CHAPTER ELEVEN
POLITICAL LITERACY

Catherine Holmes

Historians working on medieval cultures outside the Byzantine empire sometimes see Byzantium and literacy as virtual synonyms. Byzantium’s self-proclaimed status as the continuation of the Roman empire, its apparent disdain for its “barbarian” neighbours and its later reputation among scholars as the preserver of Hellenic culture, can all lead to the general supposition that the Byzantine empire was governed according to complex bureaucratic procedures, and that this system was run by a large and well-educated class of civil servants, all of whom had a profound knowledge of the classical world. Byzantinists themselves, on the other hand, have not always been so convinced by this bookish image, particularly for the centuries after ad AD 650. Since the 1970s it has often been argued that the number of individuals in Byzantium whose literacy skills or book-owning habits were sufficiently advanced to read and understand classical Greek literature remained tiny throughout the medieval period.¹ In addition, recent studies have suggested that the medieval empire often preferred to use relatively few bureaucrats and simple mechanisms of administration wherever possible rather than relying on vast armies of learned administrators and complex procedures.² Of course, this relatively negative picture of learning and written culture in Byzantium has been challenged. Revisionist appraisals have suggested a creative Byzantine engagement with the classical tradition.³ And even if the study of literacy in Byzantium remains embryonic compared with treatments by western medievalists, initiatives have still been taken in this direction. No longer is consideration of Byzantine literacy limited to the classical interests of a handful of highly educated senior administrators in Constantinople; instead a much broader range of texts, materials, scribes, audiences and functions are now considered legitimate objects of study.⁴ Nonetheless, despite this more catholic approach, scholars of the medieval empire have yet to think extensively about the intersection of literacy with politics. This lack of engagement contrasts with assessments of late antique Byzantium, where literacy has been seen as a vital adhesive in the relationship between imperial authority and provincial elites. According to this model, Constantinople’s provision of offices and salaries to those with the requisite literacy skills provided substantial incentives to provincial elites to invest in education.⁵ Neglect of the relationship between politics and literacy in later Byzantine centuries also compares unfavourably with recent treatment of the Rus, a near neighbour of medieval Byzantium.⁶

In this chapter I want to examine the relationship between politics and literacy in medieval Byzantium. I shall be less concerned with literacy as a set of acquired reading and writing skills, and more with how written culture shaped the expectations and behaviour of those involved in politics. This is not to suggest that other forms of political action did not exist, or that the relationship between literacy and power was unchanged from early Byzantium. Instead I shall develop thoughts first proposed by Margaret Mullett that Byzantine literacy from the ninth century onwards existed in a dynamic relationship with other modes of communication and social behaviour.⁷ I shall suggest that those who were associated with imperial government in Constantinople were vital participants in this relationship, but that there were other key players further afield. I will focus my attention most closely on the tenth and eleventh centuries but will also touch on earlier periods too for purposes of comparison.

The starting point for any analysis of the role of literacy in politics must be the fact that all those who exercised or were touched by power in Byzantium operated in a graphically rich landscape.⁸ From the emperor down to the lowliest taxpayer, medieval Byzantines were constantly exposed to script even if they could not read or write themselves. One reason for this was the survival of inscribed materials from the more remote past. At one level this survival resulted from the copying and editing of texts from antiquity; but even individuals far removed from such lofty, literary enterprises were likely to encounter antique script regularly. Inscribed stones and statues from earlier centuries were ubiquitous in medieval Byzantium and were frequently reused in later domestic buildings, fortifications and churches. Nor was Byzantium’s rich graphic landscape merely composed of ancient artefacts. Members of the political elite who held imperial offices often used writing as a means of displaying their status, whatever their own personal capabilities as readers and writers. Such display could include the sponsoring of manuscripts but also the commissioning and renovation of precious objects and buildings inscribed with their patron’s name. That writing could be a status symbol is evident in the prominent place that the elite awarded to books in the typika (foundation documents) of the monasteries they established.⁹

Writing, then, was significant as the residue of a past culture and as a marker of social cachet; but there were other contemporary reasons for the ubiquity of written culture in Byzantine political contexts, above all the production of texts and inscribed objects by imperial government. These included normative codes such as the Basilike, the ninth-century reworking of late antique Roman law, as well as shorter legal digests, handbooks to particular sections of the law and fresh edicts known as novels.¹⁰ In addition there were practical records related to administrative process, such as tax registers, lists of those in the state’s military service, and documents of validation and confirmation known as chrysobulls. To the list of inscribed materials connected to government can be added coins, the most common means by which subjects encountered their rulers; and lead seals, enormous numbers of which were produced during the ninth to twelfth centuries to authenticate documents.

