by Charles King
The Pechenegs were of particular concern to Constantine, for they were one of the linchpins of Byzantine security. Keeping peace with them meant that Chersonesus would remain safe, and keeping Chersonesus safe meant that the Byzantines could retain some influence—economic and even military—on the northern shore. The Chersonites were intermediaries in the trade in hides and wax coming from the steppe, and they received in exchange such goods as purple cloth, ribbons, gold brocade, pepper, scarlet, and leather imported from Byzantine urban centers on the south coast.10 The Pechenegs nominally provided protection for the city, but the relationship was usually closer to a protection racket. They knew that they could influence the Byzantines by applying pressure on their dependency in Crimea. In past centuries, Crimean ports had exported grain to the south, but the situation was now reversed. Chersonesus seems to have depended on the southern ports for grain supplies, while sending animal products taken from steppe nomads in return.11 Moreover, since the Pechenegs also served as a useful check on the power of the Rhos and the Christian rulers in the Balkans and the Caucasus, good relations with them were critical.
Constantine advised that a yearly embassy be made to the Pechenegs. The embassy, he said, should try to secure a renewal of the longstanding treaty of friendship, and plenty of lavish gifts should be offered to sweeten the deal. The only problem with this scheme was that the history of good relations with Constantinople had actually sharpened the tribesmen’s rapacity:
Now these Pechenegs, who are ravenous and keenly covetous of articles rare among them, are shameless in their demands for generous gifts, … demanding this for themselves and that for their wives, and the escort something for their own trouble and some more for the wear and tear of their cattle. Then, when the imperial agent enters their country, they first ask for the emperor’s gifts, and then again, when these have glutted the menfolk, they ask for the presents for their wives and parents.12
All the peoples of the north had grown used to this arrangement over the centuries; they continually increased the tribute they required in exchange for peace. A good emperor, therefore, needed to know how to rebuff their escalating demands diplomatically. If the Pechenegs asked for robes and diadems, he advised, tell them that those things are the emperor’s alone and would be cursed if worn by anyone else. If they requested marriage to your daughter, say that your customs forbid it. 13 Most other demands could be accommodated.
There was one thing, however, that Constantine stressed should never, under any circumstances, be given to the Pechenegs. If they asked for it, he counseled, tell them coyly that it had been bestowed on the Romans by God and could not be shared. It was the Byzantines’ most guarded state secret and one whose mystery died with the empire itself. It was a weapon they owed to the sea.
Sea-Fire
The earliest ships on the Black Sea—those known to Homer or the mythical Argonauts—were sleek and open-decked, and light enough to be pulled up onto beaches or portaged over river rapids. Their single square sail, masted amidships, could be used if the wind were favorable, but most of the propulsion was provided by oarsmen seated at narrow benches, one man to an oar. Gradually, open hulls evolved into covered decks, and successive decks were added on top of those. Ships with three banks of oars, the Greek trireme, became the main battle galley during the fifth century BC, seeing action during the wars with the Persians and between Athens and Sparta.
For the next several centuries, building better ships meant building bigger ones, with more banks of oars and multiple rowers straining to pull each massive blade. Gigantism in naval design reached its apogee among the Hellenistic kings, some of whom experimented with enormous rowed catamarans that featured multiple courses of oars on the four sides of the double hull. However, in the Roman period, the set-piece naval battles of the past gave way to new and varied forms of warfare, from chasing corsairs to quelling rebellious client kingdoms. The times demanded a ship adaptable to the varied needs of an imperial power, both full-scale warfighting and coastal policing. It was these smaller craft, fast two-banked galleys which the Romans had copied from pirate ships used in the Adriatic, that coasted along the Black Sea during the time of Trajan and Hadrian. They are depicted on Trajan’s Column, docked at a Danube port during the Dacian campaigns.
