(p. 381a) Byzantine archaeology as the total integrated examination of society has barely begun, by the standards of West European Medieval archaeology
We can admire and utilize the intensive and highly informative architectural and artistic studies of standing churches, and some houses and palaces (particularly by outstanding Greek scholars such as Orlandos and Bouras), and portable art objects. Yet one is struck by the very limited activities, clearly of a pioneering nature, mentioned in recent reviews such as that of Grunbart and Stathakopoulos (2002) on "Byzantine material culture." Schreiner (2001) describes Byzantium as possessing three cultures: the court, the Church, and the people. Most Byzantine literature was written in the "court" circle about itself and provincial life is discussed only incidentally. The "people" emerge also in the background of saints' lives and in rare letters. He further states that the material culture usually on display in museums and treasuries is mostly from "church" culture where such things could either survive in that context or be later rescued from it; this has tended to give the impression that this is Byzantine culture, apart from fortifications and palace ruins, which reflect the "court" circle again. Much survives as gifts to the West to be found today in treasuries or as spoils (e. g., in Venice). There has been no focus on the material culture of ordinary people, which is hidden away in museum magazines due to its lack of aesthetic value.
Given the restricted nature of Byzantine field archaeology, the use of absolute dating methods such as C14, thermoluminescence, and dendrochronology has been extremely rare (cf. Kuniholm and Striker 1990).
(p. 381b) A group of British archaeologists with remarkably wide period interests were publishing papers on Byzantine and Frankish churches and castles at the beginning of the twentieth century
Of many studies, some examples of their work are Wace (1904-5), Traquair (1905-6), and Fletcher and Kitson (1895-96).
(p. 382a) The Austrian Tabula Byzantina project has since 1976 issued atlases of the Byzantine Empire, province (theme) by province
The first volume, Hellas und Thessalia (Koder and Hild 1976), was especially useful for my own research in Central Greece.
(p. 382b) Constantine the Great had created his "New Rome" at the strategic position of modern Istanbul in AD 330
It is usually stated that Rome was intentionally replaced as the imperial capital at this point, but this is incorrect, as Rome continued to be the official center of its eponymous empire. It is not even certain if Constantine envisaged the marginalization of Rome, and clearly not its complete loss to the empire. Historical circumstances favored this city out of several imperial administrative centers which had developed since the strategy had been put in place, in the third century, of focusing imperial residence for shorter or longer periods at other major cities of the Roman world. Since the early fourth century AD Roman emperors had spent very little time in Rome itself.
(p. 382c) "Byzantine" civilization was coined by Early Modern Enlightenment scholars
First in seventeenth-century France (Haldon 2000: 9).
(p. 383a) This "Eastern Roman Empire" from ca. AD 650-1453
However we classify the "Roman" world, its official timespan from the mid-eighth century BC to AD 1453 represents an unparalleled phenomenon of over 2000 years, and even its "second life" runs for almost 11 centuries.
(p. 383b) Byzantium is little known outside the Southern Balkans, and is seen as a strange culture with wonderful art but disreputable politics
In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), the great pioneering historian of the Late Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, was especially scathing about its Eastern offshoot, and set the tone for much negative stereotyping among Western historians. Other Enlightenment scholars, who were anti-clerical, deplored the importance of the Orthodox Church throughout the history of Byzantium, and more recent scholars have linked Byzantium to its related offshoot states in Russia and the Balkans, emphasizing a common thread of autocracy and political intrigue. Finally, the Byzantines' own feeling of superiority over other cultures was always made evident to outsiders, with the result that as their empire declined they attracted little sympathy and much desire to take advantage of it by their enemies in both East and West (Gregory 2006: 1-3). By the ninth century knowledge of Greek was rare in Western Europe, while in the Byzantine world likewise even church councils could omit Latin texts for want of a translator. This allowed Byzantium to become the "other" in Western eyes. A combination of the growing exploitation of its economy by Italian commercial cities, and a series of military confrontations and minor wars between Byzantine and Western states, paved the way to acceptance by Western powers and the Catholic Church of the reasonableness of a Western (or, for Byzantines, "Frankish") conquest of the Byzantine Empire in 1204 (Wickham 2005, Gregory 2006).
(p. 383c) Historical sources are also surprisingly limited for such a powerful and long-lived civilization
The more important of those "histories" written by contemporaries which are preserved are essentially political and focus on the imperial court and military campaigns, while formal literature is often highly rhetorical and remote from everyday life. Saints' Lives, however, although full of miracles, also contain much incidental detail of life in town and country. The most useful sources for conditions on the ground are the limited local archives of landholding and villages which have survived in monasteries, chiefly those on Mount Athos. Other archives, such as the eleventh-century
Cadaster or Land Register of Thebes, escaped destruction by sheer historical chance (Gregory 2006: 14-16).
(p. 383d) No civilization could really survive so long without adaptation
We shall see that like its predecessor, the Early Roman Empire (Bintliff 2002), Byzantine civilization underwent a series of transformations in organization and material culture.
(p. 383e) The Byzantine Empire was the Kingdom of God on Earth, a pale reflection of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the emperor was God's earthly ruler
For contemporaries it was a startling sign for the future when in AD 800 the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned "Holy" Roman emperor in Rome by the Pope. It made abundantly clear that the direction of the rising West European states was diverging from that of the Eastern "Roman" Empire of Byzantium. No longer was the continuity of power seen to reside in a single emperor. Previously almost all Western "Barbarian" states which had emerged from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had officially acknowledged the Byzantine head of state as the only imperial leader in the subcontinent and often encouraged his official approval of their claims to authority in their own kingdoms (Chrysos 1997).
