13
In the Book of Ceremonies, traditionally ascribed to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos (913-20, 945-59), probably compiled during his second reign and updated later, the emperor is expected to take part in a great number of religious processions in Constantinople: one on every day in the week after Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, 1 May (the date of the dedication of the Nea church in 880 by Basil I, 867-86), feast-days for Elijah, St Demetrios, the Elevation of the Cross, and so on, all across the year. So are a long list of secular officials and religious leaders, tens or often hundreds of people, the wives of officials sometimes, and also the leaders of the circus factions of the city, whose task it is to deliver formal acclamations, as the emperor proceeds through the different halls, chapels and chambers of the Great Palace, out of the Bronze (Chalk) Gate of the Palace (this is where the faction leaders meet him), across the road to Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of the Byzantine empire, and, after a church service, back again. The Booklays down rules for which clothing goes with which feast-day, the text of the different acclamations (some are still in Latin, four hundred years after that language was dying out as a spoken tongue in the city), and the locations of the tables for the post-ceremony dinners. The variability in the ritual could be complex. At Pentecost, for example, the description for which is particularly detailed - it goes on for twelve pages of the modern edition - the officials do not prostrate themselves in proskynsis in front of the emperor in the Great Church, because the feast celebrates the Resurrection; it is the Pentecost service which also sees the empress appearing in church with a particularly elaborate set of official wives, twenty-one separate offices entering in seven separate groups.
Can all this really have taken place, for every feast in every year, with all these people? Who could even have kept all its variations in their head? Constantine certainly took it very seriously; he tells us in the Book’s preface, which he probably wrote himself, that he wanted to re-establish imperial ceremonial, whose neglect left the Byzantine empire ‘without finery and without beauty’, and whose celebration would be a ‘limpid and perfectly clean mirror’ of imperial splendour, allowing ‘the reins of power to be held with order and dignity’. It is clear from this that Constantine did think ceremony had been less elaborate before his time, and many of the descriptions commissioned by him were really reconstructions of long-lost activity, some of them successfully revived, some probably not. But Constantine was not unique in his interest in ceremonial. As we have seen, the capital was used to frequent processions of different types, triumphs for example, even in the difficult centuries before 850. Ceremonial was a living and changing process, with new elements invented all the time (as with Basil’s Nea church commemoration). Even military emperors might relish triumphal entries, and, when they were in the city, they too respected the regular church processions: one of the most military emperors of all, Nikephoros II Phokas (963-9), interrupted a formal ambassadorial hearing in 968 with the envoy of the western emperor Otto I, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, to do the Pentecost procession. Liutprand’s embassy went badly, so he sought to depict it in his report to Otto as negatively as he could: the dignitaries wore old clothes, only the emperor wore gold and jewels, the city crowd which lined the way from the palace to Hagia Sophia was a barefoot rabble, the acclamations were lies, the food at dinner was horrible. Unwillingly, however, Liutprand confirms the formality of the event, and he adds something to the account in the Book of Ceremonies, for the latter had said little about a crowd; this ceremony was not just amazingly elaborate, but was important to at least some of the inhabitants of the city as a whole. They respected the logic of imperial ‘order and dignity’, too.
The high point of Byzantine success and prosperity was the two hundred years after 850 or so. It was marked in the capital by a very elaborate court culture at all levels. The ninth century saw the generalization of élite education; this was already visible for some people under the Second Iconoclasm (see above, Chapter 11), but by the end of the century no secular official in the capital could easily deal politically without it. The cusp figure here was Photios (d. c. 893), who moved up the secular official hierarchy in the 840s and 850s, reaching the post of prtaskrtis, the senior chancery post, before being abruptly promoted sideways to the office of patriarch of Constantinople (858-67, 877- 86). Photios, himself from an élite family (he was a relative of Eirene’s patriarch, Tarasios), was a real intellectual, author of several books, a large letter collection, and a set of sermons of a considerable conceptual sophistication. He can be seen as the main creator of the cultural template and intellectual assumptions of the post-Iconoclast Orthodox church. But he also made it normal for major secular and ecclesiastical figures to be educated. Ecclesiastical rigorists saw Photios’ great learning as spiritual pride, and criticized him for it, but from now on they would be more politically marginal than under Eirene. And there was much to be learned. Photios’ best-known work is the Bibliothk or Library, drafted initially in (perhaps) 845, which discusses 279 separate books in Greek, by both pagan and late Roman Christian authors, in considerable detail, often quoting from them at length (some of these works only survive in Photios’ excerpts), and analysing them critically. This was not the whole of Photios’ reading - he left out poetry, for example - but, even with omissions, it shows the range of books that were available in Constantinople to a rich, determined, and politically powerful reader. The Bibliothk was popular already in the tenth century, presumably as an encyclopedia (it was one of several in circulation - the Book of Ceremonies is in effect another); Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea, modern Kayseri (d. after 932), in the next generation had a copy, and may have helped to edit it. Arethas was, in a different way, as determined a bibliophile as Photios; we have two dozen of the manuscripts made under his supervision, which collect a notable array of writings from Plato up to his own day, and include annotations which are often Arethas’ own work (indeed, they are often in his handwriting). This manuscript collection is certainly very atypical. But the learning Arethas had, and which he displayed in other works in a highly elaborate style, was by 900 or so much more normal.
