The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  The classicist, when he looks at the Byzantine revival, is chiefly interested in the preservation of Greek texts, but the historian of Byzantium will wish to ask a related and more difficult question: What impact did these texts have on the persons who perused them in the ninth and following centuries? Did the readers open themselves to the message, the values of the ancient classics? Of inspiration across the divide between Christianity and paganism there is little sign. Take the case of one of the noblest books of antiquity, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Photios was not acquainted with it, but Arethas owned an old copy, ‘not quite falling apart’, as he put it. He had it transcribed and passed the original on to a bishop friend, recommending it as being ‘highly beneficial’. Alas, Arethas’ transcription is gone and all that survives is one manuscript of the fourteenth century. No Byzantine reader is recorded as having been particularly moved by the Meditations, yet when they were first published in Europe (1559), they caused a sensation.

  Marble block from the church of St Polyeuktos at Constantinople of the sixth century, bearing part of a very long epigram in honour of the princess Anicia Juliana. The epigram which was still intact in the ninth or tenth century, was copied into the Palatine Anthology.

  The purpose of the Byzantine revival was to repair the gap left by the Dark Age and return to the mandarin literary culture of Late Antiquity, with its grammar, its metrics, its rhetoric, and its complement of miscellaneous erudition. In that it succeeded, except that the social basis of the recreated culture was extremely small—perhaps no more than a couple of hundred persons passing at a given time through the educational establishment, and that for the whole empire—candidates for posts in the imperial service and the higher echelons of the Church. The necessary schooling was now available only at Constantinople. We would not expect any signs of ‘humanism’ under such conditions. Only when something resembling a ‘bourgeois’ public had come into being could attitudes begin to change, but that did not happen until the middle of the eleventh century and then to a limited extent.

  The revival movement, as we have said, also exerted some impact on the arts. Labelled, somewhat misleadingly, the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ after the name of the dynasty established by Basil I, this phenomenon has received much more minute attention from scholars than its textual counterpart. Yet, its compass was extremely limited. Admittedly, very few works of art of the ninth/tenth century survive at Constantinople: a series of mosaics in St Sophia, admirable in themselves but not exhibiting any marked contact with antiquity, a couple of ruined churches, one of them—the monastery of Constantine Lips of 907— containing many fragments of architectural carving, practically nothing from the imperial palace, except a bit of an inlaid floor. Still, we can only form a judgement on the basis of what we have, and one thing we know well is the coinage. It shows a slight improvement in quality, but remains purely medieval, with frontal imperial and sacred images: no attempt to return to the profile head of antiquity as was done by Charlemagne. Nor do we find any trace of sculpture in the round. Even in architectural sculpture, classical elements, e.g. the Corinthian capital, are absent. The ‘renaissance’ appears only in the minor arts, largely in illuminated manuscripts and ivories. The manuscripts in question are fewer than a dozen in number and are largely of Christian content. The oldest in the series, the Gregory Nazianzen in Paris, is datable to about 880 and is certifiably imperial. Another, a Bible in the Vatican of the first half of the tenth century, was commissioned by a treasury official called Leo. One of the latest members of the group (c.980), reconstituted by modern scholarship as a Bible in several volumes (now divided between Turin, Florence, and Copenhagen), was copied for an imperial chamberlain named Niketas from an original of 535. The remaining manuscripts in question have no known sponsorship, but are presumed to emanate from the imperial court. The only notable example of secular content is a copy of Nicander’s poem on poisonous animals (Theriaca), now in Paris.

  Charlemagne’s denarii with a Roman-type profile bust, struck at various mints a few years after his coronation in 800, have no equivalent in medieval Byzantine coinage.

  Perhaps the most classical of the illuminated manuscripts of the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ is the Gospel of the Stavronikita monastery, Mount Athos, cod. 43. Its evangelist portraits (here Mark) have the statuesque dignity of ancient philosophers.

  Ivory panel probably commemorating the coronation in 945 of Romanos II, who had been married to Eudokia (Bertha, daughter of Hugo of Provence, king of Italy). Romanos, who is shown as youthful, was actually six years old at the time.

