Under the vigorous and powerful Macedonian imperial dynasty, lasting 200 years from the late ninth century, the Byzantine Empire strengthened and at times extended its borders (Figure 17.2), which however remained overall in the same lands as previously: the South Balkans with Greece, Anatolia, and a foothold in southern Italy and the Crimea. Alongside strong rulers and military power, the final victory of the “iconophiles” in 843 (the supporters of religious representative art and its mystical authority, see Chapter 18) encouraged greater internal coherence around the symbolic power of the Empire as God’s kingdom on Earth, and brought a spiritual dimension to the defenses of the Empire against its Slav and Islamic neighbor states. The grandson of the first Macedonian emperor Basil I (acceded in 867) was Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos (acceded 913), from whose reign colorful texts and images survive to illuminate the elaborate ceremonies and politics of the Empire.
Slavs within the revived Empire had been incorporated into the Byzantine state during the eighth and ninth centuries, whilst their Christian conversion followed a policy pursued by the Byzantine church and state, which led ultimately to the “Hellenization” of the probably large share of the population of Greece which derived from the Slav colonization. One means through which successful Hellenization was achieved
Figure 17.2 The Byzantine Empire in 1025.
C. Mango (ed.), Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford 2002, 178 (unnumbered figure). © Oxford University Press.
Was through imperial initiative in appointing tribal leaders as “archons” or regional representatives, tied to recognition of Byzantine authority and the payment of tax or tribute (Megaw 1966). Although we know the names of certain leading families of Slav origin in later times, most not only Christianized but adopted Greek names and kept no roots in their culture of origin. This is of course a sensitive topic even today for a nation like Greece with appropriate pride in its national heritage from Classical Greek times. As a result, the Slav presence in Medieval to Modern Greece has been subject to both academic and popular controversy. The provocative thesis of Fallmerayer in the nineteenth century, that Modern Greeks were almost entirely a Slav replacement of the vanished Hellenic stock, no longer stands academic scrutiny, but neither does the nationalistic opposite, sometimes voiced even by Greek academics, that the Slavs made no significant contribution to the population, perhaps even going“home”after a time in Greece. Malingoudis’ (1991) measured small volume on this topic is an excellent antidote to nationalists on either side of the debate. Equally important to the integration and sur-
Vival of Byzantine civilization was the Christianization of the Slav states surrounding the Empire to its North and West, spearheaded by the monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the ninth century, which gave the Byzantines a powerful spiritual influence on their often dangerous neighbors.
On the other hand, there were also signs of internal changes of a less positive character in later MB times, particularly when the Comnenoi dynasty assume imperial power in the late eleventh century. In the Aegean Mainland countryside the reduced populations suggested from textual and archaeological evidence up until the tenth and eleventh centuries, following a period under Slav control when imperial authority was largely absent, is associated by Byzantine historians with a strong peasantry and a village-based organization of the landscape. A text called The Farmer’s Law (early eighth century AD?) is seen as illustrating this phase of MB peasant life (Gregory 2006). This is contrasted with the dominant model of the Late Roman period, when peasants are considered to have been largely tied (coloni) to the estates of large landowners. By the late MB however the sources evidence an increasing conflict between the independent villager and a new class of landowners (secular but also clerical, with the expansion of monastic holdings), intent on absorbing them into their expanding estates, a battle where the emperors regularly intervened on the peasants’ side but ultimately without great success. At the time of the Crusader conquest of Greece and Constantinople from 1204 AD, many historians argue that the Greek peasantry was widely tied to a form of magnate lordship, as tenants, sharecroppers or even serfs, so that the introduction of Western feudalism by the Franks meant no radical change for many rural communities.
