Download PDF | A Companion to the Environmental History of Byzantium , By Adam Izdebski (Editor), Johannes Preiser-kapeller (Editor), Brill Academic Pub 2024.
570 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Johan Bakker obtained his doctorate at the University of Leuven. Specializing in palynology, he studied environmental change from the Late Classical period to the present in the territory of Sagalassos.
Henriette Baron is a post-doc researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum fiir Archdéologie (LEIZA) in Mainz (Germany) specializing in Byzantine Human—Animal Studies. Her book Tiere im Byzantinischen Reich reviews zooarchaeological research for the Byzantine Empire. Together with F. Daim she edited the conference volume A Most pleasant Scene and an Inexhaustible Resource, Steps towards a Byzantine Environmental History.
Chryssa Bourbou is a bioarchaeologist at the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania (Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports) and an External Scientific Collaborator at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).
James Crow
teaches Roman and Byzantine archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He studied at the Universities of Birmingham, Newcastle and Sofia. He was later based in Ankara and subsequently directed excavations on Hadrian’s Wall. He lectured at Warwick and Newcastle Universities before his current post as professor of Classical Archaeology at Edinburgh. In Turkey he has directed survey projects on the Black Sea and from 1994 in the west hinterland of Istanbul, surveying and documenting the Anastasian Wall and the Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople. He is the current chair of the British Institute at Ankara. His extensive publications include two books on Hadrian’s Wall, a monograph on the water supply of Constantinople, an edited volume on Byzantine Naxos and the Aegean, and numerous articles on frontiers, fortifications, hydraulic infrastructure and landscape archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean including the Byzantine Cyclades and the Black Sea. He is currently part of a project investigating past and contemporary water issues in Istanbul with a focus on the Acropolis/Topkapi Saray area.
Michael J. Decker is Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida.
Warren J. Eastwood
is currently an Honorary Lecturer at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. He is a biogeographer and palaeoecologist and researches past environmental change for the last 25,000 years or so in the eastern Mediterranean region where he has worked for the past 30 years. His main specialism is elucidating natural versus human-induced vegetation change using pollen analysis (palynology) and works closely with archaeologists and historians and is a core member of the University of Princeton’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative (CCHRI). His research interests also include climate change and the impact of major volcanic eruptions and tephrochronology of volcanic ash layers preserved in lake and peat sediment archives. Warren is currently a member and Honorary Secretary of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA).
Dominik Fleitmann is a Quaternary geologist and palaeoclimatologist and professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
John Haldon is emeritus Shelby Cullom Davis ‘30 Professor of European History and Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and a Co-Director of the Climate Change & History Research Initiative and Director of the Environmental History Lab within the Program in Medieval Studies.
Adam Izdebski is Independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany and Professor of Human Ecology and Environmental History at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.
Eva Kaptijn focuses on human-landscape interaction with a special interest in landscape archaeology, ancient water management, and the social aspects of subsistence economy. She is currently working for Erggoed Gelderland, the Netherlands.
Jiirg Luterbacher is Director Science and Innovation and Chief Scientist at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland and professor at the Justus-Liebig-Universitat Giefen.
Henry Maguire is Emeritus Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He specializes in Early Medieval and Byzantine art. His most recent book is Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (New York, 2012).
Mischa Meier is Professor for Ancient History at the University of Tiibingen. His research interests encompass Greek History (esp. Sparta), the early Principate and Late Antiquity. Among his monographs are Das andere Zeitalter Justinians (22004), Anastasios I. (22010) and Geschichte der Volkerwanderung (82021).
Lee Mordechai is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lee has worked on historical disasters, including earthquakes and floods, and has focused his work in recent years on the 6th century Justinianic Plague and the 536 event.
Jeroen Poblome is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leuven. As director of the Sagalassos Archaeological Research project he coordinates research programmes into past and present socio-ecological systems, social innovation, governance, sustainable development, and resilience.
