Download PDF | Anthony Kaldellis - The New Roman Empire_ A History of Byzantium-Oxford University Press (2023).
1169 Pages
Introduction
The end was inevitable, though the Romans of the east held it at bay for over a thousand years. Their anxiety over it simmered during that millennium, finding expression in apocalyptic fiction. According to one scenario, which still resonates, the waters would rise and submerge the world, and the few survivors would tie their boats to the tip of the Column of Constantine and lament its passing.1 Historical events also fueled the imagination. Raging infernos periodically tore through Constantinople, turning the porticos into rivers of fire and scorching that iconic Column. Urban insurrections led to armed clashes among the citizens in the forum around it and the surrounding streets. The Column was struck by lightning, which sheared off shards, and a mighty gale toppled the colossal nude statue of Constantine-as-Apollo that had stood at its top for almost eight centuries; the fallen statue was prudently replaced with a cross. History and apocalypse flirted around this monument in both pagan and Christian guises.
It was said that Constantine had transferred the Palladium, a talisman of Athena that made cities impregnable, from Rome to Constantinople, burying it under the Column. When the Turks finally broke through in 1453, the rout was expected to reach only as far as the Column, whereupon an angel of God would appear and deliver a sword to a common man, who would drive the enemy to the borders of Persia.2 The Column of Constantine may be the worse for wear but it withstood the test of time: it still stands in modern Istanbul (see Figure 1 in chapter 1). It was built by Constantine the Great as a focal point for his new city and remains an iconic monument for a civilization that lasted over 1,100 years. Though other phases of Roman history are studied more, this was the longest one. The eastern Roman empire, known colloquially to its inhabitants as Romanía, was one of the most durable states the world has ever seen. Its existence spanned a fifth of recorded human history, hence the length of this book.
At the start of our story, it encompassed about a fourth of a total global population of some 190 million; by the end, the Romans were but a tiny fraction of a global population that had nearly doubled. When we begin, most Romans worshipped the ancient gods of Olympos and knew a world of three continents, whereas the end of our story was witnessed by people who would, later in life, hear of the arrival of the Cross and Spanish empire to the New World. The Romans of the east did not survive for so long by praying or burying talismans to avert the apocalypse, though they did those things too.
They survived by investing in institutions of resilience, pooling resources to promote common goals, and building consensus around shared values, especially regarding justice, social order, correct religion, and the common good. This book recounts their millennial tale, which was by turns exhilarating and agonizing but always fascinating. It is a story of resilience and adaptability framed against the backdrop of those institutions and shared values, as the east Romans struggled to survive and thrive during one of the most difficult and dangerous periods in history. Like the ship of Theseus discussed by ancient philosophers, the Roman polity gradually changed its component elements over the centuries, but never lost its underlying identity.
It built a new capital in the east, lost the old one in the west, converted to Christianity, absorbed new populations, forgot Latin to fully embrace Greek, and adapted its institutions to meet new challenges as they came. These changes took place gradually, over the course not only of generations but sometimes centuries, so they were not experienced as dramatic ruptures. Sudden ruptures generally came from the outside, from the exogenous shock of foreign invasion, such as the Arab conquests in the 630s, the Seljuk conquests of the 1070s, and the Fourth Crusade of 1203–1204. After each of these shocks, Romanía recovered and adjusted, until little by little it eventually succumbed. Through all this, it remained Roman and Orthodox, and these identities were the immovable foundations on which its institutions were built and rebuilt over the centuries.
Perceptions of this culture in the west have traditionally been quite different from what the reader will find in the following pages. Starting around 800 ad and continuing to our day, western scholars and institutions have invidiously denied that this polity and especially its people were Roman at all, concocting both sham pretexts and alternative names to justify this stance. Western ideologies—at first those of the papacy and the medieval German emperors, then the idea of “Europe” that emerged in early modernity—claimed the Roman tradition as their exclusive right. For a thousand years, they saw in the east a “Greek” society, attributing to that name a host of negative connotations derived from ancient Latin literature, such as perfidiousness and effeminacy. Later on, the thinkers of the Enlightenment cast the Greek empire as corrupt, theocratic, superstitious, and lacking a functional political culture. This model was more instrumental than historical, as its purpose was to discuss indirectly the flaws of Europe’s own monarchies. In the nineteenth century, a new Greek state appeared that aspired to reconstruct the eastern empire of Constantinople.
This project was unwelcome to the western Great Powers, who saw it as an extension of Russian imperialism, and so western scholars dropped the term “empire of the Greeks,” replacing it with the vacuous names “Byzantine” and “Byzantium,” derived from the preConstantinian name of its capital. With its Romanness long placed out of bounds, they reimagined it now as a society organized primarily around Orthodoxy.3 Its political thought was wrongly cast in purely theological terms, and exhibitions of its art projected a historically inaccurate image of exotic mysticism and “spirituality.” Our modern scholarly traditions emerged from these medieval and early modern prejudices. In no other field of research is the identity of the people being studied denied so strenuously as in Byzantine Studies.
