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342 Pages
Acknowledgements
This volume is the product of too many people’s labour to produce a definitive list. However, as editors, we feel we must thank a few key people for their help with this process. First and foremost we are grateful to all the contributors for what they have produced, as well as their professionalism and patience during the process of selection and review. The original conference, from which this volume arose, was made possible through the generous support of The Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and Ertegun House. The conference was organised by and thanks to the other members of the executive committee of the Oxford University Byzantine Society, David Barritt, Joseph Dawson, and Sukanya Rai-Sharma, supported by the organising committee, Lynton Boshoff, Nicholas Evans, Alasdair Grant, Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffrey, Max Lau, Nicholas Matheou, Jonas Nilsson, Wiktor Ostaz, Lucy Parker, Aleksander Paradzinski, and Kristina Terpoy. We are also grateful to members of faculty at the University of Oxford who participated in a preliminary round of peer review, particularly Phil Booth, Averil Cameron, James Howard-Johnston, Catherine Holmes, Ine Jacobs, Marek Jancoviak, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, Marc Lauxtermann, Jonathan Shepard, Ida Toth, and Bryan Ward-Perkins. In this, as in many other things, we are also indebted to Mark Whittow. Mark participated with his inimitable enthusiasm in this conference, as he had at countless graduate conferences before it. His presence and the hard work that he wore so casually made Byzantine studies in Oxford the sort of community that nourished activities like this. He is sorely missed. Finally, we would like to thank Marcella Mulder, the series editors at Brill, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive advice.
Notes on Contributors David Barritt has recently completed a doctoral thesis at Oxford University focusing on relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople from the 9th to 11th centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the ecclesiastical, social and cultural history of late antique and medieval central and eastern Europe, and in the application of sociological and anthropological theories to historical themes. Laura Borghetti is currently a PhD candidate within the DFG-funded Training Research Group 1876 “Early Concepts of Humans and Nature” at Mainz University, with a project focused on the literary depictions of meteorological phenomena in Byzantine texts from the 9th to 12th centuries. She holds an MA (2015) and a BA (2012) from the University of Roma Tre. Her main research interests focus on questions of environmental history, narratology, metaphor theories, cognitive semantics and gender within Middle-Byzantine literature. Nikolas Churik holds an MA in Early Christian Studies from the University of Notre Dame and will be pursuing a PhD in Classics from Princeton University. He is interested in rhetoric, literary commentaries and criticism, and linguistic theory. Elif Demirtiken is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. She holds two MA degrees, one in Archaeology and History of Art from Koç University (2010–12), and another in Comparative History from CEU (2012–14). She is currently a junior fellow at ANAMED in Istanbul and also participates in the research project “Crossing Frontiers: Christians and Muslims and their Art in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus”, a part of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories Initiative. Alasdair C. Grant has studied variously Medieval History, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish at the Universities of St Andrews (MA Hons., 2011–15), Oxford (MSt, 2015–16), Edinburgh (PhD, 2016-present), and Mainz (visiting researcher, 2017–18). His doctoral thesis is a study of captives as cross-cultural brokers in the later Byzantine period (c.1280–1450). He has also worked and published on holy war in Pisa (The English Historical Review 131, 2016), and knowledge of the Mongols in Latin Europe (Traditio 73, 2018).
