Introduction to Byzantium, 602–1453

Jonathan Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351368773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Introduction to Byzantium, 602 – 1453 provides students with an accessible guide to medieval Byzantium.

Beginning with the near collapse of Byzantium in the seventh century, the book traces its survival and development through to its absorption by the Ottoman empire. As well as having an overall political narrative, the chapters cover a wide range of topics including society and economy, art and architecture, literature and education, military tactics and diplomacy, gender and education. They also explore themes that remain prominent and highly debated today, including relations between Islam and the West, the impact of the Crusades, the development of Russia, and the emergence of Orthodox Christianity. Comprehensively written, each chapter provides an overview of the particular period or topic, a summary of the ongoing historiographical debates, primary source material textboxes, further reading recommendations and a 'points to remember' section.

Introduction to Byzantium, 602 – 453 provides students with a thorough introduction to the history of Byzantium and equips them with the tools to write successful analytical essays. It is essential reading for any student of the history of the Byzantine empire.

PART I

Crisis and survival 602–820

1 Major literary sources for the period 602–820

Our knowledge of Byzantium comes from a wide variety of sources: inscriptions, archival documents, saints’ lives, speeches, manuals and legal codes, to name but a few. Much of this material is written in Greek, the literary language of the Byzantine empire, but sources in Arabic, Armenian, Latin, Slavonic and other languages are important too. Here, and in subsequent source chapters, the focus will primarily be on one particular type of information source: major literary histories, written in Greek, many of which are now available in English translation. Other types of source will be considered as well, as they often provide all kinds of insights to supplement the major histories.

Figure 1.1 Mosaic of a Gospel book from the Neonian Baptistry, Ravenna

1.1 Byzantine literature and education

To understand the historical writing of the Byzantine period, it is important first to consider the kind of educational and cultural environment in which it was produced. In 602, most Byzantines living outside Syria and Egypt spoke Koine or Common Greek on an everyday basis (see Introduction 0.3), the language of the New Testament and of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint. Literacy would have been relatively widespread because church schools that taught children to read the Gospels and the Psalms were often to be found in urban areas. For a privileged few, there was higher education which began at age 14 but that involved a much more challenging curriculum. No longer did students read texts that were written in something very close to their mother tongue. Instead they grappled with much richer and more complex forms of Greek that had been written many centuries before. They were introduced to the great epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, that preserved the idiom of around 900 BCE. Most of the set texts, however, were written in the language of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, known as Attic Greek. They included numerous historical works such as those of Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BCE), Thucydides (460–395 BCE), Polybius (c.200–c.116 BCE) and Arrian (c.86–160 CE), but the Byzantines were interested in other forms of literature as well. They read the comedies of Aristophanes (c.455–c.386 BCE), tragedies such as those of Aeschylus (525–456 BCE), the speeches of Demosthenes (d.413 BCE) and Lysias (c.458–c.380 BCE), and the philosophy of Plato (d.348/7 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Their interest extended to what would now be called ‘scientific’ writing: the medical works of Dioscorides (c.40–90 CE) and Galen (129–c.210 CE), and the mathematical treatises of Euclid (fl.300 BCE).

It may seem odd that a militantly Christian society like Byzantium should base its higher education on pagan texts, many of which featured or discussed the myths of the old Olympian gods. The curriculum had, of course, been inherited from pre-Christian times and as the Church became stronger, there were some voices raised to demand that the pagan writers be discarded in favour of theologians and Fathers of the Church. That never happened because everyone agreed that the pagan writers offered the most perfect examples of ‘correct’ Attic Greek prose style. It was important to study them because in Byzantine educated circles it was simply not acceptable to write in Common Greek. So students were trained not just to read the ancients but to write in the same way. The most common exercise for students was to write dialogues in the style of Plato, recreating what might have been said, for example, by Alexander the Great to the king of Persia. It was a gruelling course but one which was worth enduring because it provided the qualification for entry to the civil administration. In fact, in 360 a law had been passed barring anyone who had not been schooled in this way from holding one of these lucrative posts. In 602, this higher curriculum was offered at schools all over Byzantium, in Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, Beirut and, of course, Constantinople where in 425 a university of 31 faculties had been established with a view to producing literate administrators.