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller
is a researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research/Department for Byzantine Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer in Byzantine and Global History at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of Byzantium, the medieval Mediterranean and the Caucasus in a global perspective, as well as on historical network analysis, complexity studies, and environmental history. His recent publications include the monograph “Der Lange Sommer und die Kleine Eiszeit. Klima, Pandemien und der Wandel der Alten Welt von 500 bis 1500 n. Chr.” (Vienna 2021).
Abigail Sargent is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. She focuses on the histories of rural societies in the high medieval West.
Peter Talloen was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven. His research interests comprise the archaeology of cult, material culture, urbanisation, and acculturation processes in ancient Anatolia from the late Iron Age to the Middle Byzantine period. He is currently working at the Suleyman Demirel University in Isparta, Turkey.
Costas Tsiamis is Physician-Cytologist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Public and One Health of University of Thessaly (Greece). He received his Ph.D. in Historical Epidemiology at the Department of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He specializes in Historical Epidemiology and Public Health. He teaches History of Public Health, Migrant and Refugee Health and Health Diplomacy.
Ralf Vandam was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven. Landscape Archaeology, Human-environment Interactions, Material Culture Study, Late Prehistoric Archaeology, Early Complexity, Ancient Anatolia. He is currently working at the Vrije Universiteit, Brussel.
Myrto Veikou
specializes in Byzantine Studies (Archaeology, History, Philology) at Patras University, with particular interest in the investigation of the concepts of space and spatiality in Byzantium. She has been publishing on medieval settlement and spatial studies, based on Byzantine material culture and literary texts, since 2009. Her book Byzantine Epirus, a topography of transformation. Settlements of the 7th-12th centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania, Greece (Brill 2012), addressed the history of medieval settlement as a result of interaction between physical/social space and human agency, and set forth a new theory on the historicity of natural space.
Sam White is professor of political history at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and formerly professor of history at the Ohio State University. His work specializes in environmental and climate history and the uses and politics of history. He has written books on the Ottoman Empire and colonial North America as well as articles on disease, disasters, climate reconstruction, and theory and methods in interdisciplinary history.
Elena Xoplaki is researcher at the Department of Geography, Climatology, Climate Dynamics and Climate Change, Centre for International Development and Environmental Research, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Environmental History of Byzantium.
An Introduction
Adam Izdebski and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller
1 The Rationale and Genesis of the Present Volume
Let us begin this introduction with the characterization of environmental history in a recent synthesis by the French historian Grégory Quennet.! Instead of pointing out what environmental historians should do, as many earlier authors of introductions to environmental history had tried to do, Quennet sought to find the common denominator to all the works included in the research field. Quennet first drew attention to the fact that the field of research always begins from phenomena with their own concrete, material dimension. An environmental historian deals with the physical world, which includes plant growth, the lives of animals, the flows of river and ocean waters, energy conversion, and atmospheric phenomena. This leads to a duality that is atypical in humanistic thinking: on the one hand, the environment appears highly material, while on the other it must be seen as a cultural construct, as images “sitting” in the minds of people from the past; without taking these images into account it is not possible to understand the interdependence of man and nature.
Asa result, the story of the environment’s role in history will always feature many actors, be they human, plant, animal, invisible to the eye (such as diseases), or inanimate. They will be connected by a web of dependencies, which environmental historians will almost all construct in their own individual ways depending on the topic at hand. This web, a complex historical ecosystem, is never stable: it is in an almost permanent state of disequilibrium. This is reflected in the imbalances between social groups and human institutions, in the painful differences in access to natural resources or in the threats to humans that the natural world harbours. This relationship between the vicissitudes of nature and social changes — which take place at a given time and location, and thus in a specific historical reality — is the starting point for all research into environmental history. It is also visible in the current companion, which begins with a series of introductions to the methods used to reconstruct different facets of the “material environment”, and then moves on to demonstrate in selected case studies how these environmental realities became entangled in human experience, that of the people we call “Byzantine” and of their neighbours.