There are many different signs of the complexity of this élite culture. One is that it included several emperors as authors. Basil I, a hardly literate usurper, made sure his son Leo VI (886-912) was educated, by Photios in fact; Leo wrote a military manual, theTaktika (Tactics), poems, a monastic advice manual, numerous laws (written in a recognizable personal style), and a set of homilies. Leo’s son Constantine VII wrote much of a detailed (if often inaccurate) account of the neighbours of Byzantium, unhelpfully entitled by early modern editors On the Administration of the Empire, as well as commissioning the Book of Ceremonies and several other works. Even Nikephoros Phokas wrote at least notes on the military tactics he was particularly proud of, which were worked up under his supervision as two books, including On Skirmishing Warfare, one of the best of the tenth century’s many military manuals. These were not dilettante writers; for these men, writing connected prose was an essential element of statecraft.
Secondly, this learning soon became quite difficult in itself. Constantine VII largely wrote in a fairly direct style; most of his contemporaries, however, wrote in more elaborate ways, rather more like Arethas. Take Leo Choirosphaktes (d. after 920) for example: he was author of several showpiece poems for events in Leo VI’s reign, including a lyric panegyric on a palace bath-house rebuilt by the emperor, and also of a long poem called the Thousand-line Theology, which sets out an erudite and philosophically complex theology in a verse form itself structured by an acrostic with his own name and titles. Arethas, who was a good hater, and educated enough to know the philosophical allusions, accused Leo of paganism; this was obviously false, but Leo’s Neoplatonism led him to argue that only the educated (particularly experts in astrology, as Leo also was) could understand God at all. Leo Choirosphaktes was mystikos, or private secretary, to Basil I, and under Leo VI was an ambassador to the Bulgarians in 895-904; we have a set of his letters to and from the Bulgar khagan Symeon (893-927) which show the same literariness. Symeon, who had been educated in the capital, could respond in kind, which was a good thing, for in the 910s and 920s other literary figures acting for the emperors, the patriarch and former mystikos Nicholas I (d. 925) and the prtaskrtis Theodore Daphnopates (d. after 961), also sought to impress the Bulgarian ruler with Platonic or Homeric allusions. Theodore much later wrote a prose panegyric with notably complex symbolism to the emperor Romanos II (959-63); Homer, Heliodoros and Herodotos all find their place here. The letters of Leo, bishop of Synnada (d. c. 1005), cite even more classical authors, adding Plutarch, Hesiod, Sophokles; this Leo at least had a sense of humour, and admitted in his will that he read too much lay literature, but he wore his learning as much on his sleeve as any of his predecessors.
This attraction to a past literature recalls the culture of the Carolingian élite in the ninth century, as we shall see, in the density of its allusiveness and the joy in words felt by its authors. (Cf. also Chapter 14, for the ninth-century Arabs.) But there is a difference. The Carolingian kings developed an educated theological culture around them as part of a programme of moral reform; it was possible for people to become politically important solely because of their intellectual ability; Carolingian political crises were all mediated, and moralized about, by intellectuals. In Byzantium, the sense of religious mission was less constant, and, of the figures just mentioned, only Photios could easily be said to have had a political programme based on a worked-out theological or philosophical position. The others were members of an official élite, who saw their education as part of their standing in that élite; they used literary culture as an entry into and justification of political power, not as a guide to how to conduct that power. This is even true for Constantine VII; ‘order and dignity’ were his touchstones, not Carolingian-style moral reform and salvation. Nor were there, for a long time, any important theological disagreements inside the Byzantine political world after the end of Iconoclasm. Indeed, after Nicholas mystikos, even patriarchs were relatively marginal politically for a century or more.
The aim of the tenth-century Byzantine educated élite was different: it was to restore the Roman past, which belonged to them, the true Romans. In the fourth century, membership of the political élite was closely associated with a literary education, as with Libanios, Synesios and Basil of Caesarea (or, in the West, Ausonius and, later, Sidonius Apollinaris). So should it be again, and indeed was. The tenth-century literary language moved away from spoken Greek, sticking closely as it did to late Roman forms. We begin again, as in the late Roman empire, to find snobbish remarks about the lack of literary culture of the military emperors (Constantine VII sneered at Romanos I Lekapenos, 920-44, who had admittedly usurped his own throne, as a ‘common, illiterate fellow’). And the search for a Roman renewal led early to the revival of Roman law; begun by Basil I and Photios, and completed by Leo VI, the Basilika was the translation and rationalization of Justinian’s Digest, Code and Novels. This was henceforth to be (and, as far as we can tell, actually was) the basis of all the legal practice of the empire, as it had not been since the crises of the seventh century. Literary, ceremonial, and legal re-creation went together; with the renewed confidence of the period, the 350-year gap separating Leo and Constantine from Justinian could be conceptually abolished.
