Download PDF | Rustam Shukurov - The Byzantine Turks, 1204-1461-BRILL (2016).
528 Pages
Acknowledgements
In the hot spring of 1998, I had the privilege and pleasure to present a paper at the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism in California headed by Professor Speros Vryonis. It was my earliest attempt to discuss the role and place of Asians in Byzantine society using the tools of onomastic study. My paper focused on a rather limited and specific case of the Empire of Trebizond. In the course of discussion, Professor Vryonis suggested in particular that my approach had to be assessed in a much broader historical context. This exchange of ideas, which is so memorable for me, and Professor Vryonis’ thoughtful remarks, for which now I have an opportunity to thank him, have become the starting point of the present book.
I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me, directly or indirectly, in compiling this book: to the librarians of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, of the Bibliothèque byzantine in Paris, and of the University of Cincinnati, as well as to my colleagues and friends Sergej Karpov, Anthony Bryer, Peter Mackridge, Michel Balivet, Gérard Dédéyan, Natalia Teteriatnikov, Bernt Brendemoen, Nina Garsoïan, the late Évelyne Patlagean, the late Angeliki Laiou, the late Elvira Grunina, Scott Redford, the late Andrej Ponomarev, Sonia Colpart, Mikhail Dmitriev, Igor P. Medvedev, Mikhail V. Bibikov, Andrew Peacock, Mikhail S. Meyer, Michael Maas, Peter Baird, Oya Pancaroğlu, Nina Iamanidze, Deborah Brown Stewart, Ksenia Krijger-Lobovikova, Natalia Sazonova, Artemij Streletskij, Elina Dobrynina, Brill’s editor Marcella Mulder, copy-editor Karen Anderson Howes, and my son Oyat Shukurov. I am especially indebted to my late mother Claudia Loukanina and my brothers Sharif Shukurov and Anvar Shukurov whose unflagging help and encouragement speeded up the completion of this study.
I am also grateful for the generous financial help of a number of institutions which supported my research at different stages: La Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris), Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC), University of Cincinnati, the American Council of Learned Societies (New York), and the most recent aid from the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 14-28-00213) which greatly facilitated bringing the book to fruition.
Introduction
Throughout most of its history, Byzantium was in a state of permanent struggle with its eastern neighbors for political and cultural supremacy, for the control of the flow of money and goods in the eastern Mediterranean; on occasion this struggle turned into large-scale armed conflict, comparable to the “world wars” of recent history. For many centuries the most dangerous and skilled enemy, in the Byzantine mentality, was located in the East. The empire generally managed to maintain the status quo with Sasanian Iran. The subsequent era of Muslim conquests, however, significantly reduced Byzantium’s territory and greatly weakened its political and economic potential. Byzantium took more than three centuries to recover from the onslaught of the Muslims and to partially restore her position. In the eleventh century, Byzantium suffered another blow from the Turkic peoples who flooded into the Balkans and Anatolia. By the end of the eleventh century, the empire appeared on the verge of annihilation, but in the twelfth century, as in former times, it found the strength to stabilize the situation and restore its prestige. In the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, however, confrontation with the Turkic peoples entered a new phase. By the second half of the fourteenth century, the Byzantines had essentially lost the struggle. This present study is devoted to the final period in the history of the Byzantine empire, a period that ended with its defeat at the hands of the Turkish invaders.
