The relations of Byzantium with the Christian west loom large through the
chapters that follow, tracing political, military and ecclesiastical encounters
and exchanges. This does not necessarily mark over-simplification of the
issues for the sake of narrative formatting. To recount Byzantium’s relationship
with all the peoples and areas around it in equal measure would
not be feasible, given the kaleidoscopic movement of the peoples and,
in many cases, the dearth of source-materials for their relations with the
empire. The only institution whose dealings with Byzantium can be tracked
continuously across a thousand years is the papacy, offering an alternative
universalist scheme of things. The minutiae of this relationship are not
analysed or recounted here, but Byzantino-papal relations form a baseline
for Byzantium’s relations with the Christian west, a story offering extensive
windows on, if not a key to, the empire’s longevity. Time and again, they
also show how ‘Old Rome’ and its adherents impinged on the empire’s
domestic affairs.
There was an epic turning of the tables in the balance of power and
wealth between Byzantium and the west from the sixth century, when
Justinian’s armies restored most of Italy to his dominion, through to the
eleventh century, when emperors could still harness western martial and
commercial resources on their own terms, and up to the thirteenth and
fourteenth century, when westerners often, but not invariably, had the
upper hand. By the late Byzantine era, the empire was in many ways an
economic colony of the west, the Genoese and Venetians controlling the
islands and other strategically important vantage-points in the Aegean,
backed up by formidable naval resources and exchanging manufactured
goods for primary produce. The renown of western arms was such that
Manuel II Palaiologos (1391–1425) spent years touring the west in hopes of
military aid.22 Yet by this time much of the Peloponnese had been restored to
imperial dominion after decades of Frankish rule in the thirteenth century,
and – against theTurkish odds – ‘hot-spots’ such as Thessaloniki still aligned
themselves with the emperor in Constantinople under the encouragement
of their church leaders (see below, pp. 857–9).
In tracing these shifts in power one glimpses the silhouette, if little more,
of that ‘silent majority’ of orthodoxGreek-speaking country-dwellers whose
customs and beliefs stood in the way of occupiers’ maximal exaction of
resources and consolidation of their regimes. In its way, the imperviousness
of ‘Greek matters’ to land-based Latin warlords and churchmen offers
as strong a clue as any to the reasons for the resilience of the Byzantine
empire (see above and below, pp. 777–8). Yet it also stood in the way of
Palaiologan emperors seeking some form of union with Rome (see below,
pp. 829, 863–4).
This work pays pronounced attention to emperors’ dealings with nonmembers
of their empire, those considered not quite ‘Romans’ for one reason
or another, laying it open to the charge of undue attention to ‘Byzantium’s
foreign relations with little regard for its internal history’.23 This
plaint cited the then-published volumes of the New Cambridge medieval
history and is pertinent, seeing that over half our chapters derive from
contributions made to that series; the series’ framing of the middle ages
is maintained in this work.24 Moreover our chapters, in line with the
New Cambridge medieval history, aim to present the interplay between
socio-economic developments, the turn of events and vicissitudes of successive
political regimes – the stuff of narrative. There are, as emphasised above,
many roads to Byzantium, but the trails left by contacts with outsiders are
numerous and quite well documented. They bear closely on Byzantium’s
one undeniable characteristic, its durability, and on our opening questions:
how on earth did the empire last so long, as political entity and as idea?
The empire was continuously confronting armed outsiders, and constructing
a balanced account of this requires frequent recourse to non-Byzantine
sources. So attention to alternative polities seems not merely excusable,
but advisable, particularly since those which veered between merging
with and separating from Byzantium often provide invaluable information
about the empire’s internal affairs. Four considerations may support this
proposition.
Firstly, a geopolitical fact no less important for being obvious:
Constantinople lay at the hub of many routes by land and sea. Constantine
theGreat chose Byzantium because major military highways converged
there and because its accessibility by sea would facilitate provisioning of the
increased population he envisaged for his new residence. For almost 300
years corn supplies were regularly shipped from Egypt, free of charge. But
the assumption that overwhelming advantage would lie with the emperor
against all comers already needed qualification in Justinian’s era. Once
Byzantium became a kind of empire sans fronti`eres, the very accessibility
of Constantinople and its environs exposed citizens to abrupt arrivals of
aliens. Even lulls were apt to be rudely interrupted by the onset of ‘barbarians’,
as for example the appearance off the City walls of 800 Rus or
Scandinavians who refused to disarm and whose ships had to be dealt with
around 1025.25 And the speed with which Suleiman ibn Qutlumush (1081–
6) and his Turkomans advanced north-westwards along the military road
towards the Bosporus in 1075 shows the mixed blessings of the highways
inherited from ancient Rome.26 The state of emergency generated by the
Arabs’ onset eased after the seventh and eighth centuries, but the challenge
posed by potentially formidable foes on two or more fronts at a time
never wholly lifted.27 Goings-on among outsiders were therefore of keenest
concern to imperial statesmen. Through maintaining a stance of eternal
vigilance against barbarians, they could hope for loyalty and order among
the City’s inhabitants.
The capital was, in effect, permanently in a frontline position and this
raises a second aspect of the empire’s involvement with outsiders: every generation
or so Constantinople’s citizens faced a major ‘barbarian’ incursion
or at least an alert.28 The more fertile tracts of territory in the provinces
were mostly either at risk of raids fromMuslims or juxtaposed to Slavonicspeaking
populations. Those fewwhichwere not, such as the inner sanctum
around the Sea of Marmara or the north-eastern Peloponnese (see below,
p. 501), were of considerable economic and fiscal value to the empire,
enabling it to carry on. In fact the very fragmentation of Byzantium’s territories
from the seventh century onwards made it the harder for marauders
to hit all the prize areas simultaneously.With a modicum of naval capability,
the imperial government could tap these fertile areas’ resources and maintain
an administrative infrastructure and armed forces of a sort. Revenues
reliant on agrarian produce, porous borders and painstaking (and therefore
slow) methods of assessing and collecting taxes in consultation with
locals were not wholly incompatible with one another (see below, p. 63).
But in such circumstances the government could seldom afford very large,
full-time armed forces, and the more convincing estimates favour a generally
modest scale.29
This brings us to a third aspect of the emperors’ ready recourse to external
regimes and keen interest in direct dealings with them: the value of military
manpower from other societies, whether as individuals in the imperial
forces, companies serving alongside them, or self-sustaining hosts attacking
Byzantium’s enemies on home ground. Sizable field armies recruited
from ‘Romans’ and geared to combat were not only costly to equip and
maintain. They also posed a standing temptation for ambitious generals.
Military coups, apprehended and actual, formed part of the empire’s
heritage from ancient Rome and the double-edged qualities of glorious
victories won by generals, however trustworthy, underlie Justinian’s differing
treatment of Narses, who as a eunuch was debarred from the
throne, and Belisarius (see below, pp. 206, 208). During the Byzantine
emperors’ centuries-long confrontation with their Muslim counterparts
they were ever watchful of their strat¯egoi (see below, pp. 259, 266, 380–1,
394). These provincial governors had sweeping powers, but neither the revenues
nor high-calibre manpower sufficient to make a bid for the throne
easy.
Themselves disposing of finite military resources, emperors had good
reason to concern themselves with elites and power structures other than
their own. It was not merely a matter of cost-effectiveness, substituting
battle-hardened ‘barbarian’ brawn for that of Christian Romans, nor even
that outsiders were generally less likely to show enthusiasm for attempts
on the throne. Diplomacy amounted to negotiating arrangements with
external or subordinate powers and with other elements not quite – or not
at all – Roman. This was an activity that an emperor could direct from his
palace, relying on court counsellors and hand-picked agents, notably the
basilikoi who often acted as his emissaries to another potentate or notable. In
this way the emperor could swiftly mobilise armed units, even whole armies.
They served his ends but with minimal employment of his administrative
apparatus, and payment was at least partly conditional upon results. Thus
the ‘flat-management’ style discernible in central governmental bureaus of
middle Byzantium suited the emperor’s dealings with outsiders particularly
well.
