Download PDF | John II Komnenos, Emperor of Byzantium- In the shadow of father and son, eds. Alessandra Bucossi, Alex Rodriguez Suarez, Routledge, London 2016.
256 Pages
Contributors
Alessandra Bucossi is a Research Fellow and Lecturer at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She worked as Sophia Research Fellow in Byzantine Studies at KCL between 2011 and 2014. She studied Classics at the University of Genova and was awarded an MA in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s. She holds a doctorate from Oxford University and a Diploma in Greek Palaeography from the Vatican School of Greek Palaeography. She was also a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and a Research Fellow in the Ars edendi research programme based at Stockholms Universitet. Her critical edition of Andronikos Kamateros’ Sacrum Armamentarium was published in the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca — Brepols in 2014.
Elizabeth Jeffreys is Bywater and Sotheby Emerita in the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College. Her numerous publications include the important editions of Digenis Akritis (1998), the thirteenth-century verse romance The war of Troy (1996), as well as of Iacobi Monachi Epistulae (2009). She recently published Four Byzantine novels (2012), a translation of the twelfth-century Komnenian tales of romance and adventure.
Kallirroe Linardou lectures on Byzantine Art as a faculty member in the Department of Theory and History of Art at Athens School of Fine Arts. She has published on Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and co-edited a book on Byzantine eating and dining culture: Eat, drink, and be merry (Luke 12:19) - Food and wine in Byzantium (2007).
Paul Magdalino was Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Byzantine History in the University of St Andrews, Professor of Byzantine History at Koc¢ University, Istanbul, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests include Byzantine history: the society, culture and economy of the Byzantine world (sixth-thirteenth centuries); the city of Constantinople; prophecy, scientific thought and the formation of Byzantine religious Orthodoxy. He is well known for his monograph on the Byzantine Empire during the reign” of Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180), which challenged Niketas Choniates’ negative appraisal of the ruler.
Robert Ousterhout teaches Byzantine Art and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center for Ancient Studies. He taught previously at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983-2006), where he received his PhD in 1982. He also directs the ‘Cappadocia in Context’ site seminar for Kog University.
Pagona Papadopoulou is a Lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has published on Byzantine and Medieval numismatics, coin iconography and sigillography. Her monograph From unity to fragmentation: Money and its use in the Byzantine world (1092-1261) is forthcoming in the series Monographies du Centre ad histoire et civilation de Byzance.
Angeliki Papageorgiou has been a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Studies of the University of Athens since 2008. Her research interests lay in the transition from the Middle Byzantine to the Late Byzantine period, especially the Komnenian era, and revolve around issues of ideological, social, military and diplomatic history, as well as the relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Slavs. She published a monograph entitled To Chronikon tou Ierea tis Diokleias (The chronicle of the priest of Dukija), Athens 2012. Her PhD thesis John II Komnenos and his era (1118-1143) is under publication.
Vlada Stankovié is a Professor of Byzantine Studies and Director of the Centre for Cypriot Studies at the University of Belgrade. He taught at the University of Ioannina in 2008 and at the Open University of Cyprus in 2009/2010. From 2009 he is a member of the Editorial Board of Byzantinische Zeitschrift. His main interests are Byzantine history and literature (ninth-fourteenth century), the Balkans and Cyprus in the Middle Ages.
Dionysios Stathakopoulos is a Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at King’s College London. He studied in Minster, Vienna and Birmingham and taught in Vienna and Budapest. His research is focused on charity and remembrance, the history of medicine and its practitioners as well as the environmental history of Byzantium.
Ioannis Stouraitis is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna. His research interests focus on questions of war ethics, ideology and social identity in the Byzantine social order. His main publications include a monograph and a co-edited collective volume on Byzantine war ideology. He is also creator and administrator of the research website ByzIDeo, which promotes scholarly dialogue and information on issues of ideology and identity research in the Middle Ages.
Alex Rodriguez Suarez holds a PhD from the Centre for Hellenic Studies of King’s College London. His thesis focused on the Western presence in Byzantium ~ and its impact during the reigns of Alexios I and John II. He studied History at the Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona and was awarded an MA in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at Royal Holloway University of London. He was the convenor of the international workshop ‘In the shadow of father and son: John IT Komnenos and his reign’.