The attested names of their state (Romanía, i.e., “Romanland”) and vernacular speech (Roméika) do not even appear in standard reference works published in the twenty-first century.4 Yet now these obsolete ideologies and the cognitive dissonance required to maintain them are being swept away. What was formerly called “the empire of the Greeks” and more recently “the Byzantine empire” is quickly claiming its place as a direct continuation of the ancient Roman state and its culturally complex society. Better than calling it a “late” or “medieval” Roman empire, this book foregrounds an overlooked term used by the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, who flagged it in two places as a “new” Roman empire.5 Contrary to his narrative, however, its history was less a long decline and more an ongoing renewal of its basic modes. As late as the twelfth century, authors in Constantinople could still imagine it as “a new Rome, a wrinkleless Rome, a Rome forever young, forever renewed.”6 Yet paradoxically, it was also “born old.”7
It directly inherited Roman political traditions, Greek literature, and Biblical monotheism that were each about a thousand years old when New Rome was built. Its culture drew from a deep well fed by many streams. It was, in fact, the only civilization that combined these elements in their original Roman, Greek, and Christian forms, and it did so long before western theorists tried to define “Europe” in the same terms.8 It was the new Roman empire, not the old, that gave these elements to the west, including curated versions of the corpus of Roman law, Greek literature and thought, and the Church Fathers and decisions of the Church Councils. Each of these traditions remained vital and active in New Rome, where their evolving interactions defined a fascinating culture.
The recovery of east Roman identity is not the only, or even the main, storyline of this book. Its primary goal is to explain, through a combination of narrative and analysis, the longevity of this polity and the renewable sources of its resilience. The argument rests primarily upon a reinterpretation of Roman governmentality that has been underway for some time. Specifically, the new Roman state successfully threaded the needle of (on the one hand) extracting enough resources to maintain, by premodern standards, an extraordinarily large military and administrative apparatus, while (on the other hand) not alienating its subjects and making them want to secede or topple the monarchy. At the same time, through a wide range of media it hammered home the message that taxes were used solely for the public good of the Roman people.
The evidence suggests that this was no rhetorical ploy: it was an ideology that actually shaped the priorities and not just the persona of government. In this way, it achieved a considerable level of consensus and buy-in among all of its subjects, not just elites. As a result, during centuries that saw the domains of caliphs and Carolingians, Huns and Avars, and crusaders and Mongols come and go, as they succumbed to the centrifugal forces that pulled at all other premodern empires, New Rome endured. This reading, therefore, directly refutes past views of the “late” empire as despotic, oppressive, totalitarian, and corrupt,9 as well as cynical views, which are always fashionable, according to which it was run by distant elites in the capital for their own benefit without any commonality of interest between them and the provincial populations. It is easy to be cynical—and safer for scholars’ reputations—but the evidence does not support this picture. By and large, it supports instead a different picture, which is currently gaining ground.
According to this, the court recognized that it was both a practical and an ideological necessity to explain how its policies benefited the totality of its subjects. As it struggled to balance extraction with consensus, the monarchy projected responsiveness, accountability, and adherence to shared social norms, and its subjects duly held it to those standards. In New Rome, political legitimacy derived from the stewardship of the common good, as subjects were frequently keen to remind their emperors. It is not even clear that this was an “empire” in the conventional sense, a term with no clear equivalent in medieval Greek. It called itself—and was—the monarchy, or the polity, of the Romans. This book presents a detailed narrative of New Rome’s political, military, and Church history. Recent years have seen a proliferation of brief histories of “Byzantium” and concise introductions. While these serve a purpose, they tend to leap from one peak to the next to briskly cover a millennium in a couple hundred pages.
A longer narrative, by contrast, can afford to explore the valleys and crags below, so that readers can appreciate the entire terrain and properly understand how it was all interconnected. A proper history must take the time to build a world, tell its story, and situate its protagonists. At the same time, following east Roman models of history it must also try to explain events.10 Although we cannot (and therefore should not even attempt to) psychologize protagonists, we can instead situate their decisions and reactions within the range of possible options that their institutions, culture, and environment required, enabled, or impeded. It is sometimes enough to make sense of what happened, even if we cannot fully identify its causes.
