Download PDF | (Edinburgh Byzantine Studies) Florin Leonte - Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium_ Manuel II Palaiologos and Rhetoric in Purple-Edinburgh University Press (2020).
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Acknowledgements
It is my pleasant duty to acknowledge the support I have received from others in completing this volume. I am much indebted to Niels Gaul, who provided help and inspiration from the earliest stages of the project and through the publication process of this volume. I am grateful to a number of other people from whom I received ereat help at various moments: Margaret Mullett, Erich Trapp, Ida Toth, Charalambos Dendrinos, Stephanos Efthymiadis, Dimiter Angelov, Markéta Kulhankova, Alexander Riehle and the late Ruth Macrides.
I am also thankful to the institutions which offered me the possibility of working on this book: the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Department of the Classics at Harvard University, the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna and the Department of Classical Philology at Palacky University of Olomouc.
Finally, I am grateful to my family, David and Madalina, for their support and patience. This book is dedicated to them.
Introduction
This book is equally about people and their texts. It seeks to explore how a Byzantine emperor negotiated his authority in the troubled waters of late Byzantium where churchmen and court-based interest groups vied for the attention of wider audiences. And it is about the construction of discursive strategies by adapting the rules of rhetorical genres to historical circumstances. The focus of the book is Manuel II Palaiologos, both emperor of Byzantium (x. 1391-1425) and prolific author of a range of oratorical and theological texts.
The argument is that the emperor maintained his position of authority not only by direct political agency but also by rhetorically advertising his ideas about the imperial office. Throughout his reign, Manuel II created a parallel literary court where he presided over a group of peer literati who supported his position and did not contest his imperial prerogatives. It was within this group that his texts were copied and subsequently disseminated in order to promote a renewed version of the idea of imperial authority.
His ideological commitments valued education and the use of rhetorical skills as instruments of social and political change. His vision evolved and changed according to the opportunities and conditions of his reign. In order to understand it one needs to attend not only to his texts but to other contemporary written sources. This will allow us to further scrutinise the late Byzantine understanding(s) of the imperial office as well as the extent to which Manuel II’s writings mirrored or obliterated contemporary concerns.
Manuel II Palaiologos:
A Short Biography and an Overview of the Historical Context
The life of Manuel II Palaiologos coincided with a period of upheavals occurring in the last century of Byzantine history. He was born in 1350 as the second son of Emperor John V Palaiologos (rt. 1354-91) and of Helena Kantakouzene, the daughter of another ruler, John VI Kantakouzenos (r. 1347-54). As the emperor’s second son, in the beginning Manuel did not attract the same attention as his elder brother Andronikos IV (1348-85), considered to be destined to become John V’s legitimate successor.’ Even so, Manuel soon came to play a key role in his father’s diplomatic plans.
The first information on Manuel dates from 1355 when his father sent him to Pope Innocent IV as hostage to be educated in the spirit of Latin Christianity, in a move meant to obtain Western support.” At the age of sixteen, in 1366, Manuel travelled to Buda together with his father, who was visiting King Louis I (1342-82), the Angevin ruler of Hungary, in another attempt to attract the Christian rulers into a joint venture against the Ottomans. In Buda Manuel stayed for almost a year. His father promised Louis that his son would convert to Catholicism, as he himself had already been contemplating this idea.’
The plan did not materialise and after several years Manuel was offered his first administrative position as despot of Thessalonike (1369-73).* The very fact that Manuel was appointed despot indicates his secondary position in his father’s plans, since the late Byzantine practice was to attach the title of despot to imperial sons who were not destined to become emperors. Yet, soon, Manuel emerged as the main heir to the throne, following his brother Andronikos’s failed coup d’état in 1373. Eventually, in that same year, Manuel was formally proclaimed co-emperor.’
