Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 37) Cédric Brélaz, Els Rose - Civic Identity and Civic Participation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages-Brepols (2021).

Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 37) Cédric Brélaz, Els Rose - Civic Identity and Civic Participation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages-Brepols (2021).

456 Pages 

Introduction 

Classical Contexts of Citizenship and Democracy ‘Te city (polis) has decided’. Tese are the opening words of the earliest known example of legal codifcation in Archaic Greece, a constitutional act which was copied and engraved on the outside wall of the temple of Apollo Delphinios, the tutelary deity of the city of Dreros in Crete about 650 bce. Te fact that the members of the emerging political community in Dreros referred to themselves through an abstract word (polis) and presented their will as resulting from a collective decision-making — whoever the people allowed to take part in this process were, all of the male inhabitants of Dreros or only part of them — is symptomatic of the eforts made by this group to create social cohesion and to build a common identity. In this case, the process of self-assertion was made even more explicit through the permanent display of the wording of the decision on a public, sacred building of the town. 

With this material achievement and physical marker, the political community proclaimed its existence within the urban landscape.1 As soon as the frst city-states emerged in the Greek world during the early Archaic period,2 participation in and assertion of belonging to political communities at the local level were among the fundamental principles and values on which societies would rely for centuries in Ancient Greece and Rome. Cities represented the frst circle of political integration — although non-civic political and social entities (rural communities, ethnic groups, tribes, etc.) were also atested in many areas of the ancient world, also under Roman imperial rule3 — and civic membership was one of the key elements in promoting local collective identities, not conficting with other, infra-civic forms of social participation such as belonging to family clans, neighbourhood groups, religious clubs, or occupational associations.4 

The possession or acquisition of citizenship was usually a requirement to take part in public life, which included not only participation in political assemblies but also in collective religious and social performances.5 Greek cities down to the Roman imperial period, as well as local communities in the Western part of the Roman Empire, if not all formal democracies, still conceded a substantial share of power to ordinary citizens through popular assemblies and other public activities. Moreover, the atachment to what remained the original homeland of each individual continued to have a strong emotional and symbolic signifcance for most people throughout Antiquity, also afer most areas of the ancient world became parts of a global empire under Roman rule.6 For all these reasons, citizenship and democracy, or to put it in a more generic way, civic identity and civic participation are generally considered as concepts typical of the political experience of Classical Antiquity. Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages are therefore usually not associated in scholarship with these two concepts, which are seen as inconsistent with the political, social, and ideological context of the late and post-Roman world. This mainstream view partly relies on the idealization of the Greek political experience during the Classical period, in particular of ffh- and fourth-century bce Athens which is supposed to have encapsulated and embodied the values of citizenship and democracy during Antiquity.7 

 Within Classical scholarship, a narrative developed assuming that Greek democracy would have started to undergo irreversible alterations from the late fourth century bce, as Athens was defeated by Philip II, king of Macedonia, in 338 bce, and as property qualifcations were introduced for the citizens to enjoy full civic rights in Athens a dozen years later. Tis decline theory has been challenged since the 1970s,8 but it is still a common view in scholarship that it would not be possible any more to speak of democracy from the late Hellenistic period (second to frst centuries bce), and especially under Roman rule, because of the prominent role played by local elites in the public life of Greek cities. Te last vestiges of ancient democracy would have irrevocably vanished with the rise of the Principate in Rome, due to the autocratic and authoritarian nature of the new regime.9 Yet, notwithstanding the deep infuence Athens had on the political culture and institutions of the other cities during the Classical period and even in the subsequent centuries, it was an exception within the Greek world in many respects, and in particular with regard to the duration of the democratic regime (although, interestingly, it was not the earliest democracy).10 

In most other Greek cities the people were not given as much power as in fifth- and fourth-century bce Athens. Moreover, even in cities which had an oligarchic constitution restraining the ability for citizens to take part in the decision-making process, the demos was in theory still considered the holder of sovereignty of the whole political community (or at least was presented this way), and popular assemblies, rather than being simply abolished, were used by oligarchs to enhance their legitimacy.11 Civic participation cannot thus be reduced to the experience of Athenian radical democracy in which the demos was at the core of every collective decision,12 and we should pay atention to the whole range of possibilities and forms for the people to take part, to diferent extents, in the public life of political communities, even in the cases where explicit or efective democratic institutions were lacking. The same observations apply to Rome which never was a democracy in the Athenian sense.13 Even afer the libertas — the term used by Livy (The History of Rome 2.1) to describe the regime which was established afer the last king was expelled from Rome in 509 bce — was seriously undermined because of Augustus seizing power in 27 bce, the comitia or popular assemblies were formally maintained, though with dramatically reduced tasks, and the expression res publica continued to refer to the Roman state throughout the imperial period.14

 This is even more true of the local communities of the Western part of the Empire which were granted constitutions paterned afer the Roman model (municipia, coloniae). In the later case, and unlike in the city of Rome where the comitia were deprived from any efective power in elections only a few decades afer the regime of the Principate was launched, popular assemblies continued to elect local ofcials and priests and to carry out legislative duties during the frst and second centuries ce. 15 Tat these tasks were still regarded as prerogatives of the people in local communities during the second century ce is shown by the fact that the corresponding provisions were included in the by-laws issued under the reign of Marcus Aurelius in favour of the new municipium of Troesmis in Moesia Inferior (modern Romania).16 With regard to citizenship, the general assumption in scholarship is that local citizenships in the Roman Empire would have been irremediably superseded by the large-scale granting of the Roman civitas already before the Constitutio Antoniniana was issued in 212 ce, 17 and that the very value of citizenship would have weakened because of this process during Late Antiquity. 

