As Michael Angold reminds us at the beginning of his essay on political process, Byzantium was a “historical bureaucratic polity,” where power was concentrated in the hands of the ruler, the emperor. Consequently, “political process was very largely a matter of maintaining the equilibrium of the system in the face of all kinds of challenges, both external and internal.” Angold takes as a point of departure Gilbert Dagron’s important study of the imperial office, and the relationship of the emperor and patriarch in Constantinople. Placing the city at the centre of the equation, Angold supplements Dagron’s “mental” approach to power, with an analysis of political processes in the seventh and eighth centuries. He explores the shifting balance of powers between the circus factions, the famous Blues and Greens; the senate, the exact role of which is still not fully understood in Byzantium; the army, which could never be ignored; and most importantly, in Angold’s estimation, the patriarch. Angold identifies “a determination that imperial authority was not only founded in, but also responsible to Constantinople,” and posits the centrality of the cult of the Mother of God, who afforded protection to the city, the New Jerusalem.
Angold’s observations would be applicable also to the later periods, as he himself notes. Paul Stephenson expands upon this in a chapter devoted once more to balancing the interests of groups within the political process at a time of rapid economic and demographic expansion, from before 900 until the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Stephenson suggests that the imperial government, based in Constantinople, failed to develop institutions which could control and exploit that growth, and that this failure was the root of Byzantium’s decline as a centralized political power. The trajectory of the state’s decline is traced in two areas: the loss of state control of gold, the medium for taxation and payments to holders of public office; and the growth of an aristocracy, which was increasingly self-aware and cohesive, and possessed of interests opposed to those of the state. Aristocrats charged with serving the interests of the state competed with it for control of resources. Their aim was to exploit the system as far as possible without undermining it: effectively, to steal as many golden eggs as possible without killing the goose. But the goose died.
Known in contemporary legislation as the “powerful,” middle Byzantine aristocrats placed private concerns above those of the state, even as they held public office. They acquired resources which hitherto had accrued to the state – largely in the form of taxes and levies on land – and of rights which had hitherto been the preserve of the state – again, principally concerned with taxation of landed interests, but also therefore over those who worked the land. This led to political fragmentation and the emergence of new socio-economic hierarchies. During the tenth and eleventh centuries policies were devised which aimed to bolster existing political and fiscal structures, prop up the state economy and delimit the power of aristocrats. According to Stephenson, these measures failed. Twelfth-century efforts to harness the interests and wealth of the aristocracy, anchored in the land, to those of the state similarly provided no lasting solution, but instead led to greater political fragmentation, internecine conflict, social unrest and ultimately to the collapse of the state system in the last years of the twelfth century.
In chapter 3, Cécile Morrisson is concerned also with coins and money in the Byzantine economy, but offers not a political interpretation, but rather a masterful survey of fiscal and monetary history. The key developments in coins and coinage, imperial minting and finances, and the role of money in the economy through ten centuries are all set out so clearly and concisely as to defy further summary. Each development is tied firmly into its context, with full references to pertinent written sources, critical commentary and cross-references. For example, the process by which the gold and silver coinage was debased during the eleventh century, and the Komnenian currency reform, which are both central to Chapter 2, are discussed fully. Similarly, one can make far better sense of John Haldon’s chapter, on military logistics and resource-management, having read Morrisson.
Haldon’s claim is that “the East Roman empire up to the twelfth century was well served by an efficient – indeed, ruthless – fiscal and logistical system which maximized the often limited resources at the state’s disposal.” Beginning with a review of the structure and organization of the empire’s armed forces, Haldon traces the changes that attended the shift from a defensive posture in the seventh century to a more aggressive and expansive posture in the tenth. New cavalry and infantry formations followed practices outlined in tactical manuals, discussed later in the volume by Denis Sullivan, and depended upon fine leadership, effective strategy and the efficient delivery of supplies. Until the seventh century, mounts and pack animals were provided by levy and imperial studfarms, and arms and armour were manufactured in state armouries. These were bought by soldiers with a stipend provided for that purpose. This appears to have been sustained, at least in part, into the tenth century, when warehouses, storehouses and workshops in Constantinople supplied an expedition in 949. The process for supplying wood, iron ore and, most importantly, provisions was always more decentralized: food was acquired principally from the locales by a process of compulsory purchase, and this would feed the mounts and pack animals as well as the soldiers. “The late tenth-century treatise on campaign organization stipulates a basic supply of twenty-four days’ rations of barley for the horses, which according to other sources was similarly to be put aside by the thematic protonotarios for collection by the army en route.” Generals were advised to carry sufficient provisions so as not to become a burden on local producers, but they frequently failed to do so, and the passage of an expeditionary force, which might involve compulsory billeting, was rarely welcomed. This problem was exacerbated with the rise, in the eleventh century, in the use of mercenary forces.
The four chapters that follow, by Anthony Kaldellis, Leonora Neville, Shaun Tougher and Günter Prinzing, lead us away from processes, practicalities and institutions to people. But all confront the same issue: the impossibility of knowing the Byzantines. Women and children, men and eunuchs, slaves and freedmen, are all presented to us through the variously “distorting mirror” of literature, and we get closest to those who are least representative of Byzantine society. As Kaldellis expresses it, succintly, “we do not know the lives of past women and children [men, eunuchs, slaves, etc.], only the texts in which they are represented. But we should not mistake the modes of representation with those of life.” Still, one need not take the hardest “Lingustic Turn,” and it may be possible to know something more about Byzantine women and children than a particular textual strategy of representation. In pursuit of that end, Kaldellis explores some “vanishing ladies” long dear to social historians: Danielis, Theodote and Styliane (mother and daughter of Michael Psellos), but also turns to hagiography and miracle collections in search of realia rather than “authentic voices.” The devotion of sons to their mothers appears to offer a rich new vein that Kaldellis has begun to tap.
Leonora Neville focuses on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but employs insights from a close reading of Prokopios. In doing so, she emulates those whose histories she explores: Michael Psellos and Nikephoros Bryennios, in whose works there is “an odd repetition of a dramatic scene involving a speech by a woman.” The issue she highlights is the inversion of gender roles, and the criticism of powerful men that is implied thereby. Men at their weakest moments – declining high office – appear to be manly by ignoring the irrational pleading, exceptionally presented in direct speech, by women, but of course as written by men. Shaun Tougher, on the other hand, in Chapter 7, shows us men not through the eyes of women as written by men, but instead from a “eunuch perspective.” That is not to offer the views of eunuchs on men, for we have few writers known to have been eunuchs, but rather how eunuchs allow us to consider masculinity and key features of the identity of the Byzantine man: body, career and family. Eunuchs, like children and angels, cannot grow beards, and the possession of a hairy chin was de rigueur for Byzantine men from the seventh century. Beards, as Tougher shows, are good to think with. Eunuchs also had more diverse career opportunities than is frequently imagined; more indeed, at court and beyond, than the “bearded.” While there were jobs that only a eunuch could undertake, eunuchs might also serve in “manlier” roles, notably as generals, although certain senior military titles were formally denied them (domestikos), as were the roles of Eparch of the City and the rank of quaestor. Still, Tougher provides lists of exceptions. In career terms, the only absolute prohibition that was always enforced may have been that on a eunuch becoming emperor. On a more mundane level, no eunuch was permitted to marry, for the purpose of that institution was defined as procreation. Many men – notably, but not exclusively, monks – chose not to marry, and infamously that included an emperor, Basil II.
“Like other men, eunuchs were alert to the value of creating such social bonds,” and so they participated in rituals that created bonds of kinship, such as godparenthood or brotherhood. Indeed, eunuchs tended to come from well-connected families, and so perhaps they are least likely to have been within the most elusive social group in Byzantium: slaves. Günter Prinzing, in Chapter 8, assesses the complications in tracing slaves and slavery in the Byzantine World, but more importantly offers a summary of the “state of research.” This Forschungsstand may serve as a window into an area of Byzantine society that was neglected by contemporary historians and chroniclers, where it is frequently obscured by ambiguous language and terminology, but is far more apparent to those familiar with legal texts, manuals and wills. A Byzantine slave cost between 20 and 100 gold coins, and hence was a major investment. Manumission, the freeing of a slave, was considered an act of charity and was encouraged by the Church, but it made little financial sense unless the slave to be freed had provided children born into slavery, and their unions were not legally marriages until the last years of the eleventh century. Freed slaves rarely achieved acceptance outside their own kind (the case of Samonas is exceptional, and Prinzing relates it), but those who could afford to do so also owned slaves. In order to elucidate further the issues, Prinzing explores a number of excerpts from key texts and their interpretation in secondary literature: Nikephoros’ Short History, Kedrenos via Ostrogorsky, Theophanes Continuatus (Vita Basilii) and seven passages from Skylitzes (paying special attention also to the PmbZ).
The last two chapters in Part I, by Christopher Livanos and Tia Kolbaba, look at belief and Orthodoxy. They do so largely from the outside, exploring the views of those who challenged Orthodoxy from within and without the Byzantine World. In a wide-ranging, impressionistic and concise essay, Livanos introduces the notion of Orthodoxy through consideration of a perceived opposite, “paganism.” As Livanos explains, no Byzantine would ever have called himself a pagan, and no exact equivalent to the modern term, derived from the Latin paganus, existed in medieval Greek. Instead, the term “Hellene” was used, at least until the eleventh century, in a pejorative sense. But from the twelfth century those who had used it of others who were not Orthodox claimed it for the Orthodox Greeks, who contrasted themselves with others advancing claims for Roman primacy, the Latins; and still later one finds efforts towards a revival of Hellenism as pagan monotheism, by Plethon.
Where Livanos dwells interestedly on Zoroastrians and Bogomils, and on such texts as the Chaldaean Oracles, Tia Kolbaba turns directly to the matter of the Latins and the theological texts they employed in disputation with the Greeks. Kolbaba presents a considered and detailed narrative of relations between Greek and Latin Churches, touching briefly upon the ninth-century “Photian” schism, but dwelling upon the matter of azymes, that arose in the eleventh century, specifically with regard to practices in the Armenian Church, which concerns were transferred to the Latins, in the first instance to the community of Amalfitan merchants resident in Constantinople, and in the second to those communities of Orthodox Christians living in southern Italy who had come under the sway of the Normans. This region receives much important coverage, as does the controversy to which the dispute over unleavened bread led, for it escalated through political and diplomatic grandstanding and ill temper, and has come to be known as the “Great Schism.” Kolbaba takes the opposite line, that it was not even a schism, but “a quarrel between the legates and the patriarch, leading to excommunications and recriminations which neither side applied to all members of the other side and both sides were willing to forget rather soon thereafter.” The quarrel was, however, remarkably instructive for views which hardened in the long twelfth century (1081–1204), the age of Crusades, but also of a reforming papacy and of intellectual ferment in the West, which forms the last part of Kolbaba’s chapter.