Download PDF | Magdalino, Paul, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143-1180, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
584 Pages
The reign of Manuel I (1143-1180) marked the high point of the revival of the Byzantine empire under the Comnenian dynasty. It was however followed by a rapid decline, leading to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The contemporary historian Niketas Choniates chronicled the sequence of events in a narrative which has had a long-lasting effect on modern perceptions. Manuel's policies have been seen as misguided, the brilliance of his reign as sterile and decadent, and the whole basis of the Comnenian revival as fundamentally unsound.
This book, the first devoted to Manuel's reign for over 80 years, re-evaluates the emperor and his milieu in the light of recent scholarship. It shows that his foreign policy was a natural response to the western crusading movement and the expansionism of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. It also shows that what he ruled was more than the impoverished rump of a once great empire, or a society whose development had been arrested by a repressive regime. The twelfth century is presented here as a distinctive, creative phase in Byzantine history, when the empire maintained existing traditions and trends while adapting to a changing world. The structures of the imperial bureaucracy and aristocracy were rationalised increasingly, with power and resources becoming ever more concentrated on the imperial establishment, especially the imperial family, in Constantinople. At the same time, urban society outside the imperial family continued to grow in complexity and sophistication, with the Church becoming more sharply defined as a professional organisation, and the literate elite increasingly able to impose its own rhetorical culture as the basis of national Orthodoxy. It is against this background that the enormous quantity of rhetorical literature in praise of Manuel should be read - literature which has informed all subsequent perceptions of his reign.
Preface
This book grew out of an interest in the palace building and the literary and artistic image of a Byzantine emperor who seemed to correspond to Burckhardt's idea of 'the state as a work of art' as well as any ruler before the Renaissance. My interest was compounded by the realisation that this 'universal man' was not regarded either as a showpiece of Byzantine civilisation or as part of the mainstream of European history. The following chapters represent my long search for a context in which to place the cultural phenomenon of Manuel Komnenos.
Since the project was first conceived, our knowledge and appreciation of twelfth-century Byzantium have improved dramatically. Instead of the textbook orthodoxy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the depressing aftermath of the 'Macedonian Renaissance', we now have a textbook by Michael Angold devoted solely to the period 1025-1204. Ralph-Johannes Lilie has removed some basic obstacles to our perception of the empire's relationship with the West at the time of the crusades. Michael Hendy and Alan Harvey have between them provided a coherent and usable model of the Byzantine monetary and agricultural economy. Twelfth-century literary culture has attracted more and more attention, and Alexander Kazhdan has synthesised his conclusions on the subject and made them accessible to English readers. Most recently, Jean-Claude Cheynet has built on Kazhdan's study of the Byzantine ruling class in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to produce a definitive study of the world of aristocratic family politics from which the Comnenian dynastic system emerged.
In the light of these publications, my conclusion that Manuel's reign was in some sense the high point of medieval Greek civilisation will not be the novelty that it might have been had I rushed it into print ten years ago. The shape of the picture into which the emperor must be fitted is now much clearer. But, though a small piece, he is still important for joining together the sections which have so far been assembled. Only a study which takes him as its focus can clarify the relationship between power, society and culture; such clarification is the aim of this book.
I first began to work on Manuel when I was in Washington as an Andrew Mellon Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and Catholic University. Much subsequent groundwork was laid in Germany, where the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung supported me for a year as the guest of Professor Dieter Simon and his colleagues in Frankfurt, and then for a further three months at the Byzantine Institute in Munich. I later spent a profitable three months as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, and a grant from the British Academy allowed me to visit the Escorial to check manuscript readings. I am grateful to all these institutions and their staff, but most of all to my employer, the University of St Andrews, which has provided me over the years with leave, financial assistance for travel and microfilms, and subsidised research facilities.
On a more personal level, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Michael and Elizabeth Jeffreys in supplying me with transcriptions of the poems of 'Manganeios Prodromos', and to thank Constanze Schummer for transferring these from disc to paper. I can honestly say that all mistakes and omissions are my own. Juliana did, however, read parts of the text and make me feel that it was important to press on. That I brought the book to a conclusion of sorts owes much to her moral support — not to mention the exemplary patience of my publisher.
St Andrews, 1992
Introduction: problems and sources
The twelfth century was the age of Roger II of Sicily, Henry Plantagenet, Frederick Barbarossa and Saladin. It was also the age of Manuel Komnenos, who ruled the empire of Constantinople from 1143 to 1180. Like his eminent contemporaries, Manuel received more than his fair share of admiration from professional eulogists, yet there can be no doubt that he too provided excellent material for eulogy. Although his accession to the Byzantine throne was sudden, unexpected and precarious, he took control smoothly and efficiently. Only four years later he averted a major crisis when the kings of France and Germany passed through Byzantine territory at the head of huge armies and the king of Sicily took the opportunity to capture Corfu and raid mainland Greece. In addition to many ephemeral successes, Manuel reduced Hungary and the Latin principalities of Outremer to the status of client states. While he reigned, the empire's main centres of population were as secure from internal disorder and foreign invasion as they had ever been. He conducted war and diplomacy on a grand scale and on all fronts. His court was a dazzling display of power and wealth, where state occasions were celebrated with fairytale magnificence. It attracted diplomats, exiles and fortune-seekers from many lands. Manuel also received more foreign potentates than any Byzantine emperor before or since: a king of France, a king of Germany, a Turkish sultan, a king of Jerusalem, and a duke of Saxony and Bavaria.
Manuel cut an impressive figure not only through the apparatus of power with which he was surrounded, but also through his personal, often highly individual style of government. He had no need of props in order to dominate the stage on which he moved. He was an indefatigable, daring soldier, who led most of his important campaigns in person and won the affection of his troops by sharing their dangers and discomforts. Like the hero in a Western - or like Digenes Akrites, the hero of the medieval Greek 'Eastern' - Manuel seemed to possess a superhuman ability to take on overwhelming numbers of armed assailants, and wild beasts that were larger than life. Like Digenes, too, he enjoyed aristocratic luxury with equal gusto. Yet, unlike Digenes, he felt just as much at ease in the refined urban world of Constantinople as he did on the wild frontier. He liked to surround himself with intellectuals, and to show that he could meet them on their own ground. He composed his own speeches. He prided himself on his medical knowledge. He dabbled in astrology and wrote a treatise in its defence, yet this did not prevent him from taking a keen interest in theology and presiding over doctrinal disputes as the arbiter of Orthodoxy.
