by Cyril Mango
The deep-water harbour at Cherson, near modern Sebastopol. Having massive land walls and rapid maritime communications with Constantinople and the south coast of the Black Sea, Cherson was the chief stronghold of the empire in the Crimea. Chersonite clergy played an important part in missionary activity among the steppe nomads, Khazars, and Rus.
The find of several examples of these ‘liturgical bowls’ at Cherson suggests that conversion work was occurring there on a substantial scale. In fact the letters of Nicholas Mysticus suggest a very active interest in evangelization on the part of at least one of the archbishops of Cherson; in themselves they attest the imperial authorities’ awareness of Cherson’s value as a sort of ‘devolved’ mission station. Communications by sea were quite frequent, at least in summer, since emperors looked to governors and other agents there to brief them on activities in the steppe.
These ties were sometimes put to the use of missionary enterprises: the archbishop of Cherson was directed to take charge of mission work in Khazaria and he seems to have spent some time there. Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos expressed deep appreciation of his ‘zeal on behalf of that deluded nation’ and left it to him to choose a person to be made archbishop of Khazaria. It is likely that the Chersonite clergy were more accustomed than Constantinopolitans to everyday dealings with barbarians, Khazars and Rus among them. There are indications from graffiti of the presence of Alans in the town and it was there that Constantine-Cyril gave himself a crash course in Hebrew, while on his way to the court of the Khazar kagan. Rus traders were visiting Cherson by the second half of the ninth century and before long Chersonites were paying fairly regular visits to the Middle Dnieper region. It is significant that Prince Vladimir, after being baptized in Cherson, brought the town’s priests back to Kiev, where they helped officiate at the mass baptism of the citizens in the Dnieper. A priest from Cherson, Anastasios, became a close associate of Vladimir, who put him in charge of the show church built for him by Byzantine ‘masters’, assigning Chersonite priests to work as his subordinates. According to the Rus Primary Chronicle, Anastasios had betrayed the town to Vladimir by revealing to him the location of its water pipes. This allegation cannot be dismissed out of hand, but there may be a simpler explanation for the prominence of Chersonite priests in the newly converted Kiev: their experience of dealing with the Rus, if not personal links with individuals, and very possibly a smattering of Slavic, the lingua franca employed by the Rus in their trading operations.
The importation of the Chersonites into Kiev c.988 was a result of initiatives taken by Vladimir and not the emperor, but the imperial authorities were prepared to co-operate by way of the full-blown mission from Constantinople mentioned by Yahya of Antioch. In a sense, then, the emperor’s role was that of a cog, not a pivot, in the intricate process of disseminating the Word. The mainspring of action lay among the northerners who, for a variety of reasons, sought out baptism or simply more information about the Byzantine brand of Christianity. In some areas, such as the Black Sea steppe, Christianity never took root and the imperial government usually regarded a nomadic way of life as incompatible with the practice of Christianity. And much of the groundwork, before a ruler opted to become a Christian and imposed the new religion on his people, is likely to have been done by individual monks or clergymen living on the periphery of the Byzantine world. Nonetheless, the propaganda representing the emperor as a living Apostle leading people to salvation was not without substance; the emperor did see to the baptism of eminent as well as captive visitors at his court and his palace’s combination of piety, marvels, and power exerted a fascination on members of many different foreign elites. This left its mark on the literary culture and the ‘mentality’ of some. Constantine VII is given the leading role in the baptism of Olga in the Rus Primary Chronicle’s version of her visit to Constantinople. The story’s casting of him in this role is all the more suggestive in that it is almost pure fiction.
The cathedral of St Sophia, Kiev, begun in 1037, was the biggest church built in Russia until the end of the fifteenth century. It is crowned by thirteen domes in pyramidal formation. The exterior has been greatly altered in the baroque style and the frescoes of the interior extensively re-painted, but the core of the structure is original as are its Byzantine mosaics.