Nevertheless, the problem of John V’s succession had not been solved. With Ottoman help, in 1376, Andronikos imprisoned most members of the ruling family. Manuel was captive several years until his father escaped and resumed rule of the empire.’ Despite the dynastic troubles, the ensuing truce between Andronikos and John stipulated that the former and his line were recognised as legitimate successors to the throne.* This caused Manuel dissatisfaction as he saw himself deprived of the right of succession, despite the many proofs of loyalty to his father, the emperor.’
In 1382, Manuel returned to his previous appanage, Thessalonike, where, disregarding his father’s appeals to return to Constantinople, he took the title of basileus.'° His main achievement in this position was the restoration of Byzantine authority in Thessaly and Macedonia."! Yet, shortly afterwards, the Ottomans retaliated and blockaded Thessalonike in a siege that was to last until 1387.”
After the Thessalonike episode, Manuel went to Brusa to show submission to the Ottomans. He also accepted his father’s, John V’s, policy of appeasement with the Ottomans and defended his authority. In 1389, he supported John V in resisting the pressure coming from Andronikos’s son, John VII,” who in April 1390, after his father’s death, deposed John V for a short time." In the same year, in obedience to the request of the new sultan, Bayezid, he travelled to Asia Minor to join the Ottoman forces with a military contingent. Nevertheless, in 1391 at the news of his father’s death, he escaped from the Ottoman camp. He reached Constantinople and swiftly assumed power.
He was crowned emperor a year later in 1392 at a ceremony which coincided with his marriage with Helena Draga, the daughter of the Serbian lord of Serres.”” After this event, he no longer answered Bayezid’s appeals for submission, a refusal which led to a blockade of Constantinople. Manuel continued to live in the beleaguered city for several years, but in 1399, following the advice of the French marshal Boucicaut who was in charge of the defence of Constantinople, he embarked on a journey to Western Europe in search of financial and military aid.
The journey lasted four years during which Manuel resided in Paris at the court of Charles VI and in London at the court of Henry IV.'° The strong impression Manuel produced upon the Western rulers and courts is reflected by the lavish reception of the Byzantine emperor in France and England.'’ A sign of the importance of the diplomatic relations with the West was that the Byzantine emperor offered a decorated manuscript of Dionysius the Areopagite to the French king."
Upon his return to Constantinople in 1403, Manuel found the empire in a better political situation generated by the military disaster the Ottomans had suffered from Tamerlane’s advances in Asia.’ Manuel ensured his succession by appointing his first-born son, John, as co-emperor and strengthened his control over the remote provinces of the empire, the Morea and Thessalonike.
There, after the death of his younger brother, Theodore, he installed his underage son Theodore II Palaiologos as despot of the region, thus strengthening his control of the province. Later on, in 1415, he returned to the region and rebuilt the Hexamilion wall, in order to keep the Ottomans from descending into the Peloponnese.”® Due to illness, Manuel retired from the imperial position in 1422 when his eldest son, John VIII, stepped in. He died in 1425.”!
Manuel’s biography suggests that he rose to power from a weak political position in a period of deep social, economic and political transformations. To a certain extent, his three-decade-long reign mirrored political processes originating in his father’s rule, like the efforts to obtain substantial Western aid or to maintain peaceful relations with the Ottoman conquerors.
To an even larger extent, Manuel’s career was also influenced by other processes as well: Byzantium’s territorial fragmentation reflected in the autonomy of provinces and cities from the central government; the drop in the numbers of the population after 1348 owing to the combined impact of factors like plagues, invasions, wars and civil strife;” the gradual replacement of the land-owning aristocracy with a new class of entrepreneurs and tradesmen;” and the passing of various territories under foreign jurisdictions both Ottoman and Latin.”
Not only was the Byzantine state significantly diminished as a result of these processes, but, after the battle of the river Maritsa (1371), it became a tributary vassal to its powerful eastern neighbours, the Ottoman Empire. Although the battle of Ankara, in which the Tatars annihilated the Ottoman army, temporarily restored Byzantine prestige in the Eastern Mediterranean, Manuel’s position remained fragile. Throughout his reign, he controlled only a few territories: Constantinople and its hinterland; parts of the Peloponnese, including the capital, Mystras; and Thessalonike (1408-23), the second-largest city in the empire.