Martin Marko Vuéetié is a Research Assistant at the Department of History at Johannes Gutenberg Universitat in Mainz. He studied Medieval and Modern History, Byzantine Studies and Political Sciences in Mainz, Vienna and Glasgow. From 2009 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the Westfilische Wilhelms Universitat in Miinster. Recently he wrote a PhD dissertation entitled Encounters of Byzantine emperors with foreign rulers (395 to 1204): Preparation — composition — functions. Since 2012, he has been a member of the Priority Programme 1630 ‘Harbours from the Roman Period to the Middle Ages’ of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Preface
This book is dedicated to the reign of the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos (1118-1143), also known as John the Good, who ruled as the second emperor of the Komnenian dynasty (1081-1185). His reign has not received much scholarly attention, unlike those of his father and his son. In fact, the only publication focusing on his reign is the second volume on the Komnenian emperors written by Ferdinand Chalandon, Jean IT Comnéne (1118-1143) et Manuel F” Comnéne (1143-1180), which was published a century ago (1912).
Unlike his father Alexios and his son Manuel, John has not been the subject of any recent monograph and so his reign is discussed briefly in studies dealing with the Komnenian dynasty in general. The main reason for this lack of scholarly interest is the absence of a chronicle of the period addressing his rule in detail. A further explanation for this apparent lack of interest is the fact that no major political events took place during his reign; for instance, John did not have to face the passage of a Crusade through Byzantine territory. Because of the lack of studies focusing on this period, we believe that this book will fill an important gap in the history of the Byzantine Empire.
‘The origins of the present book go back to the international workshop dedicated to the reign of John II that took place in the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London, on 12 January 2013. Entitled ‘In the shadow of father and son: John IT Komnenos and his reign’, the conference presented a fresh and varied look at the reign of John, providing an opportunity to reconsider what we know about this emperor and his period. The success of the conference encouraged the Centre and the editors to publish a volume of essays derived from that initiative. This book includes seven chapters based directly on papers presented at the conference plus five new contributions, three of them by scholars who did not attend the workshop. The articles offer an insight into different aspects of Byzantium during the reign of John II, which are frequently studied separately by specialists in their respective fields: literature, religion, numismatics, architecture, artistic patronage and others.
Dionysios Stathakopoulos introduces the volume by exploring the written sources ~ accounts, panegyrics and poems — concerning John and the ideas which these provide about the emperor. In addition, Stathakopoulos looks at the key studies that have dealt with the period and reviews their authors’ approaches. Vlada Stankovié sheds light on the most obscure period of John’s life, that stretching from ~ his birth to his accession in 1118. By putting together the scarce evidence available about John as prince and co-emperor, Stankovi¢é provides a picture of the years in which John seems to have played no significant role and also faced the threat represented by his sister’s ambitions.
Ioannis Stouraitis deals with military aspects. John spent most of his reign on campaign; however, Stouraitis goes beyond the descriptions of conquests and compares the different existing narratives in order to understand the background to John’s military actions and their goals. The chapter by Angeliki Papageorgiou looks at the political ideology of the emperor. She gives an overview of the means — from triumphs to coins — employed by John to display his political ideals to both subjects and foreigners. Paul Magdalino looks at one of the most famous events of the reign, the imperial triumph of 1133.
Magdalino provides a fresh view of the occasion by analysing in detail the poems that were written by Theodore Prodromos to commemorate the triumph and also provides a new translation of them. Martin Vuéetié focuses on the encounters between John and foreign rulers throughout his reign. While these were not numerous, their analysis shows that this period witnessed the introduction of new elements in the arrangement of certain diplomatic meetings. Alex Rodriguez Suarez looks at the Western presence in the Byzantine Empire through the case studies of four individuals from the Italian peninsula: Cerbano Cerbani, James of Venice, Moses of Bergamo and Burgundio of Pisa. He shows that the presence in Constantinople of Westerners with literary and scholarly interests, two of whom had positions at court, predate the reign of Manuel I. Elizabeth Jeffreys explores the literary circles of Constantinople during the 1120s and 1130s.
