The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Facing: Basil II receiving the submission of his enemies as he is crowned by the archangel Gabriel and handed a lance by St Michael. Miniature of a Psalter, Venice.

  Within the as yet unbreached walls of the ‘reigning city’, Byzantium had accumulated reserves of political culture unequalled outside the Far East. It is indicative of the strength that Byzantium derived from its past that the expansion of the tenth century coincided with a major governmental effort to retrieve and codify the written tradition of antiquity up to the sixth century, as well as the record, both written and oral, of recent military, ceremonial, and diplomatic practice.

  At the death of Basil II in 1025, the empire stretched from Crete to the Crimea, and from the Straits of Messina and the River Danube to the Araxes, Euphrates, and Orontes rivers. The only foreign power that seriously disputed these frontiers was the German empire under Otto III’s successors, Henry II and Conrad II, who attacked Byzantine possessions in southern Italy and incited local rebels, but their base of operations was too far away for their intervention to be effective. The empire’s relations with two of its northern neighbours, the Magyars and the Rus, were on the whole improved by their conversion to Christianity at the end of the tenth century. The Rus received their Christianity from Byzantium, along with Basil II’s sister Anna as a bride for Prince Vladimir of Kiev, and the distance between Kiev and Constantinople precluded any recurrence of the problems that had accompanied the conversion of Bulgaria. Distance also played a part in the empire’s ability to coexist with the Shiite Fatimid caliphate which after taking power in Egypt (969) emerged as the main power in the Islamic world. The main rivalry of Fatimid Cairo was with Abbasid Baghdad. Although Byzantium and the Fatimids clashed in Syria, and the mad caliph al-Hakim exacerbated relations by persecuting Christians and destroying churches, including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, coexistence became possible when Basil II, after securing the eastern frontier, halted the reconquest of the Near East which had been pursued so energetically by his predecessors Nikephoros II and John I, devoting himself instead to the liquidation of Bulgaria and, in his very last years, the reconquest of Sicily.

  The forecast for Byzantium in 1025 was thus about as bright as it could have been. Twenty-five years later the empire was even slightly larger in the East through the annexation of the city of Edessa and the Armenian kingdoms of Ani and Kars. But by 1080 it was in serious trouble, rapidly losing control of its entire Asian territory, and badly shaken and eroded in the Balkans. Explanations abound for this catastrophic reversal, starting with those advanced by the Byzantine writers who narrated these events in the late eleventh century. There was clearly both a leadership failure and a system failure, although the symptoms are easier to discern than the causes: twentieth-century attempts to explain the crisis in terms of economic and military incapacity stemming from the growth of feudalism, the decline of a free peasantry, and the conflict of civilian and military aristocracies, have worn less well than eleventh-century tales of incompetent management by irresponsible individuals. In structural terms, we may say that it was now Byzantium’s turn to experience the problems of over-extension: the strengths of survival were disposable or disabling in the geographically less compact, culturally more diverse, and socially more complex organism that the empire had become as a result of profitable warfare, territorial annexation, and increased security. Yet Byzantium was still the same empire, perhaps too much so for its own good at a time when its enemies were suddenly no longer the same enemies. Byzantium had coped well with neighbours that were states, and with which it could deal from a position of superior statehood. It was less ready to deal with enemies that operated outside state structures, as was the case with the three aggressors who broke in upon it in the mid-eleventh century: the Pechenegs, the Seljuk Turks, and the Normans.

