by Charles King
46. Jan Fredrik Kindstrand, Anacharsis: The Legend and the Apophthegmata (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1981), pp. 3–10.
47. Plutarch, The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men, 148c–e.
48. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, During the Middle of the Fourth Century Before the Christian Aera, trans. William Beaumont, Vol. 1 (London: J. Mawman, F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1817), p. i.
49. See, for example, Marie Guthrie, A Tour, Performed in the Years 1795–6, Through the Taurida, or Crimea, the Antient Kingdom of Bosphorus, the Once-Powerful Republic of Tauric Cherson, and All the Other Countries on the North Shore of the Euxine, Ceded to Russia by the Peace of Kainardgi and Jassy (London: T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1802), p. 29; Henry A. S. Dearborn, A Memoir of the Commerce and Navigation of the Black Sea, and the Trade and Maritime Geography of Turkey and Egypt, Vol. 1 (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), p. 313; Jean, Baron de Reuilly, Travels in the Crimea, and Along the Shores of the Black Sea, Performed During the Year 1803 (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), bound in A Collection of Modern and Contemporary Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), p. 53; Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels to Russia, Tartary, and Turkey (New York: Arno Press, 1970) [reprint of Vol. 1 of his Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, London, 1811], p. 348.
50. Tim Severin, The Jason Voyage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
51. Strabo, Geography, 1.2.10.
52. Strabo, Geography, 1.2.10, 11.2.19. Modern travelers found the same practice among the Svans (Strabo’s “Soanes”?), who live in the mountainous region of north-central Georgia, but there is no specific connection with ancient Colchis, lowland Georgia along the Phasis river. See, for example, Edmund Spencer, Travels in the Western Caucasus, Vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), p. 341. On a similar practice among Romanian Roma, or Gypsies, see James Henry Skene, The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk, Vol. 1, 2nd edn. (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), p. 323.
53. Alexandre Baschmakoff, La synthèse des périples pontiques: Méthode de précision en paléoethnologie (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1948), pp. 14–16. Braund argues that some of the earliest periploi are probably fourth century but perhaps relied on sixth-century sources. See Braund, Georgia in Antiquity, p. 17.
54. Bryer and Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments, Vol. 1, p. 119.
55. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.97.
56. Sergei Saprykin, “Bosporus on the Verge of the Christian Era (Outlines of Economic Development),” Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, Vols. 32–3 (2000–1):96. On the decline of the Caucasus cities, see Braund, Georgia in Antiquity, p. 63.
57. Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, “Black Sea Piracy,” Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, Vols. 32–3 (2000–1):13–14.
58. Dio Chrysostom, “Borysthenitic Discourse,” 36.4. There is some controversy over whether Dio did, in fact, visit Olbia.
59. Dio Chrysostom, “Borysthenitic Discourse,” 36.24.
60. Dio Chrysostom, “Borysthenitic Discourse,” 36.7–8.
61. Ovid, Tristia, 3.13.28.
62. This description is based on Appian, “Mithridatic Wars,” 116–17, and Plutarch, “Pompey,” 45. The list of newly conquered areas is surely exaggerated: Pompey never set foot in most of them.
63. Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 94.
64. David Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century after Christ (NewYork: Arno Press, 1975), p. 217.
65. Plutarch, “Pompey,” 42.
66. Plutarch, “Pompey,” 32.
67. Ovid, Tristia, 4.6.47.
68. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 68.13–15.
69. Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography, trans. and ed. Edward Luther Stevenson (New York: Dover, 1991), p. 82.
70. Flavius Arrianus, Arrian’s Voyage Round the Euxine Sea, Translated; and Accompanied with a Geographical Dissertation, and Maps (Oxford: J. Cooke, 1805), p. 3.
71. Arrianus, Arrian’s Voyage, p. 1.
72. Arrianus, Arrian’s Voyage, p. 9.
73. Arrianus, Arrian’s Voyage, pp. 14–15.
74. Lucian, “Alexander the False Prophet,” 16.
75. H. F. Pelham, “Arrian as Legate of Cappadocia,” English Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 44 (October 1896):637.
