Download PDF | (Edinburgh Byzantine Studies) Christos Malatras - Social Stratification in Late Byzantium-Edinburgh University Press (2023).
608 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgements
The present book began as a refinement, revision and extension of my doctoral thesis defended in January 2013 in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham and entitled ‘Social structure and relations in fourteenth century Byzantium: The present book bears resemblance to only about a third of the text of the doctoral thesis.
The latter was restricted to fourteenth-century material, but the book has been extended to include the whole late Byzantine period. Therefore, several modifications took place regarding the results, the conclusions and the examples used for the defence of these. Secondly, a whole chapter of the doctoral thesis, about the social aspects of the second civil war, has been left out, since the results of it were published in two articles (‘Social aspects’ and ‘Myth of the Zealots’). A mass of detailed material relating to Chapter 3 (PhD thesis, Chapter A), with prosopographic analysis and family histories, has been equally left out, lest it overwhelm the reader.
On the other hand, the sections on social values and mobility (a whole new chapter, Chapter 2), on gestures, on the peasantry and the countryside, on the role of the common people, and other issues here and there, have been significantly expanded. The last chapter has also been modified to resemble more the evolution of late Palaiologan urban society, rather than capturing a single moment, that is the situation in Constantinople in c. 1400. As a result, despite some material being left out, the overall book is half again as large as the thesis. Any differences or conflict in the conclusions between the thesis and the present book need to be resolved in favour of the latter, as it reflects additional research and revision.
My deepest gratitude goes to my late teacher and supervisor Dr Ruth Juliana Macrides, who passed away in April 2019. Ruth was a real teacher and mentor and helped me in many aspects of my schoraly life, outside her ‘strict’ duties as a supervisor. She continued to support and encourage me for years after the completion of my PhD, offering her advice and supplying the many reference letters that I requested. She was the first person to prompt me to edit my thesis quickly and prepare it for publication. It may have proved a much longer process after all, partly because I was occupied with other projects and partly due to my striving after perfection and my extending of the thesis, but it is finally over. It is unfortunate that she can no longer see the final products of the seed she sowed, and that she can no longer mentor any other students of Byzantine Studies, the field that she served for many decades admirably.
During the various phases of this work I have enjoyed institutional help from many sources. The Research Centre of Anatolian Civilizations of Ko¢ University (2013-14), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University (2014), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that is currently supporting my research with a fellowship, the Department of Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Cologne where I am conducting this research (2018-21), the University of Vienna and the Division for Byzantine Studies in the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2020), and the University of Thessaly (2019-21) are only the most important of these institutions. The help, suggestions and discussions (both scholarly and beyond) from which I have profited courtesy of my colleagues in these institutions are more than appreciated. A special mention is due of the fellowship I acquired in 2015-16 from TUBITAK, which allowed me to conduct research at Bogazici University, particularly for the purpose of writing this book. Professor Nevra Necipoglu, as my advisor during this fellowship, greatly assisted its positive outcome.
I wish to thank Professor Emeritus Michael Angold for his insightful thoughts and suggestions on both my thesis (as one of its examiners) and on the first draft of this book, as well as for his willingness to engage in this process and his promptness and quality of work. The final shape of this book was much influenced by his and the anonymous second reviewer’s suggestions. Not least I am indebted to Professor Niels Gaul, who went through my final manuscript and made several valuable suggestions and corrections. Professor Emeritus Jean-Claude Cheynet has also provided me with support and scholarly guidance for several years since the defence of my thesis, for which I wholeheartedly thank him.
Various other colleagues assisted me to reach the outcome of this book. Dr Brian McLaughlin read through my draft and has immeasurably aided in correcting my often poor English and providing me with many other suggestions. Associate Professor Kostas Moustakas provided me with unpublished data from Ottoman tax registers for the village of Prebista, which he personally transcribed and interpreted for my purposes, and has allowed me to use one of the maps from his doctoral thesis. Professor John Haldon too has allowed me to use a map from his Palgrave Atlas of the Byzantine world (2005). Ivan Drpi¢ has granted me the permission to use his photo of a wall painting from the church of the Theotokos Peribleptos in Ochrid, illustrated in the book cover. Olivier Delouis and Vasiliki Kravari sent me PDFs of some documents from the Acts Vatopedi III, shortly before their publication (December 2019), so that I could integrate them into my final draft. I would like to thank also the staff of the Centre for Slavo-Byzantine Studies ‘Prof. Ivan Dujcev; who provided me with photos of Codex B of the Monastery of Prodromos and allowed me to use it for research purposes.
There are many more colleagues and friends whose help during this long process I need to appreciate, but I would probably require some more pages for this purpose. Much of our discussions about Byzantium and life with Olga Karagiorgou, Pantelis Charalampakis, Giorgos Terezakis, Claudia Sode, Maria Teresa Catalano, Martina Filosa, Diego Fittipaldi, Divna Manolova and Krystina Kubina influenced partly my arguments here and there. Without the support in everyday life of these and other personal friends, I doubt if I would have ever been able to accomplish my work. Last, but foremost, this work and the whole of my present and future would never have been achieved without the support, encouragement, trust and love of my family, my beloved parents and brother.
Koln 29 September 2020
Note to the Reader
With the exception of a few widely known place names (for example, Constantinople, Athens, Crete, Macedonia), no English or Anglicised form of Greek names has been used; hence, never John for ‘Iwavvng¢ nor Paleologus for TMaAatodoyoc. Equally, no translation or modern/medieval equivalent has been offered for Byzantine offices, except bare a few straightforward ones (emperor, tax assessor, governor, and so on), although a Clarification will generally be provided. No translation or explanation of epithets, dignities or titles has been offered, unless it is relevant to the context. The reader is advised to consult the glossary for all Byzantine offices and other Greek terms used throughout the text.
For the Greek names and terms, a strict transliteration to the Latin alphabet equivalent has been adopted. The letter v (ypsilon) is always written with y when alone, but with u when in a diphthong (av: au, ov: ou, and so on). The digraphs yy and yx are transcribed as ng and nk, respectively (so, MayKkacac: Mankaphas; Neotoyyoc: Nestongos). A second exception are some vowel complexes with ov, where its strict transliteration would cause phonetic confusion in English; thus, Manuel instead of Manouel. A diaeresis has been used to denote hiatus in a diphthong, or when the English transliteration may also cause phonetic confusion (so, mpwtopaiotwp: protomaistor; Xapaetoc: Chamaétos). Although not for centuries of any phonetic value in Greek, the rough breathing has been indicated at the beginning of the word or name with an H (for example, étaipetapyxne: hetaireiarcheés; ‘Y adéac: Hyaleas), even in compound words and names (for example, Atotmatoc: Dishypatos).
It should be recalled that medieval Greek surnames have a feminine form — unlike modern Greek ones, which are rendered in the masculine genitive for females. Their formation, although it follows a general pattern, does not have strict rules. Thus, Komnenos = Komnene, Palaiologos = Palaiologina, Mourmouras = Mourmouraina, Tornikes = Tornikina, Akropolites = Akropolitissa. The same goes for the plural form of family names that is often used in this volume to denote ‘the family of...’. Hence, Palaiologoi for Palaiologos, Doukai for Doukas, Laskarides for Laskaris, Metochitai for Metochites and so on.
For other medieval names the prevalent form in the linguistic background of the person has been preferred (that is, Giacomo instead of Jacob, and Guillaume instead of William). Islamic names have been transliterated according to their form in the Encyclopedia of Islam. For modern Greek names of authors or place names, a strict phonetic transliteration has been used in accordance to the current official prescriptions. Thus my first name, Xprotos, is officially transcribed as Christos, not Chrestos. Exception goes to authors who generally prefer to sign their English publications with a different method (for example, Aovyyrc: Lounghis). Strict phonetic transliteration has been adopted in all names on the Cyrillic alphabet.
Regarding the citation of primary literary sources, I have used the pattern: name of the author, translated to English title of work and name of the editor; example: loannes Chortasmenos, Letters, no. 24, ed. Hunger, 174—5. For avoiding overflow in the Bibliography, Byzantine authors with a large and diverse number of works, mostly edited in one collection, are abbreviated only by the name; example: Ioseph Kalothetos, ed. Tsames, 453-502. Only a few frequently used sources, such as the Histories of Kantakouzenos and Gregoras, or the documents from Mt Athos are thoroughly abbreviated (see under Abbreviations). In the relevant section in the Bibliography, the works are listed first according to this citation, followed by the full reference. Documentary, epigraphic and other nonliterary source material are abbreviated according to the name of the editor. For secondary literature I have always used the last name of the author(s) and a shortened title of the work.
When not otherwise indicated, all translations of Greek passages are mine. Capitalisation has been kept to a minimum.
Introduction: Byzantium after 1261: State, Society and Culture
The Byzantine world after the recapture of Constantinople in 1261 comprised not only the empire itself — which included Macedonia, Thrace, the islands of the Aegean apart from Crete, Euboea and Cyclades, a part of the Peloponnesos and a part of western Asia Minor — but also of populations that lived under Latin dominion in Greece, under Turkish dominion in Asia Minor and under the three other ‘breakaway’ states: the polities of Epirus and Thessaly and the Empire of Trebizond. The Byzantine borders, following the reign of Michael VIII (1259-82), progressively contracted. Asia Minor was lost to the Turkish emirates by 1337, Macedonia to the Serbians by 1347, most of Thrace to the Ottomans by 1371, Thessalonike and its hinterland to the Ottomans in 1387, while the short-lived conquests of Thessaly (1333-48) and Epirus (1338—48) did not improve or alter the situation since both areas soon fell to the expanding Serbian state. The islands too were lost: first to the Hospitallers (the Dodecanese), then to the Genoese (Samos, Chios, Tenedos) by the mid-fourteenth century, and later to the Gattilusio family (Lesbos, Samothrake, Ainos). Byzantium experienced a short-lived rejuvenation in the early fifteenth century through the reestablishment of its rule in coastal Thrace and in the area around Thessalonike and the Chalkidike. The illusion did not last long: Thessalonike was lost to the Venetians in 1423 and subsequently, in 1430, to the Ottomans. In 1453 the Byzantine state was effectively destroyed; with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the remaining islands (Lemnos and Imbros) and Thracian coastal towns submitted to the Ottomans.