She focuses on four authors, Nikephoros Basilakes, Michael Italikos, Nikephoros Bryennios and Theodore Prodromos, who received the patronage of court individuals, and shows that the reign of John was also an innovative period for literary creation. Alessandra Bucossi examines the Fi/iogue controversy during this period of growing contacts between the Byzantine and Latin churches. By looking at the dialogues written by Niketas of Thessalonica and the treatises of other Komnenian theologians, she traces the changing approaches — and their tools — to the procession of the Holy Spirit.
Robert Ousterhout examines church architecture through imperial patronage. By analysing three major monastic complexes, the Pantokrator, the Chora and the Kosmosoteira, Ousterhout investigates architectonic developments in relation to their use as burial sites of their patrons. Kallirroe Linardou examines the artistic patronage of John’s brother, the sebastokra~ tor Isaac. Through a series of representations commissioned by the Porphyrogennetos, she sheds light on how Isaac used portraiture in order to display his political ambitions. Finally, Pagona Papadopoulou examines the Byzantine coinage of the period. By looking at finds dated to the reign of John, she concludes that a new monetary policy was implemented in the south-eastern territories of the empire.
The inclusion of this wide range of topics provides a more complete picture of this period of Byzantine history, which is usually reduced to a list of military campaigns and the construction of the Pantokrator Monastery. In general terms, the secondary bibliography has treated the reign of John as a simple and brief parenthesis between the reign of his father Alexios and that of his son Manuel. While this period has previously been seen as uneventful and stable, many of the present contributions highlight its innovative character. Thus, the aim of this volume is to reassess not only the figure of John as emperor, but also to examine the changes and developments that took place in Byzantium during the period of his rule. The reign of John II merits its proper place within Byzantine history, and we hope that the publication of this book will contribute to rediscovering the period in its own right.
This present book complements the recent volume on the Pantokrator Monastery edited by Sofia Kotzabassi (2013). The Pantokrator indeed was the most important imperial foundation in twelfth-century Constantinople and the present book contributes to the understanding of the period that witnessed its construction. Together, these two edited volumes significantly revise our understanding of this underestimated period of the history of the Byzantine Empire. They also show that scholars of the Byzantine world are starting to look more seriously at the evidence of the period.
The international conference held at the Central European University in Budapest in 2015, entitled ‘Piroska and the Pantokrator: Dynastic memory, healing and salvation in Komnenian Constantinople’, follows this trend of recent research. That conference focused on the figure of John’s wife, the Hungarian princess Piroska-Eirene, and her role as founder of the Pantokrator, which was completed by John after she died in 1134. All of these current publications and academic events contribute to a growing scholarly interest in the neglected reign of John II Komnenos.
We would like warmly to thank the director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, Professor Roderick Beaton, for his expertise and advice in editing the volume. His cooperation has been invaluable and indeed very much appreciated. Also, our thanks go to our colleagues at King’s College London, Dionysios Stathakopoulos and Tassos Papacostas, for their continuous encouragement and support.
Alessandra Bucossi and Alex Rodriguez Suarez
John II Komnenos: a historiographical essay
Dionystos Stathakopoulos
In the case of John II Komnenos it seems that the pen was mightier than the sword. Iam referring to the quite deafening and awkward silence to which Anna Comnena condemned her brother, repaying him for the treachery of being born, of being a son, and of succeeding her beloved father on the throne. Mentions of John in the Alexias are sparse: his birth is recorded together with a description of the infant John which is ambiguous at best (at least compared to the description of herself as a child prodigy), then the birth of his first children is recorded, the fact that he campaigned together with her husband, and that while Alexios was dying, John was away trying to secure the Great Palace.
Finally, Anna accuses her brother (and his son) of keeping everyone away from her for thirty years. What she does not disclose is how she tried at least twice to usurp John’s throne with the help of her mother and husband and how these failed attempts resulted in her house arrest.? Anna writing in the 1140s must have known that there was no contemporary author writing about her brother.> Since her Alexias is one of the key texts of the period and she is the only contemporary historian who actually knew him personally, it is perhaps partly down to her silence about him that John’s reign has been largely perceived as somewhat less important than those of his father and his son.* The present volume aims to revisit and perhaps redress this. The modest scope of this introductory chapter is to review the primary sources as well as the key scholarly views on John’s reign.
