Cyril Mango. Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome. Scribner's, 1980.[beginning with pg. 13]
CHAPTER I
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
All empires have ruled over a diversity of peoples and in this respect the
Byzantine Empire was no exception. Had its constituent population
been reasonably well fused, had it been united in accepting the
Empire's dominant civilization, it would hardly have been necessary to
devote a chapter to this topic. It so happens, however, that even before
the beginning of the Byzantine period - indeed, when the grand edifice
of Rome started to show its first cracks towards the end of the second
century AD- the various nations under Roman sway tended to move
apart and assert their individuality. The rise of the Christian religion,
far from healing this rift by the introduction of a universal allegiance,
only accentuated it. We must, therefore, begin with the question: Who
were the 'Byzantines'? In an attempt to answer it we shall undertake a
rapid tour of the Empire, noting as we proceed the populations of the
various provinces and the languages spoken by them. The time I have
chosen is about 560 AD, shortly after the recovery by the Emperor
Justinian of large parts of Italy and North Africa and several decades
before the major ethnographic changes that were to accompany the
disintegration of the Early Byzantine State.
It will have been sufficient for our imaginary traveller, provided he
did not intend to stray far from the cities, to know only two languages,
namely Greek and Latin. The boundaries of their respective diffusion
were not in all places sharply drawn. It may be said, however, as a
rough approximation that the linguistic frontier ran through the Balkan peninsula along an east-west line from Odessos (Varna) on the
Black Sea to Dyrrachium (Durres) on the Adriatic; while south of the
Mediterranean it divided Libya from Tripolitania. With the exception
of the Balkan lands, where there was a fair amount of mingling, the
western half of the Empire was solidly Latin and the eastern half solidly
Greek in the sense that those were the languages of administration and
culture. Nearly all educated persons in the East could speak Greek, just
as all educated persons in the West spoke Latin, but a great proportion
of ordinary people spoke neither.
Our traveller would have had considerable difficulty in supplying
himself with an up-to-date guidebook. He could have laid his hands on
a bare enumeration of provinces and cities called the Synecdemus of
Hierocles as well as on a few itineraries of earlier date that gave
distances between staging posts along the main roads. He might have
drawn some useful but antiquated information from a little book
known to us as the Expositio totius mundi et gentium which was composed
in the middle of the fourth century; but if he wanted a systematic
treatise combining geography with ethnography, he would have had to
pack a copy of Strabo in his luggage. If he had been able to find the
geographical treatise (now lost) by the Alexandrian merchant Cosmas
Indicopleustes, he would probably have derived little practical benefit
from it. Let us imagine that our traveller was content with such imperfect documentation and that, starting from Constantinople, he
intended to travel clockwise round the Empire.
Constantinople, like all great capitals, was a melting-pot of
heterogeneous elements: all seventy-two tongues known to man were
represented in it, according to a contemporary source. Provincials of
all kinds had either settled there or would drift in and out on commercial or official business. The servile class included many barbarians.
Another foreign element was provided by military units which in the
sixth century consisted either of barbarians (Germans, Huns, and
others) or some of the sturdier provincials like Isaurians, Illyrians
and Thracians. It is said that seventy thousand soldiers were billeted on
the householders of Constantinople in Justinian's reign. Syrian,
Mesopotamian and Egyptian monks, who spoke little or no Greek,
thronged to the capital to enjoy the protection of the Empress Theodora
and impress the natives with their bizarre feats of asceticism. The
ubiquitous Jew earned his living as a craftsman or a merchant. Constantinople had been founded as a centre of latinity in the east and still
numbered among its residents many Illyrians, Italians and Africans
whose native tongue was Latin as was that of the EmperorJustinian
himself. Furthermore, several works of Latin literature were produced
at Constantinople, like Priscian's famous Grammar, the Chronicle of
Marcellinus and the panegyric of Justin 1l by the African Corippus.
Necessary as Latin still was for the legal profession and certain
branches of the administration, the balance was inexorably tilting in
favour of Greek. By the end of the sixth century, as Pope Gregory the
Great avers, it was no easy matter to find a competent translator from
Latin into Greek in the imperial capital.
Facing Constantinople lies the huge land mass of Asia Minor which
has been compared to a jetty attached to Asia and pointing towards
Europe. Its most developed parts have always been the coastal edges,
especially the gently shelving west face, favoured by a temperate
climate and studded with famous cities. The Black Sea coastal strip is
much narrower and discontinuous, while the southern shore has, with
the exception of the Pamphylian plain, no low-lying edge at all. The
coastal areas, save for the mountainous part of Cilicia (Isauria), where
the Taurus range advances to the very edge of the sea, had been
hellenized for a good thousand years and more before Justinian's reign.
