Late Byzantium Reconsidered

The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean

Andrea Mattiello, Maria Alessia Rossi, Andrea Mattiello, Maria Alessia Rossi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815372868
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351244817
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Late Byzantium Reconsidered offers a unique collection of essays analysing the artistic achievements of Mediterranean centres linked to the Byzantine Empire between 1261, when the Palaiologan dynasty re-conquered Constantinople, and the decades after 1453, when the Ottomans took the city, marking the end of the Empire. These centuries were characterised by the rising of socio-political elites, in regions such as Crete, Italy, Laconia, Serbia, and Trebizond, that, while sharing cultural and artistic values influenced by the Byzantine Empire, were also developing innovative and original visual and cultural standards.

The comparative and interdisciplinary framework offered by this volume aims to challenge established ideas concerning the late Byzantine period such as decline, renewal, and innovation. By examining specific case studies of cultural production from within and outside Byzantium, the chapters in this volume highlight the intrinsic innovative nature of the socio-cultural identities active in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean vis-à-vis the rhetorical assumption of the cultural contraction of the Byzantine Empire.

1 ‘And the whole city cheered’

The poetics and politics of the miraculous in the Early Palaiologan period

Niels Gaul

Post-1204 Byzantine history – Laskarid or Nicaean history, in this case – began with a display of civic independence.¹ If, that is, we trust George Akropolites who, writing his History towards the end of the thirteenth century,² faithfully preserved the following incident (while at the same time glossing over it as discreetly as possible – for, somewhat embarrassingly, it seems to have been an act of ‘political’ resistance): when the despotēs Theodore Laskaris, the future emperor in exile, fled Constantinople together with his wife and daughters,

arriving at the city of Nicaea, he appealed to the citizens to admit him into the city and to accept him as their lord. But they would not admit him. Then Laskaris urged them persistently and, even though he entreated them to admit his wife only, he persuaded them with difficulty.³

The reader is not told who ‘the Nicaeans’ were – presumably, the local elite rather than the dēmos – and in which way they reached ‘their’ decision, nor is there any evidence permitting a prosopographical scrutiny of this incident, but one is led to assume that the city acted unanimously, as a whole.

The long and pious reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos (r. 1282‒1328) saw the loss of the Anatolian provinces to the advancing Ottoman and Turkmen tribes and in its wake the transformation of the only recently restored medieval Eastern Roman Empire, with Constantinople as its centre, from a regional into a local power.⁴ Consequence, as much as cause, of this rapid fragmentation of the centralising (imperial) power was the re-emergence, after a long gap from imperial and late antique Rome, of meaningful civic discourse. This discourse started resurfacing from the twelfth century onward for a variety of reasons⁵ and accelerated with the cataclysmic events of 1204 and the temporary – or perhaps not so temporary, for Constantinople was never to fully recover its previous status – loss of the Empire’s ideological centre.⁶ With the City of Constantine in ‘Latin’ hands, former subject cities stepped up to take her place; the initially reluctant city of Nicaea emerged as one of the more important among them. Poleis started perceiving themselves once again as distinct political entities, whose elites sought to take charge of their own affairs internally as well as externally. Normally, this happened within the imperial framework, but especially during the fourteenth-century civil wars, there was room for manoeuvre.

In fact, the Nicaean attestation of civic independence (or pride?) that opened this chapter can be corroborated from sources considerably closer to the event. The rhētor and historiographer Niketas Choniates referred to Theodore Laskaris, before his acclamation as emperor, as ‘lord of the eastern cities’, thus emphasising the role of the poleis.⁷ He also provides us with a short description of Laskaris’ political conduct regarding these cities: ‘You travel to the eastern cities and negotiate with their citizens,’ Choniates wrote:

you point out the impending danger if they do not become your subjects right away. These you rebuke, those you reprimand. Soon you address a public assembly, soon you privately receive the nobles and invite them to dine, and you show them your great experience and intricate knowledge [of the circumstances], if only in that manner you raise the low spirits of the Rhomaioi.⁸

Addressing assemblies publicly, meeting civic notables privately: this aptly highlights the tools available to those who thought to control civic discourse in the late Byzantine world; they are discernible in the sources throughout the Palaiologan period.

As suggested by these initial observations, it appears that the discursive description of the Empire as a conglomerate of cities virtually reappeared from the very moment that the Queen-City, Constantinople, was lost.⁹ While later events, like the oft-quoted Catalan wars in the first decade of the fourteenth century, without doubt contributed to the notion of the ‘walled town’ as a self-sustaining community,¹⁰ the possibility of imagining the Empire as consisting of a network, or ‘archipelago’, of cities had already been there for quite some time.¹¹

In a world of ‘small-state complexities’,¹² frequently torn apart by rebellions, religious strife and outright civil wars, competing legitimacies and loyalties posed a severe challenge to civic concord (ὁμόνοια) and peace over the smallest incident. No governor (κεφαλή) who came under pressure from both sides – above and below, as it were: from the imperial power, on the one hand, and his own citizens, on the other – could be sure of retaining control over affairs if the tables turned. In Kantakouzenos’ apposite words:

Each of the lords over the cities will be put under pressure by their own citizens, and fearing the fickleness of fortune and not knowing to whom of the emperors the empire will fall, they will hand over their cities to the one who appears stronger at the moment.¹³

One form of – more often than not, ritualised – communication that re-emerged in Palaiologan civic communities to address this need for concord was public assemblies (ἐκκλησίαι).¹⁴ Normally, unless things went terribly wrong, the common people, the dēmos, could be relied on to swing along with what their social betters had decided; rather than a ‘democratic’ practice, such public assemblies were yet another means of visualising and performing power. Describing with hindsight the situation towards the end of the first civil war in 1328, the elder statesman and historiographer John Kantakouzenos explicitly stated that the dēmos of Epirote Edessa was dependent upon the opinion (γνώμη; other meanings include ‘disposition’ or ‘favour’) of the local lords: ‘The powerful in Edessa … did not exaggerate in any way, as the populace of Edessa depended on their opinion.’¹⁵ This ties in well with the same Kantakouzenos’ telling advice that the younger Andronikos, when falling out with his grandfather in the early 1320s, should seek refuge in Adrianople because his late father, the unfortunate Michael IX (r. 1294–1320), had assembled a considerable power base there, ‘and many would be rather eager and willing to take some risk for his son’.¹⁶ Finally, the exemplary case of Bizye shows that, in the pretext of a public assembly, a pressure group of archontes could in fact overrule the kephalē if the latter lacked support from his peers: in 1344, the governor George Palaiologos preferred to withdraw to Thessalonike, thanking the assembly for being allowed to leave unharmed, rather than defect to the opposing party in the so-called second civil war.¹⁷

However, not only poleis entered the post-1204 stage of Byzantine history with renewed vigour. This was also a period when the miraculous returned to Byzantine culture (and literature).

The return of the miraculous

Accounts and collections of miracles, popular at all times, save perhaps the Komnenian and Laskarid twelfth and thirteenth centuries,¹⁸ resurfaced in the reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos; in all likelihood, the phenomenon was tied into the restoration of Orthodoxy early in Andronikos’ reign and inter alia served to glorify this emperor’s pious rule.¹⁹ Palaiologan authors ‘refreshed’ and expanded the miracle collections of shrines which had long been in use. Such was the case with Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos’ account of the Pege shrine of the Theotokos – at the request of a certain Makarios, an aristocrat from Serres turned monk at the Pege – or of the miracles of St Euphrosyne the Younger.²⁰ Similarly, Constantine Akropolites reworked the miracle collections of the shrines of saint Theodosia, which he used not least in order to promote his own family and its imperial connections, and Saint Zotikos.²¹ Somewhat further down the social ladder, Maximos the deacon, presumably of the Kosmidion monastery in the vicinity of Constantinople, rewrote the miracles of Cosmas and Damian, whereas in Trebizond, John Lazaropoulos composed his famous dossier of the miracles of the city’s patron saint, Eugeneios.²² Equally, collecting miracles began serving the purpose of creating new saints, as they testified to someone’s saintly conduct:²³ the posthumous miracles of Patriarch Athanasios I, recorded by Theoktistos the Stoudite, or especially those of Gregory Palamas, as recorded by Philotheos Kokkinos, come to mind.²⁴

In the present context, my interest is not with the miraculous or miracle collections per se but, rather, with the performative power of the miraculous in influencing or shifting civic opinion. As it happens, two pertinent instances of miraculous performances achieving, or consolidating, such shifts have come down to us, not in late Byzantine hagiography, as one might expect, but in historiography. The somewhat fluid boundaries between the genres, or, more precisely, the inclusion of hagiographical elements into other genres, have previously been noted with regard to the Palaiologan period.²⁵ By contrast, eleventh- and twelfth-century historiographers such as Michael Attaleiates, John Skylitzes, John Kinnamos, Anna Komnene and Niketas Choniates did not pay much attention to matters miraculous. On the contrary, Michael Psellos ridiculed Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos for believing that a miracle had occurred at his late wife, the Empress Zoe’s, tomb when ‘by a trick of nature some fungus sprang up’ in a place where the silver covering a column of the tomb had cracked and moisture had crept in.²⁶ In the later thirteenth century, George Akropolites openly contested the view that St Demetrios had helped the besieged Thessalonians by killing the Bulgarian king Kalojan (John) in 1207, denigrating the saint quite bluntly.²⁷ There was, then, a considerable change of attitude in the days of the elder Andronikos.

By analysing these two instances, this chapter attempts to illuminate how this return of the miraculous could be exploited by shrewd politicians to achieve civic goals, and how such performances were recorded by contemporary historiographers (either believing or unbelieving). The first example comes from George Pachymeres’ Histories and looks at Magnesia in the early fourteenth century (ad 1303). My second example derives from John Kantakouzenos’ History and scrutinises Andronikos III’s entry into Thessalonike in January 1328. What is primarily effected in both instances is civic unity in a critical situation. One of our authors, George Pachymeres, was observing and, possibly, believing in the miraculous occurrences he narrated; the other, John Kantakouzenos, was involved (I believe) in the staging of the spectacular miraculous cure he described in detail.

In analysing these episodes as social performances, I once again borrow my terminology from Jeffrey C. Alexander’s work on social performances in the public and political spheres.²⁸ Drawing on performance theory, Alexander defines the elements of public performance as follows:²⁹ (1) the script and its cultural bac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘And the whole city cheered’: the poetics and politics of the miraculous in the Early Palaiologan period
• 2 Art in decline or art in the age of decline? Historiography and new approaches to Late Byzantine painting
• 3 The timeliness of timelessness: reconsidering decline in the Palaiologan period
• 4 Reconsidering the Early Palaiologan period: anti-Latin propaganda, miracle accounts, and monumental art
• 5 How to illustrate a scientific treatise in the Palaiologan period
• 6 Looking beyond the city walls of Mystras: the transformation of the religious landscape of Laconia
• 7 Remnants of an era: monasteries and lay piety in Late Byzantine Sozopolis
• 8 Palaiologan art from regional Crete: artistic decline or social progress?
• 9 Liturgical and devotional artefacts in the Venetian churches of the Levant, thirteenth to fifteenth centuries
• 10 Who is that man? The perception of Byzantium in fifteenth-century Italy
• 11 The story behind the image: the literary patronage of Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria between ostentation and decline
• 12 Imperial portraits of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond (1204–1461)
• Index