76. Quoted in Pelham, “Arrian as Legate,” 640.
For as to the land about the Euxine Sea, which extends from Byzantium to the Lake [Sea of Azov], it would be impossible to tell everything with precision, since the barbarians beyond the Ister River, which they also call the Danube, make the shore of that sea quite impossible for the Romans to traverse.
Procopius, sixth century
They have in no place any settled city to live in, neither do they know where their next will be. They have divided all Scythia among themselves, which stretches from the river Danube to the rising of the sun. And every captain, according to the great or small number of his people, knows the bound of his pastures, and where he ought to feed his cattle, winter and summer, spring and autumn.
Friar William of Rubruck, French ambassador to the Tatars, 1253
It is in the countries around the Black Sea that one finds the residua
of the peoples of Colchis and of Asiatic Scythia, the Huns, the Avars, the Alans, the Hungarian Turks, the Bulgars, the Pechenegs, and others, who came at different times to make incursions along the banks of the Danube, which had already been invaded by the Gauls, the Vandals, the Bastarnae, the Goths, the Gepids, the Slavs, the Croats, the Serbs, and all the peoples who came down from the north to the south.
Claude Charles de Peyssonnel,
French consul to the Crimean Tatars, 1765
3
Mare Maggiore, 500–1500
For Procopius, the historian of the early Byzantine empire, the Black Sea was a place to be avoided. Its coasts teemed with hostile tribesmen, and despite the best efforts of his patron, the emperor Justinian, to fortify several coastal settlements, the inland barbarians remained a constant concern. The most striking event he recorded about the sea was fittingly grotesque. A giant whale, dubbed Porphyrius, had been menacing shipping in the Bosphorus, so when the creature became stranded in shallow water, villagers rushed to the shore and hacked it to death with axes.1 If only it were that easy with the barbarians.
Procopius wrote from Constantinople, a city whose gates opened on both the Pontic and the Mediterranean worlds. The city became the Roman capital in 330, when Constantine moved his throne there and cemented the division of the empire into western and eastern halves. It was an unlikely choice for an imperial center. It had been repeatedly destroyed and had never before served as the seat of a major kingdom or empire. But its physical setting in relation to the water was its chief advantage.
Byzantium was established as a Greek colony in the mid-seventh century BC. Tradition held that the oracle at Delphi had instructed one Byzas, a ruler of Megara, to found a city opposite the land of the blind men, and the site of the future city seemed to fit that description. It lay on a triangular promontory at the opening to the Bosphorus, easily defensible on two of the three sides, just across the strait from an older Megarian colony at Chalcedon. As Byzas must have reckoned, the Chalcedonians were blind, indeed. They had chosen to build on the hills and open lowlands to the east instead of the excellent headland just to their west 2
Byzantium was not the successor to Rome. In the minds of the Byzantines, it was Rome. The emperor’s subjects called themselves, and for a time were called by others, Romaioi (“Romans”); their empire, in shorthand, was “Romania.” (A place called the “Byzantine empire” is the invention of later European historians.) There were two fundamental differences from the old Rome, of course. One was that the new empire was culturally Greek, built on the Hellenistic traditions that had b
een nurtured in the cities of the Aegean, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean. (Even today, Greek-speakers in Turkey are still known as Rumlar, an echo of this “Roman” past.) The other was that the imperial city now lay not at the empire’s geographical center, on the banks of the Tiber, but near the imperial frontier.
