Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

by Judith Herrin

  One high point of intellectual endeavour in early medieval Byzantium is marked by the career of Photios, whose achievements are a symbol of centuries of book culture and scholarly effort. Although he was an exceptional figure, his engagement with ancient culture was subject to the characteristic Byzantine combination of restraint and inspiration. He recorded his own thoughts – on theological, philosophical, literary and art historical topics – in most elegant Greek.

  Photios came from an iconophile family persecuted during the second phase of iconoclasm (815–43). Like his uncle Tarasios before him, he had risen through the ranks of the administration to become head of the civil service. And then, also following the pattern of Tarasios’ career, in 858 he was appointed to head the Byzantine Church in place of Ignatios, who was deposed. As patriarch, Photios wrote many sermons, letters and a treatise on the procession of the Holy Spirit, which remained fundamental to all later analysis of the subject. His rapid promotion from lay status to the head of the Church, however, caused problems in Byzantium, where his predecessor Ignatios had many supporters. When they appealed to Pope Nicholas I, the quarrel broadened to include the western Church (see chapter 12). Photios’ appointment as patriarch (858–67) was ended by the accession of Emperor Basil I, who reinstated Ignatios. On the latter’s death, Photios returned to serve a second period (877–86), and was then removed from office by Leo VI, nicknamed the Wise (886–912). During his first period of exile, however, Photios was employed as a tutor for the imperial princes – a sign of his own reputation as a teacher and the importance of the imperial palace as a centre of learning. In this capacity he may have inspired the young Leo, one of Basil’s sons, who proved himself a competent writer of sermons as well as a serious promoter of legal reform, economic organization and military tactics. If so, Leo was an ungrateful pupil; one of his first decisions from the throne was to dismiss Photios, who died in unknown circumstances.

  Photios’ dramatic ecclesiastical career was not unusual. It was balanced by an exceptional and unwavering dedication to intellectual achievement. It is now generally agreed that he wrote the introduction to the Epanagoge, a revised law code issued by Basil I, which sets out the ideal relationship between Church and State. It argues that the emperor must remain subject to the laws, even as he makes them, because he is only the representative of God on earth. Photios’ letter to the Khan of Bulgaria, which is heavily dependent on the rhetoric of Isocrates on the correct practice of a good ruler, describes the duties of a Christian monarch in a similar fashion. The patriarch urges his spiritual son to become a ‘new Constantine’, leading the Bulgarian people into the Christian oikoumene. In answers to questions raised by his friend Amphilochios of Kyzikos, Photios demonstrates his broad learning on a wide range of issues. But it is above all his Bibliotheke (Library) that illustrates his brilliance and has identified him as ‘the inventor of the book review’. In this he lists the 279 books which he recommends to his brother, Tarasios, accompanied by detailed analysis of their contents and idiosyncratic comments. It contains a mixture of secular and Christian writings, heretical and orthodox, good and bad stylists, which permits Photios to show off his taste in literary culture. While a large number of books discussed in Photios’ Library are theological, he preserves notes on plays of Aeschylus that are now lost and comments on a more complete encyclopaedia by John of Stobi (Stobaeus) than has survived.

  His notes on individual works still make very good reading:

  I read Antonius Diogenes, Wonders beyond Thule, in twenty-four sections. It is a novel… Its contents offer very great pleasure; though the narrative verges on the mythical and incredible it arranges the material in a structure of very plausible fiction.

  He then gives an account of the story which has little to do with Thule (the far North) but involves exciting travel among unknown peoples with most unusual customs, marvels and adventures. He concludes:

  This book appears to be the source and origin of Lucian’s True Story… In this novel, as in other fictional tales of that type, there are essentially two very useful features: one, that he shows the unjust man always paying the penalty, even if he seems to escape on numerous occasions; secondly, that he portrays many innocent people exposed to great danger and often saved contrary to all expectation.