We are not served well by Byzantine historians on John. The two historians that recorded his time in power, John Kinnamos and Niketas Choniates, were too young to know him personally. Their portrayal of him resembles that of Michael Psellos for Basil IT: propped up as a model, a perfect emperor, in portraits that are somewhat lifeless, a ‘John imaginaire’.
John Kinnamos (before 1143-after 1185), who wrote under John’s son, Manuel I, dedicated around a tenth of his Epitome to the reign of John.’ He acknowledges that his account is brief and second hand.’ The largest part of the narrative is an almost breathless concatenation of John’s numerous campaigns.® Like his father before him, the emperor led his armies personally and is portrayed as a cunning tactician — not least when conducting numerous sieges. Kinnamos supplies little else that could be useful in characterizing John: he was sometimes prone to anger? and was pious” — trivial facts, hardly comparable to Anna's masterly portraits of Alexios I, his family and key members of his court as well as his enemies.
Like Kinnamos, Niketas Choniates (c.1160-1217) devotes just one book of his lengthy History to John’s reign."' He equally states that his treatment of this emperor will be short and based on second-hand accounts.!? In fact, his account follows closely that of Kinnamos, who is evidently his source: the same events are related and appear in the same order."* The only major difference from Kinnamos is Choniates’ reference to the political problems caused by John’s siblings, Anna and Isaac, who at different times posed a threat to his reign.’
The two texts nevertheless read very differently because Choniates is by far the better writer; in fact, it becomes clear that he occasionally embellishes and enhances the original account in order to present his own views. In one case, for example, Choniates records that John’s measure of diverting contributions from ship-money levies into the treasury (instead of being used for the upkeep of the fleet) resulted in the flourishing of piracy.’ The most creative of Choniates’ interventions in the narrative, however, is certainly his treatment of John’s dying speech. His text is significantly longer than that of Kinnamos, who reports it as well, principally because it includes a section in which John proclaims what an ideal emperor should be like.
Bearing in mind that Choniates text was reworked by the author to reflect with hindsight what had brought on the conquest of Constantinople in 1204,” such instances are more revealing about Choniates than they are about John II. ‘The image of John conveyed by Choniates is primarily that of a soldier’s emperor characterized by military prowess, but who seemed to have disregarded the strain he put upon his armies as a result of constant campaigning.”® In his final portrait of the emperor, John is described as a restrained and pious man, but also as charitable and munificent in his imperial largesse.’? Whether Choniates drew his information from individuals who had known John or whether this is merely an ideal portrait must remain open, but the latter option seems the more sensible one.
A Western historian completes the bulk of information on John II. William of Tyre (c.1130-1185) had no personal experience of the emperor, but met with his son Manuel in 1168 and kept contact with him throughout the following years, even visiting Constantinople in 1171 as well as being a close supporter of Manuel’s grandniece, Maria, the queen of Jerusalem.” William records John’s campaigns in the East with ample information which seems based on oral informants or accounts that have not been preserved elsewhere;” as such his testimony is important. William's attitude towards John is very positive.
He is presented as a man of great courage and considerable military abilities who takes an active part in battles and inspires his troops with his tireless fighting.” Furthermore, he is the emperor of a mighty and very wealthy state and quite conscious of his imperial dignity, which according to William — the Latin princes in the Levant constantly tried to undermine.” William also includes a description of John: ‘a man of medium height, with black hair and swarthy skin, and for this reason is still called “the Moor”. Though insignificant in appearance, he was distinguished for his lofty character and famous for his prowess in war.’
Apart from works of history there are a number of extant imperial encomia written to celebrate John’s achievements as well as important moments in the life of the imperial family: two in prose by Nikephoros Basilakes and Michael Italikos as well as two dozen in verse by Theodore Prodromos.” These are texts written and performed in John’s presence (at least so much can be assumed) apart, naturally from Prodromos’ epitaphs intended for his grave. I cannot do justice to these quite complex poetical works in the short space of this overview, and in any case they have already been masterfully discussed by Paul Magdalino,” but I would like to draw attention to some important traits.
