The Byzantine Republic

People and Power in New Rome

Anthony Kaldellis

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674365407
• eBook ISBN: 9780674967403
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking "ancestors."

Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.

CHAPTER 1

Introducing the Byzantine Republic

The term “political ideology” is used regularly in the field of Byzantine Studies and there is a nearly universal consensus about what it was: Byzantine political ideology consisted of the theocratic interpretation of imperial rule found, for example, in imperial panegyrics from Eusebios onward and was echoed in the titles and ceremonies of the court. According to this interpretation, the emperor was appointed to rule by God and had a responsibility to imitate or obey God in his manner of rule. Almost no Byzantinists, however, explain what they mean by the word “ideology” or situate it within a specific theoretical approach.¹ Usually, the term is used to mean just “a basic set of beliefs,” on the assumption that most people in the empire held these beliefs and thus tacitly consented to the imperial system. But no one has yet proven that, or in what way, the population accepted the theocratic notions of court literature, nor has any methodology been devised for generating such proof.

This book is meant as a contribution to the study of Byzantine political ideology. Indeed, it approaches the topic for the first time as an open question and not as a settled set of assumptions on which future research can safely be built. “Ideology” happens to be a potent term with a rich philosophical history, even though most historians use it in a domesticated sense as any set of beliefs that a person or society seems to hold, whether relating to politics, social and economic orders, sex, religion, or some other category.² Sometimes beliefs are inferred from historical phenomena (actions or institutions) and sometimes they are quoted from texts, which may or may not adequately explain those historical phenomena (in Byzantine Studies, ideology is largely drawn from texts, and it is rarely brought into the analysis of political history). While they have enriched the term’s history and semantic range, modern theoretical schools of thought that have proposed “theories of ideology” are often at odds with each other, and they are not always applicable to the specific problems posed by Byzantine material. My study of this literature has turned up no model whose benefits outweigh its disadvantages. Most theories focus on modern problems, usually relating to class struggle and radical politics, the construction of the Self from a psychoanalytic standpoint, or the thought of a modern thinker, and too much is written in code. In this area, it seems, premodern historians must still fend for themselves.

Words do not have innate meanings, and “ideology” in particular is quite malleable. I will use it in a specific way and ask the reader’s indulgence if it does not correspond exactly to the one he or she prefers or is used to. If it still grates, a cumbersome substitute would be “background beliefs, shared between rulers and subjects, about the normative aspects of a given political order, which can be shown to have shaped how the population interacted within the political sphere, especially in times when there was disagreement about the allocation of power.” As disagreements over the allocation of power are the stuff of politics, this definition of ideology requires that theory and praxis be studied in tandem. That, then, may serve as a concise definition of ideology. In some respects, it overlaps with prevalent definitions, especially Marxist ones, but in other respects it differs from them.

Specifically, like most historians of Rome and Byzantium today, I do not define ideology explicitly as false belief, for example, as a belief whose function was to rationalize social orders and hierarchies by making them appear natural and thus inevitable (or supernatural and thus inevitable), when in fact they were only contingent fictions linked to the interest of specific groups, usually elites. I refrain from this tradition of analysis in part because the beliefs discussed in this book were generated, maintained, and enforced by a broad political consensus. They were about the proper use of state power, the purpose of the imperial position, and who had the right to legitimate the allocation and reallocation of power. It is not clear how a historian can argue that such beliefs were either true or false. It is, by contrast, possible to argue that the theocratic notion that the emperor was appointed to rule by God was false and that it did serve the needs of the court more than those of the population (though not exclusively so, as we will see). According to my definition, however, that theocratic notion might not qualify as an ideology to begin with. Therefore, while some ideologies may well be generally accepted false beliefs that serve the interests of elites (and there are many of those all around us today, and even within us), the ideology that will be presented here will not be of that type.

Another difference between prevalent definitions and my own is that ideologies are not always manufactured by and for the benefit of political elites. I will be arguing that the ideology of the Byzantine political sphere represented a survival of Roman republican notions about the sources, uses, and legitimation of power. A bottom-up model of political authority will be presented to temper, even push back against, the top-down one that prevails in the field. Incidentally, this model will help to explain two unique features of the Byzantine political sphere: why it survived for so long as an integrated, coherent moral and political community (longer than any other monarchy) and why the imperial throne sat atop a political realm that was so turbulent and potentially disloyal. Ordinarily, these two facts would be in tension, but in the Byzantine “monarchical republic” they reinforced each other.

Therefore, ideology will not here be used to refer to “rhetoric” as opposed to “reality” or simply to any set of doctrines that can be articulated even if they were not determinative of political practice. Ideology must help us to understand the actual operations of the political sphere. The political history of a culture cannot be a refutation of its (alleged) dominant ideology. Not all stated beliefs, then, were equivalent in terms of their existential valence, cognitive and political ontology, or the degree of their popular acceptance and historical impact. The goal of this book will be to identify how people understood their place in society and how they interacted with each other and their political institutions. It will attempt to uncover the Byzantines’ basic notions about what kind of political society they lived in, what its moral logic was, what was acceptable and what not; in other words, what “made sense” to them politically and what not.³ A physicist has compared this to the “mental wallpaper” of a society or “a short-hand for the assumptions we don’t get around to articulating,”⁴ a neuroscientist to the “most hardwired instincts [that] have usually been left out of the spotlight of inquiry.”⁵ Ideology is what was taken for granted in the political culture and not only, or not primarily, what was loudly and defensively proclaimed. A fuller treatment of ideology, therefore, might not classify it ontologically as a type of belief at all, for beliefs can be easily changed. “Ideology is more personal than belief (since we can simply change our beliefs), less conscious than knowledge or reasons, larger than the individual.”⁶