Manuel's learning was no doubt superficial compared with that of the men of letters who were obliged to praise him as their intellectual equal. Yet it allowed him to bridge the traditional gulf between the two elites of the Byzantine ruling class: the metropolitan, bureaucratic elite, and the military elite. In sacrificing both to Hermes and to Ares, as his eulogists put it, he displayed a balance which none of his illustrious predecessors had managed to achieve. He had all the urbanity, liberality, sophistication and sense of ceremonial occasion which had made the 'philosopher' emperors - Leo VI, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, Constantine IX Monomachos, Constantine X Doukas - popular with the civilian elite and the common people of the capital. At the same time, he had the ruthless independence of mind and ability to dispense with convention which had characterised the great soldier emperors: Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes, and Basil II ‘the Bulgar-slayer’. He could be surprisingly informal, as when he treated Baldwin III of Jerusalem for a broken arm. His originality also showed itself in more profound ways. Towards the end of his life he forced the Church of Constantinople to modify the catechism for converts from Islam so as to allow for the recognition that Muslims and Christians worshipped the same deity. He attempted to create a new role for his ancient empire in a Christian world where the vital forces were now the warriors, clergy and merchants of Latin Europe. He devoted more than thirty years of his life to building an international order in which Byzantium might regain its ascendancy not by opposing but by directing the rise of the West, and western Christians might recognise the Byzantine emperor as the natural champion of their own values. Manuel was the first Byzantine emperor since Theophilos (829-42) to attract comment for his obvious penchant for a foreign culture; he was the first ever to gain a reputation as a friend and admirer of the Latin West.
To the rhetors of his court Manuel was the ‘divine emperor’ (Oeïog/ ÉvOcog DaouUsóc) an incarnation of renewal (&vaxaívwoic) and perpetual motion (devxvnoía), a true imitator of Christ who was all things to all men and would not shrink from making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of his people.! A generation after Manuel's death, Michael Choniates referred to him as 'the most blessed among emperors',? and a century later John Staurakios described him as "Manuel great in fine deeds . . . accomplished and great in learning, most lavish in his imperial majesty and like Solomon in brilliance, a lover of beauty and finery'.? The emperor enjoyed a similar reputation in parts of the Latin world. A Genoese annalist noted that with the passing of ‘Lord Manuel of divine memory, the most blessed emperor of Constantinople ... all Christendom incurred great ruin and detriment'.* William of Tyre, the historian of the crusader states, called Manuel 'the most powerful and wealthy prince of the world"; 'a wise and discreet prince of great magnificence, worthy of praise in every respect'; 'of illustrious memory and loving remembrance in Christ, whose favours and liberal munificence nearly everyone had experienced'.? A hundred years later, at the other end of the Mediterranean, a Catalan chronicler recalled that Manuel ^was at that time the best man among Christians'.$
Modern historians, however, have been less enthusiastic about Manuel Komnenos; the emperor does not emerge from textbooks of medieval or Byzantine history as one of the outstanding rulers of his age. He is not celebrated for his statesmanship, and no national or ideological movement has glorified his memory. Three reasons may be suggested for this neglect. First, the great power which Manuel wielded was not solely or even mainly his own personal achievement, but that of the dynasty of which he represented the third generation. The wealth, the military machine, and the internal stability on which both depended had been painstakingly constructed by his grandfather Alexios I (1081-1118) and his father John II (111845). While it is clear that Manuel used these assets to the full, it is not so clear how much he added to them, and there is room for doubt as to whether he used them to best effect. His greatest military campaign, his grand expedition against the Turkish Sultanate of Konya, ended in humiliating defeat, and his greatest diplomatic effort apparently collapsed the next year when Pope Alexander III became reconciled to the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Peace of Venice. Second, Byzantine imperial power declined so rapidly after Manuel's death that it is only natural to look for the causes of this decline in his reign and in his policies. Thirdly, and perhaps most fundamentally, modern historians have, in the main, based their estimate of Manuel not on the one-sided judgements of his admirers, who include his main biographer John Kinnamos, but on the more critical and profound account of his reign that is to be found in the History of Niketas Choniates."
Choniates found much to admire in Manuel. He shared the emperor's ideals, and basically approved of the ends for which he worked. As Joan Hussey has remarked, 'he would have been astonished to read the verdict of certain modern scholars, that “if any man is to be held responsible for the disaster of 1204, it is Manuel Comnenus" '.? Yet the text of Choniates provides all the material on which this verdict is based. In the course of the seven books which he devotes to Manuel, the author identifies several aspects of the emperor's personality and policies that made him less than perfect as a ruler.
In Book I, writing of Manuel's march to Constantinople to take control after his acclamation by the army in Cilicia, Choniates mentions that two of the emperor's relatives, Andronikos Komnenos and Theodore Dasiotes, were captured by the Turks when they turned off the road to go hunting, but Manuel was so intent on reaching Constantinople 'that he did not concern himself with them as he should, nor avenge them in a way befitting an emperor'.? On the subject of the emperor's first marriage to the German princess Bertha-Eirene, Choniates points out that the promiscuity of youth made Manuel an unfaithful husband,
who was completely uninhibited with regard to sexual liaisons, went down on many females and, taking no heed, even unlawfully fastened his buckle through a hole related to him by blood. This act was a stain on him, disfiguring and spreading ugliness, like outbreaks of warts or leprosy on a handsome face.”
Book I then goes on to describe the administration of Manuel's early years, emphasising his boundless generosity at this time. However,
the emperor did not keep to these good intentions, for as he grew to manhood, he dealt with matters more autocratically, treating his subjects not as free men but as if they were servants who had been bequeathed to him, and halted - not to say reversed - the flow of largesse, and redistributed even where he had solemnly confirmed. I do not think this was due so much to conscious policy - in doubt one must always incline to charity — as to the fact that what he needed was not a normal measure of gold, but rather a Tyrrhenian Sea, having greatly extended his range of expenses, as my account will reveal as it proceeds."
The remainder of Book I is concerned with the passage of the Second Crusade through Byzantine territory in 1147-8. Like the other Byzantine writers who recorded the event, Choniates commends Manuel's courteously defensive handling of the crusader armies and the threat which they posed to the empire's security. Yet in contrast to the other Greek sources, Choniates presents the crusade as a genuinely religious enterprise, and, in common with some non-Greek accounts, suggests that many Greeks, including the emperor, deliberately sabotaged it. The townspeople of Asia Minor, he says, cheated the Latins who bought food from them, pitying them neither as strangers nor as Christians:
Whether the emperor really ordered this, as was alleged, I do not know for certain, but certainly unlawful and unholy things were done. It was undoubtedly the emperor's decision, unambiguous and undisguised by a veil of falsehood, to mint coin from impure silver and give it to those of the Italian [sic] army who wanted change. In short, there was no horror which the emperor did not devise and order others to perform, that these things might be ineradicable reminders to their descendants, and germs of fear to deter them from any future movement against the Roman people. It was then left for the Turks to do similar things against the Alamanoi, with the emperor stirring them up with letters and inciting them to war.’