Along the Black Sea the limit of Greek speech corresponded to the
present frontier between Turkey and the Soviet Union. To the east of
Trebizond and Rizaion (Rize) dwelt various Caucasian peoples, such
as the Iberians (Georgians) as well as the Laz and the Abasgians
(Abkhazians), the latter two barely touched by Christian missions. The
Empire also possessed a Hellenized foothold on the southern shore of
the Crimea, while the high tableland of the Crimean peninsula was
inhabited by Goths.
Quite different from the coastal areas of Asia Minor is the high inland
plateau, where the climate is rough and much of the land unfit for
agriculture. In antiquity as in the Middle Ages the plateau was sparsely
populated and urban life was relatively undeveloped there. The more
important cities were situated along the major highways, such as the
so-called Royal Road that ran from Smyrna and Sardis, by way of
Ancyra and Caesarea, to Melitene; the road connecting Constantinople
to Ancyra by way of Dorylaeum; and the southern road that extended
from Ephesus to Laodicea, Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Tyana and,
through the Cilician Gates, to Tarsus and Antioch in Syria. The ethnic
composition of the plateau had not undergone any notable change for
some seven hundred years beforeJustinian's reign. It was a bewildering
mosaic of native peoples as well as immigrant enclaves of long standing,
such as the Celts of Galatia, theJews who had been planted in Phrygia
and elsewhere during the Hellenistic period and Persian groups of even
more ancient origin. It appears that many of the indigenous languages
were still spoken in the Early Byzantine period: Phrygian was probably
still extant, since it appears in inscriptions as late as the third century
AD, Celtic in Galatia, Cappadocian farther east. The unruly Isaurians,
who had to be pacified by force of arms in about 500 AD and many of
whom drifted all over the Empire as professional soldiers and itinerant
masons, were a distinct people speaking their own dialect, often to the
exclusion of Greek. Next to them, however, in the Cilician plain, Greek
had solidly taken root, except, perhaps, among the tribes of the interior.
Lying to the east of Cappadocia and straddling a series of high
mountain chains were a number of Armenian provinces that had been
annexed to the Empire as late as 387 AD when the Armenian kingdom
was partitioned between Persia and Rome. These were strategically
very important, but practically untouched by Graeco-Roman civilization, and they continued to be ruled by native satraps until Justinian
imposed on them a new form of military administration. In the fifth
century the Armenians acquired their own alphabet and began building up a literature of translations from the Greek and the Syriac which
strengthened their feelings of national identity. Indeed, the Armenians,
who were to play a crucial role in later Byzantine history, proved very
resistant to assimilation as did the other Caucasian peoples.
The boundary between Armenia and Mesopotamia corresponded
approximately to the river Tigris. Three centuries of Parthian occupation (from the middle of the second century BC until the Roman
conquest in about 165 AD) had obliterated in Mesopotamia practically
all traces of the Hellenization which the Macedonian kings had tried so
hard to impose. In the period that concerns us Mesopotamia spoke and
wrote Syriac. The literary form of Syriac represented the dialect of
Edessa (Urfa), and it was in that 'blessed city' as well as at Amida
(Diyarbakir), Nisibis (Nusaybin`, and in the Tur 'Abdin that a vigorous
monastic movement of Monophysite persuasion fuelled the cultivation of
that language. Mesopotamia was a frontier district: the boundary
between Rome and Persia lay a short distance south-east of the garrison
town of Dara, while Nisibis had been ingloriously ceded to the Persians
by the EmperorJovian in 363. The cultural apartness of Mesopotamia
was certainly no help to the imperial government in so sensitive an area.
The dominance of Aramaic dialects, of which Syriac is a member,
extended throughout Syria and Palestine to the confines of Egypt. Here
we witness a phenomenon of considerable interest. When the Hellenistic kingdoms were established following the death of Alexander the
Great, Syria was divided between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The
Ptolemies, who obtained the southern half of the country, did rather
little to plant Greek colonies there. The Seleucids, on the other hand,
for whom northern Syria was of crucial importance, carried out intensive
colonization. They established a number of new cities, such as
Antioch on the Orontes, Apamea, Seleucia and Laodicea, and injected
a Greek element into existing cities, such as Aleppo. From that time
onward all of Syria remained continguously under a Greek-speaking
administration. Yet, some nine centuries later, we find Greek speech
confined not only to cities, but largely to those very cities that had been
founded by the Hellenistic kings. The countryside generally and the
towns of non-Greek origin, like Emesa (Homs), clung to their native
Aramaic.
