CHAPTER 2 Empire

Was Byzantium an empire?

It is almost always referred to as such, as “the Byzantine empire,” despite the attempt of a recent writer to rebrand it as “the city-state of the Romans.”¹ After all, Byzantium had an “emperor,” even though he had been referred to since the seventh century, and even earlier, as basileus, the Greek term for “king.” The language of court and culture was Greek, but the Byzantines did indeed claim to be, and called themselves, Romans, the heirs of the undivided Roman empire. These contradictions still have a resonance in modern Greece and in the scholarship on Byzantium, and will be discussed further in the next chapter.

The reign of Justinian (AD 527–65) seems at first sight to mark a decisive stage. Whether or not this was his original intent, Justinian’s “reconquest” aimed to recover the western territories that been lost from Roman rule since the fifth century, and so restore a unified Roman empire, albeit one ruled from Constantinople. His initiative was only partly successful even in the short term. Even before the Arab conquests of the seventh century the political reunification of east and west was shown to be no more than a dream.² Justinian and his immediate successors were also deeply engaged with religious differences in the east and with the military threat posed by the Sasanians. Perhaps Justinian’s greatest achievement was the immense task of codifying the entire body of Roman law (in Latin); this became the basis of the later legal compilations that served the Byzantine empire. Not surprisingly, Edward Gibbon was unsure about whether Justinian was to be regarded as “Roman” or consigned to the long line of “Greek” emperors who followed him.

But Byzantine interests in Italy continued, even if wider political reunification failed, and despite a rearguard action by some historians to lay emphasis on the traditional idea of a final “fall” of the Roman empire in the west in the late fifth century,3 the cultural and economic ties that linked the different parts of the Mediterranean world continued at least until the seventh century and in significant ways beyond it. This kind of change came at a slow pace, not with a big bang, and in ways that affected the east as well as the west.⁴

Byzantium has suffered from what an Italian historian writing in 1999—nearly thirty years after the publication of Peter’s Brown’s book, The World of Late Antiquity, in 1971—called the “explosion” of late antiquity as a historical period.⁵ In Brown’s book, late antiquity was already defined as continuing until AD 750, and a more recent tendency extends the upper limit even further, sometimes as far as AD 1000. Either way, the effect is to dissolve conventional divisions between the ancient and medieval worlds, and to draw Byzantium (and now also Islam) into a broader “late antique” world in which issues of state power and the history of institutions yield place to social and cultural factors, similarity and continuity. Seen in this way, late antiquity does not easily fit discussions about empire, and with its shifting contours and fluid social formations Brent Shaw indeed sees the period as marking the end of a “Mediterranean world-system,” “a great geo-political shift,” and a time of fragmentation.6 Byzantium is not easy to accommodate within either frame.⁷ Deeming Byzantium to begin only in the sixth or seventh century, as some Byzantinists prefer,⁸ does not help in the light of the longer definitions of late antiquity now current. The long late antique periodization, even including early Islam in its purview, does not merely problematize the chronology of Byzantium; it also obscures the place of Byzantium in discussions of empire and empires.

The same is true of another recent historiographical tendency, which seeks to avoid the crime of “Eurocentricity”⁹ by locating Byzantium within a much wider entity conceived as western Eurasia. This poses some new difficulties,¹⁰ and again, the particularity of Byzantium is a casualty, this time to the anxiety of historians to avoid the traditional comparison between Byzantium and western Europe.¹¹ Behind this debate lies the much deeper issue of the assumed advances made by the west and the supposed backwardness of the east. Where does Byzantium stand in relation to this polarity? Similar, if not greater, difficulties lie in attempts to bring Byzantium into global or transnational history, and so far the most active exploration of this model has come less from Byzantinists than from historians of the Roman empire. The porousness of Byzantium’s borders, insofar as they existed as such (for the efforts made by the Roman empire to establish defended borders were not continued in the Byzantine period), meant that the contours of the Byzantine state were particularly liable to shift along with the rise and fall of neighboring peoples.12 Its imperial reach was often ill-defined and its extent varied greatly over time. But this should make it more, rather than less, suited to the transnational approach. Indeed, one of the stated aims of a new center for global history at Oxford (in the planning of which Byzantium has been well represented) is to explore the dialogue between imperial, transnational, and comparative history.

Empires, and the fall of empires, have attracted lively attention from historians since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in relation to the “American empire.” Among the topics discussed are the techniques of imperial and colonial rule, the factors making for continuity or the opposite in imperial systems and their advantages or disadvantages for their subjects. The nature of ruling elites is another frequent theme. Ancient empires are also a current subject of comparative history, with Rome and China as the main empires compared.¹³ The latter comparison is traditional, and the availability of certain kinds of data, as well as certain structural similarities, makes it an obvious one, but again Byzantium is usually excluded; Haldon is right to point out that Byzantium has hardly been analyzed so far in terms of power, empire or stateformation.¹⁴ A recent book by the military strategist Edward Luttwak aims to apply to Byzantium the same kind of political and military analysis he had used in relation to Rome in the 1970s.15 But there are problems with his analysis,¹⁶ and he does not extend his coverage beyond 1204, when Constantinople was sacked by the Fourth Crusade and a short-lived Latin “empire” set up. One can understand why Luttwak ended at this point, and indeed, current scholarship emphasizes the fragmentation of Byzantine rule that followed and the weakness of the restored Palaeologan state after 1261. A good case can be made for considering Byzantium in this period as a premodern princely society. But the Byzantines themselves thought otherwise. In fact this last period of Byzantium was one in which not only the role played by court patronage in intellectual life but also the imperial ideology reached new heights.¹⁷

The term “empire” clearly needs to be defined, and its application to Byzantium given a clear chronological range. Of course neither of these caveats matters if Byzantium itself is overlooked.

A basic definition of empire would probably include the ability to bring disparate and “foreign” elements under central control, as well as the capacity to exploit population and territory by exacting some form of tribute (“tributary states”). Centralization of the means of exploitation is crucial (“state power”),¹⁸ and the key items of expenditure from the wealth that is extracted in this are likely to consist in the maintenance of an army and of the governing structures, including the court and the display that this entails. In writing of the early period Haldon usefully speaks of “different shades of stateness,” and refers to Byzantium as “a mature state”;¹⁹ it seems clear that—if sometimes only with difficulty—it was able to retain its status as a tributary state at least until the sack of 1204.

The Roman empire certainly also qualifies on this basis, especially when at its height in the first and second centuries AD, but the case of Byzantium is in fact more complex. When the emperor Constantine founded the city he called Constantinople, it was not as the capital city of a discrete new empire, but as his personal seat, not unlike the “capitals” established by his own father and his rivals at Trier, Thessalonike, and Serdica (modern Sofia). It was the special prerogatives, largesse, and other advantages bestowed on it by Constantine and his successors that gradually established Constantinople’s position. By the sixth century its population exceeded that of Rome several times over.20 It was slow to become the city of churches and monasteries that it became in later periods. But the failure of Justinian’s attempt to recover Rome for the long term and Constantinople’s success in fending off dangerous sieges by the Avars and Persians and then the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries meant that its status as the capital was unquestioned. Much later, when the emperor and administration had been forced to leave Constantinople in 1204, and more than one Byzantine outpost was established, it was taken for granted that one day there must be a return to the city and the reestablishment of Byzantine government there. Whether with hindsight that was realistic, given the circumstances of the thirteenth century, is open to debate, but the return of Michael VIII Palaeologus to Constantinople from “exile” in Nicaea, when he staged an entrance into the city on foot behind the great icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, was undoubtedly one of the great moments in Byzantine history.

The adaptability of elites and governing structures in Byzantium was one of the empire’s greatest strengths. Late antiquity was a period of change and fluidity, which saw enormous shifts in the extent of territory ruled from Constantinople. New states emerged in the west and the north, and the Arab conquests established Islamic rule around the Mediterranean. The eventual outcome of this realignment was far from clear. With the loss of so much Byzantine territory went a consequent collapse in tax revenues and in the administrative structure that had served the late Roman empire and early Byzantium so well. The details remain very obscure, yet over the period from the late seventh to ninth centuries the governing elite was successfully restructured, with new titles and organization, and a new tax system and military structure put in place, designed to deal with changed conditions and a much higher degree of local instability. The new system took shape in circumstances of contraction, but proved adaptable enough to extend to other areas as the center of gravity also changed; the achievement that these changes represent was enormous.21 Byzantium reorientated itself of necessity toward the north and northwest, and the eighth-century emperors set about the necessary adaptation, including the repopulation of the capital. During the same period the Roman lawcodes inherited from the great work of Justinian in the sixth century were revised and adapted in two new compilations. These changes are all the more remarkable in that while they were taking shape the empire survived a dangerous siege of the capital by the Arabs, a long internal dispute over the status of religious images, and the threat of usurpation. Constantine V (d. 775) was also able to campaign against the Arabs in the east, resettle some of the Christian population previously under Arab rule, and make war on the Bulgarians in the Balkans.

By the tenth century a new administrative arrangement was in place, whereby officials were rewarded by rogai, effectively salaries, in a highly monetarized and centralized system that rewarded government service and supported the imperial office (even when the throne itself was contested, as it often was). It amounted to a centralized bureaucracy, tied in to the imperial court and its ceremonies by patronage.22 Thus Byzantium was characterized by reliance on a service aristocracy rather than an aristocracy of birth. In the late eleventh century a new imperial dynasty, the Comneni, arose from among the emerging great landowning families of the period,²³ and appointed members of its own family and circle to a range of new offices and titles, perhaps creating what can fairly be called an aristocracy. However, only one eleventh-century Byzantine author uses that term, and he applies it rather to the ranks and titles held by the court elite before the establishment of the Comnenian system of the late eleventh century. The term “aristocracy” is also used, for instance, by Peter Sarris to apply to the great landowners of the sixth century who were at the center of the more monetarized economy he sees operating in that period, and with whom the emperors had an uneasy relationship.²⁴ In other words, when the term “aristocracy” is used by modern writers on Byzantium it tends to be used in a loose sense; the great families that emerged in the eleventh century and later were not “aristocratic” in the strict sense, and their hold on their position was by no means guaranteed.

The centuries after Justinian saw a major readjustment in Byzantine elites; it remained a striking feature of the Byzantine elites both secular and ecclesiastical that membership depended less on birth than on other factors. Families could not preserve status by heredity alone, though they did their best to do so. This can be vividly seen from the attempts of the Comnenian imperial network to evade church legislation restricting kinship marriage (and so to keep wealth and status within the family group). From the eleventh century onward, a recovery of urban life also led to the emergence of local archontes, a middling elite of landowners who might or might not also have ties to richer and more powerful “magnates.” Neither group constituted a feudal aristocracy. At the higher urban level, possession of a superior level of literary culture was the essential key to social mobility. This was recognized and fostered by the emperors, who took pains to provide for the availability of higher learning by founding new institutions and posts. At these higher levels, Byzantine society was highly competitive, and in the Palaeologan period, after 1261, we find many illustrations of the doors, both secular and ecclesiastical, that were opened to the recipients of this higher learning; they included individuals whose careers spanned both secular teaching positions and ecclesiastical office.

Such flexibility on the part of Byzantine elites over many centuries, the central role played by imperial patronage, and the capacity of the state to reinvent itself even while retaining the imperial office and ideology are a very far cry from the unchanging Byzantium of popular myth. The extent to which these elites were radically different from the ones that had gone before, or whether essentially similar groups were reformed and renamed, is a difficult one.25 But what matters is that such flexibility and adaptability should have continued for so long.

In some periods in its long history the very existence of Byzantium was under threat. Yet though the mechanisms changed over time, and military resources were sometimes very short, ways were found to extract a surplus, maintain a court, field an army, and even make territorial gains. It has been suggested that Byzantium’s status as an empire is anomalous, partly because its history was more a history of contraction than of imperial expansion.²⁶ Edward Luttwak in turn identifies the doctrine of relying on diplomacy and avoiding unnecessary war as characteristic of Byzantium. Yet in the tenth century Byzantium was able to recover territory in Asia Minor and farther east that had been lost earlier to the Arabs, and in the eleventh century the successful campaigns of Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” were followed by the incorporation and organization of Bulgaria (essentially corresponding to what is currently known as FYROM, part of former Yugoslavia) as a Byzantine province (figure 3). Byzantium maintained provincial rule in parts of Italy, in Ravenna in the north until the eighth century and Bari in the south until 1071, and at its height the provincial and military theme system covered the Balkans and was extended and developed by the tenth century to cover much of Asia Minor. While not perhaps constituting the conquest of foreign peoples, this testifies to expanding territorial ambitions and to success in extending the reach of imperial control. The rise of the Italian trading cities provided new opportunities for Byzantium, and they were granted concessions in Constantinople itself. The factor that most constrained further expansion was the impact of new threats and new potential enemies, including in the later period the establishment of the Seljuks, and later the Ottomans, in Asia Minor. But another factor, which is often overlooked, is the degree to which Byzantium was able to manage its provincial government by moving populations when necessary, as well as its success in incorporating the populations that came within its control. Byzantium was particularly vulnerable to changes in external conditions, with new peoples and new states emerging around it. But in total, the various changes over time in the Byzantine system illustrate rather well the applicability of the neo-Darwinian approach to empires as “determined by competitive selection of social, ideological and political-institutional practices.”²⁷

The characteristics of empires, once they have come into existence by the conquest of territory and established a unified central administrative system, have been expressed by one scholar as consisting of their capacity to administer and exploit diversity, the existence of a transportation system designed to serve the imperial center militarily and economically and of systems of communication allowing administration of the subject areas from the center, the assertion of a monopoly of force within their territories, and an “imperial project” that imposed some type of unity throughout the system.²⁸ We might add to this list the existence of a legal framework. Byzantium had all of these, even though it grew out of an earlier imperial system, and its territorial extent varied greatly over time. It also demonstrated a remarkable determination to maintain itself, through the continuity of imperial office and ideology (including religious ideology, which will be the subject of chapter 5), sustained by a learned culture, access to which the emperors themselves sought to control. It maintained this symbolic continuity even in the face of the constant instability of the throne itself.

Figure 3. The cathedral of St. Sophia at Ohrid, dating back to the eleventh century. After the Byzantine reconquest of what was then known as Bulgaria in 1018, Ohrid became the seat of Byzantine archbishops, who included Theophylact of Ohrid in the late eleventh century and Demetrius Chomatenus in the thirteenth (when Ohrid belonged to the Despotate of Epirus). ■ Image © vlas2000 / shutterstock.com

Consideration of Byzantium as an empire has been complicated by the model of a “Byzantine commonwealth,” put forward by Dimitri Obolensky in his well-known book published with that title in 1971.29 On this view, for much of its history Byzantium exercised a kind of “soft power,” based on its reputation and standing, and often, if not quite always, associated with its role as the home and champion of eastern Orthodoxy. In 1993 Garth Fowden applied the same concept, as “the first Byzantine commonwealth,” to the relations of Constantinople with other states and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean from Constantine until the age of the Abbasids, also positing an Islamic commonwealth, especially after the collapse of Abbasid power, and even a Latin commonwealth in the west as a further member of “late antiquity’s legacy of commonwealths.”³⁰ According to him, this was “late antiquity’s contribution to the technique of empire,” and its “invention” came as a result of the monotheism adopted by Constantine. It follows that this “commonwealth” was implicated from the start in a religious ideology; when applied to the post-Byzantine period the idea is even more closely associated with the influence of Orthodoxy, and especially that of the monastic milieu of Mount Athos during the Ottoman period.

The term “commonwealth” has also attracted some criticism.31 Its topdown implications of Byzantium’s “legacy” or influence are less persuasive in a postcolonial world, where horizontal exchange and plurality are emphasized more than a topdown “handing-on.” We need now to look less to the religious agendas emphasized in previous scholarship than to “connective history”—networks, connections, and interacting systems, including trade, diplomacy, and indeed these aspects of religion.³²

Jonathan Shepard has cautiously endorsed the term “commonwealth” in several important contributions, but has proposed a somewhat different model, in terms of overlapping circles, or “force-fields.” He has memorably described Byzantium as “an empire of the mind,” a “politico-cultural sphere,” within the three overlapping circles of influence in geographical terms: “the Byzantine commonwealth,” the Christian and Islamic Orient, and Latin Christendom.³³

But Byzantium’s reach was wider than what became the Orthodox sphere, and contested and complex even there.³⁴ Even leaving aside Eurasian or global historical conceptions, Byzantium needs to be understood within its wider relationships. Moreover, the term “commonwealth” is inherently favorable, bypassing considerations of power and social macrostructures in favor of a kind of generalized cultural beneficence. Yet, as also argued by Shepard, Byzantium did not hesitate to deploy military force in order to conquer or reconquer territory in the very period when its rhetoric of benign headship was at its strongest.35

The understanding of Byzantium suffers from decades of idées reçues. Even now in many countries, especially in the Balkans, the standard one-volume history of Byzantium remains that of George Ostrogorsky, originally published in German in 1940 by a Russian émigré who became a student in Germany and moved to Belgrade in 1934, where he spent the rest of his career.³⁶ The book has a Slavist agenda, especially in relation to the so-called “dark ages” of the seventh to ninth centuries, and asserts a misguided though persistent doctrine of Byzantine feudalism. Many shorter histories of Byzantium have been published in recent years, but none has so far achieved the central position held by that of Ostrogorsky, nor do the current spate of handbooks and companions generally offer a comprehensive alternative analysis. Another traditional strategy among Byzantinists has been to seek to differentiate it from the medieval west. This insistence on Byzantine exceptionalism has been resisted, for example, by Judith Herrin, but when the late Evelyne Patlagean argued against it in her last book,³⁷ the book’s reception demonstrated the tenacity of existing attitudes. But older views of the “crisis” of the eleventh century were already challenged by Paul Lemerle in the 1970s, and though Byzantium still lags far behind the Roman empire and indeed late antiquity in relation to the amount of archaeological data available, the results of archaeological work are nevertheless enabling a better understanding of issues on which former discussion was necessarily limited to reliance on textual evidence.38

Understanding the economic life of Byzantium implies understanding its trade and trading networks, and much more is now known about the changing nature of trading patterns. In its middle period Byzantium was part of a complex mesh of sea trade between the west, the northern regions, and especially the north and northeast coast of the Black Sea, Egypt, and the rest of the Muslim world.³⁹ Nevertheless, trade is only part of the story. The three-volume Economic History of Byzantium published in 2002 also illustrates the advances made in fields including the study of Byzantine numismatics, seals (once attached to documents that have themselves perished, and indicating the identity of officials and their positions), and archaeological investigation.⁴⁰ In particular, the surviving corpus of more than 75,000 official seals, albeit dispersed in individual collections, provide a vast mass of detailed information about persons, careers, and administrative organization.⁴¹ The extent to which the early Byzantine economy was market-oriented is a subject that is currently arousing intense debate as part of a wider divide between primitivists and anti-primitivists in terms of the methodological understanding of the economy,⁴² and much more needs to be done. A better understanding of the actual working of the Byzantine economy at all periods is the essential underpinning for serious consideration of the social macrostructures of Byzantium and its role and capacity as an empire.

Finally, Byzantium retained an imperial center throughout its history, doggedly holding onto it in exile after 1204. Members of the Palaeologan elite involved themselves in trading and financial alliances with Italians and others to an extent that might seem to have undermined the coherence of the Byzantine state. Yet the status of the imperial role was still upheld, even through usurpations and civil war (figure 4). It was maintained throughout the history of Byzantium by elaborate rituals, almost invariably with religious overtones and content, by a persistent and high-profile imperial rhetoric, and by a strong political and religious ideology that was continually being reinforced. The Byzantine emperors were masters of the populist theater of empire. Even the races and shows in the Hippodrome, traditionally condemned by the Fathers, came to be part of an imperial calendar dominated by the Christian year: “by the ninth to tenth centuries, the ceremonial of the Hippodrome was so visibly Christian that it resembled a solemn mass.”⁴³ The culture of Byzantium was built around this daily performance of imperial power, without which it could not exist. Thus the prestige of the imperial office survived throughout the history of Byzantium, despite a high degree of challenge and instability, with frequent coups and sometimes even civil war.

Not surprising, then, if the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, “born in the purple,” whose own path to rule had not been straightforward, laid such emphasis on the virtues of taxis (“order”) in the preface to his Book of Ceremonies. Respect for order was constantly asserted in Byzantium, and all the more so when the actuality was frequent change, usurpation, and dynastic instability. In the last period of Byzantium, given the weakness of the Palaeologan state and its vulnerability to the encroaching Ottomans (to whom Byzantium had spells of actual vassalage), this challenge was especially acute, and we can observe the patriarchs of this period taking the opportunity to proclaim a very high doctrine of their own authority. To describe Byzantium as totalitarian, with Alexander Kazhdan, is to miss the extent of these challenges and fail to recognize that emperor and church (especially emperor and patriarch) were often diametrically opposed to each other (see chapter 5). Orthodoxy constituted an important part of the apparatus of government and was a powerful tool for the emperors, and the church; its leading personages were an integral part of the state in a way that contrasts with the situation in the west (and perhaps accounts for the passionate opposition in Byzantium to the concept of papal primacy). But when emperors tried to force through their own religious agendas they were likely to encounter fierce and continued opposition.⁴⁴

Figure 4. Jousting was also a favorite pursuit in Middle Byzantine court circles; This tenth-century ivory depicts two armed combatants. In 1159 the emperor Manuel I Comnenus (1118–80) himself took part in a famous tournament against crusader knights outside Antioch. ■ Double sided comb depicting a jousting scene (ivory), Byzantine (10th century) / Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Nuernberg), Germany / The Bridgeman Art Library

Nor, unlike the west, and despite the harsh rhetoric of condemnation in religious matters, which was often useful as a means of obscuring the extent of real opposition, was Byzantium a persecuting society. Its lawcodes allowed punishments involving mutilation that seem barbaric today, but capital punishment was rare (exile, not usually very severe, or deposition, were more common).45 Books were burned in Byzantium (another legacy from the later Roman empire), but in this medieval society people usually survived.

Despite the many changes over its history, the imperial reach of Byzantium was wide, stretching all around the Mediterranean, to the east and the Islamic world, and to the north and to the Caucasus. Its rule and its influence were exercised militarily, diplomatically, politically, and economically. It was regarded in the west with a grudging admiration, and respected for the length of its traditions and its Roman past.

This was also a state that, however improbably, was able to absorb and survive a high degree of internal and external challenge over a period lasting many centuries. How this was achieved, and how Byzantium did in fact maintain itself as an empire are questions that still need to be asked.