Moreover, he had to cope with internal challenges. In the Peloponnese up to the early 1380s, the powerful family of the Kantakouzenoi exerted a strong influence. This influence was felt even during the Palaiologan rule of the Morea in the 1390s when local lords supported a certain Matthew Kantakouzenos as potential despot.” Another serious threat to Manuel’s authority came from the protracted dynastic strife with his nephew, John VII. As the son of Andronikos IV, John V’s oldest and rebellious son, John VII inherited the right to rule in Constantinople and enjoyed the support of many ecclesiastics and a part of the population in both Constantinople and Thessalonike.
When in 1391 Manuel secured imperial authority in the city, John VII also inherited his father’s, Andronikos IV’s, appanage of Selymbria, close to Constantinople. Despite persistent accusations of having sided with the Ottomans in the siege of 1394-1402, Manuel entrusted him with the administration of Constantinople during his sojourn in the West (1399-1403). Yet, upon Manuel’s return to Byzantium, John resumed his claims to the Byzantine throne. The result was an agreement between the two, following which in 1403 John VII moved to Thessalonike, where he exerted full imperial authority and enjoyed enthusiastic local support.”°
Aims of the Present Study
Doubtless, all these processes and challenges played a crucial part in shaping Manuel’s reign. As a result, more often than not, his biography has been analysed primarily against the backdrop of the political and economic upheavals of the late fourteenth century. In doing so, historians of late Byzantium have largely overlooked the functions rhetoric fulfilled in the critical decades of the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century. Yet arguably the hitherto unstudied or little-studied rhetorical texts written in late Byzantium can shed further light on various aspects of political history and especially on the conceptualisation of imperial authority.
With a focus on Manuel Palaiologos’s prolific textual production and on his involvement in the intellectual circles of the period, the principal aim of this book is, therefore, to interpret and explain the emperor’s rhetorical action in the late Byzantine context. This study shifts the focus away from political history and investigates the rhetorical and ideological facets of his political messages. My analysis proceeds from two observations: that these texts do not represent isolated artefacts but are part of larger historical and cultural matrices; and that rhetorical texts, such as orations, dialogues or panegyrtics, actively mirrored and mediated the negotiation of political power.
In Byzantium a close relationship was established between politics and highbrow literacy, a relationship reflected in the activities of the Constantinopolitan courtiers.”’ Furthermore, with the changes taking place in late Byzantine society and institutional order, there were also shifts in the indicators of social status, in ideas about power, and in what constituted the suitable system of virtues.
I conduct this analysis on two levels: first, the rhetoric of Manuel’s writings that included references to political events, with special emphasis on the reasons behind the author’s adherence to, or departure from, the literary tradition in which he was working; second, the ideological statements which Manuel inserted in these highly rhetorical texts, which can help us identify the nuances of his political visions or actions. Within this framework the goal of the present research here is threefold: first, to contextualise the emperor’s political texts written during his reign by looking into the changes that led to the specific political and social conditions at the turn of the fifteenth century.
Arguably, the emperor, confronted with multiple challenges to his authority, created a parallel court of peer literati which constituted a platform from which to disseminate his political messages. The second goal of the book is to identify and scrutinise the literary structures underlying Manuel’s political texts: the narrative structures of the Funeral Oration on His Brother Theodore, the dialogic construction of political messages in the Dialogue with the Empress-Mother on Marriage, as well as the compositional features specific to a fully fledged didactic programme addressed to his son and co-emperor John VIII Palaiologos. It will be argued that Manuel approached the rhetorical traditions of composing texts for court performance in a creative fashion so as to accommodate his theoretical and practical ideas of governance.