The destruction of the Byzantine world by the Turks is one of the Middle Ages’ most essential phenomena. Why Byzantium was unable to withstand the Turkic invasion and what were the real causes of Byzantium’s historical defeat in the contest with the Turkish Muslim world are fundamental unresolved questions. This book attempts to formulate new ways to answer those questions. To address the major problem, it is necessary to understand how the encounter with the alien Turkic culture affected Byzantine civilization and what the specific features of the Turkic invasion were that made the Turks victorious. These questions cannot be answered by traditional approaches alone. With the inception of Byzantine studies as a discipline in the seventeenth century, relations with the Turks occupied a central place in the writings of the historians of Byzantium. No generalizing approach to Byzantine history could avoid this topic. In the earlier stages of Byzantine studies, the political and military role of the Turks took a more significant place compared to later historiography. It was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that scholars began to open other horizons of Byzantine history, to formulate new questions concerning the internal social, cultural, and economic life of the empire. The main feature of the early historiography was empirical, in which the history of wars, great characters, and diplomatic intrigues dominated. Byzantine-Turkish relations were considered exclusively in political and personal dimensions as an example of religious and cultural confrontation between European Christian and Muslim civilizations. These basic approaches were inherited mostly from medieval (Western and Byzantine) historiography, anti-Islamic polemics, and epics.1 A typical version of the Byzantine-Turkic conflict was formulated in the canonical work of Edward Gibbon, whose fundamental study crowned the earlier historiosophic tradition.2 The writer considered the Turkish conquest possible because of the widespread intrigue, cowardice, and discord among the Byzantine elite. On the other hand, the Turks were described by the author as “ennobled by martial discipline, religious enthusiasm, and the energy of the national character.”3 The description of the historic defeat of Byzantium in Gibbon’s narration seems rather simplistic: on the one hand, it was the military power and the desire for conquest on the part of the Ottomans; on the other, it was a lack of will on the part of traitors that led the Byzantine civilization to disaster. Subsequent generations of historians stayed conceptually close to Gibbon’s scheme in their explanations of the historical defeat of Byzantium, taking into account two classes of heterogeneous (although deeply related) factors: the so-called internal ones caused by a change in Byzantine social and economic institutions, and external ones brought about by the Turkic-Muslim East, Europe in the West, and the Turkic-Slavic North. Researchers have been all but unanimous in maintaining that the decisive role in the fate of the Byzantine empire was not so much the internal crisis (economic and social), but rather the external impact of the Turks who had suddenly conquered Anatolia, most of the Balkans, and finally Constantinople. The Turkic element is regarded as something alien and opposite to the Byzantine world, and therefore doubly devastating.4 This seemingly self-evident interpretation of the Byzantine defeat has for a long time prevented any serious study of specific mechanisms of accommodation of the Byzantine oikoumene to the Turks. At the same time, it must be noted, the description of such mechanisms cannot be limited to the development of purely Turkological topics as a reconstruction of the “methods of Turkish conquest.”5 The first important steps toward elucidating the mechanisms of the corrosion of the Byzantine civilization under the influence of Turkic menace were made not so much in summarizing general histories of the empire, but in specialized works focusing on the collection of sources. Probably the earliest and most insightful attempt of this kind was made by Albert Wächter, a student of Heinrich Gelzer.6 Basing his writing mainly on the acts of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and Notitiae episcopatuum, Wächter demonstrated the rapidly growing crisis in Anatolian Christianity in the fourteenth century. His study was remarkable for the mismatch between an empirical research manner and his distinctly conceptual approach to the subject. Wächter avoided any analytical reasoning, while the consideration of changes within the organizational structures of the Church in an ethnocultural (not confined to historical and ecclesiastical) perspective was profitable. Wächter outlined a basic indicator of the extinction of a Byzantine legacy in Muslim Anatolia, namely the unfolding of de-Christianization and de-Hellenization of Anatolian ethnocultural space. The next significant step in understanding the problem was taken many decades later by Speros Vryonis, whose conception organically developed Wächter’s approach. Vryonis’ work uncovered the significant factor of nomadization of populous and economically important regions of former Byzantine Anatolia, which entailed a massive and transient displacement of autochthonous farmers from their lands. The Turkification of Byzantine Anatolia has been considered by Vryonis to be the result of the Turkic conquests, which initiated two parallel processes: the depopulation of the conquered areas and the Islamization of Greeks who remained under Turkish rule. Growing territorial losses caused not only the economic decline of Byzantium, but also – which may be more important – the depletion of human resources. In Vryonis’ interpretation, the problem of Byzantine-Turkic interaction aligns with the future perspective of the political, ethnic, and religious rivalry between the Christian Greek and Turkic-Muslim worlds. Vryonis considered the Turks to be a power external to the Byzantine world, having devastating impact