Middle Byzantine court culture has often been seen as static and arid; even modern commentators can be found arguing along these lines. Tenth-century writers would be delighted; this was their aim, indeed. But it is not a true account, all the same. For a start, beside all this classical vocabulary there was a dense theological culture in all these writers, as there was not in any of their secular fourth- to sixth-century forebears. Biblical allusions are in fact much commoner in their works than are Plato and Homer, in a way that would have appalled Prokopios, for example. But things were also constantly changing. Ceremonies were always being renewed and developed, even while claiming to be immemorial. They could also be sabotaged, with sometimes sharp political effects. After Leo VI’s fourth marriage in 906, which was flatly illegal in canon law, Patriarch Nicholas banned him from Hagia Sophia. This was almost more momentous than excommunication, for it meant that all the court ceremonial we began with in this chapter was thrown into confusion; Leo had to force Nicholas to resign a year later, and he did not regain his office until Leo’s death. The patriarch did not win on that occasion, but a weaker emperor would have to have conceded rather more. After the murder of Nikephoros Phokas in 969, which was instigated by his nephew and successor John I Tzimiskes (969-76), with the cooperation of Nikephoros’ own wife (and John’s lover) Theophano, John too was banned from Hagia Sophia by Patriarch Polyeuktos (d. 970); Polyeuktos demanded that John must give up Theophano and expel her from the city, and repent his crime, before he could even get into the church to be crowned, and this time the emperor gave in. The denser a ceremonial system, the more easily it can be used to make points, major ones as here, more subtle ones elsewhere. Byzantine politicians played with their system, and it changed, steadily, under their hands, as a direct result.
The Byzantine court, with all its processions, had in fact become a hugely elaborate stage, on which an equally complex politics could be fought out between rival players. The network of offices and titles were ever more crucial parts of a hierarchy which was focused directly on the emperor, and which underpinned the system of imperial power. This could itself be subverted, in the sense that emperors could be removed or marginalized, but the power of the system was nonetheless maintained. It was more solid than any other political system in Europe after the sixth century, and indeed more solid even than the parallel structures of the caliphate, except in the first century of ‘Abbasid power, as we shall see in the next chapter. This was not, however, a ‘theatre state’, a political system only consisting of ceremonial, as on Bali in the nineteenth century, as described by Clifford Geertz. Ceremonial cost money (so did it on Bali, of course), and so did official status. The other aspects of imperial self-presentation, like the bronze tree full of mechanical singing birds which so impressed Liutprand of Cremona on his earlier, happier, embassy to Constantine VII in 949 (as they were intended to - impressing envoys was a major aim of Byzantine ceremonial), cost money too. The Byzantines could be very direct about this, as with the salary-paying ceremony in the week before Palm Sunday also witnessed by Liutprand in 949: the emperor distributed bags of gold coins which were put on the shoulders of each senior court and military official in turn, across a three-day period - for there were so many officials to pay - with lesser officials paid the following week by the chamberlain. (Liutprand told Constantine that he would like it better if he could take part, and got a pound of gold coins for his spirit.) This procedure unveils the underlying motivation of the whole official class: they needed paid office, not only to wield power (which few of them would ever really manage to do), but to sustain their prosperity and lifestyle. As in the time of Theodosius or Justinian, the solidity of the state depended on an effective tax system. Since the early ninth century, this had become more and more organized again, and only this could permit the ceremonial world of Constantine VII to exist at all. Liutprand in 949 certainly did not miss the point, and even in 968, however grudgingly, he had not forgotten it. Byzantine rulers, by now, were simply richer than anyone else in Christian Europe; by 949, indeed, most Muslim rulers did not match them either. It was this that their extreme formality was designed above all else to emphasize, and indeed did so.
The stage we have been looking at was set, in this format at least, by Theodora and her advisers in 843, with the end of Iconoclasm and the proclamation of Orthodoxy (on 11 March, a day commemorated thereafter on the first Sunday of Lent by another formal procession, all across the city, as the Book of Ceremonies tells us). Theodora’s son Michael III (842-67) was dominated by others, herself, then her brother Bardas, then, after Bardas’ murder in 866, by the former groom, now chamberlain, Basil. Basil capped his rapid rise - unusual even in Byzantium, where ancestry was less crucial than in the West, as we shall see shortly - by murdering Michael in 867 as well, and becoming emperor as Basil I. Michael had to be subjected after his death to a campaign of vilification as an inept drunkard to justify this, but Basil established a stable regime, and a family succession for his ‘Macedonian’ dynasty that lasted nearly two centuries, up to 1056, longer than any family had managed before in the history of the empire.
The politico-military situation facing Basil was in most respects a favourable one. Above all, the ‘Abbasid caliphate had dissolved into political crisis after 861, thus neutralizing the strongest power in Eurasia and Byzantium’s most immediate threat; it never recovered, except for a generation roughly coinciding with Leo VI’s reign. This freed up the Byzantines, as Arab civil war had under Constantine V, to be real military protagonists if they could manage it. Already in 863 the emir of Melitene (modern Malatya), one of the main border warlords, was defeated and killed on a raid to the Ankara region; in the 870s Basil went onto the offensive, leading raids over the Tauros mountains into Cilicia and the Euphrates valley. This protagonism remained. Even in the generation of ‘Abbasid revival, the Byzantines at least managed to hold the frontier, and they gained an increasingly concrete hegemony over the lawless borderlands; Basil destroyed the autonomous (apparently heretical) Christian Paulicians of the Tauros in the 870s, and he and his successors had steadily more influence over the newly unified Armenians and their Bagratuni kings as well. Basil in the 880s then looked westwards. He was no more successful than his predecessors in holding back the long-drawn-out Arab conquest of Sicily (its capital Syracuse fell in 878), but he took advantage of the confusion produced by Arab raids in mainland southern Italy, and conquered most of it himself (not in person, this time) in 880-88, turning the Lombard principalities, much of whose territory he had taken, into client states. This meant that, even though Sicily had gone, Byzantium maintained a strong western presence for another two centuries.