(p. 383f) Essentially the Mainland Greek countryside left imperial control for much of the period AD 600-800 and came under the dominance of Slav tribes
There is dispute over the timescale of the Slav colonization in Greece, and the contemporary sources are contradictory, while the archaeological evidence is too thin to draw firm conclusions from. But it seems likely that Slav raids into Greece occurred from the mid-sixth century onward, although permanent settlement appears to be a feature of the seventh century, with additional colonization over the following two centuries (Gregory 2006). As with other "Barbarian" groups in Late Antiquity, Slavs had been used as military auxiliaries in the sixth century before adopting a largely hostile stance through conquest. The possibilities of coexistence and merger were, however, soon seen in our sources, with Slav populations in Central Greece supplying food to Thessaloniki when it was besieged by Northern Greek Slavs. Official seals giving Greek titles to Slav leaders as early as ca. AD 700 also suggest accommodation of the new populations and Byzantine authorities (A. Dunn, pers. comm.).
(p. 383g) Evidence on the Aegean islands during the EB era for churches and walled military posts confirms a tenuous grip by the Byzantine fleet on many coastal localities
Increasing evidence from fortified island kastra, EB churches, and now late forms of Late Roman wares of the seventh to early ninth centuries (Armstrong 2009) suggest that Byzantine control over coastal and island localities was more substantial than my comments suggest.
(p. 383h) A new system of provincial management emerged, the themes, where the surviving empire was divided into a series of small provinces each with an integrated government combining military and socioeconomic control
By creating governors for Carthage and Ravenna who combined military and civil authority (exarchs), the emperor Maurice (572-602) anticipated the theme system in the Eastern provinces, but the first formal themes seem to have been set up in Anatolia in the late seventh century, while much of Greece awaited the conquest of the Slav Mainland regions during the late eighth and early ninth centuries before regional themes were established. The defense of the Eastern frontiers saw a concentration of field armies in Anatolia to block Arab incursions, and this is seen as the basis for the institutionalizing of the combined military-civil authority of the themes as defensive blocks on a regional basis (Megaw 1966, Haldon 2000, Gregory 2006).
(p. 383i) Soldier-farmers ensured the regional productivity needed to make each theme both economically viable and defensible
One further interpretation of events is that the vast areas of deserted land due to prolonged warfare and the plague were resettled by such soldier-farmers within the new theme system, laying the basis for a landscape of free peasant villages as seems represented by the Farmer's Law of ca. AD 800 (Gregory 2006).
(pp. 383-384a) Between the seventh and early ninth centuries imperial forces defeated the Slavs and reincorporated the Aegean countryside into the empire
Attempts were made to reconquer Greece as early as the late seventh century, but outside of coastal bases supported by the strong Byzantine fleet the hinterland remained outside imperial control till the end of the eighth century (Gregory 2006). Even as late as the mid-ninth century there were major Slav revolts in Greece. The final subjugation and incorporation of Slav settlers into the Byzantine state in Greece was therefore a long process and this helps to explain the delayed recovery of the countryside, which archaeologically and from our sources appears to be a phenomenon of the tenth and even eleventh centuries AD. A significant additional factor was the Arab control of Crete from the latter ninth century and its use as a base for raids into the Aegean, which were stopped definitively only by the Byzantine reconquest of the island in AD 961.
(p. 384b) Nonetheless many small and large Greek urban sites continued to be occupied throughout the sixth even into the early seventh century AD, including excavated sites such as Corinth as well as at town sites explored by intensive surface survey, such as the several Boeotian cities
Surface survey at the Boeotian urban sites are in process of final publication but the ceramic analysis by John Hayes and Jeroen Poblome confirms general continuity of occupation at least into the seventh century from African Red Slip ware imports. For Corinth see Slane and Sanders (2005), where it is argued that activity survived at a low ebb till urban revival in Middle Byzantine times. Brown (2010) brings further discussion of the evidence for Dark Age Corinth (seventh through to early ninth centuries). The town lost most of its monumental character but shops and workshops could occupy former public structures. Churches were built and maintained including extramural examples near the shrunken town, although intramural burials may reflect more the creation of church-focused graves in new town parishes than the simple ruralization of urban areas. The seat of the archbishop for Southern Greece and a theme capital, with a general and garrison on the Acrocorinth acropolis, was matched by a fortified Lower Town below.
(p. 384c) The amount and dispersal of material culture should be limited for this phase of 200 years
Caraher (2010), in an insightful and thoughtful study, seeks to deconstruct traditional narratives of the complete collapse of life in the Mainland Dark Ages by arguing that formal history was written by and for elites and also that archaeologists have been too focused on monumental buildings erected by and largely for elites. The ruination of so many of the Early Christian basilicas of Greece which were built in a massive burst during the fifth and sixth centuries, does not mean that in the subsequent seventh to ninth centuries they were abandoned by the faithful. In fact parts remained in religious use and/or for burials, while many were rebuilt in the next phase of Middle Byzantine economic recovery. The memory of a sacred place led to continuity of cult for ordinary people in fully or partially ruined churches, and also for the important saints of this era as their hagiographies repeatedly inform us. As we have argued in this volume, it is likely that there was indeed population collapse from the late sixth century in Greece due to plague, warfare, and economic decline, yet at the same time significant populations remained in town and country to form the basis for ninth - to eleventh-century revival, merging with immigrant Slav colonists to form a Hellenized and Christianized society.
