Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Dr Maximilian C. G. Lau - Emperor John II Komnenos_ Rebuilding New Rome 1118-1143-Oxford University Press (2024)
401 Pages
Acknowledgements
This monograph would never have been possible without the support of many people at Oriel College, St Benet’s Hall, Worcester College, the programme in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Oxford, the Oxford University Byzantine Society, the University of St Andrews, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, the Muintir Uí Chroidheáin in Blackrock (‘the working group’), the Stabi in Berlin, and many in Guernsey too. Without Mary Whitby and Ida Toth, I would never have been able to translate all that Greek.
This work would never have been as critical without the ideas and feedback from my doctoral examiners and readers Paul Magdalino and Catherine Holmes, nor my editors James Howard-Johnston and Marc Lauxtermann. Further feedback and ideas came from Peter Frankopan, Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys, Yasuhiro Otsuki, Jonathan Lewis, Ian Forrest, Kirsty Stewart, Tim Greenwood, John Ritzema, Aoife Ní Chroidheáin, and João Dias. Equally, I have immense thanks to many other scholars who were very willing to share their work early so that it could be included in this publication. Above all, I would like to thank my late, great supervisor Mark Whittow for setting me down this path, and I wish he could have seen the final result. The best part of this research was the fieldwork across the Balkans and the Middle East, where people were incredibly welcoming and helpful, especially when I was still a postgraduate scholar very much out of my depth. Of particular note are Sami and his people at the hostel in Jericho in the West Bank, and the variety of characters at the Old Town Hostel in Pristina, Kosovo.
I would never have been able to do this research without grants from All Souls, Oriel and the British Institute at Ankara, and without the companionship of Aoife Ní Chroidheáin (all of those Pontic backroads), Douglas Whalin (getting lost in Serbia and fortress hunting in Bithynia), Hal Bigland (the Konya-Antakya road trip), Benjy Mason, Will Yates (Georgian auto-repair), and then those two with Rufus Stirling and Esteban Ramírez (down and out in Israel and Palestine). Finally, I would like to thank my parents and Aoife for supporting me throughout this journey, as well as my school teachers Chris Fothergill, Ronnie Womersley, and Peter Brakewell for getting me into history in the first place.
Note on Transliteration
In general, I have transliterated Greek names and terms as closely as possible, but not with absolute consistency. Common names, places and ethnonyms are given in their most familiar form, for example, ‘Kinnamos’ and ‘Komnene’ are used but alongside ‘Constantinople’, ‘Choniates’, and ‘Cuman’ rather than Konstantinoupolis, Khoniates, and Kouman. I tend to have used ‘Latins’ rather than ‘Franks’ for clarity, though the terms are both used in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic texts to refer to western Europeans
Note on Citation
Where one page number is given for a primary text, it will refer to the text in its original language. Where two page numbers are given (e.g. NC, p. 14; tr. p. 10), the first will be to the text in its original language, and the second to the translation. Where two numerals such as ‘10.5’ are used, they refer to the book and chapter, respectively. All maps and photos are the author’s own from fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 unless otherwise stated. Numerals given to poems and seals are those used in the published editions, e.g. ‘Prodromos XV’ refers to Hörandner’s numbering.
Note on Translations
Greek and Latin translations of the court sources are my own unless otherwise stated. When translations to aid clarification for common sources such as Choniates are required, standard editions are used unless otherwise stated. French, German and Italian have been consulted first hand. For other languages such as Russian, Hungarian, Syriac, or Norse, I have either used standard translations or consulted fellow scholars at Oriel College, Oxford and the Central European University, Budapest. I am hugely indebted to them for these additional translations.
Introduction
Overshadowed by Father and Son?
John II Komnenos has the intriguing honour of being one of Edward Gibbon’s few Byzantine heroes: the eighteenth-century historian, usually disdainful of all things Byzantine, judged that Marcus Aurelius, as a true Roman exemplar, ‘would not have disdained’ his successor of a millennium later.1 This generous appreciation of the twelfth-century emperor is a nearly word-for-word translation of the judgement made by Niketas Choniates at the end of his account of John’s life in his Χρονικὴ Διήγησις, or History of the Roman Empire from 1118 to 1207, with both Gibbon and Choniates calling him the greatest of the Komnenos dynasty.2 Gibbon’s reiteration of Choniates is indicative of a problem that has affected scholarship ever since: what we understand concerning John II Komnenos’ reign has been shackled to its presentation in the writings of Choniates, and his fellow twelfth-century historian John Kinnamos.
Unlike John’s father Alexios I Komnenos, and John’s son Manuel I, there is no detailed major primary source for John, such as Anna Komnene’s Alexiad for Alexios and Kinnamos’ and Choniates’ fuller biographies for Manuel. Instead, there are only the summary accounts found in the histories of Kinnamos and Choniates. They present seductively clear accounts of major events, their causes and effects, in spite of the passage of four or more decades between John’s reign and the times of writing. But modern histories of John’s reign have tended to do little more than recycle this limited material, presenting the reign as a sequence of campaigns by an active soldier-emperor, before concurring with Choniates’ and Gibbon’s original judgement. However, there is much more to be said about this ‘overshadowed’ period, a reign which had a direct impact on the vast geopolitical changes that swept Eurasia and Africa in the twelfth century.
The emergence of territorial lordships under permanent western European rule in the Levant as a consequence of the First Crusade and responses in the Islamic world to these developments were only the most obvious of these changes. Old empires such as John’s in Constantinople were in competition with rising powers in an increasingly interconnected world, as political and military developments in central Asia and Western Europe were felt acutely in the lands between. John’s reign therefore merits closer scrutiny, in light of a wider range of sources than the histories of Kinnamos and Choniates alone. Foreign affairs need to be viewed holistically, and placed in their proper diplomatic and military context. Account must be taken at all times of the domestic context: the selection of key personnel, celebration of victory at court, and the Church. New questions should be asked of the sources, and more light cast on the state of New Rome in this period.
Alexios’ beleaguered realm of the late eleventh century was transformed into Manuel’s grand empire of the mid and later-twelfth: John’s role in this metamorphosis should be examined. A survey of modern work reveals the stranglehold of Choniates and Gibbon’s judgement on scholarly interpretations. The most important recent publication is that which resulted from a workshop held in 2014: John II Komnenos, Emperor of Byzantium, ed. A. Bucossi and A. Rodriguez Suarez (London, 2016). The conclusion, that John deserved the favourable opinion of historians on the basis of his military achievements but that ‘otherwise no significant political events took place’, do him insufficient justice. Nor does it alter the image of John conveyed in popular works, such as John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium: Decline and Fall (London, 1995), A. Carr’s The Komnene Dynasty: Byzantium’s Struggle for Survival 1057–1185 (Barnsley, 2018), or K. Lygo’s The Emperors of Byzantium (London, 2022).
These all relate John’s life as one of continuous campaigning, with the emperor being a man of spartan tastes, characterized by faithfulness to his wife, who built a major monastery dedicated to Christ Pantokrator in Constantinople, but who was otherwise far less interesting than the rest of his family. Bucossi and Rodriguez Suarez’s volume opens with an historiographical essay by Stathakopoulos, who summarizes scholarship on John as an emperor perceived as ‘very important on the one hand, and yet apparently not worthy enough of being the subject of a dedicated monograph’.3
The closest thing to such a study is the first part of the second volume on the Komnenian dynasty by Ferdinand Chalandon published more than a century ago in 1912.4 This too echoes Choniates and Gibbon by portraying the reign as one of perpetual campaigning, with John himself being a morally upright and hardworking emperor as shown by his relationships with his family.5 This torch was passed undimmed to George Ostrogorsky who once echoed Choniates directly by calling John ‘the greatest of the Comneni’, again based upon his campaigning and personal character.6 This judgement has tended to be refined rather than re-examined since then: Angold, Karayannopoulos, and Magdalino have offered short evaluations as part of their broader studies of eleventh- and/or twelfth-century Byzantium.7
Into these appraisals, John’s reign is squeezed into a gap between what are implied to have been more dynamic periods of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They discuss some elements of continuity and change between Alexios and Manuel, and offer an updated examination of the sources, but the overall analysis of John as the campaigning, moral emperor remains largely the same.8 From these studies, Stathakopoulos chooses Magdalino’s contribution to the 2008 Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire as one that summarizes the consensus on John: (a) he campaigned in order to prove himself a legitimate emperor to a domestic audience rather than necessarily to expand the empire, and (b) the great change he could have brought about by reconquering the east was left undone by his early death. Stathakopoulos also echoes one of Ostrogorsky’s points: John did as much for the empire as was possible at the time.9 Angold and Magdalino’s consideration of John’s reign in the context of a broader historical investigation is replicated across the rest of the field. Examples from his reign are integrated into wider studies such as those on Byzantium and the Crusades by Harris and Lilie, or Byzantium and the Balkans by Stephenson and Madgearu.