The most obvious target for Byzantine aggression was the Bulgar khaganate, which had dominated the central and northern Balkans for fifty years, since the time of Krum; we need to focus on the latter, and its relations with Constantinople, for a moment as a result. Exactly how the Bulgar political system worked is not at all clear. Archaeological excavation in its successive capitals, Pliska and (from the 890s) Preslav, show considerable wealth and, in the latter, architectural ambition; so does the Great Fence which bounded Bulgar rule to the south. But what sort of fiscal infrastructure the khagans had is hard to see; they took tribute from their subjects, but it is not certain how systematically they did so. They could be very effective militarily, but they relied on perhaps semi-autonomous aristocrats (boilades or bolyary) to supply their armies. If they were to withstand the Byzantines, freed from eastern defensive needs by the 860s, they needed to borrow techniques of government from them fairly fast. The first of these was Christianity and the Christian church. The Byzantines attacked Bulgaria in 864, and Khagan Boris I (852-89) immediately agreed to be baptized in 865, and to allow missionaries in. It was such a prompt concession that it must have been on the cards for some time, although it was far from popular - Boris faced rebellion almost at once. The Bulgar mission nonetheless continued, and became a political football between the rival missionary projects of Constantinople and Rome, both of whom Boris invited in. Relations between the two churches were already bad, for the Moravian ruler Rastislav, who ruled a powerful Sclavenian polity in the Frankish borderlands (see below, Chapter 20), had in 863 invited Byzantine missionaries, Constantine-Cyril and Methodios, to proselytize, rather than the Latin missions which Pope Nicholas I (858-67) considered proper. Nicholas protested about this missionary rivalry, but without effect. More successfully, he pressed the usurping and still politically insecure Basil I to remove Photios as patriarch in 867, on the grounds that his election was uncanonical, although Photios soon made peace with Basil: he was Leo VI’s tutor by the early 870s, and became patriarch again in 877. Competition between Rome and Constantinople for the conversion of two Christianizing polities, the restored Photios’ understandable resentment at papal interference, and growing differences over Christological details, sent relations between the two churches into the worst crisis since Iconoclasm.
The Moravians and Bulgars eventually accepted geopolitical logic, and the former went Latin, the latter Greek; once this finally happened in the 880s the tension between the churches quietened down again. But Boris, in particular, had got substantial concessions in return for his Greek choice: in 870, the Bulgar church was recognized as autonomous outside of Constantinople, with its own archbishop. After 885, Boris welcomed Methodios’ missionaries, now expelled from Moravia, into his kingdom, and adopted the Slavonic liturgy that Constantine-Cyril had created for the Moravians as his own - it still exists as the core of Slav Orthodoxy. The Cyrillic alphabet was developed in Preslav in the late ninth century, too, and a Slavic religious literature followed quickly. Slavic also slowly became the dominant language in the Bulgar khaganate, largely as a result of these developments. The Bulgars were creating an increasingly Byzantinizing style of rule, but were giving it an identity separate from Constantinopolitan influence. This stood it in good stead when Bulgar-Byzantine relations became cool again under Symeon, with wars in 894-7 and 913-24, in both of which the Bulgars were notably successful, raiding the suburbs of Constantinople itself in 913, and again in 920-24, in an echo of Krum. Symeon took the title basileus, emperor (tsar, from ‘Caesar’, in Slavic) in 913 or shortly after, and was feared to be aiming for the throne of Byzantium too - he called himself ‘emperor of the Bulgars and Romans’ by 924 (why don’t you call yourself caliph as well, Theodore Daphnopates retorted). But Constantinople’s walls held, and Symeon died; under his successor Peter (927-68) peace returned. This was the apex of Bulgar power and status; under Peter we begin to find more and more lead seals, signs of a literate Byzantinizing administration, particularly in Preslav; the Bulgar archbishop had been upgraded to a patriarch, too. The Bulgar state even developed its own popular heresy, Bogomilism, during Peter’s reign. The Bogomils were dualists, and believed that the world had been created by the devil; this enabled them to generate a social critique of the growing differentiations inside Bulgar society, as is made clear in an attack on them in Slavic by Cosmas the Priest in the 960s. The Bogomils directly influenced the Cathar heresy which was so influential in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; their beliefs were second only to the Slavonic liturgy as the most lasting cultural exports of Symeon’s and Peter’s Bulgaria. The Bulgar state fell fairly rapidly in the end, as we shall see, but it left these legacies, at least.
