Settlements and countryside of Messenia during the late Middle Ages: the testimony of the fortifications

Abstract

The various groups of fortifications that were in use in Messenia during the period of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries are examined. Five categories are distinguished based on their position, size and defensive features. It is concluded that the fortifications were directly linked to the new social and political reality that prevailed in the area between the dismantlement of the Byzantine empire in 1204 and the Ottoman conquest in the second half of the fifteenth century.     

Divine Diplomacy in the late Eleventh Century

Abstract

The subject of the XXIV Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies was Byzantine Diplomacy and many of the papers dealt with high-level contacts between Byzantium and other medieval states. But although Byzantines often made use of churchmen and monks as ambassadors and although there was usually a religious dimension to Byzantine diplomacy, it is worth noting that powerful monastic figures and influential houses often engaged in diplomacy on their own account. The theatre of operations was often more geographically limited, but this kind of monastic diplomacy had much in common with its lay counterpart. In both cases, it was Constantinople and the imperial court which was the centre of ‘diplomatic activity’ and, in both cases, negotiations were often delicate and long-protracted. If favours were sought, if confirmations of privileges were required, if difficulties with zealous local officials were to be overcome, then representations needed to be made at the highest level. This often meant a monastic delegation visiting Constantinople and operating in very similar ways to lay missions.     

Reports

Abstract

Coins provide a useful historical source for the momentous events that took place in Palestine during the seventh century A.D., but relatively few have been properly published in excavation reports. This article catalogues 21 Byzantine and 10 Arab-Byzantine coins from the PEF collections, all of which are previously unpublished, including a number from excavations at Jerusalem, Nessana, Gezer and Kafr Harib. Apart from their intrinsic interest as individual coins, they provide some useful information on the coinage in circulation immediately before the Arab conquest and in the early years of Arab rule.     

A note on the death of Leo Sgurus in A.D. 1208

Abstract

Leo Sgurus, archon and ‘tyrant’ of Argolis and Corinthia from c.1200 with an impressive career in the period until c.1208, succeeded in establishing an extensive albeit short-lived Territorialstaat in the NE Peloponnesus following the Latin capture of Constantinople on 12/13 April 1204 and the subsequent Latin onslaught in Greek territories. Truly among the most outstanding figures of the late Byzantine era, Sgurus has been characterized by Dionysios A. Zakythenos as one of the last 'defenders of Greek independence’ following the Frankish conquest of 1204, for this local archon seems to have constituted the sale realistic hope of the mainland Greece populations for an effective stance against the marching crusaders of Boniface of Montferrat, though, as the late George Kolias observed thirty years ago, he unwisely directed his activities rather against his compatriots than against the Latin invader. Yet, it has recently been said by Michael J. Angold that Sgurus ‘almost certainly enjoyed local backing in his expeditions’.     

‘Feeling the rhythm of the waves: “castaway rhetoric” in John Eugenikos’ Logos eucharisterios’

Abstract

In September 1438 John Eugenikos decided to quit the council of Ferrara and sail back to Constantinople. Off Italy's Adriatic coast his vessel experienced a terrible shipwreck, whereby many of John's fellow-passengers perished. John decided then to retell his almost deadly experience in a thanks-giving logos, allegedly compiled on the basis of notes written down soon after the shipwreck. The logos stands out as a unique document in the landscape of Byzantine travel literature. This paper offers the first comprehensive literary analysis of Eugenikos’ account, shedding new light on the narrative patterns chosen by the author to recount his own experience and stage his public persona.     

‘Der sehleehteste Staat’: Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844–1913) on Byzantine institutions

Abstract

Just as Karl Marx, in 1842, called the Byzantine empire ‘der schlechteste Staat’, so did Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844–1913), the protagonist of Ottomanism and at the same time the first Ottoman ‘to make a strong and clear case for the Turkish ancestry of the Ottomans’ (David Kushner), a few decades later. Byzantine history stands, according to Midhat, for the Dark Ages, and the Byzantine empire for corruption, lawlessness, extravagance and frivolity. By contrast, the picture drawn by him of the early Ottomans is one of a community based on high moral values such as decency, concord, obedience and mutual esteem. In his view, the rise of the Ottomans heralds the dawning of the Modern Age. His identification of the Ottomans as the liberators from the Dark Ages of all the peoples previously under Byzantine rule is the central element in his concept of the ‘enlightened and liberating Ottomans,. His Detailed History of Modern Times (Mufassal Tarih-i Kurun-i Cedide), with its section on Byzantine history and institutions, has already been introduced to readers of the last issue of BMGS.     

