A stunning panorama of the thickly forested Pontic Alps rising sharply as backdrop to Trebizond impresses to this day travelers that set sail from this ancient Black Sea port-city like modern age Argonauts on their way to myriad destinations. And yet on a hot day early in September 1071, the judge of the Hippodrome and the velum Michael Attaleiates had little time to think of natureās flare for the picturesque. Bleak thoughts surely run through his mind as he left Asia Minor behind him on his way to Constantinople . Beyond the Pontic mountain range, days upon days of frantic horseback riding, to the south and east of Trebizond in the vicinity of Lake Van , lay an apocalyptic landscape littered with the swelling bodies of Roman soldiers. Attaleiates had only narrowly escaped the fate of these men during the bloody aftermath of the imperial armyās crushing defeat at the hands of the Seljuq Sultan Alp Arslan. Some of his colleagues had not been so lucky and the emperor himself had been captured, a first in centuries of Roman history.
Usually judges like Attaleiates are mere shadows on the dimly lit canvas of the empireās long legal and administrative history. We know the names of numerous members of Byzantiumās judicial class and yet, more often than not, their names alone do not tell us much. Most survive as inscriptions on lead seals that reveal little about their careers on the judgeās bench or their lives beyond the hustle and bustle of the lively byzantine courts. A smaller number of judges left us their writings on law from which we glean information regarding their profession and even, sometimes, a sense of their approach to justice. Attaleiates, however, was reasonably well known in his own time. The sources at our disposal are richer and while only small ciphers from the much larger mosaic of his life actually survive, what emerges from those is colorful and illuminating. In fact, Attaleiates was likely a household name in Constantinople at the time.
A few years prior to the aforementioned catastrophe, Attaleiates was one of the presiding judges during what in his time must have registered as the trial of the century. He joined empress Eudokia and a number of his colleagues in legal drama that in 1067 consumed the attention of the body politic. The general Romanos Diogenes, a respected warrior who had openly expressed his frustration with the empireās handling of Seljuq incursions in Asia Minor , was arraigned for sedition and conspiracy against the throne. Roughly a decade after the fact Attaleiates penned a short account of the event in which he explained that the court condemned Romanos despite a sense, shared by every single one of its members, that the generalās motivation had been irreproachable and his intentions noble. Alas, sedition against imperial authority could under no circumstances be condoned, patriotism notwithstanding. In a turn of events that contemporaries attributed to cupid, whose arrows many thought had struck Eudokia in the course of the trial, the empress spared the condemned man. 1 Romanos had proven too handsome to kill and but weeks later he became Eudokiaās husband and emperor. Little ink has been spilled on this tantalizing bit of historical trivia. Buried in Attaleiates larger History of his times it is quickly sidestepped by readers who itch to leave behind them Constantinopolitan intrigue and follow Romanos and his army on his campaigns against the Seljuqs in Asia. And yet discussions no doubt raged in Constantinople, a fecund ground for political gossip, regarding every detail of the trial. 2 The people in the streets surely pointed at the judge as he rode from the courts to his home and back, dressed in his best silk fabrics.
Such notoriety rarely came without direct material rewards. Two decrees bearing golden imperial seals, issued by Emperors Michael VII and Nikephoros III in 1075 and 1079 respectively, indicate that the man who tried Romanos Diogenes turned fame into real political dividend and tangible material benefits in the years after the trial. Here is how the secretariat working for Michael VII recorded what their emperor wished to say about Attaleiates:
There is nothing at all which can render the generous soul of a ruler even more generous than the sincere loyalty of a grateful subject whose heart is eager to serve his master. If this man is also adorned with learning of general usefulness and a good disposition and intelligence, this encourages his master to even more generosity. For this man attracts his master to himself as a magnet does iron, and he asks, as is reasonable, to enjoy abundant favors from him. Indeed an example has been revealed right before our eyes and very close at hand that this is so and that these words are true, namely the anthypatos and judge, Michael Attaleiates, a man venerated for the dignity of his bearing and his good character, a very serious individual of great learning and admirable experience, and even more admirable is his loyalty to my majesty, a man who is prouder of this [loyalty] with which he is adorned than he is of his other accomplishments, as a long period of time has clearly revealed. 3
The parsing index finger stops at the very middle of the paragraph above, where the emperor notes that right before his eyes, very close at hand Attaleiates stood as a model of loyalty to his rule. This document is testament to Attaleiatesā social and political success. The judge, who first tried and then served Romanos Diogenes loyally, figures here as a respectable and trustworthy servant of the very regime that in time toppled the warrior emperor and ordered his blinding. A second imperial decree was issued by the successor to Michael VII, Nikephoros III Botaneiates , to whom Attaleiates eventually dedicated his historical work. As with the document cited above, the language on this one suggests that the judge remained within the charmed circle of imperial confidants. In the tumultuous 3rd quarter of the eleventh century, Attaleiates successfully navigated courtly intrigue over four successive administrations from Konstantinos X to Nikephoros III and with every upheaval and change at the helm of the state increased his influence and wealth, while at the same time carefully shepherding his one and only son into the ranks of the empireās officialdom.
