Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Catherine Holmes - Basil II and the Governance of Empire (976-1025)-Oxford University Press, USA (2006).
640 Pages
Preface
Some ten years ago, in the introduction to his New Constantines (Aldershot, 1994), Paul Magdalino pointed to a striking anomaly: that famous, long-lived, Byzantine warrior-emperors held little appeal for modern scholars. Perhaps, he suggested, it was the odour of autocracy that surrounded them that was so repellent. Few Byzantine emperors were more famous, more long-lived, more warlike, more autocratic, and more controversial than Basil II, the emperor who is most commonly known as the Bulgar-slayer. But when I started investigating Basil’s reign in 1995 few emperors had been as comprehensively ignored. More recently scholarly interest in the emperor himself and the age in which he lived has revived; I now find myself with companions in the search for Basil II, above all Paul Magdalino and Paul Stephenson. While I have been working on this book their conversations and publications about Basil have been of immense help and encouragement.
This volume grew out of an Oxford D.Phil. thesis dealing with the same subject. In both my thesis and this book I have wrestled with the same problems. How does one write about a figure whose mythical status is so great, but whose reign has left such sparse and inconsistent evidence? How does one identify the right questions to ask of the reign, or the right contexts within which to make sense of the reign? Finally I decided that pursuing such an elusive figure would only be interesting if the difficulties inherent in the pursuit were made interesting; if difficulties could be turned into opportunities. Certainly it is true that we have to see Basil in distorting mirrors: in the writings of later Byzantine historians, especially John Skylitzes, and amidst the confused morass of ‘voices off from the empire’s eastern borderlands. But I have found that identifying and making sense of those mirrors has proved a fascinating experience in its own right, and an immensely satisfying, if strangely disorientating, way of perceiving the emperor himself.
My explorations have taken roughly a decade. There are many people from that time I wish to thank. My principal appreciation must be for my D.Phil. supervisors James Howard-Johnston and Mark Whittow. I thank James for his scrupulous attention to detail, his unerring ability to detect a false argument, and his steadfast support over many years; I thank Mark for his willingness to supervise the final stages of the thesis, for enabling me to experience archaeology in Turkey, for acting as sub-editor to this book, and for his friendship. I would also like to thank Jonathan Shepard very heartily indeed for introducing me to Byzantine Studies when I was an undergraduate, and for reading a draft of this book. I should also like to acknowledge Feras Hamza, who at a crucial moment in 1997 helped me to understand some of the Arabic of Yahya ibn Said.
My life as a graduate student of Byzantine Studies in Oxford was made a particular pleasure by all the members of the Byzantine Seminar and by the students and fellows at Balliol College. There are too many people to name who contributed to that wonderful life, but let me mention here Peter Frankopan, Peter Sarris, Julie Dickson, Jeyanthi John, Mathan Satchi and Maurice Keen. Among the institutions I wish to thank are the British Academy, which sponsored my graduate studies, and Balliol College, which awarded me a Jowett Senior Scholarship for the period 1995-7. Funding from the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara enabled me to travel to Turkey in 1995. From 1998 until 2001 I was able to continue studying the history of Byzantium thanks to a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Since 2001 my home has been University College, Oxford. Whether at Caius or Univ I have encountered extremely kind and intellectually stimulating communities of fellows and students. They have helped me to broaden my historical interests and enthusiasms while allowing me time to muse on the reign of Basil II. [would also like to thank all those Byzantinists who have encouraged me over the past ten years to keep working on Basil, in particular Judith Waring, Charlotte Roueché, Margaret Mullett, and Jean-Claude Cheynet.
There are also those whom I wish to thank for their support from older and newer times. From older times I would like to thank Ann Dyball, my Greek teacher at school, as well as those supervisors from Cambridge who kept faith with me when I was ill as an undergraduate, particularly Christine Carpenter, David Abulafia and Anna Abulafia. From newer times I would like to thank Matthew Grimley for bringing me the greatest happiness. Finally I would like to thank my family, especially my parents Patricia and George Holmes, and my brother Robert, for their love, support, encouragement, and imagination. It is to my parents that the book is dedicated.