Figure 1.2 Byzantine marble relief, now on the façade of St Mark’s church in Venice. It depicts a scene in Greek mythology where the hero Hercules has completed his fourth labour and has captured the savage Erymanthian boar. He brings it back alive to show King Eurytheus, who is terrified and hides in a bronze jar. The sculpture reflects the way in which educated Byzantines prized their classical heritage

Most of the history that was produced during the period 602 to 1453 was written by people who had completed this course of higher education and who often held posts in the administration or in the Church. They wrote not in Common Greek but in the archaic Attic language in which they had been schooled. The reign of Justinian I was chronicled in detail by his contemporaries Procopius and Agathias, both highly educated laymen. In the first decades of the seventh century, an official called Theophylact Simocatta wrote an account of the reign of the ill-fated Maurice though his Attic style was a great deal clumsier than that of Procopius. A deacon called George of Pisidia, who was a member of the clergy of Hagia Sophia, wrote two narrative poems describing the campaigns against the Persians and Avars waged by Emperor Herakleios (610–641) (see Section 2.2). Alongside these highly polished literary productions stands the rather simpler Chronicon Paschale or Easter Chronicle, compiled by an anonymous individual in around 630. It records events from the beginning of the world until 628 and it would appear from the title to have continued up to 630, but the last page is missing from the sole surviving manuscript. It is one of the most important sources of information for the reign of Phokas and the early years of Herakleios since the author was clearly describing events that he was living through. He also gives the full text of the despatch sent to Constantinople by Herakleios to announce his Persian victory which was read out publicly in Hagia Sophia on 15 May 628.

Then suddenly everything went silent. The tradition of writing literary histories in Attic Greek came to an abrupt end. It is not difficult to see why. The Persian and Arab invasions saw the loss of Antioch, Alexandria, Beirut and other cities with their schools and libraries. Constantinople and Athens held out against the invaders, but for much of the seventh and eighth centuries they were beleaguered fortresses where the needs of defence took priority over everything else. Higher education seems to have been drastically scaled down, although it probably did not disappear altogether. Moreover, the string of defeats was perhaps so disheartening that few felt inspired to take up their pen to record events at the time. There was some history written such as the chronicle compiled by an individual called Trajan the Patrikios in the early eighth century. Sadly it has not survived and is only known from allusion made to it by later authors. As a result, the period 630–750 is one of the worst documented and it has to be pieced together from sources that emanated from outside Byzantium or were written much later.

1.2 Patriarch Nikephoros

Only in the late eighth century was a history written in Greek that has survived until today. The work of a clergyman called Nikephoros, the Short History covers the years from Maurice’s murder in 602 to the marriage of Irene to the future Emperor Leo IV (775–780) in 769 and is written in Attic Greek. Given that he must have been born in around 758, Nikephoros cannot have been an eyewitness to any of the events he describes apart possibly from those at the very end of his account. His work must therefore be a synthesis of earlier sources that are now lost, such as Trajan the Patrikios and a shadowy individual called John of Antioch. It would seem that he was not always able to find the information that he needed: there is a gap of 27 years in the Short History from shortly after the death of Herakleios in 641 up to the assassination of Constans II in 668. Lack of available source material probably also explains why the work as a whole is so short. While Nikephoros was remote and unconnected with the events he describes, he was by no means a detached and dispassionate observer. The later pages of the Short History cover the first phase of the period of Iconoclasm (see Section 4.2) and Nikephoros was a convinced iconophile who supported the veneration of holy images. He was appointed patriarch of Constantinople in 806 by the iconophile emperor Nikephoros I (802–811) and he stood down in 815 in protest at the policies of the iconoclast Leo V (813–820). His iconophile sympathies were bound to be reflected, especially in his account of the reign of the arch-iconoclast Emperor Constantine V (741–775), although he is relatively restrained in comparison with some later writers.

Figure 1.3 Marble relief of the Apostles as sheep on either side of the throne of Christ. Like Figure 1.2, this sculpture was probably taken from Constantinople to Venice in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (see Section 12.5)

1.3 Theophanes Confessor

In around 808, a clergyman called George the Synkellos set himself the task of compiling a chronicle of events from the creation of the world to his own time but when he died in about 811, he had only reached as far as 284 CE. The work was inherited and continued by a monk called Theophanes, who was the abbot of a monastery in the western Asia Minor. Two short biographies of him survive and they portray him as an affable character, always ready to wine and dine guests at his monastery. That might explain why he become rather overweight and he allegedly suffered from kidney stones so that he was bedridden the last years of his life. He nevertheless managed to continue the chronicle and to take it up to 813 CE.