By the middle of the fourth century AD, the trireme was largely extinct. Threatened with shortages of money and men, the late Roman empire returned to the smaller galleys of a thousand years earlier, and that basic design carried over into the Byzantine era. Most of the ships in the Byzantine fleet were single-banked galleys with each rower pulling his own oar. Twin masts, rigged with the maneuverable triangular sails favored by Arab seamen, could be used if winds were good, but in battle the captain would rely solely on the muscle power of his oarsmen, some of whom might also double as marines. A few larger ships, two-banked galleys with a crew of perhaps 200, were in service in the imperial fleet based at Constantinople, but in the provincial outposts—in Chersonesus or Trapezus, say—it was probably the smaller vessels that held sway.14
Greek and Roman naval commanders had two basic tactical options during a sea battle. One was to use their ships themselves as weapons, ramming the hull of the enemy vessel and perhaps forcing it to founder. That was the great innovation of the Greek trireme, with its sturdy hull construction and breakwater beak on the bow. The other was to slip close enough to the ship to board it or, if that proved impossible, to hurl projectiles at it. The Romans perfected this form of close-in fighting. Their oarsmen would steer alongside the enemy while marines waited to throw across a boarding plank and storm over the gunwales.
The Byzantines, however, effected a virtual revolution in naval warfare. At the center was the great secret that Constantine VII urged his son not to reveal to the Pechenegs. Sailors called it thalassion pyr—sea-fire. In the warship’s bow, Byzantine sailors placed a long wooden tube, lined with bronze. One end was aimed at the enemy ship and the other connected to an air pump. A flammable substance was poured down the tube and set alight, while men at the other end worked the pump to send the flaming liquid arching toward the enemy. Large ships could be equipped with more than one tube, and the Byzantines even developed a handheld model for use by marines.15 The substance was so destructive that it could burn even on the surface of the sea. The Arab chronicler Ibn al-Atir saw its devastating effects firsthand. “A flame-throwing tube could cover twelve men,” he wrote, “and the flame was so violent and so sticky that no one could resist it. This was the weapon that the Muslims feared most.”16
The earliest mention of sea-fire—which outsiders came to call “Greek fire”—dates from the sixth or perhaps seventh century. Its invention was attributed to one Callinicus, but the exact composition has remained a mystery. The raw material was probably crude oil, or naphtha, taken from above-ground deposits such as those on the Taman peninsula, near the old Greek colony at Panticapaeum on the northeast coast. Springs disgorged the sticky naphtha onto the surface, where it could be easily collected in pots. The region was known for its seismic activity, and later travelers to the area remarked on the smoke and heat created by underground fires.17 Sea-fire became the centerpiece of Byzantine naval defense. It was largely responsible for the defeat of successive seaborne enemies, from the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries to the Rhos in the tenth, and for hundreds of years to come it would be a major bulwark against growing threats on all sides.
The naphtha wells of Taman were such a closely guarded element of the Byzantine arsenal because the advent of sea-fire actually accompanied the empire’s decline as a naval power—a time when ships had need of precisely the defensive capacity that the weapon provided. For a time in the sixth century and perhaps again in the eleventh, the Byzantine navy experienced periods of greatness; it was able to win back lands around the Mediterranean that had been lost to invading barbarians and to check other powers on the Black Sea. The water was lauded as a symbol of Byzantium’s universal empire and the chief advantag
e of Constantine’s well-sited city. Poets in Constantinople waxed lyrical about the play of light on water and the thrum of waves against the shore, and imperial law codes even protected the right of property owners to a sea view.18 But overall, the Byzantine romance with the sea was not matched by the empire’s prowess as a maritime power. Inadequate state funds, the rise of other seafaring powers in the Mediterranean, endemic piracy, and simple imperial mismanagement all contributed to the empire’s problems. And for successive imperial dynasties, engaging in long-distance maritime trade seemed to be of less interest than simply taxing it—a perverse consequence, perhaps, of the very location of the imperial capital at the intersection of major international commercial routes.
way to the Pechenegs
At their height, the old Greek colonies on the northern coast had flourished because of two things: ready export markets in the south and relatively stable, but not overly powerful, political formations in the hinterlands with which trade could be conducted. In the late Roman empire, both those factors were interrupted. The rise of other trade routes to the east via the Indian Ocean undercut the importance of the Black Sea, and the long period of demographic change on the Eurasian steppe altered the relationship with inland powers.