(p. 384d) The Byzantine Empire recovers its demographic, military, and economic power from the ninth century onward
However, compared to the manpower and natural resources available to the Eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century of the Late Roman era, the Byzantine Empire would always remain at a far lower level of economic potential. Haldon (2000: 56) calculates that the loss was of the order of three-quarters of imperial income, due to the permanent removal of the North African provinces Egypt and the Near East and all but footholds in Italy. Treadgold (2010) gives striking figures on the decline of army manpower from the full Roman Empire through its Eastern Roman (Byzantine) successor: In the late third century AD the Roman army numbered probably 400,000-600,000, in 559 it was a mere 150,000, in 773 it was 80,000, and finally in 840 it was 120,000.
(p. 384e) The "Dark Age" saw derivatives of Late Roman wares, chiefly locally made domestic and coarse ceramics, survive until the appearance of the "Medieval" assemblages
This is argued both for Near Eastern provincial Islamic as well as for Christian European cultures. Given the lack of wide distribution of international fine wares which had typified the Late Roman era, separating such sub-Late Roman assemblages from genuine Late Roman in finds assemblages will be extremely difficult, and the more so for surface collections.
(pp. 384-385a) After the mid-seventh and until the tenth century AD in the Greek provinces, only future research will create regional settlement maps for Greece during these centuries
Hitherto historians have often relied heavily on controversial inferences based on maps which plot bishoprics recorded in texts. We know that bishops can reside elsewhere than in the town associated with their see, which may in this period no longer exist as an urban center.
(p. 385b) We can also dismiss the theory that early Slavs lacked tangible houses, pottery, or mixed farming
Indeed, following Malingoudis' (1991) presentation of the evidence, it seems likely that their agricultural tools were more advanced than those of the Late Roman populations they encountered.
(p. 385c) Our working hypothesis to account for the rarity of "Slav" ceramics is that Roman-derivative wares were preferred by both population groups
It is important to bring in studies of the Slav colonization from outside Greece. For example, Breibert (2005) helpfully discusses the evidence for East Central Europe. Slavs in the early phase of their settlement (late sixth to late eighth centuries) buried in urn-cremations, then adopted inhumation, perhaps through contact with neighboring Avar and Lombard groups. They also originally dedicated food offerings in their graves, which they abandoned along with paganism under Christianization in the eighth to ninth centuries. A marked feature in this region was what Breibert intriguingly calls a weak sense of ethnic identity in material culture for the Slav settlers ("Wir-Bewusstsein"), in that burial rites and artifacts show a mixture of local Romanized styles with Avar and other cultural and ethnic elements, and the eventual disappearance of distinctive Slavic elements over time. This process of absorption is noted as especially strong in the North Balkans and our evidence from Greece would suggest that this is also a useful model for Greece.
(p. 385d) A widespread local production of handmade coarsewares in final Late Roman times, perhaps to substitute for declining professional supplies, which look similar to genuine Slav ceramics
"Slav Ware" found in Argos and Isthmia and supposedly marking the warlike settlement of Slavs, because of its lack of features comparable to early Slav wares in the North Balkans and Central Europe, is seen as more likely the local development of a handmade coarseware by local Greco-Roman populations (Oikonomou-Laniado 2003).
(p. 385e) Careful examination of Late Roman assemblages and those of "Medieval" settlements can reveal distinctive new wares, or new variants of older wares, as probable type-fossils for the Early Byzantine era
This is paralleled by similar developments within the contemporary post-Roman, early Medieval archaeology of Italy (Francovich and Hodges 2003).
(p. 385f) The incoming Slav colonizers were confident militarily, and skillful farmers seeking the best land; this would surely encourage them rather to reoccupy ancient village and city locations
We shall encounter a much better-documented parallel with the Late Medieval colonization of abandoned lowland villages by incoming Albanian settlers, who it seems purposefully located their new villages beside but rarely on top of Byzantine-Frankish villages whose occupants had fled to securer refuge sites. In Laconia Pamela Armstrong (2008) has recently discussed similar evidence for Slav settlement in the heart of the Sparta Valley being Byzantinized and Christianized from the tenth century onward.
(p. 385g) Olympia was occupied by a Late Roman settlement till perhaps the early seventh century. This community left and was soon replaced by a Slav village, only recorded from a cremation cemetery
The absence of finds from the Late Roman settlement in these graves, and of Slav finds from the settlement, seem to argue for a lack of contemporaneity between these indigenous and colonizing communities.
(p. 387a) A subsequent major rise of population and regional prosperity during Middle Byzantine times, predicted from traditional study of church-building and the historical sources, is matched by a dramatic increase in rural sites from our intensive survey
See Vionis in Bintliff et al. 2008. In Laconia and elsewhere the multiplication of monasteries and their satellite dependencies is a pronounced trend through later MB times (tenth to twelfth centuries) (Armstrong 2008).
(p. 387b) Open sites also on or near ancient sites, where Slav farmers settled down with or without local surviving peasant families
In the North Balkans, such as Bulgaria, Slav settlements have been excavated with characteristic wares comparable to those in Central and Northeastern Europe, but they are simple pit houses (Grubenhauser). Such sites do, however, include reoccupation at former Roman urban sites (A. Poulter, pers. comm.)