Stephen Humphreys will complete his PhD in Archaeology at Durham University in 2019. He holds MA degrees in Theology (2014) and Archaeology (2014) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a BA in History from the University of North Texas (2004). His research interests revolve around the ecclesiastical economy and the impact of charities in the Byzantine Near East, and the intersection between archaeology and mental health. Mirela Ivanova is an AHRC-Lady Dervorguilla scholar at Balliol College, Oxford working toward a doctoral thesis on cultures of writing in 9th- to 10th-century Slavonicspeaking lands with Dr Jonathan Shepard and Dr Catherine Holmes. She is interested in how people thought about writing and what frameworks rationalised or justified textuality in the medieval Slavic and Byzantine worlds. Hugh Jeffery is currently a predoctoral fellow at ANAMED, Istanbul, completing a doctorate to be awarded by the University of Oxford. He holds an MSt and BA from the University of Oxford. He is an archaeologist specialising in late antique and Byzantine material cultures, and is preparing a study of the Middle Byzantine settlement at Aphrodisias. Matthew Kinloch holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford (2014–18), an MRes from the University of Birmingham (2013–14), and a BA from the University of Durham (2010–13). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He principally works on late Byzantine historiography and is particularly interested in questions of narratology, postmodernism, agency, gender, and reception. Valeria Flavia Lovato obtained her PhD in Greek Literature and Philology at the Universities of Turin and Lausanne (March 2017). Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of Southern Denmark), with a project on Isaac Comnenus Porphyrogenitus. She also works on the reception of Homer, focusing especially on the educational and social function of classicizing learning in 12th-century Byzantium. Francesco Lovino obtained his PhD at the Università degli studi di Padova (2015). He is currently an associate member of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in Brno and Italian fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome. His current research focuses on the reception of Byzantine art and imagery in the 19th and 20th century. Alex MacFarlane is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, working on a thesis titled “Alexander Re-Mapped: Geography and Identity in the Alexander Romance in Armenia”. This follows a MSt in Classical Armenian Studies (University of Oxford) and a MA in Ancient History (King’s College London). Alex’s research focuses on the reception of legendary narratives of Alexander iii of Macedon at the “edges” of the world mapped therein and their recasting in medieval Caucasian literary milieu. For two years, Alex is also a curator/cataloguer at the British Library, working with the Armenian collection. Kosuke Nakada holds an MLitt (2010–12) and a BA (2006–10) from the University of Tokyo. He has also been a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2012–15). After continuing his doctoral study at the University of Tokyo, he moved to the University of St Andrews, where he is currently working on his PhD dissertation. His research examines the social and cultural interactions between Byzantium and the Caucasian peoples from the 9th to 11th centuries. Jonas Nilsson holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford (2012–18), an MSt from the University of Oxford (2008–09) and an MA from the University of Lund (2002– 08). He has worked mainly on the political history of the Middle Byzantine period and is particularly interested in questions of public administration, networks, ideology and the intersection of formal and informal power. Theresia Raum studied Latin, History, and Social and Political Studies at the University of Würzburg. She is currently a doctoral candidate and research associate at the University of Tübingen. She is particularly interested in social mechanisms in Late Antiquity and works on the early 7th century. Maria Rukavichnikova is currently a graduate student at Kellogg College, University of Oxford reading for an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine studies. Her research, supervised by Professor Marc Lauxtermann, focuses on literary analysis of late Byzantine historiography. In particular, she examines the image of the emperor as presented in the writings of two Byzantine historians, George Pachymeres and Nikephoros Gregoras. Milan Vukašinović holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History from the University of Belgrade. He is presently enrolled in a joint PhD program of Byzantine history at the EHESS in Paris and the University of Belgrade, principally focused on the first half of the 13th century. His research interests include narrativization of present and past social experience in medieval and modern texts, different conceptions of ideology, and gender issues.
Constructing Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Introducing Trends and Turning Points
Matthew Kinloch
In 1204, the city of Constantinople fell to the pilgrims of what historians have traditionally called the fourth crusade. No moment of the late antique or Byzantine past could better illustrate how trends and turning points dominate the manner in which scholars have sought to first make sense of and then reconstruct that past. The capture of the city has been understood as a moment of dramatic change. A Roman emperor was replaced with a Frank, the Greek rite with Latin, and a single polity with many. With this moment, we are told, a period of dramatic anarchy and decline from the late 12th century reached its climax, just as that same trend towards decline continued until Byzantium’s ultimate collapse with Constantinople’s fall in 1453. With 1204, another narrative was also conceived, that of reconquest, which would also terminate in the dramatic fall of Constantinople, albeit this time to Romans in 1261. In narratives about the late antique and Byzantine worlds, seemingly important events, such as the fall of Constantinople, are often described as turning points. They function as moments of change in the stories that both contemporaries and moderns tell about the past. Whether as beginnings, ends, catalysts, or stoppages, turning points are a common element of both scholarly descriptions and explanations of past happenings. Be it the death of an emperor, the composition of a work of literature, the construction of a building, or a battle, turning points constitute linguistic, narrative, and symbolic means of assigning meaning. At the other end of a wide spectrum of meaning allocation, trends have provided scholars with a means of both describing and explaining longer-term (often incremental) change. Christianisation, Turkification, expansion, growth, decline, and many other processes constitute examples of trends, by which scholars have categorised, ordered, and assigned meaning to great swathes of the past. As can be seen from the example of 1204, trends and turning points are enmeshed together to create a framework within which scholars have told and interpreted the past. However, as sceptical (or not) as scholars of the late antique and Byzantine world may be of master narratives or epoch-transforming events, they still dominate both previous and contemporary scholarly output.