If a rich graphic environment constitutes one element of political literacy in medieval Byzantium, then another was a contemporary expectation that those with power should be able to exercise command over the written word. That is to say, many sources make it clear that those in public office, including the emperor, the patriarch, bishops, generals, judges and tax collectors, should be well educated and willing to be guided by the practical wisdom of earlier generations as it appeared in written form. This view is particularly conspicuous in Byzantine appraisals of the mid-tenth-century emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos. The anonymous historian of the sixth book of Theophanes continuatus enthusiastically attributed the revival of philosophy, rhetoric, geometry and astronomy to Constantine, while alleging that the emperor liked to chose his leading civil and clerical officials from those who had trained to the highest level in these subjects. Constantine’s sponsorship of various compilations of practical knowledge, including the De administrando imperio and De cerimoniis, add to the impression that control over practical knowledge in its written form was considered an important credential for ruling the empire.¹¹

Of course, there are many reasons for questioning whether Constantine was responsible for any of the projects he is said to have sponsored; whether he himself was learned in any manner at all; or whether those texts associated with his name were of any contemporary “use.” However, the condition of Constantine’s intellect and the nature of the texts he sponsored may not be the most relevant issues.¹² The more salient point is that Byzantium was characterized by a political culture in which those charged with office were expected to exhibit command over the medium of writing. Such a context makes sense of the actions of Constantine’s grandfather and father, Basil I and Leo VI. Both emperors were associated with the compilation and rationalization of legal materials, and in the case of Leo, with a radical update of late antique military science.¹³ A similar need to be demonstrably learned may explain why the later tenth-century emperor Nikephoros Phokas did not simply conduct successful military campaigns against Byzantium’s neighbours but also commissioned written records of martial tactics.¹⁴ Late on in the eleventh century, the historian Michael Attaleiates promoted the imperial credentials of his hero Nikephoros Botaneiates by emphasizing his military experience and the fact that he spent day and night studying books.¹⁵ Nor were such promotional strategies simply excessive spin-doctoring; such allegations seem to have been responses to wider cultural expectations. According to Kekaumenos, the author of an eleventh-century manual of maxims and wisdom known as the Admonitions and Anecdotes, generals should spend every spare moment of the day devouring reading material, including military treatises, histories and the Bible.¹⁶

Yet, one could question how far Kekaumenos’ picture of the learned imperial servant really reflected practical politics in medieval Byzantium. The fact that Kekaumenos thought it important to offer this advice may itself suggest that reading was not always as frequent among Byzantine officials as he wished. But a more significant reason for doubting Kekaumenos’ prescription is that Byzantine politics can often appear to be characterized by practices far removed from the written medium. Some of the most powerful and feared of Byzantine emperors had a reputation for administering the empire with little reverence for written law or administrative procedure. Michael Psellos alleged that Basil II (976–1025), “governed not in accordance with written laws but following the unwritten dictates of his own intuition.” He also claimed that Basil’s court was unfriendly to those with literary pretensions.¹⁷ Moreover, even during the reigns of emperors with carefully crafted images as learned rulers, government and politics were often conducted more through visual, performed and material media than through the written word.¹⁸ Many Byzantine rulers, particularly those with weak claims to imperial legitimacy, ensured that their first political act was the distribution of largesse to the most significant members of the Byzantine society, including generals, civil administrators and the Constantinopolitan urban elite.¹⁹ Meanwhile, emperors sought to maintain their grip through regular and elaborate ceremonies at which salaries of gold coins, precious objects and luxurious fabrics were disbursed.²⁰ As Michael VI discovered in 1056–7, to fail to reward the most politically important figures, especially the generals, with the salaries and titles they believed their due could provoke military revolt.²¹