This study analyses the social structure and social relations within the (shifting) borders of the Byzantine, Palaiologan, state proper. In most of the other areas there were factors at work that influenced the social structure and produced a different picture (for example, in the Turkish- and Latinheld provinces, with only a few exceptions, the Greek Orthodox population had an inferior status to the Latin or Muslim population), although of course there were certain continuities, as has been observed.’ Certain aspects of continuity were present in the transition to Ottoman rule after the conquest, especially in the rural economy and society. Nonetheless external factors — expatriation of most of the local elite and replacement by an Islamic one, different culturally, even when there was a conversion — again influenced the development of social relations and the alteration of the social structure.’ Different factors also applied in the other Greek-held provinces (Thessaly and Epirus), including the part of the Peloponnesos that was under the Byzantine administration. Since 1204 Epirus and soon Thessaly were part of the dominion of the family of Komnenos Doukas, forming the so-called ‘Despotate of Epirus’ (the state was further divided into Epirus and Thessaly after 1268 between the members of the dynasty), which became a rival first to the state of Nikaia and then to the Byzantine state. The different local centres of power undoubtedly produced a dissimilar picture of social relations to those in the Palaiologan state.
The two Greek states of Thessaly and Epirus were no longer a serious threat to the Byzantine dominion after the reign of Michael VIII and eventually, in the 1330s after three successive campaigns, they were annexed to the empire. The Serbians, taking advantage of the second civil war that began in Byzantium in 1341, and under the leadership of Stefan Dusan, conquered the whole of Macedonia (apart from Thessalonike), Thessaly and Epirus. It was only the death of Dusan in 1355, and the consequent breakdown of his empire, that prevented further Byzantine losses. The defeat of the Serbian lords at Maritsa (the river Hebros) in 1371, and at Kosovo in 1389, by the Ottomans signalled the dominance of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. By 1393 the Turks had conquered Bulgaria in two stages. The defeat of the Ottomans at the battle of Ankara in 1402 brought the re-establishment of Byzantine power in parts of coastal Thrace and Macedonia, but the initiation of hostilities again in 1422 showed that there was no hope of restoring the empire."
Moreover, the period was not free of political strife. The blinding of the minor Ioannes IV Laskaris by Michael VIII Palaiologos, soon after the recapture of Constantinople in 1261, brought about the enmity of Patriarch Arsenios who excommunicated Michael VIII, but the latter managed to depose Arsenios shortly after. This engendered a schism in the Church with the supporters of Arsenios, the so-called Arsenites, which was healed only several decades later, long after the death of both protagonists. During this strife the Arsenites and the lay supporters of the Laskarides in Asia Minor caused several uprisings, while the overtaxing of these areas — a punishment measure by Michael VIII — weakened their defences, thus contributing to the fall of Asia Minor. The religious controversies deepened as a result of the efforts of Michael VIII to impose the Union of the Churches, to prevent a Crusade against Byzantium, following the Council of Lyons in 1274. However, after the death of Michael VIII these efforts ceased and instead Andronikos II (r. 1282-1328) prosecuted the remaining unionists.
The grandson of Andronikos II, Andronikos III (r. 1328-41), declared war on his grandfather, starting thus the first civil war (1321-8). This civil war initiated a new period for the internal history of the empire. More conspiracies are attested during Andronikos III’s reign, the most significant of which was instigated by Syrgiannes Palaiologos, who allied with the Serbians to usurp the Byzantine throne. But the intensity and the duration of the second civil war (1341-57), which started after the death of Andronikos III and pitched his closest friend loannes VI Kantakouzenos against the leaders of the regency of the minor Ioannes V (the empress Anna of Savoy, the patriarch Ioannes Kalekas and the megas doux Alexios Apokaukos), was not comparable. The countryside was devastated by the opposing forces, the Turks were introduced to the Balkans and, after 1352, they managed to gain a permanent foothold in Thrace. Revolts broke out in many cities of the empire, mainly against the supporters of Kantakouzenos. In Thessalonike, the pro-regency party, named the Zealots because of their zeal against Kantakouzenos, was particularly cruel to the Kantakouzenists. Dozens were executed, hundreds were exiled and three revolts troubled the city, until it was finally subdued in 1349, two years after the preliminary victory of Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos (1347-54) and his establishment in Constantinople. Peace did not last long as Ioannes V reclaimed his throne. The last phase of the second civil war ended only in 1357 with the defeat of the son of Kantakouzenos, Matthaios (r. 1353-7), by loannes V (loannes Kantakouzenos had already abdicated in 1354). Historians have claimed that social factors influenced the allegiance of the supporters of the two parties; however, I believe we are dealing predominantly with another case of political opportunism, combined with some decentralising tendencies.”
Nevertheless, a third round of civil strife broke out between Ioannes V and his second son Manuel II on the one side and Ioannes V’s first son Andronikos IV and the latter’s son Ioannes VII on the other; this started in 1373 and ended only in 1399 with the reconciliation between Ioannes VII, who was based in Selymbria, a town close to Constantinople, and the emperor Manuel II (r. 1391-1425). Although this conflict concerned the imperial succession, the ‘enemies-allies’ of Byzantium — the Ottomans, Genoa and Venice — energetically supported one side or the other. The choice of ally of each side was sometimes further defined by the social and political background of their supporters. Andronikos IV and his son Ioannes VII were supported by Genoa; therefore it was not uncommon to number in their ranks members of the elite such as Goudeles, who had orientated themselves to commerce and were business associates of the Genoese.°
The inability of the Byzantines to stop the Turkish conquest of Thrace in the 1350s and 1360s forced them to turn to Western Europe for help. In 1366—9 Emperor loannes V travelled around the region seeking aid. But any aid was conditional on concessions on the part of the Byzantines. The pope’s demands for a union of the churches bred widespread hostility. Fury about the acknowledgement of papal supremacy in the Church, and its rejection by most Byzantines, made attempting to achieve union a difficult game for the Byzantine emperors. They were unable to find enough support in the Byzantine Church for their scheme. In fact, only a fraction of the scholars and of the Church and state officials were in favour of union. The question was not, however, strictly one of political orientation. Deeper cultural aspects and identities were involved. The choice of the unionists was frequently connected with a greater appreciation of classical learning and an identity that related to ancient Greece rather than a broader Orthodox community.’
Another important factor was the place of Byzantium in the economic network of the eastern Mediterranean. Byzantine territories, and especially Constantinople, were centres of this network. Constantinople was a major transit station of the trade between the Black Sea and Italy, conducted mostly by Genoa. Genoa, after the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople in 1261, drove away Venice, which had been hostile to Byzantium, and established dominance of the Black Sea routes, preventing thenceforth the establishment of non-Genoese elements. The Genoese founded a colony in Pera, opposite Constantinople, which soon grew in importance and became a de facto independent city-state, often intervening in Byzantine politics. However, the Venetians were soon able to re-establish themselves in Constantinople by signing treaties with the emperor. The hostility between Genoa and Venice became an important factor in Byzantine politics, but Byzantium in the end was unable to profit from it. The two Italian cities had acquired privileges: in addition to receiving administrative and judicial rights they did not pay kKommerkion, a tax of 10 per cent normally applied to merchandise. This factor proved detrimental to Byzantine merchants, who found themselves in a less favourable position, and to the state finances, especially after the loss of the inland provinces. As a matter of fact, many Byzantine merchants became business associates of the Italians in order to mitigate this disadvantage; they did not work by themselves.
Another important phenomenon was the economic weakness of Byzantium in the last century of its existence. The loss of Thrace to the Turks created dependence on Black Sea grain, which was transported mainly by the Genoese. Cloth manufacture was dominated by Italian products and the Venetians were importing wine from their colonies in the Aegean, thus hurting the local producers and distributors: that is, the Greek taverns. Furthermore, cotton and grain were also imported from Ottoman-occupied regions (mainly Thrace and Bithynia), thus rendering Byzantium’s position precarious in times of distress, (such as the siege of Bayezid, 1394-1402). Moreover, the presence of Ottoman merchants is attested in Constantinople. Although the later Palaiologan emperors tried to limit Venetian privileges, the economic dependence of the empire was a reality. The progressive devaluation of the hyperpyron throughout the fourteenth century, until its final disappearance, also made the use of Venetian and Ottoman coinage a common phenomenon.°
At the head of the Byzantine state remained the emperor, who fully controlled the administration. He appointed the dignitaries who composed the central administration, the provincial governors, the tax officials, the judges and the patriarch, and gave his consent for the appointment of the five highest ecclesiastical dignitaries (the oikonomos, the megas sakellarios, the megas chartophylax, the megas skeuophylax and the protekdikos) and the metropolitans elected by the patriarchal synod. During the late period, the heads of the central administration were the mesazon and the megas logothetés, while a protonotarios has been identified as the head of the imperial chancery. The mesazon was usually the second most influential person in the administration, a position that we could compare with the office of prime minister in early modern Europe.’
In the middle Byzantine period the lists of precedence clearly distinguished between offices and honorific dignities, the latter being subdivided into senatorial and imperial dignities and dignities reserved for eunuchs."” But in the Palaiologan empire, even before the middle of the fourteenth century, all the older middle Byzantine dignities that had survived and were simply honorific (such as sebastos, protondbelissimos and megalodoxotatos) had disappeared. On the other hand, in none of the lists of precedence from the Palaiologan period can we see a distinction between offices and dignities, while it is almost certain that many of the offices-cum-dignities no longer corresponded to functions. At the same time, actual positions such as that of imperial secretary (grammateus) or of mesazon are not listed. But regardless of the duties that each office-cum-dignitary may nominally have held, it is clear from the documentary sources that they were regarded as simple dignities, since in the signatures of officials both posts and titles are commonly mentioned (for example, the kephalé of Serres and megas chartoularios Andronikos Kantakouzenos, the former being the actual post), and that titles were accorded for a person’s lifetime (or at least until their promotion to a higher one)."'
The army of the empire in the late period was composed of two main groups: the mercenaries and the pronoia-holders (pronoiarioi). The pronoiarioi were usually native soldiers whose incomes were provided by the state ceding to them its own fiscal rights over specified properties, often in the vicinity of the soldiers’ homes. The amount of the income ceded varied considerably. They could be both infantry and cavalry units, but usually the larger the pronoia was, the higher the social status of the pronoia-holder and the larger the following of soldiers he was expected to be accompanied by. The evidence for the necessity of a following is controversial. It seems that even if it was obligatory, it was only the rule for the larger pronoiarioi.
At any rate, these retinues did not have the character of private armies, in most cases they consisted of a handful of men. The lesser pronoiarioi probably maintained no following.”
