Crusade. Greece is a large area (several Early and Middle Byzantine provinces), with records, archival, literary, archaeological, architectural, and art-historical, most of which are unequalled in terms of their density and range.
This creates opportunities for useful synthesis, and for dialogue with those now engaged in the rewriting, or writing, of the inner history of Byzantium, from Italy to the Caucasus, who have been stimulated by, or involved in, the editing of archives and inscriptions (including sigillographic), and in the publication of monuments, excavations, and surveys (for all of which the ‘Greek space’, the elladiké kh6ra, is a particular, and fertile, focus of activity, as the conference showed).
Much of the material presented here can usually only be found in specialised publication, and indeed much in Greek alone. But, properly contextualised, this material about the ‘Greek space’ deserves to be brought into the dialogues or debates at the heart of Byzantine Studies, for instance about the Late Antique ‘boom’, urban life, the ‘Dark Age’, economic change, the nature of the ‘Byzantine revival’, and of social, socio-economic, and ethnic groups. The studies here synthesise such research, enabling the ‘Greek space’ as a case study in the evolution of a significant region to the west of Constantinople, to take its place more fully as a point of reference in such dialogues or debates. Equally, it provides frameworks for archaeologists dealing with Greece from Late Antiquity onwards — and there are now many — with which to engage, and it makes available a rich source of comparative material for those studying the other regions of the Byzantine world, whether historically or archaeologically, in Southeastern Europe, Italy, or Turkey.
Archibald Dunn is Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Archaeology in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Brian McLaughlin is a freelance editor, writer, and independent scholar of Byzantine history.
Acknowledgments
This symposium could not have been realised without the logistical support of the College of Arts and Law of the University of Birmingham; without the daily assistance (with brain and brawn) of the postgraduate students of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies of this university, and of Dr Lisa Montagno; and without the generous financial support of the following: The Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, The Hellenic Foundation, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, The Michael Marks Charitable Trust, and a kind donor who wished to remain anonymous.
I would also like to thank the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity of this university for the technical support and costs of publicity, including artwork, and to thank the Hellenic Foundation again for their grant towards the costs of publishing illustrations. I would particularly like to thank contributing authors, and the editors, for their patience and understanding, and, last but not least, the NHS and its Greek equivalent during several hospitalisations.
We mourn the untimely loss of contributing author Michael Heslop, Honorary Research Fellow of Royal Holloway College, University of London, who died on 5th April this year. In one of his typical acts of selfless dedication to Byzantine and medieval Greek Studies, he created, donated, and installed, an exhibition of his superb photographs of the Byzantine and Hospitaller fortifications of the Dodecanese at our Symposium.
Archie Dunn Symposiarch
Introduction , Archibald Dunn
This Symposium’s exploration of approaches to the history of Early-toMiddle Byzantine Greece feels rather like a contribution to a conference in permanent session or a journal whose presses (or transmissions and alerts) run day and night. So I would argue that we need, at the risk of seeming over-selective among the outpourings of publications (to mention only monographic ones), to highlight a few recent scene-setting — sometimes also game-changing — works in the light of which to think about the various overarching approaches of our contributors: their disciplinary orientations, thematic orientations, and the various spatial scales at which they organise their research (spatial scale being a very important feature of a work of the present type).
Contributors conscientiously updated their papers through 2019 (after which we entered a distinctly unpleasant, for some of us, time). But this scene-setting is not a review of publications since 2019. It offers an identification of works which arguably exemplify a range of positive trends or academic benchmarks whose disciplinary significance we have had time to digest.
I mention first Florin Curta’s Edinburgh History of the Greeks C.500 to 1050: The Early Middle Ages, the first modern synthesis dealing with the whole geographical space during our combined periods of interest, and one in which archaeological data plays an important role’; John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century A.D., which includes a pioneering synthesis of the archaeology of Byzantine Greece as a whole within its Jongue-durée framework”; Georgios Deligiannakis’s Dodecanese and the Eastern Aegean Islands in Late Antiquity, AD 300-700, which takes the synthesis of Early Byzantine historical and archaeological material for a distinct sub-region to a new level*; while Myrto Veikou’s Byzantine Epirus: A Topography of Transformation: Settlements of the Seventh-Twelfth Centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloakarnania, Greece, is one of the first works to foreground the Byzantine archaeology of a large area of Greece in its study, and to attempt to integrate the landscape as a dynamic and mutable factor in regional economic history (broadly defined).