And in this special relationship of the emperor with barbarians lies a
fourth reason for our paying particular attention to un-Roman peoples
beyond the City walls. It is in the field of diplomacy thatByzantine statecraft
can claim responsibility for a text without any known precursor from the
ancient Roman epoch. The title of De administrando imperio (‘Concerning
the governance of the empire’) given by a seventeenth-century scholar to
Constantine VII’s handbook addressed to his son Romanos II (959–63)
has been criticised as a misnomer, since internal affairs feature only briefly,
far more coverage being devoted to ‘the nations’ (ethn¯e), outsiders beyond
his direct dominion. But the highly personal nature of the text does not
make it unrepresentative: Constantine’s order of priorities registers where
palace-bound emperors saw their strengths lying. Constantine’s rhetoric in
his preface demonstrates the way in which workaday considerations of costeffectiveness
could be dignified into positive affirmations of the emperor’s
ascendancy, couched in biblical tones: God has raised up Romanos ‘as a
golden statue on a high place’, ‘that the nations may bring to thee their
gifts’ and bow down before him (Psalms 17.34, 71.10, 32.14).30 Through
the incessant reception of embassies from other potentates, the emperor
could demonstrate his authority in majestic form and signal his hegemony
to subjects as well as to outsiders. In addition, and with less ceremony, he
dealt directly with individual foreign notables.
The logothete of the Drome was the first official to have an audience
with the emperor in the Chrysotriklinos each morning, and he had a further
session every evening. External affairs and matters arising from them
were the logothete’s principal brief, and one reason for his close attendance
on the emperor was probably the steady flow of outsiders through
this hall. The Book of ceremonies treats the reception there of ‘several foreigners’
as routine.31 These were not necessarily ambassadors, representing
another potentate, but individuals. Such face-to-face encounters enabled
the emperor to forge personal ties with a wide range of notables, encounters
which might involve bestowal of a court-title but had no necessary institutional
framework. Through his ‘diplomacy of hospitality’ the emperor
could make the acquaintance of individuals who might return to a position
of prominence in their home society – or might return to acquire as much.
Besides, there was always the possibility that a visiting ethnikos would opt
to remain at Constantinople, becoming the emperor’s doulos, even ultimately
a Roman. Young barbarians from across the steppes or from the
other end of Europe were apt to spend stints at court.32 The princely and
noble families among the Armenians offered particularly rich pickings for
talent-spotters at Constantinople, and lower-born individuals could rise
through merit, usually initially military, in the emperor’s service. The families
of theKourkouases and the Lekapenoi are examples of such recruitment.
Instances of Armenian princes and, still more strikingly, of middle-ranking
notables holding court-titles while resident in their homeland will feature
in chapters below.33
The Armenian lands and their multifarious links with Byzantium were
to an extent a special case, but similar processes were underway on most
approaches to Byzantium other than central and south-eastern Anatolia
in the era of the jihad. They underline the way in which governance
shaded into dealings with separate societies and cultures.During the earlier
middle ages military governors supplemented central officials in treating
with Slavonic-speaking and other non-Roman notables on the outskirts
of Thessaloniki, Dyrrachium and other fortresses and strongholds on the
Balkan and Peloponnesian coast, while headmen of Slav groupings such as
the Belegezitai were termed archontes and given responsibilities as well as
titles. In this way, and complemented by ecclesiastical organisation, imperial
enclaves very gradually extended their reach to the point where taxes
were imposed or services exacted.34 In the western portions of the Byzantine
‘archipelago’ what might be termed ‘internal diplomacy’ was continually
in play, operating by devices not dissimilar to the higher-profile encounters
of the emperor with potentates and notables in the Chrysotriklinos or
Magnaura at Constantinople.
