The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  The Transformation of Social Structures

  Few states have long survived such devastating losses as Byzantium suffered at this time. The lost territories included Syria, Egypt, northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, North Africa, and most of Italy and the Balkans. Of its major regions, Byzantium kept only Anatolia entire; of its three largest cities, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, it kept only the first. Along with these lost territories, it lost almost all of its Monophysites and speakers of Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. Unlike the more diverse sixth-century empire, that of the eighth was overwhelmingly Chalcedonian Christian, Greek-speaking, and rural. Byzantium was also a good deal less prosperous, populous, and secure than it had been in the sixth century.

  While these broad generalizations are reasonably certain, any more detailed description of this phase of Byzantine history must be partly speculative and more or less controversial. Our unsatisfactory written sources provide few descriptions of what Byzantium was like. The patchy coverage of Byzantine remains by archaeologists has left a more than usually ambiguous picture. Although some historians conclude that Byzantium weathered the seventh century as an organized state not fundamentally different from the earlier Roman empire, others maintain that Byzantium became a radically different and less organized society more like early medieval western Europe.

  The worst problem is that, though this disagreement is essentially a matter of scale, we have only the scantiest statistical evidence. Archaeology seems to indicate that the inhabited area of most Byzantine cities fell by a little more than half between the sixth century and the eighth; but it is debatable which side of the argument this finding supports, especially because most Byzantine cities continued to exist. Those who believe in a thorough transformation cite the drastic falling off in coin finds at archaeological sites after the mid-seventh century; those who argue for more continuity note relatively high recorded figures for the army’s size and payroll. Yet the significance and reliability of all this evidence is disputed.

  Plans of several cities drawn to the same scale, showing their contraction within their ancient walls and further reduction in the seventh/eighth centuries (cross-hatched).

  Though a good case can be made that the truth lies somewhere in between the most extreme positions, such statistical evidence as we have supports the defenders of a measure of continuity. Their opponents are reduced to rejecting that evidence, and assuming that the tendency of several numbers from very different sources to agree is coincidental. As for the decrease in coin finds after 659, its abruptness seems to indicate not a gradual social evolution but a sudden administrative change, most likely the replacement of most of the army’s pay with military land grants as suggested above.

  Plan of Thessalonica. Only in a few cases, like Thessalonica and Constantinople, physical features and access to the sea did not allow a contraction of the fortified area, much of which was probably given over to orchards and fields.

  Faced by a persistent military threat to the empire’s existence, the government had to give priority to preserving and paying its army. Given its territorial losses, it succeeded remarkably well. In 565 the Byzantine army is fairly reliably recorded at 150,000 men. In 641 a payroll figure indicates that it still had about 109,000 men. This meant that Byzantium was supporting nearly three-quarters as many soldiers as in 565 with about half as much land. Moreover, in 773 the Byzantine army is said to have totalled 80,000 men. This meant supporting more than half as many soldiers as in 565 with less than a third as much land. Although the total for 773 has been doubted, ninth-century figures closely corroborate it, and any number much lower would make Byzantium’s surviving the Arab onslaught almost inexplicable.

  The contrast between Byzantium’s losses of land and much smaller losses of soldiers seems to show a well-executed strategy on the part of Heraclius and his successors to withdraw soldiers to safety rather than risk them in desperate attempts to defend the frontiers. It seems also to show a successful effort to maintain a large army without the help of tax revenues from many lost lands and subjects. Such maintenance was apparently the function not only of the soldiers’ land grants but of another somewhat mysterious feature of the time: the provincial warehouses attested after 659 by hundreds of lead seals. These seals, originally attached to documents or goods, bear the names both of the warehouses and of the officials who ran them on government contracts, the kommerkiarioi (commerciarii).

  In the Middle Ages the centre of Ephesus shifted from the harbour site to the nearby hill, now called Ayasuluk (Ayos Theologos) on which stood the great shrine of St John the Evangelist. The summit of the hill was later fortified as a separate citadel.

  While kommerkiarioi are known to have collected customs duties and dealt in silk, gold, and slaves, the proliferation of their seals at this date can hardly reflect an increase in commerce. The years beginning in 659 must have been a time of economic contraction in Byzantium, when people were becoming poorer, trade routes less safe, cities smaller, and coins rarer. One clue to the mystery is that the most active kommerkiarios of the years from 659 to 668, Stephen the Patrician, who has left ten seals of five warehouses from at least three themes, also served as Military Logothete, the government minister responsible for paying the army. Probably the major function of these warehouses was to sell arms and uniforms to the soldiers, who, even if they were supposed to pay their own way, still needed reliable places to buy their equipment.

  The so-called Gate of Persecution is made of ancient spolia and leads into the walled settlement of Ayasuluk. It may date from the eighth century.