Book II deals with Manuel's reaction to the invasion of Greece by Roger II of Sicily, and the wars which followed in the Balkans and southern Italy. On the whole, Choniates does not criticise imperial policy here, and seems to approve the general principle behind the emperor's costly and unsuccessful Italian venture, that attack is the best form of defence.” Even the disastrous failure of the expedition is not blamed on Manuel, who is commended for having refused to give way to despair and prepared a new expedition under Constantine Angelos. Choniates reserves his criticism for the emperor's faith in astrology, which influenced his timing of the fleet's departure:
Manuel believed, and not commendably, that the fortunes and encounters of human life are assisted by the reverse and forward motions of the stars, the positions and the various configurations of the planets, and all the other things that the astrologers talk about, denying Divine Providence and perversely applying the maxims 'it is fated', and "what is ordained by necessity and cannot be undone'. So he had a perfect sailing worked out for Angelos. Yet just as he had worked out Constantine's departure, what happened? The sun had hardly begun to set when Constantine retraced his steps on the emperor's orders. The reason was the unpropitious nature of the exit and the fact that Angelos had begun his voyage not as the favourable combinations of stars ordained or indeed as the letter of the laws governing the astral plane allowed, but as idle speculators had recommended, uttering wrong judgements and applying crude minds to subtle matters, and erring in their calculation of the favourable moment. So once more the horoscope was cast and the tables were examined. And thus after much examination and deliberation and searching of the stars, Angelos departed, moving out in harmony with the movements of the bountiful stars. So greatly did the soundness of this timing avail Roman interests and make up for the mistakes of earlier commanders, and transform the adversity which had occurred, that Constantine immediately fell into the hands of the enemy."
Also in Book II, Choniates digresses from his account of the recovery of Corfu from the Sicilians to tell the story of the deposition of the Patriarch Kosmas, which he presents as an act of gross injustice on the emperor's part."
Book III, which deals mainly with Manuel's expedition to Cilicia and Syria in 1158-9 and with his relations with the Seljuk Sultan Kılıç Arslan IL, contains no direct criticism of the emperor. However, it does pick up the theme which was stated in Book II à propos of the Patriarch Kosmas and is subsequently developed, in Book IV, into a general denunciation of Manuel's shabby treatment of certain highranking individuals. According to Choniates, the emperor's chief minister Theodore Styppeiotes, his cousin Andronikos Komnenos and his niece’s husband Alexios Axouch all suffered disgrace and punishment because they were the victims of malicious accusations. While in Book III the author implies that Manuel was an unwitting accomplice in the injustice done to Styppeiotes,’® in Book IV he clearly identifies the ruler's jealousy and paranoia as the root of the evil that befell the other two:
Every ruler is fearful and suspicious and enjoys behaving like Death and Chaos and Erebos in lopping off noble summits and removing every high and imposing man, rejecting every good counsellor, cutting down every brave and valiant general. The lords of the earth thoroughly resemble lofty and high-plumed pine trees; for just as these murmur in light gusts of wind, furiously shaking the needles on their branches, so do the former suspect the man who abounds in wealth and tremble at the one who stands out from the crowd for his valour. And if a certain man should have the beauty of a statue and the tongue of a songbird, and be charming in manner, he does not allow the wearer of the crown to relax or be calm, but disturbs his sleep, ruins his pleasure, spoils his enjoyment and causes him worries. And he [the ruler] wrongly curses Nature who created him for also having fashioned other suitable candidates for power, and for not having made him the first and last to excel among men. So they [rulers] mostly fight against Providence and take up arms against the Divinity, culling all good men from the crowd and slaughtering them like sacrificial victims, so that they themselves may squander away in peace and have the public finances to themselves as a paternal inheritance to do with as they please, and treat free men as slaves, and behave towards men who are sometimes worthier to rule than they as if they were hired servants. [They do this] being mistaken in their minds, having lost their reason under the influence of power and misguidedly forgetting what happened the day before yesterday."
After narrating the tragic fall of Alexios Axouch, Choniates adds that justice caught up with his accusers:
Whether indeed it took retribution from Manuel for this unjust action is not a matter to be discussed at the present time. Yet Manuel, being a wise man, neither unlearned nor unlettered, should not have paid attention to the Alpha which was to succeed him and dissolve his power, but should have made fast the mooring-ropes of power on Him who said that He is Alpha and Omega, as John teaches me in Revelation.!?
Choniates evidently traced Manuel's suspicion of Andronikos and Alexios to his belief in the prophecy that the name of his successor would begin with the letter A.? The author's observations here thus tie in with his disapproval of Manuel's belief in astrology. This disapproval is twice expressed in Book V. The first instance is in the account of the battle of Semlin against the Hungarians (1167). Just as the Byzantine commander was preparing for battle, a letter came from Manuel ordering him to put off the engagement:
That day was rejected as inauspicious and altogether unsuitable for hostilities, because Manuel ascribed the majority and the greatest of ventures, which obtain their fulfilment or otherwise from God, to the combinations, positions and movements of the stars, and submitted himself to the utterances of the astrologers as if these were decisions from the throne of God.”
The commander completely ignored the order and went on to win a great victory. Later, writing of the birth of Manuel's son Alexios in 1169, Choniates remarks that 'although the emperor stood by his wife and relieved her pains through his presence, he gave most of his attention to the man who was watching the stars and gaping at the heavens'.?!
Slightly earlier in Book V, Choniates introduces his account of the expedition Manuel sent to Egypt in 1169 by sharply criticising this enterprise as a piece of megalomania. The emperor was led to it, he says, in spite of other problems which still required attention, by 'untimely ambition and a desire to rival emperors whose renown had been great, and whose bounds had stretched not only from sea to sea, but from the eastern horizon to the Pillars of Hercules'.?
Book VI is devoted to Manuel's Turkish wars from 1175 to 1179, and mainly to the expedition against Konya which came to grief in 1176. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the remark just quoted, Choniates does not criticise the expedition as overambitious. His main criticism is of the strategic error of judgement which the emperor committed in rejecting the peace overtures which he received from the sultan during the march. This he did against the advice of his older and wiser commanders, 'giving ear entirely to his relatives, especially to those who had never heard the sound of the war trumpet and had shining heads of hair and bright faces, and wore gold chains and necklaces of pearls and transparent precious stones'.? On the whole, Manuel is given credit for fighting bravely and resourcefully during the appalling slaughter and panic that ensued when the Turks ambushed the long, straggling Byzantine columns as they passed through the defile of Myriokephalon. It is noted, however, that even Manuel's strength of purpose began to fail under the strain, and that when the emperor had managed to fight his way through the pass to join the survivors, he showed signs of an unbalanced mind and shocked his commanders by suggesting that he and they should slip away leaving the rank and file to the mercy of the Turks.?* There is another hint of mental instability in the description of the contradictory reports which Manuel sent to Constantinople after he had made peace with the sultan and returned to safety at Philadelphia: at one moment he likened himself to Romanos Diogenes, the emperor who had led his forces to defeat at Manzikert a century earlier; at another he boasted that the treaty with the sultan had been made under the imperial flag as this waved in the breeze and struck terror into the enemy.? Choniates also tells an anecdote in which he expresses indirect criticism. The emperor asked for water from a nearby stream, but when it was brought he threw most of it away, realising that it was polluted, and exclaimed that it was not right for him to drink Christian blood. A common soldier, hearing this, replied that this would not be the first time Manuel had tasted of his subjects' blood - he had already drunk deeply of it through his oppressive taxation. Shortly afterwards, as Manuel noticed that his campaign treasure was being robbed by the Turks, he urged the Greeks to fight and take it for themselves. The same man rejoined that Manuel should have made his offer when the money was easier to obtain.”