Finally, this book seeks to map the political attitudes and perspectives of the power agents in Constantinople towards the end of the fourteenth century: the Orthodox clergymen, the rhetoricians and the emperor. By indicating how various aspects of political power were negotiated across separate interest groups, ultimately I will try to pinpoint the new features of kingship whereby Manuel II advertised the imperial position in Byzantium.
On the one hand, this renewed representation of the imperial function was the manifestation of a constant need to maintain popularity. On the other hand, it was also the expression of a coherent political programme connected with the idea that rhetorical education, ethical values and political power were correlated, a notion that largely drew on conceptions outlined by Hellenistic and late antique rhetoricians.”* Accordingly, unlike most court rhetoricians, whose understanding of political rhetoric was rather centred on the betterment of personal affairs which continued to depend on the emperor’s person, Manuel claimed a different role for rhetoric in the political sphere that had to do with civic engagement for the community’s benefit.
By this account, this study strives to integrate Manuel’s distinct imperial vision, based on the use of rhetoric, into a broader picture of Byzantine theories and practices of power. In particular, it will illustrate the role of the late Byzantine emperors as mediators between an aristocracy composed of courtiers and a church whose dominant attitude was to reject any attempts to unite with the Latin church, other than on its own terms.
Structure
The study is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the profile and the ideological stance of the ecclesiastics and the rhetoricians. The connections with the emperor and the challenges or the support they provided to Manuel II will cover a significant section in these preliminary chapters. The second part, which is also the most substantial part of the book, provides close readings of the emperor’s texts and focuses on his particular stance regarding the imperial office. In this part, in order to assess the emperor’s strategies of generating political messages, I document the features of presentation typical of Manuel’s persuasive speech. In particular, I note the shifts in the construction of multiple authorial voices.
The focus of my inquiry here will be the practice of rhetoric, and more specifically the techniques through which Manuel turned his rhetorical writings into ideologically effective tools to disseminate political messages. Based on the discussion of the underlying socio-political developments and the authorial rhetorical strategies, in the last chapter, the focus of my investigation widens to encompass the whole spectrum of political texts produced at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. Here, I look into the political aspects of Manuel’s discourse as mirroring themes of other contemporary political discourses and putting forward an alternative political vision.
Sources
Much depends on the sources used, their advantages, their limitations, or the subjectivity of their authors. By and large, unlike in the case of other studies of Manuel’s reign which primarily used official documents as source material, the texts which I explore here fall between oratory and literature. Certain compositions were meant for performance in the court, but often they were only circulated within circles of acquaintances and supported subsequent re-elaboration in order to be enjoyed as pieces of written literature.
I have chosen to focus only on four major texts by Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos: the Dialogue with the Empress-Mother on Marriage, the Foundations of an Imperial Education, the so-called Seven Ethico-Political Orations, and the Funeral Oration on His Brother Theodore, Despot of Morea.” The reasons why I have limited my research to these four texts pertain to the fact that they were composed during his reign and, unlike in the case of other texts of his, they reflected in a systematic way the problems and issues specific to Byzantine rule of that period. These writings reveal the extent to which the emperor regarded his literary activities as intertwined with, and reflected in, the administration of the Byzantine state.
Moreover, the intended similarities of content between the four works are indicated by their inclusion in a single manuscript, the Vindobonensis phil. gr. 98, part of a series of four manuscripts which were dedicated to his son and successor, John VIII Palaiologos.
Moreover, these four texts stand for particular ways of writing about the empire which emerge from the use of different authorial voices: the Dialogue reflects a deliberative voice; the Funeral Oration a narrative voice; the Foundations and the Orations a didactic voice. Taken together, the strategies originating in the modulations of the author’s voice constitute a kind of full repertoire for imperial discourse, on a wide range of topics and concepts. Since they were not confined to Manuel’s texts, I will also have occasion to cite their occurrence in other contemporary writings that deal with political aspects of rulership. In doing so, I wish to suggest that Manuel’s multiple texts were also adapted to particular events so that they could appeal to multiple audiences.