This, in turn, calls for a rigorous analysis, parallel to the narrative and entwined with it, of the deeper structures of east Roman life, including economy (especially taxation), social stratification, ethnicity, demography, and the evolution of religious identity. A narrative that is not informed by such analysis is superficial. Conversely, theoretical models must work in practice too, and the testing ground for them is narrative. Deeper forces have, at some point, to appear on the surface, otherwise they are merely abstractions. Many of these abstractions have been put forward in the field of Byzantine Studies, promoting theological, national, or academic agendas but without robustly interfacing with events on the ground.
Here these two entwined approaches, the narrative and the structural, are deployed dialectically. Narrative does not mean that the book will focus on a few leadership cadres to the exclusion of the majority of the population. Quite the contrary, the purpose of this book is not merely to tell an exciting story—though it does that too—but to access the conditions and status of most people. This is done in various ways. First, large groups, especially provincials and the people of Constantinople, appear often in the sources, both acting and reacting, for they were regarded as legitimate stakeholders in the polity. Their consent, even if only tacit, was required for the legitimation of each new emperor and was deemed essential for the success of imperial policy.
This was why emperors, bishops, and other elites sought to justify their actions in the eyes of public opinion, whether by posting notices in churches or assembling the people in the hippodrome, the forum of Constantine, or Hagia Sophia. The infrastructure of Constantinople was designed to facilitate large gatherings for precisely this reason. For their part, the people often intervened in elite political conflicts, in doctrinal controversies, and even in economic policy, usually decisively. These interventions are crucial for understanding the basic dynamics of society and the parameters of its political sphere. Second, it is true that most large groups usually appear in the sources as aggregates that lack granular definition.
Narrative sources mostly focus on a small cast of characters, including emperors, court and military officials, bishops, monks, and saints—most of them men. But they too are significant for the people’s history, not only because they made impactful decisions but also because, as character-types that were expected to play familiar roles, they focalized the values, hopes, and frustrations of the majority.11 Roman and Christian culture in all periods was a field of contestation and debate, and leadership figures became avatars of the issues of the day. They were watched closely. No one, not even the poorest farmer in the interior, was so isolated or indifferent as to long ignore what they were doing. Romanía was a highly interconnected society, buzzing with expectations, demands, reciprocity, suspicion, and anger.
Third, this book will push back against the idea that the Roman state, as a premodern state, was unable to significantly shape the lives of its subjects and could do little more than gather taxes or recruits from a distance and, therefore, that the study of the state is little more than the study of elites. The new Roman empire was, famously, an experiment in “big government,” and its longevity is an indication of its success. Government reached all the way down to the local level and shaped the economic circumstances of most people, including what they could own, their property and inheritance rights, and how they calculated value in the first place; it defined their social status in relation to other groups; and, not least of all, it successfully established an official religion that defined not only what people believed but how they worshipped, married, were born, died, and were remembered.
It also created a unified legal system and currency, an army that pooled resources from the entire territory for the purpose of common defense, and administrative hierarchies that reported to the capital. The horizons of time and space themselves were determined by the same institutions, for example the calendar, the schedule of tax payments, and the boundaries of villages, cities, and provinces. Not even the most hardened hermits could fully escape the grid of these institutions by fleeing to remote mountain tops or deserts. Understanding these institutions, therefore, significantly explains the parameters of daily life. It was also through narrative that Christian Orthodox identity emerged.
This book does not presuppose that there was always one ideal Orthodoxy waiting to be elaborated by successive generations. When Constantine gained control of the east in 324, no Christian could have imagined a version of the faith in which Jesus Christ was “consubstantial” with the God the Father but himself “in two Natures,” with two “Wills” and “Operations”; or that icons, to which one prayed and bowed, would become central to worship; that the Greek and Latin Churches would split, among other reasons, over the “Procession of the Holy Spirit”; far less that monks, through a form of repetitive prayer, would be able to see the light of the operations of God.
These beliefs accreted gradually through contingent controversies that could easily have yielded different outcomes. Therefore, the narrative parameters in which they unfolded essentially created Orthodoxy. After all, few people fully understood the theological issues, sometimes not even the leading theologians themselves. Instead, Christian identities formed around the narratives of persecution and righteousness, triumph and injustice, that evolved around the rival doctrines to the point where the latter became secondary. With a modicum of good will, theological compromises could usually be worked out, but neither side could forgive what it believed that it had suffered at the hands of its enemies.
Through all this, most emperors tried to promote consensus and steer the ship of state safely to the other side. Orthodoxy was anything but static or settled. Narrative is indispensable for research in Byzantine Studies, which more than many others is an intensely historicizing field. Byzantinists interpret every text, idea, figure, art, and material artifact against its immediate context, striving to pin it down it, if possible, to the year, month, or even day. Getting the narrative right has ramifications for research across the field, by opening new contexts of interpretation and closing others. While our understanding of some periods has long remained stable, others have been radically transformed by recent research. The present reconstruction will challenge and possibly surprise many experts by presenting both recent findings and original interpretations. It rests on the critical use of the sources, which are cited in the notes and synthesized with conclusions drawn from archaeology and scientific data, such as palynology.