(p. 387c) The Siedlungskammer (settlement chamber) model of the German Landeskunde (landscape knowledge) school
This has recently been elaborated into the Community Area theory of the Prague school of landscape archaeology (Kuna 1991).
(p. 387d) Byzantine ceramics from Askra date to the ninth to twelfth centuries AD, and suggest a smaller village but are associated with a large church. Lock (1995) has argued that this community is "Zaratova," which gained an Orthodox bishop by the twelfth century
The locality of the ruined church is still known as "Episkopi" ("of the bishop") today.
(pp. 387-388a) At the end of the Middle Ages the Zaratova village has acquired a Greek Orthodox name, Panagia (signifying the Virgin Mary)
Also known as Palaeopanagia, now renamed Askra to emphasize Greece's Classical Golden Age rather than its Byzantine heritage.
(p. 388b) Haliartos, a Greco-Roman city also in Boeotia, offers similar evidence. Destroyed by the Roman army in the second century BC, it was not revived as an urban settlement till modern times
A small community seems to have replaced it a few kilometers distant at Onchestos (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985), and in Late Antiquity the location of the city site on the main north road linking Southern and Northern Greece prompted the refortification of the acropolis as a fort or kastro.
(p. 388c) "most of the cities of the Balkan area ceased to exist in the late sixth and / or the seventh century, and social life changed dramatically" (Gregory 2006: 158), but their village replacements are very common
In Byzantine Eastern Anatolia field survey shows a limited survival of small sites through the Early Byzantine era of the seventh to eleventh centuries, but on older Late Roman locations. Here no populous Slav tribes arrived to boost depopulated countrysides, and the frontier location, with constant raids from Islamic forces, prevented local recovery (Algaze et al. 1991).
(p. 389a) An imperial initiative in appointing Slav tribal leaders as "archons" or regional representatives
The existence of such Slav archons in Mainland Greece even before the imperial reconquest may point to an early implementation of this strategy, but more in terms of alliance than domination, a temporary recognition of local authority for Slav leaders so as to limit conflict. The lead seal of Dargdekavos, perhaps ca. AD 700 from Central Greece, is one of several examples (A. Dunn, pers. comm.), and such arrangements help to explain how Slav communities from other parts of Greece came to supply food to the besieged Greek population of Thessaloniki when it was under attack from its surrounding Slav communities.
(p. 389b) The thesis 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, that the Slavs made no significant contribution to the population
For a useful discussion of the historiography of Slav settlement see Curta (2004). For the Slavicspeaking minority still living in Macedonia and hot debates on their presence or even existence see Karakasidou (1997).
(p. 389c) The Christianization of the Slav states surrounding the empire to its north and west, spearheaded by the monks St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the ninth century
Significantly, the pioneering conversion of Slavs in neighboring states by the brothers Cyril and Methodius links them with the Slav settlement of Greece itself, since they came from Thessaloniki and knew the Slav language. It is possible that they had a Slav mother (Gregory 2006).
(pp. 389-390a) By the late Middle Byzantine period, 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)
The monasteries had been regularly multiplying across town and country during MB times, and already by the tenth century the emperor Nicephorus Phocas was openly criticizing their accumulation of lands. Royalty and the wealthy gave estates to them or founded and sponsored them, and as in the West the Church proved energetic and efficient in managing its estates and their dependent villages. As holdings grew larger, monasteries created satellite management centers, or metochoi, run by a resident monk, and also collected taxes from dependent peasants. As the Church and its lands were largely free of dues to the state this represented a considerable drain on the Treasury but allowed major building projects and fine artworks to be produced in monasteries and churches (Kaplan 1992).
(p. 390b) The introduction of Western feudalism by the Franks meant no radical change for many Byzantine rural communities
Runciman (1980) observes that the arrival of the Frankish conquerors in the Peloponnese in the early thirteenth century would probably have been seen as a mere change of masters by a now subordinate peasantry, who at times even welcomed them. The common status of peasants by this time, the paroikoi, is of tenant farmers with strong obligations to secular or ecclesiastical landlords in terms of dues in agricultural surpluses and labor services. Much of the tax and services formerly owed to the state were now being diverted instead to provincial elites and the Church, with seriously debilitating effects on the imperial finances. In association was the common institution of pronoia, which was generally similar to Western feudalism, whereby the state ceded rights over villages and their peasantry to lay or ecclesiastical authorities in return for services and tax, but allowed the beneficiary to control all the revenues and retain the bulk of the income generated (Haldon 2000, Gregory 2006).
(p. 390c) Over time 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
A parallel scenario occurred in contemporary Christian Spain (Lourie 1966).
(p. 390d) Armies became increasingly dominated by foreign mercenaries
By the end of the twelfth century the bulk of the Byzantine army were mercenaries (Gregory 2006).
(p. 390e) Led by the twelfth century to a concentration of wealth and status in a limited stratum of families
According to Cormack (1985) scholars have identified from historic sources more than 80 civil and more than 60 military elite families. It was, naturally, usually from these circles that emperors were chosen or usurpers arose.
(p. 390f) A widening gulf between relatively poor peasants and the wealthy magnate class
Starkly, Byzantines themselves characterized this polarization as between the "powerful and the weak," and the "rich and the poor." There was also a numerous class of slaves. By the twelfth century, it was left to bishops in the provinces to intervene on behalf of the best interests of the ordinary people in the countryside and towns, the emperors having grown weak and the landed magnates intent on their own wealth creation (Mullett 1990).