The Chronicle of Theophanes shares some of the weaknesses of Nikephoros’ work. It largely covers events that took place long before Theophanes was born and so it is essentially a file of extracts borrowed from earlier sources, many of which are now lost. Like Nikephoros again, Theophanes had an axe to grind. Although his father had held office under the iconoclast Emperor Constantine V, Theophanes himself was an ardent iconophile. Indeed, he was to suffer for his beliefs and so earn his epithet of ‘Confessor’. In 815, soon after the accession of Emperor Leo V, Theophanes was summoned from his monastery to Constantinople and urged to abandon his support for icon veneration. When he refused, he was imprisoned for two years, then exiled to the island of Samothrace where he died less than a month after his arrival. Although this persecution probably took place after Theophanes had stopped working on the chronicle, he is vitriolic in his accounts of Leo III (717–741) and Constantine V and clearly very unfair to them, his genial personality notwithstanding. Apart from the obvious bias, there are plenty of other things wrong with Theophanes’ chronicle. It is a rather unsophisticated work. While Nikephoros attempted to write in ‘correct’ Greek, imitating the classical language, Theophanes used a decidedly haphazard idiom, that is sometimes ambiguous and misleading. He had a rather simplistic outlook, interpreting any disaster or setback as God’s punishment for sin and attributing any victory to direct divine intervention.

In spite of all its faults, for a number of reasons Theophanes’ chronicle is the most important work of historiography produced in Byzantium in this period. Unlike Nikephoros who broke off in 769, Theophanes included the period when he himself was an eyewitness and participant. He had held office in the imperial administration before he became a monk and so had a personal knowledge of politics and government. He later attended the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 and he was well acquainted with some of the major figures of the day. Moreover, for the period before his own time, Theophanes consulted a much wider range of sources than Nikephoros did, not just ones compiled inside Byzantium in Greek but those from outside too. He seems to have used a chronicle or chronicles written in Syriac and so was able to fill in the gaps left by Nikephoros and to provide a much fuller narrative for the seventh and eighth centuries.

The most helpful aspect of Theophanes’ work is his careful system of chronology, which he inherited from George the Synkellos. The narrative is divided into year-long sections, commencing on 1 September, which in the Byzantine calendar was when the year began. Each section is prefaced with chronological tables, which give the year since the creation of the world and the birth of Christ, which Theophanes, following the Alexandrian tradition, believed to have occurred 5492 years after the creation. The year of the reign of the Byzantine emperor was given next, then that of Persian king (later the Arab caliph) and the patriarch of Constantinople. Finally, the years of some other important ecclesiastical figures, such as the pope or the patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem or Alexandria, were listed too. In this way, Theophanes was able to reconcile the various different dating systems used by his sources. Although painstaking, Theophanes’ chronology is not always completely accurate. He seems to be a year out between 609 and 659 and again from 727 until 774. Luckily, in his chronological lists, Theophanes also gave the indiction, a recurring cycle of 15 years and from this it is possible to correct the inaccuracy. In spite of the errors and the bad Greek, the Chronicle of Theophanes enjoyed a high reputation in Byzantium and it became known in the West through a Latin translation made by the papal librarian Anastasius in the 870s. Without it, the period 602 to 780 in particular would be a great deal more obscure and we would have no chronological framework in which to place it, for writers such as Sebeos (see Section 1.5) were extremely vague when it came to dates.

Box 1.1 Theophanes’ chronological method

This is a typical year from Theophanes’ work: 6104 from the creation which corresponds to the 12 months from 1 September 610 CE to 31 August 611 CE, shortly after Herakleios’ succession. Note the care that he takes to get the date right:

• Herakleios, emperor of the Romans (31 years), 2nd year
• Khusro [II], emperor of the Persians (39 years), 23rd year
• Sergios [I], bishop of Constantinople (29 years), 3rd year
• Zacharias, bishop of Jerusalem (22 years), 3rd year
• John, bishop of Alexandria (10 years), 3rd year

In this year, the Persians captured Caesarea in Cappadocia and took therein many thousands of captives. The emperor Herakleios found the affairs of the Roman state undone, for the Avars had devastated Europe, while the Persians had destroyed all of Asia and had captured the cities and annihilated in battle the Roman army. On seeing these things he was at a loss what to do. He made a census of the army to find out if there were any survivors from among those who had revolted with Phokas against Maurice and found only two … On 3 May of the same year, indiction 15, a son was born to the emperor ...