The late Charalambos Bouras’s Byzantine Athens, 10th-12th Centuries meanwhile developed a uniquely rich, and therefore methodologically instructive, synthesis of the results of research-led and rescue-led excavations throughout the city, with art history and historical enquiry, in an attempt to construct a history of a Middle Byzantine town.° But he had also, with Laskarina Boura, in their E elladiké naodomia kata ton 120 aiéna, created a rich synthesis about the Middle Byzantine monumental architecture of southern Greece which is another kind of benchmark in Byzantine regional studies.°
One hesitates to stop there — and there are other, older, pioneering, or otherwise still broadly resonating works — but the point here is to illustrate how effectively the Greek space and its materials, including now its dynamic landscapes in their diachronic configurations (but also paleobotanic residues, as we shall see) can sustain and enrich the multidisciplinary study of the Byzantine world as a whole (if not so demonstrably their much heralded ‘interdisciplinary’ study).
Our foray into this field consists of several kinds of response to an already rich bibliography, by comparison with the bibliographies for some other territories of the former Byzantine world. That richness is closely connected to the political and cultural history of ‘the Greek space’ since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, a history which favoured, relatively speaking of course, the preservation of several kinds of archives (many of these located beyond this geographical space in Italy, Malta and Spain), of religious art and architecture, and toponymy, and then subsequently favoured their deliberate conservation. We do not engage in these proceedings with that fascinating political and cultural story as such, but it is worthwhile to remind ourselves of some steps in the process whereby the study of Byzantine Greece has come to find itself where it is today.
Firstly, this field of enquiry has, ever since the 19th century, been conducted at several levels of detail and synthesis both within and beyond an expanding political Greece. Some, but by no means all, of this variety was captured by Dionysios Zakythinos in his still-historiographically interesting Vyzantiné Ellas 392-1204 (first published as an article in 1964).’ Secondly, the ultimately essential recording of freestanding monuments and excavation of buried monuments played no part in the early histories of Byzantine Greece, although Zakythinos acknowledged the interpretative challenge for historians,* nor did the incipient editing of the archives of Mount Athos (which are not rich for the Middle Byzantine period though). Thirdly, archaeologists began concertedly to ‘intervene’ in this traditional narrative history in the 1930s, using the excavations of the Forum of Corinth?; then in the 1950s using the Agora of Athens’ excavations.’ Numismatists soon became involved too.''
Meanwhile at more ‘granular’ levels of synthesis, such as those of cities or provinces, the socio-economic history of our periods of interest, the Early to Middle Byzantine, had begun to appear, in the works of O. Tafrali regarding Thessaloniki (in 1913-1919), which even included monumental archaeology, in Paul Lemerle’s politico-administrative and ecclesiastical history of eastern Macedonia of 1945’; and in a quite new kind of provincial history, Antoine Bon’s Le Péloponnése byzantin jusqu’en 1204 of 1951.' This later made systematic use of chronicles of course, but also of a wide range of literary works, archives (in which Lemerle’s work is rich), epigraphy, numismatics, and sigillography, to formulate a kind of Byzantine regional history. The die was cast, so to speak.
Gradually from 1945 onwards monographic studies of historico-geographic regions in Greece (but with a northern ‘edge’ not strictly limited by Modern Greece’s northern frontier) in Early and/or Middle Byzantine times, often trying to cover both of these periods, have appeared, in which archaeological data have been deployed increasingly.'* These and other works offer frameworks for both smaller-scale case studies (particularly archaeological, a development under way since the 1980s which can involve the surviving archives, so with a certain focus upon Macedonia), and, looking ahead, frameworks for cross-regional case studies.!*
Above all, the parallel development of a Byzantine (or Late Roman and Byzantine) historical geography of Greece from the 1970s onwards, by systematising empirical knowledge about a given region’s or former province’s politico-administrative history, economic geography, historical toponymy, and published archaeology, furnishes a ‘platform’ for regional and sub-regional studies at any ‘setting’ of a project’s focus. This development too is under way. This phase in the study of Late Roman and Byzantine Greece could be said to begin with Anna Avramea’s published thesis on the historical geography of Early and Middle Byzantine Thessaly in 1974.'° It was immediately followed by the first of the fascicles of the Tabula Imperii Romani to deal with Greece (Macedonia, and more recently Thrace and the rest of mainland Greece), and by an ongoing series of volumes of the Tabula Imperii Byzantini (which has so far covered Central Greece, Epirus, the Aegean islands, and southern Thrace across Bulgaria, European Turkey, and north-eastern Greece).!”
Meanwhile the aims of excavators were widening beyond the monumental hearts of Greco-Roman cities, such as Athens or Corinth, and whilst those excavations will continue to contribute to our understanding of Byzantine Greece’s evolution (as we learnt in the Symposium: see Chapter 9), it is vital, and is justified by the findings, that resources are found to excavate right across, and indeed beyond, the settlement hierarchy, for instance at rural fortifications (as we see in Chapter 3), and religious complexes and economic installations in the countryside (as we see in Chapters 2, 6, and 16).