(p. 391g) This Middle Byzantine economic expansion continues into the Frankish thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, forming a steady trend not anticipated by historical sources
As noted by Gregory (2006). Athanassopoulos (2010) notes that it was also unexpected that the Byzantine countryside was so prosperous in the final Middle Byzantine era when historians see a drastic decline in the status of peasants due to the Komnenonoi dynasty favoring landed aristocrats and their absorption of free villages into their estates. It seems that the more oppressive landowning regime, if anything, stimulated rural economic production and population. In her Nemea Survey data there is a spread of small rural sites and several larger nucleated settlements in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries.
However, there is doubt as to the scale of the nucleations: two she describes strangely as hamlets are claimed to extend over 34 and 46 ha, which would make them substantial towns. The evidence of density of sherds for the larger, site 600, suggests that she has included site halo and even infield manuring in these totals, since the figure is very similar to the density maps for the two medieval villages at ancient Thespiae, Boeotia, where we have population figures to control the likely occupied area. Also there seems to be a tendency to contrast the expansive open settlement pattern in Nemea of the Middle Byzantine period with that of subsequent Frankish rule, on the basis of the creation of a tower site and dependent village on an upland location of late thirteenth to fifthteenth-century date. In Boeotia at least, most tower sites were placed alongside existing MB villages, with only rare examples where villages were moved to more defensive positions. Ceramics from MB villages invariably continued well into the Frankish era, suggesting expansion in size, disappearing only in the mid-fourteenth century with the impact of the Black Death and prolonged warfare. Athanassopoulos indeed describes the open settlements as dated to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries without further differentiation and one must wonder here also if open settlements do not likewise show continuity across the Crusader divide.
(p. 391h) For the preceding Early Byzantine we have suggested that most settlements remain invisible archaeologically owing to our inadequate knowledge of the pottery assemblage
The bias introduced to site recognition by the delayed spread of identifiable glazed ceramics through Greece is also underlined by Sanders (2000, 2003). A sign of further caution comes from the historical record, according to which there already existed in the North Peloponnesian town of Patras in the ninth century a noblewoman called Danielis, who possessed a huge estate, thousands of slaves, and a textile industry. Bouras rightly expresses surprise at such early developments: "the narrative _ is rather unexpected" (2006: 67).
(p. 391i) The new Skripou monastic church constructed in AD 872 in the open countryside, on the estate of a magnate and regional government official
An epigram on the church wall tells us that the founder Leo owned the fertile and well-watered land around the church (Megaw 1966). Leo was an imperial high official (protospatharios), possibly the military governor of the theme of Hellas. The monastic church is large and shows a clear intention of prestigious display. It has much sculptural decoration and, apart from four separate inscriptions mentioning Leo, there is even a commissioned epigram by a Constantinople scholar (Bouras 2006).
(p. 391j) The location was very exposed to attack
In flat land between the rocky acropolis and Lake Copais.
(p. 393) Our own intensive survey results from several other districts in Boeotia indicate that the proliferation of villages associated with parish churches marks the late phase of the Middle Byzantine period, confirming the historic sources for agrarian expansion
The potential of Medieval landscape archaeology in Greece is beyond any current available human resources to seriously address at the regional level, and one hopes that future generations of research students will be encouraged to relieve crowding on the fifth century BC and turn their attention to the wonderful richness of Byzantine and Frankish Greece, and of course to the Ottoman centuries. To illustrate the wider potential of such work we may add a study by Marzolff (1999), who in a characteristically masterful fashion weaves the knowledge of extensive survey and excavation to portray the main lines of Byzantine and later settlement patterns on the Bay of Volos-Iolkos in coastal Thessaly. The Byzantine-Frankish era landscape is marked by hill fortifications (sometimes extensive enough to include nucleated settlements), monasteries, monastic satellite estates (metochia), villages, and a small port-town. Marzolff rightly compares the walled settlements to comparable Medieval communities in Italy, where they are termed products of incastellamento (castle-making of rural settlements) (Francovich and Hodges 2003).
(p. 394a) Larger villages are known to have stimulated considerable cottage industry to supply their own inhabitants
The observant reader may note that such large villages in fact have reached the size of smaller Classical Greek city-states, and hence their role as "village-towns" literally approximates to Kirsten's (1956) insight into the "Dorfstaat" character of the early ancient Greek city. (See Chapters 8 and 9 of this volume.) (p. 394b) The absence of a dense network of urban centers and the lack of large-scale manufacture and marketing within them
Useful introductions to historical research on the Byzantine rural economy include Harvey (1990), Cheynet (2005) and the on-line volume edited by A. Laiou-Thomadakis from Dumbarton Oaks, The Economic History of Byzantium (2002).
(p. 394c) The revival of town life
For a review of Early and Middle Byzantine towns see Moutsopoulos (2009).
(p. 394d) As with Byzantine Southern Italy, most Aegean towns lost their urban status in the Early Byzantine era if not already in the final centuries of Late Roman
See Martin and Noye (1991).
(p. 394e) Many towns suffered destruction and despoiling of their ruins
In the "Dark Ages" the limited number of towns which continued to exist as such, and the constant threat of sack through varied enemies, led them to see themselves as fortified refuges beset by threats to their survival, a role in which supernatural forces were always invoked to boost urban militias and the forces of the state. These situations stimulated the miraculous appearance of saints and the intervention of powerful icons, as is graphically shown on more than one occasion in the history of Thessaloniki (Cormack 1985).