Apart from these four main texts, this study will make use of the emperor’s other texts as well. His collection of letters is particularly important for this research as it provides additional information not only about his political vision but also about his connections with various courtiers. The political texts written before his accession to the throne (the Admonitory Oration to the Thessalonians and the Panegyric on the Recovery of His Father from an Illness), the theological treatises (the Dialogues with a Muslim [Dialoge mit einem Muslim] and On the Procession of the Holy Spirit) and the rhetorical exercises play a key role in acquiring a thorough picture of his literary activity. Although I will not deal in extenso with this part of his work, particular attention will be paid to his liturgical texts and homilies, which reveal his approach to the church.
In treating an emperor’s rhetorical-ideological selfrepresentation, much depends on other comparative sources which offer background material. It is, therefore, necessary to proceed with a brief review of the main categories of sources used in the present volume. As historical narrative was a popular genre in Byzantium, one would expect a sizeable number of these narratives. However, as has been noted, the period of Manuel’s reign represented a puzzling gap in the production of historiographical accounts or chronicles. Thus, for more extensive and detailed narratives we have to turn to the later historians who wrote after the Fall of Constantinople: George Sphrantzes’ Memoirs, Doukas’s History, or Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Histories. Among these authors, only the first, Sphrantzes, was acquainted with the emperor; he even held a position at Manuel’s court which allowed him to record some of the emperor’s sayings.
On the other hand, since the focus is on court rhetoric, I will draw extensively on texts produced in this milieu. In particular, several orations addressed to the emperor included multiple themes and notions which will be used as a backdrop against which the emperor’s self-representation will be traced. Several texts stand out: Demetrios Chrysoloras’s Comparison be tween the Emperor of Today and the Ancient Rulers, John Chortasmenos’s Address upon the Emperor’s Return from Thessalonike, Makarios Makres’ Funeral Oration for Emperor Manuel Palaiologos, or Gemistos Plethon’s Address (Memorandum) to Emperor Manuel II on the Situation in the Peloponnese. Other important categories of texts comprise letters addressed to the emperor, ecclesiastical treatises and chancellery documents.
Theoretical Framework
In comparison with previous studies of imperial visions in Byzantium, the present one is both narrower and larger in its scope. It is narrower because it focuses mainly on the texts of a single author, yet broader because these compositions are treated not only as objects of political propaganda but also as writings belonging to the rhetorical tradition. I proceed from the assumption that the Manuel II’s authority was not absolute and he had to act in order to secure it.
In addition, I underline the close relationship between rhetorical texts and their political and cultural contexts. As such, instances of rhetorical discourse become instances of social action. This perspective allows us to throw light on specific power relations established among different groups (institutionalised or not) and to historicise the development of discursive themes. Along these lines, I look at the texts, on the one hand, as vehicles for political ideas and, on the other hand, as statements embedded in a network of political processes and social practices.
Therefore, in terms of my approach, the investigation will involve several steps. In a first stage, I will try to establish the main features of the political and intellectual context, which in turn will support our understanding of the scope of Manuel’s texts. I touch on issues of social divisions as well as on questions of Byzantine identity, a concept that arguably needs to be regarded as fluctuating according to various political or cultural contexts.
As a way of organising information about self, identity has been analysed as a multifaceted theoretical construct. Given the historical-rhetorical nature of the sources used in the present study, here I will use this concept in a broad manner and focus on its religious and ethnic aspects. Furthermore, understanding the audiences of the political messages requires a look into the messages’ performance and circulation. We are fortunate to have evidence about the oral presentation in the court milieu of several texts, such as Manuel’s Orations and Dialogue. Concomitantly, the study of manuscripts and the information included in epistolary exchanges reveals that his texts were circulated and received feedback from peer scholars.