Leo VI, hemmed in by resurgent Bulgars on one side and more briefly reviving ‘Abbasids on the other, was less of a military figure than Basil had been, but he held his ground, and his Taktika revived the genre of military handbooks to considerable effect; a dozen similar handbooks, some as we have seen drafted by other emperors, follow in Byzantium in the next century. Leo focused on law and on administrative reform. He was also concerned with the centrality and survival of his and Basil’s dynasty, and the church crisis over his fourth marriage, to Zoe Karbonopsina, was caused by his iron determination to safeguard the legitimacy of his only son, Constantine VII, who was born to Zoe when she was still Leo’s mistress. Constantine was only eight when he succeeded as sole emperor in 913, however, and rivals fought over who was to be regent, or perhaps emperor, for the next seven years: the re-enthroned Patriarch Nicholas, the domestikos tn scholn (in prac- tice, the head of the eastern army) Constantine Doukas, who attempted a coup in 913, Tsar Symeon, whose second war began in the same year, Zoe Karbonopsina herself, who took over the regency council in 914 and ruled the empire until 919, and finally the head of the navy, Romanos Lekapenos, who staged a successful coup in 919, married his daughter Helena to Constantine, and became senior emperor in 920. The Macedonian dynasty had already achieved too much status to be easily overthrown, and Romanos (through Theodore Daphnopates) indignantly protested his loyalty to Constantine when writing to Symeon in 924. But Constantine, though still at court, was marginalized, and, when he finally overthrew the Lekapenoi in 945 and ruled directly, saw himself as in his second reign, with a quarter of a century’s break between the two.
Romanos I had an exceptionally loyal and able domestikos tn scholn, John Kourkouas, who held the post from 922 to 944, when Romanos was overthrown by his sons, a month before Constantine’s own coup. After the Bulgar peace in 927, John raided systematically and boldly on the eastern frontier for fifteen years, achieving military dominance in the borderlands as the ‘Abbasids folded into crisis again. He turned this into conquest in 934 when he took Melitene; he had considerable influence in Armenia; and in 944 he forced the emir of Edessa not only to make peace but also to hand over one of the great Christian relics, the Mandylion with Christ’s miraculous image, to be held henceforth in the palace in Constantinople. Constantine VII as sole ruler in 945 appointed Bardas Phokas as domestikos tn scholn, returning as he did to a family which had held this position for most of the reigns of Leo VI and Zoe, as we shall see later. Bardas and then his son Nikephoros, who succeeded him as domestikos in 955, followed John Kourkouas in pushing eastwards; Nikephoros in particular sought to conquer. In 958 he took Samosata on the Euphrates, and by 962, under Constantine’s son Romanos II, he was in control of the whole upper Euphrates valley; in 962-5 he took Cilicia, in 965 Cyprus, in 969 Antioch, the old Roman capital of the East. As important was his conquest of Crete in 961, the strategic key to the southern Aegean, which the Byzantines had unsuccessfully tried to take back several times since 827.
Nikephoros Phokas, the most successful general for centuries, was thus in a good position to repeat Romanos Lekapenos’ coup when Romanos II died with young heirs in 963. He moved swiftly to the capital, married Romanos’ widow Theophano, and, as in 920, reduced the children Basil II and Constantine VIII to the status of marginal co-emperors. He then returned to war, the first emperor to command his own troops since Basil I. So after 969 did his nephew and murderer John Tzimiskes, who was John Kourkouas’ great-nephew as well; John attacked on the eastern frontier as far south as Beirut, and by the end of his reign in 976 all the Arab rulers of the rest of Syria paid him tribute. John was also, for the first time in this period, successful in the Balkans. Svyatoslav, prince of the Rus of Kiev (see below, Chapter 20), attacked Bulgaria in 967, probably at Nikephoros’ instigation, and took Preslav; he returned in 969 and overran the Bulgar state, threatening Byzantine territory as well. John in 971 pushed the Rus out of Bulgaria in a quick campaign, the reverse of the long-drawn-out and inconclusive Bulgar wars of the last two centuries. He drew the logical conclusion to his military supremacy and deposed Tsar Boris II (968-71) as well, in a formal ceremony in the forum of Constantine in Constantinople. Bulgar power, fearsome for so long, thus suddenly collapsed, and John ruled from the Danube to the Euphrates, over a third as much again as Romanos I had ruled at his accession.
These conquests were not, on one level, enormous. The Byzantines were more experienced in defensive than in offensive war, and they were too cautious to go for the big sweep, down to Jerusalem or Baghdad - and perhaps they were right, for the one example of it in the 960s-970s, the conquest of Bulgaria, did not hold, at least initially. They were most concerned with solidity, and this they obtained. The Arabs did not get the eastern lands back; it was only the Seljuk Turk conquest of the Arab world and eastern Byzantium alike in the 1060s-1070s that would reverse the work of Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes.