(p. 394f) A few cities lasted as real centers in Early Byzantine times, notably when foci for the army and as theme (province) capitals (for example, Thessaloniki, and Amorium in Anatolia)
For Amorium see Lightfoot and Lightfoot (2007).
(p. 394g) From the ninth century onward there is a clear revival of provincial small towns, with a wave of construction of churches and defense-works, and the expansion of domestic quarters
Even in the imperial capital, Constantinople, church-building was almost frozen between the sixth and ninth centuries.
(p. 394h) Some towns are officially "refounded" as they come back into full imperial control Such as Sparta-Lacedaimon and Patras (Megaw 1966).
(p. 394i) Sparta: the Early Byzantine population withdrew to the Acropolis for security. 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
At Messene (Themelis 2003) in the Southwestern Peloponnese excavations reveal a typical scenario: the town declined in Middle Roman Imperial times but saw a major revival in Late Antiquity. In the Early Byzantine era its ruins were robbed and so far no clear occupation has been demonstrated.
This doubtless reflects a real lack of major settlement and certainly no major community, as no structures are dated to this era, but also one can be certain that the local ceramics for this era await detailed study, so it is possible that the site saw limited occupation. However, from the tenth century to the twelfth, there occurred a new florescence of occupation, with abundant ceramics associated with more than half a dozen Byzantine churches dispersed across the ancient city site, presumably marking neighborhoods in an extensive community. At Thebes in Boeotia, the town, till now confined to occupation on its acropolis of Kadmeia, expanded in the eleventh century, and especially the twelfth, onto the surrounding hills, and at the same time a famed textile industry developed, notably for silk production (Jacoby 1991-92, Bouras 2006).
(p. 394j) At Athens the town survives through the Early Byzantine 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
One prominent example is the church of the Holy Apostles in the upper Southeast corner of the ancient Agora, dated around AD 1000. The Agora had been abandoned in Late Antiquity and lay outside, and to the east of, the Late Roman defense wall, but in the tenth century it was one of the extramural areas of urban expansion where an extensive area of new private housing was constructed (Camp 2006). Another area of extramural resettlement was still further beyond the Late Roman Kastro, this time to its north, marked by the Middle Byzantine church of the Little Metropolis next to the modern Cathedral (Camp 2001). Bouras (2006), however, comments that these new neighborhoods outside the walls lacked any urban design, while the new churches to service the growing number of urban neighborhoods were small and insignificant.
(p. 394k) At some former cities the fortified Early Byzantine Kastro may have been accompanied by small hamlets nearby in parts of the abandoned ancient settlement
At the ancient city of Thespiae in Boeotia, for example (Bintliff and Snodgrass, in press), our surface survey and architectural analysis show that the Late Roman city had shrunk from its peak size in Classical-Hellenistic times, but still consisted of a small Kastro in which the leaders of the Church and the military authorities would have resided, and a larger extramural town to its east (see Figure 15.1). In the Early Byzantine era a church was built or rebuilt within the Kastro in the eighth century AD, and scattered finds of ceramics of Early Byzantine type occur across the site, suggesting also more than one hamlet in the city ruins. Finally, after the reincorporation of the region into the Byzantine Empire by the early ninth century, two large Middle Byzantine villages arose in the east of the former city site, each with a recorded church, while the Kastro was abandoned, giving its name to the paired villages - "Erimokastro," or the village of the deserted Kastro.
(p. 394l) The Byzantine town differed in several significant ways from the Greco-Roman cities it replaced
As Martin and Noye (1991) note for Byzantine Southern Italy, most towns are really villages with discrete urban functions, including the presence of some officials, markets, and refuge facilities for surrounding rural populations.
(p. 394m) Even the great cities lacked a gridded street plan of wide avenues, while their extensive central fora were replaced in typical provincial towns by small squares or street widenings
"A warren of winding streets and lanes going off in different directions" (Gregory 2006: 276).
(p. 394n) Towns could be fortified, or possess a separate Kastro (a fortified refuge and military base)
As we saw in our discussion of the Late Roman era, it is a general feature of the final era of Antiquity, from the fifth through seventh centuries, for towns in the Balkans and Anatolia to shrink around or within a defense wall. Sometimes depopulation created a small Kastro where all the inhabitants could take permanent or temporary refuge from a district; elsewhere the Kastro may have housed the military and ecclesiastical class and part of the remaining community but there was also some extramural settlement (undefended or, rarely, within an outer defense wall) (Foss 1996, Dunn 1998). Many Byzantine towns which survive the Early Byzantine era or are refounded as towns in Middle Byzantine times retain this character. Such towns either occupy a part of an ancient city or represent a flight of lowland settlements to more upland locations (Gregory 1992). Gregory comments that, rather than adopt the attitude imagined by the Early Modern Greek poet Kavafy in his famous poem "Waiting for the Barbarians," when the citizens shuffled off from the Agora, confused in the face of that threat, the tactic of concentrating a reduced population behind a small walled town or village proved a successful survival program for the Eastern Roman Empire in preserving its culture and preparing for its revival of power. Processes in the Eastern Adriatic are comparable (Sodini 2008): the inhabitants of the city of Salona receive permission to abandon their large defended town for the smaller walled Kastro they were able to create from Diocletian's nearby walled palace at Split, while in Albania walled Late Roman towns disappeared from history during the Slav invasions but reappeared in the ninth century and saw urban revival under renewed Byzantine control. As for the Balkans generally, Sodini characterizes the resultant Medieval towns as typically occupying a hillside and including a small citadel.