on Hellenism and acting exclusively through, or as a result of, overt violence.7 The most influential schools of Turkic and Ottoman studies followed a similar direction, postulating an implacable Otherness of the Greek and Turkic substrates. Thus, in 1936–38, Paul Wittek put forward the conception of “Ghāzī,” which quickly gained general acceptance. According to Wittek’s conception, the dominant political ethos among Anatolian Turks, including the Ottomans, from the late thirteenth century, was formed by the idea of ghazawat, that is, the “holy war” against Christianity; the Turkic rulers referred to themselves and their soldiers as the Ghāzī, “fighters for the Faith.”8 However, the concept of confrontation between Greek and Turkic substrates, despite its influence and seeming self-evidence in the research of the time, was not the only approach. The revision of concepts of confrontation developed in two directions. First, the “Ghāzī theory” has been criticized strongly in recent decades. For example, Rudi Lindner has shown that the Ghāzī theory is based on a single 1337 inscription from Bursa, not enough to construct a universal concept. No specific “Ghazi ideology” existed in Anatolia in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, where the Turkic principalities and chiefdoms fought against both Christians and neighboring Muslims. The Ottoman emirate began to turn into a state through sedentarization of nomads and the adoption of Byzantine and Iranian techniques in administrative, social, and economic management. Consequently, it is impossible to talk about any particular ideology of “holy war” developed by the Turks, which would have been a major factor in their destruction of the Byzantine civilization.9 Second, another trend in scholarship was associated with the anthropological research on popular beliefs and daily life in Anatolia and the Balkans. A completely different approach to Greek-Turkish relations, suggested by Frederick William Hasluck, explored beliefs, superstitions, customs, and magical rites circulating mostly in the lower social strata of the Anatolian and Balkan population under the rule of the Turks. He demonstrated an entirely different mode of Greek-Turkic and Christian-Muslim interaction and interpenetration, which often resulted in some syncretic unity of the elements of both religions and cultures in the minds of the Greeks and Turks.10 This trend in research was further developed only after World War II. The most prominent is Michel Balivet, who, like Hasluck, concentrates on the positive mutual transformations of the Byzantine and Turkic cultural substrates that led to their gradual rapprochement. Moreover, Balivet developed this approach specifically in the field of Byzantine studies, thus building a serious counterweight to the concept of confrontation. Based on his fresh reinterpretation of religious, cultural, and political contacts between the Greeks and Turks, Balivet combines Byzantine and Turkish elements within the same space, a certain ethnocultural unity (“une aire de conciliation”), in which not only did Greeks transform the Turkic world, but also, according to Balivet’s concept, Turks made a tangible impact on the Greek-Byzantine substrate at the level of popular culture and everyday life. This mutual transformation developed into the disappearance of the most irreconcilable contradictions between the two worlds. Mutual change and convergence led to the formation of “a multiethnic life style.”11 The fruitfulness of Balivet’s approach cannot be questioned: he has made a significant step in the reconstruction of the micro-level contacts between Greeks and Turks. His approach, however, is not particularly popular in modern scholarship; instead, Vryonis’ concept more precisely describes the essence of the Greek-Turkish meeting as a historical phenomenon. In the set of problems associated with the Byzantine-Turkic relations, two axioms are evident, which compel a choice (conscious or subconscious) in favor of Vryonis’ concept. First, the diversity of convergence between Greek and Turkic elements was, for the Greeks, the result of a forced and unwanted adaptation to changed conditions, which were unambiguously destructive of traditional Byzantine life. Second, the problem of Greek-Turkic interaction should be evaluated in the context of the disappearance of Byzantium as a civilization; it would be unwise to reinterpret this undeniable fact as a kind of metamorphosis of Byzantium into a new Turkic/Turkish entity.
For these reasons I follow Vryonis in interpreting the Greek-Turkic encounter as a conflict of civilizations, one which was fatal for one of the parties. However, the data concerning Byzantine-Turkic contacts found in a variety of written and material sources allow a revision and supplement to modern concepts of the Byzantine-Turkic conflict. Sharing Balivet’s approach, I consider the Turkic element not only as an external military and political factor that affected Byzantine civilization from the outside, but, since at least the thirteenth century, as an influential internal social and cultural factor transforming the Byzantine world. The focus of the present study is to attempt to “interiorize” the problem of Byzantine-Turkic antagonism, to view Byzantine Greek society from the standpoint of its reaction to meeting the alien. From this point of view, the Turks are an indispensable element of Late Byzantine civilization. This perspective distinguishes my approach from both the concept of confrontation and the idea of convergence of Greeks and Turks. I am moving beyond the binary concept of “influences,” which considers the Byzantine and Turkish elements external to each other, and am attempting to find out how far and in what direction the Turkic element could have transformed Byzantine society and culture. Hence, the chronological scope of this study is the Late Byzantine period from 1204 to the mid-fifteenth century, when drastic changes occurred in the role of the Turkic factor in internal and external life of the Byzantine world. Another