It was not until several centuries after the foundation of Constantinople that relative stability returned to the north. That was the situation that both intrigued and worried Constantine VII. Good relations with the now powerful political entities that encircled the sea were critical not only because these groups had the ability to attack the imperial capital, as they had done on many occasions, but also because valuable supplies flowed along the cross-sea route: grains from the western and northwestern coasts, hides and other products from the steppe, furs from the northern forests, slaves from the Caucasus. The complex systems that linked the imperial capital and the various seacoasts can be seen in the Byzantines’ relations with four political and economic powers from different periods: the Khazars, Rhos, Bulgars, and Turks.
For some three hundred years, from roughly the seventh until the tenth century, the Khazar state north and east of the sea was one of the most significant players in the international politics and economy of the Black Sea zone. The origins of the Khazars are uncertain, but their domain seems to have been centered on the plains north of the Caucasus mountains, touching both the Black and Caspian seas. They were the stuff of legend to Persian and Arab writers; ancient invasions were attributed to them, and like the Scythians and Sarmatians of antiquity, their name was sometimes used as an epithet for all the peoples north of the Caucasus.
The Khazar ruler, or khagan, once reported to a Spanish correspondent that his people were descended from Japheth, one of the sons of Noah, a mythical lineage also claimed by other peoples of the Caucasus and elsewhere. However, the Khazars were probably of Turkic origin—hence, one of the common names used by Byzantine writers: Tourkoi—and perhaps spoke a language akin to those of later Pecheneg, Cuman, and Tatar peoples of the steppe.
The Khazars grew powerful by serving as middlemen in the trade between central Asia and the west, a precursor of the commercial explosion along the same route in the Middle Ages. They held sway over the entire territory from the Volga river to Crimea and opened a trade link between the Caspian and the Black Sea. Their cities along the Volga and Don were major emporia where merchants from across Europe and Eurasia met to exchange salt, wax, fur, leather, honey, and slaves. The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, who visited the Khazar domains in the early tenth century, met bands of tattooed Norsemen who had rowed and portaged down river routes all the way from the Baltic Sea in order to trade there.19
Byzantines and Khazars had an inconstant relationship. They sometimes cooperated against Arabs, Persians, and Pechenegs, but Constantine VII advised his heir to forge strategic alliances with other powers as a hedge against Khazar ambition. Constantine had reason to be wary, for in the past the Khazars had sometimes interfered in Byzantine domestic politics, aiding one faction or another in the numerous succession struggles that plagued the empire. In 695 the emperor Justinian II was dispatched from his throne by a rival claimant, who also paid him the indignity of cutting off his nose and banishing him to Chersonesus, a city then under Khazar influence. Justinian made the most of his exile, however. He hatched a plan to attack Constantinople and looked to his Khazar hosts for support. He took the khagan’s sister as a wife and received the city of Phanagoria as a dowry. With foreign help, he wrested the Byzantine throne from the usurper. His Khazar wife, baptized and christened Theodora, became the first foreignborn empress of Byzantium. Theodora’s conversion was no great leap, though, for the Khazars were known for their supreme tolerance of other faiths. This pragmatism in spiritual affairs led them in an unlikely direction, toward the adoption of Judaism as the state religion.
The Khazars had a straightforward story about how they came to be Jews. In the distant past, the khagan Bulan, wishing to take on formal religious training, summoned learned men from among the Byzantines, Arabs, and Jews, and asked them to debate the relative merits of their faiths. Not surprisingly, the debate turned into a shouting match. Exasperated, Bulan asked the Christian and Muslim sages which of the two other religions was preferable. Both agreed that, forced to choose, they would prefer Judaism. That settled things as far as the khagan was concerned. Bulan announced that the Khazars, or at least their leaders, were now to become Jews, and he had himself circumcised to prove the point. The tale is surely apocryphal; medieval Slavic chroniclers would tell a similar story about how their forebears came to be Christians. But the Khazars do seem to have adopted Judaism at some point in the mid-700s. News of the conversion drew Jews from across the Byzantine and Arab lands, and scholars from Constantinople and Baghdad arrived to instruct the Khazar nobility in the faith.
This new Eurasian Jewish empire was widely known in the early Middle Ages, a real-world precursor of the fantastic kingdom of Prester John that would attract Christian adventurers to the east some time later. Most of what we know about the Khazars’ conversion, in fact, comes from the correspondence of a Khazar khagan with a rabbi of Cordoba (itself perhaps apocryphal). Yet religious flourishing accompanied political decline. Within a few centuries, the empire had vanished altogether, leaving little physical evidence of its ever having existed. Its memory, however, lingered. The Caspian—the bahr al-Khazar to the Arabs and the Hazer Denizi to the Turks—preserved the Khazar name, and when Mediterranean seamen set sail for Crimea in the Middle Ages, they were heading for a peninsula they still called “Gazaria.”20
The Khazar empire fell victim to new powers north of the sea. Periodic battles with the nomadic Pechenegs weakened their cities. More importantly, the expanding principalities of the Rhos in the forested north and along the river courses of the steppe zone looked jealously on Khazar control of the Volga and Caspian. By the late 900s, the Rhos had captured the major Khazar fortresses north of the Caucasus and rolled back Khazar power from around the Sea of Azov.
As with the Pechenegs and the Khazars, Constantine VII also warned his son about the Rhos. They lived north of the Pechenegs, sometimes raiding with them, sometimes being raided by them, but they generally strove to keep peace with the nomads, since the commerce in cattle, horses, and sheep was one of the mainstays of their economy. They also frequently traveled down the rivers toward the sea and sailed on to Constantinople. Laden with goods, their ships were always easy prey for Pecheneg raiders, especially when they had to portage over the rapids on the Dnepr or offload onto larger ships at the river mouths.21 Sometimes large parties of Rhos launched their own raids across the sea. They attacked Constantinople in 860, an expedition reminiscent of the coming of the Goths several centuries earlier. According to one surely incredible account, the Rhos fixed wheels to their fleet of 2,000 ships and sailed across the open plains west of the city to frighten the Byzantine garrison on the walls.22 They returned repeatedly, without the wheels and in smaller numbers, over the next two centuries.
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The Rhos who made their way across the sea were perhaps a branch of the same Norse traders whom Ibn Fadlan had earlier found doing business with the Khazars on the lower Volga. Later Slavic chroniclers cast them as foreign princes invited to govern the fractious Slavs in the Dnepr river basin, but a gradual transformation is more likely. Norse traders originally floated down the northern river routes from the Baltic, and over time trading outposts sprang up to service these periodic visits. These, in turn, developed into permanent cities, either founded by the Norsemen themselves or taken over from the local Slavs. Eventually, these bands of armed Norse merchants came to adopt the language and customs of their Slavic subordinates. In the ninth century, Norse princes captured the city of Kiev, then a tributary of the Khazars. When Byzantine writers looked out on this growing power in the north, they used a variety of names for these new settlers—Scythians, Sarmatians, Varangians, even Hyperboreans—but the name that stuck was Rhosoi, the people from a land far beyond the northern seacoast that the Byzantines came to call Rhosia.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Rhos made major forays along both the northern and southern coasts, perhaps using the same Viking longboats that appeared at nearly the same time along the shores of Britain. As one Byzantine writer lamented, they
