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 of parakoimmenos, 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 pea
sants 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 Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 40