The Macedonian dynasty had achieved a long period of growth and prosperity but from the late eleventh century, when the Comnenoi dynasty (1081— 1185) assumed power, the Empire began to suffer increasing problems from within and without which were inexorably going to cause its decline and demise, even if the last blow was the definitive capture of the capital, Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks. The Empire became constantly on the defensive from external aggression, at the same time as increasing indications of internal breakdown became manifest, including the loss of income and authority to a “semifeudal” provincial landlordism. Normans based from the later eleventh century in their new state in Sicily and South Italy attacked the Byzantine Balkans from the West, whilst the Seljuk dynasty led colonizing Turks at the same time into Anatolia. Although the Normans were rebuffed from the Balkans (not before sacking the second city of Thessaloniki and other major towns such as Thebes), the Turks gradually took over Anatolia except the coastlands.
John Haldon (1992) has suggested a cyclicity in the development of the Byzantine state, paralleled by similar processes in its ultimate replacement, the Ottoman state. The Byzantine Empire initially deployed the “Ancient Mode of Production” whereby free peasants were taxed at low levels to sustain its central state bureaucracy and its regional urban administration, and were also expected to provide recruits for the army. Over time however, a “service” military-bureaucratic class diverted control over the peasantry and tax income into its own hands, aspiring to a hereditary society of wealthy landowners dominating a tied peasantry. This weakened the emperor’s grip on his people and territories. Armies became increasingly dominated by foreign mercenaries, whose cash demands raised taxes, already reduced by a siphoning-off of state revenue into the pockets of the landowners. An early tight control on trade within the Byzantine world was replaced by concessions to the commercial fleets of the entrepreneurial Italian trading cities such as Venice and Genoa, blocking the rise of a middle class of wealth-creating manufacturers and traders within the state and subverting its entire economy. The early Byzantine Empire had been sustained by tax and peasant army recruits from independent rural communities, largely producing their own food and supplying sufficient small surpluses for the minor demands of the state. In contrast, the mature to late Byzantine state was being cut apart by the scissors of a declining income from its peasantry and an economic peripheralization as its wealth was being drained by the expanding proto-capitalist Italian commercial world. Unsurprisingly, the coinage, hitherto a “gold standard” for Mediterranean trade that had maintained its value for some seven centuries, now became devalued (Gregory 2006).
Whereas in feudal Western Europe a defined hierarchy of power existed, Byzantium allowed greater mobility, with two avenues to power: the civil elite with administrative roles in Constantinople and the military leadership provided by provincial landed magnates. However intermarriage and success in building up dynastic privilege led by the twelfth century to a concentration of wealth and status in a limited stratum of families, largely responsible for the commissioning of monastic and church foundations and their famous art (Cormack 1985). This meant that a powerful landowner elite dominated social life at all levels and especially in provincial towns, limiting the development of a middle class (trade and manufacture were considered unsuitable career paths for the elite) and causing a widening gulf between relatively poor peasants and the wealthy magnate class (Gregory 2006). The result was a predictable inability of the Byzantine economy to compete with that of the Italian mercantile families who, massively supported by their commercial republics, represented a foreign capitalist elite in the Byzantine homeland.
Developments in the Middle Byzantine Greek countryside
The development of rural life in the Byzantine provinces has traditionally been reconstructed from literary sources: agrarian laws, saints’lives, contemporary chronicles, and monastic archives. In second place has come the study of monuments surviving in the landscape, especially churches and monastic foundations, with much less attention being given to defensive structures such as castles and towers (which generally remain poorly dated and recorded), and the rather sparse record of modern excavation. The atlas for each Byzantine province (Tabula Imperii Byzantini) now helpfully synthesizes this information. However the richest database for writing the history of the Byzantine countryside lies invisible to all but surface artifact survey teams, ceramic scatters found across provincial landscapes. Although the first intensive surveys were only able to date pottery to very broad periods (“Medieval” or even “Medieval to Turkish”), it is now possible, with the help of a handful of experts, to assign surface finds of tableware to periods of one to two hundred years, whilst advances in establishing fabric and style typologies for domestic and coarse wares often allows their assignation to broader but still useful periods such as Middle Byzantine, Frankish, Early - or Late Ottoman, and Early Modern.