The story of this companion reaches back a decade. It began between 2012 and 2014, when an increasing number of lectures and publications indicated the beginning of a new trend in the study of the medieval environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. As a field of research, it had started much earlier (as we explain below), but, as the 2010s unrolled, what changed was the increasing consideration of the natural scientific data in relation to the written sources that had thus far dominated the field.? The original aims of the companion were thus firstly to introduce a wider readership of scholars to these various types of evidence and secondly to illustrate the potential and problems of this novel kind of research with a series of examples from several regions and periods.?
Various factors, however, delayed the finalization of the volume. Some were organizational or personal in nature, including the editors changing places and conditions of employment or authors withdrawing and new contributors being brought on board. This included Ronnie Ellenblum’s tragic death, which robbed this book of his valuable perspective. Some emerged from the sheer dynamics of the growing field of environmental history, which became manifest in a rapid rise in the number of publications, both articles as well as monographs and collected volumes, and the associated necessity to update or modify chapters and to integrate (or evaluate) new findings and controversies.*+ On the one hand, this broadened the scientific basis for the present volume, which thus reflects a more mature stage of Byzantine environmental history’s development; on the other hand, this required continuous revision and updating of the volume as it was taking its final shape.
What some readers (as well as reviewers) may miss in this volume is an overarching synthesis of the questions, methods and findings distributed among the various chapters. However, even if the amount of evidence and studies has significantly increased in the last decade, we are still far from presenting one coherent “environmental history” of the Byzantine Millennium (as they exist for diverse aspects of Byzantine history, such as political or church history, literature or law).5 Many regions, periods, and phenomena are still massively underrepresented in our data, and where the latter exists, it still often poses more questions with regard to the actual entanglement between environmental and socio-economic or cultural dynamics than it provides answers. It seems questionable whether it will ever be possible to write a single synthesis that does justice to the various spatial and temporal scales of these dynamics, and, at the moment, collaborative works such as this provide the best approximations.®
At the same time, there is a growing interest in the environmental history of the Mediterranean’ and of the Middle Ages.® It is in this trend that we need to embed the current activities in Byzantine studies, which in turn have profited enormously from developments that took off especially beginning in the 1960s.9
2 The Development of Environmental History
Environmental history as a field of historical research in its modern sense was born in the United States, and for its first decades focused on the history of that country. The first works concerned nature conservation in the USA and the perception of the natural world in American culture. (The book later recognized as the first work in environmental history concerned what “wild nature” meant to American identity.°) Other topics appeared as new people educated in historical or environmental fields joined the group of environmental history pioneers. For many of them, the influence of an ideological involvement on their scientific interests, and on how they speak about the past, is evident.
Donald Worster, the author of one of the first books to describe not concepts but actual changes in the natural environment and their impacts on people, devoted his professional life to exploring capitalism’s destructive influence on nature. In the first of his many works, which focused on the Dust Bowl — the decade of dust storms in the Great Plains of the United States in the 1930s — he tried to show how the capitalist exploitation of nature (in this case agriculture that ignores local natural resources) inevitably leads to ecological disaster! Regardless of how right Worster was in declaring capitalism “guilty” of the ecological disaster experienced by the American prairies during the Great Depression, one thing is certain. His book was a breakthrough in the thinking of historians, who from then on began to realise that social and economic phenomena have a natural dimension that can sometimes completely change the course of events: as the pioneers of environmental history would say, “Nature can punch back.”
At the same time, by highlighting the complex interplay between environmental and social dynamics, the pioneering authors such as Worster were rejecting deterministic scenarios developed in the late 19th and early 2oth century. The American geographer Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947), for instance, in his book Civilization and Climate (1915), assigned climate the prime role in historical developments.!? In turn, the British historian William Henry Samuel Jones (1876-1963) claimed in 1907 that diseases such as malaria were the main cause of the decline of the Roman Empire, since they corrupted the morale of the Romans.!8 Such theories were often mixed with notions of the “racial” superiority or respective inferiority of specific ethnicities afforded by supposed environmental or climatic (dis)advantages.'4 This problematic heritage from earlier approaches to environmental history also burdened more recent initiatives and among many historians contributed to scepticism towards attempts to bring environment and climate back into the discussion.
Similarly controversial were works on the “biological advantages” of Europeans over the inhabitants of other continents: advantages that would ultimately allow them to dominate the whole world in the igth and 20th centuries and to create a series of natural and social “new Europes’ in various parts of the globe. The first work to address this topic in a fundamentally new way, from the perspective of environmental history, was The Columbian Exchange by Alfred Crosby.!® It discusses the exchange of plants, animals, and microorganisms (diseases) that occurred between two previously isolated parts of the world — America and Eurasia — as a result of the conquests of Christopher Columbus. Of course, Europeans benefitted from this exchange, and not the natives of the Americas, where the overwhelming majority of the population died within a few decades as a result of previously unknown diseases brought from Europe.!” Another important topic that the generation of environmental history pioneers took on was how social structure and culture penetrated the landscape — or, more broadly, how humanity shapes nature for its own use (or, one might say, “in its own image”). This issue was first raised in two works — one by William Cronon and one by Carolyn Merchant — that were published almost synchronously in the 1980s and that concerned the first period of the history of New England in the 17th and 18th centuries.'®
Synthesizing systems of knowledge, mentality, gender roles, legal institutions, ecosystems and landscape into a single vision of the past led Merchant to formulate the concept of “the ecological revolution’. This idea conceives of a holistic and simultaneous transformation of societal and natural structures. The concept of the ecological revolution points with full force to the histories of man and nature being inseparable. Of course, at first glance it may seem that nature is objectified in such a historical perspective — that it is subordinated to man. Other key works by the pioneers of environmental history may make the same initial impression — those that show the mechanization of nature as industrialization progresses.!9 However, in fact, each of these works draws attention to the way in which ecosystems and the inanimate environment react to human activity. Nature never lies passive in the hands of man but responds to his or her actions in a way that accelerates or even directs changes in man’s approach to nature, as well as changes at the very heart of society itself.
Although environmental history was born in North America and was initially primarily an attempt to rewrite US history, this does not mean that at the same time, or even earlier, European historians were not showing similar interests. The most important European equivalent to environmental history is the French Annales school, a new direction in historical research born in France in the interwar period that flourished in the 1960s and ’7os (the name deriving from a journal in which representatives of the Annales school published their work, i-e., from the first version of the journal title, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale). The representatives of the new wave in French historiography were from the very outset interested in the spatial dimension of social changes, thus modifying the foundations of historical geography.?° However, the breakthrough in this field of historical research was only made by amember of the second generation of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel (1902-85), in the famous work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the times of Philip 11 (King of Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, 1556-98).”! This several-hundred-pages-long book is unique for the fact that only the third part is dedicated to the conflicts and events of the reign of Philip 11. The second part is a description of socio-economic transformations, which Braudel followed decade by decade and generation by generation, while the first, introductory part of the book deals with what he called “long-term processes”. Braudel understood this concept as “almost stationary history” (U’histoire presque immobile): extraordinarily slow changes in the natural and spatial dimension of human activity, which can be observed only by looking at history from a “bird’s eye” view — from the perspective of centuries or even longer periods of time.