While giving material rewards was important in Byzantine political culture, just as significant was the perception of imperial munificence. In this context, the apparently endless cycle of ceremonies centred on the Great Palace and Hagia Sophia formed one of the most important means by which emperors could display their own authority, and senior officials and courtiers their status and influence.²² Political ambition, reward and authority could also be represented, cultivated and even thwarted through other sorts of ceremonies, especially victory parades through the streets of Constantinople. Such displays were opportunities to celebrate victories over external foes or internal rebels, but also very convenient vehicles for the ritualized humiliation of the defeated. Stories of vanquished rebels sitting backwards on donkeys bearing the physical disfigurements of their punishments (beatings, blindings and mutilations) are common in Byzantine historiography. Triumphs also alert us to the importance that ceremony played in the conduct of foreign relations. On rare occasions captured external foes would be trampled underfoot by emperors or divested of their royal insignia during such processions.²³ But even more routine diplomacy was often conducted through theatrical and visual media, including awe-inspiring receptions and lavish banquets.²⁴ When the Byzantines wished to impress foreigners, it has been argued that they preferred to invoke monuments, relics, icons, ceremonies and long-standing traditions associated with the city of Constantinople rather than use sophisticated written records. Indeed, the very wealth of the Constantinopolitan visual repertoire may have meant that the Byzantines had little incentive to produce the kinds of detailed official historiographies that were developed for the purposes of diplomacy in the Carolingian world and early medieval China.²⁵

Acknowledging the importance of visual, performed and material methods of conducting politics and governing the empire is important. But, as we have already seen, however numerous were these alternative modes of political action and representation, written culture was still ubiquitous in Byzantium in political contexts. What are we to make of this symbiosis of the written and non-written?

There is a spectrum of potential answers to this question. One consideration is that the most important dimension to writing in Byzantium was its value as a symbol of authority rather than its use in practical government and politics. Such a context may make sense of a case like that of the Graptoi in the early ninth century. These were iconophile monks whom the iconoclast emperor Theophilos punished by publicly tattooing their foreheads with a verse summary of their crimes and subsequent punishments.²⁶ That the Byzantines themselves saw writing as a manifestation of authority, and more importantly wished outsiders to be apprised of the same mes sage, also comes across in Constantine VII’s recommendation that any foreigners who wished to borrow imperial vestments should be told about a curse engraved into the high altar of Hagia Sophia which promised doom to those who misused such symbols of imperial rule.²⁷ The other advantage to adopting this authority-centred reading is that it may also help to explain certain puzzling features about written culture in Byzantium: these include misspellings and grammatical errors in inscriptions on expensive objects and buildings patronized by emperors and senior officials, as well as the apparently unfinished nature of many high-status written projects, such as the De administrando imperio, the De cerimoniis and the imperially sponsored collection of saints’ lives known as the Metaphrastic Menologion. Such apparent sloppiness, inaccuracy and untidiness have sometimes been explained in terms of lack of education or as evidence that the Byzantines were more concerned about communication than correct orthography.²⁸ An alternative possibility is that it was not what was written that mattered in such contexts, but that it was written at all and in whose name. In these circumstances, correct spelling and completeness was far less important than graphic presence.

According to this authority-centred reading, writing in political and diplomatic contexts makes best sense when it is seen as an extension of the basically visual and ceremonial political culture of Byzantium. Yet, closer examination of the construction, function and transmission of Byzantine written culture may suggest that a purely ceremonial reading is rather too reductive, and that instead the relationship between writing and other media was more nuanced. That is to say, we ought to consider Margaret Mullett’s suggestion that writing was simply one way amid a series of other possibilities by which Byzantines communicated with each other.

Mullett’s suggestions for a multimedia approach were developed as part of an explanation for the practice of letter-writing among members of the Byzantine political elite in the ninth to twelfth centuries. As Mullett herself pointed out, surviving collections of letters suggest that epistolography was ubiquitous among the political elite and was an important means by which those charged with imperial governance kept in contact across vast geographical spaces.²⁹ However, letters did not operate in a vacuum. Instead, the sending of a letter was part of a much broader communicative system which included oral messages as well as presents such as food, wine and books. Mullett’s interpretation of the mutually reinforcing roles of writing, recitation and gift exchange was that this web of communications helped to create and maintain friendship, the social structure fundamental to a shared group identity among the governing elite in Byzantium. As such, Mullett’s arguments give written culture a strongly political dimension, but one that is essentially cohesive and consensual.³⁰ Critics of such a model could argue, however, that far from being cohesive, Byzantine politics were characterized by disintegration, competition and sometimes bloodshed. Does this more agonistic dimension to Byzantine politics negate the political role assigned to writing by Mullett? Not necessarily, for if anything, close examination of political competition in Byzantium reinforces Mullett’s suggestions about the importance of writing in political society.³¹ Thus, writing is conspicuous in historical and hagiographical accounts of military revolts and palace plots. Such narratives tell us that rebels communicated with fellow insurgents by letter. Usurpers announced their credentials for government in manifestoes, some of which, including those issued by Bardas Skleros, George Maniakes and Katakalon Kekaumenos in the tenth and eleventh centuries, survive embedded within later medieval histories. Meanwhile, emperors sent out letters to defuse rebellion or to incite defections. Oaths between associates were confirmed in writing. Slanders and forgiveness were often written down. Rewards for defending imperial authority were endorsed by imperial chrysobull. References to rebellions shaped diplomatic correspondence between the Byzantine court and its neighbours.³²

Of course, written culture did not operate in isolation during revolts. It is likely that envoys bearing letters also transmitted oral messages that expanded on or even changed suggestions in the written media.³³ Moreover, political alliances crystallized in writing did not always endure. Oaths were regularly broken and alliances collapsed. But, this should not belittle the significance of writing during rebellion. At a pragmatic level writing was a useful tool by which short-term alliances could be forged in a political culture whose most significant members often lived so far apart from each other. But there may have been other functions to writing as well. For even if rebels were frequently motivated by personal ambition and cupidity, they usually justified their actions by a rhetoric that emphasized the empire’s common good. For such rhetoric to resonate, it was important for insurgents to emphasize their own credentials in government. In this context the most important device available to a rebel was the lead seal that conveyed details of his current (and even past) offices and titles. One of the easiest ways of broadcasting those public service credentials was by dispatching a sealed document. In this sense, what was actually written in the document may have been less important than the seal that it bore.

Yet, is this suggestion that seals were more significant than written content simply further evidence that the primary political importance of writing in Byzantium was as a symbol of authority? Again, an affirmative answer to this question is too reductive, particularly if we take into account the broader practical administrative contexts within which lead seals themselves were produced and used. Establishing these broader contexts is not in itself an easy task. Research into Byzantine sigillography is still developing in sophistication, and questions of provenance, circulation and use are still underexplored. But, even in these circumstances it is clear from surviving evidence that seals were one of a series of tools related to writing that enabled those charged with imperial government to conduct the practical business of the empire. This evidence includes documents relating to property arrangements and disputes which were issued by local officials in the name of the emperor, and which are now stored in the archives of the monasteries on Mt Athos, at the monastery of St John on Patmos and in ecclesiastical archives in southern Italy.³⁴ A large cache of seals found at Preslav, an important administrative centre in eastern Bulgaria during the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, also supports a picture of government by writing.³⁵ The Preslav seals also illuminate the very complex paths that seals and the documents they authenticated could follow, criss-crossing between central government, provincial administrators and to those operating beyond the imperial frontiers as well.³⁶ Literary evidence too indicates that officials frequently communicated with each other by letter about public affairs. Two extant orations by Constantine VII request that the emperor should be kept informed in writing about military matters by his generals. Letters discussing military affairs pass between imperial officials, including the emperor himself, with some regularity in the Synopsis Historion of John Skylitzes.³⁷

Although it is somewhat speculative to leap from practical administration to broader patterns of political behaviour, nonetheless, if emperors, generals and local officials could communicate with each other in writing about matters of day-to-day government, it is likely that messages with deeper political import could also have been conveyed along similar channels. Moreover, the administrative use of writing in Byzantium may not simply provide important clues about the role that literacy could play in politics at the apex of Byzantine society, but also at more provincial levels too. Important here is evidence that the use of writing by imperial administrators prompted literate responses on the part of local political actors, above all the practice by provincial institutions and individuals of archiving documents which confirmed their landed holdings and fiscal obligations. The growth of archives can be illustrated at a general level by the documentary collections of institutions such as the Athonite monasteries, but there are more specific examples too, including the typikon for the monastery of Georgian monks established by Gregory Pakourianos at Backhovo in Bulgaria in 1085. A striking feature of his typikon is the great care that Pakourianos took about the storage of chrysobulls relating to the estates he had gained during the course of his career.³⁸ Pakourianos was an extremely experienced and exceptionally wealthy general whose typikon indicates how senior officials developed personal archives over many years as part of an arsenal to protect their own status and possessions. Such documents could in turn become the basis for an institutional collection. However, the Admonitions and Anecdotes of Kekaumenos suggests that such archiving practices were not limited to those with substantial political clout in central government alone. His text, thought to emanate from a provincial milieu in central Greece, appears to include important documents from what appears to be a family archive, including important correspondence between members of the author’s kin group and the emperor. Within this family archive one can even detect a defensive apology issued by a member or associate of Kekaumenos’ family, Nikoulitzas Delphinas in the 1060s, a text that seems akin to the personal manifestoes issued by generals such as Bardas Skleros, George Maniakes and Katakalon Kekaumenos.³⁹

However, as recent research also reveals, literate practices in the Byzantine localities did not develop as merely defensive mechanisms to protect the properties and reputations of communities and individuals from the state. Instead as Charlotte Roueché’s very detailed study of the structures and content of the Admonitions and Anecdotes has indicated, provincials may, at least in the eleventh century, have used the medium of writing to engage with the political culture of the Constantinopolitan governing elite far more creatively. The contents of Kekaumenos’ advice book show that he was enthused by the same political questions and events as more high-profile figures associated with imperial governance, especially bureaucrats with literary enthusiasms, such as John Skylitzes and Michael Psellos. Mirroring Psellos in the Chronographia, Kekaumenos reports on the advice about imperial governance given to Basil II by the rebel Bardas Skleros. Meanwhile both Kekaumenos and Skylitzes convey very similar narratives of the account of the revolt of the Bulgarian prince Alousianos against Emperor Michael IV. However, it is not only content but also genre which point towards a sharing of political interests between centre and locality. For as Roueché has shown, Kekaumenos’ handbook followed the genre of advisory literature which had recent parallels in Byzantine metropolitan literary culture, including the admonitions about correct imperial order found in the preface to Constantine Porphyrogennetos’ manual on client-management, the De administrando imperio. But even more important than common content and genre for notions of a shared political culture in provinces and capital, is Roueché’s argument that Kekaumenos had received, albeit at a rudimentary level, the same kind of rhetorical training enjoyed by his literary counterparts in Constantinople. This is evident from the way in which Kekaumenos follows the prescriptions on the writing of short narratives (diegemata) and the deployment of maxims (gnomai) found in the late antique rhetorical handbooks (progymnasmata) that were still used in Byzantine education during the medieval centuries. Furthermore, the quotations that Kekaumenos uses as handy maxims suggests that he had access to a wide body of literature from both the contemporary and ancient worlds either directly or through florilegia.⁴⁰

Most of Roueché’s arguments about the sharing of education, genre and literary content in the localities and imperial centre are developed from a close reading of the internal structures of Kekaumenos’ text. However, other evidence points in the same direction, most notably the will of Eustathios Boilas, protospatharios and hypatos, that was drawn up on Byzantium’s eastern frontier in 1059.⁴¹ This confirms that middle-ranking provincial figures had access to quite considerable reading materials. Thus, Boilas bequeathed to his monastic foundation near Edessa a library of more than ninety items from diverse genres. Of course this evidence in itself cannot tell us that Boilas was well read himself; his library could simply be a status symbol. More interesting are the other ways in which the will points to provincial analogues for the political use of writing at the imperial centre. These parallels surface when Boilas refers to his ambiguous relationship with the Apokapes family, a kin group of Georgian origin which held senior offices on the eastern frontier. As such, the Apokapes family have often been seen as powerful local lords in whose private service Boilas had procured his titles and salaries from Constantinople. And certainly the fact that Boilas made representatives of the family the executors of his will suggests a close local and personal bond. Yet this was clearly not an easy relationship, and, as the will itself indicates, Boilas had once had some of his properties sequestered by the Apokapes clan. The terseness of Boilas’ testament makes it difficult to determine exactly how this asymmetrical relationship had developed, but what does emerge is that written culture was considered by contemporaries to be as integral to politics on the frontiers of Byzantium as in Constantinople itself. Thus, Boilas states: “I have not consciously been treacherous … against him [the doux, Michael Apokapes] or his children … or contrived or written anything slanderous, but rather I have striven without deceit or artifice on their behalf … I have accomplished great and unexpected things … although I have been slandered by them.”⁴²

The Kekaumenos and Boilas case studies point towards to a dynamic role for writing in political life in the provinces as well as at the imperial centre. But in which direction did this dynamic move? From Constantinople out or from the provinces in? This may seem an odd question given the stress which is so often placed on the degree to which all forms of social, economic and cultural life in the Byzantine provinces were focused on the capital. In such circumstances surely any congruence between the written and political cultures of Constantinople and the localities can only be explained in terms of the demands of the centre? And, indeed, this chapter has already pointed in this direction by suggesting that communities and individuals in the provinces adopted literate practices, such as the archive, in order to function within and protect themselves from the Byzantine state. The fact that certain individuals from middling provincial origins, such as Kekaumenos and Boilas, went beyond simple familiarity with the record-keeping habits of the centre to more farreaching uses of written culture could also be explained as a centre-out phenomenon. That is to say, it is possible that the demands of imperial administration in the provinces led to the emergence of better educated and more politically aware local functionaries. Nor is this suggestion merely intuitive. The sigillographical record certainly makes it clear that provincial administration itself expanded significantly during the tenth and eleventh centuries.⁴³ There is also evidence that emperors were keen to ensure that those with responsibility for provincial governance should be more highly educated.⁴⁴ Although such initiatives to expand administration and improve education undoubtedly started in Constantinople, a trickle-down effect into the localities may have occurred, so that provincials who wished to participate in imperial governance found it increasingly necessary to acquire basic literacy skills. If this was so, then the political role that literacy played in medieval Byzantium may bear similarities to late antiquity: that in return for the salaries and status that service to Constantinople brought, local notables were willing to invest in education.

However, was Constantinople really such a significant catalyst for Byzantine written and political culture? There are some reasons for doubt. On the one hand, although imperial administrative structures undoubtedly proliferated in the tenth and eleventh centuries, both historiographical and sigillographical evidence suggest that large areas of the empire, especially on the frontiers, remained relatively lightly governed by Constantinople. In the borderlands, local potentates and their own functionaries often held the practical reins of power, with only minimal supervision by a representative of the Constantinopolitan centre.⁴⁵ Yet, despite relatively insubstantial administrative connections, individuals and communities in such regions often displayed a striking knowledge about, interest in and ability to play the political games of Constantinople. Events and personalities at the centre of Byzantine politics frequently appear in local historiographical traditions, transmitted by literate as well as oral means. Historians working in Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Slavonic and Latin on the periphery of Byzantium and beyond, all borrowed from Greek chronicles, even when they were hostile to the Byzantines themselves.⁴⁶ This historiographical evidence is interesting at two levels: first, it points to the fact that such local communities were already familiar with the written word, even if it was not Greek; and, second, they were able to respond to written Greek even if they came from non-Greek-speaking backgrounds. It is, of course, likely that the authors and audience for historiography on Byzantium’s frontiers came principally from monastic or ecclesiastical milieux; but it is worth noting that literate practices in such regions were not merely confined to church-related contexts, nor were they new to the tenth and eleventh centuries. On the northern shores of the Black Sea, in southern Italy, in the Transcaucasus, in the Balkans and even in parts of early medieval Rus, there is evidence for communities with long-standing experience of the use of writing for practical record-making. Sometimes such traditions developed in the context of close engagement with metropolitan Byzantine culture, as in the case of the use of writing for commercial purposes among the early Rus; but elsewhere written practices seem to have been more indigenous and self-generated.⁴⁷