Introduction
In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Byzantine Empire became the most formidable state in the Near East. Using a mixture of force and diplomacy the Byzantines pushed well beyond their long-established core territories in Anatolia and on the Aegean coasts. They annexed much of the Balkan landmass, the northern reaches of the Fertile Crescent, western Armenia and Georgia, and the islands of Crete and Cyprus.’ In the same period Byzantium’s cultural and religious influence spread even more widely, as missionaries, artists and architects bore the spiritual message and physical accoutrements of Orthodox Christianity far beyond the empire’s territorial frontiers.” The reign of Basil II (9761025) is usually regarded as the apogee of this period of expansion. The emperor’s most conspicuous achievement came in 1018 when Bulgaria was annexed after thirty years of warfare, but territorial additions also occurred elsewhere. In the east the Christian princedom of Tao in Georgia was absorbed in 1000; twenty years later Vaspurakan in Armenia was added. Towards the end of Basil’s reign Byzantine forces also became more active in the southern Italian sphere, consolidating and expanding imperial authority in the face of a variety of local and supra-regional powers including the Ottonian emperors of Germany. By 1024 the emperor was planning to invade Muslim Sicily. When Basil died in 1025 the empire’s frontiers were at their most far-flung since the seventh century. Nor was expansion purely territorial. By the end of his life Basil’s wealth was legendary: a labyrinthine treasury was rumoured to extend under the Great Palace.* One medieval historian alleged that Basil’s riches were so great that he remitted taxation for the final two years of his reign.*
Basil died admired and feared by his contemporaries. According to the eleventh-century Armenian historian Aristakes of Lastivert, when Basil went on procession through the streets of Constantinople shortly before his death, his subjects were too terrified to look him in the face and hid in their houses.’ Historians from the Muslim world described him as having great political ability, sound judgement, and strength of mind.° Nor was this praise stilled by death. Instead as the decades passed his reputation continued to grow. In his remarkable pen-portrait of the emperor the mid-eleventh-century historian Michael Psellos claimed that Basil, ‘purged the empire of barbarians and also completely subjugated his own people’’ According to Psellos, Basil was an emperor who had little time for high culture, and ruled his empire with plain speech and an iron fist. By the end of the twelfth century this reputation had hardened yet further. Now Basil was commonly known as Bulgarslayer, the sobriquet by which he is still often identified.* Yet Basil’s success during life and after death seems all the more remarkable given the very inauspicious start to his reign. When he came to the throne in 976 the treasury was all but empty, exhausted by the military campaigns of his imperial predecessors Nikephoros Phokas (963-9) and John Tzimiskes (969-76). During the first thirteen years of his reign Basil and his younger brother Constantine, his coemperor, faced two intense periods of civil war. The first was waged between 976 and 979 by the general Bardas Skleros; the second between 987 and 989 by another general, Bardas Phokas. At this time, Bardas Skleros also rebelled once again. These wars only ended with the death of Phokas on the field of battle in April 989, and the surrender of Skleros shortly afterwards. But victory had come at an immense price. Basil had only been able to achieve victory by allying himself with his pagan Rus neighbours to the north. In return for military assistance from the Rus, Basil’s sister Anna had been dispatched as a bride to Vladimir, prince of Kiev, who at the same time converted to Orthodox Christianity. Military ignominy in these early years of Basil’s reign extended yet further, above all when the emperor suffered a humiliating defeat against the Bulgarians in 986.
The scale of Basil’s recovery after the early disasters of his reign and his subsequent military conquests persuaded later medieval Byzantine writers to claim that he was the greatest emperor since Herakleios.? Yet, viewed with detachment, it is clear that Basil’s golden legacy was relatively short-lived. Within thirty years of his death the empire began to fragment amid Turkish attacks in the east, and Norman and nomad raids in the west. By the early 1040s the empire once again became prone to coups d’état. By the 1070s revolt became all-out civil war as leading aristocratic dynasties struggled to capture Constantinople, often enlisting in their armies those external foes who were threatening the territorial integrity of the empire.