The results of regional surface surveys confirm fundamental changes in Byzantine society during the MB era: a major population growth and the rising productivity of the countryside, which sustained a parallel growth in the number and size of towns (Armstrong 2003) (Figure 17.3). This economic expansion continues into the Frankish thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, forming a steady trend not anticipated by historical sources. It may be objected, as noted earlier, that we have no accurate idea of the settlement patterns for the preceding Early Byzantine era, and indeed we have suggested that most settlements remain invisible archaeologically owing to our inadequate knowledge of the pottery assemblage and the scarcity of coin finds. But several arguments can be deployed to argue that there was a real MB takeoff in rural and urban population.
Firstly, historical sources give clear signs of land intake, deforestation, village foundation, multiplication of bishoprics, and urban revival (Harvey 1983, 1990). A first peak of such prosperity around the late MB period fits the independent evidence of archaeological survey, where a dramatic rise of nucleated hamlet and village sites can be seen across Greece in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, often without prior occupation in Late Roman times or with any ceramics of the ninth to tenth centuries. There is also growing evidence from rescue excavations in Greece for the flourishing ofsmall Middle Byzantine rural settlements (such as in Attica, Gini-Tsofopoulou 2001). Whereas an absence of datable seventh - to eighth-century finds is unreliable when we are just beginning to characterize contemporary wares, the widespread lack of the typical “medieval assemblage” forms including glazed wares from the ninth and tenth centuries is strikingly consistent. The delayed explosion of rural settlements is partly due to the fact that even though from the ninth century the Empire was growing strong and flourishing again, there were regional difficulties and setbacks. The decline of Aegean piracy was held back till Crete was recaptured in 961whilst Bulgarian invasions hit Greece severely in the tenth century (Bouras 2006).
At the same time the chronology of church architecture gives a suitable rise in dated monuments: there are just a handful erected outside the major towns in the EB period, a few churches for the early MB, and then a proliferation during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and also during the first century of Frankish power over much of Greece, the thirteenth century. The example of Messenia is shown in Figure 17.4. Boeotia provides another example (Megaw 1966). After the definitive reconquest of the province from the Slavs by the end of the eighth century AD, several major church foundations from the mid-ninth century in the regional capital Thebes coincide with similar examples from Athens, as well as with the building of the famous Boeotian rural monastic church at Skripou (modern Orchomenos). Historic sources indicate that the ancient city of Orchomenos, reduced to a village by Roman times, saw this new monastic church constructed in 872 AD in the open countryside, with much spolia from its ruins, on the estate of a magnate and regional government official from the provincial center at Thebes. The location was very exposed to attack, so the important new
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Tanagrike - Byzantine sites - dated pottery
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Figure 17.3 (a) Deserted medieval villages (black circles) in the region of ancient Tanagra city, Boeotia. (b) The chronology
Of their surface finds.
A. Vionis, “Current archaeological research on settlement and provincial life in the Byzantine and Ottoman Aegean.” Medieval Settlement Research 23 (2008), 28—41, Figures 5 and 13.
Church building and renovation in Messenia
Figure 17.4 Chronology of church construction in Messenia.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, Figure 187.
Church construction and renovation in Messenia between the 9th and 19th centuries
Monastery reflects the establishment of firm imperial control in the region. The revival of the nearby settlement of Orchomenos and other parts of the adjacent countryside seems to occur later in the MB era, further symptom of that sustained wider demographic and economic growth over the period, to judge by the two small churches of eleventh-century date in the modern town and the nearby twelfth - to thirteenth-century rural church of Aghios Nikolaos sta Kampia. This is in keeping with our own intensive survey results from several other districts in Boeotia which indicate that the proliferation of villages associated with parish churches marks the late phase of the MB period, from the tenth and more usually eleventh or twelfth centuries AD, confirming the historic sources for agrarian expansion in contemporary texts such as the cadasters (landholding records) from Thebes (Svoronos 1959, Harvey 1983).
Finally we can cite the evidence of coinage. Experts in numismatics suggest that the Early Byzantine era was one which virtually lost the everyday use of money, relying on exchange in kind or services. From the ninth century however, for example at the town of Corinth, coin finds indicate a recovery of coin circulation, pointing to the revival of marketing and commerce, whilst increased production of small change, the opening of provincial mints, and tax changes confirm a rise in monetarization at the everyday level (Harvey 1990, Sanders 2003, Gregory 2006). Dunn (2007) has contributed an important study on MB peasant productivity (seen as very favorable) and rural markets, whilst an insightful analysis of Byzantine urban market areas can be found in Koder (2006). Dunn (2009) also discusses the existence of entrepots on the Strymon Delta in Macedonia, which serviced the export of surpluses from estates in its fertile hinterland as well as the channeling of imports inland.
The archaeology of Byzantine villages poses one of the greatest areas of research potential in the period. There are clearly many hundreds if not more deserted sites from the EB through LB era awaiting survey and excavation, whilst at least from the tenth century, when, or soon after, the majority were founded, the ceramics are both datable and rich. Moreover since the typical Byzantine town was small, with the revival of imperial control the village became a fiscal unit, rather than as in Classical and Roman times being merely a rural suburb of a city district. This indicates that the backbone of Byzantium was its rural population (Haldon 2000). In keeping with this observation, larger villages are known to have stimulated considerable cottage industry to supply their own inhabitants: monastic records for the village of Radolibos in Macedonia for example evidence a population of around 1000 people, with more than 20 shoemakers and two potter’s workshops (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977). Fairs occurred not only in towns but in villages and the open country, to further expand the reach of products to rural populations in the absence of a dense network of urban centers and the lack of large-scale manufacture and marketing within them. Even the industrial establishments excavated at Corinth are described by the excavators as “cottage industry” (Sanders 2003).
The revival of town life
Although historical sources are thin for events outside the two greatest cities of the Byzantine world, Constantinople and Thessaloniki, it is likely that (as with Anatolia and Byzantine Southern Italy), most Aegean towns lost their urban status in the EB era if not already in the final centuries of LR, whilst many suffered destruction and despoiling of their ruins. Just a few cities lasted as real centers in EB, notably when bases for the army and as theme (province) capitals (for example Thessaloniki in Greece and Amorium in Anatolia). But from the ninth century onwards there is clear revival of provincial small towns, with a wave of construction of churches and defense-works and the expansion of domestic quarters. By the tenth century there were some 40 towns above village status in the Peloponnese, although even the largest such as Corinth at its twelfth-century peak may have contained just 10,000 people (Sanders 2003). Some are officially “refounded” as they come back into full imperial control. Argos may be typical of the fate of larger centers: it shows continuity of activity on a very limited scale in the EB, seen as a village by French excavators (Pierart and Touchais 1996), then with the reconquest of the Peloponnese it is reborn as a major provincial center and archbishopric with numerous churches and a kastro (fortified refuge and military base) above it. At Sparta, whereas the EB population appears to have withdrawn to the acropolis for security, where behind the walls of the LR kastro houses were built inside the abandoned theater, during the tenth to twelfth centuries the town spread out into the former lower town, where rescue excavations have uncovered new public and private buildings, churches, baths, and workshops (Zavvou et al. 2006). At Athens (Camp 2001) the town survives through the EB era but in severe decline, with minimal evidence for occupation until a clear revival in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, when a thriving town re-emerges with numerous small churches marking its parishes. At some former cities however the fortified EB kastro may have been accompanied by small hamlets nearby in parts of the abandoned ancient settlement (Haldon 2000).