way in which this study will differ from existing approaches is that it will compare the two major cultural and political areas of the Byzantine world, that is, western (Nicaean, Palaiologan, Epiran) and eastern (Grand Komnenian), and will highlight paradigms of the west and east Byzantine worlds in coping with Turkic newcomers. I will also compare the two major cultural divisions of Turkic newcomers in their interactions with Byzantine societies: Anatolian Turks, who were mostly Islamized and included a large portion of urban Persian population, and the Qipchaq Turks and Golden Horde Mongols and Turks who were primarily nomads and pagans (or at least little Islamized). Such comparisons have never been made systematically.12 Chapter 1 discusses how the Byzantines identified “Turks” as a nation different from their own; I pay less attention to the well-studied subject of “the image of the Turks” in Byzantine literature13 and focus on the cultural distinction of the Turks (especially those who entered Byzantine society) from the Greek majority in that society. In Chapters 2–5 and 7 I analyze the demographic and social consequences of the Turkic presence within the borders of the Byzantine world. Turkic individuals and tribal groups penetrated Byzantine society and, on assumption, changed the demographic makeup in the areas under Byzantine control. However, as of yet we do not know which particular regions of the Byzantine empire (urban, rural) were affected by ethnic Turkification and to what extent. Consequently, one aim of my research is to reconstruct a virtual “map” of the Turkic enclaves in territories belonging to the Byzantine states during different periods. In order to understand the social and demographic changes caused by Turkic penetration, Chapter 6 specifically analyzes the legal and cultural aspects of socialization and naturalization of the Turkic newcomers in Byzantine society. Most Turks who settled in Byzantine lands, throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, adopted Christianity and, thus, entered Byzantine society. The Orthodox Turkic groups in the population of the Byzantine world I describe as “Byzantine Turks”: they constituted a specific Turkic minority within Byzantine society. For many readers, the term “Byzantine Turks” may seem to be an oxymoron like “wet fire” and inappropriate in scholarly discourse. However, the term finds some justification in the Byzantine tradition, in which such usage was not completely alien. For instance, Skylitzes called the Pechenegs who had become Byzantine subjects “Constantinopolitan Pechenegs” (τῶν ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει Πατζινάκων).14 Theodore II Laskaris speaks of “my most beloved Scythian” (τὸν ἐμὸν Σκύθην Κλεόπαν τὸν φίλτατον).15 At this time, Byzantine law refers to “the Barbarians subjected to our state” (τοῖς ὑποτεταγμένοις τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ πολιτείᾳ βαρβάροις).16 Interestingly, this definition corresponds to the name that the Ottomans, in the first half of the fifteenth century, applied to Turkic subjects of Byzantium, calling them “the Turks of the Roman land” (rûm ilindeki atrâk), equivalent to my term, Byzantine Turks.17 Ethnocultural realities in the Byzantine empire, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were more complex than the binary model that most scholars use to describe relations between Greeks and Turks. This binary model – which considers Byzantines and Turks to be somehow fundamentally incompatible, upon whose meeting only one survives – has developed only in modern times in western Europe, in particular in connection with the evolution of the modern ideology of the so-called national state. The concept of ethnicity in the Byzantine mind, as well as the mentality of other cultures in the medieval Mediterranean, had a completely different application to that of modern consciousness. Another important focus of my approach (Chapter 8) deals with the mental effects of demographic and social changes caused by the Turkic penetration. I focus on the alien influences on Byzantine daily life through available linguistic, social, and cultural information from an allological standpoint. Greek and Turkic bilingualism of mixobarbaroi and Turkophonia among Greeks will be discussed in detail. Everyday contacts with the Turks resulted in crucial transformations inside the Byzantine substratum, which may have contributed to the eventual collapse of Byzantium. This study is based predominately on Greek sources. However, it expands the traditional set of sources with a greater involvement of history texts in Oriental languages little known or unknown to specialists in Byzantine history, especially Persian and Arabic (Turkish literature is much better known). My intention is to make these Oriental sources available for the Byzantinist community, so I cite these in full with translations and detailed commentaries, especially those unedited or not yet translated into major European languages. Chapter 9 presents etymologies of Oriental proper names and lexica borrowed by the Byzantines. The lack of new facts has not allowed, in the last decades, our understanding of Late Byzantine society to improve. Another objective is to enrich the source base of Late Byzantine history by putting into circulation Oriental material in various forms, both textual and linguistic. I follow the rules of EI2 in the Roman transliteration of Arabic and Persian words with the following exceptions: the letter �ج is transmitted as “j” and not “dj,” the letter ق � is transmitted as “q” and not “ḳ.” In most cases, for original Turkic words I use “ç” instead of “ch,” “ş” instead of “sh,” and “ğ” instead of “gh,” following the conventions of Republican Turkish. An exception is made in preserving “q” for fricative “k” for Turkic words if it was predominant in Medieval Arabic script. I follow The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the spelling of Byzantine Greek terminology and names.18
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق