Download PDF | Walter Pohl, Veronika Wieser - Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison, 200–1100_ Shadows of Empire-Brill (2022).
457 Pages
Preface
This volume looks at the end of Eurasian empires from an unusual perspective: it does not focus on the imperial centres that progressively lost control over their provinces, but on the polities that emerged in the shadows of these empires. The greatest empires of the first millennium — Rome, Han China, the caliphate — were not swept away by new imperial formations, but gradually replaced by more regional realms. Their authority did not vanish completely, but remained available for later attempts at imperial renewal — Byzantine and Carolingian Rome, Tang and Song China, the Fatimid and Ottoman caliphates. In spite of this strikingly similar dynamic, much in the emergence of new polities on imperial ground diverged. This book looks at several cases across the period from c. 200 to c. 1100 to explore these similarities and differences, and offers a number of tentative comparative observations.
The contributions were discussed at a small series of workshops in Vienna and Beijing.” The Vienna workshops were made possible by the project ‘Visions of Community — Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, 400-1600 CE (viscoM)’3 Our thanks go to the FwF for the generous funding of this adventure in cross-cultural comparison. The vIscom project provided an interdisciplinary framework in which the efforts to compare Eurasian empires received inspiring input and discussion, for which we are grateful to the project team.
A number of similar comparative studies and collaborative publications could be carried out thanks to the project.* We would also like to thank the two institutions that have hosted the vISCoM project: the University of Vienna, and in particular its Institute of Austrian Historical Research; and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. At the Academy, the Institute for Medieval Research provided a stimulating environment for the coordination of the project and for ventures such as the ‘shadows of empires’ workshops and publication. Several people helped with preparing this book; in particular, we would like to thank Stefan Donecker, Nicola Edelmann, Lena Sadovski-Kornprobst and Sandra Wabnitz for the copy-editing, Thomas Gobbitt, Christina Péssel and Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek for correcting the English, Dagmar Giesrieg] for taking care of 1T and illustrations, Erik Goosmann for creating the maps, and Cinzia Grifoni for help in coordinating the publication process. And finally, we are grateful to the contributors for sharing this exciting scholarly venture with us.
Introduction: The Emergence of New Polities in the Shadows of Empire
Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser
The ‘Fall of Rome’ has often been regarded as an archetype for the collapse of empires. It was repeatedly used as a warning example in debates about the future of empires of the present. Yet in fact, Rome did not fall; it continued in the east for another millennium, if on an increasingly reduced scale. This persistence of an ‘empire that would not die’ was not an exception in the first millennium cE. In China, the Han empire was divided in the third century CE, and the dynasty was replaced; but rulers with imperial pretensions kept succeeding each other, until the Sui and Tang reunified the ‘Middle Kingdom’.
Abbasid power collapsed in the tenth century CE; but caliphs kept being appointed, and their names were still ceremonially acknowledged at the Friday prayers throughout their former realm, even though their political influence was now limited. There is more to the fall of empires than just ‘collapse’. In the cases discussed in this volume, their symbolical capital was still considerable, although their power had greatly decreased, territorially and in their range of action. The realms that replaced them unfolded in their shadows.?
These emergent political communities were often ruled by military elites that had initially been drawn into the empire to defend it as mercenaries, auxiliary units, slave soldiers or federates. Frequently, a political landscape of the ‘middle ground’ evolved, with several competing political centres and an increased significance of the barbarian fringes of the imperial system.
Such new political powers usually faced similar challenges, but were based on different structures, with a wide range of possible outcomes. Many relied on dynastic legitimacy, others on ethnic identification, some on a combination of both. Most of them sought imperial legitimation, though to very different degrees; a few also claimed imperial status themselves. These ‘sub-imperial’ powers could remain in an unstable balance with a remaining empire, they could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Most of these polities where rather short-lived, either because the remaining authority of the ancient empire destabilized them or because new ‘barbarian’ groups replaced them. Some of them, however, turned into rather durable entities, and new centres of gravitation evolved.
There is no lack of recent works comparing premodern empires and addressing the general dynamic of imperial powers.° Some studies have also focused on their decline and fall.® Little has been done, however, to compare the powers that replaced them, although there was a remarkable range of possibilities. Empires could directly succeed one another, or part of their territories be conquered by another empire. This course of events was common in the Ancient Orient, and the most dramatic examples were the conquest of Achaemenid Persia by Alexander the Great, and of the Sasanian Empire by the armies of the caliphs.
Yet apart from the latter case, the empires discussed in this book were not destroyed with one blow and neatly replaced by another imperial power. Many experienced phases of contraction, during which new political communities could emerge on their periphery or even in some of its central territories. This is how ancient Rome, the Abbasid Caliphate or the Chinese empires of the Han, Tang and Song dynasties dissolved. None of them was overwhelmed by a more dynamic imperial power.’ A new wave of expansive empires only began in many parts of Eurasia with the advent of the Mongols: Yuan and Ming, Mughals and Ottomans, and eventually, Russia and the European overseas empires.® China remained exceptional for its succession of empires following the same model; and the intermediate periods of disunity became shorter and shorter. This cyclical rise and fall of unified empire was an acknowledged part of Chinese political theory. By contrast, the incidence of empires was weakest in the Latin West, where no imperial project would ever come close to the sheer power and stability of the imperium Romanum.?
What happened ‘after empire’ thus differed from case to case. As Ian N. Wood argues in his chapter about the ‘fall’ of (Western) Rome, identifying when exactly an empire ended is far from straightforward, apart from cases of swift military conquest. In Chinese history, empires in decay were repeatedly split, often into a northern and a southern realm, both of which claimed to be the sole legitimate successor of the unified state. The northern sphere, bordering on the Inner Asian steppes, was then prone to disintegrate further, and some of these units came to be dominated by immigrant warrior groups. Chinese historians reckoned their periods by dynasty, which makes sense in a cyclical model of dynastic rise and fall.!° However, this criterion is not always adequate elsewhere. The end of Abbasid power in the tenth century CE was not the end of the caliphal lineage; and the last Western Roman emperor was dethroned a quarter of a century after the end of the Theodosian dynasty."
Such questions are usually discussed from the failing empires’ point of view. For example, few subjects in European history have been debated so intensively since the eighteenth century as the reasons for the ‘fall of Rome’? The present volume addresses the end of empires from another perspective. Here, the focus is on the smaller entities that emerged from the dissolution of an empire. Who were the new elites, how did they establish their power, what had their relationship to the empire been and what relations did they continue to have to any remnants of the empire, both actual and conceptual? What were their strategies of distinction and identification?”
1 Comparing Empires: Problems and Approaches
‘Empire’ seems a rather straightforward concept, but it is not easy to define.!* Few scholars would doubt that the Roman Empire of Augustus or the Abbasid Caliphate under Harun al-Rashid were empires.!° However, a problem already arises with the Western European realms that explicitly styled themselves as a continuation of the Roman imperium, the empire of the Carolingians and even more so, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. And what about late-twelfth-century Byzantium facing Turkish emirs in Anatolia?!6 Byzantium developed from a late-antique imperial cityscape to a late-medieval city state, while maintaining its pretence of being ‘the’ Roman Empire, in spite of increasing doubts — in its final years, little more than a ‘shadow empire’ (Schattenreich), as Evangelos Chrysos has called it.!” By many current definitions, none of these states would actually qualify as an empire. Similar questions could be raised in China about the successor states in the periods of division between Han and Tang or Tang and Song. Intellectuals in the Song-period already discussed which of these dynasties had rightfully acquired the imperial ‘Mandate of Heaven’!®
From the perspective of Medieval Studies, qualitative criteria employed in debates among modernists, for instance a monopoly of violence and the direct administrative control of the provinces, make little sense.!9 In the period of its largest expanse across c. 4 million square kilometres, the central administration of the Roman Empire is estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 bureaucrats.?° Much of Roman rule relied on city self-governance and initially even on tributary kingdoms integrated into the fabric of the Empire, over which central control was only gradually tightened. Peter F. Bang and Christopher A. Bayly have suggested to differentiate between premodern ‘tributary empires’ and modern ones.”! Can transhistorical definitions be of use at all? Size certainly is a criterium, although it would hardly be possible to agree on any precise threshold — as, for instance, Peter Turchin proposes, ‘greater than one million square kilometres’.?? Rule over a densely-populated region (such as the Yellow River Basin in Northern China or the Fertile Crescent between Iraq and Egypt) cannot be measured by the same spatial criteria as the dominance over thinlypopulated steppes and deserts. Seaborne empires, from medieval Venice to early modern Portugal, may administer only limited territories, but extend their control over vast exchange networks and strategically-placed distant military bases. Pre-modern imperial systems could in some respects be conceived as hierarchical networks rather than as territorial states in the modern sense.?3
Overall, a dynamic definition makes more sense than a catalogue of qualitative requirements. Pursuing ‘an imperial project’ could be regarded as a key feature: ambitions to dominate regions far beyond the community at the core of the polity.2* Expansive power-centres that invest much of their resources in imperial policies may rather be regarded as empires than large and self-sufficient states relying on a relatively homogeneous population. History also matters. Imperial attitudes and institutions acquired in an expansive phase and rooted in the memories of former glory may warrant speaking of an empire, such as Byzantium in its later centuries or the Southern Dynasties in medieval China.