Since at least the eleventh century the concepts of individual privileges, accommodation and compromise have dominated the Byzantine world. A culture of official privilege is far from modern Western culture, and it had serious consequences not only in the Byzantine political sphere but in the social sphere as well. This culture derived from the prerogatives of imperial autocracy, and was influenced by the Christian concepts of philanthropy, benefaction and propitiousness. These prerogatives had been present since Late Antiquity, but by the late Byzantine period they had evolved from tools of imperial autocracy to shackles. In practice it meant that the emperor was not only above the law, but also that he could disregard it in order to make a provision.” Legislation slowly ceased to be promulgated; even the earlier laws of Leon VI and of the Macedonian emperors in the tenth century had more of a symbolic than a practical function. By the fourteenth century the emperor was no longer trying to regulate society systemically; rather he was reacting on a case-by-case basis by taking individual measures."* Theoretically, any individual could petition the emperor for a privilege, the donation of land or tax immunity on their property. Their proximity to the emperor, connections to people close to the emperor, or offer of political support, would determine their success. This culture of privilege meant that the emperor was presented as the benefactor and protector of his subjects; thus he could not easily turn down requests for privileges, even when state income would be diminished.”° This culture also meant that the emperor must act piously and forgive his subjects when they erred. Consequently, capital punishment mostly ceased, even in serious crimes such as treason. The change is more obvious if one contrasts the treatment of traitors in Palaiologan times with that in the sixth to eighth centuries, when executions and amputations were the norm. The blinding of the rebel Alexios Philanthropenos was considered an extremely violent punishment and, besides, the emperor Andronikos II was not the one who ordered it. The emperor not only forgave Philanthropenos but assigned him to an important post once more. One reason for this development was the growing aristocratisation of Byzantine society and government, and the evolution of new ethics.'® But, of course, not all those forgiven were members of the extended imperial family, or even aristocrats: an infamous sorceress was accorded an annual pension (adelphaton) in a Constantinopolitan monastery.”
Religion was an important (if not the most important) facet of the social life of a Byzantine. The necessity of religious uniformity, which in its turn would limit social unrest in this domain, and of orthodoxy, which would ensure the afterlife to all subjects, made theological debates a field wherein the emperor had a pronounced role. This was especially the case on account of his position as the protector of the (Orthodox) Christian Church. The major theological debates in the late Byzantine period concerned the Arsenite schism, the controversies concerning hesychasm and the Union of the Churches. All these evolved into areas of significant struggle, with councils, imprisonments of opponents and popular unrest. They also stimulated the writing of a remarkable number of theological works and refutations. As with other dogmatic disputes in Byzantium — the Christological debates of the fourth to sixth centuries, Iconoclasm and so on — so too these disputes have been regarded as having broader cultural and social affiliations. Hesychasm had a long tradition in Byzantium and it was firmly connected with monastic life and asceticism. Gregorios Palamas further defined hesychasm and taught that an individual — through prayers, fasting and other ascetic practices — could actually see the Divine Light. Hesychasm has been seen as reflecting the social values of the aristocracy, as corresponding to Byzantine society’s spirit of individualism or as representing the old struggle and ambivalence between inner and outer wisdom, of ancient Greek and Christian philosophy.’*
The Byzantine Church suffered a severe blow from the fall of Asia Minor to the Turks. Conversions to Islam, loss of revenue, population flight and obstruction of the service of Byzantine bishops in Turkish-occupied lands, were common.” Yet the influence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople far exceeded the territory of the empire, despite the creation of independent patriarchates in Serbia and Bulgaria. Northeastern Europe was directly subordinated to the patriarchate. Despite the progress of Turkish conquests, the first half of the fourteenth century has been considered a period of expansion of monastic and ecclesiastical property, through both imperial and private donations. Imperial donations were mainly directed at the great monastic centres (in this period, the monasteries of Mt Athos and the monasteries of Constantinople) or the metropoleis, which had a greater ability to petition the emperor. However, this trend was reversed after the middle of fourteenth century owing to the financial constraints of the Byzantine state. Large confiscations took place that affected the properties of all the great monasteries. Furthermore, ecclesiastical properties were adversely affected by the Turkish conquests, although they managed to survive under the new regime.”
The Subject of the Study and the Sources
The focus of this book is on social stratification: on how Byzantine society as a whole was structured; under the influence of what kinds of ideas, beliefs and concepts and with what material realities among the members of this society; what the divisions of this society were, and to what extent modern constructions or medieval counterpart models are applicable to the Byzantine case. In addition to this vertical division, it is also important to understand the horizontal groupings within society and how greatly they contributed to the whole structure: how influential and how close were the members of a village or urban community who belonged to the same social class or group? Moreover, the two dominant institutions of the time, the state and the Church, will be analysed to define the influence they exerted on the social structure. This study does not claim to examine every aspect of Byzantine society: family structure and relations, or patterns of inheritance, gender relations, social life, and religious beliefs and customs will not be examined unless they touch upon the construction of social order and relations.
It is now generally accepted that social stratification is encountered in every complex society. A central aspect of any structure of social stratification is the relative position of an individual in the system of social power relations. Social power is the ability to influence or control the behaviour and actions of other people and it can be divided into five types: power based on an individual’s position and duties (legitimate power), on their personal skills and charisma (referent power), on their skills or knowledge (expert power), on their exercise of negative influences (coercive power), or on the rewards that they can provide (reward power). Authority, on the other hand, is defined as the right to exercise power conferred or entrusted on someone because of their personal/charismatic merit (charismatic authority), because of established rules and laws (rational-legal authority) or because of traditional beliefs and customs (traditional authority); it can be equated to legitimate power.
Max Weber and his followers, without downgrading the economic factor in determining social action, believed that ideological factors were equally as important as social action and that ideology did not merely serve (together with the political factor) the successful functioning of the relations of production, as Marxist-orientated scholars believed. Unlike Marx, who defined social structure in terms of the economic relations of production (social class), Max Weber introduced the concept of social status, which is not directly linked with social class. Social status, either ascribed or achieved, is the prestige that an individual may have in a community, and is determined not only by their economic power and occupation, but also can be influenced by political, religious or ideological factors. Thus, social stratification is determined not only by the relations of production and membership in a social class but is also dependent on factors of social status, such as caste, occupation, personal qualities or birth.”!
Another influential sociologist of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu, turned our attention from the importance of economic and financial capital to other forms of resources that can be used to reproduce inequality: to social capital, that is, the links, connections and the shared values between different members of a society, including their social network; cultural capital, all the values and assets a person acquires by culture, tradition and education; and symbolic capital, the prestige and recognition of a person in society. For Bourdieu it is the differences in cultural capital that mark differences among social classes. He particularly examined aesthetic and cultural tastes and maintained that they distanced one social class from another, while being created by those members of society who ranked high in cultural capital (for example, intellectuals).”
One question is the extent to which the ideological structure of power relations is created by the upper class and imposed on most of the populace — the producers — in order to maintain the viability of the whole social structure, or the ‘cultural hegemony; to use the term coined by Antonio Gramsci. Social order and inequality, however, comprise not only a material reality; they comprise even more an imaginative construction. Therefore, vocabulary and ritual expressions of power, performance and ideology are important facets that help reconstruct a social world and determine how a set of social relationships works. Besides, the legitimation of any power relationship should be based on, and justified by, a set of beliefs common to the social actors. The social actor, regardless of his ‘real’ or hidden motives, needs to justify his actions according to this set of social or political principles. The meaning of these ideas or principles cannot be changed to fit the purpose of the social actor and, consequently, these principles function for the social superior not only as weapons but also as traps and constraints on the social action of both superior and inferior.” The trifunctional social system of the medieval West (ie. ‘those who work, those who fight, those who pray’) has been described as one that did not represent reality and was merely an ideological construction that helped the dominant class.” However, this ideological construction seems to have described an increasing tendency in the actual system of social stratification and, perhaps, an intensification of this reality due to the effects of this trifunctional ideological system.” It is essential then to study not only the material environment of social order, but also the principles and the ideas behind the construction of this social order.
Modern social anthropological studies have moved further away from the model of ideological hegemony over the relations of production. James Scott studied the primitive economy of some villages in the 1960s in Malaysia, where the relations of production were structured around a local landowning elite and a producing population to whom the land was rented. He compared the results of this case study with other similar pre-modern social structures relating to the social order and the relations between rich and poor. He argued first that, although the construction of social order is mainly the product of the politically dominant class, inferiors are not mere passive recipients of it, but instead actively participate in its construction. These relations, he argued, are not simply rules and principles that are followed, but are the raw material that is constantly subject to change in daily human activity. Moreover, unlike the Marxist concept that social conflict would be limited if the upper class were able to persuade their inferiors to adopt their model of social relations, Scott showed that the model is not only used by the upper classes to serve their interests, but that the lower classes employ it to promote their needs and demands.” In an analogous situation in early modern England, after the institutionalisation of civil parish relief to the poor, since this aid could not meet every demand, the poor, in order to carry conviction that they needed help, resorted to due deference to their superiors, rather than claim legal entitlement to poverty relief; they found this way more profitable.” Geoffrey Koziol, in his examination of the rituals of supplication in medieval France, has also shown how the ritual language used served the preservation of the social order not only by dignifying the socially superior, but by forcing him as well to act in favour of the inferior.”
In order to discover popular demands many modern researchers have turned to two fields of research: the study of popular literature, and the study of social movements and revolutions. However, both fields are problematic. Popular literature was seen to represent the culture of the lower strata of population. This division now seems artificial, however: the recognition of the common motifs and elements that both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ literature possess eventually led to a decrease in the study of popular literature as a source for the sentiments and beliefs solely of the lower classes.” On the other hand, the study of social movements, riots and revolutions as the main expression of social inequality and resistance has also proved problematic. As Scott revealed in his study, social order was not the outcome of violent episodic negotiations — riots and revolutions — yet there were other more everyday forms of resistance to social power that did not take an overt form. Behind the language of deference may lie an opposition: the conformity of the weak, at least in public, does not mean that they accept the order as ‘just: By using as weapons the same language of social order and deference, they can try to enhance their position and at the same time avoid the risks of open resistance. As such, revolutions are only episodic events in the negotiation of power between the powerful and weak classes and do not represent the dichotomy between deference and opposition, as has been argued in the past. Accordingly, riots and crowds should be examined carefully; research has shown that there were crowds, not ‘a crowd, the composition of which changed according to the causes and the object of an action.”
A great deal of work in the past few decades in sociology and social anthropology has been done under the prism of symbolism and the ethnographic methodology developed by Clifford Geertz. In sociology, symbolic interactionism focuses on the position of an individual in society and its interaction with others. Interaction in turn is governed by the symbolism (that is, the meaning) each individual gives to different things. Symbolic anthropology has turned away from the great theories and explanations of phenomena across cultures and is a field that has only gained importance in the past few decades. It strives to understand how people, through rituals and other symbolic constructions, perceived their world. Much of human behaviour can be seen as symbolic action and these symbols need to be studied in order to understand the culture of a certain society. The ethnographic method developed from this school, although it focuses on the collection of data and their analysis by determining their social ground and import, is subjective as it focuses on the perception of an outsider (the scholar) of the thought system in the culture they are studying.”
