The Byzantine Neighbourhood

Urban Space and Political Action

Fotini Kondyli, Benjamin Anderson, Fotini Kondyli, Benjamin Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138371064
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429764981
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Byzantine Neighbourhood contributes to a new narrative regarding Byzantine cities through the adoption of a neighbourhood perspective. It offers a multi-disciplinary investigation of the spatial and social practices that produced Byzantine concepts of neighbourhood and afforded dynamic interactions between different actors, elite and non-elite. Authors further consider neighbourhoods as political entities, examining how varieties of collectivity formed in Byzantine neighbourhoods translated into political action. By both acknowledging the unique position of Constantinople, and giving serious attention to the varieties of provincial experience, the contributors consider regional factors (social, economic, and political) that formed the ties of local communities to the state and illuminate the mechanisms of empire. Beyond its Byzantine focus, this volume contributes to broader discussions of premodern urbanism by drawing attention to the spatial dimension of social life and highlighting the involvement of multiple agents in city-making.

Part I

Defining Byzantine neighbourhoods

1 The view from Byzantine texts

Albrecht Berger

DOI: 10.4324/9780429427770-3

Research on neighbourhoods in Byzantium on the basis of literary texts suffers mainly from two problems: the scarcity of information on the one hand, and the lack of a consistent terminology on the other hand. If we have any information at all, it comes almost exclusively from Constantinople, which will therefore stand at the centre of my investigation.

Constantinople was, from its foundation to the end of the twelfth century, the capital of a great empire and the centre of imperial administration. A part of its population was of course formed by officials and military persons who were sent to the provinces and recalled, and by merchants who regularly left the city and travelled. Most inhabitants, however, lived there permanently and spent their life not just within the walls of Constantinople but within a spatially limited neighbourhood, where they worked, did their everyday shopping, and went to church.

Constantinople was founded by Constantine the Great in 324 and inaugurated in 330.¹ Ancient Byzantium now formed its eastern-most part, and a big area, which was four or five times larger than the old Greek town, was added to the west. In the new part of the city, streets were laid out and terraces were built. New Constantinople was a planned city with straight streets and avenues,² with public buildings and churches constructed at prominent places, probably following some more or less uniform urbanistic concept – and it was also a city which was quickly filled by a very heterogenous population, even when it was still not much more than a monstrous construction site. It must have been a while before people felt comfortable there, that is, until the social and economic ties that develop with face-to-face interactions were established, and neighbourhoods formed where one could live in a more familiar, village-like environment.

My following remarks could not have been made without extensive reference to Paul Magdalino’s recent article entitled “Neighbourhoods in Byzantine Constantinople.”³ I will try, however, to set other accents in my interpretation of the evidence, and will sometimes arrive at different conclusions.

The basic text from which all our considerations must start is the so-called Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, which was composed in Latin around 425 AD.⁴ It divides Constantinople into 14 regions (Figure 1.1) by analogy to Rome, lists its important buildings and monuments, and its 52 porticoed streets, 4,388 houses, and 322 vici (Table 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The regions of Constantinople. Image produced by the author.

Table 1.1 The regions of the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae

Regions	Houses	vici
I	118	29
II	98	34
III	94	7
IV	375	35
V	183	23
VI	484	22
VII	711	85
VIII	108	21
IX	117	16
X	636	20
XI	503	8
XII	363	11
XIII	431	–
XIV	167	11
Summary	4,388	322

The word vicus apparently denotes some kind of residential area, and it has often been assumed that it refers to neighbourhoods as defined by Michael Smith: “a residential zone that has considerable face-to-face interaction and is distinctive on the basis of physical and/or social characteristics.”⁵ We will see later whether this can be the case or not. In the Notitia, every region had a chief officer, the curator, who probably had to report to the city prefect as the head of urban administration; his assistant, the vernaculus, whose functions are not clearly defined; and also, five night watchmen called the vicomagistri. This word actually means “master of a vicus” and is borrowed from Rome, where every region had 48 of them.⁶

There is, however, a big problem with terminology. After the Notitia was written, the use of Latin decreased in the East and ended almost completely by the mid-seventh century. Latin terms and designations of offices were either taken over as loanwords into Greek or replaced by more or less equivalent Greek words.