Cycles of revisionism and counter-revisionism come and go, but they are couched in these same frameworks of narration and explanation. The late Byzantine (or Palaiologan) world may have been reclaimed by some as a period of cultural boom, rather than military decline, and 1204 might be framed as a consequence of an increasingly interconnected Mediterranean, rather than as a great clash of opposing civilisations, but the structural apparatus by which meaning and significance has been judged remains the same, either single moments of dramatic action (turning points) or long-term transformations leading teleologically in a particular direction (trends). Actions, such as the diversion of the fourth crusade to Zara, the petition of the crusaders by Alexios iv Angelos, and the crusade’s insufficient funding, are made meaningful because they led to the capture of Constantinople, which itself is made meaningful by the effect it had on other actions. It is worth considering for a moment what exactly a trend or turning point might be, from a functional perspective. They are not first order information, that is data, but rather packages of information that have already been processed, interpreted, and placed within some kind of narrative schema. The fall of Constantinople, as it appears in modern scholarship, is made up of all the texts which purport to describe it and all the narratives in which those descriptions are embedded, mediated by all the decisions scholars have made about those texts and contexts. For all this complex mass of elements to be represented in four words, ‘the fall of Constantinople’, is impossible. What we have is a shorthand, a simplified and telescoped colligatory unit, which can be deployed within a narrative of its own, be it the end of a story of crusade, the beginning of a history of late Byzantium, or the midpoint of a narrative of church schism. ‘The fall of Constantinople’ is both more and less than the past happenings that scholars have sought to represent. ‘The fall’ contains narrativity, wholeness, teleology, eventness, and a range of other elements, absent from the past. Yet at the same time it lacks much that the past has, be it the details dismissed as irrelevant or the sheer contingency of action. Furthermore, ‘the fall’ of the modern historian cannot even reproduce ‘the falls’ of its sources, because the meanings with which each of its narrators, be they Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Niketas Choniates, or the anonymous narrator of the Chronicle of Novgorod, endowed their stories cannot be compiled into one without an exercise of power by the historian, who chooses what to keep and what to discard. ‘The fall of Constantinople’ is a thing that is made and constructed by historians, not a thing that exists out there to be found and related. The constructedness of such events, such turning points, suggests that they might more reasonably be described as concepts than events, since they are more or less thought into being. The abstraction of the structures with which historians frame the Byzantine past is perhaps more obvious in the case of the less tangible trends, which complement these turning points. It is easier to notice that something as abstract-sounding as ‘late Byzantine decline’ or ‘the age of insecurity’ is not an objective description of facts out there in the past. However, it is still easy to overstate the naturalness of such constructs, perhaps with the aid of sequential maps of a shrinking purple Byzantium or a lamenting quotation from Niketas Choniates or George Pachymeres at their most melancholic. Perhaps more importantly, it is also highly convenient to buy into such teleological schemas. By synthesising and making multiple, long, and complex texts meaningful, they allow scholars to get on with their own scholarship. The further away from a scholar’s specific object of study the more willing they seem to be to accept such simplified constructions as trends and turning points. Thus trends and turning points are most likely to occur as either the products and conclusions of synthesising analysis or as the introductory framework into which such analysis is poured. For all that the modern disciplines of late Antique and Byzantine studies have become increasingly open to theoretical concerns, the way we make the Byzantine past meaningful in the writing of it has yet to garner sustained attention. Thinking with Byzantium about theoretical questions of narrativity or the philosophy of historiography sometimes feels like a luxury we, as a discipline, have yet to earn, when so many texts remain unedited, let alone less than comprehensively analysed. However, whether we like it or not, these problems impact on our field. As scholars, we all make choices about where and how we allocate meaning to that which we study. It is not often that we state explicitly how we go about making them. An interesting exception is the explicit theorising found in the introduction to Steven Runciman’s three-volume history of the crusades. In his preface, after having modestly dismissed Herodotus and implicitly compared himself to Homer, he struck out at what he called ‘History-writing to-day’ and in so doing set out his own criteria for meaning and significance. History-writing to-day has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced with the mountainous heap of minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack. His work may be of the highest value; but is not an end in itself. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.1 Today, academia seems to be firmly ensconced in Runciman’s Alexandrian age, especially if the quasi-scholarly works of celebrity academics, of whom Runciman himself was something of a forerunner, are excluded. His observations on the culture of academic production and publication appear prescient. However, they sit alongside much that has dated less well. Most notably his assumption that ‘the modern historian’ could only possibly be a man. As with the sexist assumptions that are so visible in this passage and so often invisible (if structurally persistent) in more recent historiography, Runciman’s assumptions about what historiography should be are explicitly on display. For him, ‘the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man’, which might be understood as trends and turning points, are not just his object of study, but ‘the supreme duty of the [male] historian’. Truly valuable scholarly endeavour, in Runciman’s understanding, must aggregate up to something larger and more meaningful. It is no surprise then that his history is elite, male, and as martial as his academic metaphors. However, despite all this, for Runciman, historiographical ‘creation’ is not an inconvenient truth, but both his objective and method, which he contrasts to mere ‘criticism’. Constructivism, in the philosophical sense, has yet to gain much influence in the field of Byzantine studies, nor does it seem likely to in the future. Runciman’s romanticism should not be confused with any proto-postmodern impulse, but all the same his foregrounding of ‘creation’ seems to be as good a place to start rethinking our scholarly project(s) as any other and it certainly is time to rethink the products and processes of historiographical (and other scholarly) construction. Rereading Runciman’s classic preface begs a number of questions which dovetail with the topic of this volume. What is and is not ‘an end in itself’, what are we creating, and how are we doing it? Primarily we, like Runciman, construct meaning for ourselves, according to our own criteria, whether we make them explicit or not. Yet in contemporary academia there is an increasing pressure to impose meaning on that which we study, not only for ourselves, but for employers, funding bodies, and as Runciman mentioned, for our colleagues. This pressure reveals just how flexible meaning is. It depends on our goals, our audience, and the story we are trying to tell. Given this, there can be no objective criteria for meaning, and thus no objective criteria for the construction of trends or turning points. But is this fundamentally a problem? Do we need to find an alternative model to describe the late antique and Byzantine past? One which does not require the simplification of the past into trends or turning points, nor the subjective imposition of meaning and significance in accordance with some colligatory narrative schema. Without these elements, can we still make our work ‘relevant’ and contextualise it? The principal concern of this volume is to think with trends and turning points, while engaging with, both specific problems with and the constructed nature of, the late Antique and Byzantine past. Given his view of collaborative historiography, it seems unlikely that Runciman would have been very impressed by our efforts. It may seem unwise for one British pen to compete with the massed typewriters of the United States. But in fact there is no competition. A single author cannot speak with the high authority of a panel of experts, but he may succeed in giving to his work an integrated and even an epical quality that no composite volume can achieve. Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History, as Gibbon, the greatest of our historians, was aware…2 In the current volume, we make no pretentions to any epical quality. However, together we offer a platform for alternative ways of approaching a wide range of periods, materials, and problems. The ‘creation’ of which Runciman was such a proponent is not just a question of style and literariness, to be dismissed, but of structuring practices embedded within scholarship of all sorts. Byzantine studies does not need a Homer, a Herodotus, a Gibbon, or a Runciman to tell us ‘what happened’. It is less clear what Byzantine studies does need, but we believe that a diverse mix of scholars, prepared to listen as well as to tell, and to collaborate as well as to strike out alone, might not be a bad place to start. The starting point of this volume is the observation that late antique and Byzantine pasts are always constructed, often out of trends and turning points. The contributions in this book are divided into four sections: Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from (as well as beyond) the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles individually offer solutions to numerous specific problems, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed.
