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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON IDENTITY IN BYZANTIUM
This volume is the first to focus solely on how specific individuals and groups in Byzantium and its borderlands were defined and distinguished from other individuals and groups from the midfourth to the close of the fifteenth century. It gathers chapters from both established and emerging scholars from a wide range of disciplines across history, art, archaeology, and religion to provide an accurate representation of the state of the field both now and in its immediate future. The handbook is divided into four subtopics that examine concepts of group and specific individual identity that have been chosen to provide methodologically sophisticated and multidisciplinary perspectives on specific categories of group and individual identity. The topics are Imperial Identities; Romanitas in the Late Antique Mediterranean; Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others; and Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium. While no single volume could ever provide a comprehensive vision of identities on the vast variety of peoples within Byzantium over nearly a millennium of its history, this handbook represents a milestone in offering a survey of the vibrant surge of scholarship examining the numerous and oft-times fluctuating codes of identity that shaped and transformed Byzantium and its neighbours during the empire’s long life.
Michael Edward Stewart is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, Australia.
David Alan Parnell is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest, USA.
Conor Whately is an Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this handbook was sparked in Kalamazoo, Michigan in May of 2017 at a meeting between me and the series editor Michael Greenwood. Recognizing the Herculean task ahead, I invited two co-editors, David Alan Parnell and Conor Whately to help bring this behemoth to life. The “triumvirate” was born. From the start, one of our overarching goals for the project was to provide our wider audience a balance of topics by both newer voices and established scholars from a variety of fields, methodologies, genders, and geographical regions. After our first barrage of email invitations were sent out, and a satisfying number of positive responses returned, we then set out the categories we hoped to address, well aware that we could never cover all the necessary angles in a Byzantium that contained a myriad of “identities” and spanned more than a millennium of history.
Little did we know at the time but gathering that first cohort of contributors would be one of the simplest of our “Twelve Labours.” As is usual with edited volumes, during the next few years, unexpected events and other obligations would force some of our original contributors to pull out from the project. It was the task of each of the editors to then find worthy replacements. Of course, just as our first contributions began to trickle in at the opening of 2020, COVID-19 hit. Many of us involved in the handbook were now stuck within our own countries and homes, limiting our ability to access libraries, to interact face-to-face, and to give versions of our chapters in front of live audiences.
Others were burdened with increased teaching loads and other duties, which magnified the pressure as the deadline for completion loomed. It is undeniable that the Covid crisis afflicted many of our female contributors more adversely than the males. So, in the end, the handbook did not quite achieve the gender balance of contributors we had originally desired. More seriously for the ultimate fate of the project, some of our authors either caught Covid or had loved ones struck down. That so many of the contributors persevered under such trying circumstances is a tribute to them. Each of the scholars with whom we have had the pleasure to work during the past four and a half years have enriched our personal and intellectual lives immeasurably. So, we dedicate this handbook to everyone who has played a part in bringing it to life, both to those whose names appear in this volume and to those forced by circumstances to drop out of it.
Michael Edward Stewart David Alan Parnell Conor Whately
FINDING BYZANTIUM
Michael Edward Stewart, David Alan Parnell, and Conor Whately
You have filled the whole world with rumours of you; you have already captivated the whole of Italy in your imagination; and you have assumed an air of pride quite above the level of mortal men: you imagine in this way that you have frightened the Goths, but still you sit now in Ravenna without showing yourself to your enemy through this policy of keeping hidden—no doubt a way to guard this proud spirit of yours. Instead, you are using a heterogenous horde of barbarians to overrun a land
(Italy) that belongs to you in no way whatever. -letter from the Gothic Garrison Commander Usdrila to the East Roman General Valerian (Procopius, Wars 8.28.1-3 trans. Kaldellis)
Introduction
Defining Byzantium
Concerns about the interplay between identity and self are generally perceived by the layperson to be a product of our modern world. As indicated by the quotation above, however, questions of identity could be important for the Byzantines and their political rivals as well.’ What marked someone as a “barbarian” or a “Roman” for those on both sides of the dispute between Usdrila and Valerian is complicated. Contemporary perceptions of categories such as ethnicity, race, and nationhood can overly influence our interpretations of how ancient individuals like Usdrila identified themselves and others.” Attempts by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to pinpoint steadfast “Germanic” or “Roman” markers sometimes led to oversimplified and anachronistic definitions of identity for ancient peoples.* Usdrila and Valerian probably shared more similarities than differences.* Recent literature on the subject has demonstrated that the boundaries between Goth and Roman were more porous than formerly assumed.” Social customs crisscrossed the supposed Roman/barbarian divide. For example, by the fifth century CE, one finds an increasing elision between Roman and barbarian forms of dress, particularly amongst soldiers. On this development Mary Harlow observes, we find Roman soldiers and civilian officials wearing “garments and styles previously considered nonRoman... over time they became the ‘traditional’ dress of the Roman emperor.” ° The “Gothic moustache” famously worn by the Amal king, Theoderic (r. 475-526), furthermore, may not have been as significant an ethnic marker as traditionally believed.’ It is important to remember that many Gothic soldiers had been born in Italy and as a result were shaped by late antique Italian culture.® Their cultural similarities and similar social backgrounds might then explain the relative ease with which soldiers from both sides had been able to desert to the enemy during the Gothic war in Italy.”
