TO an Englishman today, studying for a moment the foundations of modern Europe, it seems natural to study first the history of the west and the settlements of the invaders. To a Roman citizen of even moderate culture in the fifth century, it would probably have seemed rather that the future of Europe and civilization depended on Constantinople and its fate. Civilization was focussed in the east, not the west: New Rome (and this was the official title of the city) was really Rome herself, planted there by Constantine in the year 330. The Rome of Constantine, it is true, was not the Rome of Augustus: the Roman empire was already, in fact, a Greco-Roman empire long before Constantine; but the fate of the Latin tradition and much else seemed to depend on the survival of ‘New Rome’. Byzantium, the royal city, ‘city of lights’ as a later pope was to call Paris, was, to all who knew, at once the fortress and the capital of Europe: the rest, barbarian fringe. Byzantine history, at least till the Crusades, is not a strand of history adjacent to that of Europe, possibly omissible; it is, in a sense, the central strand of European history.
A great English Byzantinist 1 would set the beginning of the Byzantine empire at the very foundation of the city by Constantine, rather than at its reorganization in the eighth century by the emperor Leo III, after the losses to the Arabs. This was the beginning. All living states grow and change, in answer to the requirements of their environment, and Byzantium became progressively more Hellenistic, more Asiatic even, in the course of her history: but the project for which she was founded remained her aim through the centuries and gave her development continuity. She was never, at any point, ‘orientalized’.
Three factors then determined her development, all present in the original concept of Constantine. First, New Rome was to be a Greco-Roman city, using the Latin language for law and administration. Secondly, she was to be Christian: for Constantine had triumphed by the marvellous interposition of the Christian god, and his new empire had a divine mission. Thirdly, by setting his new city in the Greek east, he faced the increased absorption of Hellenistic culture by his subjects and especially his capital. Alexander had carried the Greek life into Asia and the succession states of his empire had produced a civilization where Greek culture was cross-fertilized by native arts and learning: Greco-Persian, Greco-Syrian, Greco-Egyptian, Greco-Armenian, Greco-Indian arts and life formed a culture called, shortly, ‘Hellenistic’. Rome herself had long sat at the feet of the Greeks as regards learning and the arts, and Mark Antony had anticipated later developments by working for a Roman empire centred in the east Mediterranean rather than Rome: Alexandria might have been an imperial capital early in our era. The Orontes had already poured itself into the Tiber; there was no essential hostility in the fourth century between the Latin mind and Hellenistic culture, or (since the fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen had set forth the implications of the Christian faith in terms intelligible to Greek scholars and philosophers) between Christianity and Hellenism: Constantine saw no ‘cultural’ danger to either Romanitas or Christianity in moving his capital farther to the learned, the civilized, the rich, the warm, the fruitful east, which, after all, was to him the centre.
Probably his more immediate aim was to secure the strategic site of Constantinople, always one of the greatest assets of the Byzantine empire. The old city of Byzantium lay on the narrow sea that joined the Pontic and the Mediterranean worlds, and on the great east-west land route that joined the valley of the Danube with that of the Euphrates. The corn of south Russia could be brought by sea to the city, and the overland trade from China, India, Persia came through Armenia and Asia Minor to Byzantium as to a great emporium. The capital was sited also to be a ‘defence in depth’ to the north-eastern and eastern frontiers of the empire: to those of the Danube, of Armenia and of Syria. On this site, with its harbour within the Golden Horn, Constantine built his New Rome, with its imperial palace, its churches, its hippodrome, its baths: here he encouraged the heads of Roman families to build themselves ancestral villas and to settle.
The Latin tradition, moreover, though set in a city bound to become more and more assimilated to its Greek background, did not disappear. Certain evidence has been quoted to show the success of eastern influence: the use of prostration (proskynesis) before the sovereign: mutilation as a punishment: some forms of ascetic contemplation: the use, in church music, of Syrian rhythms familiar to the early Christians: and the use of the bow by cavalry, as in Persian warfare. But there is stronger evidence that the Byzantine empire remained Roman; it was never basically orientalized. It retained the Roman tradition in law and government, the Hellenistic tradition in language, literature and philosophy, and a Christian tradition thought out and refashioned under Greek influence. In those important political issues of Monophysitism (see p. 156) and Iconoclasm (see p. 409), it was a Greco-Roman policy and not an oriental policy that won the day.
The setting up of a Christian empire by Constantine was deliberate, though it was not of course possible to accomplish the conversion of all his subjects in his own day. The Christian purpose of the Byzantine empire was, however, never abandoned; the Byzantines were convinced that their empire was willed by God, and that they were protected by him, and by the emperor, his anointed. They fought the divine battles and could expect supernatural aid. Their empire as a state realized the divine purpose for human society, and this entailed at least four obligations: the defence of the Christian faith, by the emperor himself, as the supreme vicegerent and champion of God: the defence of the empire as the Christian society, by imperial armies fighting under the signum of the Christian monogram: the strong conservatism and traditionalism of East Rome: and a compassion (philanthropia) for the humble and the poor both from the individual and the state which exceeded the ‘welfare institutions’ of the pagan empire.
The Byzantine empire was not merely conceived of as itself a Christian society, but as a great missionary force. Conversion from paganism befitted its subjects, and was in the end enforced by the state; and conversion was owed, as a duty, by the empire to the tribes beyond the frontiers. As Professor Norman Baynes has, in a brilliant essay, defined the thought-world of east Rome, untying the knots of pagan and Christian philosophy, so Professor André Grabar has demonstrated the Byzantine concept of the emperor’s relation to the pagan border tribes, outside the Greek oikoumenê, by means of the imperial iconography. Whereas the pagan emperors had been represented in sculpture as trampling the barbarians beneath their horses’ feet (all will remember the small, wretched Romano-Briton beneath the horseman’s feet on the slab at Hexham, a very common motif): from Constantine’s time the representation gradually changes. The emperor’s majesty is still vindicated by his stature, greater than that of the barbarians: he is still, as before, sometimes shown seated with his foot upon the little barbarian’s head: 1 but the small barbarian is now no longer a squalid savage, but a child to be instructed, portrayed with delicacy and even affection. Rather later, the traditional representation of the emperor, resting his foot on the little barbarian’s head, is felt to be unfitting to a Christian, and the emperor now holds out the cross to a row of little barbarians, without the posture of abject submission. Later still, the barbarian nations are shown as beautiful (though small) women, presumably already converted, and gratefully offering a diadem to the emperor.
All the Byzantine emperors then, from Constantine onwards, faced the same task, had the same function, and could rely on the same elements of strength. They knew themselves to have the divine protection. They exercised a unique autocracy; they appointed all officials, and Roman law ran within their whole empire and extended into all spheres of the citizen’s life. They had, moreover, and never lost, their right to lead their armies in the field, as to direct all departments of civil life: even the decisions of the church needed their approval. They were supreme legislators and judges. They were able to maintain a gold currency acceptable everywhere, by a system of taxation efficient though burdensome: their revenue, huge for the day, was sufficient to maintain a small, mobile, highly trained professional army, and, occasionally, fleet. Their civil service was efficient, if often corrupt: it functioned even in times of palace revolution or under weak emperors. Finally, the morale of the Byzantine citizens was supported by the Byzantine church. Within an empire of various races and nationalities, the Christian religion was a unifying force: the Byzantine citizen, asked to what nation or state he belonged, preferred to describe himself as Romaios, implying citizenship of the Christian empire: implying too, the service of Christus Victor, as the Byzantine church saw him. The Byzantine emperors had as a source of strength the faith that promised themselves and their subjects a share in Christ’s resurrection: ‘the banishing of that ancient terror which beset the life of man: that it is which has won and kept the allegiance of the masses’.
The power of the Byzantine emperors rested not only on tradition, culture and orthodoxy, but on the economic strength of their empire. Population was for those days, very large: it has been reckoned that Constantinople never numbered less than 500,000 souls and at many periods more. There were many towns where commerce and industry promoted a large population, and the Christian tradition of marriage stopped the voluntary restriction of births previously obtaining in Greece and Italy. Monastic celibacy, on the other hand, somewhat restricted population. Moreove r, the emperors gave asylum to refugees, distributed land to soldie rs, freed slaves to populate deserted regions, and pursued a useful policy of home colonization.
Intern ational trade was a great source of Byzantine wealth, and made possible the maintenance of a gold coinage everywhere acceptable: the gold solidus, the nomisma or bezant was a truly international coin (see p. 136). The empire had a great number of ports, some the outlets of inland territories, like Salonika for the Balkans and Trebizond for Persia, some with industries of their own, like Alexandria. Textiles from the east, gold and silversmiths’ ware, wine and dried fruits came to these ports, as did furs, slaves, honey and wax of south Russia. Nor did this trade consist of luxury goods alone: the large population could not have existed without the transport of great quantities of bulky goods, corn, wine, timber, etc.
Industries flourished in the towns, producing some articles for the masses, and many articles of luxury, important as exports. Great silver dishes from the east, engraved chrism spoons, penetrated to London and an east Anglian king’s court in the seventh century, and not without profit to Byzantium. The ceremonies of the Byzantine court itself, and those of hundreds of churches and monasteries, required ceremonial garments, heavy gold brocades, altar plate adorned with cloisonné enamel, reliquaries, ivories, glassware, bronzes. All these articles of beautiful design and fine workmanship were produced by the gilds: all Byzantine industry was organized on the gild system. But whereas in medieval Europe the gilds themselves settled prices, wages and rules of labour, in Byzantium the state fixed profits, terms of admission and all regulations: the prefect of Constantinople could inspect all workshops.
The state also concerned itself with agriculture and particularly, though more at some periods than others, with the maintenance of peasant holdings. At all times in the history of Byzantine agriculture there were great estates and peasant holdings: the balance between them swung now to one side now to another in response to political and military needs. Briefly, it was always advantageous to the emperor to protect the small farmer, because the latter could less easily safeguard himself from the tax collector than the great landowner; and in times of acute military need, as after the Arab successes, it was vital to have a free peasantry, liable to military service, from which to recruit the army. The coloni of a Roman villa had never made good soldiers. On the other hand, large-scale farming produced more, the Byzantine merchant liked to invest his profits in land, and political disgrace, accompanied by confiscation, tended to increase the imperial demesne: there were always factors tending to increase the large estates at the expense of the small farmer. In the early days of the Byzantine empire, land was mainly concentrated in the hands of great landowners: in the days of the iconoclast emperors it was divided between their estates and small holdings, and there was later a reversion to the systems of large estates. But between the days of Justinian I and the Palaeologi small holdings never completely disappeared. The great landmark in their history is the reorganization of the army in the early seventh century, the lands of the border provinces of the empire being allotted to peasants who held on the obligation of hereditary and military service (see p. 214). The provinces of the empire were then regrouped in ‘themes’; but in the days of Justinian I the old provincial administration of Diocletian and Constantine still obtained, though Justinian took some steps towards grouping the small provinces in larger units. In the pre-Heraclian period large estates were the rule, though the limitanei or frontier troops had small, military holdings.
In this period then, before the loss of Egypt and her grain supply to the Arabs, Byzantine farmers grew corn (though not as extensively as after the loss of Egypt) and had extensive vineyards: they grew also fruits, herbs, cotton and mulberries (the Peloponnese got its name, Morea, from these mulberry trees). Bee-keeping flourished, and the farmer had too cattle, sheep, pigs and horses. Racehorses were needed: and numbers of horses for the army, where the cavalry was the superior arm. From the forests on the edge of cultivation came the timber needed for houses and ships and, indeed, all the scaffolding and beams needed for the castella and the great domed buildings of Justinian’s age.
A very large imperial revenue was raised, as in the late Roman empire, from the large imperial demesne, from various forms of land tax and levies in kind, and, very largely, from customs and charges on traders. The state property included not only agricultural estates, kept largely by confiscations, but imperial factories where silk was woven and the army needs supplied: the emperor moreover owned many caravanserais and bazaars and charged merchants for their use. With his huge revenue the emperor had to pay for fortifications, city walls and frontier defence: the small but expensive army and, sometimes, navy: mercenary soldiers and the heavy presents needed in diplomacy: the whole burden of official salaries, partly in cash, partly in kind: largesses to the army, the church, and the populace: the maintenance of costly palaces and palace servants: great sums of money, and landed endowment for churches, monasteries and ‘welfare institutions’ (hospitals for the poor, the aged, the sick, etc.): and great sums for the splendid ‘games and circuses’ of the capital. So great needs strained even the great revenue of the Byzantine emperors, but they never adopted the resource, so commonly used at the time, of debasing the currency. The Byzantine empire was set in what was then a rich and fertile part of the earth: but it could never have maintained its position on the profits of agriculture alone: the imperial management of the currency is evidence both that the supply of precious metals was relatively adequate, and that the importance of mercantile sources to the revenue was realized.
As to the machinery by which the Byzantine empire functioned, its civil administration had grown out of the service of the later Roman empire, as described in the eastern part of the Notitia Dignitatum. The emperor was the supreme Roman magistrate, though his office had acquired a Christian significance and his autocracy an eastern character in imitation of the Persian monarchy. His title up to 629, however, remained Imperator Augustus, rendered in Greek, Autokrator Augustos: the Greek word for king, basileus, was not officially used till Heraclius had conquered the Persians who used it. As the Roman emperor had been pontifex maximus, with a supremacy over all pagan religions, the emperors from Constantine onwards took over, as it were, the guardianship of the Christian religion. Just as in imperial iconography motifs representing qualities or powers of the pagan emperor were not dropped when the empire became Christian, but Christianized: as, the winged victory on the globe to a cross, and the two legionary standards held by a standing emperor to two tall crosses (signa cruris): so the sacredness of the pagan emperor was preserved in the Christian régime. It was no original part of the Christian conviction that kingship was itself sacred, but the church teaching that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’, found the sacred character of its imperial protector no stumbling block. The coronation rite was only added to the ceremonies of an imperial succession after the reign of Leo I (d. 474); and the rite of anointing not till the ninth century; but it was always the patriarch who conferred the diadem, and so necessary was the patriarch’s part, that in a disputed succession a rival claimant would obtain the creation of his own patriarch canonically or uncanonically to crown him.
The central staff of the emperor resided at Constantinople: the magister officiorum, who headed not only the imperial scrinia or chanceries, but the arms factories, the post, and the palace bodyguard: he was Head of all Departments. He had under him agentes in rebusy holding high civil and military posts. The quaestor sacri palatii presided over the council, the consistorium, and was supreme minister of justice; he drafted edicts and answered petitions. Finance was managed by the comes sacrarum largitionum and the comes rerum privatarum, the first officer administering the treasury once called the fiscus, which collected revenue, all tribute paid in money, taxes on trade and industry and various other cash sources. The comes rerum privatarum administered the imperial demesne and the privy purse, though this was later the duty of an official with a treasury of his own, the sacellarius. Following old Roman usage, officials, military and civil, were graded in dignity and honorific address: illustres, spectabiles and clarissimi. The original title of official companion of the emperor, comes, was also graded in three classes. High office both in the army and civil service was open to all, and promotion was normally by seniority. The officials of the age of Justinian were organized on much the same lines as those of the Notitia Dignitatum in the fifth century: major change came in the days of Heraclius, though from those of Justinian there was a tendency to split up the large departments, and bring the heads of all the departments into immediate dependence on the emperor.
Local government, depending on the division of the empire into provinces, rested in Justinian’s day on the system inaugurated by Diocletian and Constantine. The western prefectures of the system had been lost: but the east, the Byzantine empire of the sixth century, consisted of two prefectures: Oriens, with five dioceses (comprising the Asiatic provinces, Egypt and Thrace): and Illyricum, with two dioceses, including the rest of the Balkans. The two praetorian prefects had not only supreme legal and administrative power, but collected the annona or land tax, with which to pay salaries and feed the army. Under the prefect, the imperial vicars governed the dioceses, and under the praetorian prefect of the east, the prefect of the city, residing in Constantinople, supervised the food supplies, the gilds and the administration of the capital. The dioceses had been subdivided by Constantine into small provinces, where city and military office was held separately. This division of powers was first set aside by Justinian in regions of acute military danger: exarchs, combining civil and military authority, were appointed for Africa after the conquest of the Vandals, and for Italy, invaded by the Lombards.
Succession in the East Roman empire was theoretically elective, and in practice much influenced by relationship to the preceding emperor. The use of adoption, a custom long familiar in Roman law, made possible the existence of imperial dynasties in a system nominally elective. The succession was normally peaceful, though sometimes disturbed, or occasioned, by palace revolutions. The dynasty of Constantine I, despite the enormous prestige of its founder and the possibility of adoption, had ended with Julian (d. 363): the dynasty of Theodosius had lasted from 379 to 457 and seen the division, for administrative purposes, of the Roman empire, Arcadius taking the eastern portion in 395. The dynasty of Leo I lasted from 457 to 518, and profited by the long peace on the eastern frontier with the Sassanid princes of Persia; but could not prevent in 476 the setting up of barbarian rule in Rome.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
[to chapters viii, ix, xii and xxi]