There is a common stock of key features and themes that emerge from all of them, despite the fact that each individual author used them in a different manner placing emphasis on different aspects. Even a cursory reading reveals that the core theme of all these texts is John’s wars and his achievements in battle. One may be surprised to find that the language used to do so is quite gory and that the blood of the empire’s enemies amply (and justly, according to the texts) shed by John and his armies is a recurring topic.
Michael Italikos, more than the other two authors, offers some very specific details on the various campaigns, but all three enumerate the places reconquered and enemies vanquished by John, who is often likened to Alexander the Great as well as to a myriad other heroic figures from the Biblical and Greco-Roman past. Prodromos specifically hammers home the image of the tireless and almost superhuman emperor whose deeds have spelled the demise of enemies and the protection of his people. Another important theme of these texts is the glorification of the Komnenian bloodline with John being apostrophized as the most brilliant offshoot of the Komnenian stock countless times. Apart from these two dominant themes the usual imperial virtues are duly ticked off in these laudatory works but without a sense of something specific that is worth mentioning. For example, the emperor’s philanthropia is very frequently mentioned, but without providing any specific examples to support it.”
Around half a dozen contemporary poems mention John II. In a poem by the court physician Nicholas Kallikles we are given the description of a mosaic cycle adorning the Palace which displayed Alexios’ victories over various enemies and showed John in mourning.” It has been convincingly argued that this cycle must have been an early effort by John to cement his succession to the throne, which had not been smooth, and to assert himself as his father’s true heir — a fact which his sister devoted considerable space to refuting in her work.
In the famous manuscript Marcianus Graecus 524 there are a number of other poems, mostly dedicatory epigrams, that touch on John’s reign, though they were written during that of his son Manuel.” The information we obtain from them on John is slight: some poems describe images in which he was depicted together with his father and son,*° while one poem refers to a votive golden lamp that he had intended to donate to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem but that was actually only dedicated after his death by Manuel I.3*
A number of documents issued by John IT have been preserved either in the original or in later manuscript copies.” In 1119 he confirmed privileges granted by his father to the Monastery of St John at Patmos.** There are also three extant legal texts (novels) by the emperor: one dealing with ecclesiastical matters and two regarding family law.** All these are rather standard texts and preserve nothing extraordinary which could be useful in providing information on the emperor. On the contrary, what is quite unusual in terms of their accident of preservation are the two chrysobulls sent to Pope Innocent II in 1139 and 1141 still extant in the Vatican.
Though they contain nothing spectacular as such in terms of their content, the documents confirm the close ties of John and the Pope regarding the subject of Church union: the emperor received at least two papal embassies and confirmed his interest in pursuing the reunion, not least by dispatching Byzantine envoys to Rome.** The documents, which contain the Greek text as well as a Latin translation,’’ are lavish pieces of visual propaganda: they are huge (around four meters long), written in gold ink on purple parchment, and the elongated letters used together with the sumptuous gifts sent to the Pope produce an image of the Byzantine emperor that is powerful and magnificent. A further document is preserved by Otto of Freising (c.1111-1158): a letter sent by John to the German emperor Conrad III in 1142 or 1143. The context of the correspondence is the alliance against the Normans, but the presence of German knights in the service of the Byzantines is discussed as well.
Surely the document that has attracted most scholarly attention from the reign of John IT is the Typikon for the Monastery of Pantokrator and the charitable institutions under its auspices.“° Especially the regulations for the hospital (xenon) included in it have been the object of numerous studies and have monopolized attention to a large degree.*! It is unfortunate that the proemium of the document is mutilated with one or two folia missing.” This was an autobiographical section as the remaining text makes clear — whether composed by John himself or a ghostwriter at his instigation is not particularly important for our purposes.
Anyone who reads the entire document can hardly miss the fact that at its heart lay John’s anxiety. First of all it is an anxiety about this life: John recounts how after he ascended the throne God ‘destroyed the cunning plots of my visible and invisible enemies and rescued me from every trap subjecting all my enemies under my feet’.” But later, too, there were ‘ambushes of those within and those without, destroying and binding hand and foot those of my friends and relations who stood against me and wickedly distanced themselves from brotherly concord’. This is a none too veiled accusation against his scheming siblings, Anna and Isaac, the two persons who are prominently absent from the very lengthy and detailed list of family members that were to be commemorated at the monastery.