A recurrent historiography of eleventh-century Byzantium sees a civilian faction and a military faction at loggerheads, each rising or falling with each successive reign. This is an over-simple view of the eleventh century, and it is even less true of the tenth. It might seem that there was a civilian, not to say bookish, legitimist Macedonian tradition, which was marginalized by soldier-emperors, Romanos I, Nikephoros II, John I. We know that Nikephoros felt himself constrained by ceremonial, even though he appears to have carried it out when he was in the capital; and there were certainly cultural differences between all these figures and a Leo VI or Constantine VII. But Romanos, who started in the navy, spent most of his reign in the capital, just as Leo and Constantine did. Military officials were as important in court ceremonies as civilian ones, unless they were on campaign. A single career could include both military and civilian offices, as with Nikephoros Ouranos (d. after 1007), who was keeper of the imperial inkstand, with a responsibility for producing documents, in the 980s, but then became a notably successful general, against Bulgaria in 997-9, and as ruler of Antioch after 999 (he too wrote a military manual, but also poetry and hagiography). A civilian official could have a military son or brother, too, as with the Argyroi family, mostly a military one, which produced Romanos Argyros (he would become Emperor Romanos III, 1028-34), a highly literary eparch (governor) of Constantinople and economic manager of Hagia Sophia, as well as his brothers Basil and Leo, who were generals in Italy and on the eastern frontier. There was no structural political opposition between the two traditions. A good indication of this is the career of Basil Lekapenos (d. after 985), bastard son of Romanos I, who was made a eunuch by his father. He rose in the civil administration, as eunuchs generally did (though even he fought in at least one campaign, in 958), and in 945 supported the coup of Constantine VII, who was after all his brother-in-law; he gained the title ofparakoimmenos, guardian of the imperial bedchamber, and was effectively head of the civilian government for the whole period 945-85, except for Romanos II’s four-year reign. He actively supported the rule in turn of Constantine VII, Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and then Basil II (976- 1025) in the difficult first decade of the latter’s sole reign after John’s death. He changed sides when he had to, notably from Nikephoros to John (he too was complicit in Nikephoros’ murder), and gained great wealth from his office; he was not necessarily a lovable man. But he represented a continuity which successive emperors could not easily reject. The civil government of the capital and the heads of the armies needed each other, the first to produce the funds to pay the second, the second to defend the first, and they both knew it.
Basil II was anyway the heir of both political strands: the legitimate Macedonian heir, he was also an ascetic military figure in the Nikephoros Phokas mould (he never married or had children), and uninterested in learning. Michael Psellos in the 1060s stressed his dislike of ostentation, within the framework of a ceremonial practice which Basil, too, respected: ‘Basil took part in his processions and gave audience to his governors clad merely in a robe of purple, not the very bright purple, but simply purple of a dark hue, with a handful of gems as a mark of distinction.’ He spent most of his life campaigning; in 991-5, for example, he was not in the capital at all, with the result that there was a four-year vacancy in the patriarchate, for any patriarchal election needed imperial participation. But he was also highly attentive to taxation, and rumour grew at the end of his extremely long reign of a financial surplus so huge that tunnels had to be built under the palace to hold it.
Basil did not establish his position easily. In his early years he faced revolts from generals who aspired to repeat the careers of Nikephoros II and John I. First was Bardas Skleros, doux of Mesopotamia on the far frontier (976-9); in 978 Basil sent Nikephoros’ nephew Bardas Phokas the younger, back in the family office of domestikos tn scholn, to push the rebels over the frontier. Basil was himself more concerned with Bulgaria, where revolts on the western edge of the former Bulgarian state (in the area of modern Serbia and Macedonia) were beginning by the late 970s to turn into an attempt to reverse the Byzantine conquest. Their leader was by the mid-980s Samuel, who defeated Basil himself in 986 in what is now western Bulgaria, and who already by then controlled all Symeon and Peter’s former realm except the old heartland around Preslav. After the 986 defeat, eastern revolts broke out again. Bardas Skleros returned in 987; Bardas Phokas was sent against him once more, but this time he declared himself emperor as well, allied himself with Skleros, and then imprisoned him. A rebel Phokas, given Nikephoros II’s heroic reputation, was much more dangerous for Basil. Bardas Phokas had controlled all the eastern armies anyway, and they remained loyal to him. Basil to confront him had to seek help from the Rus, and in 989 he defeated and killed Bardas Phokas at Abydos on the Dardanelles. Skleros surrendered a year later, and was quite well treated by Basil. This was unusual; Basil normally treated opponents savagely (including even prisoners of war). But Skleros’ revolt, at least second time around, was that much less threatening.
Basil II ruled without trouble after 989, and remained fully in control both of the armies and the palace (he had removed Basil Lekapenos in 985). He did not continue the 960s-970s focus on the Arab frontier, partly because Arab power in Syria, in the form of the Fatimids, was becoming stronger again, as we shall see in the next chapter; most of his wars were with Samuel. They took a long time. Samuel was by no means on the defensive, and attacked far into Greece from his Macedonian base, where he declared himself tsar in 997. It was not until 1014 that Basil destroyed Samuel’s army, and only in 1018 did he mop up resistance. Basil did fight in the East as well, all the same; here, he was mostly interested in gaining hegemony over Armenian and Georgian princes. His successes here pushed the frontier as far as the modern Turkey-Iran border, further east than even the Romans had reached, though independent Armenian kings still remained in the capital at Ani. Basil’s control here was not fully stable; Armenians were hard to rule. But the very quantity of his campaigns, over so many decades, created a certain stability, even in the Armenian lands - and certainly in Bulgaria. Armenians and Bulgars were easily absorbed into his own armies. The war economy, across fifty years (seventy, if one starts with Nikephoros Phokas’ campaigns), became structural to the state. Basil may have had a reputation for heavy taxation, but his wars must have paid for themselves if he died with money reserves. And this was so even though he relied almost entirely on a professional, and well-paid and equipped, army, the tagmata, the expanded heir of the eighth- and ninth-century specialist regiments, as well as mercenaries from wherever he could get them. In the early eleventh century Byzantium looked in good shape. None of Basil’s successors for fifty years had his (rather grim) charisma, but the state did not falter until the Turkish onslaught in the 1070s.