This brings us to the problem of the sources and their context-specific limitations. Despite the prevalence of studies with the words “Byzantine political ideology” or “political theory” in their titles, the Byzantines did not theorize their state or society in systematic and comprehensive ways.⁷ It is unlikely that any one genre or text perfectly encapsulated the norms of the political sphere, as all were produced within specific historical, political, and discursive contexts and usually served the particular interests of individuals or institutions. Ideologies are matrices of meaning and normativity, but we should not expect to find them laid out in convenient formulas. They are usually implicit rather than explicit, the underlying logic that facilitates the move from premise to conclusion in the act of political reasoning. And what makes the most sense is precisely what needs to be affirmed the least, as it can be taken for granted. Ideology must be excavated; it will not necessarily be written in letters of gold ten feet tall.

The Byzantine sources present us with a wide range of attitudes and even “beliefs” that appear in different settings, were activated in specific contexts, and were relevant primarily, or even exclusively, in those contexts. For example, an innovative political treatise, a topos of imperial rhetoric, the standards by which historians evaluated emperors’ reigns, a legal preface, the slogans chanted in the streets against an emperor by a rioting populace, and a work of moral advice addressed to an emperor do not all operate on the same level or have equivalent claims on our attention. In general, the argument presented here will avoid the few speculative works of original political thought that were produced during the Byzantine millennium and are now receiving renewed attention, such as the anonymous sixth-century Dialogue on Political Science, Thomas Magistros’s treatise on kings and their subjects, and Moschopoulos’s theory of oaths.⁸ Their proposals may have rested on commonly shared assumptions, but we can know this only by comparison with other types of evidence. These texts have to be understood in relation to the political sphere as a whole, but they are idiosyncratic variations of particular aspects of it. They must be brought into the discussion afterward, as they cannot be assumed in advance to reflect the norms of the Byzantine polity.

The orthodox view of Byzantine ideology does not rest on those treatises anyway. Scholars have instead latched on to the formula that the emperor was appointed by God, and pursue it, to the exclusion of all else, through all genres in which it appears. This has resulted in a series of interchangeable views, some more legalistic, other moralizing, or ceremonial, or theological, and so on,⁹ and they share an absolute commitment to the nexus of God and emperor. But it is possible that we have been led astray by the court here. The imperial idea is so often recycled because it is impressive, is conveniently discursive, and consists of a handy formula. But that is exactly how it was designed. The formulaic nature of the God-emperor schema makes it easily repeatable, both in Byzantium and in scholarship. This does not mean, however, that we should gullibly view the rest of the culture through it. For instance, no one has yet explained how the alleged belief that the emperor was crowned by God (and all that) shaped subject-ruler interactions in real time, nor have the facts of political history been explained by it. So we need to be skeptical: what is asserted the loudest by those who have the means to broadcast messages is not necessarily an ideology. It was an important part of the culture, no doubt, but in what way exactly remains unclear. We must instead use a variety of sources to “triangulate” their political logic in search of an (often unspoken) ideological core. That is why I will use as wide a variety of sources as possible. The result may not be entirely coherent or orderly, in part because no complex culture such as Byzantium was fully coherent or orderly. But its center held for a long time, and I do not believe that it was located in the theology of the imperial position.

Some aspects of Byzantine ideology are easy to identify. All historians would agree that monarchy was (nearly) universally regarded as the optimal type of regime. In the period studied here, there were no movements to institute a different regime and only two or three theorists (in the early sixth century) favored the Republic. Therefore, in terms of the ontology of the political sphere, it made intuitive “sense” to the Byzantines that one person should be in charge. Yet this does not take us far. Monarchy is a broad category that can be inflected by different ideologies concerning the source and legitimate use of its power and the relationship between ruler and subjects. What type of monarchy, then, was Byzantium? The thesis of this book is that Byzantium was a republican monarchy and not primarily a monarchy by divine right. In the rest of this section, I will set out some of the reasons that warrant skepticism of the theocratic rhetoric. The evidence for them will be presented in the rest of the book.

First, our current version of imperial ideology focuses almost exclusively on the emperor and has little to say about the terms that defined his relationship with his subjects. As that relationship is not theorized, it is treated pragmatically as the operation of largely coercive institutions. Most studies that purport to talk about “imperial ideology” really mean ideology about the emperor,¹⁰ as if he were the only political entity of consequence; they do not mean ideology about how Byzantine political society was supposed to operate. The notion that “the person of the emperor [was] the embodiment of Byzantine ideology”¹¹ is fairly uncontroversial but is doubly wrong: it was not the person that mattered as much as the office, and the office hardly exhausted the reach and content of Byzantine political ideology. The Byzantines had a sophisticated ideological ontology that placed the office into a pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introducing the Byzantine Republic
• 2. The Emperor in the Republic
• 3. Extralegal Authority in a Lawful Polity
• 4. The Sovereignty of the People in Theory
• 5. The Sovereignty of the People in Practice
• 6. The Secular Republic and the Theocratic “Imperial Idea”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index