Thus encounters and negotiations of many kinds between the emperor
and his senior officials and outsiders – whether informal meetings, ties
solemnised by a court-title, or actual administrative posts – were the sinews
of Byzantine governance. This networking process was necessarily unending,
occurring at many different points and social levels across the imperial
dominions, not merely the capital. This is one reason why the question
of Roman identities is so complex. A senior army commander, Philaretos
Brachamios, could carve out a power structure having markedly Armenian
characteristics to the point where he was dubbed first of the Armenian
rulers of Cilicia by a later Armenian chronicler.35 And a century earlier the
sons of an Armenian kom¯es in the imperial armed forces had transmuted
into leaders of a Bulgarian insurrection against Byzantine occupation, the
Kometopouloi (see below, p. 522). Collation of Byzantine with western
sources shows several persons prominent in the imperial service, intellectual
life and even the Byzantine patriarchate in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries to have had close Italian connections, if not actually to have been
of Italian origin.36
It is by considering some of the other elites with which the imperial court
had so much to do that one may hope to understand the workings of the
Byzantine empire. If this attention to ‘foreign relations’ appears excessive,
such is the price of prying into the human, and not very institutionalised,
organs of that empire. Byzantium’s workings involved compromise and
accommodation on the part of both outsiders and imperial authorities. The
latter were in practice willing to make concessions. For example, the Rus
trading in Constantinople in the tenth century were allowed to have their
disputes with Byzantines resolved partly in accordance with Rus custom,37
while the Armenian princes allocated territories in eastern Anatolia had
commands over sizable communities of fellow Armenians, maintaining
their own culture and church organisation.38 At any stage in the course
of these encounters, individual outsiders could opt for Roman ways and
religious orthodoxy in their entirety. Hence the need to keep orthodoxy
clear and pure, and to be on guard against deviance. It is no accident
that lists of ‘the errors of the Latins’ (i.e. western Christians) began to be
circulated at the very time when westerners were becoming a familiar sight
in the larger Byzantine towns and on highways, and when social intercourse
with them was on the rise.39
It was, in fact, their ongoing accommodation of exogenous groups and
individuals within the empire in varying degrees of assimilation and their
flexibility in dealings with them and with externally based traders, elites
and potentates that made Byzantine rulers so adamant concerning certain
prerogatives. So long as key marks of uniquely legitimate hegemony were
reserved, all manner of concessions – jurisdictional, territorial, honorific –
might be vouchsafed according to circumstances. Foremost among these
‘brandmarks’ was the name of ‘Roman,’ with all its connotations of cultural
and moral superiority, antiquity, rightful sovereignty and, from Constantine
the Great’s time on, manifest Christian destiny (see above, p. 6). It is
no accident that the Byzantines reacted promptly to those external rulers
and their emissaries (usually western) who impugned their monopoly of
Romanness, whether by terming the basileus ‘Greek’ or by purporting to
brand their own regime Roman (see below, pp. 417, 432, 540, 545). From the
same considerations, efforts were made to maintain consistent protocols,
terminology and, even (for centuries at a time), media in formal communications
of the basileus with other rulers. As Anthony Bryer observes, John
VIII was still styling himself ‘emperor and autocrat of the Romans’ and
signing in purple ink at the council of Florence in 1439.40
Court ceremonial and indeed the whole ambiance of the emperor’s
‘sacred palace’ in Constantinople, its orders of precedence, titles, vestments
and other trappings, were likewise presented as quintessentially ‘Roman’.
As the chapters below suggest, the style of the court could alter as new
emperors sought to distance themselves from immediate predecessors, and
certain authority symbols changed appearance over time. Yet even emperors
invoking ‘renewal’ to legitimise their regime tended to present themselves
as ‘new Constantines’, harking back to the very first Constantine.41 Conscious
effortswere made to use de luxe baths, antique dining styles, buildings
and other monuments, together with chariot-racing and spectacles patently
associated with ancient traditions for the grander state occasions.42 Such
observances seem mostly to have continued until the twelfth century. Some
involved sizable numbers of Constantinople’s citizens as well as the elite,43
and the games and races occasionally yet regularly held in the Hippodrome
symbolised the emperor’s ‘marriage’ to his City aswell as his other attributes,
such as eternal victory (see below, p. 521). Even banquets in the palace drew
hundreds of invited guests, and the purpose of official orders of precedence
was to maintain ‘good form’ and order (taxis) against the ever-present risk
of confusion and loss of imperial composure.44 But there was also a sense
that the imperial court was the repository, breeding-ground and citadel of
true Romanness, the place where those ‘born in the purple’ would first see
light of day.45
The conviction that being raised in the palace conferred moral qualities
aswell as legitimacy was volubly expressed by a prime (and far fromdisinterested)
beneficiary, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Decrying his former
co-emperor, Romanos I Lekapenos (920–44) as ‘common and illiterate’, he
opined that only ‘those raised up in the palace’ were imbued with ‘Roman
customs from the very beginning’, as if the court were a kind of crucible of
Romanness.46 Classical, Attic Greek was also prized by Constantine, aware
as he was of his own deficiencies in writing it.47 Attic was the dialect in
which orations and other formal statements were composed for delivery
at court occasions, and in which official accounts of emperors’ deeds were
composed. Thus the Byzantine court, with its regard for ‘good form’ and
preoccupation with continuity, religious orthodoxy and linguistic correctness
might seem to epitomise a ‘mandarin’ political culture. Literary works
from this quarter are among the readiest sources for the general history of
the empire (see below, p. 58).