  The most immediate threat, both to the imperial heartland and to the imperial achievement of Basil II, came from the Pechenegs, the tribal confederation that had dominated the western Pontic steppe since the end of the ninth century. The Pechenegs had a fearsome reputation among their neighbours, the Magyars, the Khazars, and the Bulgars, unlike whom they remained resolutely pagan and nomadic. The Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria brought them into direct contact with the empire as its principal neighbours on the lower Danube. At first the Byzantine policy was to exclude them by a heavy military presence on the border, but after a series of devastating raids in 1033–6, one of which penetrated as far as Thessalonica, the government of Michael IV (1034–42) instituted three measures to rationalize frontier defence: a reduction in the number of frontier garrisons, the creation of a depopulated, uncultivated ‘waste zone’ to the south of the Danube, and the financing of markets beside the border fortresses to supply the nomads with the manufactured and agricultural goods they would otherwise have sought by raiding. This policy seems to have worked until 1046 when the Pechenegs were pushed westwards by the movements of the Oghuz Turks. An attempt by the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–55) to weaken them in traditional divide and rule manner, by fomenting rivalry between two chieftains, backfired, and after Byzantium had the worst of the subsequent confrontation, a thirty-year truce was agreed in 1033, allowing the immigrant tribesmen to remain in their new habitat in the Black Sea hinterland south of the Danube—an area very close to the original nucleus of the Bulgar kingdom. The empire retained control of the Danubian towns, but the uncomfortable similarity to the seventh-century beginnings of the Bulgarian nightmare were probably not lost on the people of Constantinople. The emperor Isaac I Komnenos (1057–9) tried without great success to impose a more favourable settlement, and in the 1070s a revolt involving the Pechenegs and the local Vlachs removed the Danubian towns from imperial control. The collusion was ominous, and when hostilities resumed with the expiry of the thirty-year truce in 1083, the Pechenegs made common cause with disaffected heretical communities on the southern slopes of the Haemus mountains. The emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) decided in 1087 to take the war north of the mountains in an attempt to repeat John I Tzimiskes’ successful campaign of 971, but a confrontation at Dristra, where Tzimiskes had won his final victory over Sviatoslav, led to the complete rout of the Byzantine forces from which Alexios barely escaped. A truce establishing the frontier at the Haemus mountains soon broke down, as the Pech-enegs raided deeper and deeper into Thrace, reaching the outskirts of Constantinople in 1091. The emperor’s army was heavily outnumbered, and the situation was only saved by the arrival of a large host of Cumans, now the steppe people behind the Pechenegs. In the event the Cumans were persuaded to destroy the Pechenegs at the battle of Mount Levounion, but they might easily have joined the other side, and they returned as invaders three years later. They replaced the Pechenegs as a permanent menace to the north, and in 1122 either they or a remnant of the Pechenegs advanced into Thrace in great force. But the emperor John II Komnenos (1118–43) overwhelmed them at Stara Zagora in a carefully executed campaign. This confirmed the restoration of the Danube frontier which had begun in 1092. The arrangement of the mid-eleventh century—a trade zone on the Danube backed by a waste zone to the south—seems to have been reinstituted with considerable success. Until 1185, the lower Danube was the least eventful and most stable part of the imperial frontier. This may have owed something to the cooperation of the Russian princes, who had a share in the commercial wealth of the Danubian towns. But it was ultimately due to the fact that the Pechenegs and Cumans were familiar enemies: in their nomadic lifestyle, primitive religion, military performance, steppe habitat, and stateless existence, they conformed to an ethnic stereotype that the Graeco-Roman world had confronted since the beginning of history, and which learned Byzantine writers, not unrealistically, perpetuated by referring to all northern barbarians as Scyths.

  Constantine IX Monomachos and his wife Zoe making a donation to the cathedral church of St Sophia. Constantine has been substituted for an earlier emperor, probably Romanos III, and his head accordingly changed, but it i
s not clear why the heads of Christ and Zoe have also been remade. Mosaic in the south gallery of St Sophia, Constantinople.