Because of the position of Basil’s reign between the expansion of the tenth century and the political and military disintegration of the later eleventh, its significance to any understanding of the history of medieval Byzantium in particular, and the Near East in general, could hardly be clearer. If nothing else Basil’s fearsome reputation among contemporaries and later generations seems worthy of detailed investigation. Yet, his is a reign strangely neglected by modern historians. The last detailed general overview was produced at the turn of the nineteenth century by Gustave Schlumberger.'° For much of the twentieth century very little was published in connection with Basil. Re-engagement with the emperor in print has only begun to revive in the last decade.” But while this renewed scholarly interest is extremely encouraging, it has yet to make a substantial impact on the standard view of Basil’s reign. According to that standard view, the reign falls into two distinct temporal and geographical phases. The first phase consists of thirteen years of internal civil unrest, when the emperor found himself threatened by the ambitions of the empire’s leading aristocratic families, such as the Skleroi and the Phokades. These families are sometimes labelled the ‘Powerful’ (Dynatoi). Basil’s military victory over these families in 989, and his issuing of draconian legislation in 996 against the Powerful, are usually seen as laying the foundations to the second, and much more glorious, phase of Basil’s reign. This second period is usually characterized as an unbroken litany of armed conquests in Bulgaria, Armenia, Georgia, and southern Italy.
Yet, there are grounds for thinking that Basil’s reign deserves substantial reanalysis, not just because the model outlined above is too schematic and simplistic, but more importantly because of the direction that Byzantine Studies have taken in recent decades. Since the 1970s most historians have approached Byzantine history of the so-called Middle Period (ninth to twelfth centuries) primarily through analysis of the empire’s socio-economic structures. The result has been substantial growth in knowledge about the empire’s economy, its armed forces, its administration, its fiscal resources, and the personnel of its elites between the ninth and twelfth centuries. But while it has proved relatively straightforward to acquire knowledge about fundamental structures, it has proved more difficult to date crucial periods of change within those structures, and it is in this chronological sense that Basil’s reign has taken on a special resonance. In the absence of firm datable evidence charting structural transformation, Basil’s exceptionally obscure reign has often been used as a convenient black-hole period during which fundamental changes are assumed to have occurred. As a result Basil’s reign has come to be seen as the time when a centrifugal polity, dominated by a struggle between a provincial, military aristocracy and imperial authority, was transformed into a more centripetal state focused on the person of the emperor in Constantinople. Yet, as we shall see in greater detail in later chapters, interpretations of Basil’s reign as the crucible of structural revolution ultimately rest on rather shallow foundations: the allegations made by Michael Psellos that Basil’s character underwent a profound mutation in response to the difficulties he experienced in his early years as emperor. According to Psellos, Basil turned from a wastrel, the lover of luxury, into an ascetic warrior, the lover of battle and privation. It is from this single medieval description of Basil’s change in character that modern historians have extrapolated the incidence of more fundamental structural change in medieval Byzantine history.”
An important reason, then, for studying Basil’s reign in much greater depth is to see whether historians have been correct to identify this period as central to long-term social and political structural changes in the Byzantine Empire. But how should such an inquiry be framed? A traditional approach would involve constructing a sustained analytical chronology of the reign which traces the development of internal politics and external relations. However, in the case of Basil’s fifty-year hegemony a comprehensive narrative which deals evenly with the different chronological periods of the reign and with the various geographical regions, frontiers, and neighbours of the empire, is inhibited by an extremely fragmented source-base, a phenomenon familiar to historians of early medieval Europe and the Near East. Particularly problematic is the uneven and piecemeal record left by medieval historians. Surviving historical narratives of the reign are rare and often late in date. Even when all the available medieval narratives, in Greek and other languages, are collated, long chronological gaps and substantial geographical lacunae are frequent. The fragility of the historiographical record makes it difficult to integrate other written sources (such as saints’ lives, military manuals, and letters), many of which are of uncertain date, into any general analysis of the reign.
The obvious shortcomings of the written sources mean that the material record cannot be ignored. And here, indeed, there are real signs for hope. In the century since Schlumberger wrote his analysis of Basil’s reign, many hundreds of lead seals and coins from the later tenth and early eleventh centuries have been discovered, analysed, and published. Recently archaeological excavations and surveys in many of the former provinces of the medieval Byzantine Empire have begun to expand in scale and ambition. Indeed, it is this material archive that has enabled scholars to begin to investigate the structures underpinning medieval Byzantine society in much greater depth, as recent research into Byzantine administration, the army, and the economy illustrate so clearly.’? Yet, in order to maximize the potential of the material archive in reconstructing political and diplomatic history, the right questions must be asked of it. It is unrealistic to expect material evidence, which so often cannot be dated accurately, to plug geographical or chronological lacunae in the written sources. Nor should the material record be asked to provide answers to very specific political, administrative, or chronological problems about which the written texts are silent. Such an approach is either likely to founder through the lack of appropriate evidence, or may simply result in the selective use of material to support preconceived models.*
Yet, if the medieval evidence is fraught with so many caveats, how should this reign be approached? In the time that has passed since Schlumberger’s publications, no new substantial tenth- or eleventh-century history or chronicle has been uncovered which might provide the underpinning to a reworked narrative treatment. In these circumstances there seems little profit to be gained in writing a history of Basil’s reign which simply synthesizes the extant written sources and adds ephemeral details from the material record. Such an undertaking is unlikely to expand significantly on Schlumberger’s very competent analysis, which with great sensitivity integrated a heterogeneous array of sources into a narrative framework. In addition, a synthesis of this variety bristles with methodological difficulties. A linear narrative structured around the fragmented and piecemeal record provided by the medieval historians may simply replicate those historians’ chronological, geographical, and prosopographical lacunae. Furthermore, an effort to integrate sources from outside the historical record may mean that those sources are read out of their most meaningful context. The result could be the creation of entirely false realities.
Instead, in order to develop an analysis which moves beyond a narrative based on what recent scholars have seen as plundered evidence,” we need to consider how to turn the nature, limitations, and potential of our different sources to best use. This is an approach that involves investigating the internal structures of source materials and identifying those sources’ most meaningful contexts. It is an approach that requires the exploration of contexts far beyond the geographical and chronological boundaries of Basil’s reign. It is an approach that is inherently deconstructive. It is also an approach that is explicitly source-led. My reason for advocating such an approach is that it is only by understanding how the sources that reflect on Basil’s reign actually work, that we can ever hope to construct a clear and reasonably accurate picture of the reign itself.
The most crucial sources in the study of Basil’s long reign are the testimonies of the various medieval historians. Although these testimonies contain vast lacunae and serious flaws, they must be fundamental to an apprehension of political and diplomatic change during the reign. They are the only form of evidence which provides some sort of chronological spine; they are the only form of evidence which focuses specifically on the political and diplomatic history of the later tenth and early eleventh centuries. More to the point, until we have established how and why these medieval historians constructed their own chronologies and interpretations, we cannot hope to use other source materials to good effect. Modern historians, whether consciously or otherwise, always set their understanding of alternative sources of evidence, both written and material, against the background provided by medieval historians. Paradoxically, then, if eventually we want to use alternative materials to investigate Basil’s empire, we need to have a solid grasp of the most obvious form of evidence, the historiographical record: and it is on this form of evidence that this book will focus.
The opening chapter has a very limited ambition: to lay bare the bones of the modern models and the medieval evidence relating to Basil’s reign. It delineates how modern scholarship has shaped our understanding of Basil’s hegemony by outlining the received view of the reign in the modern literature, by identifying where the focus of modern historiography concentrates, and by examining the relationship between modern analysis and medieval interpretation. Above all, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which a very narrow reading of Michael Psellos’ account of Basil’s reign dominates the modern historiography. The chapter then moves on to assemble and briefly discuss all the available medieval sources for the reign. In particular, it identifies those occasions where common ground is to be found between several medieval historical narratives, as well as those periods for which there is very little medieval testimony. Subsequent chapters explore further some of the most significant concentrations in the medieval evidence.
Chapters 2 to 4 look in greater detail at the main Greek narrative account of the reign composed by John Skylitzes at the end of the eleventh century. Despite the recent French translation of Skylitzes’ text published by Bernard Flusin and Jean-Claude Cheynet, the Synopsis remains a relatively little-studied text.’° In these circumstances, Chapter 2 summarizes and analyses the small, scattered body of scholarship which has been dedicated to this author and his text, the Synopsis Historion. The chapter ends by indicating how this research can help us understand Skylitzes’ very idiosyncratic treatment of Basil II. Chapter 3 represents a detailed textual analysis of Skylitzes’ use of source materials. At the end of the chapter, the principal implications of this analysis for Skylitzes’ presentation of the Byzantine past, including the reign of Basil, are highlighted. Chapter 4 explores the literary, social, and political contexts behind the Synopsis Historion. It considers how these contexts influenced the construction of Skylitzes’ text as a whole and the author’s coverage of the reign of Basil in particular. The next chapter continues to build out from earlier chapters, but takes us beyond Skylitzes. It examines that period of Basil’s reign which is most fully represented by all the medieval historians of the reign: the revolts of Bardas Skleros and Bardas Phokas which took place in the period 976 to 989. The chapter compares Skylitzes’ coverage of these events with the rest of the medieval historical record, including those texts originally written in Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian. It identifies a hitherto unacknowledged manifesto in the Greek tradition written in praise of Bardas Skleros.
Taken together, all these historiographical chapters demonstrate how the medieval narrative of Basil’s reign in Greek, as represented primarily by Skylitzes but also by Psellos, was conditioned by the political and literary demands of history writing in the later eleventh century. They also suggest that the Greek historians’ retrospective vision of the Byzantine past has badly obfuscated our understanding of the nature of and tensions within late tenth- and early eleventh-century Byzantine governance, especially relations between the constituent members of the Byzantine political elite. While Psellos and Skylitzes have persuaded modern historians that the ambition of powerful aristocratic families shaped the governance of the Byzantine Empire during Basil’s reign, it will be argued that this interpretation in fact reflects much later eleventh-century preoccupations rather than political reality in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 move on to use the historiographical analysis conducted in Chapters 1 to 5 to construct a picture of governance in Basil’s Byzantium which more accurately reflects later tenth- and early eleventh-century political and administrative realities. These chapters are primarily concerned with the exercise of political authority in three frontier regions of Byzantium: the east, the Balkans, and southern Italy. These are regions where at least some sustained contemporary written narratives survive, in contrast to a region such as Anatolia where the historiographical record falls completely silent between 990 and 1021. In these two chapters frontier governance is discussed not only through scrutiny of the surviving medieval historiography, but also in relation to other extant evidence, especially contemporary lead seals owned by imperial officials. Chapter 6 deals with the empire’s eastern territories, including those acquired by Basil’s imperial predecessors in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as those annexed by Basil himself in Armenia and Georgia. Chapter 7 investigates Byzantine governance of the Balkans and southern Italy during Basil’s reign. Recently it has been suggested that Basil II’s wars in Bulgaria were on a rather smaller scale than has been traditionally thought, and that they may have been punctuated with long periods of peace. This chapter offers qualified support to the first of these suggestions, while at the same time adhering to the more traditional view that warfare was endemic in the Balkans for much of Basil’s reign. More generally each of these chapters will argue that in regions where we have enough evidence to see imperial administration operating on the ground in real time, many of the stereotypes about Basil’s harsh and _ repressive methods of governance prove incorrect.
Direct oppression was used sparingly and with exemplary purposes in mind; indirect negotiation was Basil’s preferred style of practical governance, at least in those localities of his empire where a reasonable amount of contemporary evidence survives. The first seven chapters of this book demonstrate how we can only get closer to the contemporary realities of Basil’s reign if we recognize the limitations and potential of the extant evidence, and are willing to work in ways which will allow that evidence to speak. The book is explicitly constructed around the contours of the evidence rather than around preordained temporal, geographical, or thematic categories. Its chapters do not constitute a comprehensive chronological and geographical treatment of the period 976-1025; the evidence is simply too uneven to support such a project. Nor are they systematically arranged to cover discrete themes: there is no separate chapter on Basil’s relations with the Powerful, on art and literature, on administrative reforms, on Constantinople, on the separate provinces, or on Byzantium’s different neighbours. This is not to say that these themes are ignored. Each surfaces throughout these seven chapters. My point is merely that questions about the chronology, geography, and grand themes of Basil’s reign are only worth asking, and indeed answering, once the evidence-base has been soundly delineated and examined.
Yet, all is not caution. If much of this book is concerned with deconstructing evidence and showing the degree to which many apprehensions about Basil’s reign are somewhat misplaced, the final chapter offers a short account of a reconstructed Basil. It is here that a new narrative of the reign is sketched out. It is here that new interpretations of old concerns are offered: Michael Psellos’ treatment of the reign, the legislation of 996, and the startling and famous image of the soldier-emperor in the Psalter, now in Venice, which was commissioned by Basil himself. It is in the course of this discussion that the relationship between the emperor and the army, rather than that between emperor and great families, is identified as the crucial structural tension in Byzantine governance in the later tenth and eleventh centuries. It is here that the significance of Basil’s reign for the later eleventh-century collapse of the Byzantine empire is assessed. It is here that Basil is rehabilitated as the central political figure of Byzantine history in the so-called Middle Period.
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