  Detail of the Veroli Casket depicting the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, London, Victoria and Albert Museum. The casket is decorated with an assortment of subjects drawn from classical mythology (Bellerophon with Pegasus, the rape of Europa, etc.), rendered in a somewhat humorous manner. Probably tenth century.

  Joshua meeting the archangel Michael in front of Jericho. The city is both represented in the background and symbolized by a seated personification. Partly tinted parchment roll of the middle or second half of the tenth century, depicting the story of Joshua in a continuous frieze.

  To a greater or lesser degree the miniatures of the above manuscripts exhibit antique features, such as ‘atmospheric’ backgrounds shading from blue to pink; personifications of cities, rivers, mountains, and abstract qualities; fantastic elements of architecture reminiscent of Pompeian painting; votive columns festooned with ribbons and topped by vases. Presumably copied from models of the fifth/sixth century, they convey a strange atmosphere of unreality.

  Ivories of the same period are fairly numerous, but contain few datable pieces. A plaque depicting the marriage of Romanos II to Bertha/Eudokia in 945 (now in Paris) and a triptych probably commissioned for Constantine VII (Palazzo di Venezia, Rome) suggest that the best items belong to the middle of the tenth century. Their classicism resides largely in the draped figures of Christian personages. By contrast, a series of ivory caskets decorated with scenes from pagan mythology exhibit pudgy figures and awkward, cavorting cupids.

  The fashion for the antique appears to have waned by about the year 1000. Limited to precious objects which, by definition, had little public exposure, it did not influence greatly the main lines of contemporary artistic production until it was rediscovered during the Palaiologan revival of the late thirteenth century.

  9

  Spreading the Word: Byzantine Missions

  JONATHAN SHEPARD

  The Byzantine emperor, as a successor to Constantine the Great, was acclaimed as ‘equal of the apostles’ in court acclamations and rhetoric. An emperor, not a patriarch or any other sort of churchman, had been chosen by God to bring about the conversion of the inhabitants of the Roman world, and proclaiming one’s willingness to spread the Word was a useful political prop: it impressed the uniqueness of the emperor’s relationship with God upon his own subjects as well as foreigners. The image of the emperor as carrying on the original apostles’ work was projected by the ceremonial in the Great Palace at Pentecost, when the court celebrated the descent of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire. The chanters prayed that the emperors, ‘joy and pride of the Romans, may draw those who speak foreign languages into a single tongue in the Faith’. The Life of Basil I, commissioned by his grandson, Constantine VII, praises his attention to ‘this apostolic work’, attempting to draw various peoples into subjection to Christ. It is taken for granted that the emperor is the key to instigating missionary work not just in this imperial biography but even in the sole full-blown Lives of Byzantine-born missionaries which are known to us, those of the brothers Constantine-Cyril and Methodios. There was a certain institutional basis to the rhetoric. The emperor claimed the right to change the rank and extent of metropolitanates in certain circumstances and assumed special responsibility for regions where there were only isolated, suffraganless archbishops or no Church organization at all. Such was the state of affairs beyond the northern Black Sea. This was, from Late Antiquity
onwards, the quarter from which ‘barbarian’ peoples were likeliest to trouble Byzantium’s outposts on the Crimea and its Balkan territories. One might expect emperors to have taken a keen interest in converting the northern peoples to Christianity, if only as a means of drawing their fangs.

  The nations worship Christ. Miniature of Khludov Psalter.