  The Pecheneg problem was one that could be solved because it could be contained; the Pechenegs did not have institutional backing from the rest of the ‘Scythian’ world. It was otherwise with the Islamicized Turks who assailed the empire from the east in the mid-eleventh century. They too were nomads in search of plunder and permanent new pastureland, both of which Asia Minor provided in abundance. At the same time, they were aggressors in a religious cause and with tribal connections to the dynastic regime which in the mid-eleventh century took over and revitalized the Abbasid caliphate. The Seljuk leader Togrul and his successors Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, who succeeded him as the power (sultan) beside the caliph, were primarily interested in reuniting Islam under the banner of strict Sunni orthodoxy, and their immediate priority was the reintegration of the Fatimid state rather than the conquest of Byzantium. However, they were happy to divert the predatory energies of the nomadic Türkmen against the Christian lands of Georgia, Armenia, and Byzantium rather than let them loose on the settled Muslim populations of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. It was the combination of nomadic free enterprise and central backing from the highest Islamic authority that made the Turkmen such a formidable threat at a time when Byzantine governments were preocccupied with their own internal security. The simultaneous incursions of multiple warbands with no fixed base made it difficult to concentrate resistance and resources, and when, finally, an emperor came to power who gave priority to the eastern front, his counter-offensive brought him into direct confrontation with the sultan Alp Arslan at the battle of Mantzikert (1071). The capture of Romanos IV Diogenes was the most humiliating defeat that a Byzantine emperor had suffered in battle since the death of Nikephoros I 260 years earlier. The defeat was actually made worse by the sultan’s clemency in releasing Romanos according to a peace agreement which made minimal territorial demands; the emperor’s release precipitated a civil war between him and the administrative regime in Constantinople, which rejected him in favour of his co-emperor, Michael VII Doukas. Although the government of Michael VII managed to eliminate Romanos, it failed to retain the loyalty of the army as a whole; as civil war resumed, the Turks not only advanced unopposed, but were drawn deep into Asia Minor by Byzantine generals seeking to recruit them for or against the emperor in Constantinople. The towns and villages of the interior were also totally unprepared for self-defence after more than a century of freedom from enemy raids, and local landowners looked to their interests at court rather than the preservation of their estates. Thus twenty years after the battle of Mantzikert, the Turks were established on the west coast of Asia Minor, and their occupation was progressing beyond the nomadic stage: a branch of the Seljukid family was creating the nucleus of an independent sultanate behind the massive Roman walls of Nicaea, in the Asiatic hinterland of Constantinople, while in Smyrna an emir called Tzachas, who had spent some time in Byzantine service, had built himself a fleet with which he was attempting to capture the Aegean islands.

  The situation began to improve for Byzantium from 1092, when the death of Malik Shah hastened the break-up of the Seljukid realm into a number of principalities. After Alexios I saw off the Cuman threat to the Balkans in 1094, he could turn his full attention to the East. The armies of the First Crusade, which arrived in 1096–7 as a result of his appeals to Pope Urban II, helped him to retake Nicaea, and in the wake of their advance towards Antioch, his forces completed the expulsion of the Turks from the coastal plains and river valleys of western and southern Anatolia. However, Alexios did not benefit from the later conquests of the crusade, which indeed greatly complicated his attempts to recover lost territory in the East. Apart from Cilicia, in the south-eastern corner of Asia Minor, which reverted rather fitfully to imperial rule between 1137 and 1180, there was no further movement of the boundaries established at the end of the eleventh century. This failure to recover what had been the continental core of the medieval empire may seem surprising in view of the empire’s recovery in other ways. Under the dynamic leadership of Alexios I Komnenos, his son John II, and his grandson Manuel I, Byzantium regained its status as a great power in the Balkans, the Aegean, and the wider Mediterranean world, capable of deploying massive armies, impressive fleets, and seemingly unlimited sums of gold.