The Byzantine town differed, however, in several significant ways from the Greco-Roman cities it replaced as “central-places” in each region (Haldon 2000). Firstly, apart from Constantinople and Thessaloniki, other Aegean towns were very small. Even the great cities lacked a gridded street plan of wide avenues, although they still possessed substantial public squares, but in typical provincial towns the extensive central Greco-Roman fora were replaced by small squares or street widenings. Roads were narrow and winding, and house-blocks irregular. Towns could be fortified, or possess a separate kastro, but the key to their internal organization was a network of parish churches or monasteries, creating local neighborhoods where much welfare and education provision as well as communal activities were focused around the Orthodox Church. In fact in contrast to the ancient city, where aristocrats and wealthy businessmen had frequently invested in public secular amenities and games to attract approval, these groups now primarily displayed their wealth through the construction and decoration of religious institutions (Cormack 1985). The great communal baths of the Roman era, as much social as exercise centers, went out of use in Late Antiquity, to be replaced by much smaller establishments open to the public but run as private ventures or attached to religious complexes, as much victims of economic decline as the underlying disapproval of the Church (Magdalino 1990).
The functional role of Byzantine towns is controversial. A major debate has been running for over two decades on the fate of towns in former Roman provinces between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Barnish 1989). One view emphasizes the decline of their industrial and commercial activities during the “Dark Ages” in response to the collapse of markets and trade-routes. An alternative thesis stresses the continuing significance of the social and political role of surviving or re-emergent towns in the Early Medieval era. For the Byzantine Aegean provincial towns, it seems likely that they functioned essentially as regional market centers providing services and craft products, with a solid local agricultural base, as well as acting as foci of provincial military, political, and ecclesiastical administration. Long-distance trade and manufacturing for an interregional market appear to be of lesser importance, although we know of clear exceptions where towns had industries producing for a wider consumer zone than just their region. If the various workshops at Corinth, for example, show typical service industries for the townsfolk and surrounding villages (pottery, metalworking, and metalwork), sources tell us of major silk manufactories there and also in Thebes of international importance (Jacoby 1991—1992). However, at Sparta as at these other towns, it was especially a Jewish colony that was prominent in the processing and commerce of textiles and local agricultural surpluses. Moreover the presence of Venetian merchants at provincial towns in our sources also suggests that local entrepreneurs were slow to take advantage of such flourishing populations and regional production (Zavvou et al. 2006), although at the same time it does evidence a surplus of wider marketability. A few centers also benefited from holding international fairs, such as Thessaloniki, where merchants from the Christian West, the Islamic Near East, and Southern Russia were active (Gregory 2006).
Schreiner (2001) observes that in Byzantium a broad urban culture, so well known from contemporary Western Europe, is poorly represented, and then chiefly in its final LB two centuries. This reflects the high centralization of the court and the state’s policy of limiting the powers of provincial towns. All who could, went to Constantinople to make careers and wealth. With the later decay of the capital and imperial power, however, rival centers emerged, Trebizond as a second imperial city from the thirteenth century in Northern Anatolia, and Mistra likewise dominating the Peloponnese; but both remained focused on the residence of imperial court personnel. Only Thessaloniki shows signs of the development of a politically-assertive urban bourgeoisie, linked to the importance of its commercial community in Late Byzantine times.
In the later phase of MB it appears that Italian entrepreneurs took advantage of flourishing urban centers in the Byzantine world to dominate their financial and commercial affairs, which restricted their own citizens’ ability to participate in wider Mediterranean economic opportunities. Advantages given by the Byzantine state to such Italian businessmen in terms of trading privileges were partly to blame, a combination of a lack of awareness of the negative effects on its own trading communities, and pressure (including military) on Byzantium to perpetuate these inequalities. However the restrictive practices of the Byzantine guild system were also a major factor in limiting the ability of local producers and merchants to compete with the flexible, state-sponsored commercial families of Northern Italy. The truncated potential of Byzantine commerce can be indicated from an exception, its flourishing entrepots in the Black Sea during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, walled emporia run by magnates paid by the state (Stephenson 1999). Nonetheless, to confound the expectations of historians, who have derived from political history the image of a declining state and economic crisis, the twelfth century sees a flourishing urban network in the Aegean. Although much was being both siphoned off and run by Italian and Jewish businessmen, there was sufficient wealth for rich Byzantines to fill these towns with their endowments to monasteries and churches, paralleling a countryside dense with populous villages.
World History