To this extent, given their attested dissemination, I regard these texts as having a public character. The analysis will also be supported by several concepts of social network analysis, such as degrees of acquaintance with the emperor and the instrumentality of the network. Connected to this preliminary contextualisation is the discussion of Manuel’s ‘literary court’, which can be defined as a group of readers and writers acquainted with one another. Second, as I explore notions of political thought in rhetorical writings, I will try to answer the following questions: how does the Byzantine ruler construct his representation in writing and what are the cultural or ideological presuppositions upon which such a representation is based? Despite their conventions and the audience’s expectations of conformism, the texts depend heavily on the use of metaphors, with elaborated imagery often drawn from poetry, myths or other literary accounts.
Thus, with the caveat that an exclusive rhetorical approach can lead to accepting a text’s own premises, this kind of analysis will draw extensively on concepts central to rhetorical and literary theory, such as genre understood as an aspect which combines the form (e.g. collections of chapters, moral essays, dialogues, speeches) and the function of a text shaped by its performance; and authorial voice seen as a changing aspect across the texts of the same author.
Furthermore, in order to map the competing political discourses during Manuel II’s reign, I will use an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis which relies on the investigation of the form of the writings as well as of the ‘structural relationships of power and control as they are expressed in language use’.
As discourse engages three aspects — language, context and group interaction — I will focus on the connections between texts and social and political action. This perspective can provide useful analytical tools for assessing the dynamics of enunciations of a political and social nature. Lastly, this mapping of political discourses will be accompanied by an attempt to provide a discourse genealogy in which various discursive themes will be seen to operate across a range of late Byzantine contexts.
Previous Scholarship
As one of the last Byzantine emperors whose reign spanned a period of more than thirty years, Manuel II Palaiologos has received much scholarly attention. In recent decades several critical editions of his texts have been published, thereby drawing attention to his personality.*? Most often, these have included the emperor’s activities in broader accounts of social and political history.
This is the case of the recent volume by Antonia Kioussopoulou, who used evidence drawn from Manuel II’s biography for her argument regarding the political and institutional transformations in late Byzantium under the influence of similar processes in the Italian city-states.’* While Kioussopoulou saw the emperor as an agent of these transformations, Nevra Necipoglu’s account of late Byzantine history emphasises the role of other social groups in the configuration of the political landscape: aristocrats, businessmen, ecclesiastics and local archontes.
Remarkably, both these accounts take as a point of departure the same statement preserved in Sphrantzes’ Memoirs, according to which an emperor should act as a manager rather than as a ruler in the common sense of the word.” Still, because of their focus on late Byzantine social and political changes, neither volume engages with Manuel’s political ideas and rhetorical ceuvre in a comprehensive manner.
As far as the investigation of political ideology and its expression in rhetoric in late Byzantium are concerned, important comparative material is provided by two studies. One is Dimiter Angelov’s Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium (1204-1330), which deals with innovative political ideas on society, economy and imperial authority circulating in the early Palaiologan period. Angelov argued that the most important development in early Palaiologan political thought was the growing gap between official ideology on the one hand and the political ideas of lay and ecclesiastic thinkers on the other.
He noted that, in this period, some political debates were aimed against the emperot’s autocratic attributes, and that the emerging theories of governance as a reciprocal relationship between ruler and subjects paralleled Western theories.*’ The other study, Ida Toth’s unpublished doctoral dissertation titled Imperial Orations in Late Byzantium (1261-1453), provides an analysis of the rhetorical and performative aspects of the speeches addressed to late Byzantine emperors.
Toth described a specific Byzantine rhetorical form over the last centuries of its use. To these two studies can be added Anthony Kaldellis’s recent problematisation of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy.*® These recent volumes indicate that late Byzantine ideological enunciations surface in a variety of texts and are often hidden behind common rhetorical topoi.