  At first sight, reality seems to match the image of the emperor as zealous ‘apostle’. The list of peoples to the north—and also west and east—of the Black Sea whom Byzantine missionaries visited is varied and long. The Bulgars under Khan Boris accepted Christianity in, most probably, 864 and although Boris switched his allegiance to the Roman pope soon afterwards, he returned to the Orthodox fold in 870, striking a deal with Basil I whose details are unfortunately obscure but which most probably gave Boris scope to approve, if not to nominate outright, his own archbishop. Missions, in the form of ‘an imperial agent and priests’, were sent by Basil to the Serbs and to other Slavic groupings in the western Balkans. The pious scholar and imperial aide Constantine was sent to the court of the kagan of the Khazars in 860-1, and within a couple of years he and his brother Methodios were expounding the Word and translating the Gospels into Slavic for the benefit of Rastislav, the prince of Moravia, and his subjects. Early in the tenth century the ruler of the Alans, a semi-nomadic people dominating the foothills of the Northern Caucasus, adopted Byzantine Christianity and began to impose it on his subjects with the aid of a monk and subsequently a metropolitan sent from Byzantium. From around 948 at least two parties of Hungarians headed by chieftains visited Constantinople and their leaders were baptized. After the second of the two recorded visits ‘a certain monk named Hierotheos’, newly consecrated as ‘bishop of Tourkia (Hungary)’, accompanied the visitors back on their return journey. Another ‘state visit’ took place about this time, headed by the leader of a people whose reputation for ferocity matched that of the Hungarians, the Rus. Princess Olga was, together with her entourage and other notables, treated to two receptions at the palace and at some stage in her visit she was baptized. A generation later, c.988, Olga’s grandson Vladimir was baptized and a full-blown religious mission was sent to Kiev— ‘metropolitans and bishops’ according to a well-informed Arabic writer. Vladimir took as his Christian name that of the senior emperor, Basil II. Olga’s godfather had been Constantine VII and she had taken the name of his wife, Helena, as her baptismal name. Likewise Khan Boris had assumed the name of Michael after that of the emperor of the day, Michael III. The Byzantines did not allow convert-peoples to forget that they had been their benefactors. The concept that each successive Bulgarian ruler was the ‘spiritual son’ of the Byzantine emperor of the day was aired in the protocols for correspondence addressed to him. A similar form of address served to remind the Alan prince of his debt to and moral dependence on the basileus.

  Baptism of the Bulgarian king Boris in 864. The emperor Michael III, shown on the left, acts as his godfather. The bishop on the right is Photios. Miniature of the Chronicle of Manasses.

  Some of the missions gave rise to lasting metropolitanates and eventually to secondary expansion much further afield. However, there is no evidence of a sustained effort to spread the Word and save souls everywhere in accordance with the emperor’s self-styled role as an ‘apostle’. Emperors do not seem to have sponsored major missionary undertakings in any quarter between the seventh and the early ninth centuries. In 816, Leo V attempted to introduce a crowd of pagan Bulgar emissaries to Christian worship in the form of the liturgy and thereby to cement the peace treaty which he was making with them. His efforts incurred derision, as a case of pearls being cast before swine: by implication, the Bulgars were best left to their own savage ways. This state of affairs changed from the 860s onwards, but in the great majority of the cases listed above, it was foreign potentates who took the initiative, asking the emperor to send teachers capable of expounding the Christian religion or prelates and priests who might set about organizing a Church for them. According to the Life of Constantine, his journeys to Khazaria and Moravia represented the emperor’s response to requests from those lands’ rulers for, respectively, a bookman to counter Judaist and Muslim proselytizers and assistance in teaching the people the true Christian faith. About the same time the Rus, having failed to gain rich pickings from their raid on Constantinople in 860, sent a request for a mission. A bishop was sent and this enterprise—which proved to be unfruitful—gave Photios occasion to claim the Rus as ‘subjects and affiliates’ of the emperor. It is quite likely that the emperor, Michael III, was stung into a more active response to such requests than had hitherto been the norm by a particular concatenation of circumstance. The Rus assault had created panic among the citizens of Constantinople and to seize—and be seen to seize—the opportunity of averting a return visit through the dispatch of a senior churchman to the north was politic. At the same time, the Khazar leadership’s decision c.861 to adopt Judaism in spite of the efforts of Constantine to put the case for Christianity was a humiliating rebuff. It served a warning that barbarians seemingly set in their foolish ways might abruptly turn to a monotheistic religion which owed no favours to the basileus. A similar turn of events seemed to be in view much closer to home. In the early 860s Khan Boris of Bulgaria was floating the prospect of his acceptance of Christianity to Louis the German, king of the East Franks. Michael III could hardly have viewed with equanimity the forging of formal links between Boris and the Franks’ ecclesiastical organization or the western Church in general: this would most likely reinforce the burgeoning political alliance between Boris and Louis.

  Such was the situation early in the decade which saw an unprecedented flurry of missionary activity directed by the emperor. If we follow one Byzantine version of events, the Bulgarians’ acceptance of Orthodox Christianity was the result of Michael III’s initiative: he threatened Boris with attack by land and sea and the Bulgars, overawed, sued for peace and offered to become Christians. The emperor is thereby credited with the Bulgars’ conversion. The obvious inference to be drawn from this version is that Michael launched a pre-emptive strike, forestalling any alignment with the western Church on the part of Boris. It is, however, worth noting that other Byzantine versions ascribe the initiative to Boris. According to one, he was instructed in the faith by a captive monk and then persuaded to adopt Christianity by his sister, herself converted during a spell at the emperor’s palace in Constantinople. Another has him converted by a monk who painted for him an awesome picture of the Last Judgement: Boris was scared into immediate baptism. These accounts are not necessarily totally fabulous for having an obvious hagiographical tinge. It may be that there was indeed imperial sabre-rattling over the recent closening of ties between Boris and the East Franks, but that Boris himself took the initiative, proposing to accept baptism from the Byzantine emperor’s priests: he may have spent some time weighing up the advantages of abandoning paganism without committing himself to a specific replacement, mindful perhaps of the examination of monotheistic faiths which the ruler of the Khazars had recently conducted. Whichever reconstruction of events one may prefer, it is clear that the Byzantine emperor was not acting as a wholly free agent in providing a mission for the Bulgars: even if he did, in effect, force orthodoxy upon them at spear-point, he was doing so in order to thwart the advance of Latin western influence.

  The evidence for Byzantine missionary enterprises beyond the frontiers before the 860s is sparse and the missions dispatched from that decade onwards were to a large extent sent in response to local rulers’ requests or in competition with rival proselytizing religions. They do not seem to have been initiatives taken by the emperor unilaterally. This apparent discrepancy between propaganda and reality should not surprise us. Conversion of the heathen was only one among several duties of Christian leadership which the emperor exercised. It served, essentially, to place him on a pedestal distancing him both from his own subjects and from ‘the nations’ beyond. The primary function of the pro
paganda and court ceremonial was to highlight and celebrate the emperor’s special access to God which resulted from his incomparable piety and made him a worthy successor to the first Constantine. The sublime ‘apartness’ of the emperor, before whom ‘mighty in wisdom’, all the ‘nations’ will ‘quake’ is the leitmotif of a confidential manual which Constantine VII wrote for his heir. The emperor was worried by the greed and the presumptuous demands of the barbarians of the north: they wanted to partake of the wondrous products of the palace complex, while Constantine’s aim was to keep them exclusively at the disposal of his son. The cautionary tales which were to be told so as to dampen the northerners’ ardour for imperial crowns, robes, and princesses assumed some acquaintance with Christian traditions. But they were to convey the moral that the exclusiveness of the ‘purple-born’ was at God’s command. An obvious means of toning down this exclusiveness was common adherence to the Christian faith, and this caused some embarrassment for Constantine VII. He considered the possible precedent for foreign marriages which the marriage in 927 of the Christian tsar Peter of Bulgaria to a Byzantine princess could be said to have set. He insisted that even this match breached both Church law and an alleged prohibition of Constantine the Great, without however offering any substantive rejoinder to those who might cite it as a precedent. Thus while the Life of his grandfather might idealize Basil’s ‘apostolic’ work in spreading the Word among the Bulgars almost a century earlier, Constantine himself privately recoiled from the implications of such mission work: it might open the door to ‘uppity’ barbarians expecting to be treated on a more or less equal footing. Constantine could hardly abandon to their fate such missionary enterprises as were already under way, and it was he who presided over the baptism of the Magyar chieftains and Princess Olga, becoming the latter’s godfather. But while he sent a bishop to the Hungarians, he seems to have balked at doing the same for Olga. This would be in key with his uneasy awareness of the diplomatic repercussions when ‘barbarian’ peoples turned into self-confident Christians, as the Bulgars had all too evidently done.