It is unlikely that the use of Greek should have been more widespread
in Palestine than it was in northern Syria, except for an artificial
phenomenon, namely the development of the 'holy places'. Starting in
the reign of Constantine the Great, practically every site of biblical
fame became, as we would say today, a tourist attraction. From every
corner of the Christian world people poured into Palestine: some as
transient pilgrims, others on a longer-term basis. Monasteries of every
nationality sprang up like mushrooms in the desert next to the Dead
Sea. Palestine was thus a babel of tongues, but the native population -
and we must remember that it included two distinct ethnic groups,
namely theJews and the Samaritans - spoke Aramaic as it had always
done. The pilgrim Egeria, who witnessed the Easter services at
Jerusalem about the year 400, has this to say:
"Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac,
another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the
bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and neer in Syriac,
there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek,
translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them.
Similarly for the lections that are read in church: since these must be read in
Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the
benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who
are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an
interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and
sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin."
Another element of the population of-both Syria and Palestine consisted of Arabs who had spread as far north as Mesopotamia. Some of
them, like the Nabataeans of Petra and the Palmyrenes, had become
sedentary and lost their native language. Others roamed the deserts
either as brigands or as vassals of the Empire whose duty it was to
protect the settled areas and oversee the transhumance of the nomads.
We should not, in any case, imagine that the Arab conquest of the
seventh century introduced a foreign element into those provinces: the
Arabs had been there all along, their numbers were increasing and, in
Justinian's reign, they assumed more and more the role of keepers of the
emperor's peace. When, for example, the Samaritans staged a bloody
revolt in 529, it was an Arab chieftain, Abukarib, who put them down.
Closely linked with Syria by virtue of its situation was the island of
Cyprus. Here Greek had been spoken since prehistoric times, but there
was also a sizeable colony of Syrians as may be deduced from the
prevalence of the Monophysite heresy . St Epiphanius, the most famous bishop of
Salamis (d. 403), was a Palestinian and is said to have known five languages -
Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Egyptian
and Latin. An exaggeration perhaps, but even so an indication of the
multilingualism that characterized, as it still does, the more enterprising among the Levantines.
Separated from Palestine by an area of desert lay the rich and ancient
land of Egypt. Here, too, the distribution of Greek was a direct legacy of
the Hellenistic age. The capital, Alexandria, was a predominantly
Greek city, but it was officially described as being ad Aegyptum, not in
Aegypto, an intrusion into an alien country; and the farther one travelled
from Alexandria, the less Greek was spoken. Apart from the capital,
only two cities had been founded by the Greeks, Naukratis in the Delta
and Ptolemais in the Thebaid; nor did Hellenization make much
progress under Roman administration. Setting aside theJewish colony,
which in the first century AD is said to have numbered about one
million, the bulk of the population, even though they were administered
in Greek, continued to speak Egyptian (Coptic), and there are signs
that in the Early Byzantine period Coptic was gaining ground so that,
by the sixth century, even some official acts were published in the native
tongue. Above all, Coptic was the language of Egyptian Christianity,
while Greek was identified with the alien hierarchy that was imposed
by the imperial government.
The settled part of Egypt, which was practically limited to the Nile
valley and the Delta, was threatened on all sides by barbarian tribes.
From the east came raiding Saracens; in the south the black Nobadae
and Blemmyes were particularly troublesome, while the west was open
to Berber incursions, as was also Libya, a province that was administratively joined
to Egypt. St Daniel, who was a monk at Scetis, no great
distance from Alexandria, was three times kidnapped by barbarians
and managed to escape only by killing his captor - a sin for which he did
penance for the rest of his life. When, in the second half of the sixth
century, the itinerant monk John Moschus visited the Egyptian monasteries, he
picked up many tales of depredations both by barbarians and
by native brigands. Some monasteries had become practically
deserted.
With Libya we come to the limit of the Greek-speaking provinces.