More micro communal and familial identities likely shaped Valerian’s and Usdrila’s sense of self as well. On this point, one specialist has commented, “It should be kept in mind that most people in those times (the sixth century) were distinguished either by the home of their father or their birthplace.”!° Provincial and local identities had become increasingly important in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. It has even been posited that the growing importance of local identities had “contributed to the fall of the Roman west.”"" regard Goths and Romans as homogenous groups. Peter Heather contends that when it came to We should also be careful not to Gothic identity “affiliation to the group’s identity fell off dramatically as you moved down the social scale.”’? Others have argued similarly that the Byzantines’ sense of their Roman identity was tethered primarily to the emperor, Constantinople, and the imaginations of the literate ruling elite, a view that some of the contributors in this handbook challenge.'* As Walter Pohl has recently discussed, in comparison to other groups like the Goths, the notion of Romanness as an ethnic identity remains controversial and needs much further elucidation.'* So, identity, both in its modern and ancient contexts, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Then as now, individuals had an innate way of pointing out differences of identity that sometimes defies scientific or historical explanation.
To gain better insight into the many layers of identity in the ancient world, the modern scholar may use wider discourses or ideologies dealing with identities found in a writer like Procopius as a valuable tool by which to recover how individuals’ and groups’ sense of self was learnt and expressed. As many of the chapters in this handbook will demonstrate, an exploration of the complex ways internal and external labels were constructed and deconstructed may also transport us closer to the ideological battlefields surrounding contested political and ideological claims. To do so properly, however, one must interpret the sources on their own terms and try to block out as much as we can our modern preconceptions. Nevertheless, we must also recognise that the portraits of identity found in a writer like Procopius were open to distortion. In the case of Usdrila’s letter, names were worth fighting over since they were tied to contemporary contests of power. We cannot be sure, moreover, whether Procopius precisely recorded the words or even the genuine sentiments of Usdrila, nevertheless the letter offers a precious glimpse of wider disputes concerning the emperor Justinian’s and his soldiers’ “Romanness” and subsequently the legitimacy of their claims to Italy. In addition, as several of the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, there is a real need to study the post-Roman west and the medieval-Byzantine east together.'°
That Justinian (r. 527-565) considered himself and his subjects as Romans also has important implications for a study on identity that uses the term “Byzantine” to describe a state ruled from Constantinople.'° Scholars have become increasingly aware that the rubric, “Byzantium” is largely a construct of later western European sources.’” It is undeniable that the term Byzantium comes with some baggage. It has been argued persuasively that the label “Byzantium” was created within a European colonising discourse intimately connected to hostile Crusading ideologies that sought to detach medieval Romans from their Roman identity and heritage by emphasising their “Greek” and hence inferior and effeminate “Eastern” identity.’ Nevertheless, the Byzantines’ “Greek” identity was not always used disparagingly. As we will observe in Leonora Neville’s, Michael Stewart’s, and Sviatoslav Dmitriev’s contributions, many Byzantines saw themselves as the proud heirs and continuers of a Hellenic intellectual and cultural tradition. Moreover, in the modern Greek nation-state, what is interpreted as the Byzantines’s essentially Greek identity, which serves as a vital waystation to Greece’s classical past, has and continues to play a critical part in Greek self-identification. '?
“Roman” and “Greek” were only two of many markers of identity in Byzantium. It has been argued by some that the Byzantines’ religious identity as God’s “chosen people” who had super-ceded the Jews was far more important than their Roman or Greek identities. The increasing place of Christianity in all aspects of the Roman world represents one of the dominant developments of Late Antiquity and is a defining feature of Byzantium. The edict of toleration improved Christianity’s position in the empire, while Constantine I’s (r. 306-337) revelation before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312) and his putative conversion made the religion more palatable to a large proportion of the empire’s population.”° The Christianisation of the elite accelerated over the course of the fourth century, and by the sixth century, it seemed so pervasive, for instance, that most scholars hold to the traditional view that the classicizing historian Procopius was a Christian, despite Anthony Kaldellis’s forceful and provocative argument to the contrary.”
Through their deft use of a wide array of visual and literary mediums, Byzantine emperors and ecclesiastics crafted portraits of themselves as the true champions of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, definitions of Byzantium based on its orthodox culture brings with it its own set of problems. When it came to religious matters there was never one unified Church or voice; religious authorities often faced challenges from dissidents from all levels of society over doctrinal correctness. Moreover, what constituted “orthodoxy” could and did shift over time.?”