As a rough guideline, the definition by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper is quite adequate for the study of pre-modern imperial developments: ‘Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people’.”5 It encompasses the idea that empires integrate several peoples and groups, which they often seek to keep apart. The present volume looks at what happens when these ‘new people’ and territories that had been incorporated in the course of expansion slip out of imperial control again, when ‘hierarchy’ cannot be maintained as before and new distinctions appear, although the ‘memory of imperial power’ continues to cast its shadow. The process in which states lose control over parts of their former territories, or indeed all of them, is not so different between empires and large polities that we might not regard as imperial. When the Han Empire split in the third century cE, this process of dissolution continued until a number of regional dynastic realms came to coexist in the so-called ‘Sixteen Kingdoms Period’ (304 to 439 CE) in North China.” Yet imperial shadows and a ‘memory of power extended over space’ were still very much alive in the former imperial centres. To what extent such memories led to a desire to spearhead re-unification varied between different cases.?”
The present volume adopts a comparative perspective on the political landscapes that emerged in the former territories of first-millennium empires. The dissolution of the Western Roman Empire has usually been treated on its own terms, and more often than not due weight has not been given to the fates of Eastern Rome. This process was often regarded as a model for the fall of civilizations.”® We need to step out of this Eurocentric perspective. However, there is a fundamental paradox about European historians opening up to a more global point of view. Trying to transcend the limitations of a purely Western perspective may meet much fiercer critique than remaining within the trodden grounds. We strive to go global as Europeans, but within a European/American academic context, and need to be aware that we are entering foreign realms of history.?9 The process by which history became global is deeply entangled with European colonialism, and that creates a number of problems. It would hardly be a solution, though, to keep limiting ourselves to a parochial view of history in which only the Western tradition mattered. Rather, the aim should be to ‘de-centre’ Europe, and open up to the multiplicity of post-imperial developments.*° The greatest advantage of comparative studies is that they teach us to abandon former certainties and to pose new questions to our own material.
This is particularly true if the subject is ‘empire’. The very word is derived from the Latin term, imperium. It was linked to rule by an emperor for a long time, which even creates problems in Roman history: Rome pursued an imperial project long before the first monarchic imperator ruled over what continued to be called the Roman ‘republic’, res publica. The city of Rome gradually came to be seen as caput mundi, the head of the world. These universal claims were embedded in an ideology of peace, civility and the common cause (which is the meaning of res publica). The ideology of Rome offered multiple identities and self-representations: urban, civic, legal, ethnic, cultural, military, political, imperial, and finally also Christian — in a tension with each other that was never quite resolved.*! Thus, it provided a robust model for a hierarchical order of a plurality of ways of life.
European ‘world history’ since the eighteenth century very efficiently combined this imperialist perspective with an interest in foreign cultures while positing enlightenment-style ‘progress’ and ‘reason’ as a benchmark by which they could be assessed. There is no way in which we could simply liberate ourselves from the weight of this intellectual heritage, which was both highly productive and deeply compromised by serving as an instrument of domination. Abandoning the Western strand of reasoning and deferring to alternative imperial or subaltern scholarly traditions would not make much sense either, as much as alternative approaches need to be taken seriously. Sebastian Conrad has argued that the responses to post-colonial globalization tend to generate cultural essentialisms and trans-historical identities/differences; and these will not solve the problem.?? What scholars educated in the Western tradition can do is to develop its critical potential in order to arrive at a thorough and differentiated critique of its own role, while maintaining its intellectual rigor and sophisticated methodologies. This is a long and winding road, and cannot change the context of worldwide power structures in which academic efforts are inevitably set. It can only make them (and their historical emergence) more transparent.
This also requires a dialogue between scholars from different backgrounds and traditions. The present volume is part of such a dialogue, which, however, it does not incorporate directly, as the proceedings of the companion conference that was held in Beijing in 2015 were published separately in Chinese.®? Thus, our volume offers a rather preliminary attempt at a critical approach to the empires of the first millennium CE from a European/US scholarly perspective. It is a contribution to what the editors still regard as an early stage of discussion, not a final assessment. It is not a handbook, let alone a textbook, and it does not offer an inclusive master narrative. Its ambition is to unite a number of case-studies from different parts of the Eurasian continent in order to explore the variety of ways in which imperial rule could be replaced. Further examples — the Tibetan or the Japanese empires, the Gupta or the Fatimids — could have provided an even greater variety, but would also have made this collection exceed the limits of a manageable volume.
2 Global Pitfalls and Perspectives
‘Global history’ is an approach that has mostly been applied to the Modern Period, not least because European colonial expansion was often regarded as the driving force behind the unification of the world.** The ‘globalization’ of our time has raised many further questions, and ‘global history’ could be used in an affirmative sense to provide teleological narratives explaining this process, but also as a critical tool to expose the Eurocentric bias of such narratives.?° This is not the place to recount the theoretical efforts to disentangle the multiple histories of ‘the wretched of the earth’ from the European master narrative of the spread of progress and of a superior civilization.%6 Post-colonial theory demonstrated that decolonization had not removed the unequal relations between imperial centres and the ‘subaltern’ spaces of difference.*” It opened ways to understand the cultural impact of a colonial past and a discriminatory present on the hybrid and ambivalent world in which the identities of the elites of former colonial countries continued to be defined by their non-whiteness and cultural otherness. Thus, it complemented the more socio-economic perspective of world systems theory.°®
For the subject of this book, pre-modern empires could be conceived as creating their own ‘world systems’, with a centre and peripheries and unequal exchanges, long before Modernity. Some of these peripheries might also be exposed to magnetism from more than one of these systems, as was the case in Armenia or in early Seljuk Anatolia.?9 Post-colonial theories can help to elucidate the persistence of imperial dynamics of othering in spite of the erosion of the first-millennium empires addressed in the present volume: Romanized, Sinicized or Islamic ‘barbarians’ remained somehow ‘subaltern’ even when they ruled over former imperial provinces. Still, as the chapters of the present volume indicate, the outcomes of such tensions could vary considerably in different cases. As in Rome or the Caliphate, despised foreigners could be used as soldiers, and some of them could eventually carve out their own dominions from the former imperial territories. When these realms fell, the groups of barbarian warriors who had maintained their military capacities were integrated in the Tang army in the seventh century and became instrumental in building anew Chinese Empire. The sources disagree to what extent this hybrid military elite was fully accepted by the Chinese, but it seems that ‘difference’ in the post-colonial sense had remained.*° The Abbasid caliphs of the ninth century had conferred slave status onto their Turkish mercenaries, which may have complicated, but did not prevent their eventual access to power, while they were still despised by their Arab subjects.*! It took centuries before a group of Turks who arrived later, the Ottomans, managed to re-establish a stable imperial system. Only in the West did some of the direct successors of barbarian warlords who had come to power in the provinces of Western Rome manage to stay in power and gradually shift the hierarchy of status to their benefit.4?
Whereas scholars have pursued global interests for a considerable time in the field of Modern History, it has only rather recently become an important concern in the study of the ‘Global Middle Ages’## In 2019, the Medieval Academy of America chose the ‘Global Turn in Medieval Studies’ as a title for its yearly conference. The ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’ research network in Britain was an interdisciplinary pioneer project which discussed many of the issues at stake in this emerging field.44 An early attempt to extend the horizon of Medieval Studies was the Global Middle Ages project at the University of Texas.4° The ‘Visions of Community’ project in Vienna, in which the present volume was conceived, began with a conference in 2008 and was later funded by the Austrian Research Fund for nine years.*° There is, of course, a problem with periodization — can we apply the chronological concept of a ‘Middle Ages’ invented in the European Renaissance under rather particular circumstances to global history?*” One way to defend its global use is to employ it as an approximative shorthand term, for which no convincing alternative has yet emerged. Katherine Holmes and Naomi Standen have chosen a different approach, arguing for some shared qualitative features of the period across Europe and Asia.*8 In any case, as they maintain, there is little to gain by debating periodization.*®
The problem of loaded terms and unwelcome overtones in our scholarly language cannot be solved by a radical purge of terminology. If we were to avoid all terms carrying unwelcome overtones, we would considerably deplete our language, and would have to abandon culture, ethnicity, nation, class, state, identity, religion and many other words.°° That would also make communication with a general public quite difficult. It would be preferable to promote awareness of possible misuses and misunderstandings rather than aiming for an elusive purity of language. Loaded terms may help in the heuristic process, but should not be taken for granted or used to frame the historical narrative. They help to pose the questions, but do not provide the answers. Where possible, they should be replaced by lower-threshold terms.