The French historian’s revolutionary approach consisted in making the study of the natural world a springboard to contemplating past social change and, ultimately, to thinking about the “surface level” of history — that is, events occurring in quick succession. In other words, Braudel understood the natural environment as frames that impose restrictions on, and provide opportunities to, historical societies — as the theatrical stage on which history plays out. With all the novelty of Braudel’s approach, his perception of the place of nature in human history is actually the reverse of the view that underlies environmental history. In that approach, which this book adopts from the outset, the natural environment is a historical figure on a par with humanity; it changes at the same pace — according to various measures of historical time, be they short or long — as society in all aspects of its existence. For an environmental historian, nature cannot be relegated to the realm of the unchanging and “stationary”. The human and natural world are constantly interacting and co-creating one another, building a common history.?2
One far closer to the current understanding of nature's place in history was a younger member of the Annales school’s second generation, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (born in 1929). Preparing his first book on the history of the villages of Languedoc (in the French region on the Mediterranean Sea, to the west of Provence), he noticed that what should be unchanging and almost eternal — the annual rhythm of natural life and agricultural activity — is in fact subject to constant changes.?3 When he began to look more closely at the dates of the grape harvest from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution, he discovered that they were closely related to the weather conditions in the summer of that year, and thus constituted a record of climate change, both from decade to decade and over a longer timeframe. This discovery led Le Roy Ladurie to make climate history and its impact on human history one of the mainstays of his scientific career, laying the foundations for a completely new field of historical and natural scientific knowledge (which is currently flourishing).2*
Moreover, the experience gained in studying the climate and the dependence of Languedoc peasants’ way of life on the rhythms of nature sensitized Le Roy Ladurie to the historicity — in other words, the impermanence and variability — of all ecosystems and landscapes that humanity has a hand in. Hence, in another ground-breaking work, in the fascinating study of the heretical village of Montaillou, he devoted a great deal of space to the ecological aspects of how this particular community that existed in the French Pyrenees in the late Middle Ages functioned.” In his understanding of the role of nature in history, Le Roy Ladurie was, in a word, “close” to the American pioneers of environmental history acting at the same time across the Atlantic and with whom he remained in frequent contact, as evidenced by the 1974 jointly-published thematic issue of the Annales journal.
Climate history itself grew over the following decades to become a European specialization within the wider field of environmental history. In addition to Le Roy Ladurie, the group that created this historical discipline included the British geographer Hubert Lamb (1913-97) and the still-active Nestor of Swiss environmental historians Christian Pfister (born in 1944). In his works, which mainly concerned the Early Modern period (16th-18th centuries), Pfister developed an approach that not only can reconstruct past climate changes, but also, above all, allows their impact on human life and activity to be studied — from agriculture, through understandings of the world, to superstitions and other phenomena of culture in its broader sense.?® At the same time, historians from other European countries — Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain — have further attempted to transfer experiments in American environmental history to the European context, yielding works that present a new understanding of the key processes of socio-economic change in Europe at the beginning of Early Modern times.’
3 Byzantine Studies and Environmental History
The field of Byzantine Studies has also long been engaged with environmental or geographical issues, and the “environmental interests” of byzantinists do map rather well onto how historical research into environment-related topics developed in different European countries.28
The two key currents of environmental history avant la lettre within Byzantine Studies were inspired by historical geography, in both the French and the German version — the former closely connected with the Annales school and the latter focusing primarily on the reconstruction of settlement history and communication networks of the Byzantine world.?9 In France, we are thus faced with regional stories devoted to specific regions of the Byzantine world or neighbouring territories. One classic is Jean-Marie Martin’s study of Apulia: in this case, the environment, which is discussed traditionally in the first part of the work, acts as the backdrop against which the region’s history unfolds.3° Meanwhile, research by a team led by Jacques Lefort and his work on Macedonia and Bithynia have already gone beyond the scope established by the Annales school. Representatives of the natural sciences collaborated on the work and undertook to reconstruct natural changes in the past (though to a limited extent), and the questions it posed concerned the landscape as much as settlement or the ecclesiastic network. Regrettably, Lefort’s team managed to study only two regions of the Byzantine world — Macedonia and Bithynia.!
For the Viennese “school” of historical Byzantine geography, the Tabula Imperii Byzantini (T1B) project (first presented by Herbert Hunger at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Oxford in 1966) is of fundamental importance: successive volumes reconstruct the settlement and transport networks of a given region in successive periods of Byzantine history, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages.? This large research project established a special framework for the methodological approach to historical geography.
The research of the TIB aims to reconstruct the state of the Byzantine world at a certain moment in the past and to encapsulate the changes that its spatial organization has undergone. One of the most interesting works to have been created in this circle is Johannes Koder’s introduction to the historical geography of Byzantium. It illustrates both the ambitions and the limitations of this approach. Even its title is significant: Das Lebensraum der Byzantiner, “The living space of the Byzantines”.3% This title reflects the author's ambition to reconstruct the space in which the Byzantines lived, in all its richness and diversity. The book contains chapters on landscapes and climate, but they are based on 2oth-century (modern) data, rather than palaeoclimatic or palaeo-ecological data (which was, after all, hardly available in the 1980s).
