by Cyril Mango
In a given sense, however, Yeats was right. The empire, no matter how much it changed below the surface, did present a facade of studied immutability, which was an essential part of its mystique. It was the emperor’s duty, stated the historian Zonaras in the period of the Komnenoi, ‘to preserve the ancient customs of the state’. If one lived, say, in the ninth or tenth century, one did not have to be a scholar to know that the past—not the pagan past of long ago, but the Christian past of Late Antiquity—had been greater than the present. One had only to look at St Sophia to understand that such a stupendous technological achievement could never be duplicated, and that if Justinian managed to put it up, that was due to supernatural help. The past validated the present and had to be repeatedly dusted off through a process called restoration, renewal, or rejuvenation, as distinct from innovation (kain-otomia, neoterismos), which was subversive and dangerous. That is why on state occasions the emperor dined in a hall that had allegedly been built by Con-stantine the Great, reclining on a couch as no one had done since antiquity, and watched on the Kalends of January a performance of dancing ‘Goths’, although no Goths had been in evidence for as long as anyone could remember. That is why medieval court dignitaries bore Roman titles like consul, patrician, magister, quaestor and received as their insignia such outdated objects as fibulas, ivory tablets, and gold torques of a type worn by army officers in Late Antiquity; why on coinage barely intelligible Latin inscriptions were maintained long after that language had gone out of use.
The feigned immutability of the empire was matched by its extraordinary longevity. Indeed, Byzantium was the only organized state this side of China that survived without interruption from antiquity until the dawn of the modern age. Its longevity is, indeed, its most conspicuous feature. True, it might easily have collapsed on several occasions—notably in 626, when Constantinople nearly fell to the Avars and Persians; in 717-18, when a massive Arab expedition against the city failed because, it seems, of an unusually severe winter and help from the Bulgars; in 1090-1, when the nomadic Cumans unexpectedly stepped in to avert a deadly threat from the Pechenegs and the Turks. Even earlier, in the course of the fifth century, the eastern empire might well have passed, like the western, under the control of German war lords with consequences that cannot now be estimated. It is also true that the convention of speaking of the Byzantine empire down to 1453 masks the obvious fact that its imperial phase had ended in 1204 or rather a couple of decades before that fateful date. But even if the empire lasted nine centuries instead of eleven, that is still a remarkable achievement, which shows that it commanded the loyalty or acquiescence of its inhabitants, who were willing to pay their taxes, serve in the army (at any rate until the eleventh century) and respect the emperor’s authority.
It is perhaps even more remarkable that down to the end of the twelfth century the empire did not suffer any fragmentation, as happened, for example, to its neighbour, the Abbasid caliphate. There were, of course, many rebellions, but they were aimed at capturing the throne, not at detaching a particular piece of territory. No enterprising strategos ever thought of declaring an independent Cappadocia. It is only under the Komnenoi that we witness the first separatist movements as the idea of a unitary state is progressively eroded by a policy of distributing the empire’s lands to members of the ruling clan as well as to foreign condottieri. Greatly accelerated as it was by the Fourth Crusade, fragmentation had actually begun earlier.
The cohesion of the empire down to the twelfth century is all the more difficult to explain in view of its ethnic diversity. Of the make-up and geographical distribution of its constituent population groups it is only possible to speak in very approximate terms, but there can be no doubt that next to old native stock there were great numbers of Slavs (throughout the Balkan peninsula), Caucasians (Armenians, Georgians, and Laz) and various other orientals, mainly Syrians, Turks, and Christian Arabs. Smaller groups included Jews, Gypsies, nomadic Vlachs, and western traders and adventurers. The long-standing imperial policy of transplanting whole populations to make up a demographic deficit in this or that area (e.g. in the Peloponnese in c.800) further complicated the picture. Of the ethnic groups, the Slavs, probably the most numerous, made the least impact on the composition of the elite, whereas the Caucasians were so prominently represented as to have almost taken over the empire for the duration of its medieval greatness, providing emperors and empresses (Leo V, Theophilos’ wife Theodora and her powerful clan, Basil I and his descendants, Romanos I, John I Tzimiskes), influential ministers like Stylianos Zaoutzes under Leo VI, a plethora of military commanders and many of the great landowning magnates bearing the family names of Phokas (at least in part), Skleros, Kourkouas, Krinites, Mousele, Bourtzes, Taronites, Tornikios, etc.