Yet recent model-based studies have shown that the proportion of Roman citizens among local populations in the Roman Empire during the frst and second centuries ce has been overemphasized so far.18 Regional studies also show that there were huge discrepancies in the percentage of Roman citizens according to the area and that, contrary to what is generally assumed, Roman citizenship was not necessarily considered atractive for all local elites, who remained commited to their home cities and primarily acted in accordance with their own local or regional agenda which implied membership and participation in provincial communities through the possession of local citizenships.19 Moreover, the universal granting of Roman citizenship in 212 ce did not afect the collective statuses of local communities and thus did not make local citizenships disappear.20 One of the unexpected consequences of the Constitutio Antoniniana was, on the contrary, the increasing atention paid by Roman citizens throughout the Empire to their small ‘homelands’ and the celebration of local identities, cities still competing during the third century to get privileges from imperial power and praising their glorious past.21 

Despite the gradual encroachment of imperial power on local autonomy and the trend towards centralization in the administration of the Roman Empire from the late third century ce, 22 cities were still a key actor for the governance of the Empire under the Tetrarchy and during the reign of Constantine, as is shown by the fact that, interestingly, imperial authorities themselves continued to foster local communities by granting civic status to villages or other dependent entities at the beginning of the fourth century.23 Even if the impoverishment of civic elites led to the decline of the epigraphic habit — namely, of the practice consisting in self-representing and celebrating local notables and political communities through the systematic engraving of stone inscriptions and display of monuments — throughout the Empire from the middle of the third century ce and then generated a dramatic drop in our evidence with regard to the functioning of civic institutions,24 legal and literary sources (and in some cases inscriptions as well) hint at the continuance of civic ofces and popular assemblies across the Roman Empire long beyond the end of the third century, albeit with large variations depending on the region and with deep transformations.25 Te most visible fgures in local communities from the fourth to the sixth centuries were the curiales, who were originally members of local councils (ordines decurionum or curiae in the West, boulai in the East).26 During that period, belonging to the local elite became gradually disconnected from the holding of civic ofces: wealth and landownership only, together with social reputation, were now the decisive criteria, and local notables began to form a social group acknowledged as such by imperial power and referred to in legal sources as principales, honorati, or possessores/κτήτορες.27 

Next to local magnates, the rise of the bishop as leader of the civic community is one of the main features of the political, social, and religious transformations experienced by local communities in the later Roman Empire. Te deep change brought about by the development of episcopal power as the central civic authority in Late Antiquity and of the bishop as, in the words of Liebeschuetz, ‘the only [permanent functionary] who had achieved his position with popular consent’,28 has recently been characterized as a transformation both with regard to the scope of this power (the defnition of the group subject to it) as well as its nature, character, and legitimization. Peter Brown points at the inclusion of several types of inhabitants of city and countryside (the poor, those living in the rural areas outside the city walls) as full and fully entitled members of the bishop’s community, in which the boundaries between those with and those without citizenship eroded.29 Te kind of power the bishop exercised added to this transformation of the community he was called to oversee.30 Te legitimacy of his power, whatever concrete forms it took, was ultimately in his role as a pastor — a kind of power qualifed by Brown as ‘sof’.31 Claudia Rapp, in her seminal book on episcopal authority in Late Antiquity, responds to the body of scholarly literature that focuses either on the secular or on the religious aspects of episcopal authority. Her study makes clear that these two aspects cannot be separated. 

The model she provides to study late and post-Roman episcopal leadership in a systematically integral way is threefold, taking into account the pragmatic, spiritual, and ascetic authority of the bishop.32 Supported by both archaeological and textual sources, Rapp underlines the merge of civic and ecclesiastical responsibilities within the ofce of the episcopate. Tese responsibilities, as Rapp argues, were ofen of ‘interchangeable nature’,33 for example, with regard to the public function  of the episcopal residence, his role in the fnancial administration of the city, his infuence on the city’s public space by competing with other infuential citizens for taking the lead in the building programme, and, not in the least, his role in charity as a new form of civic benefaction. Te focus of scholarship on the ruling class of local communities in the later Roman Empire as well as on bishops led to underestimation of the role played by another crucial actor of civic life: the people. Te people had been an indispensable interlocutor and partner of local elites during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, even in the cases where they were not secured participation in the decision-making process through unambiguously democratic institutions. To a certain extent, local elites, in the context of civic life and civic ideology, could not conceive their own existence without the people, and even needed the demos/populus for the legitimization of their own social position and political power, hence the constant dialogue and interaction between the two groups which is a characteristic of the political sociology of cities during the Roman imperial period.34 