The historical analysis focuses on the transport network, state and church administration and the settlement network. It thus constitutes an overall synthesis of the Tabula approach but presented in relation to the Byzantine world. It should be emphasized that, even though the Tabula Imperii Byzantini team to this day largely continues to work along the methodological principles formulated in the 1960s and ‘7os, the group also seeks contact with researchers from within or beyond the world of Byzantology who deal with spatial phenomena of relevance to Byzantium.** These contacts spawned the works of a young generation of Viennese byzantinists who exceed the traditional bounds of historical geography, heading towards historical anthropology or digital humanities, for instance.*° In addition, research on environmental and climate historical aspects was integrated in Vienna into a new research programme on complexity and medieval global history.3®
In general, long-standing historiographic traditions — which, of course, do not represent the entirety of historical geography in Byzantine Studies — were joined by another very active research field, namely, the climate history of the Byzantine world. Although it had been raised as a research problem by the 1990s, for more than ten years it had enjoyed the interest of only two byzantinists: the Austrian historian and historical geographer Johannes Koder, who speculated as to the possible impact of climate change on the history of the Empire,?’ and Ioannis Telelis, a Greek philologist who gathered all mentions of weather phenomena scattered throughout Byzantine literary texts.3* This situation changed in the 2o10s, since Byzantium became a subject of interest to Princeton’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative.?9 This group is a forum bringing together historians and representatives of natural sciences (including palaeoclimatologists) investigating the Eastern Mediterranean. In recent years, the group has published or inspired a large number of studies on the climate history of Byzantium of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.1°
Thereby, Byzantine studies is also entangled within the wider and growing field of medieval environmental history, whose flourishing is also manifested in the choice of main thematic strands for major events such as the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (2021, on “Climates”)*! and a rapidly growing number of studies across periods and regions, from Late Antiquity to Early Modern, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to South Africa, in various languages.” As this volume makes clear, however, while climate history remains one of the main driving forces of the field of Byzantine environmental history, it is far from the only one, as the field is expanding to include a wide variety of environmental phenomena.
4 Byzantine Environmental History and Mediterranean Studies
Byzantium’s environmental history can also not be discussed without mentioning the controversy about the Mediterranean world as a subject of historical research. The debate on this subject has been particularly reinvigorated in the last 20 years thanks to the monumental study by Peregerine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea of the year 2000.48 Written with the intention of taking its place as “the new Braudel’, the work distinguishes between history that describes the Mediterranean world (“the history of the Mediterranean”), and history grounded in the realities of the Mediterranean, ie. in which the Mediterranean is a historiographical category (“history in the Mediterranean”).
The authors consider Braudel (and themselves as his successors) a representative of this second tradition, unlike many other historians who, though they write about the Mediterranean world, are not interested in what makes it unique. Although this distinction may seem artificial, especially that it is expressed through the use of mere prepositions, it raises a significant problem that the authors of The Corrupting Sea had to grapple with and that, since the publication of their book, has been the subject of debate by historians: what makes the Mediterranean unique as a subject of historical research, what justifies writing about the history of the Mediterranean world, or what is to be the subject of a truly Mediterranean historiography?
Horden and Purcell pose this question because they have a suggested answer. Their position is that the Mediterranean world may be an almost timeless historiographical category, so their answer relates to essentially environmental phenomena (and not, for example, the socio-political: no empire or country, even one as long-lived as France, can accommodate a three-thousand-year history such as that which Horden and Purcell write about). Interestingly, the strategy of using arguments grounded “in nature” in this context is deeply rooted in the mode of thinking about nature and history that Braudel and the Annales school developed. As we have already explained, Braudel and his milieu saw geographical or environmental phenomena as the most stable element of reality and, because of this stability, geographical similarities can best be used to justify making a particular area the subject of long-term perspectives on history (as Braudel did in La Méditerranée).