Nevertheless, the Christian state that Justinian ruled from Constantinople had changed as a political and social entity from the Latin-speaking, Italian-based, non-Christian Republic, and early imperial Roman empire, a difference that some in the sixth century CE appeared to recognise, as we can observe in Usdrila’s letter.”°
Hence, this book takes as its starting point the year 330, the date of the “foundation” of Constantinople, formerly the city of Byzantium. The fourth century CE was a momentous one in Roman history, and this civic transformation was just one of many changes usually associated with the advent of the medieval Roman Empire, Byzantium. And yet, many of the changes we associate with the Roman world in 330 had begun long before, with the accession of Septimius Severus (r. 193-211) and the third-century crisis ushering in the expansion and transformation of the military and the restructuring of provincial administration. Diocletian (r. 284-305) introduced the tetrarchy, rule of four, with two eastern and two western emperors, and although aspects of this system did not long outlast his retirement, there continued to be senior eastern and western emperors over the fourth century, effectively establishing two separate states. Along with the reorganization of the empire at the highest levels (the imperial office) came an expansion in the number of provinces and officials associated with its management. Running the empire, east and west, became more centralised.
The territorial and administrative division between the eastern empire and the western empire reinforced linguistic differences, with Latin remaining the dominant language in western Europe and Greek in the east. Latin remained in use for centuries in the east, appearing in legal compilations like the Theodosian and Justinianic codes. It also continued to play an important role in the language of the military, though its wider usage diminished, despite the arrival in Constantinople of individuals from the western Mediterranean with strong Latin pedigree in the sixth century, like Corippus and Jordanes, both based in the capital but who wrote works in Latin. But while Greek and Latin had an oversized role in the early Byzantine world, they were by no means the only important languages, with significant literary traditions in Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, and more. Collectively, for all the conventional features of much early Byzantine literary culture, like the epic poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis and the classicising history of Agathias of Myrina, there was much that was new.”°
The topic of migration has engendered fierce debate, particularly concerning its impact on the transformation of the Roman state and the creation of a post-imperial west.?° Though much of this scholarship has concentrated on the successor kingdoms in western Europe, the movement of people into the imperial territory was no less significant in the Byzantine state, particularly in the Balkans, and, in the second half of the sixth century in Byzantine Italy.?’ While this migration could lead to significant destruction in some areas, in others, the intermingling of varied groups fostered the creation of regional cultures and identity, with the visual culture of Byzantine Arabia a good example of this dynamic blending of peoples.”
It is certainly important to underline that Byzantium was not an unchanging monolith. With over a thousand years of social and political history that spans the late classical, late antique, medieval, and early modern periods covered in various academic departments in many contemporary universities, Byzantium defies easy periodisation or categorisation.”? Byzantium, to borrow Averil Cameron’s sage words, was never “static but like all societies always in a process of reaction and adaptation.”*° In other words, the Byzantium or medieval Roman state of Basil II (r. 976-1025) differed somewhat socially, geographically, structurally, and politically from Justinian’s Empire.*' Yet, there were a number of tenacious commonalities between Justinian’s and Basil’s worlds as well; there were many lingering aspects of identities based on a common moral, political, and religious past that linked later Byzantines, socially, spiritually, and intellectually to their classical Greco-Roman, late antique and earlier medieval Roman ancestors.°” Both Justinian and Basil II certainly saw themselves as part of the long line of imperial rulers that had begun on the Tiber with Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE).*°
To sum up, though we should and will debate throughout this volume the use of the term “Byzantium,” we suggest that it still is a useful way to differentiate it from its earlier Roman incarnations, while always appreciating that the label is an early modern invention.
Byzantium in a Changed World
The rise of Islam and the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century as the region’s dominant political and military power marks a watershed moment in Byzantium’s history; indeed, for many Byzantinists it demarcates the dawning of a new age.°* The Arab/Muslim invasions of the mid-seventh century and beyond lopped the extremities off of the early medieval Roman Empire: Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and eventually the rest of North Africa were all submerged beneath the rising tide of Islam.*° Although the Byzantine world was constricted in the seventh century, identity did not become less complex or contentious. In a culture built on the rhetoric of religious and political triumphalism, these defeats at the hands of a rival religion and political order provoked considerable anxiety amongst the population and created ideological challenges for the ruling elite. While some Byzantines interpreted these defeats at the hands of the Arabs as Divine punishment for their sins and a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, others, as Ryan Strickler underlines in his chapter, took a more optimistic stance, predicting that the Christian Romans would eventually triumph. Others have contended more controversially that it was no coincidence that the period of Byzantine iconoclasm coincided with the expansion of Islam.
Even if the rise of Islam did not play a direct role in these debates about the veneration of sacred images, the political and military dominance of the Umayyads and then the Abbasids made Byzantines rethink their position in the world.*” It has been plausibly supposed that the disputes over icons in Byzantium, papal and central Italy, and the Frankish kingdom in the eighth and ninth centuries were part of a process of these independent entities cultivating distinct cultural and political identities.
The establishment of the Caliphate had some other unintended consequences. Having fled lands in Byzantium taken by the Arabs, from the seventh to the ninth centuries, a steady flow of Byzantine monks resettled in and around Rome.” The resulting cultural and religious exchanges between these Byzantine and Italian monks are an underappreciated aspect in the emergence of a post-imperial Italy. As Francesca Dell’Acqua has recently explained, “The ‘Greek’ clerics were deemed precious allies of the popes, and for this reason, they were protected, they buttressed the intension of the papacy to consolidate its image as the source of orthodoxy and a spiritual reference for the entire Christian world.”*° So too is it important to appreciate how competing ideologies of identity were formed and contested amongst local elites within the overlapping peripheries of the Byzantine and Carolingian empires.*' In some ways, Byzantium’s territorial losses created greater homogenization in the reduced Roman state, which was left both more Greek-speaking and more Chalcedonian in its Christianity.” There was no longer a need for as much religious negotiation between Dyophysite and Miaphysite.
Despite this seeming homogeneity of medieval Romans, however, regional differences continued to matter. For instance, life in Byzantine southern Italy looked rather different from life in Byzantine Anatolia. A major question is whether provincial identities themselves were important to the inhabitants of these areas, or whether they were essentially administrative window dressing that obscures a common Roman identity. A number of chapters in this volume grapple with regional peculiarity vis-a-vis what it meant to be Roman in the Byzantine world. Of course, when we use the term “Byzantine” we do not refer just to the period immediately following the seventh-century reduction of the Roman Empire. Another important category of identity in Byzantium then is its chronological aspect. How did the occupation of Constantinople by the Latins between 1204 and 1261 and the subsequent loss of imperial authority shape Byzantium’s sense of identity? In what ways did the identity/identities of a seventh-century inhabitant of Cappadocia resemble the identity/identities of a thirteenthcentury resident of Epiros?** The passage of centuries and ages is a critical component of our conception of Byzantium, even as it is difficult to quantify in terms of the identities of the inhabitants of Byzantine lands. We check in with their political, religious, social, and ethnic identity in snapshots, here and there, and try to conceive of a broader picture through those brief glimpses. As Byzantium moved into its middle and later period a variety of sources provide windows into other important markers of identity.
The Social Order
In particular, the identities of the marginalised members of society are of interest.** As Nathan Leidholm and Cahit Oguz underline in their contributions, there is significant evidence in this period for the role of slaves and peasants, always the bedrock upon which ancient and medieval Roman society was constructed . Although they were not privileged, they were integrated into the Byzantine society, not ground beneath its heel. The early and middle Byzantine period also witnessed many powerful women, both on the throne and elsewhere in society, and this has generated interest in gender in Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean world.** Feminist studies of Byzantium have gradually been joined by gendered studies of masculinity and of the role played by eunuchs who, along with supernatural angels were noted for their gender liminality.*° So too have scholars begun exploring in deeper detail Byzantine sexuality and their appreciation of men’s and women’s beauty—both in a corporeal and a spiritual sense.*’ Neville’s chapter underlines this appreciation for the sensual aspects of the corporeal male body and throughout proves that, when taken as a whole, Byzantines were not always the stringent Christians or sexual prudes depicted in much of the modern literature.
We know the most about the elite men who ruled over peasants, slaves, less-privileged women, and everyone else. They wove elaborate stories about their identities and about the imperial power which they supported or rejected. These identities can be tracked, and traditionally have been, through literary sources, but are also apparent in physical objects such as coins, silks, household items, epigraphy, and a wide range of material art of the Byzantine world.** So too could the human body—both clothed and naked—reveal at a glance, crucial aspects about one’s identity in Byzantium.*? As in the modern world, when the ancient Byzantine got dressed, the type of clothing one chose or was forced to wear in the Byzantine world could mark not only one’s gender, but ethnicity and social status. Indeed, the human body itself was open to internal and external classification. By scrutinising a wide range of visual images from Byzantine material culture, Grace Stafford’s chapter reveals that nothing quite defines one’s humanity so much as their naked body.
Nevertheless, texts covering a range of literary genres remain at the heart of many of the chapters in this handbook. An appreciation of our Byzantine authors’ sense of identity, loyalties, and literary strategies are just as important as mining their texts for information. Individual authors bring their own unique perceptions. As Leonora Neville’s, Rafal Kosinski’s and Penelope Buckley’s contributions in this volume ably demonstrate, the language the author chose to write in, the religion they espoused, and the regions and macro and micro identities they chose to embrace or reject are vital to better understand their texts and the world in which they were created.
Romans, provincials, emperors, slaves, peasants, elites, Christians, Jews, philosophers, soldiers—Byzantium was a big tent that enclosed all of these facets of individual and social identity. More than 500 years after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine world continues to fascinate and entrance us. Modern historians are not the only ones drawn to study the Byzantine world and consider what identity meant to its inhabitants. As Adam Goldwyn points out in his chapter, Byzantium has a collection of admirers today, ranging from Orthodox believers to Greek nationalists, from private art collectors to amateur historians, from political dreamers to Alt-Right white supremacists. Modern Byzantine studies is therefore just as much an arena for the examination of identity as the historical Byzantine world.
To close, an ambitious project like ours obliges a collaborative effort. This volume consists of contributions from 24 experts from a range of disciplines such as Art History, Archaeology, Classics, History, and Religious Studies to provide an accurate representation of the state of the field both now and in its immediate future. Of course, no single volume of essays could ever provide a comprehensive vision of identities on the vast variety of peoples within Byzantium and its borderlands over a millennium of its history. It is our hope, nevertheless, that this handbook will provide a satisfying taste of the fecund and steady flow of recent scholarship dedicated to identity in Byzantium.*° We Byzantinists have a duty to help shape discourse on Byzantium in a way that is historically accurate and that welcomes all people into the study of these remarkable medieval Romans and the rich centuries of their society.
Structure
The chronological parameters of this present study span from the fourth century to the present day. We divide the following 23 chapters into 4 sub-topics that will examine concepts of group and specific individual identity as they apply to each contributor’s area of expertise. The four sub-sections (1. Imperial Identities, 2. Romanitas in the late antique Mediterranean, 3. Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others, and 4. Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium) have been chosen to provide methodologically sophisticated and multidisciplinary perspectives on specific categories of group and individual identity. What follows is a brief description of each of the chapters by sub-section.
Imperial Identities
Over its long social and political history, perhaps no other individual or institution embodied the ideals of the Byzantines’s sense of their tripartite identity (Hellenic, Roman, Christian/Orthodox) as much as the emperor. A myriad of verbal texts and pictorial images broadcast to the wider public the ideal physical and moral perfection of the emperor. Although indebted to ideals of imperial and righteous behaviour in the Roman and Greek tradition, norms of imperial messaging could and did change dramatically over time and even within the same dynasties. These shifts in imperial representation did not always unfold in a linear fashion. Hence, a diachronic exploration of the ideologies surrounding the virtues and vices of the emperors offers an important tool by which to examine both continuity and change in the way identity was constructed in visual and literary representations of the emperor from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries CE.
In Chapter 2, Sviatoslav Dmitriev underlines the importance of including interactions between philosophical and legal traditions in sixth-century Byzantium and beyond when attempting to understand both continuity and change in concepts of ideal rulership in Byzantine civilization. From this perspective, the Byzantines of the sixth century appear to have a mixed imperial identity—Greek (broadly philosophical, cultural) and Roman (narrowly administrative, legalistic) —at the same time.
Narrowing the investigation to the short reign of the emperor Julian (r. 361-363), in Chapter 3, Nicola Ernst examines how Julian shaped his own unique imperial identity by distancing his image from that of his predecessor Constantius II (r. 337-361). As with many Roman emperors who came to power under disputed circumstances, Julian’s propaganda trumpeted the philosopher-soldier’s martial and moral virtues, while simultaneously denigrating his predecessor Constantius for his military failures and immorality. Ernst demonstrates that while Julian sought to establish an imperial identity distinct from that of his cousin Constantius, he still leaned heavily upon the examples set by his uncle, the emperor Constantine.
Taking a broader historical sweep, in Chapter 4, Christopher Malone investigates visual depictions of the emperor, both martial and non-martial, across a range of visual mediums. In a culture that revered the virtues of soldiers as archetypes of Roman masculinity and leadership, it should not surprise that the Roman emperors in the early and later Empire utilised and indeed monopolised key aspects of militaristic and violent messaging in their self-representation in mediums such as literature, coinage, and monumental art. Even non-campaigning emperors like Justinian continued to lean upon militaristic imagery in their self-representation. Yet from the eighth to the tenth century, we see a shift away from visual images depicting violent militaristic images of the emperor, in favour of more ceremonial and religious depictions. Malone posits that this shift in ideology may be read in the light of contemporary political events. He links this change to the rise of the Caliphate and the more defensive and less militarily aggressive nature of Byzantium in this period. Underlining, however, the need not to see these shifts in imperial ideology as purely linear, the change away from martial representation of the emperor was not permanent. In the wake of a series of Byzantine military successes from the tenth century, one finds the re-emergence of soldier-emperors as role models and paradigms in a wide range of literature and visual art.
Between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries silks in a variety of forms were not only key economic assets for Byzantium, but a key medium by which the emperor and those around him to trumpet current political ideology and to bolster imperial identity. Building upon the work of the previous chapter, in Chapter 5, Anna Muthesius interprets the visual messaging found on imperial silks. Deftly guiding the reader on a millennium-long journey through Byzantine material culture, Muthesius ponders the ways that the makers of these highly sought-after luxury items spoke through the pictorial images. What types of images were being used? Did they change over time? What political ideologies were being communicated by Byzantine silks distributed within Byzantium and to Western Europe and beyond? Moreover, how did this visual messaging relate to concepts of good order, sound governance, pious rule, and to the communication of Byzantine imperial identity at home and abroad?