Yet the rise of bishops as political actors in the local communities of the Roman Empire from the beginning of the fourth century onwards, and the resulting progressive transfer of many competences from the secular authorities to the Church in the administration of cities, gave new opportunities to the people to express themselves as a group and to have an infuence on local governance, as shown by the role played de facto by the people, as a community of believers, in episcopal elections.35 Te participation of the people in the election of bishops and in the public life of local communities in the later Roman Empire and in the post-Roman world ought not to be interpreted in terms of long-term continuity of democratic practices dating back to the Classical period. We should rather pay atention to the large-scale changes experienced by civic ideology and practices from the fourth century ce because of the restrictions of local autonomy through imperial power,36 of the increasing social inequalities between the people and the local elites, and of the overarching Christianization of society and ethics. Symptomatic of the transformations which afected civic identity in Late Antiquity is how civic discourse and terminology were reinterpreted in accordance with Christian concepts.37 Tis process of rephrasing the Classical defnition of civic membership, especially during the ffh and sixth centuries, is a key issue for our enquiry: capitalizing on the defnitions given by the apostle Paul and by Augustine of what community belonging should mean for Christians, Caesarius, bishop of Arles at the beginning of the sixth century, claimed that the true homeland for Christians, the christianorum civitas, had to be searched for in heaven.38 Community membership now meant frst and foremost to be part of the chosen people of God.39 Next to the theological considerations supporting these claims, the deep geopolitical transformations which afected the Roman Empire from the beginning of the fifth century undermined the signifcance of cities as political entities and as forms of social organization.40

 In addition to major economic difculties, the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire into many separate Germanic kingdoms and the predominance of the military, landowning aristocracy among the leaders in these new states exacerbated the decline of the cities as political communities and led to the reshaping of collective identities on the basis of ethnic, rather than civic, categories.41 In the East, cities, although they were not transformed into administrative units directly depending on imperial power, were deprived from most of their competences during the sixth century because of the centralizing policy of imperial authorities. However, even if the government of the early Byzantine Empire, as well as of the Germanic kingdoms in the West — unlike the Roman Empire until the fourth century ce — did not rely on local autonomy any more,42 towns were still communities somehow,43 made of local notables forming a ruling group on the one hand, and of ordinary people on the other. Te issue as to whether the inhabitants of these towns maintained, nurtured, or developed a sense of common awareness and of urban — if not civic — identity is of particular signifcance for our questioning.44 For that reason, this book also includes a chapter on the early Islamic world in order to examine whether, in a diferent cultural context which did not emphasize civic ideology (although Islam spread into regions which had been part of the Roman Empire and which had a long tradition of civic culture like north-western Africa, southern Spain, and north-western Syria), phenomena similar to what happened in the early medieval West and in the Byzantine Empire can be observed or not with regard to collective identities and popular participation in early Islamic towns. Tis raises the more general issue of popular participation beyond, or regardless of, the formal recognition of power to the people through democratic institutions. Te group consisting of the majority of the population of a town, whether it was characterized as an acknowledged institutional actor through the words demos or populus in their political meaning, or rather as a crowd through expressions such as plethos, ochlos, plebs, or turba, could have a share of power in local government, take initiatives for the common good, or, in any case, play a role in public life.

 Already during the early Roman imperial period, the people of local communities, next to their prerogatives allowing them to take part in the decision-making process through the casting of votes during formal assemblies, were able to infuence and to act in public life through shouting, and by exercising physical pressure on the elites during popular gatherings or meetings, whether or not legally called. Acclamations and other expressions of popular will outside the ordinary voting process were even fostered in the later Roman Empire, as consensus among the people was used as a means to legitimize the status or decisions of local or provincial elites and of imperial power, and was regarded as the result of God’s approval.45 During Late Antiquity, the inhabitants of cities had many ways to express their will or, at least, to infuence public life, including through mob violence.46 

This sociological, not institutional, ability of the people to potentially interfere as a mob in the everyday administration of the towns is a constant, diachronic element in the urban history of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages as well. How frequent and signifcant this form of popular participation was, and how strong the town-dwellers’ self-awareness was,47 will have varied greatly, depending on local contexts, and possibly also on the existence or not of an old civic tradition.48 In Constantinople, for instance, which was in any case an exception as the capital of the Empire and as the New Rome encapsulating the political relationship between the emperor and the people, the symbolic role devoted to the people in monarchic/imperial ideology, the active participation of the city population in the rituals for the acknowledgement of new emperors, and popular response, ofen through violence, to political events involving imperial authorities represented such distinctive features of the Byzantine Empire that Anthony Kaldellis, in a stimulating — albeit deliberately provocative — way, could label the nature of the regime in Byzantium down to the twelfh century as ‘republican’.49 References to the Classical defnitions and practices of citizenship and civic participation have been constant in political thought and experience in the Western world since the late Middle Ages. The Roman Republic, in particular, was set up as an ideological model for supporting communal experiences in Italy: as early as the mid-thirteenth century, several Italian cities deliberately emphasized their Roman past, or invented one, to foster local pride;50 in the mid-fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo explicitly atempted to re-enact the Roman Republic to promote in the city of Rome a communal government which would be independent from aristocratic families and from the papacy;51 in early sixteenth-century Florence, Machiavelli, in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, presented the Roman Republic as an example for polities of his time.52 

Later on, in the context of the Enlightenment, the Roman Republic was deliberately identifed as a model by America’s Founding Fathers as well as during the French Revolution.53 As more radical republican ideas were making progress during the frst half of the nineteenth century, Classical Athens, which had seemed so frightening to political thinkers so far because of the share of power the people had thanks to democratic institutions,54 started to be considered as a source of inspiration for liberal revolutions,55 and nowadays in many European countries children are taught at school that Periclean Athens should be seen as the archetype of modern democracy. All these claims of a Classical legacy in modern political discourse with regard to citizenship and democracy led to an idealization of the Greek and Roman experience in the feld. A direct consequence has been the neglect of the civic practices and discourses from the late Roman period onwards, as well as, to a lesser extent, of the rise of communal entities in medieval Europe since the eleventh century. In this context, Maarten Prak’s recent book, Citizens without Nations, is a ground-breaking contribution to the discussion.56 In his book, Prak shows that the origins for the concept of citizenship in early Modern Europe, rather than in the legacy and claim of Classical models, should be searched for in the experience of urban citizenship in medieval local communities.