In Book VII Choniates summarises and concludes his account of the reign. He begins with a discussion of Manuel's western policy. This
brought ridicule on the emperor from the Greeks. They claimed that he nurtured foreign ambitions for personal glory, and had his eyes on the ends of the earth, doing all kinds of hot-blooded and foolhardy things to push beyond the boundaries that former emperors had established, pouring out to no purpose the money which he collected by combing his empire with fiscal assessments and exhausting it with unwonted taxes.”
These accusations were not fully justified, says Choniates, since the policy did not constitute an unreasonable innovation, but was a natural response to the matchless strength of the Latins, who had to be prevented from uniting in alliance against the empire. However, no attempt is made to justify Manuel's financial policy, which is characterised as both rapacious and wasteful. Few of the emperor's subjects benefited from his lavish generosity; he showered his wealth upon foreigners, especially Latins, and members of his family, notably his mistress Theodora and her son by him. Being highly susceptible to his household servants and to his barbarian underlings, ^whose speech was preceded by spittle', he appointed them to important financial offices. Some of them amassed great wealth and lived like kings, even though they did not possess the bare rudiments of an Hellenic education. He trusted them so much that he gave them judicial duties which would have tested the expertise of trained lawyers. In the fiscal administration of the provinces, too, foreigners were given the senior posts, with learned Greeks placed under them. This was because Manuel distrusted the Greeks as embezzlers, although in fact his trusty barbarians cheated him in the very way he had hoped to avoid, with only a fraction of the tax yield reaching the treasury.
Choniates goes on to mention Manuel's building activity and his monastic patronage, both of which he portrays in a not unfavourable light. However, he is scathing on the subject of the emperor's granting of lands in military pronoia. Such grants, he maintains, ceased to be rewards for military excellence, but became available to all men who could afford a horse and a small down-payment. As a result, 'those who formerly had only the fisc as master suffered dreadfully from the greed of the military', whom Greeks were forced 'to serve in the manner of slaves'; often a fine upstanding native would find himself paying taxes to some common half-barbarian who was vastly his inferior as a warrior. The effect on the imperial provinces was plain to see - those that had not been snatched by enemies had been laid waste by their own defenders.”
There follows a long section in which Choniates discusses Manuel's interference in doctrinal matters:
It is not enough for most emperors of the Romans simply to rule, and wear gold, and treat common property as their own and free men as slaves, but if they do not appear wise, godlike in looks, heroic in strength, full of holy wisdom like Solomon, divinely inspired dogmatists and more canonical than the canons - in short, unerring experts in all human and divine affairs — they think they have suffered grievous wrong. While it is proper for men whose profession is to know and teach about God to punish, or indeed anathematise, those people who are so uneducated and brash as to introduce unaccustomed and new doctrines, the emperors cannot bear to be second to anyone even in this, but they themselves introduce, judge and determine dogma, and often punish those who disagree with them.
And this emperor, who happened to have a ready tongue and a natural way with words, not only issued numerous ordinances, but composed catechetical orations, which they call silentia, and delivered them in public. As time went on, he branched out into sacred doctrine and discussed the nature of God. Often feigning uncertainty, he raised scriptural problems and asked questions concerning their solutions, mustering all the learning in which he rejoiced. He would have been praiseworthy in this if he had taken his selfindulgence no further and had not gone into more elusive doctrines, or, in looking at these, had not insisted on having his own way or twisted the sense of the words to his own purpose, defining and applying interpretations in matters where the Fathers had already pronounced in the right sense, as if he comprehended Christ entirely and had been let into the secret of His nature clearly and divinely.”
As examples of this irresponsible dogmatising, Choniates points to Manuel’s role in the major doctrinal controversies of his reign, as well as to his proposal at the end of his life to alter the references to Allah in the catechism for converts from Islam.” The change was forced on the clergy despite strong protests from the patriarch and other bishops. In connection with this episode, Choniates digresses to tell of a prophecy made by his own godfather Niketas, Bishop of Chonai, at the beginning of the reign. Manuel had stopped at Chonai on his way to Constantinople from Cilicia, and had received the bishop’s blessing in the church of the Archangel Michael. Some of the local clergy had expressed doubt as to whether such a young man would be able to govern an empire, especially since his elder brother Isaac was already established in the imperial palace. The bishop answered their doubts by saying that Manuel would indeed rule the empire and would live slightly longer than his grandfather Alexios, 'and as his end approaches he will go mad'. Some saw this as a reference to Manuel's greed for money, while others identified the mania as some other fleshly sin. But when the controversial formula concerning the Muslim deity became known, everyone agreed that this fulfilled the prophecy, since it was obviously sheer madness.?!
Concluding with an account of Manuel's last illness and death, Choniates takes a last opportunity to ridicule, and condemn as dangerously irresponsible, the emperor's belief in divination and astrology:
He did not accept that his end was drawing near, but insisted that he knew for certain that another fourteen years of life had been lavished on him. He said this to the wise and thrice-blessed Patriarch Theodosios who suggested that he take paternal thought for the affairs of state while his mind was still healthy, and seek out a man who would selflessly care for the boy-heir to the throne until he came of age, and loyally put the Empress before himself and care for her as if she were his own mother. But those pestilential astrologers had the audacity to say that the emperor would shortly recover from his illness and, so they said, devote himself to love affairs, and they shamelessly predicted the razing of enemy cities to the ground. What was more outrageous, they, being quick-tongued and used to lying, foretold a great commotion of the universe, conjunctions and combinations of the stars, the eruption of violent winds; they practically predicted the transformation of the whole natural order, thus proving themselves ventriloquists rather than stargazers. They not only enumerated the years and months and told the weeks in which these things would happen, and notified the emperor accordingly; they also specified the days and snatched the fleeting moment of the hour, as if they had clear knowledge of the things which the Father has kept in His own power, and about which Our Saviour reprimanded his disciples for asking. So not only did the emperor himself seek out caves and sheltered recesses and prepare them for habitation and have the glass removed from the imperial palaces so that they should not be damaged by the blasts of wind which lay in store; but those too who were enrolled in his service and his kin, as well as those who insinuated themselves by flattery, also diligently occupied themselves in the same way, so that while some burrowed like ants, others made tents, entwining ropes and sharpening pegs in order to fasten them securely.”
It must be stressed that the passages we have quoted are not the whole picture painted by Choniates, but patches of shadow which add depth to an otherwise luminous portrait. Choniates does not criticise Manuel as consistently or as savagely as he criticises later emperors - the paranoid, schizophrenic, licentious Andronikos I; the vain, vindictive Isaac II; the feeble, henpecked Alexios III — all of whom he clearly does blame for the disasters suffered by the empire in the generation before 1204. Nevertheless, the colours which he uses to blacken these figures are essentially the same as those which darken his portrait of Manuel. Andronikos, Isaac and Alexios are all ridiculed for their reliance on prophecy as a substitute for faith in God and resolute, constructive decision-making. Andronikos and Isaac are both, in different ways, criticised for their autocratic handling of church affairs. Andronikos' persecution of the nobility is presented as one of the worst features of his tyranny. Promiscuous and incestuous sexuality are emphasised in him, as are extravagance and megalomania in Isaac. These flaws are first identified in Manuel and, as we have seen, Choniates explicitly connects him with later rulers by broadening his criticism of Manuel into criticism of an imperial type. The connection is implicit, moreover, in passages where the author, while not criticising Manuel directly, calls attention to traits which are presented negatively in later emperors. In Manuel's moment of panic at Myriokephalon, we have a glimpse of the failure of nerve occasionally displayed by Andronikos I and Alexios III, and in his contradictory reports of the battle we have a premonition of Andronikos' violent fluctuations of mood. In some ways, indeed, Andronikos emerges from the History as an exaggerated version of Manuel; Choniates may have wanted to suggest that the excesses of his reign were the product of his unequal rivalry with his cousin.” Certain apparently neutral remarks which Choniates makes about Manuel's concern with appearances also take on an extra dimension when viewed in the light of later passages. Thus in Book II he describes how Manuel enhanced the effect of the triumph which he held after his first Hungarian campaign by dressing up the captives to look more distinguished than they really were, and by parading them in a succession of small groups in order to create the impression of a neverending multitude.^ In the account of the Myriokephalon campaign, as we have seen, he makes a point of mentioning the gold chains and jewelled necklaces worn by those young men in Manuel's entourage who gave him wrong advice.” At the end of Book VI he observes that Manuel was more respected and loved when he endured the hardships of campaigning 'than when he was crowned with a diadem and robed in purple and mounted his horse with its gold trappings'.? The reference to ^wearing gold' as one of the less attractive attributes of imperial power should be seen in the same context. All these remarks betray an awareness of a contrast between the image and the reality of power -a contrast which underlies Choniates’ criticism of Isaac II's imperial style and is fully brought out in his account of an incident at the court of Alexios III. The emperor and his dignitaries, dressed in all their finery, were performing the prokypsis ceremony in connection with the Christmas celebrations, hoping to make a good impression on some visiting envoys of the German emperor Henry VI, who posed a serious threat to Byzantium at the time.” But the Germans were not impressed:
To the Greeks who stood beside them urging them to look at the bloom of precious stones in which the emperor, like a flowery meadow, was bedecked, and to feast their eyes on springtime charms that could be gathered in winter, they replied, "Germans do not have need of such pageantry, and they do not care to stand in reverence of brooches and fine clothes appropriate to women, whose business it is to please with make-up and veils and earrings.' And they added, striking terror into the Greeks, 'Now the time has come to change out of women's dress and put on iron instead of gold.' For if the embassy was not successful and the Greeks did not comply with the will of the German emperor, they would have to face up to men who had no truck with precious stones, pearls, purple silk and gold, but were men of war, whose eyes reddened with rage every bit as blazing as the sparkle of gems, and studded themselves in their daylong toils with beads of sweat more lustrous than any pearls.”
All in all, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Choniates, despite his overall admiration for Manuel, did see the emperor's failings as the beginnings of a failure of leadership which led the empire to ruin. This impression is strengthened by two considerations. First, Choniates does have flawless heroes. Five characters John II Komnenos, Conrad III of Hohenstaufen, Frederick Barbarossa, Andronikos Kontostephanos, Conrad of Montferrat - are presented as valiant, altruistic leaders, untainted by the vices and failure of nerve for which Manuel and his successors are criticised. It is highly significant that three of these figures are western crusading leaders, two of them German monarchs, and that the only Byzantine emperor among them is Manuel's father. Choniates says that John was the best of the Komnenoi; he also points out that Manuel owed the wealth which paid for his early patronage and the military machine which fought his wars to John's careful and provident administration.”
Secondly, it is clear that Choniates deliberately reacted against important elements of the ‘official’ version of Manuel’s reign, as represented by the history of John Kinnamos and the panegyrics addressed to the emperor. Not only does he implicitly reject Kinnamos' assumption that the conspiracies against Manuel were genuine, but he expressly criticises emperors for aspiring to possess the superhuman qualities for which Manuel was praised.“ The only character whom Choniates describes in the language of contemporary panegyric is Frederick Barbarossa.*! His critical approach to Manuel puts him in the tradition of the literary opposition to the Comnenian dynastic regime, represented a generation earlier by John Zonaras, whose portrait of Alexios I is the ‘corrective’ to the eulogistic Alexiad of Anna Comnena.? Choniates was more disposed to accept the aristocratic, military ethos of the Comnenian regime, but like Zonaras he was exercised by the constitutional distinction between kingship and tyranny, and felt that the absolutism of Comnenian rule inclined to the latter.? In this, he was no doubt influenced by his classical education and his study of law, as well as by Byzantine literary discussions of the ideal ruler, including perhaps that which Theophylact of Ochrid had composed for Constantine Doukas at the beginning of Alexios’ reign.“ But however ‘constitutional’ his critique, it was motivated, ultimately, by the conventional religious view that the empire's misfortunes were divine punishments for its sins. His perception of Divine Providence is by no means crudely fundamentalist or mechanistic; at times it approaches the idea that ‘God helps those who help themselves’. However, the theme of divine retribution clearly underlies his whole vision of the Comnenian empire's decline and fall, and it is the strand which connects all his disapproving remarks about the emperors of his day. Whether he accuses them of indolence, vainglory, personal immorality, occultism, impiety or tyranny, and whether he puts the blame on them personally or on the general corruption of Byzantine society, he is demonstrating why God withdrew His favour from His 'holy nation' and gave it to peoples who, however unspeakable in their manners, somehow had integrity where the Byzantines were hollow. Thus even Manuel, the emperor who so bravely and cleverly strove to fill the void, had to some extent to be portrayed as a hollow man. How else was his monumental failure to be explained?
Since the Enlightenment, modern historians have discarded the medieval notion of Divine Providence as the prime cause in human affairs, but they have often been willing to accept the judgements of medieval writers that were based on this notion. This has been the case with Choniates, whose negative comments on Manuel continued to carry conviction long after the reasoning behind them had fallen out of fashion. As long as Europeans continued to look at twelfth-century Byzantium through crusading eyes, Choniates was a valuable witness to the charge that Manuel had sabotaged the Second Crusade. Thus Gibbon: 'the complaints of the Latins are attested by the honest confession of a Greek historian, who has dared to prefer truth to his country’.* With the advent of Romantic Hellenism and Greek Independence, other aspects of Choniates' critique came into focus. George Finlay, the enlightened Scot writing with experience of the unconstitutional rule of King Otto of the Hellenes, saw Manuel as the incarnation of a decadent twelfth- century ancien régime — an extravagant, hedonistic, anachronistic roi soleil who ruined what was left of the only progressive element in Byzantine society, its embryonic middle class.“ For Constantine Paparregopoulos, the great national historian of modern Greece, Manuel made a fatal mistake in surrounding himself with Latins, for events proved 'that of all foreigners it was the westerners with whom it was impossible for our people to coexist'. The emperor's expenditure was disastrous, for 'the times did not allow the ruler financial or other excesses', and his power was based on an illusion: 'through the personal bravery and daring of Manuel Komnenos, the state had taken on a certain brilliance which, as far as its real power was concerned, could deceive anyone who looked at the external appearance of things'.*
Both Finlay and Paparregopoulos judged Manuel according to the criteria of nineteenth-century nationalism, and neither identified the source of his information. Yet it seems that both were decisively influenced by their reading of Choniates. The same is true of later historians who studied the Comnenian period in greater depth and with less commitment to Greek nationalism. A classic statement is provided by the passages in which Frédéric Chalandon summed up Manuel's achievements, and concluded that 'la décadence a commencé . . . dés le règne de Manuel'.* Chalandon reached his conclusions after careful study of a wide range of sources, both Greek and foreign. But there is nothing in his verdict to indicate that he had read anything but Choniates, and it differs from those of Finlay and Paparregopoulos only in being more comprehensive and less obviously motivated by present-day concerns.