Farther west lay Tripolitania, a narrow coastal strip, then the important regions of
Byzacena, Proconsularis and Numidia, and finally the
two Mauretanias extending as far as the straits of Gibraltar. These had
all been extensively romanized, and the richer areas, corresponding to
modern Tunisia, had counted in better days among the most developed
and prosperous parts of the Empire. How far the native population had
been assimilated is a matter of uncertainty; nor it is entirely clear
whether the vernacular language of the cities, which St Augustine calls
Punic, was a legacy from ancient Phoenician (as appears more probable) or whether it was Berber. Our traveller in 560 would have found
in any case a situation somewhat different from that which the Bishop
of Hippo had known a century and a half earlier: for Africa had barely
been recovered from the Vandals (in 533) who had held it for a century
as an independent power. The Vandals had not been sufficiently
numerous to have made a significant impact on the ethnography of the
population, but their intrusion had led to the upsurge of the various
Berber tribes who now seriously threatened the settled areas.
We need not concern ourselves with Spain, although part of its
southern coast was recovered by Justinian from the Visigoths and
remained in Byzantine hands for about seventy years. And so we may
lead our traveller to Italy, whereJustinian's rule had just been established on a somewhat shaky basis after a great deal of bloodshed. The
whole country was then in a dreadful state. Continuous warfare
between Byzantium and the Ostrogoths, lasting from 535 until 562,
resulted in the destruction of Milan with a reputed loss of three hundred
thousand males, the virtual depopulation of Rome which sufered
three sieges, and widespread starvation in the countryside. 'Italy has
become everywhere even more destitute of men than Libya,' wrote
Procopius, perhaps without great exaggeration. As to the composition
of the population, there can be little doubt that the ltalitai, as Procopius called them, were basically Latin; even in the imperial capital of
Ravenna, which had close ties with the East and numerous oriental
settlers, Latin was the normal medium of communication. Some tiny
pockets of Greek may have survived in the southern part of the peninsula and Greek certainly continued to be spoken on the east coast of
Sicily. There were other minority groups, such as the Jews and the
recently arrived Ostrogoths, but the latter could hardly have numbered
more than a hundred thousand. Many more waves of invaders and
settlers were to come, without, however, altering the fundamentally
Latin character of the population.
Crossing the Adriatic, our traveller may have disembarked at
Dyrrachium and followed the Via Egnatia all the way back to Constantinople. The regions he would have to traverse were then about as
desolate as Italy. To quote Procopius once again,
"Illyricum and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the
Adriatic to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese,
was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when
Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among
the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than
two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured, so that a veritable
'Scythian wilderness' came to exist everywhere in this land."
Procopius omits to mention here that some of the most destructive
invasions of the Balkan peninsulahad occurred beforeJustinian's time,
in particular by the Goths in 378, by the Huns in 441-7, by the
Ostrogoths in 479-82, by the Bulgars starting in 493. There can be little
doubt concerning the immense amount of havoc caused by these and
later incursions, but their effect on the ethnography of the regions in
question is difficult to assess. The native populations were the Illyrians
to the west, the Thracians and Daco-Mysians to the east and, of course,
the Greeks to the south, but it would take a brave historian to state who
was living where and in what numbers in the middle of the sixth
century. The Slavs had already begun to settle, especially in the area
between Nis and Sofia, as proved by the place names listed by Procopius, and we may imagine that the prolonged presence of Gothic
and other barbarian troops had left some trace. As to languages, we
have already commented on the boundary between Latin and Greek.
Of Illyrian (whose relation to modern Albanian is disputed) very little
is known, but Thracian, in particular Bessic, was still very much alive
in the sixth century.
Such, in brief outline, were the peoples and languages of Justinian's
Empire; and if I have laid any stress on the native elements, it was in
order to correct the bias of our literary and narrative sources. To take
but one instance, the fourth-century rhetorician Libanius, who was
born at Antioch and lived most of-his life in that city, whose writings fill
eleven printed volumes and are a mine of useful information, mentions
only once the existence of the Syriac language. Yet it is an indisputable
fact that Greek-speaking Antioch was an island in a sea of Syriac.
Cultivated authors simply took no notice of such 'uncivilized'
phenomena. Nor are inscriptions much more illuminating. Whoever
set up an inscription, be it even on a tombstone, naturally used the
'prestige' language of the area. Besides, many of the vernacular dialects
were not written. It is largely in the milieu of monks that we are
occasionally brought face to face with ordinary illiterate folk and gain
some inkling of what they spoke. Predictably, it was their native patois.