General considerations will not help us understand why this mishmash of nationalities identified themselves with the empire. A couple of concrete cases may be more illuminating. Here is Kekaumenos, a retired military man of Armeno-Georgian descent bearing what looks like an impeccably Greek name (‘the burnt one’). His ancestors had served the empire, not always faithfully, for at least four generations. Moderately educated, he wrote his famous Admonitions in the 1070s, one of the most self-revealing texts of the Byzantine period. Kekaumenos has much to say about loyalty to the emperor, which he recommends. ‘No one’, he writes, ‘has ever dared to mount a rebellion against the emperor and the Roman country in an attempt to subvert the peace who has not himself been destroyed. For this reason I entreat you, my beloved children, to remain on the side of the emperor and in servitude to him; for the emperor who sits at Constantinople always wins.’ Loyalty, in other words, was dictated by prudence: rebellion was too risky. Yet Kekau-menos was not entirely committed to the imperial ideal, nor did he wish the empire to expand at the expense of others. In addressing ‘toparchs’ (rulers of independent principalities on the empire’s periphery), he urges them to keep their distance, otherwise the emperor will grab their lands and give no thanks in return.
A few years after Kekaumenos, another Georgian condottiere, Gregory Pakourianos, who had likewise served the empire faithfully, had risen to the much more exalted post of ‘Grand Domestic of the West’ and been rewarded with immense landholdings, founded the monastery of Backovo in present-day Bulgaria (1083). While professing his unflinching adherence to the religion of the Greeks, he formally forbids any Greek monks or priests to be enrolled in his monastery because Greeks are grasping and unreliable. Pak-ourianos died fighting for the empire, but never learnt to sign his name in Greek characters (he did so in Armenian).
We may imagine that the two examples we have given were not entirely untypical. Kekaumenos was largely assimilated, though well aware of his origins, whereas Pakourianos was as yet unassimilated, a foreigner among Greeks, whom he profoundly distrusted. If those two proved loyal, it is clear that many Armenian nobles resettled in Cappadocia after the absorption of their kingdom into the empire (1045) harboured a deep resentment against Byzantium, like the deposed king Gagik II, who ordered the execution of the Greek metropolitan of Caesarea after the latter had had the temerity to call his dog Armen. It is probably to their disaffection that we may attribute the incredibly swift loss of most of Asia Minor to the Seljuk Turks, who achieved in ten years what the Arabs had been unable to do in the course of two centuries. By 1071 Suleyman ibn-Kutlu-mush was installed in Nicaea and raiding the coasts of the Bosporus. The general whom Alexios I sent to oppose him, a certain Tatikios, was also a Turk.
In a wider perspective the latter part of the eleventh century proved for Byzantium a crucial turning-point. If we look to the West, we find that the period in question leads up to what has been called the Renaissance of the twelfth century—the age of the first Gothic cathedrals, of the universities, of scholastic logic and the revival of legal studies, of vernacular poetry, and much else besides. It is clear that in Byzantium, too, similar trends were beginning to surface: merchants were joining the ruling class (what was called rath
er vaguely the Senate), legal studies were temporarily encouraged, poetry in the vernacular was making a timid appearance, Aristotelian philosophy was taught at Constantinople by an Italian (John Italos), and a new lay spirit was being manifested by intellectuals like Michael Psellos and the civil servant-cum-poet Christopher of Mitylene (who even made fun of the collecting of dubious relics of saints). It was a promising beginning, but it came to very little. Why? Was it because of incompetent government, collapse of central authority, and military disaster, which required all the energy and ingenuity of Alexios I Komnenos to repair—and that only in part? Or (as argued by the late Paul Lemerle) was Alexios himself the culprit—a ‘false saviour’, who downgraded the nascent bourgeoisie, parcelled out the empire’s best lands to his relatives and cronies, surrendered long-distance trade and shipping to the Venetians, shut down the teaching of Aristotelian logic, entrusted education to an obscurantist Church, and burnt heretics? Which ever explanation one adopts, Byzantium failed to experience the cultural flowering that occurred in the West and progressively fell further and further behind.