Apart from these accounts of late Byzantine cultural and political history, three books deal specifically with the emperor’s personality and activity. The earliest one, Jules Berger de Xivrey’s Mémoire sur la vie et les ouvrages de lempereur Manuel Paléologue (1853), was a biography which, however, remained incomplete. The second in chronological order, George Dennis’s The Reign of Manuel II in Thessalonica: 1382-1387 (1960), deals with the short episode of Manuel’s rebellious rule in the second city of the empire between 1382 and 1387, but focuses exclusively on political events. Likewise John Barker’s monograph Manuel II Palaeologus (1391-1425): A Study in Late Byzantine Statesmanship (1969) treats extensively the internal and external affairs of Manuel’s reign and uses most of the sources available to that date, without, however, looking into the emperor’s ideological tenets. Finally, a recent doctoral dissertation by Siren Celik aims at reconstructing Manuel’s biography both as a literatus and as a power broker.*” To these can be added substantial chapters such as the study by Klaus-Peter Matschke dealing with political, social and economic aspects of the history of late Byzantium.*® More recently, Cecily Hilsdale has discussed the role of Manuel’s diplomatic gifts of religious representations and relics.*! All these scholarly treatments have touched upon crucial topics such as the dynastic conflicts, the wars with the Ottomans, or the negotiations with the Latins for military aid. However, even if these authors do not completely overlook the emperor’s literary output, they never appear to consider it as a corpus of sources worth investigating for its picture of late Byzantine society.
For instance, Barker’s statements on the prolixity and the lack of historical value of the emperor’s letters suggest the persistence of a predominant attitude among some Byzantinists of the past in search of different types of evidence.” On the other hand, more often than not, Manuel was described as an active ruler concerned with military and political developments, who acted according to a political vision that encompassed the entire region of the Eastern Mediterranean, with its powerful players. If his military efforts to pacify or recapture Byzantine territories were generally acknowledged, secondary literature also puts forward the image of a diplomat balancing between regional players. He is presented as a ruler who made the best of the resources at his disposal, including fostering commercial relations with different trading groups.** For that reason, scholars have described Manuel as an administrator rather than an emperor in the traditional sense of the term.
Building on previous scholarship, my intention is to provide an alternative perspective on the emperor’s activity and personality, taking as a starting point his intense rhetorical activity. This perspective has been only tentatively explored in previous scholarship. The few studies dealing explicitly with the oratorical discussion of empire in Manuel’s texts are generally attached to larger scholarly enterprises concerning Manuel’s imperial power. While they touch upon his rhetorical output, a study that would take the imperial texts into serious consideration is still lacking.” Notably, when dealing with the emperor’s literary output, many scholars have turned to his theological texts, as these could be more easily integrated into the intense doctrinal debates of the late Palaiologan period. Thus, albeit in sarcastic terms, as early as the seventeenth century Leo Allatius (1586-1669), the keeper of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library, remarked on the emperor’s penchant for learned argumentation in his treatise On the Procession of the Holy Spirit:
To a brief public statement by a certain Latin, <Manuel> replied in a long treatise comprising many arguments, for he believed that by making use of a verbose speech (prolixiore sermone) he could break the power of reason, and by the multitude and excessive size of chapters, as if by dissipating darkness, he could bring forth the light of truthfulness.”
Fortunately, the more recent scholars of Manuel’s ceuvre were more sympathetic than Allatius. With the publication of several important critical editions, judgements concerning the form and function of individual texts have become more nuanced. For instance, in the introduction to the Dialogue, Athanasios Angelou discussed in detail the text’s prose rhythm.*” In their critical editions of Manuel’s texts, Erich Trapp, Julian Chrysostomides, Christina Kakkoura and Charalambos Dendrinos provided important hints as to the historical, doctrinal and literary contexts of the writings they edited: the Dialogues with a Muslim, the Funeral Oration, the Orations and the treatise On the Procession of the Holy Spirit respectively.** All these historians and philologists noted the emperor’s literary preoccupations, without, however, proceeding to a more comprehensive discussion.
In contrast, the ensuing study will proceed differently, although it will refrain from offering a global interpretation of the emperor’s ceuvre. It will strive nevertheless to spell out the major rhetorical features and ideological implications of this late Byzantine emperor’s political writings.
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