Hence the custom of setting up 'national' monasteries. Others, however, were multinational: that of the Sleepless Ones (Akoimetoi) was
divided by language into four groups - Latin, Greek, Syriac and
Coptic. The monastery founded by St Theodosius the Coenobiarch in
Palestine catered for Greek, Bessic and Armenian. On Mount Sinai in
the sixth century one could hear Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic and
Bessic. In 518 the abbot of a monastery at Constantinople could not
sign his name to a petition because he did not know Greek. Similar
examples could easily be multiplied.
Our survey would have been much more instructive had we been
able to express in figures the relative importance of the various ethnic
groups. Unfortunately, we have no reliable figures at our disposal, as
has already been indicated in the Introduction. One eminent scholar
has nevertheless ventured the view that Justinian's Empire, including
the reconquered western provinces, had no more than 30 million
inhabitants. Not taking into account the losses caused by the great
plague of 542, this appears to be too low an estimate: we may be nearer
the truth in postulating 30 million for the eastern half of the Empire. In
very approximate terms, the distribution would have been the following: 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia
combined, 10 million in Asia Minor, and 3 to 4 million in the Balkans. If
these figures are anywhere near the truth, it would follow that the
native Greek speakers represented less than a third of the total population, say 8
million, making allowance for the unassimilated peoples of
Asia Minor and for the Latin and Thracian speakers of the Balkans.
The Greek, Coptic and Aramaic elements would thus have been on a
footing of near parity. Compared to the spread of Latin in Gaul and
Spain, it must be admitted that the Greek language had made very
limited progress between the third century BC and the sixth century AD.
This was no doubt due to the fact that Hellenization was largely centred
on cities. About a century after the Arab conquest Greek had become
practically extinct in both Syria and Egypt, which can only mean that it
had not grown deep roots.
One further observation may be made on the basis of our survey,
namely that in spite of mounting insecurity in nearly all parts of the
Empire, most of Justinian's subjects still lived in their traditional
homelands. The diaspora of the Greeks, of the Jews and, to a lesser
extent, of the Syrians had occurred several centuries earlier. From the
viewpoint of ethnography, as in so many other respects, Justinian's age
represents, therefore, the tail end of Antiquity.
It would be wearisome to describe here all the ethnographic changes
that the Empire witnessed after the sixth century, but we must say a few
words about the greatest mutation of all, which started happening a few
decades after Justinian's death. Its first sign was the massive installation of the
Slavs in the Balkan peninsula. The Slavs came in several
waves and, unlike earlier invaders, they came to stay. In an oft-quoted
passage John of Amida (also known asJohn of Ephesus) records that in
581
"an accursed people, called Slaonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the
country of the Thessalonians, and all TXrace, and captured the cities, and took
numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery,
and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main
force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own.... And even to this day
[584 AD], they stili encamp and dwell there, and live in peace in the Roman
territories, free from anxiety and fear, and lead captive and slay and burn."
Another source, the so-called Chronicle of Monembasia, states that in
the year 587-8 the Turkic Avars (with whom the Slavs were usually
allied)
"captured all of Thessaly and all of Greece, Old Epirus, Attica and Euboea.
Indeed, they attacked the Peloponnese and took it by war; and after expelling
and destroying the native Hellenic peoples, they dwelt there. Those who were
able to escape their murderous hands were scattered here and there. Thus, the
citizens of Patras moved to the district of Reggio in Calabria, the Argives to the
island called Orobe, the Corinthians to the island of Aegina.... Only the
eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched
by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the
country."
There is some doubt concerning the exact date of these events, but it is
undeniable that at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the
seventh, when the Danubian frontier completely collapsed, practicallv
the entire Balkan peninsula passed out of imperial control. Only a few
coastal outposts, such as Mesembria on the Black Sea, Thessalonica,
Athens and Corinth, held out. Elsewhere the old population sought
refuge on off-shore islands, as it did on Monembasia, or emigrated to
Italy. The domain of barbarism extended as far as the outer defences of
Constantinople - the so-called Anastasian Long Walls which described
a wide arc from the Black Sea to Selymbria (Siliv on the Sea of
Marmora - but even these had soon to be abandoned.
The last important Slavonic settlement was that of the Serbs and
Croats who in the reign of Heraclius occupied the lands where they still
dwell. Then, in 680, came the Turkic Bulgars and conquered the
country that bears their name, where they were eventually assimilated
by the sitting Slavonic population. The barbarization of the Balkans
began to be reversed only towards the ed of the eighth century, but by
that time its effects had become permanent.