  This can be compared with a later entry:

  I read a substantial, indeed enormous, work in fifteen sections and five volumes. It is a collection of testimonies and quotations of whole books, not just Greek but Persian, Thracian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldaean and Roman, by authors highly regarded in each nation. The compiler tries to show that they are in agreement with the pure, supernatural and divine religion of Christians; that they announce and proclaim the supernatural Trinity of one substance… The author was not averse to similar exploitation of the writings on alchemy by Zosimos (he was a Theban from Panopolis). Here he expounds the meaning of Hebrew words and discusses where each of the apostles proclaimed the doctrine of salvation and ceased his mortal labours. At the end of the work he offers a personal exhortation, blended from and strengthened by pagan maxims and scriptural quotations. Here in particular one can recognize the man’s devotion to virtue and irreproachable piety… So far I have not been able to discover the name of the compiler of these volumes… But he lived in Constantinople with his wife and children and was active after the reign of Herakleios.

  This work is now lost. Photios’ account allows us to reflect on how little we know of the seventh century, and how much literature has been destroyed.

  In the Library, Photios comments on his own reading at his brother’s request and promises more notes to come. His efforts to summarize the contents of rare books were followed by later scholars, who compiled compendia of useful information, notably Emperor Constantine VII (see chapter 16). Similarly, the group which gathered around Photios to discuss some of the lesser-known writings available in the ninth century established a pattern. He did not discuss all the texts in regular circulation, which probably explains why the obvious works of Plato and Aristotle do not feature in his Library. Meetings where authors read their latest compositions became a common feature of Byzantine intellectual life and continued to stimulate literary debate and commentaries to the end of the empire. The literary salons run by well-educated women like Anna Komnene in the twelfth century, and foreign princesses who wanted to learn about Byzantine culture, such as Mar’ta (Maria) of Alania in the eleventh, involved philosophers, rhetoricians, poets and historians on precisely this model.

  While Photios was clearly unusually brilliant, he was also representative of his society and wrote for a readership with similar tastes and capacities. In his letters to Amphilochios, we sense the shared training in classical Greek texts, which had been copied again and again, excerpted and re-ordered in compendia (florilegia) of ancient wisdom. The same attention was given to the Bible, studied both by ecclesiastics and lay people as a fount of knowledge. While it is true that Byzantine scholars followed a rather rigid curriculum of study, they included everything they could read in Greek, with discipline and curiosity, and copied ancient texts with care. They preserved for posterity a much larger corpus of classical Greek authors than would otherwise have survived. Photios, however, in his devotion to all aspects of the Greek inheritance, pagan and Christian, classical and medieval, scientific, legal and literary, embodied the aspirations of Byzantium. He moved beyond the boundaries of established culture to compose sermons, treatises and letters of great interest. He encouraged a clearer understanding of the importance of the ancient Greek past for medieval Byzantium, which sustained it through many centuries of political uncertainty.

  12

  Saints Cyril and Methodios, ‘Apostles to the Slavs’

  How is it that you now teach and have created letters for the Slavs, which none else have found before?… We know of only three tongues worthy of praising God in the Scriptures, Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

  Life of Constantine, probably by Methodios, nin
th century

  In the ninth century, two brothers, Methodios and Constantine, who lived in Thessalonike, where their father Leo was a military officer, learned to speak Slavonic. Many Slavs came to the city to trade and bilingualism was a feature of life on the imperial frontiers. But these two young men were exceptionally good at languages. When Patriarch Photios realized this, he encouraged the brothers to invent a way of writing down Slavonic. They devised an alphabet to represent the sounds of the spoken tongue and began to translate the key texts of orthodoxy. Their first attempt produced an alphabet called Glagolitic, which later developed into Church Slavonic; their second is still in use in Russia today. This alphabet is called Cyrillic after Constantine’s adoption of the monastic name Cyril before he died in 869. The brothers became known as Saints Cyril and Methodios, ‘Apostles to the Slavs’.

  The elder brother, Methodios, initially followed a secular career and held an official position in a Slavonic principality of Macedonia, where he must have lived among Slavs. Then he became a monk on Mount Olympos. After the death of Emperor Theophilos in 842, the younger brother, Constantine, was sent to complete his education in Constantinople. His first patron, the eunuch Theoktistos, promoted him as an ordained priest and official of the church of Hagia Sophia. But in addition, he studied Syriac, Hebrew (he translated a Hebrew grammar into Greek) and philosophy. His second patron was Patriarch Photios himself, with whom he shared intellectual interests and a concern with education. Like Photios, he was sent on diplomatic missions to the Muslim court at Samarra and the Khazar centre, north of the Black Sea, where he is supposed to have discovered the relics of St Clement, a shadowy Bishop of Rome in the first century, banished to the Crimea.