Fifty years ago it was still customary to claim that the political achievement of Byzantium had been the defence of Europe (or of Christendom) against continuous Asiatic aggression, but such a judgement is no longer considered acceptable. Today we are more likely to praise Byzantium, not for smiting Asiatics, but rather for having been multi-ethnic and multicultural. Multiethnic it certainly was, as we have seen; as for being multicultural, that was more from necessity than design. In matters of religious belief and observance variations were not tolerated except when uniformity could not be imposed. Even the Jews, a licit sect under the Roman empire, were repeatedly pressured to convert. It was only because all such attempts failed that the Jews, who were valuable economically, were left to their ways while being treated with contempt. Muslim merchants and prisoners of war were allowed their places of worship because denying them would have led to reprisals. Byzantium was less tolerant than Islam and marginally more tolerant than western Christendom.
The cultural legacy of Byzantium cannot be summed up by evoking names of great thinkers, poets, or artists. There was no Byzantine Abelard or Thomas Aquinas, no Chretien de Troyes or Dante, no Nicola Pisano or Giotto. The few Byzantine intellectuals who rise above the average, like Photios in the ninth century, Psellos in the eleventh, Planudes or Gregoras in the thirteenth-fourteenth, do so not so much by their originality, but as polymaths and voluminous authors. Byzantine art is anonymous. In the domain of letters the biography of authors, even in summary form, ceased to be of interest after the sixth century and they came to be distinguished from one another, if at all, by their titles, civil or ecclesiastical—deacon, skevophylax (sacristan), logothete, magister, or whatever. In many cases we are still unable to sort out all the Georges, Gregorys, Symeons, etc. and assign even approximate dates to them.
Lacking in individualism, Byzantine culture may be seen as a tightly knit body of thought expressed in the institutions of government, Church, and monasticism and reflected in the domains of writing and art. In the formulation of the nineteenth-century Russian thinker K. Leont’ev, Byzantinism meant monarchy, Christianity of a particular kind, a low estimation of all earthly things, and a denial of the possibility of universal well-being. That is fairly close to the mark, but calls for a little adjustment and elaboration. Christianity should be placed first, its distinguishing feature being that it was a static system of doctrine as expounded by the Fathers and defined by the seven ecumenical councils. Being perfect, it admitted of no further development. Of all the major Christian denominations, Byzantine Christianity may be called the most authentic in the sense that it is closest to the dogma of the Patristic age, but in denying any development after 787 it placed itself in an illogical stance, besides leaving the Holy Spirit with little to do.
Monarchy may be placed next because its necessity followed from religion. The governance of the earth being a reflection of that of heaven, no other system was pleasing to God or even worth discussing. The last Byzantine treatise on political philosophy was written in the early sixth century and remained unread. By contrast, the Mirror of Princes by the deacon Agapetos of the same period, which defined in simple terms the qualities of the ideal emperor while admitting his God-given status, proved a lasting success. It was taken for granted that the emperor was chosen by God, to whom alone he was accountable, and that his responsibility encompassed both the spiritual and physical welfare of his subjects, the spiritual being by far the more important.
The Byzantine doctrine of monarchy entailed a number of paradoxes, which cannot be said to have been adequately addressed. In the first place, the emperor was theoretically ruler of all human beings or, at any rate, of all Christians. That was demonstrably not the case. To take account of the existence of independent Christian states, the fiction of ‘the family of princes’ was put into circulation: the emperor was represented as the paterfamilias, other rulers being his children or nephews. Second, if the emperor was chosen by God, why was he occasionally a wicked man (e.g. Phokas) or a pagan (Julian) or a heretic (Constantius II, Valens, etc.) or, under the Ottoman sultans, a Muslim? Simple answer: to punish Christians for their sins. Was such an emperor to be obeyed? Yes (read Romans 13: 1-4: ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’, etc.), although under Iconoclasm the option of subversion was considered in extremist circles (see Chapter 6).