The regions of Constantinople are, in Michael Smith’s definition, districts created by a top-down process.⁷ They are hardly mentioned at all after the Notitia – one exception is the short entry about the great fire of 465 in the seventh-century Chronicon paschale.⁸ Here, as in other contexts outside of Constantinople, the word regio is rendered in Greek as rhegeon. In other texts, however, regio is translated by the Greek geitonia, a word which presumably means a much smaller unit, that is, a neighbourhood as defined above. The sixth-century Lexicon of Hesychios, for example, explains the ancient word agyia as “block of houses, lane, street, neighbourhood (geitonia),” but at the same time, it translates rhegeonarios as geitoniarches, thus equating their roots, rhegeon with geitonia.⁹

Rhegeon and geitonia are used interchangeably, without reference to Constantinople, as late as in the twelfth century.¹⁰ On the other hand, the geitoniai in Ioannes Malalas’ report about the street violence between Blues and Greens in the last years of Justinian are clearly not urban regions in the sense of the Notitia, but much smaller units marked by face-to-face interactions, as in the following two passages¹¹:

[The Greens] went to the Mese, to the neighbourhoods of the Blues, and stoned those they encountered, chanting: “Fire, fire! No Blue is to be seen here.”

While Zimarchos was city prefect, a disturbance in the neighbourhood of Mazentiolos occurred in this way. When the prefect Zimarchos sent some of the comitarienses to arrest a young man named Kaisarios, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Mazentiolos resisted them and mutilated many soldiers as well as many of the comitarienses.

Note that the neighbourhood of the second episode is named after a person. We will return to this phenomenon later.

The words rhegeonarios or rhegeonarches apparently replace the Latin curator, while the vernaculus and the vicomagister disappear completely from the sources. We may add as a footnote that Cassius Dio actually had translated the vicomagister, in his report about the introduction of this office in Augustan Rome, as stenoparchos,¹² but this newly coined word did not make it into the Byzantine texts.

In our next relevant document, the Kletorologion of Philotheos from 899, the geitoniarchai are mentioned in a list first as subordinates of the city prefect, and later as subordinates rather of the demarchoi, that is of the leaders of the Blue and Green factions.¹³ They are invited to the Christmas and Easter banquets, and on the latter occasion, their number is given as 12.¹⁴ This implies that they took the place of the curatores, not of the vicomagistri, and that a corresponding number of regions existed in Constantinople in this age. In fact, the regions XIII and XIV of the Notitia had been outside both the Constantinian and Theodosian walls and no longer formed a part of the city.¹⁵ Since the space between these walls had not yet been taken into account by the Notitia, we may assume that the remaining 12 regions were later modified to include this part of the city.

In the time of the Kletorologion, however, it seems that the geitoniarchai had lost their function in urban administration and played a role only in the court ceremonial. They are missing from the “Book of the Eparch,” a contemporaneous work where the office of the prefect is described,¹⁶ and a second passage of the Kletorologion lists them as subordinates of the two demarchoi, together with poets, singers, charioteers, and others.¹⁷

In the “Book of Ceremonies,” by contrast, the geitoniarchai are always subordinates of the demarchoi and two in number, one for each faction.¹⁸ In any case, it is clear that neither in the Kletorologion nor in the “Book of Ceremonies” do the geitoniarchai have anything to do with the administration of geitoniai. One list in the Kletorologion also mentions the “judges of the regions,” the kritai ton regeonon, who may actually have served in the 12 regions of their age.¹⁹

The only source which defines the duties of a geitoniarches as the “supervisor of a neighbourhood” in the literal sense of the word is the tenth-century Life of Saint Gregentios of Taphar, a fictitious person presented as the missionary of the Homerites in present-day Yemen, and dated to the sixth century.²⁰ According to this text, Gregentios gave laws to the Homerites, that is, to the inhabitants of their capital, Taphar. These laws have nothing to do with southern Arabia, although this is still claimed by several researchers.²¹ Instead, Taphar is depicted as a kind of idealized Christian capital, which imitates and even surpasses Constantinople.

In this text, Taphar is divided not into 12, but into 36 rhegeones or geitoniai (the words are used interchangeably), each administered by a geitoniarches.²² The geitoniarches is the person responsible in the geitonia to whom all evil and unlawful things have to be reported. He has the right to punish transgressions of the law, confiscate the property of wrongdoers, and to banish them from the city. He has his own police troop and distributes confiscated property or goods among its members, keeping a part for himself.²³ The geitoniarches has “to look in various ways upon the things that happen in the houses,” and if he notices any transgression, he has to inform the landlord who must correct the matter on the spot. If the landlord refuses to do so, the geitoniarches is obliged to denounce him to the city prefect.²⁴ Also, the geitoniarches has to invite persons to come who do n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction: a neighbourhood perspective on Byzantine cities
• Part I Defining Byzantine neighbourhoods
• Part II Byzantine neighbourhoods as social spaces
• Part III Byzantine neighbourhoods as political agents
• Index