Only a very few works, notably Birkenmeier’s Development of the Komnenian Army, Stanković and Zlatar’s analyses of Komnenian Constantinople, or studies on the monastery of Christ Pantokrator, devote substantial sections to John.10 By contrast, in Angold’s Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, John is barely mentioned, except as being preoccupied with campaigning and with little time for the church—a view echoed in the Cambridge History of Byzantium, where Magdalino characterizes John as remarkably non-interventionist, with domestic matters in general being ‘conspicuously uneventful’.11 Stathakopoulos is right, therefore, when he remarks that John’s reign has often been included in studies ‘for reasons of completeness, and quite half-heartedly’, even if he excuses this as being ‘due to the constraints of the source material’.12 Beyond these general studies, there are a few that focus more directly on John and his era. These include the recently published PhD thesis on John by Papageorgiou as well as the various studies in the Shadow of Father and Son volume of essays on John edited by Bucossi and Rodriguez Suarez, which are complemented by the research presented in the recent Piroska and the Pantokrator volume.13
In the Shadow of Father and Son mainly contains studies that attempt, in Stathakopoulos’ words, to paint the shadows of John’s reign as ‘a chiaroscuro place of texture and nuance’, and to a great extent these studies and Papageorgiou’s thesis and the Pantokrator volume succeed in doing much of the foundational work needed for an extended study on John. Papers by Vučetić, Rodriguez Suarez, Jeffreys, Bucossi, and Ousterhout in the Shadow of Father and Son volume contextualize John’s reign within current research on how Byzantine emperors interacted with foreign rulers, and dealt with western intellectual culture, literary trends, the filioque controversy, architecture and patronage, even if the distinctiveness of John’s reign in this volume remains in its transitional character, as a ‘chiaroscuro’, an interval between better illuminated periods of history.14 John is more prominent in the chapters contributed by Stanković, Magdalino, Linardou, and Papadopoulou. They cover, respectively, John’s life before 1118, his triumph of 1133, the hidden references to John’s brother Isaac, and coinage and monetary policy.15
Finally, Stouraitis and Papageorgiou’s papers in the same volume tackle the big question of re-evaluating John’s campaigns and political ideology.16 They come to very different conclusions as to whether John acted according to some form of crusader ideology in particular, with the former advocating that John’s ideology operated within the traditional scope of the Roman emperors, whilst Papageorgiou champions John as an emperor who adopted the crusading ideology of the west. A similar range of papers is to be found in the Piroska and the Pantokrator volume. Refreshingly in this publication, John’s wife and empress takes centre stage. Of particular importance is Bárány’s re-evaluation of the politics surrounding Eirene-Piroska’s marriage to John. The papers by Sághy, Jeffreys, Franchi, Mielke, Demirtiken, Kiss, Shlyakhtin, and myself focus on what the evidence tells us about her as an empress, and those by Ousterhout, Wolford, and Jeffreys update scholarship on the Pantokrator.17 These studies have already highlighted some new methodological approaches that this investigation will also adopt. In the first place, they confirm that the narrative accounts by Choniates and Kinnamos should be appreciated as carefully wrought pieces of literature with defined rhetorical purposes.
They were not written to let readers know what occurred, but they were instead texts that used historical events to make a convincing argument, and should therefore be used with the utmost care. This can be done by reading them in context with the many other written sources that have not hitherto been exploited to their full potential. The most useful, because they are concerned with the people and events of the time, are those non-Byzantine histories written in neighbouring regions. These exist in a variety of languages, such as Latin, Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac, and though some were written at a similar distance to events as the histories of Kinnamos and Choniates, others were written almost as these events occurred. These texts give us unique insights, above all into a more contemporary, non-Constantinopolitan, and non-Emperor-focused view on events.
Of particular relevance are the Chronicle of the so-called Priest of Diokleia and the history of Michael the Syrian: regional texts that allow us to focus on developments in areas outside Constantinople that Choniates and Kinnamos gloss over in favour of what the emperor was doing, or what occurred in the capital. In addition, there are numerous non-historical or semi-historical Byzantine sources: letters (official and private), documents, legal texts, saints’ lives, and, most important of all, contemporary poetry and orations that celebrated the emperor’s achievements. John’s reign can be better understood in the light of these texts: the political pulse of the time is contained within them; they allow us a window into how John, his administration, and his rivals wished events to be portrayed. These texts are a portal into the type of world in which these authors lived and the one they sought to construct, and, equally, the means to understand better why their authors represented their worlds in specific ways.
Beyond the written word, not much use has been made of the growing volume of material evidence. This category of evidence allows us to read texts in entirely new ways, especially in the case of the archaeological remains of the many fortifications John built. Far from there being few extant sources, there is in fact a plethora of evidence that survives testifying to John’s reign: however, it must be identified and a means found to piece it together, and thus evidence is the focus of the first chapter of this volume. Following the opening chapter, attention turns to the events of John’s life. It may seem surprising to say so, but the chronology of John’s reign is far from secure. Byzantinists have been inclined to adopt a thematic approach within the framework of the more general studies mentioned above.
This approach does not take account of the evolving priorities of John and his contemporaries from year to year, and at times even from one day to the next, as circumstances developed, and goals shifted. Choniates and Kinnamos also give a deceptive impression that John dealt with the various challenges facing him sequentially, and that he dealt with them according to some form of grand plan. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that his choices, and the events themselves, can be better understood once it is acknowledged that the emperor had to balance multiple demands at once, often facing various challenges in the same year, and therefore having to change his priorities accordingly. The significance of a number of key events changes radically once they are seen in a context which is sensitive to chronology.
The fundamental principle governing the arrangement of the majority of the material in this book is therefore chronology. The aim is to watch policy as it evolved in time, in carefully documented changing circumstances. At first sight, such an approach may appear dated compared to modern scholarship, more in keeping with the work of J. B. Bury, Steven Runciman, or latterly John Julius Norwich.18 However, it is only when the two Byzantine histories (by Kinnamos and Choniates) are supplemented with previously unused textual and non-textual evidence, and when developments are placed in their specific historical contexts, that a full understanding of the pressures upon John and his empire, and the emperor’s responses to those pressures, can be obtained, and more probing historical analysis can be undertaken.
Chapter Two therefore covers the first thirty years of John’s life before the death of his father and his succession. This is a stage of John’s life which has rarely been examined before, but during which we can see the policies and personnel of John’s government taking shape. This chapter will, therefore, also include an overview of twelfth-century imperial government. Moving on from domestic affairs, Chapter Three examines the world as it appeared to John from Constantinople, providing a tour of the recent history of the emperor’s geographical and political neighbours near and far. This is followed by a consideration of the key military and diplomatic events in Alexios’ last years, and of the ways in which John sought to complete his father’s plans in both the Balkans and Anatolia. Chapter Four focuses on the emperor’s response to the nomad invasion of 1122–3, perhaps his greatest victory, and then the disposition of his Danubian lands thereafter.
Chapter Five covers the years 1123–6, which focus on the potential gains and pitfalls of client management in this period. At this time, John involved himself in the affairs of Turks, Serbs, and Hungarians while battling the Venetians over trading privileges. He ended up overextending his resources, and was forced temporarily to abandon some of his initiatives in order to salvage his position. John’s decision to focus on the Balkans led to war with Hungary as well as with the Serb prince of Raška; this 1127–9 conflict is covered in Chapter Six. John’s victory there settled the Balkans, such that he could return to Anatolia in the 1130s. Anatolia is therefore the focus of Chapter Seven, although John’s engagement in this region was as much driven by his brother Isaac’s attempted coup as any vision of reconquest. Both old and new dynamics were, however, at play with regards John’s greatest campaign during the years 1136–9, when he conquered Cilicia and brought his battle-hardened army to the Levant and Syria.
His successes and failures in this region resulted in an even more intense set of campaigns from 1140–3, which took John from the rugged mountains of northern Anatolia to the lakes of the central plateau and then back to the Levant, before his sudden death left his designs stillborn. Despite this sudden end to John’s life, the two final chapters of this investigation look deeper into what the emperor was able to achieve, and the scope of his plans for both his empire and his church.
Chapter Ten examines John’s fortification building programme and how that led to the re-establishment of secure Byzantine provinces in Anatolia in particular. Coupled with this, it takes a closer look at John’s army and its successes. Chapter Eleven finally turns to ecclesiastical history, highlighting that for all of John’s campaigning he also poured resources into philanthropic, legal and ecumenical initiatives that attest to both his personal piety and hint at further objectives had he lived out his last years in Constantinople.
These last two chapters draw on material from John’s entire reign, and they point ahead to the conclusion of the book, where this previously overshadowed emperor can at last be brought into the light. Across the book as a whole, we come to appreciate how John rebuilt New Rome on the battlefield, in the landscape, and in the capital city. He did this through campaigning and the construction of a network of fortifications and monasteries; with these achievements he left his mark on the ideology of crusading, the iconography of imperial coinage, and in the positive judgement he received from both his own court and many outside his realm. We can also acknowledge that his ambitions stretched yet further, even if imperfectly accomplished: the encirclement of the Anatolian plateau and further territorial gains in the west, and the advancement of ecumenical relations and legal reform bold initiatives that were first delayed by his missteps, and which were then left incomplete at his early death. His reign was therefore just as dynamic as any of his contemporaries, and it is only as memories faded, and New Rome with it, that his legacy became obscured.
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