Constantinople had the capacity to control access to the Black Sea, but the new Rome, unlike the old, turned out to be more a victim of its geographic destiny than a shaper of it. The great irony of the Byzantine centuries is that an empire whose capital sat at the entryway to a body of water that outsiders had long coveted for its riches demonstrated rather little desire to profit from it. For a time, the Byzantine army and navy successfully prevented any rival—Persians and Arabs, in particular—from gaining a foothold on the southern and eastern coasts; the city of Chersonesus in Crimea, fortified and refurbished by successive Byzantine dynasties, looked out for the empire’s strategic interests in the north. But those achievements were primarily defensive. Beyond seeking to ensure access to grain, salt, and other supplies and to levy taxes on trade with the peoples of the northern steppe, the Byzantines were most concerned with warding off the ill effects of the sea, not prospering from its wealth. Once the sea’s economic potential was again manifest, in the Middle Ages, the Byzantine emperors had by then given over virtually all their commercial interests to surrogates, the Italian citystates of Genoa and Venice. The Byzantine navy had dwindled to a small fleet charged with protecting the imperial city, and even then the citizens were often left to rely on a meager last line of defense: a massive chain, floating on pontoons, that blocked off the harbor of Constantinople from an attack by sea. They were still using it when the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
The cultural influence of Byzantium, however, was another matter. Orthodox Christian traders and seamen crisscrossed the sea, even at times when relations with inland powers were at their nadir. Greek-speaking communities continued to thrive along the coast, particularly in the southeast. Some areas remained largely within Constantinople’s purview—such as Chersonesus and its hinterland and much of the Anatolian shore—but even when they could no longer be counted as part of the temporal empire, these and many other areas of eastern Europe were still part of the eternal one, the domain of eastern Christendom. While the former experienced periods of growth and decline, the latter expanded steadily, so that by the early Middle Ages other Christian kingdoms around the coastline, from the Bulgarians in the west to the Georgians in the east, felt ready to challenge the Byzantine emperor’s claim to special status as universal sovereign. In the end, it was the coming of two groups that could be brought into neither the profane nor the sacred domain—the Catholic powers of the Mediterranean and the Muslim Ottomans—that changed the nature of life around the sea.
“The Scythian Nations are One”
Already by the time of Constantine, most of the hinterland was well beyond the empire’s reach. The northern river courses, the mountain passes of the Caucasus, even the Danube plain, abandoned by Rome in the third century, were as foreign as they had been to Trajan and Hadrian. In the Byzantine imagination, the barbarian peoples, particularly those on the northern steppe, were the archetypal outsiders. They were everything that the “Romans” were not. Many were pastoral, with no settled cities; they did not speak Greek; they were not Christians; and they were not subjects of the one divinely ordained emperor.3 In the Byzantines the cultural prejudices of Classical Athens thus met the political narcissism of late imperial Rome.
Yet, however great this cultural divide might have appeared to the empire’s literate elites, in practice successive dynasties understood that the security of their empire and its capital depended on the willingness to compromise with the succession of peoples who moved out of the steppe and pressed up against the imperial frontiers. The interests of barbarian rulers had to be accommodated; otherwise, they could easily play off Constantinople against other eager patrons: the ever-present Persians and, later, the powerful medieval kingdoms of the Balkans and the principalities of central and eastern Europe. New peoples arrived from the Asian steppe, first settling on the northern and western shores and then, with the coming of the Turks, in the Byzantine heartland of Anatolia. Over each generation, these new immigrants also had to be brought into the imperial system—deals renegotiated, alliances reworked, and clients satisfied—or, at the very least, prevented from destroying it.
The steppe had long been an open highway between central Asia and Europe, and for almost the entire millennium of Byzantine civilization, traffic was heavy. Most of the immigrant groups—Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans—were the western edge of a series of population movements that began much farther to the east, in Mongolia and western China. Yet these migrations rarely involved hordes of whip-snapping horsemen thundering at full gallop across the treeless steppe. The metaphors of “waves” and “tides” of barbarian invaders obscure the fact that the movement of peoples toward the west was a gradual process that extended over many centuries.4 For some groups, it took generations to move the few hundred kilometers from the Volga to the Dnepr, still longer to make it to the Danube. Those who arrived from the east were by and large nomads, and with rare exceptions—such as the Huns in the fifth century and the Tatar–Mongols in the thirteenth—they moved slowly, always conscious of the need for adequate grazing lands and water for their herds.