(p. 394o) The key to towns' internal organization was a network of dispersed parish churches or monasteries
See Bryer (1986), Kourkoutidou-Nicolaidou (1997).
(p. 394p) Aristocrats and wealthy businessmen now primarily displayed their wealth through the construction and decoration of religious institutions
The urban elite, local wealthy families, and imperial officials preferred to display piety and wealth through the founding or decorating of major monasteries. Contemporary parish churches, in contrast, tended to be architecturally unpretentious, and are presumed to have been paid for by the poorer local population of each district (Bouras 2006).
(p. 395a) A major debate has been running on the fate of towns between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. 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
The chief proponents for the first, inter-regional economic theory are Hodges and Whitehouse (1989) and Hodges (2010); for the second, the socio-political centrality of towns, see Ward-Perkins (1985, 2006). The fact that the gold coin, the solidus, created by Constantine the Great in the fourth century, retained its value till the eleventh, perhaps reflects the ability of the Eastern Empire even through the darkest days of the Early Byzantine era to hold on to a core set of institutions and economic base. The emperor's head also reminded Byzantines of the continuity of "Roman" power and of their specific identity (Gregory 2006). For some detailed case-studies of the transition from Late Roman to Early Byzantine towns, see the monograph by Zavagno (2009).
(p. 395b) Byzantine Aegean provincial towns 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
Cheynet (2005) comments that very many "cities" were no larger than 1000-2000 people, whose occupants were mostly farmers, although he points out that monasteries and major landowners were also active in supplying goods to such regional market centers from their carefully placed estate centers. Bryer (1986) suggests a low urban density for Byzantine towns, with much cultivated garden space. He considers that this even applies to large urban centers such as Constantinople and Trebizond, where the Byzantine housing density was low compared with their attached colonial suburbs occupied by the Genoese and Venetian merchant communities. He also cites sources for small and large cities (for example, Thessaloniki) to indicate that urban residents were responsible for major farming activity outside the town.
(p. 395c) Clear exceptions where towns had industries producing for a wider consumer zone than just their region. At Corinth sources tell us of major silk manufacturies there and also in Thebes
Recorded in the context of their skilled workforce, notably including Jewish craftspeople, being carried off by the Normans from Sicily in 1147 when they sacked Thebes, Corinth, and Athens.
(p. 395d) 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
For Corinth, Thebes, and Sparta the sources tell us of commercial agents buying up surplus olive oil, presumably for wider distribution than the towns' own market radius (Sanders 2003). Armstrong (2009) argues that, whereas the rise of the silk industry in Thebes was primarily stimulated by the growing wealth and economic organization of local landowners, the development of a major export trade in olive oil in contemporary later Middle Byzantine Laconia was essentially driven forward by the activities of Venetian entrepreneurs and merchants.
(p. 395e) Only Thessaloniki shows signs of the development of a politically assertive urban bourgeosie
The landowning aristocracy and the emperor were weak in the major international commercial center of Thessaloniki, and this encouraged anti-establishment elements, such as the Zealots, a faction in thirteenth - to fourteenth-century Byzantine society composed of monks and the lower clerical orders, and the "sailors" who appear to have been a semi-guild with experience in the imperial fleet (Papadatou 1987). These factions united to seize the city in the fourteenth century and kept it an autonomous city-state for seven years. The limited influence of the great landowners also explains the dominant role of the town's church hierarchy in founding monasteries and public churches in the Later Byzantine era (Rautman 1989).
(p. 395f) Advantages given by the Byzantine state to Italian businessmen in terms of trading privileges
The Byzantines had collaborated with the commercial Republic of Venice to try to thwart Norman expansion from its base in the kingdom of Sicily, and in 1082, in return, began the first of a series of agreements awarding special trading rights for Venice's merchant fleet within the Byzantine Empire. Similar deals with Pisa and Genoa gradually undermined Byzantine merchants' ability to intervene significantly in wider Mediterranean trade and even reduced their role within the Aegean (Gregory 2006).
(p. 395g) The twelfth century sees a flourishing urban network in the Aegean
In keeping with the wider picture, by the twelfth century contemporary sources suggest that the city of Constantinople had recovered its population level, after a severe slump in the intervening centuries, to that reached at its Late Roman climax of the sixth century AD (Magdalino 1990).
(p. 397h) The Fourth Crusade diverted its forces from the increasingly difficult theater of war in the Holy Land, to sack a softer target, the capital of another Christian state, Constantinople
The conquest of Constantinople was actually the almost inevitable culmination of combined economic and military pressure on Byzantium from Italian and other Western states. Disputes over trading privileges to Western traders, and control of land reconquered from Islam by Crusader expeditions to the Near East, were also connected to increasing estrangement between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Warfare and civilian massacres between the two power blocs had grown in frequency in the period running up to the 1204 sack of Constantinople, and a general atmosphere of distrust and incompatible worldviews overrode any consideration of ethics in regard to the destruction of one Christian state by others in the name of a "crusade" (Gregory 2006).