Simultaneously with the loss of the Balkans the Empire suffered a
more serious amputation by being deprived of its eastern and southern
provinces. This happened in two stages. First, between the years 609
and 619, the Persians conquered all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They
were then defeated by the emperor Heraclius and withdrew to their
own country; but a few years later the same provinces were overrun by
the Arabs and, this time, lost for good. The whole of the north African
coast also succumbed to the invader. The Mediterranean empire of
Rome simply ceased to exist, while the Byzantine State found itself
limited to Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, a bit of the Crimea and
Sicily.
The Persians also initiated another development that was to have
important demographic consequences by striking at Constantinople
through Asia Minor. In so doing they caused immense havoc. When
the Arabs had succeeded to the Persians and made themselves masters
of all the territories up to the Taurus mountains, they, too, struck into
Asia Minor- not once or twice, but practically every year- and this
went on for nearly two centuries. Many of the raids did not penetratc far
from the frontier, but several of them extended as far as the Black Sea
and the Aegean, and a few reached Constantinople itself. As it turned
out, the Arabs never managed to gain a foothold on the Anatolian
plateau. What happened instead was that every time they marched in
the local population would take refuge in the inaccessible forts with
which Asia Minor is so liberally proviced. The Arabs would pass
between the forts, taking prisoners and booty, while the Byzantines
would burn the crops to deprive the enemy of supplies and keep him on
the move. The consequences of this prolonged process are easy to
imagine: much of Asia Minor was devastated and depopulated almost
beyond repair.
In this way an enormous demographic gap was created. The Empire
urgently needed farmers as it also needed soldiers. To achieve this end
it had to resort to massive transfers of population. The Emperor Justinian Il, in
particular, applied this policy on a wide scale. He moved a
good part of the population of Cyprus to the region of Cyzicus on the
southern shore of the Sea of Marmora. It was, apparently, a failure:
many of the immigrants perished en route, and those who reached their
destination later asked to be repatriated. Justinian II also moved 'a
great multitude' of Slavs to Bithynia. Once again, he had little luck:
the thirty thousand soldiers he raised from among this group to fight
against the Arabs defected to the enemy, whereupon the emperor
inflicted cruel reprisals on their families. In the 760s, however, we are
told that 208,000 Slavs came to live in Bithynia of their own accord. In
the eighth century we repeatedly hear of the organized settlement of
Syrians in Thrace.
Among the new immigrants the most prominent, however, were the
Armenians, many of whom arrived without being forced to do so. The
Armenians were excellent soldiers, and the Empire, deprived of its
Illyrian recruiting ground, needed them badly. In fact, the immigration
of Armenians had started in the sixth century, and from the reign of
Maurice onwards they formed the backbone of the Byzantine army.
The trickle of Armenians into the Empire was spread over many
centuries. Many settled in Cappadocia and other parts of eastern Asia
Minor close to their original homeland, others in Thrace, others in the
region of Pergamon. It is impossible to give even a rough approximation of their
numbers. Unlike the Slavs, however, the Armenians
quickly rose to prominent positions, even to the imperial throne, and
dominated the military establishment throughout the Middle Byzantine period.
Thus, if we place ourselves at about the time when the Empire
started on the slow course of its recovery, say towards the end of the
eighth century, we find a population that had been so thoroughly
churned up that it is difficult to tell what ethnic groups were living
where and in what numbers. It is often stated that by shedding,
however painfully, its principal non-Greek-speaking elements, such as
the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Illyrians, the Empire had become
more homogeneous. It is also asserted that the non-Greeks were gradually
assimilated or Hellenized through the agency of the Church and the
army, and that this happened in particular to the indigenous populations of Asia
Minor as well as to the Slavs in the Peloponnese and
elsewhere in Greece. The critical reader may be advised to treat such
generalizations with a measure of caution. It is true, of course, that
following the eclipse of Latin, Greek became the only official language
of the Empire, so that a knowledge of it was mandatory for pursuing a
career or transacting business. Neither Armenian nor Slavonic ever
supplanted it as a general medium of communication. It is also true
that in the long run Slavonic died out in Greece and in Bithynia, and if
any Armenian has been spoken in Thrace within living memory, it was
not on the part of descendants of the colonists planted there in the
eighth century. But then it is also known that Greek survived in Asia
Minor on a continuous basis only in Pontus and a small part of
Cappadocia, whereas it had become practically extinct in the western
part of the subcontinent until its reintroduction there by immigrants in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We would not argue from the
last observation that western Asia Minor was not predominantly
Greek-speaking in the Middle Ages. However illuminating it may be in
some respects, the long view does not help the historian of Byzantium to
solve the specific problems that confront him. Was Hellenization, for
example, a conscious aim of the imperial government, and if so, how
was it implemented and with what success? And if it succeeded in the
Middle Ages, why had it not done so in Antiquity under conditions of a
more settled life and a higher civilization?
When we look at our scanty sources; we realize that the formulation
of the above questions does not correspond to the Byzantine way of
thinking. First of all, the very designation 'Greek', which we use so
freely today to describe those Byzantines who did not belong to any
alien group, is entirely absent from tlie literature of the period. An
inhabitant of Greece south of Thessaly would have referred to himself
as a Helladikos (a name already current in the sixth century AD), but he
could have been a Slav as well as a 'Greek'. The same holds true of other
regions whose dwellers called themselves by the names of their
respective provinces, for example Paphlagonians or Thraksians (after
the Thraksian 'theme' in western Asia Minor). Since, therefore, there
was no notion of'Greekness', it is hard to see how there could have been
one of 'hellenization'. The only passage, to my knowledge, that may
imply something of the kind says that the Emperor Basil I converted the
Slavonic tribes from their old religion and, 'having grecized them
(graikosas), subjected them to governors according to Roman custom,
honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression
of their own rulers'. It has long been, however, a matter of dispute
what the term 'grecized' may mean in the present context. What we do
hear about, again and again, is the conversion of various peoples to
Orthodox Christianity, be they pagan Slavs or Muslim Cretans, and the
setting up of an ecclesiastical organization. Here is how the Chronicle
of Monembasia describes the activity of the Emperor Nicephorus I
in the Peloponnese: 'He built de novo the town of Lacedaemon and
settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thraksians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it
into a bishopric.' Surely, neither the Kafirs (possibly a generic term
for converts from Islam) nor the Armenians would have contributed to
the hellenization of Laconia. The emperor's purpose was simply to
implant a Christian population and set up a bishopric.
There can be little doubt that the evangelization of non-Christian
peoples settled in the Empire was carried out in Greek. This may cause
some surprise in the case of the Slavs since the Slavonic alphabet was
itself devised by a Byzantine, St Cyril, presumably in the 860s. Its
invention, however, and the consequent translation of the essential
Christian texts were intended for a far-away Slavonic country,
Moravia; and it was entirely a matter of chance that the Cyrillo-
Methodian mission, after its initial failure, should have found a fertile
soil in a country for which it was not intended, namely the Bulgarian
kingdom. As far as our knowledge goes, no attempt was ever made to
evangelize the Slavs in Greece in their own language, just as the
liturgical use of Greek was imposed on conquered Bulgaria after 1018.
Clearly, this must have contributed to the spread of Greek. But was it
due to deliberate policy? Is it not more likely that the absence of a
linguistically qualified clergy, the relative inaccessibility of the Slavonic
Scriptures, and the mixed nature of the population should have combined to make the use of Greek the easier option?
However efficacious the liturgical imposition of Greek may have
proved, it has to be admitted that the assimilation of barbarian enclaves
was a very slow process. In the Peloponnese the presence of pagan Slavs
a short distance south of Sparta is attested in the latter part of the tenth
century, that is nearly two hundred years after the first attempts to
bring about their conversion. Equally telling is the case of the Slavs in
Bithynia. We have seen that these were transplanted in v ery considerable numbers
at the end of the seventh century and towards the middle
of the eighth. Some two hundred years later, the Byzantine armament
assembled in an effort to conquer Crete in 949 included a contingent of
'Slavonians who are established in Opsikion' (this being the administrative name of
a part of Bithynia) placed under their own commanders. Clearly, these Slavonians
still formed a distinct group. In the
next century Anna Comnena refers to a village in Bithvnia 'locally
called Sagoudaous', presumably after the tribe of the Sagoudatai,
attested in Macedonia in the seventh century. A little later the Slavonic
element in Bithynia was augmented by the EmperorJohn II Comnenus
who settled near Nicomedia a throng of Serbian captives. Serbian
villages are still mentioned in those parts in the thirteenth century. In
other words, it is quite possible that the Slavs of Bithynia, or at any rate
part of them, were assimilated by the (Ottoman Turks without having
ever become 'Greek'.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these and many other cases
is that the Middle Byzantine Empire was by no means a solidly Greek
state. In addition to the Armenians and the Slavs, there were many
other foreign elements, such as the Georgians and the Balkan Vlachs. A
massive influx of Syrians and other Christian orientals followed the
eastward expansion of the Empire at the end of the tenth century; and
when, in 1018, the imperial frontier was once more extended to the
Danube, it comprised vast areas where Greek had never been spoken or
had been extinguished a long time previously. Whether Greek speakers
formed at the time the majority or a minority of the inhabitants of the
Empire is a guess I should not like to hazard.