Another area of current scientific research—the study of fluctuations in historical climate—has received much attention recently but has not yet reached a point where its ambivalent claims can interface with the other material in this book. The work of integrating climate into this narrative is left to future historians, who will thereby be taking up, in their own distinctive way, a task that has been handed down by the ancients themselves. The history of the New Roman Empire is one of the most fascinating tales in human history. It is at times Biblical, taking its cue from scriptural archetypes, and at times heroic, drawing on Homer and the classics. It is replete with saints and sinners.
But behind the more colorful figures, there labored a host of bureaucrats, lawyers, military engineers, land surveyors, and tax collectors that kept the whole thing together. This is a story of a single society held together by a strong sense of its values and its identity, and by robust institutions that enabled it to survive the most dangerous millennium of human history. Germanic barbarians, Muslim conquerors, and Viking raiders all came and went, while Romanía endured to the very threshold of modernity, falling to the sound of cannonfire. How it did so will occupy our attention for the next thousand pages.
A Note on the Spelling of Names The reader will find at the end of the book a glossary of important technical terms whose use could not be avoided; they are mostly offices, titles, and institutions of the east Roman state. “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines,” which are misleading modern terms, are not used, except in the subtitle and a few rare references to modern perceptions. The pre-Constantinian name of Constantinople is “Byzantion.”
It is also called the City, because that is what its residents frequently called it (ἡ Πόλις) in recognition of its size and importance. “The City” lies behind its modern Turkish name Istanbul, which derives from the Greek for “in the City” (eis ten polin); the expression had given rise to a name much like “Istanbul” even before the Turkish conquest. Other place-names are usually spelled according to their Greek form, unless they have overwhelmingly familiar English forms (e.g., Athens).
Turkish forms are introduced only at the very end. The names of individuals are spelled according to their most likely native language, or the language in which they wrote, which for most people in this book was Greek (e.g., Prokopios and Ioannes). The Latinization of Greek names (“Comnenus”) and, worse, their Anglicization (e.g., “John”) is an offensive form of cultural imposition. It is practiced for no other culture except “the Byzantines,” whose very name as a people (“Romans”) has likewise been deemed inadmissible in the west for centuries. It is time for this nonsense to end. An exception is made here for famous individuals who, by a subjective standard, are overwhelmingly well known by their English names, e.g., Julian, John Chrysostom, Justinian and Basil II, as well as some western Europeans who came from multilingual backgrounds and whose names at the time were recoded in many variant forms.
The same is true for the names of the important Church Councils, by which they are generally known, as opposed to the names of the cities in which they were held (e.g., Nicaea vs. Nikaia). Moreover, the names of emperors and high officials are Latinized down to ca. 520, because the highest echelons of government in Constantinople continued to operate in Latin until then, and these men appear here as its functionaries, regardless of their native language. Before the glossary, the reader will also find a list of state revenues and large payments, in gold solidi, by which other costs and values can be put into perspective.
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without all the excellent research of colleagues around the world, for which I am immensely grateful. If bibliographies did not eat up so much of the allotted word count, more of your publications could have been cited here. In the years that it has taken me to write this book, I have consulted with dozens of you on matters large and small, and I can discern now the influence of countless more conversations, debates, and lectures that took place years earlier.
It is, unfortunately, impossible to thank everyone here individually, so a collective acknowledgement must suffice. For proof of my appreciation, I direct readers to the podcast “Byzantium & Friends” that I launched while writing this book. It remains to be seen whether that medium will have a longer shelf-life than this book you are reading. The New Roman Empire exists only because Stefan Vranka, at OUP, asked me point-blank after dinner if I might be interested in writing it. Of course, I immediately said no. His support and frank advice helped immensely once I came around to it. Special thanks go out to others who also read long sections of this book and made valuable comments and corrections, especially Garth Fowden and my former students Scott Kennedy, Marion Kruse, and Brian Swain. Ian Mladjov also corrected many errors and provided the excellent maps for the books.
The color plates and index were subvented by research funds that were provided by the Division of Humanities of the University of Chicago. Many of the images were generously made available by David Hendrix and Dumbarton Oaks. The medallion on the cover was judiciously recommended by Betsy Williams. Finally, I am immensely grateful to young scholars around the world who are struggling—against the headwinds of neoliberal austerity, politicized hostility to the humanities, and the insecurities of adjunct employment and the projectgrant system—to expand our knowledge of history and impart their love of it to the next generation of students.
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