The Byzantine archaeology which informs newer regional studies has, as is well known, grown exponentially in quantity. It has been slowly acquiring ‘critical mass’ since the year 1960 (with the Greek Archaeological Service’s methodical reporting of discoveries, and the steady appointment of Byzantine archaeologists and/or art historians throughout its new units.'® And since 1978-1979 the archaeology of Late Roman and Byzantine Greece has been benefitting substantively from the introduction of the multi-period intensive interdisciplinary survey (now slightly misleadingly and blandly called, obviously for brevity, ‘landscape archaeology’), those being the years in which Stanford University’s Southern Argolid Survey and Cambridge and Bradford Universities’ Boeotian Survey began.!?
As dozens of such surveys have since then been launched in every part of Greece (including, at last, Greek Thrace), and as they espouse almost without exception the theoretical merits of sampling the entire visible artefactual record, we are brought, by design or by default, as close as is currently possible to representative samples of Byzantium’s archaeological presence without expensive excavations. The pedestrian surveys, sometimes combined with remote sensing, and with the developing sites and monuments records of the archaeological service, and of course texts wherever relevant, are now facilitating new kinds of sub-regional syntheses (a good example of which is presented in outline in Chapter 4).
None of these new developments however supersede or displace historical analysis of social or cultural or economic structures and trends at the regional level. Indeed just such a regional historical study was published by Angeliki Laiou in 1977, based entirely on the archives of Mount Athos.”’ The functioning of the Church in the provinces (Chapter 17), the functioning of provincial markets (Chapter 19), and the functioning of the rural economy throughout Middle Byzantine Greece (Chapter 18), are only captured in their complexity in monastic archives, letters, legislation, or fiscal records (the Praktika for instance). The general conclusions of these chapters mesh interestingly with the Middle Byzantine archaeological projects included in these proceedings.
Archaeology challenges many of us, whether engaged in it or with it, to test academically sound ways of combining it with historical enquiry: to design and ‘test’ such approaches. Correlations between different kinds of fieldwork are common practice now (typically between extensive survey, sites and monuments records, and intensive survey), and correlations between these and the earth sciences and environmental sciences are common in Greece as elsewhere. In practice, the ground of integration will vary, not necessarily stretching far across the range of disciplines that an ‘interdisciplinary’ survey says that it is bringing together, but nevertheless demonstrating a sound basis for further testing of this great challenge. Such is the case with Chapter 12, a circumspect re-analysis of one of the richest palaeo-environmental sources for the study of Byzantine agriculture and land use more generally, ‘preparing’ some of the Greek palynological data for testing against (ultimately) historical data. That data will surely concern Late Roman and Byzantine economic outcomes.
The challenge meanwhile of a close correlation between cultural archaeology and the quintessentially historical topic of relations of production in Byzantine Greece would obviously be a major gain for history, archaeology, and interdisciplinarity itself (which is becoming an end in itself for those who try to ‘strategise’ research), if it could be demonstrated. And Greece’s multiperiod intensive interdisciplinary surveys have been used to try to demonstrate just this possibility, with Cynthia Kosso’s bold attempt to ‘map’ the spectrum of Late Roman-to-Early Byzantine rural sites of all kinds found by these surveys in central and southern Greece since 1978-1979 onto legal and other texts’ references to types of rural habitation from the villa ‘downwards’, and to correlate these sites and their material culture with forms of legal land tenure.
The Boeotian Survey (presented at the Symposium), using data more refined than some of the data available to Kosso, has attempted something similar for the khora of the polis of Thespiai.’” But detecting and distinguishing between specific social relations of production in the ceramic landscape is problematic (when we know from texts that a slave could be a farmer, and a tenant could be, depending on the terms of the tenure, in a better situation than a smallholder).
Having said that, sophisticated excavations of Byzantine ‘Dark-Age’ levels at an urban site (and provincial capital) such as Gortyn in Crete (Chapter 5), or those of Butrint, on the mainland opposite to Corfu (Chapter 10), reveal features and artefacts from which conclusions can be confidently drawn about a continuing elite presence, and long-distance traffic in higher-value goods, which characterise and localise important historical phenomena to which texts of the 7th or 8th centuries offer vanishingly brief allusions that we hardly know how to evaluate. The excavations and remote-sensing surveys of Corinth have meanwhile identified a phase of urban fortification which definitively excluded the old forum in the mid-to-late 6th century, meaning that the forum’s abandonment (initially to burials) no longer illustrates ‘catastrophic’ decline at all (Chapter 9).