  According to the Life of Constantine, probably written by Methodios, familiarity with the language spoken by the Slavs was common enough in the region of Thessalonike. Numerous tribes had settled there after they crossed the Danube frontier at the end of the sixth century. While some groups captured major fortified cities and on several occasions besieged Thessalonike, without success, others moved south with their families and herds and occupied agricultural land. Their presence throughout the Balkans and as far south as the Peloponnese was hostile enough to cause the flight of much of the indigenous population to mountain castles and islands, according to later reports. From the late eighth century on, imperial campaigns began to reassert control from Constantinople, and in 786 Empress Irene and her son Constantine VI made a royal tour as far as Berroia (Stara Zagora in Bulgaria). Accompanied by dancers and musicians, they marked the pacification of the Slavs and dedicated the church of Hagia Sophia in Thessalonike. Twenty years later, Nikephoros I is reported to have thwarted a combined Slav–Arab uprising in Patras and invited the original population to return to their city. As Arethas, a ninth-century scholar records, his own relatives were among those who came back from Sicily to Patras, where they found the defeated Slavs under the bishop’s authority.

  Despite the loss of control over large areas of the Balkans and western Greece for many generations, Constantinople eventually restored imperial administration through the new system of ‘theme’ government. By the tenth century, there were themes in the Peloponnese, Hellas (central Greece), the islands of Kephalonia, Zakynthos, Kerkyra (Corfu), Dyrrachion (modern Durrës in Albania), Thessaly, Thessalonike and Macedonia. After many years of contact with Byzantium, the Slavs who had originally settled in Sklaviniai were now aware of Christianity and the Greek language. Only on Mount Taygetos above Sparta two tribes remained hostile to the civilizing mission of Byzantium, and they were eventually incorporated. Just as Rome latinized and Christianized barbarian invaders in the West, even though it lost control over them, so the strengths of East Rome, its Greek culture, commerce, laws and wealth absorbed numerous intruders.

  In 862, however, Emperor Michael III received a request from Moravia (part of ancient Pannonia, modern Slovakia and the Czech Republic) for Byzantine priests. King Rastislav was anxious to counterbalance the influence of Frankish missionaries from Bavaria and to create an independent Moravian Church. Although Patriarch Photios considered the Greek language superior, he encouraged Methodios and Constantine to use the new alphabet to translate the Gospels and the Psalms, as well as the liturgy attributed to St John Chrysostomos, into Slavonic. In 863 he sent the brothers to Moravia where they spent four years setting up a church using both the new vernacular and Greek. This was opposed by the western missionaries, who celebrated the liturgy in Latin. Perhaps at the request of Rastislav, the brothers planned to have some of their disciples ordained as priests to strengthen their church in Moravia, and in 867 they set off for Rome.

  When they reached Venice, a famous debate took place over their use of the Slavonic liturgy. On one side were the westerners (bishops, priests and monks from Venice and possibly Francia), who insisted that there were only three sacred languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, because they were the languages used on the Cross to record the death of Jesus. On the other side, Constantine defended the newly created vernacular, pointing out that,

  we know of numerous peoples who possess writing, and render glory unto God, each in his own tongue. Surely these are obvious: Armenians, Persians, Abkhasians, Iberians, Sogdians, Goths, Avars, Turks, Khazars, Arabs, Egyptians and many others… Falls not God’s rain upon all equally? And shines not the sun also upon all?

  While they attacked him ‘like ravens against a falcon’, according to the Life of the saint, Constantine retorted that they should be ashamed to command all other nations to be blind and deaf, and produced numerous scriptural justifications for allowing all nations to praise the Lord.