Chalandon's work remains the standard political history of the Comnenian period, and his assessment of Manuel's place in the Comnenian revival has been echoed by a series of eminent Byzantinists. Thus Bréhier: ‘L’erreur de Manuel est d'avoir cru que les circonstances lui permettaient de rendre à l'Empire son antique puissance .. . Or cette politique de grand style était trop étendue pour les forces dont il disposait et il ne put obtenir que des succés partiels, mais peu solides. And Runciman: ‘The extravagance of his ambitions had wasted the resources of the Empire, whose economic decline he had refused to recognise.’ Ostrogorsky blames Manuel's methods rather than his aims, but in developing this argument he betrays a conviction that the aims themselves were hollow, because they were based on an outdated notion of Byzantine world supremacy and on an imperial system flawed by feudalism.”
Positive pronouncements on Manuels place in history are not entirely lacking. An emperor who showed such enthusiasm for westerners could not fail to have some appeal for western Europeans convinced of the superiority of their own values. The sentiments of William of Tyre and the Genoese annalist were echoed by Hans von Kap-Herr in the most thorough study of Manuel's western policy which appeared before Chalandon.? Kap-Herr approved of Manuel as an untypical Byzantine who alone among his people tried 'to help the ageing state of the Greeks with the fresh forces of the West'. Although he criticised Manuel for not being sufficiently singleminded in his policy, he considered that its failure was mainly due to the xenophobic, cowardly inertia of the emperor's subjects. Seeing the question in this way, Kap-Herr was not disposed to believe everything he read in Choniates, and in a long excursus provided the most substantial critique of Choniates' account of Manuel which has yet been written.
This view of Manuel as an emperor who responded positively to the challenge posed by the West was taken up by Paolo Lamma, who in 1955-7 published a two-volume study of the interaction between the two twelfth-century imperial revivals, that of the Hohenstaufen in the West and that of the Komnenoi in the East.? Lamma not only added weight and nuance to Kap-Herr's basic thesis, but also drew attention to three other aspects of Manuel's reign which had previously been neglected. First, he pointed out the close connection between internal and external politics which may, on occasion, have led Manuel to take foreign-policy decisions for internal reasons. Secondly, he emphasised the fluidity of the international situation, which called for bold measures and also required Manuel to keep his options open. Thirdly, he pointed to the gap between the political realities in which rulers dealt and the ideology and rhetoric of the sources, which primarily represented the attitudes of their authors. In particular, he warned against assuming from the vaguely Justinianic style of Manuel's imperial programme that Manuel was trying to restore Justinian's empire.
Lamma's more favourable approach to Manuel was not rejected by Byzantinists, and Joan Hussey incorporated it into a general historical survey.” More recently, Ralph-Johannes Lilie has challenged the traditional view that Manuel's defeat at Myriokephalon was a major disaster for the empire, and has argued that Manuel came to terms with the existence of the crusader states in Syria and Palestine more successfully than either his father or his grandfather. Furthermore, in a major reassessment of the empire's relations with the Italian maritime republics, he has shown that Manuel's imperial ambitions in the West were based, to a much greater extent than scholars realised, on a search for co-operation with the western emperor, Frederick Barbarossa.?
Even so, Manuel's established reputation dies hard. Héléne Ahrweiler and Robert Browning both reinforced it in their general comments on the reign, and one may note that Ahrweiler took ‘quelques lignes de Nicétas Choniate' as her guide. The most up-todate English language textbook on the period gives qualified approval to the view of Manuel's policy as 'overambitious' and ‘unrealistic’.*”
Whether we ultimately accept or reject Choniates' picture of Manuel, the context in which we view that picture has been vastly enriched and illuminated in the eighty years since Chalandon wrote. Our access to and appreciation of the sources — both literary and documentary, Latin and oriental as well as Greek — is now much more complete. Texts known to Chalandon are now available in modern editions with reliable commentaries. Several texts which he did not use have been published for the first time. Others remain unpublished, or printed in rare old editions, but scholarly awareness of their importance has been increased. Archaeological investigation of this as indeed of most periods of Byzantine history is still in its infancy, but there is now some useful material, particularly on monetary circulation and fortifications, to set beside the evidence from libraries and archives.
With the processing of new sources of information, the scope of enquiry has broadened. Chalandon wrote a political history, with strong emphasis on foreign policy, but looked at economic, social, cultural and administrative questions only in passing. One does not have to be a fanatical believer in 'histoire totale' or in historical determinism to feel that the picture thus obtained is incomplete, and that the emperor and his policies can only be understood against a wider background. Our knowledge of that background has been transformed by specialist studies in many areas: the prosopography, stratification and court hierarchy of the imperial ruling class; the agricultural and monetary economy; education, literature and art; fiscal, military and ecclesiastical administration.
To enumerate and appreciate all the publications since Chalandon which have enriched and illuminated our knowledge of Manuel's empire would require a chapter in itself. Reference to them will be made throughout the following chapters, and here it need only be observed that they provide justification enough for a study of Manuel which will incorporate and advance their findings.
However, the incorporation of new material and a larger context will not lead to a better understanding of Manuel's reign unless it proceeds from the recognition that the old, familiar subject matter poses serious problems of interpretation. It is not sufficient merely to fill out and touch up Chalandon's portrait of Manuel on the basis of recent scholarship: we need to re-examine the very principles on which that portrait has been composed. Historians in the Chalandon tradition have started from three assumptions: (1) Choniates is the most reliable source; (2) Manuel's imperial programme was unrealistic and anachronistic; (3) the empire was structurally unsound and could not afford the demands that Manuel made on it. These assumptions beg fundamental questions of methodology.