Romanitas in the Late Antique Mediterranean
Though much of the recent work on identity in Byzantium and the post-imperial west has sought to uncover the much more complex realities beneath the traditional tropes found in the early Byzantine literature, in Chapter 6, Michael Stewart examines the continuing allure of the prejudicial Roman/barbarian binarism in the Age of Justinian. As Stewart argues here, attitudes toward those labelled as barbarians in sixth-century Byzantium were flexible and mutable; we have numerous examples that demonstrate that by this period many of the traditional boundaries between non-Romans and Romans had broken down. Then as now, however, in times of conflict, skewed visions of the past and ingrained prejudicial ideas about “foreign” peoples cast as dangerous others could and did bubble to the surface. The old Roman/barbarian binarism indeed had a lingering appeal amongst Byzantine elites that defied the much more complex realities on the ground.
Taking a closer look at the ways non-Roman peoples defined themselves, in Chapter 7, Robert Kasperski examines how two different non-Roman historians represented the past to their peoples, the Gothic historian Jordanes’ sixth-century work, the Getica, and the eighthcentury Lombard historian Paul the Deacons’ History of the Lombards. The purpose and value of these types of histories have created a sharp divide amongst contemporary scholars. Kasperski explains that scholars have used two “conflicting modes” of interpretation when examining the early histories of barbarian peoples. Both Jordanes’ and Paul’s history may be considered as origin stories. However, their role as accurate historical accounts, which built a sense of shared ethnic identity for the Goths and the Lombards, continues to spark considerable debate. First, offering a summary of these disputes, Kasperski then provides his own thoughts on how these groups shaped their sense of identity.
In Chapter 8, Rafat Kosinski charts the evolution of Romanitas in the late antique world through a detailed assessment of the personal identities and interests of four authors: John Diakrinomenos, Theodore Lector, Marcellinus Comes, and Victor of Tunnuna. All of these authors wrote in the sixth century, but they have been selected to represent different regions and traditions in the Roman world. By examining each author individually, Kosinski examines authorial self-identity, drawn out primarily by assessing the writer’s interest in their own homeland and patria at the expense of other regions of the empire. The language the author chose to write in and the religion each espoused also loom large in the analysis. Together, these vignettes show the transformation of Romanitas in this period.
While there have been some recent studies examining gendered identities in the Ostrogothic kingdom, they have tended to focus on the reign of the Ostrogothic queen Amalasuintha or investigated perceptions of Gothic manliness and unmanliness largely from an East Roman perspective, namely Procopius’ Wars and Jordanes’ Getica. By examining ideologies of gender from the viewpoint of those writing within the Ostrogothic Kingdom, in Chapter 9, Jonathan Amold fills this gap. Using primarily the works of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, Amold consistently demonstrates a position that denies the later claims of Justinian’s court. In this alternative view, Goths were celebrated as the manliest of men, even as Belisarius was besieging Naples in 536, while the Romans, both past and present and in the east and west, were unmanly, either effeminate and weak soldiers or civilian damsels in distress, who needed heroic Goths to rescue and defend them in order to live in peace and to prosper.
In Chapter 10, Andy Merrills investigates the mutable identities of Vandal, Byzantine, and Moorish North Africa, (circa 400-700 CE). This is a period commonly characterised as marking the last phases of “Roman” North Africa, in which successive external powers presided over a shrinking Carthaginian kingdom, while “Moorish” or “Berber” polities evolved organically in the hinterlands. This chapter complicates and problematises this model, arguing both for the “African” character of Vandal and Byzantine identities in this period, and proposing that Moorish or Berber identities were more profoundly shaped by political and religious impulses than has frequently been assumed.
In Chapter 11, Christopher Heath considers Byzantine identities in the Italian peninsula from the re-imposition of Byzantine control of the Italian peninsula with the defeat of the Ostrogoths in the middle of the sixth century until the reacquisition of Beneventan independence in 895. The adoption of this longer time frame beyond the end of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna in 751, which is usually seen to signify the end of active Byzantine authority in central and northern Italy, allows discussion of the persistence of micro- and macro-identities in the central Mediterranean that favoured, cultivated, and retained a Byzantine focus.
Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others
In Chapter 12, Joseph Western returns to the question of Byzantine identity in southern Italy but expands the temporal boundaries to the tenth and eleventh centuries. Western seeks to keep generalisations of group identity in constant conversation with the realities of individual actions in the region. In a region that has been described as a mosaic of identities, local Greek-speakers, imperial appointees from Constantinople, Lombard rulers, and Arabs all rubbed shoulders and played one another off against each other for advancement. Further narrowing the scope, Western examines the identities and agency of individuals in Byzantine southern Italy such as Prince Guaimar of Salerno, Prince Radelchis II of Benevento, and the Byzantine naval commander Euphemios. Individual identity in the region is not easily reduced to one or two factors, and connections between those factors cannot be assumed.