Anxiety about his earthly life goes hand in hand with John’s care about the fate of his soul after death. The entire document — and thus the entire foundation complex — is destined to address this and ensure in the best possible way, no expenses spared, with an almost obsessive attention to detail, that John’s salvation would be secure.
Obviously the lion’s share in this is taken up by the foundation of the monastery — a large one by contemporary standards — with some eighty monks and fifty members of the clergy along with another sixty monks living in the six dependencies of Pantokrator, under the leadership of its superior.” The text is very detailed on how the liturgical services were to be performed and again the largest part is taken up by commemorative services for John and his family, both alive and dead. There were daily, weekly and annual services for over thirty members of the Komnenoi: John’s grandparents, parents, siblings and their spouses, children and their spouses and children as well as uncles and aunts and their spouses.“
After outlining the functioning of the monastery, the text of the Typikon turns to the three charitable institutions that were to function under its auspices.” The hospital (wenon) is regarded as the crowning achievement. There were to be five wards, each for a different type of ailment, with fifty beds, each ward fitted with one additional bed for emergencies, and there were six additional beds with pierced mattresses, for those patients who were unable to move. All in all the hospital could cater for sixty-one patients — the Typikon specified that they were to be bedridden sick people and of course destitute.
The medical and paramedical personnel that was assigned to care for the inmates reaches the unbelievable ratio of almost 1:1. Surely this had little to do with providing efficient medical help — it is there to impress his contemporaries and more importantly to show God the seriousness of the emperor’s commitment to charity. The amount of detail in the Typikon’s provisions is again staggering — nothing is left to chance. From the overall admonition that no bed should be left empty, to matters of bedding and clothes for the sick, food, heating, drugs and medical equipment, to the very detailed work plan and hierarchy of medical and paramedical personnel — no aspect of the life and wellbeing of the inmates was left unaddressed.
To ensure that the monastery and the charitable institutions would function long after his passing, John endowed them with considerable property, a substantial part of which is appended to the Typikon, while we are not aware of additional revenues that were outlined in the emperor’s secret testament, mentioned by the Typikon, but not preserved.” Furthermore, John placed his son Alexios and after him a leading member of the family as protectors. Thus, so long as the Komnenoi should live, they would ensure that John’s stipulations were observed — ideally in perpetuum, though in reality the hospital does not seem to have functioned for more than a generation, while the leprosarium may in fact have never been realized at all.
‘The Pantokrator Typikon has been called by Anne Wharton Epstein ‘an endowment document of legalistic and bureaucratic ilk ... concerned with the protection of a large monetary investment’. Indeed it is hard to overlook this aspect given the amount of prescriptive detail outlined above. If we compare this document to the Typika issued by John’s mother Eirene for the convent of Kecharitomene and to that by his brother Isaac for the convent and hospital, or old age home, at Kosmosoteira (all three produced within the first half of the twelfth century), the Pantokrator stands out in that respect, despite the many similarities among the three documents.”