First and foremost is the question of how to interpret the Greek literary works which are still our most important sources of information. All the evidence derived from archives, scattered documents and foreign chronicles is subsidiary to the testimony of John Kinnamos and Niketas Choniates, who provide the only coherent accounts of Manuel's reign. Since their estimates of Manuel differ considerably, it would seem that a main task of any modern historian of the reign should be to come to terms with this difference. Yet no scholar since Kap-Herr has looked at the problem in any depth; even Paolo Lamma, whose treatment of literary material is on the whole very sensitive, tends to present the two authors as exponents of a common Byzantine point of view. Most other authorities have, as we have seen, implicitly followed Choniates, without stating the reasons for their preference. But why should Choniates be regarded as more reliable? Neither author had first-hand knowledge of the whole reign, but Kinnamos spent several years in Manuel's service, whereas Choniates had barely finished his education when Manuel died.?? He almost certainly wrote his account of the reign later than Kinnamos, whose history appears to have been composed within two years of Manuel's death. Choniates' more distant perspective allowed him to see more clearly the overall significance of the period and to reinterpret it in the light of later events. However, it seems also to have blurred his vision of factual details. According to him, the piles of bones which testified to the bloody passage of the Second Crusade through Asia Minor belonged to slaughtered Turks; in fact, they were the remains of crusaders.?? His narrative of the war with Sicily is so confused as to be almost worthless. There is much confusion, as well as some fantasy, in his account of the fall of Theodore Styppeiotes.” He overestimates the age of Alexios II in 1180 by over a year, and fails to mention Alexios’ betrothal to Agnes of France.?! Kinnamos, by contrast, is a far more accurate and informative narrator. This does not mean that Choniates was not the more profound and perceptive historian. But it does mean that when the two authors offer conflicting evidence, Kinnamos' version should be taken very seriously. Thus Choniates' portrayal of Manuel as a paranoid egoist, arbitrarily inflicting unjust punishments on the basis of false accusations, must be questioned in view of Kinnamos' statements that Theodore Styppeiotes and Alexios Axouch were indeed guilty of treason. Equally, Choniates' description of Manuel anxiously watching his court astrologer at the moment of his son's birth does not necessarily offer a more penetrating insight than Kinnamos' claim that the birth was a vindication of the emperor's stance in the theological controversy of 1166.9?
Modern scholars have perhaps felt instinctively suspicious of Kinnamos because he was so obviously the 'official' historian, writing in a spirit of uncritical admiration. Choniates, by contrast, is sophisticated, sceptical and scurrilous; he gives us the gossip on his emperors, and he does not spare them or their office. He is a critical observer of his own society, and his powerfully evocative picture of an effete, corrupt, immoral establishment is strangely in harmony with the impression of Byzantium given by hostile western observers. Yet we should beware of assuming that Choniates' dissension was any more objective and dispassionate than Kinnamos' ‘party line’. Choniates is full of passionate outbursts; personal experiences and interests frequently obtrude. His portrait of Manuel was conditioned, as we have seen, by a conception of Divine Providence, and by sympathy with those who had not done well under the Komnenoi. It was designed to form part of a series which would also feature Andronikos I and Isaac II, and the sources of its inspiration must be sought in their reigns as much as in Manuel's. We cannot exclude the possibility that Choniates projected his own experience in public life back on to events before his time; his portrayal of the Kamateros family may be a case in point.®
Kinnamos and Choniates both belonged to a tradition of history writing which had long treated the historical genre as a vehicle for presenting a personal and partial view of the past.“ They also belonged to a cultural milieu which attached great importance to ceremonial rhetoric, and in which the delivery of a polished imperial oration was a sine qua non for office holding. Reference has already been made to the encomiastic literature of Manuel's reign. The sheer quantity and variety of this material is one of the most striking features of the period, representing the work of some fifteen or so authors in over a hundred pieces of prose and verse composed directly or indirectly in honour of the emperor and high-ranking officials. Kinnamos and Choniates have to be read in the context of these rhetorical works. Most were written very close to the events to which they relate, and are therefore far from negligible as sources of factual information in their own right, confirming, correcting and supplementing the narrative data. They also throw light on the methods and sources of the historians, who often echo the language and motifs of encomiastic literature. This is, as we should expect, particularly noticeable in Kinnamos, whose work often reads like a factual guide to the allusions made by Manuel's encomiasts. It may well be the ‘composition’ (ovyyoadf)) to which Eustathios of Thessalonica, in his funeral oration for Manuel, refers his audience for fuller details of the emperor's achievements.” Yet there is much in Choniates work too which recalls the encomiastic literature of Manuel’s reign; even his criticism is a rhetorical reaction to a rhetorical image. An example of a positive echo is the passage where he records that not long after Manuel's death an important relic which he had brought to the imperial palace, the stone on which Christ's body had lain in the sepulchre, was removed to the emperor's tomb in the Pantokrator monastery: ‘it was, I think, meant to proclaim and demonstrate to all that he who now lay silent in the tomb had done and suffered'. This remark ties in with a rhetorical lament delivered by Gregory Antiochos in 1181, where the author compares the emperor's career to an imitation of Christ's passion. Choniates helps us to identify the occasion for the lament, and the lament helps us to understand the source of Choniates’ idea.
Of course, we cannot assume that surviving rhetorical pieces were the actual sources for passages in the histories, any more than we can assume that Choniates borrowed from Kinnamos when he covered the same ground. What can be assumed, however, is that the historians had at their disposal a large fund of rhetorical ‘journalism',9 which embraced not only occasional rhetoric of the kind we have mentioned, but also more or less first-hand reports of historical events. Of these, several survive: the records of Manuel's dialogues with the patriarchs Nicholas IV and Michael III;” the reports of the doctrinal synods of 1157 and 1166; and the Sacred Arsenal. These are all documents in the sense that they claim to be records of official business, but they have all been subject to literary editing, and two of them, the synodal Ekthesis of 1166 and the Sacred Arsenal, are set in a panegyrical framework which makes them, in effect, documented encomia. The same encomiastic spirit no doubt pervaded two other groups of texts which are attested in the sources: the newsletters which the emperor despatched to Constantinople and other cities while he was on campaign, and the minor histories of single episodes, such as the accounts of the Second Crusade to which Eustathios alludes in one of his orations.”
A study of Manuel I which attempts a comprehensive analysis of twelfth-century Byzantine literary culture will do justice to neither topic. However, it must to some extent come to terms with the ‘journalism’ of the period not only as source material but also as a literary phenomenon, not least because this phenomenon has contributed to the poor reputation which the twelfth century has traditionally enjoyed among Byzantinists. Kap-Herr referred to the 'tasteless bombast and hollow rhetoric' of Comnenian literature, and Krumbacher considered that 'it lacks the freshness of life, the sustaining, transforming and constantly productive power of nature. It resembles a carefully reconstituted mummy rather than a living organism."* Robert Browning, a far from unsympathetic commentator on Byzantine literature, has spoken of 'the brilliant, fragile and empty civilisation of the long reign of Manuel Comnenus’.” This association of Manuel with empty brilliance is the essence of the portrait given by Choniates. Our view of the literary culture of the period, and its relationship to Manuel, is thus highly relevant to our ultimate perception of his place in history.