A delineation of the evidence for literacy and its uses in the kaleidoscope of Byzantine provinces and frontier regions lies beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the degree to which the relationship between literacy and politics in the Constantinopolitan centre may have been shaped by established experiences of written culture in the provinces and on the frontiers is a topic worthy of further investigation. In this regard one fruitful area of study could be petitions. As the elite letters studied by Margaret Mullett suggest, lobbying for favour and protection in Byzantium was a complex and arduous process even for those with a great deal of power. However, it is clear from rural saints’ lives, from the Athonite archives and from other literary sources that such complexity did not deter individuals and communities living in the provinces from active lobbying, if necessary in Constantinople itself. Their conduct and expectations were intimately tied to written culture. Petitions, for instance, could take the form of letters. Even when lobbying was conducted by personal delegations, what petitioners so desperately sought were favourable documents drawn up and authenticated by representatives of the imperial centre. This incentive is brought out very clearly by the life of St Luke of Phokis which describes representatives of his parents’ village community journeying to Constantinople in search of basilika grammata (imperial letters) in order to resolve local disputes.⁴⁸ Of course, securing a response to a petition could be a long and tortuous task, but this in itself may be significant. As the empire expanded geographically in the tenth and eleventh centuries, those individuals and communities who saw the emperor in Constantinople as their ultimate protector grew in turn. It may have been the petitioning culture that developed alongside territorial expansion which gradually forced emperors into developing a bigger and more complex bureaucracy, especially in Constantinople itself. If this is so, then we may be wise to see the role of literacy in Byzantine government and politics as demand- rather than supply-led.

Such thoughts are of course speculative. However, if this demand-led model has any merit, it might point towards a particularly intriguing way in which the middle Byzantine empire exhibited parallels with its late antique predecessor. These parallels start with some contradictions that Chris Kelly has observed in the relationship between literacy, government and politics in the late antique empire. The most striking of these contradictions is the fact that despite the state’s need for literate administrators to facilitate the collection of taxation and administration of justice over vast geographical areas, much of the extant written evidence connected to early Byzantine bureaucracy is curiously disorganized, unsystematic and inefficient. Rather than concluding that bureaucratic reality was simply failing to live up to imperial rhetoric, Kelly suggests that this mismatch was an essential and even deliberate component to autocracy. In other words, according to Kelly, emperors realized that they needed bureaucrats and the rule of law for functional imperial administration but they also wanted to avoid becoming too circumscribed by the personnel, practices and precedents that accompanied government by writing. Hence the mismatch between rhetoric and reality was a means by which emperors could carve out some personal space for the arbitrary actions that were needed to make the rest of the political community respect imperial authority.⁴⁹ Does this resolution have applications beyond late antiquity? Could it make sense of some of the tensions visible in imperial attitudes to written government in medieval Byzantium, above all those expressed by strongarm emperors like Basil II? Of course, the allegations by Michael Psellos that Basil made up law as he went along and that he governed in an ad hoc manner with scant regard for men of learning prove on closer inspection to be erroneous. Basil did not dispense with government by writing. He himself issued two important novels, which we know from the Peira, a mid-eleventh-century collection of legal decisions, which continued to be enforced several decades after they were promulgated.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, Basil’s own court was far from a cultural desert. His most trusted servants included those with extensive education, literary interests and experience of written administration. The most significant of these figures was Nikephoros Ouranos, keeper of the imperial inkstand, diplomat, general, provincial governor, hagiographer, letter-writer and compiler of a vast military manual.⁵¹ And yet, could it be that in order to maintain some room for political manoeuvre and prevent entrapment within this bureaucratic network, Basil was determined to cultivate an alternative and exceptionally daunting image: that of the emperor for whom writing was of next to no importance?

NOTES

1 Lemerle 1971; Mango and Ševenko 1975.

2 Stephenson 2000 (esp. chs 2–4); Neville 2004; Holmes 2005 (esp. chs 6–7).

3 Mullett and Scott 1981; Angelov 2007.

4 Browning 1978; Oikonomides 2005 (esp. papers III–VI); Holmes and Waring 2002; Mondrain 2006.

5 Heather 1994.

6 Franklin 2002b, esp. ch. 4.

7 Mullett 1990.

8 For this concept see Franklin 2002b: 3.

9 For the monastic foundations of Gregory Pakourianos, Eustathios Boilas and Michael Attaleiates see Lemerle 1970.

10 For a useful summary see Franklin 2002b: 133–5.

11 Theophanes Continuatus 1838: 446; Lemerle 1971, esp. ch. 10. See also Featherstone in this volume.

12 For scepticism see Ševenko 1992.

13 Dain 1967. See also Sullivan in this volume.

14 McGeer 1995: 171–224; Dagron and Mihescu 1986.

15 Ref. from Karagiorgou forthcoming.

16 Ref. from Roueché 2002: 117–23.

17 Impellizzeri and Ronchey 1984: I. 42–3.

18 See Bourbouhakis in this volume.

19 See plentiful examples in Skylitzes 1973: 132, 375, 393, 417–18, 422.

20 The Italian envoy Liudprand of Cremona gives a colourful account of the mid-tenth-century ceremonies in book 6 of his Antapodosis (Chiesa 1998: 149–50).

21 Skylitzes 1973: 483.

22 Dagron 2003a (esp. chs 2, 3 and 6); Featherstone in this volume.

23 McCormick 1986: 131–230.

24 Again Liudprand provides first-class evidence here (Chiesa 1998: 147–9, 195–6).

25 Shepard 2003: 91–115.

26 Cunningham 1991: 84–6, 94–6.

27 Constantine Porphyrogenitus 1967: 66–9.

28 For arguments about orthography as an index of literacy see papers III–VI in Oikonomides 2005; Jeffreys 2008; Waring 2002:176–8.

29 See Papaioannou in this volume.

30 Mullett 1988.

31 On rebellions see in the first instance Cheynet 1990.

32 Numerous examples of the use of writing during revolt appear in John Skylitzes’ testimony (Skylitzes 1973: 36, 179, 187, 190, 206, 209–10, 256, 279–81, 317, 327, 335–8, 366–7, 417–18, 428); on manifestoes see Shepard 1992 and Holmes 2005, ch. 5; on diplomatic implications see Canard 1949–50.

33 See e.g. imperial envoys sent with plenipotentiary powers during the revolt of Bardas Skleros in the early years of Basil II’s reign (Skylitzes 1973: 316–20).

34 For written culture in provincial administration see Morris 1986.

35 Stephenson 2000: 17.

36 Frankopan 2001; Cheynet and Morrisson 1990.

37 Skylitzes 1973: 288, 355–6, 450–1, 457–8; McGeer 2003.

38 Lemerle 1970: 135–7, 154ff.

39 Litavrin 1972: 252–68; Lemerle 1960: 41–56.

40 Roueché 2002; Roueché 2003.

41 Lemerle 1970: 13–63; Vryonis 1957.

42 Trans. Vryonis 1957: 266.

43 Oikonomides 1976: 148–9; Nesbitt and Oikonomides 1991–2001.

44 Wolska-Conus 1976; Oikonomides 1976: 133–5.

45 See n. 2.

46 For material shared between Byzantine, Arabic and Armenian sources see Holmes 2006; for Greek historiography in Slavonic chronicles see Franklin 1990.

47 For the Rus see Franklin 2002a; for the relationship between writing and political culture on the northern shores of the Black Sea see Shepard 2006c.

48 Connor and Connor 1994: 6–8.

49 Kelly 1994; Kelly 2004: ch. 5.

50 Svoronos 1994: 184–232; Oikonomides 1986; Magdalino 1994: 105–6.

51 McGeer 1991; Crostini 1996.