The approach chosen in this book is comparative, and that also requires a brief explanation.5! Comparative history used to be written from a European vantage point, contrasting a dynamic, free and enlightened Western civilization with static, autocratic and intellectually backward cultures in the rest of the world.52 Even where the cultural achievements in other parts of the world were praised, the assumed superiority of the West remained unquestioned.54 This led to a search for divergence/s:5+ where and why did ways part between a West geared for progress and the rest locked in essentially premodern societies? A lot of excellent research navigated with difficulty around the trap of the implicit assumptions traditionally connected with this field of studies.°>
In recent debates, therefore, the risk that comparison would reify and essentialize the units compared has been emphasized.5° The observation is very valuable; comparison between different ‘cultures’ and ‘civilizations’ from a European perspective has been one way to impose difference and to lock nonEuropean ‘cultures’ in their essential otherness and, in many respects, inferiority. However, the solution cannot be to put a ban on looking for distinctions. It has been suggested that the fundamental hybridity of all cultures be studied instead. Indeed, since Antiquity Eurasia has had an entangled history (‘histoire croisée’), a mixed population, and hybrid cultural spheres. In this sense, pushing the beginning of globalization backwards has been an eye-opener in many respects: to the Mongol period,*” or to the ‘Year 1000’.58 However, it is easy to overestimate pre-modern connectivity, which tended to leave more traces in our sources than people living local lives like they have done since time immemorial. Reducing culture to multiculturality, fluidity and mobility comes close to denying native knowledge, and to naturalizing the capitalist globalization of our present.
In our research, then, we should neither privilege difference nor hybridity, neither mobility nor locality, neither cultural flows nor the maintenance of tradition. Grand narratives such as ‘the Great Divergence’, ‘the Axial Age’ or ‘the process of globalization’ may be helpful to direct attention to certain phenomena, but are insufficient as overarching master narratives. The comparative method works best when it moves swiftly beneath the level of overall models. We certainly should not pick ‘Western Culture’, ‘the Islamic World’ or ‘Imperial China’ as transhistorical units of comparison, but historicize our subjects, allow for their inner multiplicity, and avoid teleologies.59 As Holmes and Standen have suggested, the aim is to ‘put the social interactions, expectations and demands of people who lived in these times into global focus through the juxtaposition of specific cases’.®° It is a method they call ‘combinative’ rather than formally comparative. Our goal is not to arrive at transregional or transhistorical models by a systematic analytical grid in the manner of historical sociology.® It is a transcultural hermeneutic approach that aims at a better integral understanding of complex systems and their changes.®
Rather than ordering the evidence according to great binaries such as East/ West, divergence/convergence, globality/locality, we should employ ‘midrange comparison’ developed bottom-up from the sources.®? Imposing topdown questions risks producing premature results and projecting models from the region with the better evidence onto another one where the sources are lacking.®* The present volume was structured by a number of shared research questions, but was not streamlined according to a systematic grid of comparative topics. At the present stage of studies on the ‘Global Middle Ages’, we preferred to let the chapters unfold according to the source base, following the particular research logic of each field and individual scholarly agendas. In this way, we hoped to arrive at more reliable and differentiated comparative perspectives.
This is also what the experience of the multiple comparative ventures of the ‘Visions of Community’ project has taught us. Among the axes of comparison explored in the project were the construction of polities and realms, the significance of genealogies, and the institution of monastic and spiritual communities.® One volume in the series ‘Historiography and Identity’ compared the writing of history in China, the Islamic World, Byzantium and the West.°® In a thematic issue of the Medieval History Journal, ethnic origin narratives of the ancient Turks, the Tibetans, in Yemen and in the early medieval West were discussed.®’ Further volumes address terminologies of community®® and urban communities.®? Religious aspects are the central issue in two volumes on ‘Cultures of Eschatology’”° and in a book comparing the relationship between ‘Ethnicity and Religion’! Closest to the theme of the present volume, a collaborative publication deals with the ways in which empires rely on or confront particular communities in their orbit — regions, provinces, cities or local elites. As a pilot study to the present volume, Hugh Kennedy and Walter Pohl have compared the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire and of the Abbasid Caliphate.”
All of these collaborative works represent exploratory ‘adventures in comparison’ by interdisciplinary groups of ‘Visions of Community’-team members and numerous external specialists in different fields, as the present book does. The editors are convinced that the field is at an exploratory stage in which we should not expect any overarching synthesis. The conclusion to this volume will tentatively offer a few more general observations. In a next step, a small monograph is planned in order to develop a more systematic approach to the fall (and persistence) of empires.”?
In the present volume, therefore, a group of specialists in their fields compare a number of late antique and medieval Eurasian case studies in order to gain insights into the possible dynamics of sub- and post-imperial constellations, and into their variety. Some of these new powers had a strongly military character and were led by warlords exploiting what remained of the imperial infrastructure. Some derived their legitimacy from a prestigious dynasty, whether ennobled by an ancient pedigree or by acknowledgment from remaining imperial authorities or rituals. Some were more directly linked to the imperial tradition and/or infrastructure, if on a smaller scale. And some derived the social cohesion among the elite from a sense of shared ethnic identity. Emerging religious affiliations could also play a role. In terms of strategies of legitimation, the various case studies in this volume differ widely. There are obvious differences between the post-imperial scenarios, but also systemic differences between the macro-regions this volume deals with. The results of this comparison will not be used here to construct trans-historical models. Rather, as the editors of a recent volume on ‘The Prospect of Global History’ put it: ‘Looked at with a comparative eye, every society of the past, across the globe, gives us a new set of questions to pose to other societies, and a new set of alternatives. Every society has paths not taken; which, and why? The global becomes, indeed, an array of possibilities’.
3 The Post-Roman West
In modern historiography, the removal of the last Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus, a name rich in symbolic overtones, in 476 CE has generally been regarded as ‘the fall of Rome.’”> However, ‘Rome’ clearly persisted for another thousand years in what had been the Eastern half of the Empire, Byzantium. In the West, imperial rule was replaced by several kingdoms ruled by Christianized military elites of ‘barbarian’ origin. The fundamental questions regarding these processes and their causes remain hotly debated among historians: Did Rome ‘fall’, or was it just ‘transformed’? Did barbarian migrants destroy the Western Roman Empire, or was their rise to power rather the result of a process of transformation within late Roman society?” In fact, as argued elsewhere, Rome ‘fell’ in four different ways and at different times: it dissolved into barbarian kingdoms in the West in the fifth century CE; Roman infrastructure almost completely collapsed in the Balkan Peninsula from the late sixth century CE onwards; Persia and then Muslim Arabs conquered the rich southeastern provinces between Syria and Africa in the seventh century CE; and what remained of Byzantium was gradually lost in recurrent crises between the late eleventh and the fifteenth centuries cE.” This variety of partial collapse seems to suggest that there was no coherent process of ‘decline and fall’, and contingency played a role. Of course, barbarian invasions, attacks by Persian and Islamic armies or raiders often were a serious challenge in late Rome and Byzantium without leading to disastrous consequences. The remarkable balance of resilience and vulnerability in what remained of the Roman Empire at different stages can hardly be understood by external pressures alone.”8
In the West, there is an additional issue with the end of empire, as Jan N. Wood shows. Odoacer’s successful military coup in 476 CE was a ‘a noiseless fall,”9 a ‘non-end of the Roman Empire’.®° It was little more than an episode in a long process in which power and resources were redistributed, population and prosperity declined, and the complexity of ancient society was reduced, if to a different extent in different regions. Wood has convincingly argued in a recent book that in the long run, ecclesiastic institutions appropriated about the share of resources that had gone into maintaining the Roman Army before, and ended up possessing about a third of the land in many regions by the eighth century.*!
As different groups were affected by this process in different ways, multiple ideas as to whether and when the Roman Empire ended are attested in contemporary sources.®? In his chapter, Wood provides a comprehensive overview of all the different events considered decisive by contemporary writers and modern scholars, such as the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 CE, the Vandal capture of Carthage in 439 CE or the murder of Aetius in 454 CE. In Gaul, Burgundians and Franks acted independently by the 460s, but were still considered as representing the Empire. Over the course of the fifth century, a sub-imperial system, which one might call a ‘Roman commonwealth;* replaced direct imperial rule in the West.* This balance of power changed in many ways in the 530s and 540s CE, when the Gothic War started by the Eastern Romans and the socalled Justinianic’ plague devastated Italy more than all ‘barbarian’ invasions taken together, and the series of consuls in Rome ended after more than a millennium.® In Gaul, the Burgundians were overwhelmed by the Franks, who started their own, if only moderately successful, imperial project. As Wood argues, this was when the real break with Roman authority happened in Italy and Gaul. Paradoxically, the forceful interventions of Justinian’s largely ‘barbarian’ troops in the West ultimately undermined the authority of the Empire there.
In most regions, the impact of the ‘Great Migrations’ was political rather than demographic, establishing privileged groups numbering a few tens to perhaps a hundred thousand members among a population of millions. Only in some regions did ‘barbarian’ pressure lead to a withdrawal of ‘Romans’ to the South (for instance, from Noricum or Britain). In most regions of the former Western Empire, since the fifth century CE the large majority of the late Roman provincial population lived under the rule of gentes, ‘barbarian’ groups which formed a new military elite. They were distinguished by their ethnonyms: Goths, Burgundians, Angles, Saxons, Lombards and others; and increasingly, their kingdoms came to be named after them.
