Following the stabilisation of the political and military situation in both the Balkans and in Asia Minor after the early tenth century, and the beginnings of the demographic recovery that accompanied a period of warmer climatic conditions, many urban centres recovered their fortunes. The most obviously favoured were those that had an obvious economic and market function in their locality. Thebes in Greece provides a good example of such a recovery: by the middle of the eleventh century it had become the centre of a flourishing local silk industry, local merchants and landowners had houses there, attracting artisans, peasant farmers with goods to sell. Landless peasants looking for employment also gravitated to such foci, thus further promoting urban life. This urban regeneration was also connected with the growth of a social elite of office and birth, which had the wealth to invest in urban or rural production.
Towns therefore grow in economic importance during the later tenth and especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This reflects in part the improved conditions within the empire for trade, commerce and town-country exchange-relations to flourish. It also reflects the demands of Constantinople on the cities and towns of its hinterland for the provision of both foodstuffs and other goods. Towns begin to play a central role in political developments - in the period from the later seventh to the mid-eleventh century most military revolts had been based in the countryside and around the headquarters of the local general; during the eleventh century and afterwards political opposition to the central government is almost always rooted in towns, whose populace also appear in the sources as a body of self-aware citizens with specific interests. Unlike in contemporary Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, communal identity did not go much beyond this -
Map 6.13 The revival of urban life: distribution of urban centres/bishoprics in the empire c. 900. (After Hendy, Studies.)
Local magnates who held both landed wealth as well as imperial titles and offices tended to dominate, and their attention was divided between their own town and locality and the attractions of the imperial capital, the centre of Byzantine society.
Towns were also affected by the military organisation of the empire - from the middle of the tenth century many towns became the seats of local military officers and their soldiers, a reflection of the improved ability of the state to supply and provision its soldiers through cash payments and a reliance upon the existence of local markets. The consequence of all these factors was a reversal of the process of ruralisation of economic and social life that characterises the later seventh and eighth centuries. But however much towns now came to flourish as centres of local economic activity, they still retained crucial functions, and all the appearance of, kastra, fortresses, and represented a very different sort of urban culture from that of the late Roman world, which they now replaced.
Equally, a large number of fortress-towns underwent only limited change at this time. In many cases (although lack of evidence makes generalisation dangerous), it is clear that there was little to differentiate between an undefended village settlement and a kastron. The inhabitants of many kastra were assessed for their taxes on a communal basis, just like any village. Size was certainly not an important feature. A major difference between the typical late Roman ‘city’ and the medieval town was that public buildings were no longer funded from ‘public’ sources - the church, monasteries and private individuals were the only sources of wealth, except where the state was involved (in constructing defensive works, for example). At the same time, the medieval Byzantine town was cramped within its defences, with few large public spaces and no planned network of streets. Tradition determined the siting of cemeteries, and the sort of buildings that might be erected near to churches or the houses of the local magnates (archontes) or the bishop - whose presence was possibly the only obvious differentiating feature between small town and defended village.
But there were important functional differences between towns and villages. Towns had a greater role as markets, as residences for representatives of the military or other state administrators, as foci for traders and artisans, for an ecclesiastical establishment with economic requirements and effects, a more regular market or fair, and a range of other services and functions not available in a rural village context. The structure of town society was also very different from that of the countryside. Communal, non kinship-based organisations, such as confraternities, specialist ‘societies’ focused on a particular saint’s cult, for example, or the supporters’ groups associated with chariot - or horse-racing, did not exist in villages.
World History