And the excavations of pottery kilns at Aegean insular sites of the 7th—9th centuries provide detailed case studies of the wide circulation of well-modelled amphorae that seem to reflect the state’s introduction of controls upon their volumes (hence on their total values when filled), all of which is a far cry from assumptions about technical decline, localisation of economies, and simplification of networks (Chapter 6). At the level of the individual monument, fresh discoveries (many of them made as a result of careful modern conservation) are revealing the unsuspected extent of restoration and professional reconstruction of great churches from the mid or late 7th century through the 8th century in Thessaloniki and elsewhere (Chapters 8 and 13), while extensive archaeological surveys in the Dodecanese reveal an unsuspected rural monastic movement in the 8th (and later) centuries (Chapter 16). In other words, there is much scope for archaeological case studies of the 7th—8th or 9th centuries to critically inform the modelling of patterns and trends in economic, social, and cultural activities that can be correlated with, and greatly refine, models extrapolated from highly problematic historical sources.
Syntheses of specific types of archaeological data recorded throughout Greece (provenanced inscriptions: Chapter 14) and fortifications in different regions of Greece (Chapter 11), a multidisciplinary correlation between the findings of excavations, intensive surveys, art history, and texts (Chapter 16), rural excavations (Chapter 2), and urban excavations (Chapter 13), demonstrate for the most part a fertile complementarity with historical enquiries in which the contributions of archaeology are quite definitely enhancing our understanding of important phenomena on which written sources shed light but which they will never (for the Middle Byzantine era) fully contextualise, reconstruct, or explain. The relatively rich and dateable epigraphy of churches’ benefactors of the 9th-12th centuries enables the tracing of the evolution of a rising provincial elite in its institutional relationships (Chapter 14).
Case studies of the new fortifications of this period, in their variety, scale, and topography, illuminate the changing security problems of the time, but equally decisions to organise protection of localities of which we know almost nothing historically (Chapter 11). There is much recording and analysis still to be carried out at fortified sites however, and, even where we have documentary materials (see below), the fortifications themselves tend not to be illuminated by these. However, one such archivally recorded kastron, Hierissos in the Khalkidike, has become probably one of the best-recorded archaeologically (Chapter 13).
The revelations of its artisanal production, consumption, and connections are fascinating to link with its historically documented capacity for collective, and clearly successful, activity in the agricultural (agro-pastoral) sphere. The urbanisation of the Middle Byzantine provincial kastra has found a highly instructive case study. The Middle Byzantine countryside as the arena of a rising provincial elite’s investments in prestigious pious foundations (of which almost invariably only the church survives) is traced across the Peloponnese in its economic logic by the correlation of the Middle Byzantine material from some of the multiperiod intensive surveys with the chronologies of the contemporary churches in or adjacent to their surveyed zones, and with the agricultural potential of the topographically associated landscapes, in this way making much greater use of the surveys’ Middle Byzantine ceramic data than they had done (Chapter 15).
But this almost certainly illustrates the variety of ways in which elite endowments could combine forms of monastic retreat with elite residence. In any case, the implantation of new rural fortifications, the rise of new towns at some of them, the rise of a new provincial elite, and its expression of its status and religiosity in variations upon the theme of the private monastery (for which the sources of this period are highly informative), all — thanks to innovative combinations of archaeology, art history, and texts — bring the institutions, social classes, and economic developments of this period into more instructive degrees of focus at the regional and sub-regional level than they would otherwise have done.
Byzantine Greece seems rather familiar because of its ubiquitous monumental presence in modern Greece. But if we try to tie its sites and monuments — those ubiquitous basilicas and small Middle Byzantine cruciform churches, those forts and town walls, and now the traces of the occupation of the remotest countryside revealed by intensive surveys — into accounts of Byzantium, or into local histories of the kinds which are possible across much of the West, we quickly encounter a host of well-known problems. As a consequence, Byzantine Greece is not as familiar as it might seem. But is it inaccessible? Parts of Greece are relatively rich in regional archives (Chapter 13). It is relatively rich in epigraphic (and sigillographic) material (Chapter 14). And the archaeological exploration of Byzantine Greece (research-led and rescue-led) is relatively intense. Specific categories of this material already enrich Byzantine Studies as a whole (studies of its architecture and art, of ‘the city’, of the rural economy, and of all social classes, for instance).
But these categories of data can often be correlated with each other, given their geographical or topographical aspect (archives with extensive and intensive surveys in Central and Eastern Macedonia for instance), so as to illuminate Byzantine Greece itself in its own regional and sub-regional specificities. Without often allowing clear correlations with the narrative history of Byzantium (despite the wishes of previous generations of scholars), this data can instead illuminate the evolution of settlements and installations of all kinds in relation to each other and to the changing political and social institutions of Byzantium. That two-way interchange between syntheses and new case studies via regional studies conducted at varied scales and degrees of intensity is vital for the development of Byzantine Studies.
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