Therefore, in order to evaluate the framework of social structure, apart from the respective economic standings and exchanges between two social actors, it is also very important to examine the social interaction between these two actors, having as guide two important aspects: the semiotics of the text and the symbolic communication described (since we are unable to see the people themselves and pose questions).
Gestures, rituals and other kinds of symbolic communication have been an important subject in medieval studies the past decades under the influence of the Annales school.” Gert Althoff, especially, pursued highly relevant work on medieval political rituals whose functionalist approach emphasised their importance to power relations and turned our attention to their malleability and the question of how changes could be brought to rituals in order to serve political purposes. However, rituals do not have only a functional purpose. The work of Geoffrey Koziol on the semiotics of medieval rituals of supplication has shown how these changed over time reflecting changes in the culture, society and political order in different areas. Koziol has emphasised the polysemy of the rituals and the need to study the context and environment of their performance, since the same ritual (for example, the kissing of feet) in a different context may have meant something different.
Gestures, even in our modern world, are important in expressing deference and emotions, and are closely linked to rituals. Descriptions of gestures in everyday social interaction, rather than palace ceremonials, are unfortunately rather sparse in Byzantine sources. Perhaps the main reason for this divergence is the lower literacy of the West before the fifteenth century and the concomitant importance of the oral tradition and physical gestures. The rituals of homage and oaths were not necessarily written down. By contrast, in Byzantium, oaths, promises of good behaviour and even testimonies, as they have survived in patriarchal documents, were routinely written down. However, this does not mean that Byzantine society lacked or downplayed physical gestures. Much of the everyday social interaction was governed by rituality. Although the demarcation of boundaries in fields was a remarkable ritual that involved cross-processions, it was necessary at the same time to describe these boundaries in a document — a document that was actually proof of ownership of a property.”
Many types of documents — such as agreements, sale or donation contracts and supplications — were drafted making use of an elaborate ritualised language that can convey to us important traits of Byzantine society and perceptions, as much by its strict compliance with the ritual language as by the changes brought from time to time upon it. On the other hand, the semiotics of the language in any documentary or literary text should also be approached with caution. Language is not a means only of communication, but also for someone to achieve their own interests; it expresses and serves the reproduction of the social system.™
There is an additional component that we need to be aware of in the Byzantine literary tradition in particular: it was firmly connected with the classical tradition throughout its history. A rhetorician’s language ought, according to the principles of imitation (mimesis), as much as possible to resemble the classical, especially Attic, models. Sometimes, common motifs are routinely repeated and in fact their successful use and adaptation to the text seems to be one of the aims of the author. One of the stylistic aims of Byzantine literary authors was to vary their expression each time they expressed the same thought or subject matter, or to use classicising terms rather than actual contemporary ones (for example, the Turks are commonly called ‘Persians’), thus bridging the gap between their literary models and the contemporary world. Nevertheless, literary mimesis was certainly not a mechanical process but often a quite adaptable and creative one. Although Byzantine literature may no longer be regarded as lacking originality and innovation,” Byzantine literary texts should nevertheless be approached with caution when used as sources for terminology and precise meaning.
The main contemporary narrative works used as sources for early Palaiologan society are the histories by Georgios Pachymeres, by the emperor Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos and by Nikephoros Gregoras. Georgios Pachymeres offers a relatively analytical narrative for a period that he had largely witnessed, between 1254 and 1308. The ecclesiastical debates of that period form a large part of his account. He considers that history is educational and he has a critical eye for many of the influential characters of his time, such as Michael VIII.” The main advantage of the History of Kantakouzenos is that it is written by one of the leading persons of the government between 1320 and 1354, roughly the period covered by the account. Kantakouzenos is the protagonist of the work and he tries throughout the narrative to defend his actions. Although the work adopts an objective tone, in fact it has many deliberate omissions or depictions of reality that differ from those of other authors, and would better serve the purposes of his work and blacken his enemies’ reputations. Whereas he attempts to present himself as a wise and philanthropic character, trying to govern by consent, in effect he betrays his uncertainty and his lack of omnipotence. His characters are motivated either by magnanimity, piety, philanthropy and modesty, or they are deceivers of the ‘g00d men; motivated by vanity, avarice and greed.” The History of Gregoras begins with the capture of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204 but becomes more detailed for the period between 1321 and 1359. Gregoras was a highly educated man and took a leading part in the hesychast controversy during the 1340s and 1350s. He was condemned by the synod of 1351 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His characters are again motivated by the same principles as those of Kantakouzenos, are but presented in a less multifaceted way.”
The second half of the Palaiologan period lacks a detailed contemporary historiographical account, until a few decades before the Fall, when the accounts of the historians Doukas, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Georgios Sphrantzes and Michael Kritoboulos (all writing after 1453) become more detailed. Doukas, writing as an official who served the Gattilusi lords of Ainos and Lesbos, strives to provide a reliable account, using both Ottoman and Latin sources, although he takes a very strong unionist stance. Chalkokondyles, on the other hand, consciously writes about the emergence of the Ottomans. Having been a student of the philosopher Plethon, his work exemplifies the new Renaissance outlook through such devices as the use of ‘Greeks’ to indicate the Byzantines, that is the Romaioi, the eternal fight between Greeks and barbarians, and the emphasis on tyche instead of Divine Providence. Michael Kritoboulos dedicated his work to Mehmed Il, describing his achievements after 1451, and offers to us the viewpoint of a compromised member of the local Byzantine elite on the new Ottoman world. Sphrantzes’ account, finally, is more of a memoir, written in almost demotic Greek. Even if it lacks historical depth, he includes several interesting details of his personal experience as a close associate of the last emperor, Konstantinos XI Palaiologos (r. 1449—53).””
In addition to the historical narratives, interesting insights on interpersonal relations are offered by the series of letters written by educated men. Letters were considered literature and were composed for this purpose. Consequently, they embrace many conventions and motifs, centred on the relationship between author and recipient. However, because of their rhetorical and not purely descriptive character, they tend sometimes to be obscure and do not focus on concrete details, either because these were conveyed orally by the letter-carrier or because they were deliberately omitted by the author, since such details would probably affect the literary character of the letter. By way of illustration, in the large corpora of Theodoros Hyrtakenos and Michael Gabras, we rarely learn about the object of their frequent petitions, or their reasons for animosity, and sometimes not even the names of their ‘enemies: Nevertheless, letters remain a valuable source of information about Byzantine culture and education, but also on social history, highlighting, among other issues, interpersonal relations and social exchange and the composition of literary and political circles in Byzantium.”
Among the important letter collections one should include the Letters of Demetrios Kydones, a native of Thessalonike and mesazon for several decades (1347-54 and 1356-86) to two successive emperors, Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos and Ioannes V Palaiologos. His letters are a valuable source of information on both political activities and intellectual pursuits in the second half of the fourteenth century.*' Rather different in tone are the letters of Patriarch Athanasios I (in office 1289-93 and 1303-9), most of which are addressed to the emperor Andronikos II. Athanasios was an ascetic, rigid and conservative man, deeply concerned with moral integrity and care of the poor. Unlike the situation revealed by the letters of his predecessor Gregorios Kyprios (1283-9), who similarly petitioned the emperor on several issues, Athanasios did not have the same large circle of ‘friends’ and supporters, especially in high literary circles, and consequently was despised by them (for instance by Gregoras) as semi-educated and ‘wild’ Therefore, his letters are important since they offer us a different perspective and social attitude.” Different in content is the large collection of letters by Michael Gabras in the first third of the fourteenth century. Gabras, although a member of the intellectual circles of Constantinople, does not seem to have been economically well-off. Many of his letters are petitions to important members of the aristocracy for help, even for small matters like food for his horse; for this reason they reveal to us the attitude of a ‘lesser’ man.” Later in the same century the letters of the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and of the pro-Latin teacher Manuel Kalekas also offer us valuable information regarding the intellectual circles of Constantinople and the political history of the empire.
Homilies — religious sermons delivered, or simply composed — are an underrepresented source. Although they are full of spiritual advice and religious attitudes, homilies occasionally offer glimpses of social life and attitudes and sometimes deal with questions of social balance and inequality.“ Earlier Lives of saints have been amply used in research concerning topics of social life, cultural values and religious attitudes. However, the Palaiologan period is less an era of production of new hagiographic material than a period for rewriting older saints’ Lives. The choice of the saint could be an important factor for analysis if the saint’s social background was important, but in fact the occasion of a feast, the construction of a new church, or religious-political affiliations eventually determined the choice.” Nevertheless, there were also new saints’ Lives, and the analyses of these by Ruth Macrides and Angeliki Laiou have produced valuable insights into social life in the early Palaiologan period and the background of the saints celebrated.”
The fourteenth century was an important period of codification, albeit certainly not on the scale of the ninth to tenth centuries. The ceremonial treatise of Pseudo-Kodinos is an excellent example. The treatise describes the various court ceremonies, and includes the lists of precedence of the officials and their dress. But the main field of codification was law. The codification of canon law by Matthaios Blastares was the first systematic work of this nature, where the author tried to reconcile the traditions and discrepancies between canon and civil law. Around the same time, Konstantinos Harmenopoulos produced a simplified codification of civil law, something that made the work quite popular in other Orthodox countries, while it survived in Greece as the civil law code until 1946. Perhaps these codifications can relate to a general increase in interest in law and justice in the fourteenth century: this is attested first by Andronikos II’s Novel of 1306 (incidentally the last known piece of legislation in Byzantium); second, through a higher standard of legal expertise (especially concerning the church court); and third, the subsequent judicial reforms, in particular, the establishment of the katholikoi kritai (general judges) as the supreme court of the empire.”
Although our sources are relatively numerous, they have at the same time serious limitations. The profile of the authors of the literary works does not vary substantially. Most of them had relatively similar cultural concerns and belonged to the same closed literary circles of the empire. Most of the scholars had a higher, or at least middling, social and economic background. The education they had received required substantial financial assets, since education was mostly private and usually provided by individual tutors, although schools are attested throughout the middle and late Byzantine period. Most writers resided primarily in the two largest cities of the empire, Constantinople and Thessalonike, but there were additional smaller centres of literary activity.* Nevertheless, these sources allow an understanding of the way Byzantine society functioned, how it was structured and what ideas about society were, at least on the higher level. Although such observations should be applied only with caution to the lower and middle strata of the population, we should remember, as observed above, that the ideological system of social stratification is not simply imposed on the weak segment of the populace but is negotiated and built with its consent.