The First Arab Expedition against Amorium

Abstract

The chronology of Byzantine history in the middle of the seventh century is obscure and confused. Among the unsettled problems is the date of the early Arab raids into Asia Minor after the Arabs completed their conquest of Palestine and Syria in 640. The scanty Greek and Oriental Christian sources need supplementation from the Arabic ones. Although Charles C. Torrey published his edition of the Futū Mir or History of the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa and Spain by Ibn ‘Abd al-akam more than fifty years ago, Byzantinists do not appear to have consulted the important section on Egypt which has not been fully translated into a western language. Yet Ibn ‘Abd al-akam, who was born c. 798–9 and who died in 871, is a significant and early historical authority. He provides a short reference to an Arab expedition against Amorium in the year A.H. 23 (A.D. 644): ‘ … according to Layth b. Sa‘d [and] he said 'Wahb b. ‘Umayr was commander of the forces of Egypt in the Amorium expedition [fī ghazwati ‘Ammūriyata] in the year twenty-three and the commander of the forces of Syria [was] Abu‘l-A‘war al-Sulamī’.’     

Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 11 June 2009

Abstract

A total of 119 rock-cut burial caves of the Roman and Byzantine periods were surveyed in the study area, all of which had been subjected to robbing at some point in the recent past. This tomb raiding in the Saffa region has resulted in severe damage to a large number of rock-cut tombs, the desecration of several hundred ancient burials, and in the extraction of thousands of funerary objects from their original context. This study depends mainly on interviews with several of the raiders of these tombs and on a field survey carried out by the author in February and March 2011. The main aim of this study is to address three questions: What are the present and future challenges facing the tombs of the Roman and Byzantine periods in the study area? Could an ethnographical study help us to expand our understanding of the looting history of these burial caves and the kinds of looted objects that were found there? What can such an ethnographical study add to our understanding of the past?     

The exploitation and control of woodland and scrubland in the Byzantine world

Abstract

A welcome and necessary aspect of the renewal of studies of the Byzantine economy has been the analysis, sometimes in both the technical and the broader organisational aspects, of the production and redistribution of particular goods. One only has to think of some recent work concerning mining and metallurgy, minting, silk-production, glass-making, potteries, shipping, and salsamenta, to realise the potential significance of such studies, the need for the historical study of all types of economic activity, and how unilluminating has become the incantation of such statements as that the Byzantine economy was ‘overwhelmingly' rural (almost invariably made with reference to the primary products of a narrowly defined agriculture), or that centres of population were ‘characterised by consumption', or even that commercialised redistribution was ‘feeble’ and stagnant in the Early Byzantine period.     

Anna Comnena's account of the First Crusade: History and politics in the reigns of the emperors Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus

Abstract

Anna Comnena's history the Alexiad has been accorded a high honorary status by Byzantine historians. Her pioneering efforts in philosophy and the thoroughness of her historical methodology are admired, although there is a distinct reluctance to analyse her historical writing. On a superficial level the Alexiad is a straightforward text: an historical panegyric in its organisation, frequently eulogistic in tone, in the manner of court orations, and rhetorically strongly influenced by conventional Byzantine pastiches of Homer. A triumphal mood pervades the biography. A somewhat more careful assessment soon reveals the significant tensions and contradictions which lurk beneath the formalised strength of this epic historical narrative. Ideological and cultural problematics abound. The self-conscious celebratory presentation of Byzantium's cultural elitism is frequently subverted by the author's pessimism. The spatial and temporal terrain of the Alexiad contains many visionary qualities, even though the text purports to narrate the events ‘as they occurred‘. Historical perspectives and idiosyncratic philosophical positions impinge, blend, envelop, and disorganise the text. Among the many themes is Anna's presentation of the ‘Latin West’, and in particular her characterisation of the appearance of crusaders in Byzantine society. A more personalised feature is Anna's self-projection of herself within the Alexiad as ‘a dutiful daughter’ and ‘a loving wife’. Yet the narrative contains elements of gender confusion, for there is an assertive and possessive interest in forms of political power that were usually culturally exclusive to Byzantine men.     

Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography

Abstract

The Russian scholar V.A. Smetanin, whose work during the 1970s and 1980s dealt exclusively with Byzantine epistolography, would clearly like to think of himself as an ‘epistolologist', occupied in the specialised field of Byzantine ‘epistolology'. Epistolology is an auxiliary discipline within history, according to Smetanin, which encompasses both theoretical and practical concerns. Its theoretical interests are to work out methods for, (a¹) drawing boundaries between letters and other historical documents, (b¹) dating letters on the basis of their epistolological markings (epistolologicheskich priznakov), and (c¹) understanding the introduction and assimilation of correspondence into learned discourse. On its practical side, epistolology aims to solve problems of, (a²) the immediate components (nepocredstvennoe vychlenenie) of correspondence, (b²) its architectonics, and finally (c²), the introduction and assimilation of the epistolographic legacy into learned discourse. Smetanin opens a middle road within epistolology, too, in effect a series of ‘steps’ (stupenich) which converge on both theory and practice. Thus the so-called ?oχωρισι (a³) takes in the question of the distinguishing features of epistolography, ?ρo? λευσι(b³) works out its manner or conduct and ??ρμoσι (c³) studies its function or use.     

The Aleppo question: a Byzantine-Fatimid conflict of interests in Northern Syria in the later tenth century A.D.

Abstract

The ambition to control Syria had always been among the serious temptations of Emperor Nikephoros Phokas (963–969). In the last year of his reign and specifically on October 28th, 969 A.D. two of his generals, Michael Bourtzes and Peter Phokas (the Stratopedarch), at last succeeded in capturing the great city of Antioch. I For the first time in three centuries Byzantium reestablished its authority in Northern Syria, and soon Antioch became a seat of a doux whose responsibility was to guard the southeastern flank of the Empire. Like both the doux of Mesopotamia and that of Chaldia, the doux of Antioch had to supervise the small themes in the new Byzantine territories which came under his jurisdiction. Moreover, as a stronghold Antioch was to serve as the main Byzantine headquarters in all military operations in Syria for years to come.     

Peasant Names in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia

Abstract

The historian who is engaged in the study of Byzantine social history is faced with a problem common to pre-industrial societies, or societies in which the majority of the population is both exploited and illiterate. The sources, written as they are by an upper class and largely for an upper class, give relatively abundant information about a small segment of the population, leaving us in darkness about the rest of society. In Byzantine history this is particularly true about the peasantry, which has left us only a very few sources of its own, and rather uninspiring ones at that. The Byzantine upper class wrote its own history, but the Byzantine peasants did not, thus making the task of the modern historian more difficult. Despite these problems, work has been done on both the urban and the rural population of the Empire, and more will probably be done as monastic archives become available. The study of the Byzantine peasantry is of primary importance. For if we are to understand Byzantine society, we must study and understand what happened in the countryside. After all, the Byzantine economy rested on agriculture, and the social relations which determined the fate of the state were, primarily, the social relations prevalent in the countryside.     

A Byzantine hagiographical parody: Life of Mary the Younger

Abstract

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life.     

A Critical Reappraisal of Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias

Abstract

Despite the massive amount of scholarly literature on Iconoclasm and its aftermath, there are really only two major publications that deal specifically and synthetically with ninth-century art. One of these is André Grabar's magisterial L'iconoclasme byzantin, a chronological analysis of monuments and texts; the other is Robin Cormack's short but insightful essay in Iconoclasm, the collection of papers originally presented at Birmingham in 1975, which asks ‘whether the discussion of religious images stimulated by Iconoclasm changed the nature of Byzantine Art’. My aim is rather different. Rather than presenting an encyclopedic overview, this article attempts to crawl into the fabric of Byzantine culture: to see and understand Byzantine art of the ninth century as the Byzantines saw and understood it. It follows that the material presented has not been segregated into the familiar (and often useful) categories of style, iconography, and context, for, to the Byzantines, the three were neither exclusive nor separable. For similar reasons, I have deemphasized any linear progression that might imposed with art historical hindsight on the distant past, and have thereby underplayed the flashes of innovation, novelty and erudition that such detachment allows. These sparks are probably more visible (and certainly more appealing) to twentieth-century art historians than they were to the ninth-century Byzantines, for whom, as we shall see, the power of tradition militated against individual creativity, and artists on the whole remained anonymous artisans. In my attempt to look at Byzantine art from the inside rather than from the outside I have, in other words, concentrated on the fluid interface between objects, and the shifting dialogue between objects and context. This is because what interests me here is how Byzantine ideas about art (their theories), Byzantine perception (how the Byzantines saw), and the artifacts themselves (the practice) come together in the ninth century: how art, that preeminent social construct, worked in the years after Iconoclasm.     

A Greek Lexicon of the middle Byzantine period

Abstract

Greek lexicography of the Byzantine period is a thorny subject, indeed an almost thankless task, if efforts end merely in a collection of inaccessible and unpublished handwritten' material. I would like to call to mind the case of Emmanuel Miller in the last century, who showed a continuous interest in lexicography, pouring out new Greek words in the notes to his editions on every occasion. However, those notes are nothing but feeble shadows of his vast collection left to the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris about ninety years ago. When I inspected this mass of more than 40,000 small slips, I was considerably taken aback, in view of the fact that this collection as well as every other similar to it (for instance the 10,000 Athesaurista gathered by Pezopoulos) are practically of no use for Byzantine studies, since they have never been published.     

From Süleyman Pasha to Mehmet Fuat Köprülü: Roman and Byzantine history in late Ottoman historiography

Abstract

The following is a continuation of the task set out in my Note in BMGS 10 (1986) 211–22. Working towards a Bibliography, I have tried to bring together, in a corpus, Ottoman Turkish works of some importance dealing with Roman and Byzantine history (including historical topography) which appeared as books, or part of books, between c.1870 and 1920. A particular aim has been to illustrate the development of this corpus in relationship with ‘westernising’ trends in the historiography of the Ottoman empire over the same period.     

Synônê: re-considering a problematic term of middle Byzantine fiscal administration

Abstract

The history of Byzantine fiscal administration, as is well-known, is still an area in which many problems remain to be resolved. In 1880 the Russian Byzantinist V. G. Vassilievsky, one of the first historians to address them seriously, described Byzantine fiscal structures as labyrinthine; other scholars have not disagreed. But as a result of the work of successive generations, we are in a much better position today to understand the fundamental lines of development of late Roman and Byzantine fiscal arrangements, and in particular to follow the evolution of middle and later Byzantine fiscal administrative structures out of the situation that prevailed in the later Roman period, especially from the fifth and sixth centuries. Many problems remain, of course, and in the present contribution I would like to re-examine the term synônê, which has a technical significance in late Roman and Byzantine texts. The exact meaning of the word remains disputed and this has led to conflicting opinions among those who have attempted to interpret its application in the sources. The resolution of some of these questions has important consequences for our understanding of how the state's fiscal structures operated over the period in question.     

Armitage on Locke on International Theory: The Two Treatises of Government and the Right of Intervention

Summary

The paper examines David Armitage's claim that Locke makes an important contribution to international theory by exploring the place of international relations within the Two Treatises of Government. Armitage's suggestion is that the place of international theory in Locke's canonical works is under-explored. In particular, the paper examines the implication of Locke's account of the executive power of the law of nature which allows third parties to punish breaches of the law of nature wherever they occur. The corollary is a general right of intervention under the law of nature. Such a right could create a chaotic individualistic cosmopolitanism and has led scholars such as John Rawls to claim that Locke has no international theory. In response to this problem the paper explores the way in which Locke's discussion of conquest, revolution and the right of peoples to determine the conditions of good government in chapters xvi to xix of the second Treatise contributes to a view of international relations that embodies a law of peoples.