It is worth exploring in more detail this justification, which in a way redefines the theme of unité that is repeated in the titles of successive chapters of the first part of La Méditerranée. Specifically, Horden and Purcell believe that what makes the Mediterranean world unique is its division into an infinite number of “microecologies” — small regions, sometimes consisting of a single valley or coastal plain, which differ in their environmental potential (climate, soils, vegetation) and have developed into a stunning mosaic of landscapes. At the same time, all these microregions are connected to one another by the sea on which they lie. According to Horden and Purcell, this interplay of fragmentation and connectivity should be the theme of every study of history in the Mediterranean (i.e., grounded in Mediterranean realities).
Besides Horden and Purcell, so too John McNeill has attempted to redefine the Mediterranean in the last quarter century by conducting a comparative study of mountain chains in various regions of the Mediterranean world.** His work has been innovative in many regards, especially in its attempt to apply the American environmental history model to a new geographical context, but it has had only a limited impact. Nor did McNeill avoid simplifications by allowing the influence of Worster and other pioneers of American environmental history to limit the scope of his historical analysis to the last two or three centuries. At the same time, his standpoint was that, in the pre-modern era, mountainous areas were subject to constant and repetitive rhythms, and that true changes occurred only with the advent of modernity (which is in keeping with Braudel’s approach to the Mediterranean environment).*5
More innovative were two other studies published at almost the same time as The Corrupting Sea. The first is a study of the historical ecology of Mediterranean Europe by Olivier Rackham and Alfred Grove,*® based mainly on archaeological and environmental material. It focuses on the natural phenomena that historians and archaeologists usually take to be unchanging, but that do change over time and should be seen as dynamic actors of history rather than purely a set of relatively stable “geographical factors”. To a large extent, the book contradicts Braudel’s vision of the Mediterranean that Horden and Purcell, as well as McNeill, had adopted and developed.
The second work is a monumental study by Michael McCormick?’ that focuses on economic phenomena, and that proves the durability of communication and trade in the Mediterranean world even in the centuries immediately following the fall of the Roman economic order at the end of Antiquity. Although McCormick does not attach such importance to the category of the Mediterranean, his research was an important reference point for the beginnings of the “Mediterranean debate’, because it proved the endurance of a sui generis Mediterranean system of communication and exchange even through the most difficult conditions (somewhat confirming Horden and Purcell’s thesis that a history grounded in Mediterranean realities can also be written beyond the context of the Roman Empire at peak power.)
While the work of Horden and Purcell garnered widespread admiration for the scale of the undertaking, the theses they presented were not widely accepted, but instead sparked a debate that continues to this day. It has strongly engaged ancient historians, which is not surprising considering that although Horden and Purcell look at the period from ancient Greece to the 19th century, the bulk of their material relates to Greco-Roman antiquity.*8 This discussion has been approached from the perspectives of both traditional historiography and interdisciplinary research.49 Two new book-size syntheses have also been published, one on the “prehistory” and the other on the “history” of the Mediterranean world.5°
However far from consensus we are, it is possible to talk of the Mediterranean as a historiographic category being reinstated — after a break of several decades; this is reflected by, for example, new textbooks on Mediterranean history, such as the Companion to Mediterranean History, whose editors include Horden.* Interestingly, even though it was published more than a decade after The Corrupting Sea, the in-depth understanding of the environmental aspect of Mediterranean history is provided not by Horden and Purcell, but by the Italian-American medievalist and environmental historian Paolo Squatriti. He argues that the ecological connectivity between the various regions and microregions of the Mediterranean world did not lead to a stable environmental structure, but that Mediterranean ecosystems were in a state of constant flux due to those connections, which needed to adapt to new socio-economic or ecological conditions and led to the spread of new species of plants and animals.5?
Byzantine Studies do not hold back from the “Mediterranean debates” and try to address them in various ways. Byzantine historians are increasingly using the term “the Eastern Mediterranean” to designate their research subject. In one of the significant syntheses of Byzantine culture and history of recent decades, by Averil Cameron,°? the last chapter is entitled, simply, “Byzantium and the Mediterranean’ and begins by referencing The Corrupting Sea. But Cameron does not propose any innovative approach to Byzantium as part of the Mediterranean world in Horden and Purcell’s meaning. The chapter concerns Byzantium’s relations with the Islamic world and the place that Byzantium held in the complex political, religious, and cultural reality of the late antique and medieval “Eastern Mediterranean’.
So, what might the Mediterranean category mean in relation to the environmental history of Byzantium? As all contributors to the “Mediterranean debate” admit, the days of the Roman Empire, Byzantium’s predecessor, constitute the only historical period that affords a clear justification for thinking of the Mediterranean as a unified whole. After all, the Mediterranean concept is inspired by the existence of a unified Roman world surrounding the Mare Nostrum.
Therefore, since some chapters in the present volume discuss the persistence of Roman features and elements in Byzantine socio-environmental structures, they also raise the question of the presence in the Byzantine world of a heritage of Mediterranean unity. This, however, does not mean adopting the concept of the “ever-lasting Mediterranean” that Horden and Purcell and Braudel all argue for. The Byzantine world co-created a particular Mediterranean, or rather only its Eastern part, which existed largely separately from the Western part. Byzantium co-created the Mediterranean, which had basically been formed by the late antique Roman Empire, and which was then transformed and consolidated by the Arab conquests and the coming into being of the Muslim world. According to Squatriti, it needs to be emphasized that the connectivity between micro-ecologies, or rather the ecological interdependence of individual regions of the Mediterranean world, is not permanent.
They should instead be looked upon as a phenomenon that fluctuates, a kind of Mediterranean unity that constantly pulsates and morphs.** This perspective — the impermanent, variable structures of ecological interdependence - can also be taken to view the Romanness of the Byzantines. If the Roman world was the apex of Mediterranean unity dreamt of by subsequent empires, including fascist Italy and colonial France, it is appropriate to ask to what extent Byzantium carried this deep ecological interdependence of regions and microregions into the Middle Ages.
5 The Structure of the Volume
As we have already explained, the first section of our companion is devoted to the various “archives of society” and “archives of nature” for environmental history, as Christian Pfister (see above) has called them,®> with contributions from active (and often pioneering) scholars in the field. The chapter of Chryssi Bourbou discusses the evidence related to humans (bio-archaeology). Three other chapters look at the major agents entangled in the ecologies of the Byzantine Empire, such as animals (Henriette Baron), microbes (Costas Tsiamis), and plants (Adam Izdebski). Inanimate “forces of nature” are discussed in two more chapters dealing with climate dynamics (Jiirg Luterbacher, Elena Xoplaki, Adam Izdebski, and Dominik Fleitmann) and seismic phenomena (Lee Mordechai).
The second section of our companion presents “environmental history at work” in various case studies. Two chapters are devoted to longue durée phenomena, such as the relationship between the Byzantines and nature (Henry Maguire) and the traditions and dynamics of agriculture in the Levant (Michael Decker). Other contributions focus on specific regions, such as the islands of the Aegean (Myrto Veikou), two important archaeological sites in Anatolia, Sagalassos (Johan Bakker, Eva Kaptijn, Jeroen Poblome) and Euchaita (Warren Eastwood, John Haldon), or on the hydraulic infrastructures in a long-term perspective in Constantinople and Thessaloniki (James Crow) and in historical Armenia (Johannes Preiser-Kapeller).
The four last chapters in chronological sequence present major periods in the socio-political, environmental and climate history of Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean: Late Antiquity, with a focus on the 5th to 7th centuries (Mischa Meier), the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” and the apex and crisis of Byzantine power in the 1oth to 12th centuries (Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, also tackling more general debates on the socio-political dynamics in this period, hence its length), the Crusader period (Abigail Sargent), and finally the Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Period, characterized in climate historical terms as the “Little Ice Age” (Sam White).
Each chapter in this volume can be read separately, but together they create a valuable overview of the main aspects of the environmental history of Byzantium in its entirety, of course with significant lacunae (regarding periods, regions, or specific phenomena). Still, they provide a firm basis for an orientation in the field, enabling readers to evaluate claims and methods in the increasing number of relevant publications and, equally, to have a starting point for their own further research.
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