Understanding each of these groups is difficult, for there is little to go on besides what sedentary, literate cultures said about them from afar; but one thing seems clear: Over the great sweep of Black Sea history from the end of the Roman empire to the coming of the Ottomans, a certain continuity of culture on the northern steppe, rather than the wholesale supplanting of one distinct group by another, was the norm. A local economy based on nomadic and semi-nomadic herding and long-distance trade, blending elements of Iranian and Turkic languages and cultural forms, and all influenced by long-term contact with Greek, Slavic, and Germanic populations, is perhaps as close as one can come to describing what that culture was like. “The Scythian nations are one, so to speak, in their mode of life and in their organization,” wrote a sixth-century Byzantine author, using the same generic label for the northern peoples that Herodotus had used almost a thousand years earlier.5 Far more than older empires such as the Romans and Persians, the Byzantines were in sustained and intimate contact with these peoples beyond the sea. They could not avoid it, for from the earliest years of the empire, the threat that these groups could present, not only to Byzantine holdings in Crimea but also to the imperial city itself, was readily apparent.
Long before the establishment of the new Rome, the Scythians had given way to new arrivals, the Sarmatians, probably speakers of an Iranian language like the Scythians. They were already living east of the Don river in Herodotus’s day and were, he claimed, the product of trysts between Scythians and Amazons.6 As they moved farther west, the region once known as “Scythia” gradually came to be called “Sarmatia,” a “European” half lying west of the Don river and an “Asiatic” half to the east. (The cartographic convention that identified the Don as the boundary line between Europe and Asia would endure well into the nineteenth century.) The Sarmatians were followed by still other groups. Most, such as the Avars, followed the pathways from the east and made their way deep into the heart of Europe. Others, such as the Celts and Goths, filtered in from the north and west. Some groups were even able to reach across the sea to the south coast. Byzantine chronicles from the fourth century detail Gothic raids on Pitsunda and Trapezus along the eastern and southeastern coasts, and for a time the Goths even established a major base in Crimea, a small pocket in the southwest of the peninsula that would be known as “Gothia” well into the Middle Ages. (In the early 1400s, one traveler reported that his German manservant could easily converse with the locals, who retained some facility in their lost Teutonic language.7) Many groups adopted Christianity; some were given their own bishops and
even awarded designated churches in Constantinople.
Procopius, who wrote during a period of Byzantine resurgence in the sixth century after a long period of territorial loss, was clear on the difficulties of securing Byzantine control of the sea and of protecting the few Greek-speaking communities that still speckled the coast. Garrisons had once been stationed all along the coastline, but most had by his day been abandoned. Procopius could not even hazard a guess as to the actual circumference of the sea; so numerous were the barbarians around it, especially in the north, that accurate information was now impossible to obtain. Apart from the occasional exchange of embassies, there was little interaction with these peoples, he said.8 In some areas, however, Procopius’s emperor, Justinian, did manage to reassert authority. Old ports that had fallen into disrepair were restored. At Trapezus he built an aqueduct to alleviate the persistent problems with fresh water. At Panticapaeum and Chersonesus in Crimea—which lay, said Procopius, “at the extremity of the Roman empire”—he found the walls in ruins and made provision for their restoration.9
The problem, of course, was that this “extremity” was not very far away. For the greater part of the Byzantine period, the main concern was not necessarily to capitalize on the advantages of the Black Sea, but rather to keep others from doing so. That was the chief worry of the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. In the tenth century, Constantine assembled a manual of statecraft, De administrando imperio, for his son and heir, Romanus. The cast of characters around the sea had changed markedly over the centuries since Procopius, but the basic relationship between the empire and its neighbors was largely the same. The Slavs had appeared in the 600s, and by Constantine VII’s time they had established a powerful empire in the south Balkans. In the north, the Sarmatians and Alans had given way to the Pechenegs, a Turkic people who had arrived from central Asia in the 800s. Farther to the north, a group the Byzantines called the Rhos—a Norse aristocracy governing a Slavic population—were already conducting lively trade with the coast or, when it suited them, making war on Constantinople. In the east and south were the Arabs, whose armies were fueled by the fervor of their new faith, Islam. Christian kings and princes in Georgia and Armenia were buffers against the Muslims, but their Christianity did not mean that they were beyond opposing the seat of Christendom itself when it was in their own interest to do so.