This book then is about this one man, a respected judge, effective courtier, and active politician. In a sense, it is a micro-history: a study of Byzantiumās pen-pushers, a look at the role of highly educated officials in the empireās politics through the focused engagement with one manās life. Men like Attaleiates produced laws, framed imperial ideology, promoted some imperial reformist initiatives while undermining others, and interpreted the Roman past in ways compelling for both emperors and citizens. 4 The medieval Roman polity, the state that the Byzantines themselves called RomanĆa (the land of the Romans), was an imagined community created on parchment by Attaleiates and his peers and defended on land and sea by the very same men who populated the pages of their histories. Courtiers and bureaucrats are what distinguished RomanĆa from feudal polities and emerging republics in the west. They were such a prominent aspect of RomanĆaās social and political life that thirteenth-century Crusaders mocked Byzantine officialdom by pretending to write in ledgers while holding quills. And yet, ironically, there is perhaps only one accessible study of this influential class of men. Members of the empireās erudite officialdom no doubt cast an unimpressive shadow when placed next to warrior emperors, rebellious generals, and hardy warriors. It is to them, however, that we must turn in order to understand the distinct nature of the medieval Roman polity and state, since the quill of the bureaucrat often trumped the sword of the empireās soldiers, shaping, for better or for worse, the fate of the empire and the way that its history is remembered.
This then is a biography of a man, whom we know by the three texts he left us, all of them little read and yet important in their own right for the study of Byzantium. It may appear disingenuous that as a historian I write about a medieval ācolleague,ā yet it should be clear from the outset that this is not a study of Attaleiates as a writer of history. Our subject was after all a judge, a member of the court, who only incidentally dabbled with history. In that, Attaleiates differs from my colleagues all around the world and of course he differs from me. Unlike him, we write history to earn a living. Unlike us, he did not pay his bills by crafting historical narratives and he was by no means expected to instruct students in a classroom. Different, however, as his career path may have been from that of most academic historians, he nevertheless sought to fulfill an aspiration as true today as it was back in the eleventh century. As an educated individual Attaleiates partook in a vibrant debate on politics and culture and aimed to instruct future generations, much like his modern counterparts who teach in university classrooms.
Still, one can take such comparisons only so far. Attaleiatesā audiences were unlike ours and, as a result, his narrative techniques and ours are distinctly different. We are supposed to be self-effacing and keep our biases under control, or at least clearly stated, as we process information with academic rigor. He, on the other hand, wore some of his biases on his sleeve, while expressing some others more discreetly, trying not to step on the toes of too powerful a court rival. He also made cameo appearances in his own historical narrative in an attempt to highlight his role in the events described and used his own deeds as examples for his readers. Modern scholarship on Byzantium has noted this āautobiographical impulseā of the historians and chroniclers who wrote in the period from the tenth century onwards. It is this phenomenon that I exploit here in order to reconstruct aspects of Michael Attaleiatesā life, not as a historian, but as judge, courtier, and member of the empireās bureaucratic elite.
One man then becomes a fellow traveler on a journey through the eleventh century. His trajectory, from provincial birth to Constantinopolitan burial, takes him from a bustling provincial harbor to the palace in Constantinople and the Byzantine army in the battlefield. In examining the details of his life, as those emerge from the diverse texts he left to posterity, we visit the empireās territories, we walk the streets of Constantinople, we invest on land and real estate, and we take his advice on how to craft an effective tax haven for our fortune. We even face the prospect of death at the hands of the empireās barbarian enemies.
In proposing such a journey back in time, I seek freedom from the historical presumption that as scholars we may only commit to paper what can be strictly verified by the sources. Such exigency, while in theory ensuring historical accuracy, rarely allows an accessible image of an era to emerge. Our sources, if only they are treated imaginatively, though by no means uncritically, offer a peek at exactly such an image. Whether Attaleiates stared at the sea on a breezy summer afternoon, while sitting at the pier of his hometown harbor, cannot be confirmed by his writings. Yet the fact that he was born in the Mediterranean port town of Attaleia where he spent his childhood makes it an absolute certainty that he had indeed felt the sea breeze in his hair. As a piece of information this little detail may appear speculative and devoid of significance. It does, however, open a window into the mind of this one medieval man and it is up to us to look into it and examine the implications of what we see inside.
The reconstitution of Attaleiatesā experience necessarily also relies on information, which only indirectly deals with him, such as evidence from the historical footprint of other known members of his class. Eustathios Romaios, Michael Psellos, Christophoros Mytilinaios, Symeon Seth, and Basileios Maleses are Attaleiatesā contemporaries whose experiences and worldviews become ciphers in the latterās portrait. By focusing on a single personās life, as distilled from his own writings and from the experiences of his contemporaries, this book aims for a semblance of chronological order. However, as anyone who has ever attempted to relate such a story knows all too well, strict chronological sequence is difficult to achieve without sacrifices in the fluidity of the narration. People recounting their lives rarely do so in straight lines. The inevitable ebb and flow of events and memories lead one back and forth and disrupt the neat linear scheme of the storyteller.
What is more, the story of Attaleiatesā life resembles, in a way, a damaged wall painting. There are areas of the composition where the colors are bright, where lines are clearly discernible and patterns visible to all, while in others whole pieces of plaster have fallen off the wall leaving large gaps. Still elsewhere we reconstruct the image by recourse to what we know about similar compositions. As any conservator of art would admit and any archeologist would confirm, a fair degree of uncertainty is involved in the process of restoration. Yet, as with any restored piece of art or architecture, the end result, even if speculative to a degree, will excite our imagination and spur further research in ways that academic caution might not.
What would Attaleiates have made of the notion itself of academic caution? How much was truly at stake for men of his stature and erudition in the field of letters and ideas? Did this seasoned j...