Such a notion of the ruler as presiding over an established-looking cult appealed to a number of ambitious potentates in the Balkans and to the north of the steppe. They could herd the inhabitants of the lands under their sway into at least outward observance of Christian forms of worship while priests and choirs offered up prayers for their own personal salvation. The very functioning of an ecclesiastical organization across scattered settlements and broken terrain brought definition as well as legitimacy to a regime. The churchmen, whether of Byzantine or (far more frequently) local origin were beholden to the princes for most of their possessions and income. Sprawling dominions such as those of the Rus long remained, in effect, missionary churches, whose clergy had to look to the princely authorities for their physical protection. They were seldom in a position to offer sustained opposition to the princes’ policies or actions, except in matters of doctrine or Church discipline. In any case, the Orthodox Church within the Byzantine lands did not set much of a lead, either for the taking over of responsibility for administration or for developing an ideology to justify such a move. Even in the later years of the empire, when senior churchmen had the ear of ordinary people more than emperors did and when bishoprics and monasteries grew rich from their extensive landholdings and trading networks, the tendency was to prize above all withdrawal from earthly power struggles. Issues of ‘public policy’ (such as resistance against the Turks) were not seen as a major concern of the patriarch. The preservation of doctrine and ritual free from innovation or alien influences was the Byzantine Church’s principal duty, and little value was put upon education or book-learning which led beyond those ends.
In eastern Europe the Church’s priorities were much the same. When the Mongols subjugated the Rus principalities in the mid-thirteenth century, churchmen acquiesced in the new order as being the will of God, even referring to the khan as their legitimate overlord, tsar (the Russian word for ‘emperor’). In return they gained properties and wide-ranging rights of jurisdiction. After the Mongols’ power waned and, in the mid-fifteenth century, the prince of Moscow found himself predominant in the ensuing vacuum, churchmen drew on Byzantine ceremonial and early Byzantine writers such as Agapetus to bolster the concept of the ruler as appointed by God and answerable to him alone. So long as the autocrat remained pure in doctrine and broadly respectful of the Church as an institution, he could get away with much—and even, literally, with murder in the case of Ivan the Terrible. The Church would sometimes take a stand when ‘Latins’ or other heretics tried to impose false doctrine on the faithful. Attempts by the tsar and the patriarch in the mid-seventeenth century to correct the text of the Scriptures and service-books and to bring aspects of ritual into line with the practices of the Greeks evoked furious protests that the age of Antichrist was at hand. Many monks and parish clergy chose to end their earthly lives rather than jeopardize their souls through breaking with tradition, and the ‘Old Believers’ (as they were called) numbered hundreds of thousands. Their descendants, mostly living in the outer reaches of the Russian empire, saw out the Soviet Union and at the end of the twentieth century their numbers were swollen by neophytes who saw in their imperviousness to change an expression of Russian ‘nationhood’.
Reconstructed elevation and plan of St Sophia, Kiev.