By the dawn of the eighth century, Byzantium was an empire in name only. As we discussed above, a string of defeats at the hands of Arab/Muslim armies had seen the lands of the Roman state dwindle to a mere shadow of its former glory. Some interpreted these defeats as a sure sign of the impending apocalypse. Yet, as Ryan Strickler relates vividly in Chapter 13, this period witnessed less pessimistic messaging as well that indicates the endurance of the Christian Byzantines’ sense of group identity. Even in the territories that had fallen to the Muslims, we have evidence that some writers sought to ensure their fellow Christians that their status as God’s chosen people remained intact. Defeat was not evidence of God’s abandonment, on the contrary, as had occurred often in the Roman past, it served as a test of the Byzantines’ resolve and religous faith and was temporary. Christian enemies, whether Muslim invaders or their Jewish neighbours, were inferior to Christians who retained God’s blessings and awaited their repentance. In the end, the empire would regain its status and Christians would retain command of God’s empire on earth.
In most modem scholarship, provincial labels (Macedonian, Paphlagonian, Cappadocian, etc.) are seen to have functioned as ethnicities in Byzantium. In Chapter 14, however, Anthony Kaldellis maintains that they were not ethnicities, but regional identities fully imbricated within the Roman rubric; they were basically regional variations, materialised by stereotypes, of the ethnic Roman norm. They drew their force from antiquarian associations, military units, and the ancient (and Byzantine) habit of referring to the population of a province by their ethnika, even if the ethnonym in question had no relation to an ethnicity at all (e.g., the genos of Opsikion, Boukelarios, etc). Kaldellis strives to clear up a great deal of confusion among historians who are taken in by these labels and assume that Byzantium was a multi-ethnic empire because it consisted of Macedonians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, and the like. As we observe in this chapter, being a “Roman” cut across stereotypes and ethnic divides. What emerges is a “Romanness” more widely diffused and with deeper cultural and social roots than assumed by many Byzantinists.
In Chapter 15, Nathan Leidholm journeys into the world of Byzantine slavery. Separating social from institutional history, Leidholm examines the continuity and persistence of the servile status in the Byzantine world by developing a comparison between master/slave and parent/child. The most ubiquitous form of slave labour in the Byzantine period was that of the household slave. By drawing on rich medieval sources, Leidholm elucidates the relationship between master and slave. One way that the master/slave relationship resembled parental relationships was in the way slave owners arranged marriages for their slaves and provided for an inheritance for them. In many aspects, Leidholm shows, Byzantine slaves were trapped in a state of perpetual childhood.
The largest part of the medieval Byzantine politeia, the peasantry, is the focus of Cahit Oguz’s Chapter 16. This presents certain challenges since most of the peasantry was illiterate, thus making the historian rely on the prejudicial opinions about them found in written sources that take an elitist perspective. The middle Byzantine historians indeed provide generally hostile constructs. Sometimes, however, there are exceptions to this general rule. Oguz underlines throughout the paradoxical images of the peasantry that bely the tired stereotypes. On the one hand, when depicted as a group they could be respected for the essential role they played in both feeding and defending the state. On the other hand, the urbane intellectuals lampooned what they saw as the miserable lives of peasants. Yet, a closer examination of the middle Byzantine sources shows that there could be nuance even amidst these extremes. Emperors could be praised for having been born to the “simple” and “innately” moral life of the rustic. Despite the rarity of positive descriptions of peasants as individuals, positive depictions of the peasantry as a group are more common. This seems especially true within the scope of extra taxation, corrupt officials, famines, and hostile invasions, where middle Byzantine writers emphasised the need to treat the peasantry fairly and respectfully. So, while they might be looked down upon and ignored as individuals, as a group central to the survival of the politeia, they needed to be respected.
Ioannis Smarnakis’ Chapter 17 examines the many shades of identities in the state of Epiros during its own “long thirteenth century.” The multiple identities of the Byzantines and their mutations in relation to the changing political, social, and cultural context of the empire’s life have been explored in several recent studies. However, in Smarnakis’ view, the modern literature on the subject often overemphasises ethnic or even “national” criteria when it ap-proaches the Byzantine discourses about “us” and “others.” The rough projection of ethnic differences, a fundamental characteristic of nation-states, into the medieval past, risks imposing modem ways of perceiving identity and otherness on people with totally different mental horizons. After all, the Byzantine state was not a well-structured bureaucratic machine like the nation-states of modernity, which intervene extensively in the everyday life of their subjects with the aim of producing stable and coherent national identities. Although, even in the Palaiologan period (1259-1453) the Byzantine state maintained a much more sophisticated administrative apparatus compared to most of the European states of the era, the main goals of the central government were to ensure military control over its territories, to collect taxes from the provinces and to administer justice.
In Chapter 18, Anne-Laurence Caudano reveals how the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, led to attempts by Byzantine writers to emphasise the Byzantines’ orthodoxy as a key aspect of their identity and an essential means to differentiate them from the Latins. In this time of crisis, these writers sought not only to understand the conditions that had led to the loss of Constantinople but also to differentiate “their” Christianity from that of their conquerors. Writing in the wake of 1204, Byzantine intellectuals increasingly sought to base the faith of Byzantine Christians in “true “doctrines, both to define themselves as a group and to better protect themselves from the “heretical sicknesses” that the now-dominant Latin Church was seeking to spread to them. Little wonder then that from this period orthodoxy became an even more important indicator of one’s Byzantine identity, which could then be contrasted to the Latins or “others” (including native Byzantines) who had allowed themselves to be “infected” by these westerners’ “heretical” teachings.
Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium It is generally assumed that the eventual disappearance of nude statuary in late antiquity speaks to the growing dominance of prudish Christian attitudes towards sexuality and the human body. In Chapter 19, Grace Stafford adds needed nuance to this conventional view, positing that such a restricted focus on one artistic medium and the polemics of churchmen has left us with a distorted picture. With the statue habit in steep decline in late antiquity, we must look to other genres of artistic representation. When we do, we see that societal attitudes to the nude female body were not as simple as such literary sources suggest. A small corpus of images in mosaic and metalwork spanning the fourth and fifth centuries CE continue the earlier tradition of representing women nude or semi-nude. Through these examples, we can explore how approaches to the female body intersected with age and class and complicate our understanding of the role that the body could play in constructing ideal femininity and attitudes toward women’s identity in early Byzantium.
David Parnell, in Chapter 20, presents evidence for at least two different views about the appropriate role for the wives of military officers and other public officials in the sixth century. Some elite Romans favoured a restrictive role, which would keep women out of public affairs and the duties of their husbands, while others believed wives should be allowed more leeway to travel with their husbands and even assist them in fulfilling their official responsibilities. While focusing on the opinions represented by Procopius of Caesarea in the History of the Wars and the Secret History, Parnell also demonstrates that these views can be seen in the writings of other contemporaries, including western ecclesiastical authors.
In Chapter 21, Leonora Neville wields historical memory as a tool to examine the ways medieval Byzantines interacted with both the people and cultural attitudes to gender that they met in ancient texts. While appreciating the impact of Christianity on social norms, by tracing the ways later Byzantines interpreted and embraced ideals found within earlier non-Christian texts, Neville reveals deep continuities with ancient Greek and Roman cultural values in Byzantine conceptions on gender. The sincere religious devotion of later Byzantines did little to hinder the persistence of some pre-Christian Greco-Roman attitudes concerning same-sex attraction. Neville concludes that medieval Byzantine ideas about the virtues and vices of men and women did not just play lip service to ancient deals, but rather were connected to the fundamental structures of Byzantine culture. What emerges is a Byzantium less beholden to supposed restrictions concerning sexuality and same-sex attraction than many have formerly presumed.
In Chapter 22, Penelope Buckley considers specific modes of self-identification for these three seminal middle Byzantine authors, Anna Komnene, Michael Psellos, and Michael Attaleiates. Traditionally, the author of a Byzantine history identifies him or herself in such a way as to authenticate the truth and quality of the work. Though text and author could be similar but distinct entities, Buckley demonstrates that our writers’ “authorial-selves” imbues their texts, and thus offers the modern reader a key tool for uncovering both the “meaning” in their histories and traces of the “real” individual behind them. Moreover, positioning counts: that of a courtier or family member or disciple or army-follower.
Constantinople may have fallen to the Turks in 1453, but since the renaissance, the idea, and in some instances, the dream of Byzantium has lived on. In fact, Byzantium has likely never been more popular than it is today. Thanks to an abundance of translations in many modern languages, Byzantine writers like Procopius and Michael Psellos have far more readers currently than they ever had during their own lifetimes. An abundance of new scholarly journals and social media feeds suggests that the number of academics and members of the educated public fascinated by Byzantium is only growing. Nevertheless, as Adam Goldwyn demonstrates in Chapter 23 this increased fascination with Byzantium has a more sinister side. Though by no means central, Byzantium has found a place in debates surrounding contemporary identity politics, particularly within the digital culture of the American far right. As Goldwyn discusses in the chapter, this presence manifests itself in the so-called “manosphere,” a sub-section of the broader alt-right that consists of the constellation of blogs, websites, Reddit and 4chan threads, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages that fertilise the larger “Men’s Human Rights Movement” (MHRM or, as often, Men’s Rights Activists, MRA). Of course, these “Byzantiums” are more a reflection of contemporary identity politics more than accurate visions of Byzantium at any point in its history. Yet, at the close of Goldwyn’s contribution we are left to ponder, just what can these alternatives—albeit simplistic and flawed—visions of Byzantine identity tell us both about the modem world’s reception of the past and Byzantium’s legacy now and into the future?
Finally, a note on transliteration. We have left this up to the discretion of individual contributors, a reflection of the diversity of approaches to, and understandings of, the Byzantine world. So, some contributors Latinise the names they use, some stick with Greek names, and some use some combination of the two. In the case of the latter, it has usually been the more familiar names, like Procopius, that have been Latinised.
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