The first section (Scholarly Constructions) of this volume, which includes this introduction, offers an explicitly self-reflexive consideration of how scholars of the late antique and Byzantine world have gone about constructing the past. In the first paper, Francesco Lovino starts by reflecting on the construction both of Byzantium and of Byzantine studies itself. Taking as his focus the seminal Czechoslovakian journal Seminarium Kondakovianum (1927–1938), Lovino demonstrates just what the careful study of the intellectual and physical context of modern scholarship offers the discipline. As he shows, Russian émigré intellectuals constructed, in Czechoslovakia, a rival Byzantanism to that dominant in Stalin’s Russia. Rebelling against the subsummation of Byzantine studies into a discourse of Russian national identity, scholars utilised Eurasianism to push the focus of scholarship East, decentre the Mediterranean and Europe, and challenge the arbitrary dichotomies of East and West. Lovino’s paper serves as a timely reminder that the Byzantine past cannot be extricated from the context in which it is constructed. In a discipline where a self-conscious reception studies is still struggling to form itself, Lovino has ensured that central European scholarship will not be ignored, as it so often is in Anglophone Byzantine studies. The second section of the volume (Literary Trends) focuses on trends in Eastern Roman literature. In it, contributors consider how the Byzantines themselves (as well as modern scholars) constructed texts. Together, these studies reveal the double bind in which modern scholars find themselves, trapped between the constructed quality of both the sources and creations of their study. Laura Borghetti opens this section by reanalysing the femininity and iconodule philosophy which underpin the Cassia constructed by scholars from her Hymns. The role of the Cross in the female saint’s passio threatens to undermine the basic assumption of the author’s alleged iconodule faith. As she shows, far from being a simple magical object, the Cross can be considered as a proper αἴνιγμα of Christ’s presence alongside the holy woman. Through a careful analysis of text and narrative structures, Borghetti raises questions regarding the basic assumptions of scholars regarding their own Cassia and the Cassia that we actually find in the text. She is joined in rethinking the assumptions which underpin famous characters of Byzantine literature by Valeria Flavia Lovato, whose study also finds parallels with that of Lovino, since her focus is on the reception and construction of the past. Her elucidation of scholarly debate during the 12th century, in the work of the exegetes Eustathius of Thessaloniki and John Tzetzes, focuses on the reception of a debate already present in Homeric poetry as to who was the best of the Achaeans. Lovato reveals a heated debate revolving around the epithet ptoliporthos (‘city-sacker’) that Homer often ascribes to Odysseus. In demonstrating Tzetzes’ deliberate reconstruction of traditional Homeric narratives and reading his argument in discourse with Eustathius’s commentaries, Lovato dismisses the passivity with which scholars used to treat these authors and goes further to reveal their active engagements with both contemporary literary debates and the classical past. In the same section, Nikolas Churik and Milan Vukašinović offer radical reassessments of traditional generic designations, respectively, the metaphrasis and the letter. On the one hand, Churik explores the transformation of meaning between the metaphrases of the Hellenistic and Palaiologan periods, which are so often examined only in a Byzantine context. His reanalysis of syntax and semantics, in the metaphrases of the Alexiad of Anna Comnena, the Basilikos Andrias of Nikephoros Blemmydes, and the Historia of Niketas Choniates, demonstrates that certain characteristics are present across genres, even as the goals of the translator changed, from the 5th through 13th centuries. In so doing he critiques the assumption that there was a unique turning point in the metaphrastic tradition during the Palaiologan period, preferring instead to understand transformation as a more gradual trend. Vukašinović, on the other hand, deconstructs the very notion of documentary evidence in his analysis of the relationship between letters constructed as literary and documentary, in the context of 13th-century Serbian and Epirot historiography. By utilising several narratological tools and speech act theory, he demonstrates that the letters embedded in Serbian hagiographic narrative texts cannot be so easily divorced from supposedly ‘real’ letters. Ignoring unhelpful questions regarding the relative or absolute historicity of letters, Vukašinović problematises the approach of late Byzantine and medieval Serbian historians to their ‘source material’. Concluding this section with a paper exploring George Pachymeres’ Historia, Maria Rukavichnikova examines how a historical narrative of fundamental importance to the historiography of the late Byzantine world has been constructed. She demonstrates that the author’s playful interpretation and utilisation of classical ironic forms is central to the text and furthermore is central to the character of Michael Palaiologos as created by Pachymeres. She argues that Pachymeres reinterpreted the eiron-alazon model from classical drama and then utilised his new version as a key pillar of his work. Such a reading dramatically transforms approaches to both the whole work and specific characters, such as Michael, whose