As the contribution by Walter Pohl argues, this ethnic principle of distinction became standard in the medieval West. Many of the Roman successor kingdoms were subdued by stronger neighbours, yet the model of a kingdom ruled in the name of a people remained until it was transformed into the modern nation. In the course of a few centuries, large parts of the population in the core areas of these kingdoms adopted the ethno-political identities of their realms, while (with the exception of Britain and regions along the Rhine and the Danube) the elites of Germanic extraction in former Roman provinces began to use the Romance languages of their subjects. The ethnic description of the political landscape did not mean that other features of identification did not matter. The organization in a kingdom of their own could safeguard the position of the new elites and provide a political identity. Their power rested on their armed force, and joint campaigns reinforced their military identity. The new kingdom was legitimized by its own church organization and its shared identity as a Christian people. Eventually, the ethnonym became common as the name of the patria, the homeland (or, sometimes, of its core area), which could serve as a territorial marker of identification. Within this aggregate of identifications, the actual salience of ethnic identifications with their load of shared cultural memories was variable, a sensitive indicator of political circumstances, as Helmut Reimitz has shown in the case of the Franks.8®
Arguing that ethnicity was a key element in the construction of the post-Roman political landscape in the former Western Empire therefore does not mean that what motivated human actions was necessarily an overwhelming sense of common blood and allegiance. The point is just that the organization of power on which social cohesion rested came to be shaped by notions of ethnic affiliation and privilege. With its particular ‘visions of community’, the Christian faith played an important role in affirming ethnic identities.8” The Christianized peoples (gentes) had their part to play in the history of salvation, and ecclesiastical organization increasingly came to be structured in Churches of the gens and/or the realm, for instance in the ‘Church of the people of the Angles’, the focus of Bede’s famous history, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written by the Anglo-Saxon monk in the eight century.°8 In the Carolingian Empire, the idea of the Christian people, the populus Christianus, opened up a way to conceive of the community of the realm.®? It was a complementary ‘vision of community’, which was different from but not incompatible with the ethnic concept of a kingdom of the gens. The history of the Western Middle Ages can also be told as a dialectic process between these two paradigms, which have always been entangled, and were ultimately modified and fused in the modern nation state.9°
Stefan Esders discusses the relations of the Eastern Roman Empire with the new powers in the lands of the former Western Empire, and the ways in which it influenced the mindscapes and supported the legitimacy of the new polities between the fifth and seventh centuries CE. Modern historians, he argues, have relegated the Roman Empire of Constantinople to the exotic world of ‘Byzantium, and locked it into an East-West contrast. This form of orientalism made it difficult for scholars to assess its continuing impact on the Latin kingdoms, despite the fact that in many respects, these continued to be ‘kingdoms of the Empire’?! up to the mid- or even late sixth century CE. They remained under treaties that recognized the majesty of the emperor, whose portrait continued to adorn the gold coins issued by the kings of the West. The shared Christian religion provided common ground, in spite of all dogmatic controversies; and the emperor’s baptismal sponsorship of a ‘barbarian’ ruler or the latter’s adoption as a ‘son in arms’ constituted a close if hierarchical personal link. The emperor also bestowed honorary titles on barbarian leaders, which facilitated their interaction with their Roman subjects. However, marriage alliances between imperial princesses and ‘barbarian’ kings were surprisingly rare when, for instance, compared to Chinese practices.
Yet the post-Roman kings in the West also built a legitimacy of their own, independently of imperial recognition. One key form was the oath of fidelity to the king which all subjects were supposed to swear, ‘making loyalty a matter of individual devotion to a Christian ruler’.°? This oath could rest on conditions negotiated beforehand, such as the ruler’s acceptance of local law and customs. As Esders shows, this led to a ‘contractualization’ of politics, in which consensus had to be sought and to a certain extent formalized. These negotiated agreements between the king and local communities also went beyond the ethnic definition of the kingdom by the ruling people, enabling the inclusion of the regional ‘Roman’ majority in a shared Christian fatherland. In this way, the initially precarious rule of a ‘barbarian’ army and its commander could gradually be transformed into a stable polity, which in a number of cases outlasted the elites that had once founded the kingdom.
In his chapter about the early medieval Bavarians, Helmut Reimitz presents a long-term perspective of the fates of a peripheral duchy after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. The region along the upper and middle Danube, the provinces of Raetia, Noricum and Pannonia, was one of the parts of the Empire in which little of the Roman order and infrastructure survived. Raetia, which was to become Bavaria, remained under the influence of powerful post-Roman kingdoms, but moved from being the northern periphery of Ostrogothic Italy to becoming the eastern periphery of the Frankish sphere of power in the sixth century. Reimitz argues that the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Franks in Gaul represented different models of integrating the Roman provincial population under ‘barbarian’ rule. While in Italy the Goths were a privileged military caste and the Roman majority the civilian population, there was no clear functional divide in Merovingian Gaul; there were Frankish peasants, and military careers were also open to non-Franks. In this way, several ethnic and social groups could be united in the Frankish kingdom(s).
The Bavarians, first mentioned in the historical record in the sixth century CE, were one of these groups. Until recently, the big issue was their origin, which was assumed to explain sufficiently who they were. Reimitz’s careful analysis and more nuanced approach, however, show that their ‘Bavarianness’ only really began to matter in the eighth century CE, when they came under pressure by the Frankish identity politics of the Carolingians. The Bavarian response was to highlight their double continuity with the post-Roman centuries both as Bavarians, a people with its own law and dynasty, and as faithful subjects of the Merovingians. In this way, the eighth-century Carolingian promotion of Frankish identity stimulated the insistence on Bavarian identification. However, by the end of the century, the early Carolingian strategy of emphasizing Frankishness and the corresponding assertions of other ethnic identities meant that the ethnic plurality of the expanding Carolingian realm could not be accommodated within a Frankish kingdom, but only within a renewed Roman Empire. The example shows that ethnicity was not simply imported into the crumbling Roman realm, but that potential identities were available to be used for marking out particular political projects in the centuries after Rome. By the time the Carolingians attempted the reconstruction of a Western Roman Empire, the political landscape had been transformed into a world of Christian peoples, which would soon become hard to accommodate within an imperial frame.
4 The Carolingian Empire and Its Dissolution In the late eighth century cE, the Carolingian dynasty attempted to re-establish
the Western Roman Empire, first by military conquests ranging from Iberia to Illyricum, and then by Charlemagne’s imperial coronation in Rome in the year 800.93 This re-appropriation of Roman political models established an imperial tradition that lasted for more than a millennium, a realm proudly called the Holy Roman Empire; but for most of that time, it hardly met our modern scholarly definitions of an empire. When the Carolingians adopted the imperial title at the height of their power, their expansive dynamic had already begun to subside.°* The cultural impact of Carolingian rule on medieval Europe can hardly be over-estimated (not least, on its political culture); yet in the history of Western power politics, the Carolingian Empire remained an exception. No subsequent political unit on the Western half of the continent would ever match its size again, let alone that of the former Western Roman Empire (if we exclude the short-lived attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, and of course the colonial empires, which did not much change the topography of power in Europe).°° From the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire onwards, Europe was characterized by a balance between mid-sized and smaller polities. Unlike the Roman, Abbasid, Han and Tang empires, the Carolingian realm was simply divided up among its own aristocracies, which the Carolingian dynasty had ceased to control. Although Normans, Muslims and Hungarians raided the imperial territories from all sides, none of them conquered relevant parts of it — with the exception of one Norman group settled (and soon integrated) in what would become the Duchy of Normandy. On one level, the process of the empire’s disintegration was ignited by the division of the realm among the sons of Emperor Louis the Pious in 840, which created the kingdoms of (German-speaking) Eastern Francia and (French-speaking) Western Francia/France, of (Northern) Italy and Burgundy, and a precarious middle kingdom of Lotharingia. On a regional level, mostly pre-existent regions came into their own as duchies: Aquitaine, Brittany, Normandy and Francia (the fle-de-France) in the West, Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony and, again, Francia (Franken) in the East. As Helmut Reimitz shows in his chapter, the Carolingian imperial formation was a decisive step in the consolidation of these particular identities. These were relatively large regional units, most of them with a preCarolingian ethnic tradition transformed by the experience of empire. They kept creating problems for the cohesion of the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom throughout the Middle Ages — at least, that is the traditional medievalist perspective, which saw these particular entities as obstacles for nation-building. One could also see it the other way around: in the long run, both the emperors and the French kings thwarted the processes by which independent Bavarian, Saxon or Aquitanian polities could have formed.
What the Carolingian realm and its Ottonian successor do seem to have triggered, however, is the rise of new kingdoms in their northern and eastern peripheries.°° I/dar Garipzanov’s chapter addresses the case of Denmark, one of the earliest examples of a kingdom established on the periphery of the Carolingian Empire. In the course of the tenth century CE, a Norwegian kingdom formed in Scandinavia, a Hungarian kingdom as well as a Bohemian/Czech and a Polish principality (later kingdoms) emerged in the east. All of these polities soon followed the early medieval model of a Christian kingdom with ethnic designation. Furthermore, most of them had long-lived and prestigious founding dynasties: the Przemyslids in Bohemia, the Arpadians in Hungary, the Piasts in Poland. None of them conquered any former Carolingian (or Ottonian) core territories (which the early Hungarians, initially following their steppe tradition, had quite systematically raided). Thus, they were not really post-imperial formations in the same way as many other examples in this volume. However, they were affected by the rhythms of a more or less distant empire in ways comparable to the Tuyuhun and the Khitans beyond the frontiers of China, as described in Michael R. Drompp’s chapter, to be discussed below.
Garipzanov deals with the Northern periphery of the Carolingian Empire. In what ways was the emergence of new kingdoms in former barbarian lands linked to the rhythms in which the Byzantine and the Western Empires expanded and contracted? Obviously, the individual cases differ. Garipzanov argues convincingly that the development of a Danish kingdom responded to Carolingian imperial expansion. Some scholars have made much of an early process of Danish state building in the fifth and sixth centuries, connected with archaeologically attested centres such as Gudme on the Isle of Fyn.97 According to Garipzanov, regional polities and identities prevailed in Denmark (as in the rest of Scandinavia) until the early ninth century. Not all ‘kings of the Danes’ attested in Frankish sources were kings of all the Danes. The very name Denmark may be a Frankish term for what was considered a liminal polity, a marca (march).°8 Only under Carolingian influence did a unified Danish kingdom arise — both in reaction to Frankish attacks on South Jutland, and as a result of the influx of Frankish prestige goods that came to provide signs of distinction for a rising Danish aristocracy. Garipzanov pays attention to the material side of these processes. The Danish model subsequently spread to Norway and other parts of Scandinavia, and encouraged centralizing tendencies (and Viking raids) there. The decline of the Carolingian Empire coincided with a new regionalization of the Danish kingdom in the later ninth century cE, while the Ottonian Empire in the mid-tenth century had an impact on the rise of the Jelling dynasty in a unified and expansive Danish kingdom. At this point, Scandinavia seems to have built up its own momentum in sustaining supra-regional kingdoms, which soon (if against considerable resistance) rested on a Christian basis.99
5 Byzantium
Four contributions address the peripheries of perhaps the most paradoxical medieval empire: Byzantium, the Roman Empire of the Greeks. What we call Byzantium began as ‘the’ Roman Empire in the East and ended as a beleaguered city state of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The ‘empire that would not die’ survived several dramatic setbacks, and lost much of what would qualify it as an empire by modern standards, but could still be proud of an imperial tradition stretching deep into the past.!©° Its inhabitants, or at least its representatives, thought of themselves as Romans and not as Hellenes (a term with pagan connotations) or Greeks (which was an outside designation), saw their state as ‘the’ Roman state, and their emperor as coming from an unbroken succession of Roman emperors reaching back to Caesar and Augustus.!©! Yet the Byzantine emperor's Greek title was basileus, which had initially designated officials in ancient Greek cities, and could be used for any ruler. The term kaisar was employed for designated successors or as an honorary title, and could even be bestowed on barbarian allies. Autokrator, ‘one’s own master’, ‘absolute ruler’ was used to translate the Latin imperator, and was increasingly common in later Byzantium.!°* The Greeks had no specific word for the medieval Latin concept of empire, as embodied in the Western Imperium Romanum, and used generic terms such as arché (dominion), politeia (polity) or kratos (power). Shared Romanness and Christian orthodoxy as well as God-given rule sufficed to distinguish the Roman Empire of Constantinople from all other polities. In general, the Christian language of authority could combine pretensions to supreme dominion with terminological modesty, as in the title ‘servant of the servants of God’ (servus servorum Dei) of the pope.!°3
In its history spanning over a millennium (conventionally, from Constantine transferring the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople in the early fourth century to the Ottoman conquest in 1453 CE), the Eastern Roman/ Byzantine Empire was always on the defensive save for a few, rather brief, periods of resurgence, chiefly under Justinian in the sixth and the early Macedonian Dynasty in the tenth century CE. Byzantium provides a striking case for a long-term study of imperial decline and resilience. The present volume explores these developments from the sixth to the twelfth century CE, ranging from Italy to Armenia. The lasting presence of Byzantium influenced political, cultural and religious developments within a wide horizon, in former provinces but also beyond the ancient frontiers, so that the distant Rus’ in Kyiv, and ultimately in Moscow, could claim to be the Third Rome. The concept of a ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ may imply more orthodox political unison than we can safely assume.!°4 Yet Jonathan Shepard’s chapter in this volume impressively demonstrates that Byzantine authority stretched beyond the actual frontiers of the Empire.
The provinces that Byzantium lost at various points in its long history encountered very different fates. The richest regions, Syria, Egypt and Africa, swiftly fell to the emerging Islamic empire in the seventh century CE and irrevocably became part of the Islamic World, although both Hellenistic culture and the Christian religion survived the conquest period quite well. This is an intriguing case of a rather smooth transition from one empire to a rather different one, and demonstrates various ways in which particular communities could use the opportunity to reassert themselves (for instance, Jews or groups of dissident Christians), or had to adapt to a more subaltern role (Orthodox Christians).!°5 These processes, however, are not in the focus of the present volume.
Slightly before the Islamic conquests, since the late sixth century, Slavs occupied the Balkan provinces, except for a few coastal areas. This marked the cleanest break with Roman life and infrastructure in all of the former empire — and represents the rare instance in which imperial rule was replaced by a power vacuum, initially without any recognizable new rulers or polities. Only gradually did regional powers emerge in the Balkans again. At the end of the seventh century CE, the north-eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula was occupied by the Bulgars, who established their steppe realm along the Lower Danube. It soon began to compete with Byzantium, and in time adopted several of its cultural features, including Orthodox Christianity and the title czar (caesar).
Francesco Borri looks at the coastal areas of the Northern Adriatic as a Byzantine periphery in the sixth to tenth centuries. Byzantium had recuperated Italy from the Ostrogoths in the devastating Gothic War (535-54), but in 568, the Lombard invasion shattered much of the hard-fought results of imperial restoration. The Empire managed to retain control over Rome and parts of Southern Italy, as well as most of the Northern Adriatic coastline, with the former seat of the Western Empire, Ravenna (which the Lombards only captured in 751). The emerging trade centres in the Venetian lagoon slipped from Byzantine rule in the ninth century CE but retained, in Gherardo Ortalli’s words quoted by Borri, a ‘byzantinité latine’!°6 In this case study, we see an Empire fade in slow motion from one of its former core areas. Borri refutes older views in Italian historiography that saw ‘Greek’ dominion in Italy as a kind of colonial rule, and instead insists on the Roman allegiance and identity of the imperial subjects in the area. The local elites profited in many ways from imperial titles and honours, and from exchanges with Constantinople, the ‘urbs regia’ (royal city), and its Mediterranean trade network. This network also facilitated the rise of Comacchio and Venice as emporia, mainly catering for the needs of the Lombard elites. In this case, the ‘shadows of empire’ mainly brought benefits to townspeople and traders who still proudly defined themselves as milites, soldiers of the Roman army. Eventually, however, this basic consensus eroded. Political and theological conflicts within the Byzantine Empire and between Constantinople and Byzantine Italy strained imperial loyalties. The expansive policy of the Lombard kingdom in the eighth century cE gradually diminished the areas of Byzantine control in Italy. Increasingly, the Romans of the East were seen and despised as ‘Greeks, and Romanness became a thing of the past — and, of course, a property of the city and the Church of Rome.!0” However, privileged access to the wider networks of Byzantium and beyond remained an asset, which Venice was able to exploit better than the other coastal centres around the Adriatic. What replaced allegiance to a Roman Empire in and around the lagoon was a regional, Venetian identity. In the region around the former imperial capital Ravenna, Romanness was preserved as a regional identity in the Romania, today’s Romagna, which remained distinct from Lombardia, where Lombards had ruled.
Jonathan Shepard's chapter traces some of the ups and downs of the ambiguous relationship between the Bulgars and Byzantium from the ninth to the eleventh century CE, which shares a number of traits with the relations between China and its nomad neighbours. Slavic realms gradually emerged in, and were conditioned by, the sphere of influence of Byzantium and Bulgaria on the one hand, and of the Frankish/‘German’ imperial ambitions in the northwest, on the other. Shepard takes a closer look at the conditions of the ‘variable geometry empire’ centred on Constantinople, which was on the defence for most of its existence, but ‘capable of metamorphosing from loose influence to direct control — and back again’. Its imperial authority was believed to ‘reflect the harmony of the Creator’, being ‘wondrous to foreign [nations] and our own people’, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus (r. 913-59) claims in the tenth-century ‘Book of Ceremonies’!°° Byzantine court ceremonies and symbols of power, diplomatic gifts and the Orthodox creed had an impact far beyond the former Roman frontier. Thus, Shepard assesses Byzantine influence and the ambivalent reactions towards it in three rather different cases: the Bulgar(ian)s, who had carved out their dominion not far from Constantinople, and thus had very volatile relations with Byzantium; the Rus’, who became part of the Orthodox world in their centre in more distant Kyiv; and, even more distant, the competing Roman Empire of the Germans. All three mostly welcomed close contacts with Constantinople, appreciated its diplomatic gifts and sought dynastic marriages with its imperial princesses, but also strove to outshine Byzantium. The attitude that Shepard defines as ‘contrarianism’ could involve different strategies: closing the borders, resisting Byzantine Christianity, and highlighting one’s own traditions, or, by contrast, adopting imperial forms of representation and trying to beat Constantinople at its own game. In the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, the attraction of a Byzantium that had recovered its capacity for sudden rebounds still remained unbroken. The powers in its sphere of influence employed similar strategies of representation to meet this challenge. Another form of ambivalent relation to adjacent empire/s can be studied in the case of Armenia, the subject of Johannes Preiser-Kapeller’s chapter. He analyses the remarkable example of a region that lived under ‘overlapping shadows of empire’. Between the fifth and the eleventh century CE, Armenia was exposed to the often-overwhelming power of the Roman/Byzantine Empire in the west and the Persian Empire and the Caliphate in the east. If one of these empires lost its capacity to intervene in the region, like Byzantium in the seventh century or the Caliphate in the tenth, then the other empire usually gained the hegemony. Inner divisions and conflict made a coherent Armenian political strategy difficult. Only rarely was Armenia organized as a relatively independent kingdom, such as in the fourth or in the tenth century cE. On the other hand, as Preiser-Kapeller observes, the ‘renewal of a kingdom of the Armenians more than four centuries after the eclipse of the ancient monarchy’ is in itself remarkable. The cultural memory of the Armenians provided the resources for such a revival. The imagined glory of the ancient Argakuni kingdom continued to be cultivated by generations of Armenian scholars. Pride in Armenia's early conversion to Christianity was expressed in the legend of the brotherly affection between the Romans’ and the Armenians’ first Christian monarchs, Constantine I (r. 306-337) and King Trdat 111 (d. c. 317/330). When the ArSakuni dynasty fell around 400 cE, the subsequent periods of Roman and Sasanian dominance saw the diffusion of Armenian script and the emergence of a rich literature. As Preiser-Kapeller argues, it was not the state but this strong tradition of Armenian-ness that ensured the survival of an Armenian sense of identity through many centuries of internal and external conflict. It was the people, its Christian faith and its literary culture, and not so much the country that counted: thus, an Armenian kingdom could maintain itself in the distant region of Cilicia, between Anatolia and Syria, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. This is a rare case of an identity that could be maintained up to the present in the periphery of empires and states, based on strong notions of a divinely-sanctioned distinctive identity, and in spite of a very reduced political room for manoeuvre.
Armenia could be seen as part of a wide peripheral belt stretching along the former Roman boundaries, from south of the Caucasus to south of the Alps. Here, a relatively stable chain of Christian peoples emerged in a politically rather unstable landscape: Armenians, Rus’, Bulgarians, Serbs, Hungarians, Croats and others. Many of the names that structure the tenth-century handbook De administrando imperio (‘On the Administration of the Empire’) by Constantine Porphyrogenitus can still be found on today’s maps, although none of them continuously maintained their political independence over the centuries. They existed in the shadows of successive empires, which could suppress their polities, but not the memories they had created.
Alexander Beihammer addresses a further example of a peripheral region sandwiched between Byzantium and the Islamic World which emerged in the late eleventh century CE: Anatolia and its neighbouring regions to the south, where ‘Turkish’ emirates formed at the margins of Seljuk power after the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071 CE.!°9 This is a particularly instructive example of post-imperial dynamics in a region where the shadows of weakened empires continued to linger. Beihammer surveys recent research that has deconstructed the grand narrative of a straightforward Seljuk-Turkish takeover of formerly Byzantine Anatolia, and proceeds to draw a more nuanced picture. In fact, the Grand Seljuks never established a firm hold on the provinces that slipped out of Byzantine control. Local lords centred on one or more fortified central places ruled over loosely knit territories, with whose populations they had to negotiate a stable settlement. These local rulers were mostly Turkish emirs in Anatolia, and a patchwork of Frankish, Armenian, Byzantine and Muslim lords in Cilicia and northern Syria. In their competition with each other, they relied on titles, gifts and privileges conceded to them by the imperial centres in Constantinople and Baghdad, respectively. Neither of the two empires, however, had the means to establish a stable overlordship over these multiple regional polities.
The attempts of the regional rulers to buttress their authority also led to the retrospective construction of ‘unifying myths’ in order to link the legitimacy of the competing emirs to the Seljuk conquest. Thus, while the power of the Seljuk dynasty in Baghdad declined, its glorious past became a source of authority in distant Anatolia. In this way, the Seljuk sultans of Konya established their hegemony in the course of the twelfth century CE. From the contemporary Islamic perspective, they were the Seljuks of Rum, ruling over a swath of former Roman territory, in which some of the Byzantine structures were still in place. Byzantine observers generally regarded the new ruling groups in Anatolia as Turks, which they identified with the ancient Scythians and Huns, and thus linked them with traditional ethnographic stereotypes about mounted steppe warriors. They were also aware of the Persianate character of the Seljuks of Konya, and of the Khurasani background of the dynasty. In a sense, Islamic and Byzantine perceptions of the Seljuks of Konya took recourse to familiar strategies of identification: a dynastic grand narrative in the Islamic world, and ethnic perceptions of foreigners in Byzantium. Neither of the two perceptions were completely inadequate, and both facilitated the mental mapping of what was in reality a rather fluid situation in which a hybrid population and a multiplicity of political actors resulted in constant shifts of balance. However, this explanatory bias in our sources does not provide a reliable basis for a straightforward explanation of the profound structural changes in Anatolia after more than a millennium of Helleno-Roman hegemony in terms of either dynasty or ethnicity.
It would take centuries until Asia Minor would be reunited again as part of another powerful empire under the Ottomans. Still, in the Mediterranean parts of what had been Eastern Rome, imperial aspirations remained on the agenda. Legitimacy could be obtained by deriving one’s rule from a preceding dynasty or polity, from Islamic or Christian tradition. The Byzantines might note the Turkish, Persian or Arabic background of a new power, which did not matter much in the Islamic sources. Along Byzantium’s northern frontier, where Byzantine texts (such as the De administrando imperio of Constantine Porphyrogenitus)"° more insistently linked polities with a particular people, ethnic affiliation seems to have carried more weight in legitimizing the rule over a territory.
6 The Caliphate
The collapse of Abbasid power occurred in the tenth century CE, particularly during the rule of Caliph al-Muqtadir (g08—32 CE). As Hugh Kennedy put it, ‘the caliphate disintegrated into a bewildering variety of successor states. The Muslim sources present these states as being ruled by dynasties’! The organization of these new realms varied according to the economic and social conditions: wealthy areas at some distance from the power centres, such as Fars or Egypt, prospered, whereas the core areas in Iraq, Jazira and Syria suffered from devastating power struggles, the decay of irrigation systems, and the increasing pressure of pastoral peoples on agricultural land. ‘The old heartlands became impoverished’, and ‘the old ruling elite was replaced by outsiders’!* This process was not due to any foreign invasions, but driven by internal problems — a downward spiral caused by the erosion of Arab military power and the diffusion of Turkish mercenaries, by agricultural recession and the neglect of irrigation systems, by sectarian struggles and tribal rivalries, by intra-dynastic conflict and regional rebellions.
The groups that first grabbed power when central control waned had lived inside the caliphate for generations, typically in marginal regions, in the mountains or deserts. Their initial power base were soldiers from their own people or tribe. Therefore, much in the process of the Abbasid caliphate’s disintegration resembled the collapse of the Han or Western Roman empires. At some point, warbands acting by arrangement with the provincial elites were better able to protect particular regions than a crumbling central government. As Jiirgen Paul shows for Fars, where the Northwest Iranian Buyids established their rule, such an arrangement could be profitable for the regional elites."'3 The same holds true for Gaul in the fifth century cE."*4 The North Iranian Buyid dynasty established its power centre in Baghdad, reducing the caliphs to symbolic authority."
While these developments in many respects resembled the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, the outcome was different.“6 What is striking in the Abbasid case is the great variety of political players who took advantage of the decline of the caliphate: military units from Khurasan or Iranian mountain ranges, Bedouins from the desert fringes of the Fertile Crescent, Kurds, Armenians and Berbers, and Turkish mounted warriors whose ascent in the Islamic World had only just begun. Some of them were led by commanders or governors appointed by the caliphs, others motivated by their sectarian Shiite creed or by resistance against caliphal religious policies. Most of the new leaders recognized the caliphs’ nominal overlordship and were in turn legitimized by the latter’s gifts, robes of honour, privileges and lofty titles. There is irony in the fact that when the Buyid leader Ahmad b. Baya marched into Baghdad in 945, the Caliph honoured him with the title Mu’izz al-Dawla, which can mean ‘Fortifier of the Dynasty’ or ‘Glorifier of the State.”