(p. 397i) Althought the official sources for political and social history have suggested worsening conditions for Byzantine society in town and country from a highpoint in the eleventh century, the archaeological picture contradicts this, while the latter matches local archives such as monastic records
Thus the extensive ownership of villages and their lands by the wealthy monasteries of Mount Athos in Macedonia allows us, through their surviving accounts, or typika, to observe the same continual expansion of land use into the fourteenth century. On the other hand, this rural colonization was into progressively poorer land which, combined with the effects in that century of plague and warfare, came eventually to precipitate the decline of regional populations by the end of that century, just as in almost all other provinces of Greece (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977).
(p. 398a) Byzantine everyday material culture
This section, together with the illustrations, relies heavily on the publications and lecture course on Byzantine and later ceramics given by my former PhD student Dr. Athanasios Vionis, of the University of Cyprus, to whom I am extremely indebted. For a wonderfully illustrated compendium of everyday objects used by Byzantine people of all classes, the exhibition catalog edited by Papanikola-Bakirtzis (2002) offers information and fine images of every aspect of everyday life.
(p. 398b) Handmade "Slavic Wares," found in many sites in Greece: an indigenous replacement for the general disappearance of local industrial products and also produced by genuine Slav settlers from outside the Balkans were used both as cooking and table wares
Slane and Sanders (2005) argue for a related phenomenon at Corinth: a coarse fabric pottery, used in earlier Roman times in the region for cookpots and jugs, was developed during the sixth to seventh centuries into a wide range of domestic shapes and even for amphorae, reflecting a decline in wider trade and a growing reliance on regional products.
(p. 398c) Other wares reflect a clearer development as sub-Roman ceramics
Armstrong (2009) provides the clearest publication of a major revision in our understanding of Early Byzantine (seventh to ninth centuries AD) ceramics. A prolongation of typical LR amphora types, Cypriot Red Slip wares, plainware jugs and cooking-pots in Late Roman style all continue through this period and evidence far more exchange and settlement activity in the Eastern Mediterranean than previously imagined on the basis of a supposed poverty of distinctive post-Roman wares to fill this period. Interestingly the main activity appears to link the South Aegean, Cyprus, Southern Turkey, and the Levant with less contact to the North Aegean and Constantinople.
(p. 398d) Constantinople White Ware is a yellow-green glazed ware found rarely in the Early Byzantine provinces
The origins of glazed ceramics are disputed. In the Roman Empire there had been low-level production of green glazed ceramics (using lead as the chemical base), but this is rare enough to be seen as an unlikely source of the Byzantine tradition, which commenced with the Early Byzantine White Wares from Constantinople. In contrast, glazed ceramics developed rapidly within the Early Islamic world, taking as their origin older traditions of glazed pottery in the Middle East, notably Persia, which in turn seem to be influenced by the precociously sophisticated glazed wares of China, where glazed ceramics had already appeared by the second millennium BC. Further discussion of
Constantinople White Wares can be found in Papanikola-Bakirtzis (1999), Papanikola-Bakirtzis et al. (1999).
(p. 398e) The wide spread of Early Byzantine transport amphorae indicates that maritime commerce did not cease during the "Dark Ages"
In the Adriatic (Sodini 2008) EB-era commerce can be seen not to have collapsed, trackable through the spread of amphorae produced at Otranto in Southern Italy, but, as in the Aegean, handmade wares rose in importance, reflecting both the downscaling of local production and the appearance (in the Eastern Adriatic) of Slav settlers. Small-scale glazed production on both sides of the Adriatic is argued to imitate imports of Constantinople White Ware.
(p. 398f) Early Sgraffito (incised) Ware
The whole Byzantine through Frankish Greek sgraffito tradition has been well discussed and illustrated in volumes by Papanikola-Bakirtzis (1999) and Papanikola-Bakirtzis et al. (1999).
(p. 398g) Even in provincial trading towns such as Corinth, such glazed wares are less than 1 percent of the weight of excavated pottery in the tenth to eleventh centuries, then rise gradually to 20 percent in the thirteenth century
At Corinth local imitations of Constantinople glazed wares appeared sporadically from the eighth century, but it was only from the eleventh century that a significant local industry was set up to make a wider range of forms and decoration (Sanders 2003).
(p. 398h) The burgeoning commerce of the late Middle Byzantine and Late Byzantine Aegean
The important discovery in 2005 in the Harbor of Theodosius in Constantinople of over 33 ships with large cargoes of amphorae, still under excavation and awaiting study, shows the potential of future archaeological studies to shed light on the Byzantine commercial economy (Crow 2010).
(p. 398i) Byzantine lead seals
Lead discs were cast with a central groove for the cord securing the seals to the document. Holes in the folded document introduced the cord and the two ends of the cord were put between two discs, which were compressed by iron pincers and stamped with the negative of a design. Some seals were in precious metal. In the early seventh century Latin disappeared and all later examples are in Greek (Polychronaki 2005). Historic individuals can be named, and the value of this evidence in lesser-known eras can be shown by the example cited elsewhere in this chapter of a Slav leader recognized by the Byzantine emperor in Central Greece, when the region was out of imperial control ca. AD 700.
(p. 398j) Byzantine burial traditions: many traditional forms of interment continue from Antiquity
For a long time the Byzantines continued to bury their dead in everyday or smart clothing and give them the necessary things for life, having inherited the Late Roman idea of objects for the afterlife despite theological contradictions (Effenberger 2001). For recent discussion of burial rites relating to children, see the papers in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (2009).
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