  The militarization of society during this period was pervasive. The old provinces with their civilian governors were replaced by the themes, which the strategoi and their subordinates administered under what amounted to martial law. Soldiers took possession of a substantial portion of the land, in grants large enough that they must have had a number of relatives, tenants, or hired hands to farm for them. The military payroll, even paid at about a quarter of the old rate as it seems to have been, would still have dominated the state budget and monetary economy. In the chaotic period between 695 and 717, the army repeatedly made and unmade emperors. In contrast to the period between Theodosius I and Heraclius, most emperors were themselves generals, and often led armies against the enemy.

  Number of coins

  Number of coins per year

  In many excavated urban sites the number of stray coin finds in base metal drops to almost nil towards the end of the seventh century and shows slow recovery from the ninth onwards with a peak in the eleventh-twelfth. This pattern (which does not apply to either Constantinople or the village of Dehes in Syria where Byzantine coin circulated) has been viewed as showing a drastic decline of a monetary economy during the Dark Age.

  With the ascendancy of the army, the civil service became smaller and less influential. The time of the creation of the themes around 660 also saw a reduction and reorganization of the central bureaucracy. Most of the old ministers either disappeared, like the Comes rei privatae who had managed the vanished impe(rial estates, or became less important, like the Magister officiorum whose office became the honorary title of Magister. Now the chief ministers were three officials called logothetes: the Postal Logothete (Logothetēs tou dromou), who, besides the postal service, managed foreign relations and internal security, the General Logothete (Logothetēs tou genikou), in charge of taxation, and the Military Logothete (Logothetēs tou stratiôtikou), already mentioned as the army’s paymaster. The entire central bureaucracy seems to have shrunk to about six hundred men. Scarcely any civil officials survived in the provinces except for tax collectors, including the kommerkiarioi.

  Enemy invasions and the empire’s need to defend itself against them had a profound effect on the life of its subjects, as appears clearly from excavations of towns. During the seventh century the Byzantines abandoned the Hellenistic and Roman fashion for monumental cities with a gridiron plan, wide streets, open squares, and large pub
lic buildings. Such cities had become an unaffordable luxury in a time of populations reduced by plague and sudden enemy invasions and sieges. Except for a few cities that already had strong fortifications, like Constantinople and Thessalonica, the inhabitants saved expense and effort by building walls only around the most defensible areas. They abandoned large parts of most cities, and even moved some cities from plains to more easily defended sites on hills.

  The smaller and hillier sites of these new cities, most of which are better called towns, required that the streets be narrow and irregular and the size of squares and large buildings restricted. Except in Constantinople itself, townsmen had to do without hippodromes and theatres, and to make do with smaller churches and baths than before. Although the resulting towns were much less grand than those of the earlier Roman empire, they were hardly more cramped or untidy than those of classical Greece or of Renaissance Italy. Though the urban life of Byzantium in this period was far less vital than in either of those, the reasons had more to do with militarization and a general cultural and economic decline than with the towns’ size or aspect.

  One significant change was that the Byzantine towns had lost most of their administrative importance. They no longer had city councils responsible for governing and taxing the countryside. The decurions, prosperous landholders who had served on the councils, disappeared as a class, though some landholders must have continued to live in the towns, along with the bishops who still had jurisdiction over the surrounding regions. As trade declined along with the coinage, towns also lost some of their function as markets. The importance of their new role as places of refuge during enemy raids is evident from their often being called simply forts (kastra).

  Another important change in the towns, evident even at Constantinople, was cultural decline. In the earlier Byzantine period, most of the better educated people had been senators, decurions, and civil servants, or teachers who trained them. These were the men who had written and read most secular literature, and their relatives became the ecclesiastics who wrote and read most religious literature of any sophistication. Now that the decurions had disappeared and the senators had merged with the civil service, which in turn had become smaller and less prestigious, education and literature in evitably suffered. Though practically all military officers and clerics were literate, they generally contented themselves with an elementary education.

  Literature tended to become limited to sermons, hymns, hagiography, and some theology, all displaying few literary pretensions. Only enough history was recorded to leave us a bare account of the main sequence of events. The Ecloga of Leo III, in which the emperor complains of the ignorance of the lawyers of his time, is a pathetic document to set beside the Justinian Code. The Quinisext Council’s strictures against those who destroyed or discarded religious books, saying nothing of secular ones, give a dismal picture of the decline of education. Yet the destruction of books cannot have been catastrophic, because in the subsequent period the Byzantines still possessed most of the literature that they had had in the sixth century.

  The changes of the seventh century appear to have been somewhat less pronounced in the villages, where, as before, the bulk of the empire’s population lived as farmers. In most of the countryside enemy raids would have occurred at least once a generation, but they were more frequent in regions easily accessible from the frontier. In the most exposed areas, the rich evidently weathered the insecurity better than the poor, so that the largest landholders were now to be found on the Anatolian plateau, where the Arabs raided most often. In the more secure coastal plains, large landholders apparently became quite rare, probably because a general decline in population had increased the value of labour and reduced that of land.

  Demographic decline was probably the main reason for an economic contraction that affected both the towns and the country in this period. The bubonic plague that had first struck in the sixth century returned again and again. The epidemic in Constantinople from 747 to 748 caused so many deaths that Constantine V repopulated the city with settlers from Greece. The last recorded outbreak of the plague within the empire came in southern Italy as late as 767. Enemy raids also discouraged population growth, and the condition of the economy did nothing to encourage it.