  

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Download PDF | Wisdom's House, Heaven's Gate: Athens and Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, By Teresa Shawcross , Palgrave Macmillan 2024.

Download PDF | Wisdom's House, Heaven's Gate: Athens and Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, By Teresa Shawcross , Palgrave Macmillan 2024.

505 Pages 

Preface

Imagine a Mediterranean at the dawn of the eleventh century divided between two rival superpowers. One was the Christian Empire— Byzantium—of Basil II, the greatest ruler of the Macedonian dynasty and the other, the Islamic Caliphate of al-Hakim, the greatest ruler of the Fatimid dynasty. Through taxation, these states had at their disposal the vast resources of their territories’ agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and local commerce. They also profted from control of the fow of goods along the networks of long-distance trade that made up the overland and maritime Silk Routes. This book is the story of what the subjects of these superpowers thought—or, rather, of what they were told they ought to think by those who claimed to be their teachers and rulers. It is the story of how particular systems of knowledge and belief came into being. I trace the formation of two intertwined, highly generative versions of Abrahamic monotheism. These are Chalcedonian Orthodox Christianity and Ismaʿili Shiʿi Islam. 

Engaged in constant contact and exchange with those on the other side of the border, the proponents of each religious doctrine and rite saw in their enemies a distorting mirror in which they could discern their own truths. Integral to their projects were the claims they advanced over not only the traditional legacies but also the ritual and symbolic landscape of a pair of cities that had long boasted names to conjure with, both within the Mediterranean and beyond: Athens and Jerusalem. Beginning in the Caliphate and provoking a response in the Empire, a revival occurred of Classicism—specifcally of Hellenism—that contributed to the transformation of religion by the seemingly incompatible but nonetheless combined forces of intellectualism and mysticism. Training in philosophical wisdom provided access to another, heavenly world. The selective adaptation and compilation of material from existing works of Neoplatonic thought—together with the composition of new writings—allowed the resources of a carefully curated metaphysical speculation to be combined with dogmatic theology in order to promote the ambitions of competing elites. Statesmen and teachers such as Abu Yaʿqub al-Sijistani and Michael Psellos created the frameworks that sought to render the power exercised by the regimes they served not merely legitimate, but also attractive. For, in the Middle Ages, ideas still mattered. Indeed, they were vital concerns. 

They fed a wider cultural fermentation traceable not only in the pages of scholarly manuscripts whose perusal was reserved for a literate minority, but also in public architecture and art. Offcial construction projects coupled with demographic shifts profoundly reshaped—even in regions geographically remote from the confict zone—the environment in which all classes of society participated in organised worship: performing their devotions in order to join the rank of those who had been fully initiated and received the gift of illumination. When analysing the political and religious ideology of Constantinople and Cairo, we have tended hitherto to focus on the hostility these regimes shared for Baghdad, rather than on the rivalry between them. The received opinion has been that the relationship of the Macedonians and Fatimids was generally an amicable one. But the existence of a series of peace treaties between the two dynasties cannot disguise a fundamental incompatibility of territorial and economic interests. 

This does not mean that such incompatibility should be equated with a grand civilizational struggle between Christianity and Islam. Continuity with conficts between the Heraclians and the Umayyads or the Isaurians and the Abbasids—often waged primarily by the satellite powers of each—may have been asserted by specifc tenth- or eleventh-century writers eager to analyse and explain current affairs. However, actual policies can be shown to have changed considerably not only from reign to reign, but also within individual reigns. Constant manoeuvring by rulers, as well as by their courtiers and their subjects, manifested itself in escalations and de-escalations of various types. A more nuanced picture thus begins to emerge from a careful reconsideration of the sources. This revisionist work is being initiated by a new generation of scholars. 

The study contained here does not pretend to be defnitive or even comprehensive. It aims simply to advance an argument—and to inspire further discussion. In tentatively formulating an outline for an alternative historical narrative, I have preferred, instead of offering a running commentary that would draw attention to points of disagreement and offer a critique, to acknowledge rather in my footnotes our very considerable dependence on the advances made by earlier researchers. This recommended itself as the approach that was not only the most straightforward, but also the most likely to achieve an exposition that would be as accessible as possible to readers. As is always the case when one undertakes to step outside the protection of a specifc discipline or specialism, I have needed a scholarly community with vision and forbearance. I count myself fortunate in that regard. My book would not exist without the award of a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. 