  An invitation from Pope Nicholas I caught up with them there and they left Venice for Rome, only to find that Nicholas had just died. His successor, Hadrian II, however, welcomed the missionaries. Constantine presented the pope with the relics of St Clement, which he had brought from the Black Sea. The disciples from Moravia were duly ordained and ‘they at once sang the liturgy in the Slavonic tongue in the church of the Apostle Peter’. The Slavonic Scriptures were placed in the church of St Maria AD Praesepe, and the liturgy was celebrated several times there and in other churches of Rome. In February 869, when he felt his death approaching, Constantine became a monk with the monastic name Cyril. He was buried in the shrine of San Clemente, where later frescoes commemorate his adventurous life.

  Pope Hadrian not only approved of the missionaries’ use of the vernacular, he also appointed Methodios as papal legate to the princes of Moravia and Pannonia, instructing him to read the lessons first in Latin and only then in Slavonic. Shortly after his brother’s death, he left Rome to take up this position and for over fifteen years he continued their work of translation and conversion, despite increasing Frankish opposition. After the overthrow of Rastislav in 870 by his nephew Svjatopluk, Methodios was imprisoned in Swabia (south Germany) for several years; eventually he and his supporters were driven out of Moravia. Despite the brothers’ efforts, the Church in Moravia passed increasingly under Frankish control and remains largely Roman Catholic today.

  Elsewhere, however, the Slavonic liturgy had greater success. Before his death in 885, Methodios and his disciples completed translations of the Bible, liturgical services and collections of canon law. The aim of making the Slavs one ‘among the great peoples who praise God in their own languages’, as recorded in the Life of Constantine, was ultimately achieved. Not only the Bulgarians but later the Russians and the Serbs were thus allowed to celebrate using their own tongue. Given the Byzantine insistence on the centrality of Greek in the transmission of all culture, how should we view this triumph of the vernacular? It is a tribute to Patriarch Photios, who had nurtured the outstanding linguistic talent of the two missionary brothers from Thessalonike. But it can also be seen as a radical break with tradition, another example of Byzantine innovation and creativity, which contrasts with the insistent use of Latin demanded by the western Church.

  Photios was a brilliant scholar
and diplomat, but when he initiated the process of converting the Bulgars to Byzantine Christianity he provoked Pope Nicholas I into a tremendous battle. Rome was already critical of Photios’ rapid promotion through the clerical ranks, and in 861 condemned his appointment to the patriarchate as ‘an invasion of the see held by Ignatios’. An exchange of hostile letters began, which led to a debate over Constantinople’s claim to powers equivalent to those of Rome in the West, its preservation of correct Christian doctrine, and its authority to convert non-Christians to orthodox traditions, most specifically the Bulgarians.

  The importance of Bulgaria lay in its position between the spheres of eastern (Byzantine) and western (Frankish) influence. In 862, when Khan Boris made an alliance with Louis the German, a descendant of Charlemagne whose territory abutted Bulgaria in the West, Michael III sent a military expedition to counter it, and Boris was forced to accept Byzantine terms and Christian baptism. Photios performed the ceremony and the Khan was given the Christian name Michael by the emperor, his godfather. Boris-Michael, however, had failed to win over his own pagan supporters, who opposed the Greek clergy and rose in revolt. Rapidly, the Khan put down the revolt and made an abrupt turn to the West, writing to Louis the German in 866 and to Pope Nicholas. He was trying to work out which of the two leading centres of Christianity would accord his Bulgarian Church the greater degree of independence.

  As Boris-Michael played one side off against the other, both New and Old Rome responded to his questions about the true faith. Photios’ letter on correct theology as defined by oecumenical councils, and on the duties of a Christian prince, implied the Khan’s subordination to Constantinople. In contrast, the pope emphasized Roman control and use of the Latin liturgy in the nascent Bulgarian Church in his Responsa (Answers). While Nicholas cited the absolute superiority of the Bishop of Rome, based on descent from St Peter, Photios drew on the theory of the pentarchy, the five great patriarchs meeting in council, as the highest authority in Christendom. The pope mentioned papal claims to the diocese of East Illyricum, which had been transferred to Constantinople in the eighth century, and ridiculed some of the customs attributed to Byzantine priests working in Bulgaria. Both parties were trying to ensure that Boris’s state adopted Christianity in a particular form, sending rival bands of missionaries to convert his subjects.