presentation cannot be read without understanding that he plays the role of eiron in classical drama. In the third section of the volume (Constructing Politics), contributors have reconsidered historiographical orthodoxies in the political sphere. Each author takes as their subject moments that have been framed as turning points in late antique and Byzantine historiography. While the papers range over the full breadth of the period, they repeatedly converge on similar problems in both their textual evidence and the approaches of previous scholarship. Their reconsiderations draw on very different methodological and theoretical approaches, from traditional close readings to mobilisation theory of crisis management. However, they share a tendency to contextualise and complicate accepted constructions. Taking the disintegration of the (west) Roman state in the 5th century as his subject, David Barritt reassesses the construction of papal power during this traditional turning point in historiography. Dismantling arguments that the papacy derived its authority through the framework of traditional Roman law, he demonstrates that Leo i (440–61) moved away from legalistic modes of legitimation and sought to place the pope outside legalistic structures and instead derive authority directly through his special spiritual connection with Saint Peter. Theresia Raum’s contribution concentrates on the 30-year period at the start of Byzantium’s so-called dark age (610–41), which is so often conceived of as a momentous turning point in Byzantine historiography. In her powerful study, she reinterprets the radical response of the emperor Heraclius to the stresses placed on both the Byzantine empire and its society during this period. Raum places her response to what she describes as the discourse of threat, found in source material such as the works of George of Pisidia, in the context of the response of individuals within societies under stress. Instead of aggregating all agency to Heraclius and subordinating all transformation to his personal characteristics, she utilises social scientific theory to place Heraclius firmly in his socio-political context. Thus, she generates a more complex and multidirectional picture of the societal transformation that made Heraclius the first emperor to leave Constantinople on campaign since the late 5th century. Kosuke Nakada’s contribution, like that of Raum, decentres the historiography of a commonly assumed turning point, namely the 10th- and 11th-century expansion of Byzantine territory into the Transcaucasus. The Caucasian sections of the De Administrando Imperio have been taken as evidence of a planned and centralised Imperial doctrine of eastern expansion. However, Nakada refocuses on the autonomous rulers of the Caucasus and field commanders. In so doing, he replaces a top-down and centralising vision of both the text of the De Administrando Imperio and of Byzantine power with a reading of the text that highlights rather than covers up its limitations as a source and a more complex and multi-directional set of power dynamics. In showing how a highly normative imperial text from Constantinople has constructed the history of the eastern ‘periphery’, Nakada’s contribution mirrors that of Mirela Ivanova, who deals with the opposite problem. Instead of the Caucasus as constructed from imperial Constantinopolitan texts, she rethinks how ‘native’ epigraphy has been used to construct earlier medieval Bulgarian history (c.700–850). Since inscriptions provide the only native sources for the reconstruction of the early Bulgarian polity, historians have been keen to use them to reconstruct solid chronological trends of progress and growth. By reconsidering the Madara Horseman, traditionally considered the earliest ‘Bulgarian’ monument, and the so-called ‘Triumphal Inscriptions’ of Krum (c.803–14), Ivanova demonstrates that these inscriptions cannot be read as floating factual evidence. Like Raum and Nakada, Ivanova stresses the situatedness of both the textual evidence and the society in which it was produced and interpreted. Given that her material is epigraphic, this means a focus on the materiality of these objects, as well as how they might have been viewed by specific audiences. The result is the powerful argument that these early inscriptions have played and continue to play an important role in not just recording but constructing early medieval Bulgarian history. Jonas Nilsson picks up on many of the themes that have developed throughout the third section of this volume. Again, he challenges a historiographical orthodoxy, regarding the intensification of religious persecution during a moment that has been framed as a turning point, namely the reign of Alexios i Komnenos (r. 1081–1118). While this intensification has generally been portrayed as a top-down imperial attempt to destroy opposition to Alexios, Nilsson’s careful rereading of the evidence for this historiographical construction reveals, once more, a more complex picture. Taking an oration delivered in 1091 by John the Oxite, titular patriarch of Antioch, he argues that Alexios was not seeking to silence his critics, but rather to win their support. When placed within the framework of complex and multidirectional societal dynamics, Nilsson generates an alternative Alexios. An Alexios whose recourse to the traditionalism of the emperor’s role as champion of orthodoxy and his construction of a penitential programme was not an attempt to negotiate support. This analysis contradicts the assumption of comparability with a western model of religious