I have emphasised the importance of Choniates as the originator of the negative assessment of Manuel made by modern scholars, because all the elements of that assessment are contained in his account. This said, it must also be emphasised that no modern authority follows Choniates consistently. As we have seen, all have ignored the religious basis of his critique and each has picked on one aspect of this critique to the exclusion of others: Gibbon on the Second Crusade; Finlay on Manuel's absolutism; Paparregopoulos on his lack of nationalism; Ostrogorsky on Comnenian feudalism. All agree that Manuel’s basic failing was the size of his imperial ambitions. Yet as we have seen and many historians, including Chalandon, have recognised, Choniates is not consistent on this point. He defends Manuel's strategy of intervention in Italy. The one passage in which he directly criticises the emperor's foreign policy as unrealistic refers to the Egyptian expedition of 1169, not to Manuel's attempt to gain the western imperial crown. In all, it is clear that modern critics have not followed Choniates simply because they have been persuaded by his arguments, but also, and perhaps primarily, because his account tends to confirm their own preconceptions. To these we must now turn.
The assumption that Manuel's imperial programme was unrealistic and anachronistic rests largely on the fact that this programme failed. It also, perhaps, stems partly from the embarrassment of nineteenth and twentieth-century man on being confronted by the claims to universal sovereignty which Manuel expressed so flamboyantly. Byzantinists may have fallen into the kind of "Whig' interpretation of medieval history which was once applied to the other twelfth-century empire, that of the Hohenstaufen rulers Frederick I Barbarossa and Henry VI.” In this view, the attempt to revive the Roman Empire was misguided because it ran counter to the progressive forces in medieval Europe: rising nationalism; local and professional corporatism; and the more popular universalism of the Church, led by the Papacy. Certainly from a modern perspective it does seem that the future lay not with the imperial monarchies of Germany and Constantinople, whose raison d'étre was the ancient ideal of a Christian Roman Empire, but with those regimes where the ruler was feeling his way towards becoming emperor in his own kingdom. But it did not necessarily seem that way in the late twelfth century; before the death of Henry VI in 1197, the Hohenstaufen seemed on the point of dominating the whole Mediterranean world. It may be helpful to see the imperial revivalism of this period not as a purely reactionary movement, but as one of the many manifestations of contemporary vitality, an attempt to give new life and meaning to an old ideal. The new wealth, the growing professionalism of the educated elite, the corporate self-consciousness of the feudal nobility: these trends found expression not only in institutions which eroded royal authority but also in the service of that authority. The culture of the late twelfth century was very much a court culture. The courts of the Hohenstaufen and the Komnenoi were only two of its centres, and the imperial title did not make them so very different from the others. The title carried a claim to inherit the entire Roman legacy, but what did this mean in practice? It did not necessarily involve a conscious desire to govern all Christian people, or all territories which had formerly belonged to Rome. It had territorial significance mainly insofar as it applied to Italy, and even here the tendency was to build on, rather than sweep away, the status quo which had arisen as a result of the Gothic, Lombard and Norman invasions. The antiquarian style of imperial propaganda, with its evocation of ancient imperial glories, undoubtedly reflects the mentality of literary and legal men surrounding the emperor; it is less certain that it reflects the thinking of the emperors themselves.” The fact that Frederick Barbarossa could advertise himself as the heir of both Charlemagne and Justinian suggests that he did not model himself very closely on either predecessor. Manuel's evocation of Constantine and Justinian was equally superficial. Renovatio imperii Romanorum, the revival of the Roman Empire, was an attempt not to reimpose an ancient political order but rather to stabilise the existing order under the notional supremacy of one emperor. It may be thought that this was a vain ambition, a striving for empty prestige, which hardly justified the immense effort put into it by both eastern and western emperors. On the other hand, the magnitude of their efforts could indicate that more than prestige was at stake. Indeed, it is clear that nominal supremacy in the Christian world brought real political advantages. It provided a justification for expansionist policies, especially in Italy; it also provided a sound legal basis for the formation of unequal alliances, and it could be crucial to a ruler's internal security. Moreover, the nominal head of Christendom was its chief representative in dealings with the nonChristian world. The twelfth-century situation was such that political problems could not be compartmentalised but called for a universal strategy. Imperial revival was a natural response to this challenge by those with imperial claims.
But even if it is conceded that Manuel's programme was sound in itself, it may still be objected that it was unrealistic to the extent that it was more than the empire could afford. Without anything approaching exact figures for Manuel's ‘budget’ it is hard to estimate what proportion of the empire's wealth he spent on foreign policy, and even harder to estimate how much of this money was wasted in terms of the results it achieved. Some discussion of these questions will be attempted in the next two chapters. What interests us here is the theoretical validity of the further assumption underlying modern criticism of Manuel's policies: the assumption that the empire was in a state of economic decline. Exponents of this assumption have pointed to three phenomena in twelfth-century Byzantium: the dominant, privileged position of Italian merchants in the empire's trade; the increasing importance of feudal relationships at all social levels; and the corrupt and oppressive nature of the imperial fiscal system as documented in the letters of provincial bishops.” These phenomena may show that Byzantium was failing to develop the techniques, attitudes and social structures which were leading to economic progress in Western Europe, but they do not prove that the empire was growing poorer. The point on which all literary sources, whether Greek or foreign, are agreed is that Byzantium was an extremely rich society. Like all literary evidence, this must be read with a critical eye. However, the documentary and archaeological evidence for demography, settlement and monetary circulation tends to confirm, rather than negate, the impression that Manuel must have been one of the wealthier monarchs who sat on the Byzantine throne. Besides, it is important not to let modern experience and ideology influence our conception of the role of economics in a medieval society. We should beware of assuming that a healthy economy necessarily went together with a particular form of political organisation - that either feudal devolution or state centralisation was in itself conducive to material prosperity. Equally, we should beware of assuming that wealth was invariably the most decisive factor in the power struggles between medieval monarchies.
Such are the considerations which have determined the conception and shape of this book. It is primarily a study of one emperor, and it is a biography in the sense that it seeks to come to terms with him as an individual. Yet like all biographies of medieval figures it is also, necessarily, a study of the age in which he lived, of the personality as an expression of impersonal factors. The sources are neither rich nor intimate enough to give us the psychological insight and sense of development which make true biography possible. Although by the twelfth century Byzantine writers were no longer content to portray their characters as simple caricatures of good and evil, and attached great importance to personal experience,? their intellectual formation did not foster the recording instinct of the modern diarist or letter writer. Manuel Komnenos has come down to us as the incarnation of Byzantine civilisation in the twelfth century, and it is thus that we must approach him. For this reason, I have decided not to attempt a chronological survey of his life and reign, but rather to look at his empire in terms of certain dominant themes. In each case, this will involve going outside the chronological limits of Manuel's reign. Particular attention must be paid to the reigns of Alexios I and John II because, as we have seen and as contemporaries emphasised, Manuel was very much the continuator of an imperial revival inaugurated by Alexios and associated with the Comnenian dynasty as a whole. Indeed, the period is more often identified with the dynasty than with any one of its rulers — in contrast to the ‘age of Justinian’ or the 'age of Constantine Porphyrogenitus'. Not only is Manuel to be reassessed within the context of the Comnenian dynasty, but the achievement of the dynasty has to be re-evaluated in accordance with the growing perception that the twelfth century, like the eleventh century before it, was a time of constructive change in eastern as well as western Christendom.™ The failure of the Comnenian revival was not a foregone conclusion, but a paradox which makes Manuel and his policies all the more interesting.
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