Any boundary drawn across conditions of flux is arbitrary, and several chapters
in Part II delve back into seventh-century events, as background to the
problems facing emperors once warfare on their eastern approaches became
unremitting. Armies had to be stationed across the Anatolian plateau,
combat-ready yet potentially self-sufficient, and emperors needed to forestall
defections to the Arabs by those forces’ commanders. The balance
between maintaining military effectiveness and ensuring trustworthiness
already coloured Byzantine political thinking and strategy in Justinian’s
era. But the problem gained a new edge from the Arabs’ ongoing challenge
and, asWalter Kaegi shows, emperors were very fortunate that comparable
tensions dogged the Muslim leadership and stymied its capacity for major
invasions (see below, pp. 365, 373, 375, 392). By around 700 the Muslims
were tightening their hegemony over Armenia after a brief revival of imperial
influence there (see below, pp. 345–6). And in 705, Justinian II (685–95,
705–11) forcibly regained his inherited throne in Constantinople, aided not
by a ‘Roman’ army, but by the Bulgars, now installed in the former province
of Moesia. The emperor’s special relationship with barbarians as an alternative
to his own forces would become a hallmark of the medieval empire.
The deep-seated state of emergency is set out in detail by Marie-France
Auz´epy, who shows how Leo III (717–41) and Constantine V (741–75)
recast the formula for state survival set out by the first Justinian. Through
reforming the army and identifying it very closely with their own regime,
the Isaurian emperors allayed risks of a coup d’´etat and provided a strong
right arm for state power, even while recognising the limits of the material
defences affordable for Romans living in the provinces. They also provided
the wherewithal, in the form of lower-denomination silver coins, for greater
recourse to taxes raised in money (see below, p. 270). The sweeping powers
of the autokrat¯or and his agents were tempered by concern for justice,
providing a vent for the aggrieved through the channel of the emperor’s
courts, but also ruthless punishment for proven malefaction (see below,
pp. 275–7). The spiritual welfare of the emperors’ subjects was also catered
for systematically, with numerous new sees founded. Furthermore, the
‘idols’ deemed to have incurred God’s wrath – and consequent disasters for
the empire – were denounced and, eventually, destroyed. Thus iconoclasm
is fitted by Auz´epy within a broader context of crisis, and her chapter as a
whole illustrates the imperial order’s capacity for renewal.
The fruits of this renewal ripened in the decades following the rulers’ final
abandonment of iconoclasm in 843, while the Abbasid caliphs no longer led
or funded massive incursions into AsiaMinor. The need to purge contaminating
idols had lost its urgency, while devotion to images for accessing
the divine was fervent in some quarters of the church. Shaun Tougher’s
chapter demonstrates the standing of churchmen after the restoration of
icon-veneration. Patriarchs could still be unseated from their thrones, like
Photios (858–67, 877–86) in 867 (see below, p. 301). But churchmen and
monks had stood up for icons, some earning the status of ‘confessors’, persons
who had suffered persecution for true belief, albeit not death.One such
churchman was Theophanes Confessor, the author of a chronicle that is
one of our main sources for eighth- and early ninth-century Byzantine history.
Commemoration of the restoration of icons to favour was celebrated
annually at the Feast of orthodoxy (see below, p. 290).
The gradual expansion in the material and demographic resources available
to the emperors from the mid-ninth century onwards was therefore
tempered by the esprit de corps and general repute of churchmen as orthodoxy’s
guardians. The limits of the emperor’s ‘space’ were symbolised in the
routes he did, and did not, take on his way to the liturgy in St Sophia.28
It may be no accident that one of the earlier – and victorious – eastern
expeditions launched by Basil I (867–86) was directed against dualists,
the Paulicians, as if to demonstrate his orthodox credentials in the drive
against heretics. Basil’s expeditions against the Muslims of Melitene and
Tarsus were, however, less successful, and his parading of his piety and
generalship was at least partly designed to camouflage humble origins and
a blood-soaked throne (see below, pp. 294–6). Equally, Byzantine defence
installations could do little to curb the depredations ofMuslim raiders who
had the nearby island of Crete as a safe haven and potential emporium for
slave trading from the 820s on (see below, pp. 499–500). Yet their ability to
sustain themselves through raiding implies fairly rich pickings to be had.
This accords with other hints of economic vitality, for example the code
for officials supervising trading and craft activities in the capital – the Book
of the eparch, issued or reissued under Leo VI (886–912).29
Nonetheless, Byzantium’s armed forces were fully stretched in containing
Muslim land raids. And the Christianisation of the Bulgars in the
Balkans from c. 865 onwards rendered their polity more cohesive and militarily
formidable than ever, even if their receipt of baptism from Byzantine
priests made them nominally ‘spiritual sons’ of the Byzantines, and
notionally deferential.30 With valuables and manpower leeching away to
Muslim land raiders and pirates, Byzantium was hard put as ever to conduct
large-scale campaigns on two fronts at once (see below, pp. 498–
500). Even after the death of Symeon of Bulgaria in 927 eased Byzantine
concerns about its western neighbour, offensives to the east were limited
in scale and largely confined to removing thorns from the flesh. A
kind of equilibrium prevailed, compounded by the emperors’ reluctance to
entrust their generals with armies of full-time soldiers schooled in aggressive
warfare.
Such an army could easily be turned against an emperor and this was,
in effect, what happened after the rampages of the amir of Aleppo, Saif al-
Dawla, became insufferable. Within a few years of the codification of the
status of theme-soldiers’ military holdings,31 the raising of more full-time
soldiers and switching of tactics to full-scale offensives,Crete was regained –
and its conqueror, Nikephoros II Phokas (963–9), was sitting on the imperial
throne. There is little doubt that the army’s size increased markedly
in the later tenth century.32 This reinforced the challenge which ambitious
army commanders posed to the young emperors claiming the right
to rule through birth in the purple, Basil II (976–1025) and Constantine
VIII (1025–8).
Basil eventually quelled the revolts of his generals and associated his
regime with the army to an extent unparalleled since the iconoclast soldieremperors.
The protracted resistance of the Bulgarians to his attempts to
impose hegemony provided opportunities for the exercise of war leadership
in person. While the epithet of ‘Bulgar-slayer’ was only applied to
Basil much later,33 his Bulgarian wars enabled him to square the circle
and maintain larger armed forces, spectacularly intimidating neighbours
on all sides, without falling prey to rebellion (see below, fig. 37 on p. 523).
And the continually mounting agrarian and commercial prosperity and
population size of the enlarged empire was most probably sufficient to
sustain this army.
What is less clear is whether the empire’s customary methods of painstaking
tax-collecting and transmuting of revenues into soldiers’ pay were well
geared for the armies that Basil II amassed. Such negotiable fiscal transactions
required very many officials, and a significant increase in their
numbers is suggested by the profusion of their seals in this period. Moreover,
Basil set a precedent as ‘happy warrior’ and expansionist, without
providing a male heir: his successors had to cope with a certain legitimacy
deficit as well as with broader issues of strategy, the role of the armed forces
and finding means of paying for them.
The vitality, wealth, yet vulnerability of eleventh-century Byzantium is
brought out inMichael Angold’s chapter. Culturally the empire was a hive
of creativity, from the visual arts to literature. The volume of law-cases concerning
money, property and inheritance is registered in a textbook assembled
from a senior judge’s rulings and opinions, the Peira (literally, ‘trial,
experience’).34 And Constantine IX Monomachos’ (1042–55) institution
of a law school at Constantinople represented an attempt to ensure welltrained
jurists and administrators for state service in an era of widespread
litigation (see below, pp. 598–9). Byzantium had not seen such a pitch of
general material well-being and diversity of faiths and cultures beneath the
imperial aegis since the seventh century. The analogy holds good in strategic
terms, too. In the mid-eleventh century, as in the 630s, the emperor
could justifiably believe that his foes were subjugated or reduced to virtual
impotence (see below, pp. 227–8).
Yet then, without much warning, emperors found themselves combating
raiders on three fronts: although the Pechenegs were more or less absorbed
into the Balkans, the Normans in the west and above all the Turks in the
east were not so amenable. In default of an incontestably legitimate dynasty
ruling in Constantinople, several generals fancied for themselves the role
of imperial saviour, for which there was pressing need. Disagreements over
strategy and uncertainty as to the nature or intentions of the enemy were
compounded by rivalries between generals and within the now labyrinthine
Constantinopolitan court establishment.
That Byzantium lacked flexibility in its response to external challenges
at a time of internal tensions and inflated bureaucracy is not so surprising.
More striking is the alacrity with which Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118)
recovered from the strategic mistakes of his early years as emperor and
learned from them. He proceeded to reorganise his army, abolish many
court titles and effectively debase the coinage. The empire had, after all,
lost control of much of Anatolia to the Turks and was correspondingly
impoverished: in cutting his imperial coat to fit diminished cloth, Alexios
was pragmatically responding to severely reduced circumstances. There
were precedents from earlier reigns for such economies and recourse to
‘flat-management’ style, as there were for the simultaneous emphasis on
piety and plain living that Alexios made a hallmark of his regime (see
below, p. 618).
The empire’s material losses made correct worship all the more important,
and although the church was now vocally resistant to emperors’ tampering
with doctrine, Alexios and his descendants still saw themselves as
guardians of doctrine, shepherds of their subjects’ souls (see below, pp. 617–
18 and fig. 46). This was also the case with Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80).
Manuel displayed prowess in astrology, jousting and war in equal measure.35
His virtual ‘cult of personality’ included placing Christ Emmanuel on his
earliest coins, a visual pun on Manuel’s name, while the list of subjugated
peoples associated with Manuel on an inscription in St Sophia evoked the
titulature of Justinian’s era.36
In emphatically aligning his regime with doctrinal purity and regularity
of worship, Manuel resembled Justinian. The blend of expansionist
bravado and inspired opportunism with tacitly defensive measures and
ad hoc fortification-work belonged to a great tradition (see below,
pp. 637–9, 642–4, 684, 685). And the Komnenian empire’s reversion to
a pattern of far-flung strongholds and outer and inner zones of imperial
orthodox order in some respects evokes the state of emergency of the late
seventh and eighth centuries (see below, pp. 261, 264, 653–4). In the twelfth
century, too, the imperial presence could be concentrated in ‘hot-spots’,
the more fertile lands and strategically important points, where protection
and exactions were more intensive, in contrast to those districts, maritime
or inland, that were left exposed to barbarian incursions or occupied by
outsiders. Manuel Komnenos still had formidable armed forces37 and a
navy at his disposal, and these could well have helped him and also his
successors gain new vantage-points, tap the burgeoning commerce of the
eastern Mediterranean and forge alliances (see below, pp. 638–9, 645).
Two twelfth-century developments complicated matters. Firstly, the
political stability and administrative workings of Byzantium were now
entwined with the extended family of the Komnenoi, together with a number
of related families (see below, pp. 657–8). Lands, fiscal privileges and
senior military posts were gathered in their hands, and for all the resultant
advantages of cost-cutting and political cohesiveness, the expectations of
individuals and branches of the familywere high, mutually competitive, and
proliferating. This lessened the flexibility that the imperial administration
had traditionally shown in attuning tax assessments to a property’s current
capability to pay them.38 The effect of extensive tax exemptions, piling tax
burdens on those left unprotected by privileges of one sort or another, was
neither healthy for state finances nor conducive to longer-term political
stability.
Secondly, the twelfth-century imperial authorities had to contend with
western Europeans of a different stamp from those of the earlier middle
ages. The westerners were themselves fragmented and many individuals
were primarily concerned with trading opportunities or a career rising high
in the basileus’ service. Yet the intimacy of some western venturers with
the Komnenoi and their successors paved the way for displaced members
of the imperial family or pretenders to seek aid from western potentates
and from causes with agendas of their own. Alexios Angelos’ fateful bid
in 1201–2 for help from western leaders, one of whom was his brother-inlaw,
was from this perspective nothing out of the ordinary, but it triggered
the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders. Already in 1185
a kinsman of Manuel I Komnenos, together with a pretender claiming
(falsely) to be Alexios II,Manuel’s son, had given KingWilliam II of Sicily
(1166–89) a pretext for sending an expedition that easily took Thessaloniki
and only failed to reach Constantinople through overconfidence.39 Around
1184 another authentic Komnenos, Isaac, had taken control of Cyprus and
started issuing coins in his own name, and it was a western crusader, King
Richard I of England (1189–99), not the Constantinopolitan emperor, who
eventually dislodged him. Thus some of the empire’s choicest lands and fortified
towns were proving to be highly vulnerable, or self-sufficient imperial
entities, a foretaste of conditions after 1204, and indeed after the restoration
of imperial status to Constantinople at the hands of Michael VIII
Palaiologos (1258–82).
World History