persecution, since it highlights the role of a specific moment of military threat and the direct appeal to pre-existing non-state power structures, rather than the suppression of alternatives to state power. The fourth and final section (Turning Points in Religious Landscapes) incorporates a wider variety of evidence than the rest of the volume. In so doing, it opens up a sustained critique of scholarly constructions in the fields of material culture, archaeology, and the built environment, alongside evidence provided by texts. The final four papers of the volume highlight trends and turning points at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, drawing out commonalities in scholarly approaches to constructing both historiography and a highly religious society. Hugh Jeffrey starts the section by tracing the cult of the archangels Michael and Gabriel in Aphrodisias/Stauropolis from the 5th to the late 12th century. His study thinks carefully about how scholars have constructed meaning from archaeological evidence. First, he reconsiders the apparent turning point in the Christianisation of the city. The conversion of the temple of Aphrodite into a large cathedral has previously been presented as the climax of a violent struggle between pagans and Christians. Instead, Jeffrey understands it as the expression of the Metropolitan bishop’s ongoing attempts to control the vernacular cult of ἄγγελοι (angels). Second, he traces the cult of ἄγγελοι beyond the destructions of the 7th century, which led to the abandonment of that same cathedral. In so doing, he refuses the urge to fit archaeological evidence into the frameworks provided by texts or the expectations of classicists regarding a magnificent antique city. The result is nothing less than the construction of a new temporal frame for the study of Aphrodisias/Stauropolis. Stephen Humphreys’ contribution similarly touches on the complex role of bishops in civic life between the 4th and 7th centuries. After laying out the evidence of crosses in cisterns and other water installations in Byzantine Palestine, Humphries suggests that these crosses were intended as a means of guarding against the contamination of water. His arguments thus contradict scholarly assumptions about Palestinian monasticism and ecclesiastical ownership, while illuminating Christian attitudes to a key resource. In the penultimate paper of the volume, Alasdair Grant compares various accounts of the two translations of the relics of St Nicholas at the end of the 11th century. While scholarship has favoured the three accounts of the first translation of the relics to Bari, Grant seeks to emphasise the fourth and often underappreciated account of the relics’ translation to Venice. Through careful comparative textual analysis of the traditions of the two translations, he creates a platform to discuss the prevailing trend of the late 11th century transformation, which saw the collapse of Byzantine Anatolia catalyse both Turkic and Latin (especially Italian) Christian impingement on and then expansion into Byzantine space. One of Grant’s most important contributions is placing these translations in the context of Venetian participation in the first crusade, a symbolic turning point in modern narratives of this Latin Christian impingement. The final contribution to the volume, by Elif Demirtiken, fills a vacuum in the study of monastic patronage in late Byzantine Constantinople carved out by the historiographical constructions with which I began this introduction. The dramatic turning point of the fall of Constantinople in 1204 has formed the terminus for most studies. Consequently, Demirtiken’s unconventional period of focus (c.1080–1340) allows her to place the founders of the Theotokos Pammakaristos monastery in the context of the considerable amount of available evidence. Demirtiken draws out trends in patronage, which she understands as the ‘materialized representations of unequal relationships between the founder and the audience/viewer’, of both continuity and transformation. The results of her study demonstrate an important change in the profile of patrons. By the 14th century, the Komnenian norms, which saw only those very closely associated with the imperial family as monastic patrons, had loosened to allow an increasingly diverse range of patrons, especially women and those less closely associated with the imperial family. Scholars have found trends and turning points useful because they classify, simplify, and give meaning to that which we study. They fit the incoherent and anarchic mess of the past into structured frameworks that can be used to describe and explain them, allow meaning to be imposed on the past, and even allow us to fit our own academic narratives into the mainstream of late antique and Byzantine studies. For these reasons, they are highly problematic, but they are also a useful place to start if we want to reassess disciplinary assumptions. It would be easy to explain and deconstruct the terminology of trends and turning points, but it is more important to understand the function they fulfil and in so doing reconsider the constructed nature and the constructive process of these framing elements in the scholarship of the late antique and Byzantine world. The early career scholars who contributed to this volume offer the potential for a new trend towards increasing reflexivity in Byzantine studies. However, this collection is merely a contribution and can only become a disciplinary turning point if its readers decide to make it one.
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