Maaike van Berkel approaches the downward spiral of the Abbasid caliphate from the perspective of the communication between centre and periphery. For an empire that at the height of its power in the eighth century CE stretched from the Inner Asian frontiers of China to the Atlantic, pre-modern problems to cover large distances overland mattered more than in other imperial configurations. The essential elements of functioning communications between the imperial centre and its far-flung territories were thus the appointment of trusted governors and the reliable collection of tax and tribute from the provinces. In this respect, the decisive shift occurred during the dynastic conflicts of the mid-ninth century cE, when the caliphs increasingly had to recognize self-made local leaders instead of sending their own men as governors. Of course, the political leverage of the strong men of the provinces ‘depended on the distance of their province to the centre, the richness in natural resources of the area they controlled, their own local contacts and power bases, the length of their term in office, and their networks in Baghdad’, as Maaike van Berkel shows. In general, their spaces for independent action increased. Political turmoil at the centre forced the caliphs to sell off tax rights and properties to gain liquidity in the short term. Van Berkel’s analysis reveals that communications between the caliphate’s centre and its periphery had followed a sophisticated routine and relied on a highly developed postal system that also procured information for the court. Yet this system essentially depended on the good-will of the participants, especially if the centre’s capacity to sanction breaches of loyalty decreased.
Jiirgen Paul’s contribution examines one of the Abbasid peripheral regions, Fars, a rich agricultural area in south-western Iran, and in particular its transition from largely uncontested Abbasid rule in the earlier ninth century CE to the Buyid takeover in the 940s cE."® Fars was dominated by a number of noble families who seem to have controlled large portions of the land under cultivation; the most powerful of these were even called mulik, kings. The caliphs could rely on them for tax-collection, which in turn was also profitable for these nobles themselves. They were sometimes rewarded with high office in Baghdad, and had some leverage to negotiate with the imperial administration. Since the time of the Sasanids, Fars had sent large sums of tax money to the imperial core area of Iraq, as Paul shows. This system only collapsed in the tenth century CE, when the caliphs desperately tried to extract more money, and began to send Turkish officers in order to put pressure on regional leaders. They quelled local resistance by force, but ironically, one of these officers, Yaqut, then grabbed power in Fars and stopped sending taxes to Baghdad."9 At that point, some nobles invited a warlord from the Daylam region in northern Iran, Ali b. Biya, to the province, and he and his brothers brought Fars under their control.
Paul makes the transitional processes transparent: the local magnates in Fars had long been loyal to an imperial power outside the province, which offered both protection and recognition of the regional rulers’ lofty position in the province. When the caliphs ceased to provide either, the magnates looked for alternatives. A rebellion by one of the powerful landowners failed, not only because his Kurdish mercenaries proved unreliable, but because his act had disrupted the delicate balance between the magnates. Elites of imperial provinces are used to outside rule, whose impartiality they tend to trust more than that of their peers. The subsequent Turkish military rule of Yaqut also proved unstable. The agreement with the Daylami warlords, who had been careful to respect the position of the regional magnates, was better suited to the needs of both sides. The Buyids had come to stay, and would govern Fars for about 150 years. In this they were more successful than another Daylami warlord, Mardavij, who had used his initial success in central Iran to promote himself as a successor to the Sasanian dynasty, and advocated a return to Zoroastrianism; he was killed in a rebellion of his Turkish troops in 935. Although an Iranian identity and a return to regional self-government or even to pre-Islamic Persian imperial traditions were available options for the formation and legitimation of post-Abbasid polities, these choices were not met with enthusiasm by Iranian magnates. They opted to be ruled by a moderately foreign military group that would not meddle with their business, largely continued caliphal administrative practice, and kept taxes in the country — not unlike the aristocrats in fifth-century Gaul who toyed a little with pre-Roman Gaulish identities, but reached pragmatic arrangements with Gothic, Burgundian and Frankish leaders.!2°
The Buyids seem to have made some use of their Iranian background (if from a distant and rather ‘barbaric’ province), and, at least initially, could count on the loyalty of their Daylami soldiers.!2! Yet ethnic allegiance did not guarantee social cohesion in the long term. The three sons of Biya founded three different realms — in Fars, Baghdad and Northern Iran — and conflicts within the dynasty soon ensued. Especially the Buyids in Baghdad had to rely more and more on Turkish mercenaries, and the loyalty of their army became a matter of pay, as in most of the dynastic realms that had replaced the Abbasid Empire.!2* None of the several dynasties that had carved out their spheres of power in the Abbasid caliphate succeeded in generating a new imperial dynamic. And none created a stable territorial-political configuration, as the post-Roman kingdoms did in Europe.!?3 We should not simply see that as a failure, however. It was this political multiplicity within a unified Islamic sphere that encouraged great cultural and intellectual achievements, more than many periods of political unity.!4
7 China
Three chapters in this volume address China, surely the most remarkable case of medieval imperial dynamic. It is easy to note that Chinese history-writing paid a lot of attention to empire and dynasty, but difficult to grasp the rather different configuration of these concepts in China in the period.!”5 Of course, other players and incentives in the political field existed — warlords, foreign invaders, ethnic identities, regional interests, court factions, aristocratic dissent, religious difference — and could contribute to creating fissures in the imperial fabric. Sometimes they triggered the emergence of new, post- or sub-imperial polities. But they provided no lasting legitimacy for the resulting political entities. Until1gu, successful contenders for power invariably founded new dynasties, and sought to place themselves in the glorious imperial tradition. The establishment of an empire in the late third century BCE by the Qin dynasty and the subsequent Han period (206 BCE to the early third century CE) created a strong precedent built on Confucian teachings of a divine harmony in society guaranteed by wise rulers and administrators. At the same time, defending the empire against the powerful steppe realm of the Xiongnu in the Han period provided the model for a divide between civilization (hua) and barbarians (which in China were not subsumed under a single, synthetic category as with ‘barbari’ in the West, but were differentiated by the cardinal directions and by different moralizing qualifications).!26
The cyclical model of Chinese historiography became a powerful historiographic paradigm and obscured the alternative options developed in the centuries between Han and Tang.!2” When the Han Empire dissolved in the early third century CE, it was succeeded by mostly short-lived realms defined in Chinese historiography by their ruling dynasties.!2° While the south continued to be ruled by Chinese dynasties (as described in this volume by Andrew Chittick), ‘barbarians’ came to dominate the ‘Central Plains’ (or ‘Middle Kingdom’, zhongguo) in the north. In the fourth century aD, Xiongnu-led warbands founded short-lived dynasties. The Xianbei, a pastoral people from Manchuria, were more successful. In the late fourth to the earlier sixth century, the Tuoba branch of the Xianbei ruled Northern China under the traditional dynastic name of (Northern) Wei.!2° China was only re-united in the late sixth century CE, after almost four centuries, under the Sui and Tang Dynasties.!8° Another period of division came after the demise of the Tang (907 CE), often called the ‘Five Dynasties’ period in Chinese historiography. The Song Dynasty managed to reunite the Empire on a somehow reduced scale after the middle of the tenth century cE, although they had to confront the Khitan/Liao Dynasty in Manchuria from the start.13!
Much of what we know about the period of disunity between the Han and the Tang comes from dynastic histories produced under the early Tang in the seventh century.!°? The Tang institutionalized a sophisticated mechanism of official state history. Tang scholars established the cyclical model of the rise and fall of dynasties, which became the master narrative of Chinese imperial historiography. In order to escape this retrospective historiographic model, Andrew Chittick focuses on the texts already produced in the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties in the fourth to sixth centuries. He traces the growing notion of north and south as separate spaces: the ‘ethnicization of difference’, as he aptly calls it.!83 He starts from an important observation about the idea of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Han’ identity. We tend to take these for granted, but, as Chittick points out, ‘the terms “China” and “Chinese” are used to translate a score of different terms in the Literary Sinitic, signifying geographic, cultural, political, or ethnic senses of the term, or all of them at once, without distinguishing between them’ This plurality of self-identifications only began to become more structured under the Tuoba Wei in the fifth to sixth century CE, when the ruling elite of steppe warriors used Hanren (‘the Han people’) to define those of their subjects whose ancestors had formerly lived under the Han.!54 The term could also serve to distinguish the ‘Northerners’ from the Wuren (Wu people) of the south. From the northern perspective, these Southerners were now counted among the barbarians like the yi people from the north, and segregated in special quarters for foreigners when they came to the northern capital Luoyang.