It was facilitated by two fellowships at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens—as well as by shorter residencies at Harvard Divinity School, the School of Middle-Eastern Studies at Leiden University, the Department of Asian and North-African Studies at Ca’ Foscari-University of Venice, and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

 It owes a particular debt to the undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and interested members of the wider public who at various times have attended my seminars. Encouragement and support were provided by: Ellen Alvord, Colin Austin, Chris Benfey, Chris van den Berg, Brendan Burke, Rhea Cabin, John Camp, Fred Cheyette, Ioanna Christoforaki, Ioanna Damanaki, Martin and Claire Daunton, Melinda Duer, Sylvie Dumont, Aspasia Efstathiou, Joseph Ellis and Ellen Wilkins-Ellis, Tara Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Key Fowden, Maria Georgopoulou, Geoffrey and Joan Greatrex, Louise Haywood, Catherine Holmes, Tariq Jaffer, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Anthony Kaldellis, Marie Kelleher, Hugh Kennedy, Manolis Korres, Dimitris Krallis, Michael Maas, Fred McGinness, Maria Mavroudi, Peter Meyers, James Montgomery, Barbara Nagel and Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Jenifer Neils, Leonora Neville, Pamela Patton, Anna Pianalto, Jamie Reuland, Ian Ryan, Teo Ruiz, Peter Sarris, Martha Saxton and Enrico Ferorelli, Lenia and Derek Shawcross, Jonathan Shepard, Irini Solomonidi, Alan Stahl, Tasos Tanoulas, and Wendy Watson and John Varriano. I am especially beholden to Nikolas Churik, Jeremy Farrell, Greg Fisher, David Gyllenhaal, Luke Madson, Lucas McMahon, and Jean-Marcel Rax for their assistance with technical matters. 

The project has had to contend with the transformation of publishing by the outsourcing and automation of tasks such as copy-editing, typesetting and printing that used once to be the responsibility of staff based in house. Recent months have seen an ever greater reliance by publishers on so-called artifcial intelligence. I wish to thank the press’s employees and subcontractors for having striven to fnd solutions for the problems arising out of the limitations of a technology that, while promising, is still in its infancy and struggles to handle multilingual texts. I dedicate this book to my siblings—in gratitude for the many hours we have spent together in play as children and in discussion as adults. They will understand me when I reach for the words of the poet in order to explain what spurred me on to write the pages that follow: “Ἔρως […] τῶν πάλαι θρυλουμένων / ἔγραψε ταῦτα …” 2022, Feast of St Dionysius the Areopagite, location undisclosed 

Teresa Shawcross

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Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 25) Erica Buchberger_ Yaniv Fox - Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400-800-Brepols Publishers (2019).

Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 25) Erica Buchberger_ Yaniv Fox - Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400-800-Brepols Publishers (2019).

305 Pages 

Introduction 

This volume is about inclusion and exclusion, which are social transactions that allocate or withhold resources from individuals or groups of people. It is interested in the development of these dynamics in texts produced by Christian authors working in the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. Inclusion and exclusion are ubiquitous social phenomena with an unmistakable purchase on every human endeavour. In countless fields of activity, from war, diplomacy, and politics to commerce, religion, and beyond, we can track the footprints of inclusion and exclusion. First and foremost, however, inclusion and exclusion are intimately personal experiences, firmly rooted as they are in our earliest socialization processes.1 The developing individual learns her place within society by discovering how she resembles and differs from others and witnessing first-hand the implications of those correspondences. 

Essentially, then, to include and exclude is to map the social landscape and navigate it according to the compass of similarity and difference.2 In one way or another, everyone with whom we interact is bound to us by similarity. Families, communities, and whole societies are constituted on the notion of similarity as a precondition for belonging. Depending upon the case, such similarity can be profoundly pervasive or markedly limited. Everywhere and always, however, the detection of similarities translates into behaviour. The sharing of space — with a friend, stranger, enemy, or even an animal, an object, or the perceived presence of a supernatural entity — prompts particular behaviours. These behaviours, which may prove pivotal, are spurred by the human impulse to divide the world into groups governed by assumptions about similarity and difference.3 Inclusion and exclusion are also complementary acts. In fact, one is meaningless when considered in isolation from the other. The moment that one includes, one excludes. And inclusion and exclusion are coded not only into the guidelines of normative behaviour but also into linguistic registers, regulating the ways in which members of a group address their perceived peers and their perceived ‘others’.4 The question, however, is not always one of ‘us’ and ‘them’. We tend to view the world concentrically, its alterity increasing with distance, whether physical or metaphorical. 

In this way, we quantify alterity and compare categories of otherness. And this tendency is all-encompassing. What utterance does not assume and articulate some division between subject and external reality? The act of speech is perhaps the most intrinsic enactment of inclusion and exclusion available to human experience. Moreover, far from being merely binary modes of ontological or epistemological categorization, inclusion and exclusion are also powerful legal, political, and cultural tools. This volume will engage with the ways in which late ancient and early medieval societies applied these tools to shape the world around them. As a field of historiographical interest, inclusion and exclusion are a natural continuation of the growing preoccupation with questions of identity. In recent years, this topic has generated a vast body of literature, charting the adoption and adaption of various conceptual constructs that facilitate self-definition.5

 Many of the broader categories of identity — religion, ethnicity, gender, class — have strong bearing on the discussion at hand. It might be useful to think of  inclusion and exclusion as instruments in the service of the discourse of identity, bringing its conceptual constructs into the realm of social praxis. Recent work on intersectionality has likewise devoted much attention to the consequences of navigating multiple — at times, interlocking and even contradictory — identities.6 Such attempts at harmonizing conflicting social demands reflect the kinds of relationships that concern us here. Groups, the building blocks of society, are themselves heterogeneous units. As social forces, inclusion and exclusion can turn inward, either because groups order themselves hierarchically or because they perceive themselves as having both a centre and a periphery. Thus, there can be ‘better’ specimens of a certain group, who embody more of its characteristics. 