It is not altogether easy to define the feelings of solidarity, if any, that
bound together the multinational inhabitants of the Empire. In the
sixth century the slogan Gloria Romanorum still appeared from time to
time on the imperial coinage, but it is not likely that there was much
devotion in the eastern provinces to the idea of Romanias. Besides,
loyalty to Rome and admiration for her ancient greatness had been a
regular theme of pagan polemic, whereas the Church maintained the
position that Christians were, above all, citizens of the Heavenly
Jerusalem and in so doing probably weakened the cohesion of the
Empire. That is not to say that instances of loyalty to the State are
absent from Byzantine history: quite the reverse is true. It is enough
to recall the despair of the population of Nisibis when their city had
been ceded to the Persians in 6, the demonstrations of Dro-Roman
sentiments at Edessa in 449 in the context of sectarian strife, and a
multitude of similar cases. But then we must remember that at the time
the only alternative to living under Roman rule was living under
Persian rule (which was usually worse). People crushed by the burden
of taxation were often tempted to desert to the enemy, even to join some
barbarian tribe that levied no taxes, but that was not an option for those
who enjoyed a reasonable standard of living. A feeling of Romanitas was
hardly the determining factor.
As far as we can judge, the main links of solidarity were two: regional
and religious. People identified themselves with their village, their city
or their province much more than they did with the Empire. When a
person was away from home he was a stranger and was often treated
with suspicion. A monk from western Asia Minor who joined a monastery in Pontus
was 'disparaged and mistreated by everyone as a
stranger'. The corollary to regional solidarity was regional hostility.
We encounter many derogatory statements concerning 'the cunning
Syrian' who spoke with a thick accent, the uncouth Paphlagonian, the
mendacious Cretan. Alexandrians excited ridicule at Constantinople.
Armenians were nearly always described in terms of abuse. Even
demons had strong feelings of local
affiliation and did not want to consort with their fellows from the next
province.
Religious identity was often more strongly felt than regional identity.
Had the Church been less intolerant, it may well be that different
religious groups could have lived peaceably side by side, but there was
usually some zealous bishop or monk who incited a pogrom, and then
the fight was on. It is not surprising that Jews and the few remaining
pagans should have proved the most consistently disloyal elements in
the Empire. Within the Church, however, religion and regionalism
overlapped to a considerable extent. And herein, perhaps, lies the key
to the 'heretical' groupings. For what seems to have motivated the Syrian or the
Egyptian
Monophysite was not so much his belief in some abstruse point of
doctrine as his loyalty to his own Church, his own bishop and the holy
men of his neighbourhood. Whenever a Christian splinter group had a
solidly established territorial base, all attempts to impose on it a
uniform, imperial orthodoxy ended in failure.
If in the Early Byzantine period the idea of Romanitas held little
potency, the same was even truer of the Middle period when the old
imerial caDital had receded into some 'Scthian wilderness' and the
Latin tongue had been forgotten. Even in contexts of international
confrontation the emotive concept became that of Christian rather than
that of Roman identity. When, in 922, Romanus I Lecapenus urged his
army officers to put up a spirited defence against Symeon of Bulgaria,
they vowed to die on behalf of the Christians, and this although the
Bulgarians were by this time, at any rate nominally, Christian themselves.
Significantly, however, no new term emerged to describe the
identity of the Empire as a whole. Nor was it much needed on the level
of everyday life. When, in the early ninth century, St Gregory the
Decapolite, a native of southern Asia Minor, landed at the port of Ainos
in Thrace, he was promptly arrested by the imperial police and subjected to a
bastinado. We are not told why; perhaps he looked like an
Arab. He was then asked: 'Who are you, and what is your religion?' His
answer was: 'I am a Christian, my parents are such and such, and I am
of the Orthodox persuasion.' Religion and local origin constituted his
passport. It did not occur to him to describe himself as a Roman.
Source:
This text is part of the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection
of public domain and copy-permitted texts related to medieval and Byzantine history.
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Paul Halsall, May 2023