Summing up, while the material we have on John II is not negligible in quantity, it is somewhat unimpressive in terms of the amount and quality of the information it provides, given that so much of what I have surveyed above is either not contemporary with the emperor or is quite short and mostly topical. It is therefore not entirely surprising that the discussion of his reign in modern scholarship reflects these constraints: John is deemed a very important emperor on the one hand,*® and yet apparently not worthy of being the subject of a dedicated monograph. The closest we have to this is the first part of the second volume of Chalandon’s monumental study of the Komnenoi.™ This is a work very much based on sources, and since no major new source has surfaced since its publication, it is still relevant. Chalandon’s verdict is wholly positive, praising John’s love of austerity and moral order, charity towards his subjects, courage and tireless drive. His reign was ‘a perpetual campaign’; he was a very successful commander who had ‘all the qualities that make a successful general without a soldier’s coarseness’. The largest part of Chalandon’s narrative on John is devoted to his campaigns; the rest is made up of sections on his family: his wife and children, his siblings and other relatives. In a way the author's rather matter-of-fact way of looking at John does not depart in any significant way from that of his Byzantine sources; this is a solid fact-based account that does not aim to provide a critical evaluation. John II is portrayed as building on his father’s achievements and paving the way for those of his son. In a way this uncontroversial view has been dominant in the bibliography on John, especially since Ostrogorsky’s very influential History of the Byzantine State cemented it into orthodoxy:
‘The verdict of both contemporaries and posterity has acclaimed John (1118-1143) as the greatest of the Comneni. As a ruler he combined clever prudence with purposeful energy, while at the same time he was a man of upright, steadfast character and high principled far beyond his day. Moderate, yet firm and forceful in pursuing his goal, he carried on his father’s policy with iron determination, never losing sight of
the bounds of possibility.*
‘The topic received new impetus in the 1980s and 1990s with the publication of major works on the Komnenian period. In Michael Angold’s The Byzantine Empire 1025-1204 only a very short but densely written chapter is devoted to John’s reign.*” Though it does not significantly change the established view it offers a much more nuanced reading of the period and suggests a unifying strategy behind the emperor's military and diplomatic endeavours. A similar outlook is evident in the treatment of John by Paul Magdalino in The empire of Manuel I Komnenos.** The author shows clearly that despite seemingly departing from the policies of Alexios’ later years John in fact followed a similar pattern. One of Magdalino’s major contributions to the understanding of John’s reign is his interpretation of the emperor's alliance with the German king against the Normans (sealed, inter alia, with the betrothal of his fourth son, Manuel, to Conrad’s sister-in-law Bertha) as opening the way for a more direct involvement in southern Italy that was to become a reality under Manuel.
To these studies that look — rather succinctly — at John’s rule as a whole, one can juxtapose those concerned with some of its more specific aspects: the Church and the army. In Michael Angold’s Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081-1261, John hardly makes an appearance. The emperor ‘was preoccupied with campaigning and foreign affairs and had little time for the church’.® As far as John's relations to his own Church go, this view is linked to the absence of sources and is therefore bound to remain stable. Looking at relations with the papacy, however, and given the little-explored material of John’s overtures in the direction of Union, we can expect new ground to be broken in the future. Angold emphasizes the role of the empress Eirene-Piroska in setting the tone of his court. Despite the fact that her portrait in the gallery of the Hagia Sophia is one of the most recognizable Byzantine images, Eirene was a shadowy figure at best, but this is changing as a result of recent scholarship. Her role in sponsoring, conceptualizing and building the Pantokrator Monastery has been emphasized as well as the fact that she was venerated as a saint and therefore served as a model for appropriate female aristocratic behaviour.”
If there is one area that John excelled in, this was undoubtedly his military record. John W. Birkenmeier explored this in his book The development of the Komnenian army, 1081-1180. Expectedly, the image of the emperor that emerges from this study is that of an astute strategist with clear and coherent goals, but also that of a cautious supreme commander who preferred besieging cities, while his son more often opted for pitched battles that could (and did often) go disastrously wrong.
The current consensus on John IJ and his reign is summed up by Paul Magdalino in his chapter on the Komnenoi in the Cambridge history of the Byzantine Empire. The emperor's constant campaigning is presented as ‘indicative of his need to command the loyalty of the army and prove himself worthy of his inheritance’ rather than as a reaction to actual threats; the victories he secured (which were duly and impressively celebrated) were the main reason for his comparatively secure hold on power. His ambitious plans in the East were cut short by his untimely death, but Magdalino persuasively argues that despite controlling a well-trained and effective military force, what John achieved may well have been at the limit of what was possible. Within his empire John's reign is characterized as ‘conspicuously uneventful’; his attitude towards the Church ‘remarkably non-interventionist’.“
The constraints of the available source material and the scholarly consensus in the assessment of John's reign would make one wonder what the aim of the present volume could possibly be — given that a major, transformative re-evaluation of John II is not likely. Given the sophisticated modern accounts on the reigns of his father and son, the period in the middle has been oddly passed over. The little attention this period has received and the way it has been presented (obligatory for reasons of completeness but quite half-heartedly) leave ample room for our effort to tackle the reign from various angles, to shed light on every nook and cranny, and to produce an image of John and his reign that is much more complete and complex. John II may remain in the shadow of his father and son, but hopefully this will be now in a chiaroscuro space with texture and nuance.
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