A more difficult question concerned the status of the Church, of sacer-dotium versus imperium. No matter how long one dances round the topic of Byzantine ‘caesaropapism’, the fact remains that the emperor, starting with Constantine, had effective control of the Church, that he alone convoked general councils and presided over them, issued binding dogmatic pronouncements (like Zeno’s Henotikon or the Ekthesis of Heraclius), appointed patriarchs and metropolitan bishops, was allowed privileged entry into the presbytery, even preached sermons if he so wished (as did Leo VI), although he could not celebrate the liturgy. The emperor routinely legislated on matters that ought to have been the exclusive concern of the Church (e.g. on clerical marriage, private chaplains, the minimum age of entry into a monastery, etc.) just as canon law impinged on the daily conduct of laymen without any clear distinction between their respective spheres. One can cite, of course, examples when churchmen stood up against the emperor over matters of doctrine or morals (and were promptly ejected for insubordination) and, in the Palaiologan period, the inability of successive emperors to impose union with Rome in the face of public hostility. There is even the isolated case of (probably) the patriarch Photios inserting in a lawbook a statement resembling the western doctrine of the ‘two powers’, but the lawbook in question, called Eisagoge, was not applied in practice. The exceptions do not invalidate the rule: Church and State were indissolubly wedded, thus depriving Byzantium of that tension between the spiritual and the secular that did so much to shape the conscience of western Europe. In modern times Orthodox churches have followed the same path of subservience, whether under the Ottoman sultans, the Russian tsars or Soviet communism.
Facing: The church of San Vitale, Ravenna, was started under Ostrogothic rule by bishop Ecclesius (522-32) and completed after the Byzantine recon-quest by bishop Maximian in c.546. Its presbytery, with its marble, stucco, and mosaics, offers the most complete visual impression of a church interior of that period.
Nor did monasticism, which enjoyed an extraordinary diffusion in the Byzantine world, provide the necessary counterweight. An isolated attempt to create a monastic pressure group that would influence imperial policy and act as arbiter in the realms of morals and doctrine was, indeed, made by St Theodore Studite in the face of what he regarded as the culpable softness of the secular Church with regard to the ‘adulterous’ marriage of Constantine VI (795) and, later, the revival of Iconoclasm (815). Theodore, a man of dogged determination and great organizational skill, was able to capitalize on the increased prestige of monasticism after the lamentable performance of t
he episcopate during the first phase of Iconoclasm: at the Second Council of Nicaea (787) abbots of monasteries were for the first time admitted to the governing body of the Church. Theodore’s initiative was, however, lost. Although monks continued to be held in high esteem and several emperors made a point of cultivating them, we do not find that either individually or collectively they won the kind of influence that Theodore had fought for. The scandalous conduct of Michael III (if we are to trust our sources) was not reproved by monks, nor the murder that placed Basil I on the throne. The fourth marriage of Leo VI shocked the ecclesiastical establishment, but Leo’s spiritual director, who was a monk of great sanctity (Euthymios), took his master’s side. And so it continued. Several reasons may be suggested why an effective ‘monkish’ party failed to materialize. The institution was too fragmented to have been welded into a coherent force. There were no monastic orders, as in the West, possessing a unified organization and specific aims. Monasteries were beholden to a variety of patrons. Some were classed as imperial (i.e. were in the emperor’s gift), others as episcopal, many were administered for profit by laymen, but the trend, as the Middle Ages advanced, was towards independence (called autexousion or autodespoton) as a hedge against exploitation by outside bodies. Increasingly, Byzantine monasteries evolved into landholding corporations intent, above all, on maintaining and enlarging their endowment, which is why some of them have survived to this day. Their services to other causes, such as education, have been greatly exaggerated. Even on Mount Athos, which is a ‘republic’ of twenty monasteries, some of them quite rich, a school was set up for the first time in 1753 and closed permanently eight years later. The school only caused trouble and was an impediment to the pursuit of the ‘angelic life’.