Such priorities and shibboleths are, however, best viewed against a background
of barbarians frequenting the imperial court, ad hoc arrangements
continually being made with useful potentates, and titles bestowed on outsiders
with barely a smattering of spoken Greek. The proportion of families
in the ruling elite comprising first-, second- or third-generation immigrants
probably made up around a quarter of the total.48 The number of persons
of external stock who made it, or almost made it, to the imperial throne
is striking. Romanos Lekapenos’ uncouthness made an easy target for Constantine
VII’s jibes since he was of quite recent Armenian origins. But the
Porphyrogenitus was himself the grandson of a low-born opportunist, conceivably
of Slavonic stock; the tendentious ancestry claimed for Basil ‘the
Macedonian’ in the Life of Basil composed under Constantine’s auspices
even represents him as of Armenian kingly descent.49 Once sole occupant of
the throne, Basil I had displayed his orthodox piety and staged triumphs to
parade his supposed qualities of victorious generalship.50 He also undertook
spectacular works to restore churches in and around Constantinople and
to refurbish the Great Palace, the setting for imperial ceremonies.51 Basil’s
measures were designed to legitimise a palace coup, but they demonstrate
how certain ‘core values’ such as doctrinal orthodoxy and regard for palace
ceremonial lent themselves to assimilation by highly ambitious, capable
outsiders. Basil’s adaptation and manipulation of establishment forms and
conventions was extraordinarily skilful, enabling him to work, charm and
perhaps sleep his way to the very top. But his career pattern was played
out less spectacularly – and through more straightforward merits such as
military talent – by many individuals intent on merely attaining the higher
reaches of the imperial establishment, or gaining a footing there for their
offspring. Many were members, if not from the dominant family, of elites
beyond Byzantium’s borders, external or internal.52 Thus one of Basil’s early
patrons, the widow Danelis, appears to have belonged to the ruling family
of a Sklavinia in the Peloponnese. Basil’s way of thanking her upon seizing
power was to confer a court-title on her son and to stage a reception in the
Magnaura, befitting ‘someone of substance and distinction who is at the
head of an ethnos’.53
The concern with ‘form’ and general inclination to stand on ceremony
of imperial Byzantines were, unquestionably, obstacles to casual infiltration
by outsiders belonging to different cultures. Their presence in sizable
numbers in the imperial milieu was predicated by the ‘diplomacy of hospitality’.
An abiding apprehension was that this might lead to dilution of the
‘Roman customs’ which were integral to Byzantium’s credentials for hegemony.
Such apprehensions are seldom vented in as many words in extant
written sources. But they go far to explaining the limitations of the historical
sources emanating from the Byzantine establishment, their preference
for a classicising prose style and tendency to present events in terms of
antique or scriptural precedents. The insistence on taxis in the more functional
works composed in palace circles is, in fact, an index of the pressures
making for the reverse. Prominent among those pressures’ drivers was the
steady stream into Constantinople – and, often, out again – of outsiders,
whether from the ‘outer territories’ beyond the City walls54 or out-and-out
ethnikoi. The maelstrom of constant interaction between the imperial leadership
and significant outsiders and alternative power structures underlies
the glassy surface that establishment-derived literature tends to present to
us. This interaction, the opportunities as well as the problems it posed for
Byzantium’s rulers, is a theme running through the chapters of this book
and it has a bearing on the empire’s longevity.
World History