Byzantine documentary sources are not lacking but cannot be compared with the rich material in many parts of Latin Europe. Most of the archives we possess come from the monasteries that have survived to our day (the monastic communities of Mt Athos, Meteora, St John’s monastery on Patmos and the monastery of St John Prodromos in Serres). These documents are concerned exclusively with the monasteries’ property or status. They are comprised of judicial acts concerning land disputes, sale or donation documents, testaments, contracts, imperial documents and fiscal property inventories by local state agents. The reason for the preservation of such documents is the continued ownership of the particular property by the monastery. Therefore, confiscations or future loss of a property seldom come to our notice. The documents are more numerous during the first half of the fourteenth century, perhaps due to the rapid expansion of monastic properties. Afterwards they decrease, an indication of state confiscations.
Regarding knowledge of the urban economy, the situation improves in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thanks to the increase in the Italian notarial acts from the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, which are indispensable to the study of overseas and regional trade. They reveal the entrepreneurial activities of Italian merchants and their connections with their Byzantine associates or competitors. They also reveal the names of Byzantine merchants and sometimes their level of wealth, information that is valuable for the present study. Undoubtedly the most important source remains the account book of Giacomo Badoer, a Venetian merchant active in Constantinople between 1436 and 1440, recording a few thousand transactions and naming several of his Byzantine partners.” Byzantine notarial acts and account books have survived, but only in very limited numbers. The preservation of the acts of the patriarchal synod for the years 1315-1402 also contributes to our knowledge of Byzantine society, for the decisions of the Synod deal not only with Church, but also with judicial disputes, particularly regarding marriage, inheritance and dowry, and more exceptionally regarding commercial and ordinary civil law. Unfortunately, these acts (749 documents) do not cover the full activity of the Synod, but only a small part of it, and their distribution is uneven. Some years are not represented and many of the documents (177) come from the last two years of the register (December 1399-January 1402), which coincides with the lengthy siege of Constantinople (1394—1402) by Sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402).
The documentary sources are not very helpful for the lower strata of society. As already mentioned, most of the monastic archives are concerned with purely financial matters and, since most of the land had already been moved into the possession of the wealthy classes since the twelfth century, it is rare to encounter simple peasants or the poorer city inhabitants. The tax registers (praktika) may be very helpful in perceiving the distribution of economic resources among the peasants, in reconstructing patterns of inheritance within the peasant household and for certain demographic characteristics of the Byzantine village, but they offer no real information on how the peasants constructed their social reality, how they actually lived, whether — despite the rate of tax — they were relatively well-off or not, and how they themselves (or even their landlords) viewed the social system of production.
Recent Scholarship on (Late) Byzantine Society
In 1978, after approximately a century of Byzantine studies, Hans-Georg Beck contemplated the absence of a social history of Byzantium.” Thirty years later John Haldon, in the introduction to his edited volume A social history of Byzantium, was still criticising the lack of a systematic study of the social history of Byzantium and mainly its theoretical aspect.*' The book is, however, more of an introduction to different aspects of Byzantine society rather than a systematic study of it.
The decades after World War II experienced an increase in all aspects of Byzantine historical study; more specifically, one of the main themes concerned the question of the integration of Byzantium into the scheme of Western feudalism.” This attempt was directed by Marxist historians mainly in Eastern Europe and its most important exponent was Georg Ostrogorsky (actually a non-Marxist). According to this theory, there was a ‘Golden Age’ of Byzantium in the seventh to tenth centuries, with a predominance of free peasantry and an army composed of peasant soldiers. The period following the failure to restrain the development of highly concentrated landownership was seen as a one of decline for Byzantium.” In addition, Ostrogorsky himself and Marxist historians not only connected Byzantium with the economic aspects of feudalism as defined by Marxism (that is, roughly, when the producing population is tied to the land and pays rent to the landlord) but strove to stress the growth of ties of dependence, visible in the development of retinues. These historians focused on the tax and judicial immunities that the great landlords tried to extract from the state as evidence for the breakdown of central authority.”
The theory had immense impact on Byzantine studies. Nevertheless, even during Ostrogorsky’s lifetime serious opposition to the theory of feudalism was raised, mainly by Paul Lemerle.” The last years of the 1970s and the first years of the 1980s can be considered to form a transitional period for Byzantine studies. Héléne Ahrweiler, studying eleventh-century society, was reluctant to use the term feudalism.” The change in approach was accomplished by the publication of Laiou’s book on the peasant society of Macedonia, which for the first time in Byzantine scholarship made use of statistical data from the tax registries of the fourteenth century.” Likewise, Evelyne Patlagean’s book on poverty in early Byzantium was orientated towards a structuralist approach to history, by denying the application of modern concepts and categorisations and adhering rather to the terminology of the sources.”* Yet Alexander Kazhdan’s series of lectures entitled People and power proved more influential: it called for a new orientation of Byzantine history towards New History, that is, the field of cultural history developed by the Annales school in France, especially in the 1960s to 1970s, aiming at a new orientation of historical studies against the traditional logic of old political history, that asked new questions, for example about the people’s mentalities or their concerns, and used hitherto neglected sources. Kazhdan wanted to find what he called the homo byzantinus: how a Byzantine common man behaved, how he lived, what his ideas on the world, society and literature were. Traditional historical topics such as diplomacy, political history and institutions were to be examined in the light of these new questions.” Although many of his arguments in the book regarding the homo byzantinus were not followed by Byzantinists, his plea had serious repercussions for the research field. The study of the institution of family, fashion and ecology are topics that appeared for the first time in Byzantine studies — or, at least, it was after the appearance of People and power that they proliferated.”
The aristocracy has been the second favourite subject of Byzantinists in Social History. The main reason for this is perhaps the nature of our sources, which are much more related to the upper class, as we related above. One of the main characteristics of the Byzantine aristocracy, and the reason for the extensive literature on it, is the lack of a clear definition of this term in Byzantium. Aristocracy is thus commonly confused with three other social constructions: the nobility, the elite and the dominant class. The dominant or the powerful social group is usually an socioeconomic definition referring to those layers of society that own the means of production, are economically dominant and therefore also share political power. This distinction is usually from a Marxist perspective and has some truth to it, since economic power is usually accompanied by political power as well. But, on the other hand, in our own time as well as in the pre-modern period there are examples of people without economic power who in fact exercised political influence, and vice versa.°' Although the distinction between dominant and subordinate classes can be useful in certain respects, it does not help to distinguish the differences in social and political power that different members or groups of the dominant or subordinated classes enjoyed. Close to the concept of dominant class is the concept of social elite. The theory of the elites was, in fact, created in opposition to the Marxist concept of ruling class, the connotations of which entail economic dominance by a certain group of people. A smaller part of the elite, the governing or ‘power elite; came to designate those of the elite who in fact took an active part in government.” The discussion of elites in Byzantium, rather than of aristocracy, has the advantage that it is a safer term to use than ‘aristocracy; which entails continuity and ‘good birth, and is diachronic and applicable even today. In fact the term ‘elite’ is closer to the essence of the word aristoi in Greek, often used in Byzantine sources, than the word ‘aristocracy’ itself, which also has connotations of the classical types of government (kingship, aristocracy, democracy).
Nobility is more of a legally defined social category. It implies a long tradition of generations of title holding and office holding, and more or less legally defined (or at least customary) privileges over other social categories. After the abolition of the hereditary status of senator in the Roman empire around the middle of the fifth century (when senatorial status was recognised solely for the rank of illustris, and could be accorded only through office holding or imperial favour), nobility in the Roman lands declined. In fact, in Western Europe the category of nobility was created in the twelfth century, around the same time that feudalism emerged as a coherent system, and was then connected to fief holding.” In the case of Byzantium, researchers have identified the absence of nobility. When the word ‘nobility’ is used in this book, it will indicate the quality of ‘possessing good birth; and not a defined group of people.
Finally, there is the concept of aristocracy. ‘Aristocracy’ is commonly used as a synonym for nobility, but in fact nobility is one of the characteristics of an aristocratic social group. Six main criteria have been identified for an aristocrat: distinction of ancestry, landed wealth, position in an official hierarchy, imperial or royal favour, recognition by other political leaders and lifestyle.® Not all the criteria are present in every aristocracy and in different periods, or to the same degree. But there is one main criterion that is indispensable in defining aristocracy in distinction to an elite or dominant class: continuity. This is observed in terms of successive generations of office holding within the same families, and simultaneous control and possession of sources of wealth. In other words, ancestry is of central importance compared to other types of elite or dominant classes.
Perhaps the best definition of Byzantine aristocracy, as is understood by most scholars, is Haldon’s definition of the Byzantine elite as those who:
occupied a social and economic situation, which either reflected, or ensured access to, senior positions in state and church, social esteem from their peers, the ability to transmit their social, economic, and cultural capital to their offspring, and the ability to control resources in terms of land and its products, manpower and movable wealth.
Byzantinists have tried to discern the main criteria for the designation of the Byzantine aristocracy in the sources and have identified four: ancestry, office in the imperial or church hierarchy, wealth and merit.”
Kazhdan’s other important study was The social composition of the Byzantine ruling class, 11-12" centuries, which first appeared in Russian and for this reason, apart from a summary of it, it remained unknown to the general public for a long time. Instead of presenting the usual theme of the expansion of great landownership (already a fact) and the relations between the state and the aristocracy, Kazhdan’s study focused on a thorough analysis of the Byzantine aristocracy that tried to determine what elements defined its membership during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He proposed to divide this aristocracy, first by function (his main division being between military and civil aristocracy). and second, according to the importance of their office in the state hierarchy; he scored all office-holding families according to eminence on a scale of one to five, trying to define the continuity and the prominence of families of the elite. Around the same time, other studies focusing on the analysis of the Byzantine elite appeared. The analysis of Byzantine society and its division into groups, and their role and place in Byzantine society between the seventh and ninth centuries, was undertaken by Yannopoulos.” Winkelmann’s analysis of the Byzantine ruling class of the eighth and ninth centuries addressed similar problems.”
The direction also shifted to a discussion of the so-called opposition between the civil and the military aristocracy, which had been identified by Ostrogorsky and became an established, even classic, concept for historians of Byzantium. Their opposition was seen to represent not only the contest for power of a party, but, even more, conflicting cultural perspectives (military ethos versus civil courtier ethos), different areas of origin (the civil aristocracy from Constantinople and the military from the provinces), different sources of wealth (landed wealth for military families and real estate or moveable wealth for the civil aristocracy), and different perspectives of state organisation (the military families opposed the centralising tendencies that the court and civil families promoted). The civil aristocracy was seen as having dropped to second rank after the victory of Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118), the exponent of the military aristocracy.’ The same opposition was seen to take place in the reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos between the rising civil bureaucratic families (most notably, the Choumnoi and Metochitai) and the great landowning military aristocratic families. Unfortunately, evidence from the sources has many times been distorted in order to fit the picture. It was Giinther Weiss who first tried, based on evidence from the intellectual Michael Psellos, to deny the clustering of the aristocracy into these two categories.” Jean-Claude Cheynet, in his seminal analysis of the revolts and movements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, rejected the theory of a struggle between them. He reasoned that by that time the distinction between the aristocratic families had been blurred, their intermarriages making it impossible to identify a family tradition for each one.” The question of this opposition in the late Byzantine period will be the subject of further analysis in my study.
At the same time, studies on various facets of the Byzantine aristocracy multiplied, starting perhaps with the collective volume edited by Michael Angold, entitled The Byzantine aristocracy. This volume laid the basis for future discussions on some interesting matters and questions, such as the self-representation of Byzantine aristocrats, their patronage of art, literature and monasteries, or their relation to political power. Quite important work on the middle Byzantine aristocracy has been conducted in Paris, too, led for quite some time by Jean-Claude Cheynet, which addressed not only general questions, such as the anthroponomy or the rules of inheritance of aristocratic property, but also focusing on the history and the legacy of specific families. The development of Byzantine sigillography from the 1980s facilitated the further advancement and multiplication of studies on Byzantine prosopography. A synthetical study on the various aspects of the representation of the middle Byzantine aristocracy (patronage, memoria, its presentation in the literature, the importance of family and its visual representation) has recently been concluded by Michael Griinbart.”
Incontrast to the middle Byzantine period, the Palaiologan aristocracy has not received the attention and analysis it deserves.” Although the question of the social aspects of the second civil war received two important monographs by Weiss and Matschke — with the monograph by Weiss thoroughly examining the internal structure of the party and retinue of Kantakouzenos in the second civil war” — the first study specifically devoted to the late Byzantine aristocracy was an article by Angeliki Laiou in 1973. Although relatively short, its scope — that is, the first synthesis and approach to Palaiologan aristocracy — is ambitious. Laiou defines the Byzantine aristocracy mainly economically: they were the powerful, those that were in ‘possession of [large amounts] of land’ As such, she divides them into two groups: the great families and the families of the provincial aristocracy ‘up to the vicinity of revenues of eighty iyperpyra per year, and then the small pronoia-holders ‘up to the minimum attested revenues of 12 hyperpyra: The second conclusion of the synthesis by Laiou is that the Byzantine aristocracy was in fact the major factor in the decentralisation of the Byzantine empire.” Research on the late Byzantine aristocracy thereafter focused on the entrepreneurial activities of Byzantine aristocrats during the late Palaiologan period.”
Nevertheless, systematic analysis of the late Byzantine aristocracy was lacking until recently. The doctoral thesis by Demetrios Kyritses in 1997, although unpublished,” came to fill the void, up to c. 1350, where his analysis stops. Kyritses followed Kazhdan by analysing the Byzantine aristocracy in terms of office and title holding, and divided it into two groups: the higher military aristocracy (he identified the military as the leading segment of the aristocracy) and the civil aristocracy, noting moreover that there is no evidence for opposition between the two groups.” The other memorable argument of his thesis is the observation that the Byzantine aristocracy was closed-minded and did not develop any ‘class consciousness, and each individual family promoted the interests of its narrow circle.
A second important study of the late Byzantine aristocracy was written by K.-P. Matschke and integrated into his book, co-authored with Franz Tinnefeld, Die Gesellschaft im spdten Byzanz, as one of its three main themes. They also divide the aristocracy into military and civil (or the bureaucracy, as they call it), but in accordance with Matschke’s earlier writings, they observe a competition for power between the two groups, the second one struggling to empower the state machine vis-a-vis the higher aristocracy, which, in turn, contended to obtain and enlarge its privileges. The second important aspect of this book is the almost exhaustive analysis of the engagement of the Byzantine aristocracy in trade. They conclude that the Byzantine aristocracy was increasingly engaged in trade in order to offset its losses of landed wealth in the second half of the fourteenth century.”
More focused studies appeared later, offering further insights. Necipoglu analysed the aristocracy of Thessalonike in the last century of the empire, including a useful table of all those mentioned as archontes in the sources.” In her monograph she analysed the political attitude of the aristocracy (and, in general, of all Byzantines) between c. 1370 and 1460 in the face of Ottoman and Latin expansion.* Thierry Ganchou expanded and enriched the field’s horizons by writing several studies on families of the late Palaiologan elite and using often unpublished archival material from the West. Tonia Kiousopoulou analysed the political and cultural identities and behaviour of the aristocracy in the fifteenth century, connecting the economic entrepreneurial activities of the Byzantine elite with their stance on the question of the Union of the Churches and their general orientation towards the West.”
Even though the aristocracy has been the favourite subject of Byzantinists, little research has been directed towards ascertaining what the Byzantines thought of their society and how they viewed it: What were the criteria according to which they divided it? Under what concepts and mentalities did Byzantine society function as a whole? How did political ideology or cultural phenomena help in the function and formation of Byzantine society, or, vice versa, how were they reflected through the prism of Byzantine society? It was perhaps Beck who first consistently tried to understand the Byzantines, to analyse their preoccupations, to search out how they thought and to discover the effect of all these elements on Byzantine culture. Although his contribution to the knowledge of Byzantine culture remains memorable, he produced little work on social relations and structure. Nevertheless, it was he who stressed the openness of Byzantine society and who tried to interpret the theological debates, not through the prism of social or political divisions but more as self-standing philosophical phenomena. It was he who first stressed the importance of followers and retinues, formations that were both vertically and horizontally structured, and he who regarded the literati of the empire as something akin to a separate ‘caste’*° Kazhdan also undertook the task of consistently describing Byzantine society from a new perspective, utilising certain traits that he identified. For Kazhdan, Byzantine society lacked social hierarchy (he mainly compared it with the Western European case), and theoretically all people under the emperor were equal. He proceeded further by arguing that the central trait of Byzantine society was individualism, the lack of any developed horizontal or vertical social ties and, consequently, of social groups apart from the nuclear family. Kazhdan integrated his argument with his explanation of many social and cultural phenomena of Byzantium.” His theory attracted more critics than acceptance; the evidence that he presented was criticised as being controversial or exaggerated.
At the International Byzantine Congress of Vienna in 1981, Matschke presented an interesting paper on the importance of mentalités (Geisteshaltungen) to the study of Byzantine society and social structure. In this short article he mentions the problems Byzantinists face regarding the social structure of Byzantium; he stresses that Byzantium was not alien to the notion of hierarchy (answering Kazhdan); he refers to Byzantine society’s special characteristic of openness, and to the principle of equality, which was seen as natural, although later, after the twelfth century, inequality was also seen as a normal phenomenon; he stresses the importance of the poor/powerful model to the social division of Byzantium; and he analyses the emergence of aristocracy and the changing criteria of its definition.’ Both Matschke and Kazhdan offered initial approaches to the nature of Byzantine society, but their efforts were not continued.
As structuralism has asked, however, are we really allowed to use terms such as ‘society, ‘social structure’ and ‘class’ for Byzantium, when the Byzantines themselves did not have a notion of these terms?” The terms are not simple constructions that can be applied everywhere or change their meaning in order to overcome ambiguities in evidence. This approach could create dangers of misunderstanding and anachronism. We need the terms when they help us better to understand these societies in modern language or to compare similar phenomena; nonetheless, they should be used with caution. While it is a fact that the Byzantines did not have a concept of class, they did describe their world, their ‘society; in terms of economic and political dominance (see Chapter 3), and thus our use of the word ‘class’ with reference to Byzantine society is legitimate. Conversely, take, for example, the concept of feudalism that has been discussed so many times in Byzantine Studies and other disciplines: even if we accept the socalled ‘tributary or feudal mode of production’ as the notion of feudalism, and not the specific relations of dependence and hierarchy that developed in Western Europe, I do not believe that such a monolithic idea helps us better to understand Byzantium and the complex relations of production. We cannot simply apply, for instance, the concept of a constitution — or more recently of a republic” — to the constantly changing traditions of the Byzantine political order or to Byzantine political culture.
Byzantine Society before the Palaiologan Period: Structure and Characteristics
From the seventh century, Byzantine society experienced profound changes, although many of these were the result of long processes during Late Antiquity. Already in Late Antiquity, the older Roman distinctions between senators, equites and plebs, as well as that between free and unfree people, had become obsolete, as the order of the equites disappeared, having been assimilated into the senators above or the curiales below. Since many of the provincial curiales were absorbed by the senatorial aristocracy, which increased substantially in number, and as social and economic inequalities deepened, the two-fold legal distinction between honestiores and humiliores became much more important. The increase in the senatorial elite was soon followed by its division into three honorary classes, but as Justinian I (r. 527-65) restricted membership of the senate only to the highest class, the il/ustres, who in turn could reach this degree only if they held a higher office, the connection with the imperial administration became much more important and the de jure heredity of the senatorial class was effectively abolished, even though a de facto continuity of the senatorial class remained in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Byzantine senatorial elite was also adversely affected by the political and military upheavals of the seventh century. Many families disappeared and many of the great landholdings were lost; what remained of the senatorial elite primarily found shelter within the civil or church administration. For quite some time, ancestry lost its previous significance as a mark of social status. The emperor, at the same time, became the most important source of monetary wealth, which he personally distributed annually to all officials. These developments made the imperial administration the most important source of status during the rest of the Byzantine period. Possession of office provided political power, a source of wealth, and increasing social status, as well being a prerequisite for their transmission to later generations. Although birth and ancestry figure from time to time as marks of distinction, their importance was diminished in favour of imperial service and ‘merit, or whatever one might call the creation of an effective network that through patronage secured an official position throughout Byzantium. At the same time, the social and cultural capital that had maintained the senatorial elite during Late Antiquity, particularly the availability of advanced education and the self-consciously cultured lifestyle it permitted, almost disappeared.”