  Three reasons may be suggested. First, the empire was more often than not on the defensive against continued nomad pressure for raiding and grazing in the lowlands; with one notable and disastrous exception, all the campaigns which Alexios, John, and Manuel led into Turkish Anatolia were essentially demonstrations of force or retaliatory strikes rather than systematic wars of reconquest, though the ephemeral gains were naturally given great publicity. Second, Byzantium hoped to exploit the rivalry between the two Turkish states which vied for supremacy over the Türkmen nomads: the Seljukid sultanate of Rum, which after the First Crusade relocated to south-central Asia Minor, with its capital at Ikonion (Konya); and the emirate founded by a chieftain called Danishmend in the northern and eastern areas of the plateau. Although Byzantine interests lay in preserving a balance between the two, the empire tended to side with the Seljukids against the Danishmendids, since the latter were the more committed to holy war, as is clear from the name of Ghazi (warrior for the faith) that most of them adopted. In 1161, when the Seljukid sultan Kiliç Arslan II came to Constantinople to seek support from Manuel I, the emperor formally adopted him as his son in a treaty which stipulated that in return for generous subsidies he would restore to the empire all lands which he took from the Danishmendids. But he failed to keep his side of the bargain and brought the whole of Turkish Asia Minor under his rule, which determined Manuel on a change of policy. In 1175, the emperor advanced the frontier on to the plateau by building and manning fortresses at Dorylaion and Soublaion. The next year he led a huge expedition to conquer Ikonion, but it came to grief in a classic ambush in a mountain pass at Myriokephalon. It was a humiliating end to the only serious attempt to reverse the Turkish occupation of central Asia Minor by direct military confrontation.

  Facing: Edessa (Urfa), Harran gate. Above the gate was carved an inscription naming the emperor Alexios I and commemorating the expulsion of the Turkish garrison in 1095. Only a small part of the inscription remains above the right-hand jamb.

  That such a confrontation had not been tried before is also explained by the fact that the reoccupation of Anatolia was only part of a wider strategy of political restoration in the eastern Mediterranean. This strategy focused on the areas to the east of the Seljuk sultanate, the areas which Byzantium had reconquered from the Arabs in the tenth century and resettled with a population of Armenians and Syrians. The main Turkish influx into Asia Minor had largely bypassed this region, leaving the local military command structure relatively intact in the hands of the local Armenian aristocracy, whose presence greatly facilitated the passage of the First Crusade and the establishment of crusader principalities at Edessa and Antioch. The residual infrastructure of empire in the area was a promising basis for imperial restoration, and it is thus understandable why the Byzantine government invested heavily in the effort to recover Antioch. More generally, the very existence of the crusader states, first at Antioch and Edessa, then at Jerusalem and Tripoli, was a challenge to Byzantium as the Christian empire of the East. For its credibility, as well as its security, the empire had to exercise some sort of dominion over these outposts of a western Christendom which now flanked Byzantium on two sides.

  The third great external challenge to Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from the Latin West. It came not from the revival of the Frankish empire in Germany, but from new units of aggression formed during the fragmentation of the West Frankish kingdom in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Norman adventurers who appeared on the borders of Byzantine southern Italy in the early eleventh century were the descendants of Vikings settled at the mouth of the Seine as Carolingian vassals. Their
impact on Italian and Byzantine history reflected both their Viking origins and their Frankish background. On the one hand, they were predators and mercenaries of no lasting loyalties and no fixed address, who strenuously resisted commitment to any of the powers who engaged their services, whether Byzantium, the papacy, the Lombard princes of Capua and Benevento, or the Apulian rebels against Byzantine rule; it is not only Byzantine writers who refer to them as unspeakable barbarians. On the other hand, they were thoroughly rooted in the post-Carolingian culture of knightly honour and religious reform; they had strong territorial instincts, and they expressed their territoriality by reproducing the structures of lordship and vassalage which they had brought with them from ‘feudal’ France. As they became established, they gained the grudging respect of local religious houses and religious leaders, including, eventually, the papacy which recognized their potential value as vassals of the Church, who could defend its interests more satisfactorily than either the German or the Byzantine empire. The rise of the Normans in southern Italy coincided with growing strains in papal relationships with both powers: with Germany, because of the minority of Henry IV and then the latter’s hostility to Church reform; with Byzantium, because of the age-old dispute over ecclesiastical jurisdiction in southern Italy, coupled with controversy over doctrine, papal supremacy, and liturgical usage which erupted in a dramatic exchange of excommunications in 1054 that is conventionally seen as the beginning of the schism between the eastern and western Churches. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II invested the main Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, as Duke of Apulia. With his younger brother Roger, he proceeded to occupy southern Italy and Sicily at the expense of Byzantines, Lombards, and Muslims.