The Old Believers’ position encapsulates, in an extreme form, the strengths and weaknesses of the Byzantine bequest to the Slavic-speaking peoples. On the one hand, the creation of a sizeable body of sacred writings and service-books in Slavic translation facilitated regular worship and individual devotion on the part of the many and enabled a pious handful to lead ascetic lifestyles modelled on those of the Desert Fathers. The development of a lit
erary language not far removed from spoken Slavonic also allowed for original compositions to serve local purposes. Outstanding among these works is the Primary Chronicle, where extracts from translated Byzantine works, exegeses of doctrine and pious excursuses are interspersed with tales of Rus princes’ exploits and internecine quarrels. The birch-bark letters found in Novgorod and other towns are, in themselves, testimony to fairly widespread functional literacy in the urban centres along the major riverways. The letter writers took for granted their readers’ familiarity with Christian prayers, saints, and feast days, and their veneration for oaths taken ‘on the Cross’. Attachment to these rites and the belief systems and lore which underlay them enhanced order and social cohesion across wide spans of territory, encouraging the making of long-distance loans and contracts, and thus fostering the trade and prosperity of pre-Mongol Rus. However, the Church’s reverence for tradition reinforced existing peasant suspiciousness of the unfamiliar and gave it a broad ideological justification, discouraging any individuals who might have wanted to explore the intellectual contents of books and to enquire further. As the case of the Old Believers shows, veneration for books could have a primarily symbolic significance, the inviolability of the text prevailing over all attempts at rectification of errors and inconsistencies. Gradually, from the time of Vladimir’s conversion onwards, countless small worlds, inward-looking and variegated but with common Christian bearings, emerged across the expanses between the Black Sea steppe and the Arctic Circle and from the southern Balkans to the Ural mountains and beyond. Whatever their particular institutional arrangements, they owed their existence ultimately to the missionary efforts of the Orthodox, and a certain awareness of their shared rites, doctrines, and traditions persisted through all the rivalries of their hierarchs and the power struggles between their political overlords. It was compounded rather than weakened by the lengthy periods of unbelievers’ rule, the Turks in the Balkans, the Mongols in Rus. A sense that the Orthodox had a common cause transcending their linguistic and cultural differences was evident even at the end of the twentieth century, when the peoples of Russia, Bulgaria, and Greece showed sympathy and active support for their fellow Orthodox Serbs in the face of Kosovar separatism and ‘Western’ intervention. Material and diplomatic considerations specific to the twentieth century played some part in shaping the alignments, but underlying these was the distinctive line of development upon which the Byzantine emperors, churchmen, and monks had set them.
10
Fragmentation (1204-1453)
STEPHEN W. REINERT
From the perspective of political history, the final 250 years of the Byzantine experience frequently impress the reader as little more than a pathetic spectacle of accelerating fragmentation, disintegration, and decay. The trajectory begins in April 1204, with European crusaders dismembering and occupying much of the empire, and ends in irrevocable defeat on 29 May 1453, when an Ottoman army storms Constantinople and brings the Byzantine imperial tradition to a close. Much of what transpires in between appears to be a tiny cauldron boiling with endless inner and external conflicts, some of them unfathomably petty, but nonetheless earnestly waged with alarmingly limited economic resources. Throughout these centuries, in short, the once magnificent Byzantine empire seemingly devolves into little more than caricature, a disordered and dysfunctional polity—overall, a biosphere of impoverishment, absurd pretensions, and generalized Angst. Seen against this wider backdrop, its rarefied cultural flowering in art, architecture, and classical scholarship seems to provide the only convincing rationale for exploring the final chapters in the history of the Byzantine state.
The reader’s weariness is understandable, and certain of his summary impressions may indeed be correct. But the historian is engaged as much with the study of catastrophes, decline, and decay as of their opposites, and the narrative of late Byzantine history is in fact more complexly textured than the novice may suppose. Our aim, therefore, shall be to sketch the fate of late Byzantium with sympathy for its component episodes, rejecting a teleological obsession with 1453. To that end, we shall describe the political evolution in six phases, none coinciding with the dates of particular emperors’ reigns, and all of varying thematic consequence. In general, notwithstanding its melancholy tone, we contemplate here a story of persistent struggle against relentless and often overwhelming adversity, punctuated with instances of genuine valour and patriotism. And despite numerous examples of mediocre leadership, at least one of the Palaiologan emperors, Manuel II (1391–1425), justly ranks among the greatest Byzantine statesmen, and as a brilliant figure in the fourteenth-century revival of letters.
A re-creation of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Painting by Domenico Tintoretto (1598–1605) in the Ducal Palace, Venice.