By the mid-tenth century, most of the political players in Byzantium had surnames. This was a new development; it is far less true of the ninth, when nicknames were less often inherited. Even in the tenth, surnames were not always stable, as with John Tzimiskes (‘the Short’) who was a male-line Kourkouas descendant, or else not always used, as with the Lekapenoi, who are called that in eleventh-century, not tenth-century texts. Although we can track a few aristocratic families back into the eighth century, most of the greatest families of the tenth were themselves fairly new: the Phokades began with Phokas, apparently an ordinary soldier promoted by Basil I to several provincial governorships from the 870s onwards; the first Kourkouas and first Lekapenos were also contemporaries of Basil; the Argyroi and Doukai are first documented in the 840s; the Skleroi went further back, but only to Nikephoros I in the early ninth. If these families had aristocratic ancestors further back in the past, there was no need to recall them; family identity could begin here. Leo VI could happily use the (borrowed) opinion in the Taktika that generals should not be of distinguished origin, for those of obscure origin would have much more to prove; this view would certainly have been shared by his Phokas contemporaries, and may not have been controversial to many around 900. But even Basil II a century later, when complaining in a law of 996 about the misdeeds of ‘the powerful’ (dynatoi), explicitly envisaged that a dynatos could be ‘originally a poor man, [who] was afterwards granted titles and raised to the height of glory and good fortune’; his idea of an old family was a domestikos tn scholn whose descendants were ‘likewise dynatoi with success extending over seventy or a hundred years’. Although we should not take the phrase too literally, this image, too, only takes us back to Leo. The tenth century certainly saw a crystallizing aristocracy with a visible family consciousness, and elements of that consciousness can be traced back to the ninth century at least, but the concept of the special nature of high-status ancestry was not dominant as yet.
Official titles certainly did figure in aristocratic identity, on the other hand. And so did land. All these families had lands that were above all on the Anatolian plateau and the eastern frontier: the Phokades and Argyroi in Cappadocia, the Skleroi close to Melitene. It is hardly surprising that they rose in the army under these circumstances, although the quasi-chivalric values of the great nostalgic border epic of the twelfth century, Digens Akrits, cannot yet be seen in our sources. The Phokades were the most consistently ambitious of these families in our period, but are also the best documented, and they can serve as an example. Phokas’ son Nikephoros Phokas the elder was the first of them to become politically prominent; he was, like his father, a personal favourite of Basil I, and became domestikos tn scholn at the start of Leo VI’s reign, a post he held for nearly a decade. His son Leo held the same post under Zoe, and was seriously defeated by the Bulgars in 917; Romanos I had him sacked in 919, and he was blinded after a revolt. Leo’s brother Bardas was excluded from power under Romanos, who clearly (and unsurprisingly) saw the Phokades as rivals, but was, as we have seen, recalled by Constantine VII, and he and his son Nikephoros the younger ran the armies of the empire for twenty-five years, first as domestikoi, then as emperor. Nikephoros’ brother Leo was a general too, though a less popular one, including in the capital, where he became a civil official during Nikephoros’ reign; that, plus a lack of speed in reaction, meant that he could not reverse John Tzimiskes’ coup. After a revolt in 971, however, he too was blinded. Bardas the younger, first domestikos then rebel, was his son; it is hardly surprising that Basil II did not promote the family much after 989. But Bardas’ son Nikephoros could still stage a revolt from his Cappadocian base in 1022, and his son or nephew Bardas tried again in 1026. These two were respectively killed and blinded, and the family is not heard of again.
The Phokades ended their family history as rebels, and were remembered for that thereafter, but until the outrage of Nikephoros II’s death - and, in fact, until Bardas the younger’s revolt in 987-9 - they were quite different: they were one of the most established families of military leaders in the empire, holding the supreme command of the East for forty-five out of the hundred years before that revolt, not to speak of a string of provincial commands in the Anatolikon and in Cappadocia, and the occasional civil office as well. Out of power under Romanos I, they were by no means forgotten, and this must have been true even under Basil II if the last Nikephoros Phokas could reappear in 1022 (apparently persuaded by the governor of the Anatolikon, Nikephoros Xiphias, who needed him as the popular figurehead for a bid for power on his own behalf). The point is that, although they had a landed base they could retire to - and plenty of land elsewhere, including in the capital - they only really existed as major players when they held office. Without it, as an Armenian chronicler put it, they ‘ranted like caged lions’. The Phokades had a family identity, to be sure, but it could only really be expressed through office-holding. Wealth, land, and three or four generations by now of ancestry were by no means enough on their own. This was even truer of the other families, who hardly appear in the sources at all when out of office.