  The rarity of the gold coins used for large transactions, and the greater rarity of the copper coinage used for everyday buying and selling, would not so much have reflected a reduction in trade as caused one. The government minted coins not for the convenience of private citizens but for its own purposes, which meant primarily to pay and supply the army. When the state circulated fewer coins, private traders would have needed to resort to barter more often, putting up with the inconvenience of shipping and storing bulky and perishable goods instead of small and durable coins.

  Because even the soldiers would have had less cash, the kommerkiarioi who ran the provincial warehouses probably accepted the products of the soldiers’ farms as payment for their arms and armour. If so, the warehouses would have come to serve as trading posts for all sorts of goods, making up for some of the inefficiencies of barter and paying out coins when necessary, even if at a premium. Practically everyone still needed coins, if only to pay his taxes. In 767 our sources report a sort of monetary panic, in which farmers were forced to sell their goods at absurdly low prices to get the money to pay their taxes.

  In comparison with earlier Byzantine times, the rich appear to have been poorer and the poor richer. The old senatorial class had vanished by the end of this period, having succumbed to too many political revolutions and too much demographic and economic change. The rural magnates of the Anatolian plateau came from fairly new families, many of them Armenian; they earned most of their income from ranching rather than rents, and aspired to careers in the army rather than the civil service. They became richer and more powerful than civil servants and merchants, who were themselves poorer than they had been in the sixth century.

  Yet most peasants seem to have owned farms of sufficient size and fertility, and to have lived without worrying about exactions from anyone but tax collectors. When a peasant defaulted on his taxes, the other peasants of his village were expected to make up the difference, and usually they seem to have been able to do so. Bad weather was presumably as common as ever, and enemy raids were worse than before. But with enough land available for the reduced population, anyone who survived a bad year could mend his fortunes. Rural slaves and the urban poor had become insignificant groups.

  The Dark Age of the seventh and eighth centuries left Byzantine society more primitive than before, but still recognizably the descendant of late Roman society. Unlike contemporary western Europe, Byzantium kept most of the superstructure of the Roman state, including its system of taxation, professional army, civil service, monetary economy, and secular schools. All of these were scaled back, often drastically, out of economic necessity, so that the public sector shrank more than the private sector. But the Byzantine state remained large enough to give its emperors greater powers than any king or emperor in the early medieval West, and to give Byzantium the ability to withstand the similarly organized caliphate.

  Icons

  CYRIL MANGO

  The word icon is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a devotional painting usually on wood, of Christ or another holy figure, especially in the eastern Church. By so restricting its meaning, we are following Russian rather than Greek usage, for in Russian the term ikona is confined to religious representations, whereas Greek eikon means a likeness of any kind, both literally and metaphorically. We usually assume that the Orthodox icon was not meant to be a naturalistic portrait. While preserving the lineaments of the human figure, it transposes them (or so it is said) to a higher, unearthly level of reality by observing a tradition established ‘by the Fathers’.

  Portraits on wooden panels, often highly naturalistic, were used in Egyptian mummy cases. Here that of a priest of the second century ad, excavated at Hawara.

  Icon of Christ
executed in the encaustic technique, probably sixth century. It has been cut down on both sides and partly repainted. Mount Sinai, monastery of St Catherine.

  Commemorative mosaic depicting St Demetrius in his church at Thessalonica between two ‘founders’, probably of the middle of the seventh century. This work has often been quoted as an example of the ‘abstract’ style.

  It is certainly true that, after the Council of 787, Orthodox painters were not free to follow their fancy, but had to adhere to accepted formulas. St Nicholas, e.g. was always a man with a short, curly, grey beard, dressed in episcopal vestments and holding a gospel book. He could not be shown with a black beard, for then the worshipper would not recognize him as St Nicholas. The bishop with a black beard was St Basil. It is also the case that medieval and later icons tended towards abstraction, accentuated by a frontal pose and a plain gold background, although the degree of their lifelikeness varied somewhat with the style of the period.

  Icon of St. Nicholas of the eleventh century, now fully evolved as a devotional object, with greater emphasis placed on ornament than on the human figure. Mount Sinai, monastery of St Catherine.

  There is nothing, however, in the Orthodox doctrine of sacred painting to say that icons had to be abstract and non-naturalistic; indeed, that doctrine assumes the opposite, while ignoring the finer issues posed by the problem of likeness. The earliest preserved icons—the best ones to have survived are in the monastery of St Catherine on Mt. Sinai and date from about the sixth century—are painted in a realistic style, which reminds us of the funerary portraits of the Roman period found in the cemeteries of Egypt. We know from literary sources that portraiture was very widespread in Late Antiquity—portable portraits were put up of emperors, dignitaries, living bishops, popular actors, and dancing girls—and there is no reason to think that saints were represented in a different style. The images which the iconoclasts sought to banish were not ‘icons’ as we conceive them today.