Slowly a new elite emerged, yet with a high degree of continuity; one section resided in Constantinople, whose members had a career mainly in the imperial or ecclesiastical administration, and the other lived primarily in the provinces, whose members pursued a military career. It is important to differentiate here between the higher and lesser elite. A few large provincial families and clans dominated the higher military offices from the later ninth century, but their areas of jurisdiction changed frequently — following the experience of the eighth century, when the long-term service of the stratégoi influenced the allegiance of the provincial armies — and their careers depended largely on the emperor and the balance of power in Constantinople. The members of the lesser elite pursued lifelong careers in their provinces of origin and cultivated a militaristic ideal of honour like that portrayed in the epic Digenes Akrites.”” The whole of the provincial elite invested part of their wealth in expanding their landholdings. However, it should be emphasised that, especially regarding the higher elite, the income that the officials received as a salary usually far exceeded their income from land, until at least the eleventh century. Only in the case of lesser officials and dignity holders would income from land, if they had in fact invested in it, have surpassed state salaries. Land represented more of a social than an economic asset. It was a source of prestige in local society and, with the possession of an office, contributed to the expansion and maintenance of a network of patronage and possibly to the allegiance of the locals.” Land was a safer choice of investment for more stable and diachronic institutions (such as monasteries) than it was for the elite, who constantly faced the threat, and not infrequently the reality, of confiscation by the state.
In the tenth century, this social and economic expansion of the elite into local society, as well as the gradual consolidation of the higher elite clans, created conflict with the state and the imperial family (the Macedonian dynasty), which socially did not originate from within these aristocratic clans, and which attempted to constrict their expansion with legislative measures. For the first time, the elite clans showed on several occasions that they could raise substantial support for their cause, both in their respective provinces and in the capital, mostly in order to change the balance of power in Constantinople. The state reacted by using one clan against another; the imperial family preserved the throne and the clans capitulated and were reduced, but the expansion of the elite in the provinces was not seriously restricted. It was precisely during the reign of Basileios II (976-1025) that many of the families who would dominate the politics of the eleventh century emerged.”
As the networks of these clans expanded, many (or even all) of their members gradually moved to the evident centre of power, Constantinople, and allied with elite families of the civil establishment, making the differences between the two traditions imperceptible. Besides, the eleventh century witnessed a pronounced expansion of civil administration, a numeric growth of the elite and a fair degree of social mobility, whereby members of the upper middle class of Constantinople were admitted to the senate, partly in order to strengthen the political networks of the emperors and partly due to the state’s need for cash through the sale of dignities. Much of the political crisis of the eleventh century represented the rivalry and struggle for power between multiple elite factions, rather than the older view of opposition between the military and the civil aristocracy. In the end, one of these factions, the Komnenoi, having allied with the Doukai, emerged victorious.”
The victory of the Komnenoi has been described as the victory of the military elite. Admittedly, the civil elite was pushed into the background and the social ascent of the upper middle class of Constantinople was halted. A new hierarchy of dignities based on the epithet sebastos was established (sebastokrator, panhypersebastos, protosebastos, and so on), reserved for the members of the Komnenian faction, in order to supersede the older, inflated hierarchy of dignities possessed by much of the civil elite. The administration became considerably more simplified when compared with the extravagance of the eleventh century, and the provincial military and civil administrations were once more united, under the respective doux in each province. Yet, what the Komnenian emperors created was effectively a family-centred clan, forged by an alliance of families with a military (for example, the Palaiologoi) and a civil tradition (for example, the Kamateroi), which was established at the top of the social and political hierarchy, reducing all other families to the lesser elite. This clan would monopolise almost all the higher offices in civil and military administration for most of the twelfth century.”°
Quite some time ago, Kazhdan noted some important changes in Byzantine culture and society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The first one was the growth among the elite of laterally extended families, replacing the older dominant type of the simple vertical family, and a concomitant improvement of the role of women and increase in the importance of lineage. The growth in the importance of lineage was accompanied by a growth in the importance of ancestry as a mark of distinction. The second feature constituted a search for greater social stability and, consequently, less social mobility. The openness of Byzantine society, a feature remarked upon by several scholars, became more and more restricted, although, even in the twelfth century, the upper middle class of Constantinople still had some prospects of social ascent.” A third feature is the development of a military ethos, which Kazhdan connects to the consolidation of the Komnenian military elite. What has been less remarked upon, however, is an equal and synchronous development of a civil courtly ethos in the imperial and aristocratic courts that promoted an elegant lifestyle, the importance of education, patronage of the arts, physical beauty and similar cultured values.”
The elite family — the aristocratic oikos — began to embrace non-relatives. As its economic and social role increased, it incorporated people who entered its service (called in our sources oiketai, anthropoi, and also oikeioi in the late Byzantine period). These people were drawn from all kinds of milieux, depending also upon the social position of the oikos. The most capable, or those already belonging to a better-off social milieu, received education and were later often endorsed to pursue a career in administration. Others joined the military entourage that formed part of the aristocratic oikos. But as power was increasingly vested in a system of privilege derived from the court, so the different oikoi invested in alliances based in kin or in friendship, while the lesser ones each depended upon the patronage of a more powerful oikos.
Another important development after the late eleventh century was the expansion of an already known system, the oikonomia, whereby, instead of receiving a salary or similar cash income/gift from the state, an oikonomia-holder was granted the state income from a specified area. This reduced the expenses of the state, since the collection of taxes was now conferred on the recipient instead of the often untrustworthy and corrupt tax collectors, and reduced its need to have large amounts of cash always available to meet its obligations, a serious issue in the first period of the eleventh-century crisis (before the 1070s). On the other hand, even if the state reserved the right to revoke the grant, it still represented the devolution of its authority to private individuals and further consolidation of their private interests as agents of state power and status in the provinces.”
Some important changes also occurred in rural social relations. Most of our sources agree that free peasantry and rural communities predominated in Byzantium between the eighth and the tenth centuries. The rural producers principally inhabited free communities, working their properties and paying their taxes. This population produced the bulk of the thematic army of the empire, and the village communities constituted the primary tax unit. In the course of time, large properties were augmented, while seasonal difficulties, or the coercive patronage of powerful people, brought independent peasants into dependence upon the large landowners. The state, too, appropriated abandoned lands, which it later could give away for cultivation (in rent or by selling them) to other peasants or even large landowners, thus breaking the cohesion of the community.'”
The tenth-century legislation may have attempted to restrict the rise of concentrated landownership, probably because its negative effects on the growth of the patronage power of provincial elites against the state were perceived. To begin with, it is unlikely that the state income from taxes was seriously diminished by this process, since the large landowner would still need to pay the taxes incumbent on his new properties unless the state granted him tax exemption. Nor was the military potential of Byzantium affected, since the army was progressively evolving into a professional force based on the centrally stationed and professional units tagmata; these were precisely the armies that brought Byzantium its victories in the second half of the tenth century and later, rather than the provincial (thematic) armies.'”’ From one point of view, the government's poor understanding of this process caused some serious issues in the eleventh century. Although the state’s expenses were increasing in order to sustain a larger professional army and an expanding elite, it was still preserving tax exemption on the lands of the increasingly redundant provincial farmer-soldiers. Romanos IV Diogenes remembered these soldiers and they in turn brought him the disaster of Mantzikert in 1071 (together with possible treason by the Doukai) with their lack of professionalism and proper equipment. Beginning with the reign of Alexios I, the state contributed to the increase of large landownership, with the institution of oikonomia. After a while, the free peasants inhabiting a granted property, who would otherwise only pay their taxes to the state, were reckoned as dependents of the recipient of the grant.
There are, however, some important differences in the status of dependent peasants during the Justinianic period, the tenth century, the Komnenian period and later. The coloni of Late Antiquity were allocated land by a large landowner; they were not allowed to abandon this land, but nor could they be chased off it even if they managed to hold it for thirty consecutive years (so long as they paid their dues). Another important segment of rural producers were the tenants, those who rented a piece of land for a period shorter than thirty years. The legal status of dependent peasants was never codified in the middle or late Byzantine periods, and most of our evidence comes from legal practice or incidental information, in all probability reflecting customary rights mixed with the survival of Justinianic legislation. In the tenth century, a legal opinion denied any right, sale or transmission, of a paroikos (that is, a dependent peasant) on the land he had been allocated. But the need to produce a legal opinion on this matter, as well as another legal opinion (the Peira of Eustathios Romaios) in the eleventh century, stipulating that a paroikos who cultivates a piece of land for more than thirty years should be treated as an owner (despotes), betray that there had been some important changes emerging from custom. Once (in the late eleventh century) the status of paroikos was conferred upon not only those who cultivated land belonging to other people but also to those who paid their dues not to the state but to a third party (that is, to an oikonomiaholder), the distinctions between independent and dependent peasants became blurred. Thirteenth-century documents from Smyrna record the last known disputes over the rights of peasants vis-a-vis landlords." Despite the political problems, the period between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries was a time of demographic and economic expansion in both the countryside and the cities. In the countryside, agriculture expanded into previously unproductive zones close to or within the limits of villages, such as forests and meadows. Although peasants individually gradually expanded the productive zones, this process was most effectively conducted by the large landowners who had more capital to channel to this purpose. Even more important was the intensification of demand for agricultural products caused by the increased urban and elite populations.'” Byzantine cities had been affected negatively by the changes of Late Antiquity: the progressive reduction of public life, buildings and space; the increased political role of Constantinople and the immigration of local elites to Constantinople; and, finally, the devastating demographic and economic effects of waves of the plague and foreign invasions.’ Most older Byzantine cities had been reduced to the size of a fortified castle by the eighth century, while surveys have shown that an important segment of the urban population became ruralised in proximity to the castle. The Byzantine town then served mostly as an administrative and storage centre and offered shelter. Beginning in the ninth century, Byzantine towns experienced a momentous rejuvenation caused by an increase in security and overall population. Towns were rebuilt, existing ones expanded and the volume of artisanal and trading activities increased. Each artisanal profession, at least in Constantinople, was organised in a guild, regulated by strict rules imposed by the state, and all guilds supervised by the eparchos of the capital city. Following recent reassessments, it appears that, until the thirteenth century, the range and scale of commercial operations of the Italian republics was not as large as had been suggested, and they were more profitable than detrimental to the Byzantine economy. In part, the increase in urban and rural production was stimulated by prospects of commercial profits, since local, regional and international trade was expanding and new markets were opening.'”
The growth of the population and of economic activity in Constantinople, and the openness of the elite in the eleventh century, had further repercussions on the political and social history of the empire. First, members of the upper middle class who achieved wealth often purchased dignities and may automatically have entered the senate (membership of the senate was reserved for those above the dignity of protospatharios). Secondly, in the context of the political crisis of the eleventh century (as well as that of the late twelfth century), especially regarding dynastic legitimisation, it signified a new period for the role of common people in the political life of the empire. Their proximity to the centre of power certainly brought about an interest and, up to a degree, an involvement in politics. They could voice their demands and, if channelled properly, this could become ‘public opinion’ However, their motivation had little relation to a sentiment of their ‘constitutional’ role, as has recently been argued:'® they were in most cases actuated, either by leading citizens such as heads of guilds, or by the elite, to serve the interests of a party as a pressure group.”