Aristocratic landowning was nonetheless increasing. An early example, the first really wealthy private owner we have clear documentation for since the sixth century, was Danelis (d. c. 890), who was one of Basil I’s first patrons before he came to imperial attention; she reputedly owned over eighty estates in southern Greece. The figure may well be exaggerated, but the order of magnitude might be a guide to aristocratic wealth in the East, where most of the powerful families were based. Certainly emperors thought that dynatoi were gaining too much power in the localities. Every emperor from Romanos I in 928 to Basil II in 996 (except John Tzimiskes) issued laws against the oppressions of ‘the powerful’, laws which survive as a group, and which refer to each other. The emperors sought to make it difficult for dynatoi to buy land from peasants, who were sometimes forced to sell because of misfortune (as in the great famine of 927-8), or else simply because they were intimidated by local aristocrats. Neighbours and village communities were to have the right to buy such land back; if the peasants were soldiers (that is, in the thematic armies, an element of the Byzantine military rather marginalized by the tagmata in this period) they could not sell land at all, unless to poorer soldiers. Romanos I in 934 said this was because land accumulation by dynatoi threatened tax collection; Constantine VII in 94⅞ was worried that peasant soldiers might enter the private armies of ‘the powerful’; Basil II in 996 provided anecdotes of state officials expropriating whole villages, and also envisaged that dynatoi might force merchants to move markets (and thus market tolls) onto their lands. Who the dynatoi actually were was rather vaguely and inconsistently defined in this legislation, but certainly included state officials, and there is no doubt that the Skleroi, Phokades, etc. formed part of them. It has been easy to see ‘the powerful’ as threatening everyone in the empire, free peasant owners, the organization of the army, the fiscal system, and, thanks to private armies and regular revolts, the whole state.
It is a mistake to try and talk this legislation away, as some historians do, in an understandable reaction against the apocalyptic readings of some earlier writers. What we call aristocrats were certainly more politically prominent than before, and therefore presumably richer, across the tenth century, and indeed later; this sort of local oppression is what aristocrats demonstrably do in other times and places; it is therefore unreasonable to deny it for tenth-century Byzantium, given that we actually have an unusually explicit set of texts. Nor would it be surprising that emperors feared that it would be harder to collect taxes from ‘the powerful’ than from ‘the poor’ (that is, everyone who did not have political clout); it always is, and similar problems are well attested in the late Roman period. But there are plenty of reasons why we might not want to rely on the intensity of imperial rhetoric too much when looking at such texts. First, the tax system was not under threat, as Basil II’s accumulation of reserves, despite constant war, shows. Secondly, local oppression, precisely because ‘the powerful’ always do it, was less threatening to the state than the emperors claimed. Village communities were certainly well entrenched, including in law and in tax-paying, especially in Anatolia; it would be logical for emperors to seek to support them. (They did so in quite late Roman terms as well, as befits a century as Roman-revivalist as the tenth; when Nikephoros II in 966/7 said, ‘it is our wish that dynatoi purchase from dynatoi only, the soldiers and the poor from persons who have attained the same status as they have’, he was echoing the laws against social mobility of the fourth century.) But this does not mean that peasants were universally under threat.
It is also not at all obvious that great landowners really did dominate the countryside by the late tenth century. They did in parts of southern Greece, as Danelis already implies, and as is further confirmed by the Thebes Cadaster, a brief local tax survey from the later eleventh century, which shows a preponderance of relatively large owners in an area north of Athens (although a few peasant proprietors as well). We could hardly doubt that the situation was the same in some core aristocratic areas in central and eastern Anatolia. But aristocrats do not dominate in the earliest, tenth-century, Athos documents from northern Greece, which show monasteries (themselves expanding landowners, as Nikephoros II and Basil II complained) opposing, but also being opposed by, local communities such as Hierissos, the closest large settlement to Mount Athos. Although large landowning steadily gained ground after 1000 in northern Greece, this was not the case everywhere even then; and peasant landowning still continued on the Aegean coast of Turkey for centuries. So did it in Byzantine southern Italy, although this was a more marginal area for aristocratic interest. Anyway, even if some of the great families were as rich as Danelis, they were not so very numerous. It is far from clear that the Byzantine aristocracy had achieved the dominance over the landscape that was normal in the West (see below, Chapter 21), even in the eleventh century, never mind the tenth, whatever emperors claimed in their laws.
The great families of Byzantium thus seem to me for the most part less locally preponderant than they were in the West; and also more reliant on office-holding for real political protagonism than they were in the West. There were also, probably, more areas of Byzantium than in the West by the tenth century that were not dominated by ‘the powerful’; this seems a reasonable conclusion to draw, even though Byzantine evidence tells us so little about peasant society. Even in the West, as we shall see in Part IV, aristocratic élites were closely connected to the state in Carolingian Francia, Ottonian East Francia (the future Germany), late Anglo-Saxon England; they owed their identity and status to royal patronage, and they did not seek to establish autonomous local power, or to undermine royal power, unless the crisis of a kingdom forced them to go it alone, as in tenth-century West Francia (the future France). In tenth-century Byzantium, where the state - based on taxation as it was - was far stronger, where office-holding commanded huge salaries, where public position was tied up with army commands and regular presence in the capital, autonomous local power did not stand a chance. The fragmentary evidence we have for provincial judicial procedures, too - mostly court cases from Athos, where the monasteries spent a strikingly large amount of time squabbling with each other - shows effective and systematic official interventions, with judges regularly sent from the capital and interacting with a network of local officials as well; this network of public power, again without parallel in the early medieval West, would not easily give way to private autonomies. In any case, Basil II, who is often held to have been particularly hostile to the dangers of the great families, did not fear them so much as to make any provision for the survival of his own dynasty. Not only did he never marry, but he never even tried to persuade his colourless brother Constantine VIII (who succeeded him, 1025-8) to marry off his two daughters while they could still bear children, and perpetuate the line that way. Basil knew that other families would soon take over the imperial office, and this clearly did not bother him. Nor, given the continuing power and stability of the Byzantine empire for another half century, can he be said to have been wrong.