Download PDF | Leonora Neville - Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium_ The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios-Cambridge University Press (2012).
243 Pages
Introduction
The Material for History written by the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios in the early twelfth century is a story of men and arms. The history is a remarkably sympathetic reading of a devastating decade in Byzantine his- tory, 1070-1080. While Nikephoros maintains a sense of horror at the Empire's disastrous political situation, his history has remarkably few vil- lains and a great many heroes. The laudatory characterization of nearly all the leading politicians is all the more remarkable in that Nikephoros is relling stories about men who fought each other. The most sympathetic and heroic characters in the history are three political enemies: Romanos Diogenes, John Doukas, and Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder.
These men fought destructively and at times viciously, John unwillingly became a monk and Romanos and Bryennios were blinded. Romanos's blinding led to his death. : That Roman generals who were engaged in fighting other Romans while the Empire was being conquered by Turks, Pechenegs, and Normans can all emerge as heroes in Nikephoros Bryennios's history indicates that Nikephoros was a masterful rhetorician whose history is far more than a plain description of events, Such a text daferves a systematic reading as a work of literature as well as history. The present study is grounded in the conviction that all Byzantine historical texts need to be studied in their own right as coherent compositions before scholars can begin either constructing stories about the past or developing an accurate view of Byzantine culture and society. Byzantine historical texts are still too often mined for information deemed pertinent for the reconstruction of events rather than treated as coherent and complex texas. We need to understand the role that the history played in twelfth-century culture and politics before we can accept or reject its evidence about eleventh-century battles or sociery.
My initial premise that Nikephoros's history is a well- constructed text and worthy of detailed analysis has not been disappointed. Neither has my suspicion that Nikephoros's narrative choices speak to his twelfth-century political and cultural situation in ways that should give pause to modern historians hunting for facts about the eleventh century. Here I have tried to illuminate some of Nikephoros's authorial choices and cultural attitudes, so far as they can be ascertained through the study of his history, to provide some preliminary guidance to this text and, hopefully, to bring readers to a greater appreciation of its literary and historical virtues.
Nikephoros's characterizations frequently call on classical Roman ideals of masculine virtue. A primary conclusion of the current work is that Nikephoros's sense of virtue and honor can be understood as a response to what he perceived as traditional Roman values. While scholars have identified renewed interest in classical Rome as one current in court thought in the twelfth century, Nikephoros's history has not been considered as part of this trend. Nikephoros is here presented as a major proponent of classical Roman virtue and a central character in the growing engagement with Roman history in twelfth-century Constantinople. When the text is read in light of classical Roman ideas of masculine virtue, new meanings emerge.
Most significantly, the work supports a critique of Emperor Alexios Komnenos, the author's father-in-law. Alexios Komnenos is the most complex character in the book. Alexios is never a straightforward hero and some episodes admit of a highly critical reading. Like many Byzantine texts, Nikephoros's history seems designed to speak with double meanings much of the time." Nikephoros's history has long been seen as representing a shift in Byzan- tine culture from a more Christian, quietist ethic to a more military. aristocratic, and valarous sensibility. The seemingly more militaristic and aristocratic culture of the twelfth century, with its greater emphasis on personal loyalty and martial honor, can give the superficial impres- sion of being more 'medieval' than its predecessor. Nikephoros himself has been characterized as "a great seigneur," which draws an implicit parallel with conceprualizations of western medieval chivalric culture.
In some contexts the twelfth-century cultural change has been seen as a decline from the cultural traditions of the Byzantine Empire. In Ostrogorski's classic narrative, the influence of the "military aristocracy" was deeply connected with the lamentable "feudalization" of Byzantine society. Ostro- gorski decried "feudalization" because he saw it as bringing economic and political decentralization. While theories of Byzantine "feudalization" have become passé, the shift toward the values of the twelfth-century "military aristocracy" remains part of our understanding of twelfth-century Byzan- tine culture.
Rather than the implicit westernization of Ostrogorski's story however, the shift toward military culture is here seen as a response to the develop- ment and cultivation of cultural memories of classical Rome. Nikephoros's emphasis on personal military virtue can be understood as a return to tra- ditional Roman cultural values and ideas of proper masculinity. While the emphasis on military glory bears a surface similarity to western knightly ideals, the details of Nikephoros's stories show that he was drawing on clas- sical exempla. Nikephoros was not creating a new medieval sense of manly virtue, but recalling what he perceived to be classical Roman attitudes. Within the field of Byzantine studies the interactions of the medieval Romans with their classical past generally have been discussed in terms of "renaissance" or "revival."
Intentionally or not, the biological metaphor of rebirth implies a period of death or decay. It also reifies culture into a somatic entity capable of birth and death. The logic of the growth, death, and new-birth model of history thus necessarily puts undue emphasis on issues of cultural continuity and disjuncture. Any perception of shifts in Byzantines' valuations of their past becomes embroiled in debate over continuity of culture and mechanics of change. The biological metaphor also carries an inherent valuation dividing history into "good," vital times and "bad" dead times. Concepts of cultural memory provide a more flexible means of dis. cussing the shifting relationships with the past seen throughout Byzantine history.
Beyond the three-generation span of personally communicated memory, societies create cultural memory through the interplay of avail- able textual and physical remnants of the past, the cultural memory of their elders and the context of their current society." Texts, monuments, objects and stories from the past are the materials from which cultural memory evolves in response to the ever-changing environment and challenges each generation faces. The choices one generation makes about what in the past is valuable or dangerous can affect what texts and artifacts are pre- served or destroyed for the future and can markedly alter their presentation and contexts. But the particular valuations and meanings one era bestows upon the detritus of history do not necessarily pass normatively into the furure.
In this way Byzantine history is not the story of the repeated birth and death of a reified antiquity, but of different generations constructing their cultural memory differently. In perceiving as valuable and selecting for emphasis certain values and crates of the classical past, Nikephoros was par ticipating in the ongoing process of creating cultural memory. The mass of textual and physical antiquines in Constantinople and throughout the Empire presented constant points of reference and demanded interpreta- tion. The resonance thar stories of old Romans who fought, struggled.and died for the glory of the Empire had for Nikephoros needs to be seen in light of the particular military defeats the Empire suffered in his child- hood.
In other eras the touchstones for the creation of cultural memory were Christian martyrs, rather than the Horatii. This shift is not a matter of anything dying and being reborn but a change in perceptions of what in the past had true meaning for the present; of what in the past held power for the identity, moral direction, and orientation of the present. The study of Byzantine cultural history is frequently the study of changes in medieval Roman constructions of their cultural memory and varieties within those changes The conceprion of classical Roman history at stake in this book is the one Nikephoros, developed from the monuments, texts, landscape and cultural memories that surrounded him.
This differs most obviously from contemporary textbook conceptions of Rome in having its textual basis in Greek but not Latin sources and in perceiving Plutarch, Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cassius Dio as all fully Roman rather than as Greeks variously negotiating Roman rule. The process by which Greeks came to adopt Roman identity was sufficiently thorough and distant to have lefi no trace on medieval Roman perceptions of the past." More importantly, Greek assimilation to Rome had no meaning for Nikephoros, therefore he was blind to it in the texts he read as it played no role in his memory of Roman history.
Further, while contemporary scholars may consider Polybius and Plutarch to represent different cultural periods within Roman history, it appears that from the perspective of the twelfth century Nikephoros used their texts, among others, to develop a unified memory of old Roman traditional morality. Just as Plutarch made characters from widely different centuries serve as exemplars judged according to one moral system." Nikephoros appears to have brought his reading of diverse periods in Roman history into a cohesive vision of Roman ancestral traditions. Nikephoros's textual sources did not mention the mos maiorum because that term is Latin. The Greek histories of Rome, however, did convey the sense that upholding the customs of the ancestors was a core Roman virtue and presented various visions of what those traditions were.
Throughout this text I use terms such as "traditional Roman values" and "classical Roman virtues" to refer to Nikephoros's perception of the mos maiorum. Nikephoros shared the experience of creating his own personal conceprion of what the mos maiorum was with every other Roman for whom Roman traditional morality held meaning. Aeneas, Romulus, and Horatio were ancient models for Gato and Seneca as much as for Nikephoros. Romans of widely different eras engaged in the process of learning traditional Roman virtues through their cultivation and education, broadly conceived. Nikephoros may have read Dionysius's "Roman Antiquities" rather than Livy, but they all were creating a cultural memory of Roman values on the basis of texts, monuments, stories and the memories of their elders.
This book has three parts, the first and last dealing with the twelfth- century period of composition and the middle with the close reading of Nikephoros's history. The first chapter presents our extant evidence about Nikephoros and largely deconstructs the standard narrative of the 'attempted coup' in 1118 of Anna Komnene in Nikephoros's name that derives from the later histories of John Zonaras and Niketas Choniates. The chapter then presents multiple possible scenarios for Nikephoros's allegiances and for the context of composition. By destabilizing his standard biography, this chapter frees the literary analysis in Part II from being determined by presuppositions about authorial intentions.
The rest of Part I sets up a framework for understanding the functions of early twelfth- century court history, audiences, and the possible sources at Nikephoros's disposal. The core literary analysis of Nikephoros's history in Part II endeavors to illuminate some of its many possible meanings. It opens with a discussion of Nikephoros's explanation of the causes of Roman decline. Chapter 6 describes his overt case for Alexios's right to accede to the rule of the Empire. Some of Nikephoros's views regarding Roman identity are discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 explores the moral patterns behind Nikephoros's descriptions of the many military encounters in the history. Chapters 9 and to deal with Nikephoros's deployment of familial pol- itics and his sense of religion.
The remaining chapters of Part 11 treat individual characters in the history and endeavor to bring the previous dis cussions of Nikephoros's system of values to bear on understanding those portraits, The deep reading in Part It makes the text far more telling as a source of information about Nikephoros when it is brought to bear on the dis cussion of Nikephoros's attitudes and politics in Part 11. The first chapter of Part III explores how the reading of Nikephoros's history presented in Part II may modify our understanding of the events surrounding John Komnenosis succession and the possible political contexts for the compo- stion of the text. Nikephoros's relationship with his wife Anna Komnene and the various relationships between their histories form the middle chap- ter of Part III. The final chapter turns to a discussion of what Nikephoros's appeal to classical Roman exemplars meant for his twelfth-century Con- stantinopolitan culture.
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