Conversely, in the south the Northerners were increasingly associated with the Xiongnu, the ‘people who draw the bow’, in contrast to the southern civilian elites, characterized by ‘cap and girdle’. The process of applying ethnic prejudice to the northern ‘others’ was more complicated in the south, which was initially ruled by the Eastern Jin, who after the fall of the Han had taken refuge from the chaos in the Central Plain in the southern capital Jiankang.5 This led to, as Chittick calls it, a ‘refugee paradigm’ in southern court writings that initially accepted the centrality of the North, now ruled by usurpers, and the inferiority of the south. Yet as the efforts to reconquer the traditional seat of empire, the Central Plain, failed, and the Eastern Jin were replaced by indigenous southern dynasties, authors at the southern court began to accept and ideologize the partition, the ‘Huai frontier’. Now both states claimed to be the only civilized and legitimate heir of empire, and not only the ruling warrior elite of the North, but also the entire northern population came to be despised as barbaric by southern writers. As Chittick argues, the strategy of claiming the cultural legitimacy of peripheral states that had adopted Chinese standards of civilization developed at the southern court became a model for Korea, Japan and other Sinicized polities in Eastern and South-eastern Asia. In China, the Tang re-established the unity of empire, including the South, and propagated that as the norm, and periods of division as — although unavoidable — times of crisis.
Q. Edward Wang looks at the tension between imperial unity and political divisions from a slightly different angle. He argues that Chinese scholars and bureaucrats in fact had to preserve a double balance. In terms of space, relations between the imperial core region of the Central Plains along the Yellow River and the peripheral regions had to be negotiated. In terms of time, court historians had the task to integrate periods of unity and disunity, with all the different competing sub-imperial formations, into a coherent master narrative of history. This involved the question which of the of past dynasties had been legitimate, which was discussed with particular interest in the Song (tenth— twelfth centuries CE) and the subsequent Southern Song periods (twelfth— thirteenth centuries CE). Wang sums up the stages in the development of division and unification ‘in the shadow of the Han’!86 and the ways in which the changing dynasties were retrospectively regarded. There was a strong current among Chinese scholars of the Song period to regard the establishment of imperial unity as the central criterion for the legitimacy of a dynasty, to which moral aspects, such as rightful accession to the throne or just rule according to Confucian standards, could ultimately be subordinated. Some authors, however, considered dominion over the Central Plain as sufficient for imperial legitimacy. Finally, the great eleventh-century historian Sima Guang sought to include all previous dynasties in his comprehensive vision of history as basically legitimized by their success.!8”
Yet when the Song were pushed into the South by the Jurchen Jin Dynasty in 1127 CE, the imperial scholars’ perspective on imperial legitimacy changed. Here the papers by Wang and Chittick become complementary. Under the Southern Song, the centrality of the north to the concept of a Chinese empire soon faded from scholarly writings. Although there was little effort to reconquer the north, the paradigm of imperial unity remained powerful in the historiography produced at the Southern Song court. Nevertheless, other criteria for legitimacy came to be valued much higher than control of the Central Plain: rightful succession, the Han origin of the dynasty, moral and cultural values came to the fore. Especially when Mongol pressure made itself felt from the north, Southern writers emphasized ‘cultural tradition and ethnic origin rather than geographic possession and historical outcome, as Wang argues, creating a concept of a ‘cultural China’. This idea would repeatedly become salient until the present day. It helped to overcome the discrepancy between the high expectations of the ruler, who was required to be both successful in imperial policies and impeccable in his moral conduct — and historical realities in which most rulers could at best be regarded as having achieved only one of the two principles, or neither. Medieval Chinese scholars acknowledged this problem, and adapted their solutions to their respective context. At the same time, they reaffirmed a time-honoured discourse of empire that denied legitimacy to any other form of government: the Chinese imperial tradition was the norm, and while it was malleable to circumstances, it was irreplaceable in principle. The notion of continuity under necessarily shifting political conditions was increasingly built on a traditional cultural profile, which in turn shaped expectations. And indeed, after all the dramatic upheavals in Chinese history, the political system always slid back into place, and corresponded to the models constructed by the carefully-controlled historiography of state.
Michael R. Drompp, by contrast, looks at China not from the perspective of the imperial historians, but from the periphery, tracing the history of two pastoralist groups who lived just outside the frontiers of Chinese empires from the fifth century onwards: the Tuyuhun in the regions around the upper Huanghe (Yellow River) on the northeastern edges of the Tibetan Plateau, and the Khitans in Southern Manchuria along the upper Liao River. Both were medium-sized peoples that appear in the Chinese sources around 400 CE, while northern China was divided during the period of the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’. Both were not only exposed to Chinese interventions and influence but also to the stronger steppe powers in what is now Mongolia, the realms of the Rouran, Titrks/Turks and Uyghurs, and at times also the Tibetan Empire (in the case of the Tuyuhun, who were finally incorporated into it in 663 CE), and the Korean states (to the east of the Khitans).
Both the Tuyuhun and the Khitans went through, as Drompp puts it, ‘a bewildering series of shifting allegiances’ to neighbouring powers. Jonathan Skaff has described relations between powers in the Sui-Tang period as essentially individual patron-client relations which constituted a flexible instrument of establishing hierarchies within and between Chinese and nomadic societies.!38 The Tuyuhun profited from their favourable location, protected by mountains but in control of a main road from China to the west, and established a centralized polity led by a qagan, at the time the most prestigious title of a steppe ruler. Still, in the seventh century CE they succumbed to the double pressure from the Tibetan and Tang empires.
The Khitans were more exposed to interventions from three sides, and organized as a tribal federation with less space for building sovereign positions of power. Yet, as Drompp notes, paradoxically they sustained the pressure of neighbouring realms for much longer, perhaps because of their more flexible, decentralized structure. In spite of repeated political setbacks, they survived many of their imperial neighbours. Their moment came in the early tenth century CE, when they exploited the weakness of the Song Dynasty in China and the end of the ‘Orkhon tradition’ of successive steppe empires in Mongolia to expand into Northern China, and became part of official Chinese history as the Liao Dynasty.
They were remarkable for their system of binary rule, in which the steppe elite remained in Manchuria, and a separate capital was established for the administration of the Chinese subjects. The Liao maintained their rule until the Jurchen defeated them in the early twelfth century CE. Part of the Khitans then moved west to the regions between the Amu Darja and the Altai and founded the empire of the Kara Khitay (the ‘Black Khitans’, or Western Liao in the Chinese sources, which still regarded them as a Chinese dynasty). Michal Biran has called their empire ‘a unique window on the extensive cross-cultural contacts between China, Inner Asia and the Muslim World’!°9 It fell to the Mongols in 1218 CE. The late medieval/early modern English term for China, Cathay, derived from their name, Khitan/(Kara) Khitay.
The two cases, similar and different as they are, constitute remarkable examples of resilience in the shadow of empires, and reflect the changing magnetism of China and its shifting impact on its peripheries. Both groups had emerged beyond the former frontiers of the Han Empire, and both essentially maintained their pastoralist ways. China’s steppe neighbours repeatedly made a point of resisting the lure of Chinese luxury, which the Ancient Turkish inscription of Bilge Khagan in the Orkhon Valley (733) made responsible for the fall of the First Turkish Empire: ‘Deceiving by means of their sweet words and soft materials, the Tabgach (Chinese) are said to cause the remote peoples to come close in this manner ... Being deceived by their sweet words and soft silk, you, Turkic people, were killed in great numbers’!4° However, both the Tuyuhun and the Khitans got to know their Chinese neighbours very well, and developed extraordinary diplomatic skills in dealing with their imperial pretensions. Their resilience was based on their flexibility.
One thing that emerges from the present volume, then, is that in the period under scrutiny it was rare that empires collapsed quickly and completely, and were swiftly replaced. Rome, the Caliphate, the Chinese empires, Byzantium, the Carolingians, none of them disappeared when their power eroded. Most of them kept a smaller part of their realms after suffering severe losses. They all retained some of their authority and symbolic capital after their unequalled power had waned. Their range of influence could stretch far beyond their actual capacity of intervention. Post-imperial systems, to an extent, remained grounded in the imperial past and its tangible remnants. Imperial ambitions continued, although outside China many attempts at imperial reunification had only limited success. The shadows of previous empires lingered over the plurality of their political heirs.
This continuing interaction between imperial traditions and new political formations, but also the ‘contrarianism’ of post-imperial elites shaped pluralistic political landscapes within a shared matrix: a discursive frame provided by Christianity in the West and in Byzantium, by Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, and by a blend of ideologies of transcendent harmony most clearly expressed by Confucianism in China. Much of this is surprisingly similar between all the cases discussed in the present volume. However, what became of post-imperial plurality differed between the Eurasian macroregions.
In China, imperial unity remained the focus of political ambitions. In the Middle East and in large parts of the Mediterranean World, empire continued to be on the political agenda, although many attempts fell short of the high expectations they had raised. In Western and Central Europe, a stable plurality of mid-sized states emerged, which increasingly proved resistant to efforts of large-scale political unification. The chapters of the present volume allow to trace many aspects of this gradual divergence that took shape under comparable conditions.
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