1204–1261: Dismemberment, Survivals, and Competition for Constantinople
The structure of the Byzantine empire had in fact begun to fracture before the Fourth Crusade arrived in Constantinople, as evidenced by the secession of Bulgaria and Serbia in the mid-1180s, the rise of independent lordships in Cyprus, the Peloponnese, and western Anatolia from the 1180s through the early 1200s, and the establishment of the ‘Empire of Trebizond’ in the Pontus in April 1204. This incipient fragmentation, however, was peripheral, whereas the assault inflicted by the crusaders in the storming and sack of Constantinople (12–15 April 1204) and the ensuing expeditions of conquest in that and the following years dismembered Byzantium at its very core. By 1210, from this calculated orgy of violence—prosecuted ‘in the name of God’ against ‘Greeks’ conceived as ‘the enemies of God’—there had emerged on formerly Byzantine soil some six new Frankish states, dozens of minor dependent lordships, and a vast scattering of Venetian and Genoese colonies.
Four of the new Frankish states deserve mention. The immediate heir to the Byzantine order in Constantinople was the so-called ‘Latin Empire of Constantinople’, the first emperor of which was Baldwin, count of Flanders (1204–5). This Latin empire endured fifty-seven years, but its last truly vigorous ruler was Baldwin’s successor, Henry (1206–16). It was created with territorial claims to Constantinople, parts of coastal Thrace, Anatolia, and the islands of Samos, Chios, and Lesbos—but by 1225 was reduced to little more than the capital. The second-ranking Frankish state to emerge in the wake of 1204 was the ‘Kingdom of Thessalonica’, founded by Boniface, marquis of Montferrat (d. 1207). Its original territorial base was in Macedonia and Thessaly, but its fortunes quickly dissipated after 1207, when Boniface was killed in a war with the Bulgarians. The lands of this kingdom soon returned to Greek control in 1224, leaving little trace of the intervening Frankish presence. A more long-lived Latin polity was the ‘Principality of Achaia’, the conquest of William of Champlitte and Geoffrey Villehardouin, the former being viscount of Dijon, and the latter hailing from Champagne. Originally centred at Andravida, in the north-west Peloponnese, it continued to exist, in increasingly emaciated form, down to 1430, when the Greeks of Mistra absorbed its final remnants. Finally, the ‘Duchy of Athens and Thebes’ was established, again through conquest, by Boniface of Montferrat, who quickly transferred its territory to a Burgundian knight, Otho de la Roche (d. 1225). Of its two centres, Thebes was the more flourishing, with workshops producing silk and other fine fabrics, and colonies of Jewish and Genoese merchants. In 1311, the duchy was conquered by a rampaging army of Catalan mercenaries; in 1388, it was purchased by a Florentine family, the Acciajuoli, who controlled it down to the Ottoman conquest in 1450. Such, then, were the chief Frankish principalities taking shape after 1204, and theoretically forming a feudal hierarchy, with the Latin emperor of Constantinople at the top. Alongside this, the Republic of Venice obtained a number of prime maritime territories, which rapidly expanded her Mediterranean commercial empire. Venice’s key acquisitions in these years included three-eighths of Constantinople, Dyrrachium, the Ionian Islands, most of the Aegean Islands, the key ports of the southern Peloponnese (Modon and Coron), Crete, and other impo
rtant harbours on the Black Sea coast of Thrace.
Surprisingly, this Latin appropriation of core Byzantine territories did not entail a concomitant liquidation of the Byzantine political tradition. While much of the Hellenophone element of the former Byzantine state was indeed absorbed within the new Frankish and Italian entities, some of the Rhomaioi regrouped in three peripheral areas which now assume the character of Byzantine successor states—Epiros, Nicaea, and Trebizond. As noted above, the empire of Trebizond actually took shape in April 1204, before the fall of Constantinople to the Latins. Its founders, Alexios and David, were scions of the Komnenoi dynasty, and it lasted down to 1461, when the Ottomans took the capital city of Trebizond. Economically, this Pontic outpost enjoyed considerable prosperity owing to the trade in luxuries, especially spices, coming from western Asia and points further east. More central to our narrative, however, was the emergence of Epiros and Nicaea as new Hellenophone centres, potentially poised to confront the Franks, above all the Latin regime in Constantinople.