Whereas the higher elite in the Komnenian period was almost exclusively located in Constantinople, its incomes derived mainly from estates in the provinces, where the estates that supported other Constantinopolitan institutions and monasteries patronised by this elite were also located, along with the state estates that provided the salaries of the sizeable, and largely mercenary, Komnenian army. Never before had Constantinople been such an important political, social and economic centre of the empire. Undoubtedly, then, the realities of economic and political power engendered a spirit of agitation against Constantinople in the provinces, which sponsored the rise in power of local elites and a sentiment of autonomy that came to the fore when the first problems at the centre appeared towards the end of the twelfth century. The first serious problems in the Komnenian system emerged after the 1160s, at the same moment that Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143-80) conferred power upon families of the lesser elite that did not belong to the Komnenian clan. In fact, the last quarter of the twelfth century saw the rise of a system like that of the Palaiologan period, when a few clans, one of which was the imperial clan (in this case the Angeloi), dominated the political life of the empire. The problem with the Angeloi was that they failed to create a lasting alliance with these families.’
After the fall of Constantinople, some important, inevitable developments occurred. The social position of the imperial family in Nikaia was further reduced to a standing only slightly superior to that of other powerful families, a situation that would continue during the Palaiologan period. In terms of composition, much of this elite comprised of older families that had fled to Nikaia after 1204, such as the Kantakouzenoi, the Palaiologoi and the Tornikioi, among others. However, the position of the local elites in Asia Minor — and later those in the Balkans, following their submission — was improved in terms of political power. These local elites provided the backbone of the imperial army, one of the foundations of the state and the main basis of its expansion in the Balkans. The lack of a fixed imperial capital before 1261 contributed to this tendency. Nevertheless, most of the families that would dominate the upper echelons of the empire after 1261 became established in the higher elite precisely during the Nikaian period.
The conflict that ensued during the short reign of Theodoros II Laskaris (1254-8), which has been described as in terms of this emperor’s hostility towards the higher elite, seems to represent rather a shift of power from the elite of Asia Minor to the European elite led by the Palaiologoi."”
Outline
This book is divided into two parts: The first part analyses the system of social stratification in late Byzantium. The analysis has been further subdivided into five comprehensive chapters, each one with a different focal point. The first chapter examines the ideological infrastructure, the mechanisms and the concepts through which Byzantine society regulated and perceived its social stratification. It explores how Byzantines understood social inequality in their society, the importance of social hierarchy and the conservation of the social system. Gestures and rituals of dressing, positioning and similar are highlighted in order to show the importance of social hierarchy for Byzantine society. It strives to find the rules and the norms, the social contract through which the system of inequality functioned and was maintained, securing social peace. At the same time it presents ideas that circulated in this period, controverting the social contract, and instances where social tension over the established order took the character of open resistance, concluding with some thoughts on the reasons for the lack of peasant revolts in late Byzantium.
Having considered the importance of social hierarchy for Byzantium, in the second chapter we explore the principal values that defined social distinction for an individual and generated status in late Byzantine society. Different values (such as wealth, birth or occupation) are identified and their relative importance for Byzantine society established. The different expressions of these values are described: how, for example, wealth was primarily a means for an opulent lifestyle and less a medium to control the means of production; how the use of multiple surnames was a way to boast about one’s ancestry; or how poverty became correlated to contemptibleness, disrepute and ill-birth. This chapter also examines what happened in cases where individuals did not achieve similar levels of social distinction in all defining factors but the person still ranked low in other social values, the so-called status incongruence. Next, we analyse cases of social ascent, where someone was able to climb socially by obtaining or using these kinds of values. On such occasions, it is important to determine this person’s social behaviour, whether he adopted fully his new role in the social system or maintained values and ideas of his earlier social position, and furthermore to see the effectiveness and the modes of social integration or whether these people strove to undermine the social system and pursued the interests of their social origins.
The third chapter seeks to understand the basic principles of the Byzantine system of social stratification, the factors that defined social categorisation. As in most societies, not all social groups were constructed based on the same factors: next to the occupationally defined social groups, there were groups based on economic or political power without considering gender, age or religious or ethnic factors. Byzantines themselves likewise had different perceptions of their social categorisation system. Our task, nevertheless, is to identify the dominant system of social stratification, the defining criteria through which Byzantines understood social differentiation, and the social groups by which they divided their society. Once this has been accomplished, in order to produce a comprehensive picture it is necessary to contextualise Byzantine perceptions and to make use of modern models and categories (such as the estate system or middle class) that help us better to understand modern and past societies. This might mean organising or reviewing Byzantine evidence, but instead of simply imposing models and categories on the Byzantine context, the applicability of these models and categories to the Byzantine situation has been carefully considered. The chapter includes a thorough analysis of the basic groups in the Byzantine social stratification system: it asks who belonged to each social group, what their role in society was, and how tradition and evolution shaped these groups throughout the late Byzantine period.
Chapter 4 moves the discussion to the different associations and networks persistent in Byzantine society and considers the influence each type of these groupings exerted on the social structure. For this purpose we take first larger traditional social groupings structured horizontally, meaning that they could include different social strata, such as the urban or the village community, but also other associations such as the family, guilds and confraternities. Under the same spectrum the chapter examines political and social associations and networks formed through friendship or common political interests. Finally, it analyses the importance of the networks formed around elite families, either through marriage associations and friendship, or through patronage in the form of retinues. The latter networks are regarded as the most important type of association in Byzantine society after the nuclear family, in terms of their influence on social structure and relations.
Chapter 5, which concludes the first part, discusses the access that different social groups had to the economic and political capital of Byzantine society. The extent of their access allows us to understand their social power — that is, their ability to influence society by their possession of the means of production and of political authority and power — as well as the material realities of social inequality in terms of income. For the latter purpose, the first section includes an analytical survey of socio-economic inequality among peasants in particular villages of Byzantine Macedonia, considering the access each household had to the economic resources of the village and the potential income it could generate. The chapter concludes with a deliberation over the relations between the two most important institutions of authority in Byzantine society, the state and the church, as well as their own place and influence upon society. It considers the relations between the elite (that is, the social group whose members predominantly had access to political power) and the state, in order to understand the connection between centre and periphery and to contemplate the collapse of the Byzantine empire after the middle of the fourteenth century.
Because many aspects of these phenomena are analysed only briefly in this first part, in Part II, I have found it productive to offer two case studies as a way of complementing the arguments of Part I and building a complete picture of the late Byzantine social structure. Chapter 6 then focuses on the analysis of a late Byzantine provincial society, namely the area around Serres in eastern Macedonia. The area features rich and so far little-explored documentary material that consequently permits interesting observations on the local society, the relations of production, the control and use of urban and rural space, and generally on both the urban and the rural society of the surrounding region. The chapter proceeds to identify the different social strata active in the local society, their control and exploitation of the sources of economic power and their status in local society. Besides, the area of Serres, by virtue of the frequent changes of dynasts in the second half of the fourteenth century, offers the most illustrative example of one of the main arguments of this book regarding the relations between the higher aristocracy, the lesser elite and central authority: that is, the progressive estrangement of the lesser elite from the Byzantine state and the higher aristocracy, the state’s chief advocate.
The second case study, Chapter 7, moves from the provincial and primarily rural society of Serres to Constantinople, the centre of the empire, an urban society, amidst a period of social change and crisis. It examines the structures and the characteristics of late Palaiologan urban society, focusing on the period around the year 1400. At this time our information on Constantinopolitan society greatly improves thanks to the survival of a few hundred documents from the Patriarchal Register, recording not only the activity of the patriarchal synod on issues pertaining to the Church, but also the verdicts of the Synod as a judicial court on cases of ecclesiastical, civil and commercial law. This increase in documentary evidence coincides with a severe period of crisis: the Ottomans had blockaded Constantinople in the hope of forcing the Byzantines to surrender; this occurred following half a century of economic and political decline, during which the countryside had been raided and eventually lost to the Serbians and then to the Ottomans, thereby restricting the Byzantine empire to the vicinity of Constantinople. It is therefore worthwhile analysing the attitudes and responses of some social groups to this crisis, particularly those of the higher elite, which had based its power on the control of a large proportion of the landed wealth in the provinces, or of the civil elite, which saw a serious diminution of the available positions in the central administration.
In the Appendices, one may consult Table 26 for a list of all known title holders in the late Byzantine period, arranged according to the rank of the title as listed in the official hierarchy given by Pseudo-Kodinos. The Appendices also include a few tables pertinent to Chapter 6 on Serres, documenting some information and arguments found there: Table 27 presents (and in some cases explains) the dating of documents in Codex B of the Monastery of Prodromos as adopted in this book, since in many instances this dating differs from the one proposed by the editor of the documents; Table 28 provides the references for the tenures of the ecclesiastical officials in Serres and Zichna, as presented in Tables 10-11; finally, Table 29 includes a catalogue of all individuals of the upper stratum active in Serres (based on a number of objective factors), their office, title and honorary epithets, the range of their reported activity in Serres and the type of their property (rural and/or urban), in addition to the sources that mention them and any identifications made between the individuals.
Finally, in the concluding matter one can find a glossary divided into four parts: (1) a glossary of general Greek terms used more than once and not always explained; (2) a list of honorary epithets, dignities and offices encountered in the book; (3) an alphabetical list of the official titles in the Palaiologan period; and (4) an alphabetical list of the ecclesiastical offices of the metropolitan clergy. For reasons of clarity, in particular for readers not familiar with the Byzantine system of dignities and offices, the following distinction has been made: (1) honorary epithets are unofficial designations (kyr, authentés, paneugenestatos); (2) dignities are those official ranks without any function that survived into the Palaiologan period (megalodoxotatos, sebastos, and so on); (3) titles are all those offikia or axiai mentioned in the list of the court hierarchy supplied by Pseudo-Kodinos, and which were given for life, except in cases of promotion; some had started before the Palaiologan period as offices but had lost their original function in the meantime (for example, parakoimomenos), some retained their function at least for some time (for example, megas logothetés, protasékrétis), some had begun as military offices, were still given to military men and may have had a function, but we are not always certain about it (for example, megas tzaousios), and some were always purely dignitaries (for example, protosebastos); (4) offices are only those posts outside the official hierarchy that definitely maintained a function and had, for the most part, a determined tenure (usually one or two years, sometimes renewed).
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