Environment and Society in Byzantium, 650-1150

Between the Oak and the Olive

Alexander Olson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030599355
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030599362
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book illuminates Byzantines' relationship with woodland between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Using the oak and the olive as objects of study, this work explores shifting economic strategies, environmental change, and the transformation of material culture throughout the middle Byzantine period. Drawing from texts, environmental data, and archaeological surveys, this book demonstrates that woodland's makeup was altered after Byzantium's seventh-century metamorphosis, and that people interacted in new ways with this re-worked ecology. Oak obtained prominence after late antiquity, illustrating the shift from that earlier era's intensive agriculture to a more sylvan middle Byzantine economy. Meanwhile, the olive faded into the background, re-emerging in the eleventh and twelfth centuries thanks to the initiative of people adapting yet again to newly changed political and economic circumstances. This book therefore shows that Byzantines' relationship with their ecology was far from static, and that Byzantines' decisions had environmental impacts.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. OlsonEnvironment and Society in Byzantium, 650-1150New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59936-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alexander Olson¹

(1)

Independent scholar, Burnaby, BC, Canada

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that olive and oak are useful objects for studying environmental, economic, social, and cultural changes. It emphasizes that due to its environmental requirements, frequent mention in textual sources, use in construction and agrarian economies, and long lifespan, the oak is an excellent means for studying relationships between premodern people and their environments. The chapter also demonstrates that the olive, due to its strong remains in fossil studies, archaeologically noticeable oileries, and focus in written works, is also a useful source for analyzing how human choices have interacted with the Mediterranean environment. This chapter also presents the available sources for studying how Middle Byzantium’s environmental history unfolded in the Aegean Basin. It sets the chronological limits of the study between 650 and 1150.

Keywords

Environmental historyByzantine historyLand useEconomy

End Abstract

At some point, probably in the eleventh century, a Byzantine man named Pantoléôn engaged in the arduous work of clearing a field in northern Greece’s Chalkidike peninsula.¹ With an axe he cut down the trees’ trunks, and then, painfully stooped for long periods of time, dug up roots with a pick, possibly setting fire to the deadwood in order to expedite the process. Perhaps the only aspect of the situation that was positive for this medieval fellow was the cool weather, as it is most likely that he carried out this exhausting work that did not yield a meal (at least in the short term) during the winter when harvests and the vintage were not pressing concerns. Pantoléôn’s relationship with trees was not entirely adversarial though, despite the fact that he was removing them. In the midst of his clearing, he noticed a tall evergreen oak and a deciduous oak with exceptionally tasty acorns, and he decided to leave these two trees untouched.² In fact, when all this back-breaking work was complete, these two trees stood right in the middle of Pantoléôn’s newly cleared field. His choice was a sensible one. These oaks could provide leaf fodder for goats, acorns for pigs, possibly even for himself and his family given that these acorns were mentioned as especially edible. Finally, these two oaks could provide shade for Pantoléôn and his wife (whose name is not given in the text) if they took a break from reaping and gathering their field’s cereal.

While the document that provides us with the only known evidence of Pantoléôn’s existence was focused on determining what lands were owned by a large monastery, called Iviron (and for that reason the document only treated this peasant tangentially) the text reminds one that medieval Romans (hereafter often called “Byzantines”), like most people in the pre-industrial Mediterranean, had to pursue their existence next to, and often within, woodland.³ Truly, woodland was central to the lives of Byzantine peasants who represented the vast majority of the population: it provided food, fuel, and building materials. It was a place in which economic decisions were made, social relations expressed, and where much of the rhythm of daily life transpired. With such importance in mind, if one really wants to obtain a better understanding of the Byzantine economy, material culture, and landscapes, then it is necessary to situate these historical actors beside this woodland. This woodland’s form varied considerably across the Byzantine world, ranging from the bushy scrub consisting of evergreen oak, wild olives, and drought-resistant shrubs that often covers the drier locales of Greece and Turkey, to the canopied woodland dominated by deciduous oaks accompanied by handfuls of chestnut, beech, or fir trees in cooler and wetter areas, to the pine-dominated slopes of mountains. Regardless of its form, this woodland was very important to the Byzantines who utilized it on a constant basis. Indeed, Byzantines’ choices and attitudes had significant effects on woodland composition and scope because they promoted certain arboreal species in its midst. At the same time, certain types of trees pressured Byzantine cultivators, with varieties such as evergreen oak presenting a formidable challenge to anyone who did not actively prevent it from spreading into their fields. As the great Mediterranean historian Fernand Braudel noted in his influential work on Mediterranean history, people had to work hard to prevent vegetation from infiltrating their cultivated spaces.⁴ His quote was specifically in reference to Mediterranean agricultural practice in hilly areas, but it adequately reflects the challenges that Mediterranean farmers face, not only from working around sharp relief, but from working against the tenacious plant life that characterizes the region’s ecology.