The prophet Muhammad expresses such a sentiment when he tells his companions: ‘I am the most Arab of you all, I am of Quraysh and I was suckled among the Banū Sa‘d bin Bakr’, perhaps privileging his nomadic upbringing and his superior command of Arabic as coveted social resources.7 As this parable demonstrates, alongside the conceptual scaffolding that underpins these social phenomena, the decision to include and exclude also has a clear pragmatic rationale. Whatever form they ultimately took historically, resources have always been finite, giving rise to different ideas on how best to control and apportion them. Furthermore, competition over resources amplifies some differences while smoothing over others. The following chapters approach the regulation and distribution of resources from a variety of angles. 

The Spatial and Chronological Setting The Mediterranean, a popular setting of historical treatment, shares many of the problems posed by other spatial choices, such as the Roman world, Christendom, and the West. Ultimately, each of these settings can seem rather arbitrary. Our choice, then, warrants a word of explanation. The populations, material goods, and ideas that inform the following discussions may have been borne on the waves of the Mediterranean or washed onto its shores. It is their impact on the terrestrial, rather than maritime, environment, however, that animates this volume. Moreover, as the contributions are  not primarily concerned with ecological history or how the inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral acted upon the sea or were, in turn, influenced by it,8 our use of the term ‘Mediterranean’ may be taken as a misnomer: after all, the chapters discuss southern Gaul, Italy, and Syria, but also northern Gaul and Britain. What makes these historical scenes specifically ‘Mediterranean’? Arguably, at one point, even Britain, Mesopotamia, and Ethiopia functioned as Mediterranean hinterlands, in the sense that the inhabitants of these regions were nourished by seaside economies, adorned themselves with Mediterranean fashions, and practised a Mediterranean religion.9 Here, one notes the degree to which historiographical discussion about the late antique and early medieval world remains beholden to the ideas of Henri Pirenne. 

The Pirennian notion of a Mediterranean commonwealth, driven by economy but yoked together by an assemblage of cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities, certainly informs this volume. Yet it is precisely the breakdown of similarity, real or perceived, that serves as its polestar. In such moments of dissolution, inclusion and exclusion reveal themselves in starkest clarity. In the century or so since Pirenne produced his groundbreaking work, scholars have learned a great deal about the emergence of the post-Roman order. Such knowledge makes it difficult to affirm Pirenne’s idea that this order resulted from a barbarian ‘dream […] to settle down, […] in those happy regions where the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the soil were matched by the charms and the wealth of civilization’.10 Pirenne’s portrayals of the late Merovingians and Islam have likewise withstood scrutiny poorly, and critique of his ideas has constituted a highly fruitful avenue of late antique and early medieval historiography of the past century. In many ways, scholarship is still arguing with Pirenne.11 The Roman sea, for Pirenne, served as a conceptual adhesive, holding together disparate societies with the help of language, religion, economy, and culture.  

The Muslim sea had the opposite effect, unmaking the ancient world and birthing a medieval one. The Mediterranean as a conduit of human activity in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has not lost its currency in modern scholarship, although Pirenne’s dichotomous treatment of it certainly has.12 Roman cultural homogeneity has been shown to be, if not sheer fantasy, then at least the preserve of a paper-thin imperial elite.13 In the eastern provinces, it was not Latin but a variety of local languages such as Syriac and Coptic that prevailed in most spoken contexts; in more formal scenarios, Greek functioned almost exclusively as the East’s lingua franca.14 In the West, classical erudition (or lack thereof ) meant that a seemingly uniform Latinate community was, in actuality, highly stratified and susceptible to inclusive and exclusive forces.15 Germanic languages, which probably played different roles at different times, left little trace in the surviving literature, although, without question, they added a layer of complexity to this picture. 

If Christianity is to be regarded as the sealant that held the vessel of late antique and early medieval culture afloat on the waves of the Mediterranean, we must also concede that it often played an opposite role. The undercurrents of heresy and schism steadily ate away at unity. For a while in the West, Nicenes and Homoians became the defining antithetical poles in the conversation on religion,16 while in the East, Chalcedon was the yardstick against which orthodoxy was determined.17 Even among those communities joined together in communion, Peter Brown’s notion of ‘micro-Christendoms’ teaches us that it was difference, not similarity, that appeared most saliently in this context.18 Our decision to take the Mediterranean as a frame of reference allows us to envision a space whose outer rim is intentionally ill-defined — a ‘greater’  Mediterranean19 — that, in the chronological parameters underlined below, was still informed by late Roman culture and was Christianized or in the process of becoming so. Continuity between the Roman and post-Roman world is therefore an enduring theme in the chapters of this volume. 

As the chronological purview we have chosen clearly shows, the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean remained a culturally coherent space throughout the invasions of the fifth century and the Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa two centuries later. It was interconnected through trade, religion, and culture for much longer, adapting and transforming as it came into contact with new cultures and their ideas. 

To be sure, the political map of the Mediterranean changed dramatically from the beginning of the chronological scope envisioned by this volume to its end. Significant unto itself, this shift conceals deeper cultural trends that took much longer to achieve fruition. Provinces that were absorbed by the Islamicate world soon reoriented themselves towards new linguistic and cultural centres, yet the process of Islamization would take centuries to run its course. All the while, Christian communities in the Levant and North Africa continued to look, either in agreement or in opposition, to Constantinople. The barbarian courts in the West and the papacy likewise continued to view themselves as part of a religious and political community headed by the emperor, whose influence was not effaced even by the rise of the Carolingians, Pirenne’s great progenitors of medieval culture.

The Chapters of This Volume Exclusion and inclusion come into sharper relief when seemingly monolithic social and cultural constructs are shaken, setting into motion processes of adaptation and change. During Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the space that for centuries had been occupied by the Roman state experienced precisely such a process. By and large, the chapters of this volume will confine themselves to the period 400–800 ad, or from the beginning of the last Roman century to the height of Carolingian power. Any attempt to map a periodization model onto the complexity of the historical process is inevitably artificial, and ours is no exception. It is, nevertheless, possible to say that the Mediterranean we encounter at the earliest point of this timeline differs in several significant ways from the one that emerges from the latest. The most conspicuous change entailed the abandonment of one and the adoption of another, very different, religious system. From the early fourth century on, the imperial administration at first took a sympathetic, then an ideologically committed, stance on the question of Christianity, steadily working to transform a polytheistic society into a Christian one. 

The new religion did not emerge fully formed, of course. Much of the religious history of subsequent centuries can be viewed as a journey to discover where the theoretical and practical boundaries of membership lay. From the outset, Christianity aimed to mould society according to divine will. This subversive social vision expressly sought to reconfigure relationships between the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, and the politically powerful and the disenfranchised. Ecclesiastical thinkers were keenly aware that, while God was infallible, his interpreters were not. Already in the epistles of Paul, an exclusionary discourse was applied to those who would misinterpret the divine plan, drawing sharp distinctions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy and outlining the ways in which one could traverse the boundaries between the two in either direction.20 Once it achieved primacy in the Roman Empire, Christian thought was forced to make peace with more mundane considerations, which it did with surprising agility. 

But even with new forces impinging upon the Church’s calculus, its claim to exclusive exegetical authority never waned. As a result, many would find themselves on the wrong side of the fence, either as non-Christians or as Christians of a lesser kind.21 The chapters of this volume are divided into four main thematic sections, each exploring the different paths taken by Christian societies as they attempted to regulate access to social and cultural resources. Of course, the Church was not one entity but many. Christian communities negotiated the parameters of social discourse in a multitude of ways, through the activities of small but influential intellectual circles, the coercive power of the state, and the legislative initiatives of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Each of these strategies produced different kinds of texts. The first thematic section, ‘Literate Communities and their Texts’, investigates how texts functioned as means of inclusion and exclusion. Whether by crafting a deliberate narrative, by creatively editing existing works, or by altogether restricting access to competing texts, scholars throughout the period at hand controlled the dissemination of ideologically charged rhetoric. 

The first chapter of the volume, by Carmela Franklin, asks whether the ‘Frankish redaction’ — purportedly a subcategory of one of the five textual classes identified by Louis Duchesne — constitutes a valid interpretative framework for the Liber pontificalis. This examination has immediate bearing on questions of inclusion and exclusion since the manuscripts that contain the socalled Frankish redaction have long been regarded as a concerted Carolingian effort to enmesh the family’s political ascendancy in the history of the papacy in the eighth century. Such a reading would point to a deliberate Carolingian manipulation of the Liber pontificalis, with the aim of refashioning the historical narrative to conform to a certain political agenda. Yet Franklin concludes that the Frankish redaction cannot be interpreted in isolation from other manuscripts in its class, and that it was, in fact, a Roman creation that took shape through a disorganized process whereby marginalia migrated into the text. Dirk Rohmann sets out to examine the institutional treatment of texts considered outside the bounds of orthodoxy. 

In addition to identifying outright violence against texts that originated from heretical schools of thought and pagan circles, culminating in officially sanctioned book burnings, he deals with the defensive attitudes embraced by authorities in an attempt to shield orthodox dogma from outside scrutiny. As Rohmann shows, by positing that heterodoxical compositions were indebted to older, pagan works, Christian communities were forming a new understanding of the term ‘heresy’, which encapsulated a more exclusive heresiological discourse. Shane Bjornlie proposes a new context for the reading of one particularly charged text, namely, Beowulf. In Bjornlie’s treatment, the sixth-century Scandinavian kingdom of the Geats functions in the epic as a layered metaphor for the ninth-century courts of Wessex and Aachen, allowing the author to analyse and work through the societal anxieties that ensued from the encounters of the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks with their partially acculturated Viking neighbours. Bjornlie argues that Beowulf is rich in textual couplets that embody this narrative strategy. 

The spatial dichotomies posited by Beowulf — the mead hall, governed by an aging king, juxtaposed to the lawless fens, stomping grounds of Grendel — are one example of this, symbolizing the authorial preoccupation with the Anglo-Saxons’ own heathen past and the potential unravelling of their political culture. The second thematic section of the volume, ‘The Internal Dialogue of the Church’, looks at ecclesiastical authors and their efforts to forge a path to consensus and thereby circumscribe the parameters of orthodoxy. This project did not automatically denounce as heretical those schools of thought that diverged from accepted theological convention. Rather, it took a subtle, and ultimately more accommodating, approach to the question of heresy. Hence, divergent thought was judged not only against dogma but against other parameters, too, in an effort to seek a more inclusive principle of Christian community. Yonatan Livneh’s chapter examines the narrative strategies of Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, whose compositions envisage Church history in terms of constant inner conflict. This, argues Livneh, is a departure from previous attitudes governing ecclesiastical historiography. Choosing discord as a leitmotif was not meant to glorify or encourage Church disputes: quite the opposite. Weaponizing theological nuances was, for Socrates and Sozomen, behaviour deserving of criticism and was depicted accordingly as a boon for the Church’s adversaries. 

Daniel Neary’s analysis of the writings of Anthony, a seventh-century monk in the Palestinian monastery of the Mother of God at Choziba, continues in a similar vein. Like Socrates and Sozomen, Anthony censures the litigiousness of Church leaders, whose proclivity for splitting theological hairs caused them to forsake more immediate spiritual concerns and brought the Church much misfortune. Far from adopting the sectarian positions of his theological partisans, Anthony sees religious controversy as an obstacle on the path to restoring the Palestinian church to its former greatness, opting instead for a more inclusive policy of religious oikonomia. Peter Schadler discusses the process whereby acceptance of ecumenical conciliar legislation became a parameter for orthodoxy in the compositions of Melkite writers. By examining a chronological arc that begins with the writings of Sophronius of Jerusalem, then proceeds to John of Damascus, and culminates with Theodore Abu-Qurrah, Schadler highlights an emerging concern with conciliar authority. All of these men were forced to contend with the reality of post-Chalcedonian councils and therefore developed a response that, while accepting of later ecumenical legislation, fashioned the first four councils as a true gauge of orthodoxy. 

As Schadler shows, acceptance or rejection of conciliar legislation became an increasingly relevant criterion as the Muslim conquest of the Levant made communication with Constantinople increasingly sporadic, exposing Christian communities to Muslim scholarly attention and criticism. Post-Roman royal courts frequently weighed in on the Church’s internal dialogue. Social cleavages along doctrinal lines were a matter of great political concern, and the state therefore took an active role in controlling events on the ecclesiastical stage. Religious identity also interacted in subtle ways with other strata of social identity, occasioning the emergence of a complex grammar of religion, ethnicity, and class that corresponds only very partially to our own. 

Christendom’s sense of its past, forged by centuries of controversy, was decisive in determining ecclesiastical and civil authorities’ response to the challenges posed by these outsiders, as the papers in the third section, ‘Persecution and Dissent’, discuss. As argued by Éric Fournier, under the Vandals, both Nicene and Homoian churches deployed strategies against one another that had originally evolved to resist the Donatists. The History of the Vandal Persecution’s graphic scenes obscure the fact that imperial legislation under Theodosius took a harsher stand on Donatists than Huneric, Victor of Vita’s most maligned king, ever did on Nicenes. Robin Whelan’s chapter probes the nuanced interplay between Gothic and Homoian identity in sixth-century Italy. Contemporary sources did not necessarily envision explicit links between these two discrete spheres of identity. Whelan considers the context in which several key papyri from Byzantine Ravenna were produced, against the backdrop of new exclusive legislation emanating from the imperial court. 

He demonstrates how, in the uncertain atmosphere that followed the conquest of Italy, ethnic discourse could be employed to divert unwanted attention from confessional differences. Erica Buchberger considers the precarious state of Jews in seventh-century Spain by examining the evolving attitude towards Spanish Jewry as a consequence of internal processes taking place within the Visigothic polity. The adoption of Catholicism and the increased blurring of ethnic lines between Romans and Goths was an inclusive process that sought to redefine the political community. It did so by embracing an exclusionary approach towards Jews, who became ever more marginalized as time went on, exemplifying the degree to which inclusion and exclusion, as social forces at work, are closely intertwined. Thomas  J. MacMaster perceives the Jewish policies of Frankish King Dagobert  I as a local offshoot of a Mediterranean trend spearheaded by Emperor Heraclius. He uses supporting evidence to re-evaluate the claim made in the so-called Chronicle of Fredegar that Dagobert effected a comprehensive policy of forced conversion, which has hitherto often been dismissed as exaggeration or even complete fiction. 

The fourth and final thematic section, ‘Elite Networks’, investigates inclusion and exclusion in the context of elite culture. Whether through political manoeuvring, the exchange of florid epistles, or performative feasting, elites used inclusion and exclusion to accentuate or downplay certain aspects of their identity to advance a range of social goals. The uncultured mores of barbarians in the sources has often been taken as evidence of their otherness. As Emmanuelle Raga shows in her discussion of dining, feasting, and diet, food and food culture were important strategies of  distinction for Roman society. It is not immediately apparent, however, that these differences stemmed from ethnicity. Raga argues that social class and occupation are better predictors of such behaviour than ethnicity and that the modern emphasis on ethnicity has clouded our reading of the sources. 

The culinary practices of soldiers and peasants would have appeared to Roman elites as offensive and boorish, but this judgement bore little relation to ethnicity. On occasion, barbarians could behave as aristocrats, and their performance was evaluated on the basis of their adherence to the social norms of the Roman elite rather than on ancestry. As Aleksander Paradziński demonstrates in his chapter, the carefully constructed ethnic identity of the Ardaburii, a family of high Roman officials of Alanic ancestry, flowed directly from its fluency in the language of late Roman politics. The family’s most successful members — Aspar, Ardabur, and Patricius — nurtured alliances at court as well as among non-Roman groups, such as the Thracian Goths. Their ethnicity, expressed in naming and matrimonial policies, reflected a desire, in Paradziński’s words, to appear ‘as Roman officials’ but also to broadcast ‘a clear signifier of a differing identity’. ***

 Inclusion and exclusion are exceptionally complex social phenomena, especially when taken against the backdrop of a transforming Mediterranean between the fifth and ninth centuries. As a result, our chapters are much more exploratory than they are conclusive. Nevertheless, by peering into this chronological and cultural space through the lens of inclusion and exclusion, the authors of this volume converge on many important points, evidence of the usefulness of this approach for understanding the late antique and early medieval world. 

 

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