This interplay between Byzantine people and their physical environment is the subject of this book, and consequently this work adopts the set of concerns and interests that are central to the sub-discipline of environmental history. At its most basic level environmental history is, as the noted practitioner John McNeill defines it, a form of history that includes the environment as a component of its analysis or story.⁵ Another prominent scholar in the field, the US historian William Cronon, has implored environmental historians to figure out nature’s function and significance for humans,⁶ and to concentrate on relationships between people and ecosystems as opposed to modes of production.⁷ More specific definitions are possible, although there is disagreement within the field as to what these definitions should include or exclude.⁸ Medieval historians, while analyzing very different contexts from those of their Americanist counterparts, have produced works that recognize how a combination of peoples’ perceptions, values, and material demands shaped their landscape, which in turn acted on the minds and material conditions of people.⁹ Highly varied topics and methodologies are certainly possible in environmental history, and it is clear that an interest in the interaction between people and their environment, however defined, greatly enriches any type of historical study, including those of pre-modern contexts. Yet such works are still relatively few for the medieval European context, and especially rare for the study of the medieval Roman Empire (hereafter called “Byzantium”).

An all-encompassing environmental history of Byzantium would represent a considerable undertaking and would probably run several volumes. As most environmental histories concentrate on a specific topic, this book focuses specifically on trees and woodland. Indeed, a particular attention to trees can be beneficial in the realm of environmental history. Some historians have already used trees as a focus of their work, broadening fellow scholars’ perspectives on specific historical environments, cultures, and economies in the process.¹⁰

Scholars of Byzantium, with one notable exception,¹¹ have not made the Byzantine interaction with trees a primary subject of their works. However, several historians have touched on various other themes or aspects of the Byzantine interaction with woodland or the changing landscape history of Byzantium. In several articles, John Haldon has made use of fossilized pollen samples and historical texts to argue that the Caliphate’s seventh-century warfare directed against Byzantium led to land abandonment in central Anatolia and a consequent increase in tree cover.¹² Another Byzantinist, Adam Izdebski, has synthesized Byzantine history with environmental data from the Anatolian portion of the Empire, arguing that Asia Minor’s landscape became differentiated in the early middle ages, with changes in the environment arising from land abandonment and shifts to other forms of cultivation in light of the seventh-century’s political and economic transformation.¹³ In essence, these environmentally inclined works examine the breakdown and adaptation of the Byzantine state and its ability to harness the region’s agrarian resources in the face of historical transitions and also climate change. While these works are the most environmentally informed of any that treat Byzantium, their geographic and chronological parameters are specific to the Anatolian plateau in the seventh century, and their analytical focus emphasizes warfare, plague, state collapse, and climate change as explanations for changes in vegetative cover.

This book differs from the works mentioned above in several ways. First, it adopts a longer and later chronological focus: roughly following an arc between the mid-seventh and the mid-twelfth centuries. Second, this book’s geographical concern is the Aegean Basin, a region very different than the Anatolian plateau. For our purposes, I define the Aegean Basin (or Aegean littoral) as the ring of lowlands and river valleys that surrounds and empties into the Aegean Sea. The selection of this geographical delimitation is two-fold. First, as Leonora Neville articulated in a crucial work regarding Byzantine social history, this region represents the “core” of the Byzantine Empire, where foreign powers did not effectively invade and in which the Byzantine government was consistently demonstrating its sovereignty and made itself felt via the collection of taxes.¹⁴ Thus, the Aegean stood in contrast, economically and culturally, to the outlying border regions which were largely in the hands of co-opted magnates (such as the Caucasus, the interior of the Balkans, and the Adriatic and Italian provinces of the Empire). Second, the Aegean littoral has a very different climatic regime and ecology than the other “core” region of Middle Byzantium, the Anatolian plateau: the area that has received much more attention from scholars interested in the Byzantine interaction with the environment, including Haldon and Izdebski.¹⁵ The large grasslands and cold winters of the Anatolian plateau are not a feature of the Aegean world, but a collection of hills, small coastal plains, mild winters, hot summers, and Mediterranean vegetation is. Environmental differences still certainly exist within the Basin, some locales being more arid with light soils and others being comparatively wet with deeper soils.

Despite ecological variation throughout the Aegean littoral, the early Byzantine period saw an overall expansion in arboreal cover in the region. However, this story has received far less attention than the tale of postclassical Anatolia’s environmental transformation. A handful of scholars have acknowledged the littoral’s more wooded environment of the eighth and ninth centuries, with Archibald Dunn providing further analysis, by means of both textual sources and studies of fossilized pollen, of later clearance and the general role of the state in utilizing woodland.¹⁶ However, this story needs to be further fleshed out in order to better appreciate how this changed environment affected the region’s inhabitants and how they, in turn, worked with it.

It is this emphasis on how and why people worked with certain trees the way that they did, that also serves to separate this book from the environmentally inclined scholarly works discussed above. While the works of Haldon and Izdebski have provided valuable new data, established that there was a significant change in the amount of arboreal pollen in the air, and illustrated the role of warfare, cultural shifts, and climate change in altering the landscape, this book shifts attention to how the environmental data indicates plants’ opportunism and reflects cultivators’ choices. Further, this work explores how cultivators adapted to a landscape that changed on its own in the face of a reduced human presence. Essentially, it is this book’s contention that certain trees enable another level of cultural and economic analysis, shedding light on the ideas that shape land use. These alternative points of focus will receive elaboration further below.

This book’s inquiry into Byzantines’ choices, and how the resultant economic strategies affected their landscape, has predecessors in the field. Several agrarian historians (who, given their interests, could fit under the more recent label ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Middle Byzantium’s Environmental and Economic Antecedents
• 3. An Evergreen Empire
• 4. The Decline of the Olive in Middle Byzantium
• 5. Rearranging Woods and Scrub
• 6. The Return of the Olive
• 7. The Devil Chops Wood
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter