YZANTIUM IN THE YEAR 1000

THE
MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN
PEOPLES, ECONOMIES AND CULTURES, 400-1500
EDITORS
Hugh Kennedy (St. Andrews)
Paul Magdalino (St. Andrews)
David Abulafia (Cambridge)
Benjamin Arbel (Tel Aviv)
Mark Meyerson (Toronto)
Larry J. Simon (Western Michigan University)
VOLUME 45
BYZANTIUM IN THE YEAR 1000
EDITED BY
PAUL MAGDALINO
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2003
Cover illustration: Basil II Bulgaroctonus, miniature
(Cod. Marc. Gr. Z. 17 (=421) f. IIIr, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia)
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byzantium in the year 1000 / edited by Paul Magdalino.
p. cm. (The Medieval Mediterranean, ISSN 0928 5520 ; v. 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004120971 (hbk.)
1. Byzantine Empire History Basil II Bulgaroctonus, 976 1025. I. Title:
Byzantium
in the year one thousand. II. Magdalino, Paul. III. Series.
DF595 .B97 2002
949.5'02 dc21
2002034276
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Byzantium in the year 1000 / ed. by Paul Magdalino. -- Leiden ; Boston:
Brill 2003
(The Medieval Mediterranean ; Vol 45)
ISBN 90-04-12097-1
ISSN 0928–5520
ISBN 90 04 12097 1
© Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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To the memory of Nikos Oikonomides and Lenos Mavromatis
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CONTENTS
Preface ........................................................................................ ix
Abbreviations .............................................................................. xvii
List of Contributors .................................................................... xix
Marriages towards the Millennium .......................................... 1
Jonathan Shepard
Political Elites in the Reign of Basil II .................................... 35
Catherine Holmes
Basil II and Asia Minor ............................................................ 71
Jean-Claude Cheynet
The Balkan Frontier in the Year 1000 .................................... 109
Paul Stephenson
Between Two Empires: Southern Italy in the
Reign of Basil II .................................................................... 135
Vera von Falkenhausen
Turning Sisinnios against the Sisinnians:
Eustathios Romaios on a Disputed Marriage ...................... 161
Ludwig Burgmann
Byzantine History Writing at the End of the
First Millennium .................................................................... 183
Athanasios Markopoulos
Byzantine Poetry and the Paradox of Basil II’s Reign .......... 199
Marc Lauxtermann
viii CONTENTS
Hagiography under the Macedonians: the Two
Recensions of the Metaphrastic Menologion ...................... 217
Christian Høgel
The Year 1000 in Byzantium .................................................. 233
Paul Magdalino
Index ............................................................................................ 271
PREFACE
This volume grew out of the Byzantine session of the 19th Congress
of Historical Sciences at Oslo. With the Congress scheduled for
August 2000, it did not require much effort of imagination to find
a theme. The subject of Byzantium at the end of the first millennium
A.D. would have suggested itself even if the date had been
completely devoid of historical significance. In fact, the choice was
far from being purely arbitrary or symbolic. The year 1000 A.D.
marks the middle of a century which saw the medieval Byzantine
Empire at the height of its military and political power. Between
950 and 1050, the empire of New Rome reconquered the islands of
Crete and Cyprus, and went on to regain a substantial amount of
continental territory in Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, the Balkans
and Southern Italy, which it had lost in the seventh and eighth centuries,
as well as annexing more of Armenia than had ever been
ruled by the ancient Roman Empire. Its political and cultural influence
extended beyond its frontiers, not only to the principalities and tribes
which were its immediate neighbours, and to the ancient centres of
the Christian world, Rome and Jerusalem, which remained tantalisingly
beyond its military grasp; with the conversion of Rus, symbolised
by the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 989, its magnetism
reached far to the north of the Black Sea, into what for the Romans
had been the dark wastes of Scythia. The decades before and after
the year 1000 also tend to be seen as the high point of Byzantine
imperial absolutism, the period when centuries of administrative, economic
and ideological centralisation came to fruition, and the Byzantine
emperor controlled the resources, the lives and the beliefs of his subjects
as never before or since.
The emperor in the year 1000 and the generations on either side
of it was Basil II (976–1025), whose name is emblematic of the greatness
of the medieval Byzantine state. It is not just that Basil’s reign
came chronologically at the end of a series of interrelated developments
which characterise the political and cultural ‘renaissance’ of
Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries: a long succession of
strong and effective emperors, all more or less closely identified with
the dynasty founded by Basil II’s great-great grandfather, Basil I the
x PREFACE
‘Macedonian’; an ideology of restoration, recovery and renewal,
expressed in an imperially-sponsored programme of collecting, codifying,
excerpting and re-issuing the written legacy of the Greco-
Roman past; a growing professionalism in the armed forces, backed
by a revival of military theory; a closer identification of the Church
with the interests of the State, and particularly of the ruling dynasty;
a consistent effort to advance the cause of the imperial fisc by legislation
and in the administration of justice. Basil himself has gone
down in history as the Byzantine ‘l’état c’est moi’, the paradigm of
efficient, successful state control—so much so that the problems of
the Byzantine state in the late eleventh century have been blamed
on his excessive insistence on the domination of the imperial periphery
by the bureaucratic, Constantinopolitan centre. To some extent,
his reputation was created after the eleventh-century crisis by nostalgia
for the better times which he had seemed to incarnate. Thus
the Grottaferrata text of Digenes Akrites, a work dating from the twelfth
century and set in the eastern borderlands which by that time had
been lost to the empire, refers to him as ‘Basil who took imperial
glory to the grave with him’. It was not until the late twelfth century,
with the revolt of Peter and Asan and the establishment of the
‘Second Bulgarian Empire’, that Basil became known as Boulgaroktonos,
the Bulgar-Slayer. But the idealisation of Basil as a model emperor
began before the twelfth century. It has been detected in the two
main Greek sources for his reign, the Chronographia of Michael Psellos
and the Synopsis of John Skylitzes, which can be seen, in their different
ways, to reflect the agenda of imperial revival under the first two
Comnenian emperors, Isaac I (1057–1059) and Alexios I (1081–1118),
whose family had done well under Basil and had good reason to
identify retrospectively with his regime. Both sources have enduringly
shaped later perceptions of his reign. To Psellos we owe the
portrait of Basil as the harsh, austere, parsimonious despot with no
time for luxury or literature, while Skylitzes is responsible for the
view that Basil concentrated on the Balkans and the destruction of
Bulgaria at the expense of Asia Minor and the advancement of the
eastern frontier. Both historians have by their emphasis created the
impression of a reign dominated at the outset by massive military
rebellions, and dedicated thereafter to eradicating aristocratic faction
and civil war. Ultimately, however, the image of Basil II the grim
autocrat stems from his own publicity: from the threatening antimagnate
rhetoric of his Novel of 996, and from the miniature of
PREFACE xi
the Venice Psalter depicting him armed and triumphant with barbarians
grovelling at his crimson-shod imperial feet.
The composite picture of Byzantium at the peak of its achievement
under Basil II was central to modern perceptions of Byzantium
in the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century. This was
not only because the different components fitted together so plausibly,
but also because the composition represented what Byzantinists
and the regimes or ideologies they served most wanted to find in
Byzantium: the perfect moment of a state system with an impeccable
Greco-Roman pedigree which was triumphant over Islam and
northern barbarism, yet did not have—indeed, energetically resisted—
the dark forces of feudalism and Catholic clericalism which were the
bane of the Western Middle Ages. This basic consensus united Greeks,
Slavs and Western scholars with a classical education. It received its
fullest articulation in the synthetic histories of the mid-twentieth century
which remain among the most coherent and readable narratives
of Byzantine history, and it continues to inform more recent
literature. Yet the story has become progressively less clear in the
light of three trends in recent scholarship. Firstly, the uncoupling of
economic, social and cultural history from political and military history
has led to the realisation that under Basil II, battles and borders
apart, the peak of Byzantine achievement was still to come, in
a pattern of development which was not simply imposed by the
expansion of the Latin West but paralleled and shared in the dynamics
of Western expansionism. In this, Basil could be seen less as the
ruler who brought the medieval Byzantine system to perfection than
as a reactionary who repressed its natural evolution. But this might
be to credit Basil with too much personal initiative and input. A
second trend in recent scholarship has been to deconstruct the image
of the grim autocrat by looking critically at each of the main sources
in the context of its composition, and by questioning the key motifs
which make up the myth of ‘Basil the Terrible’: his accumulation
of untold surplus wealth, hoarded in specially excavated chambers;
his disdain for culture; his blinding of 15,000 defeated Bulgarians.
The idea that Basil persecuted the aristocracy has also come in for
criticism on the grounds that several aristocratic families, including,
as we have seen, the Komnenoi, did very well during Basil’s reign.
This is consistent with a third concern which certain recent and
forthcoming studies of the period have in common: a tendency to
emphasise that the expansion of the Byzantine state in the tenth
xii PREFACE
century and its subsequent consolidation were achieved by methods
which were not particularly ‘statist’ in either an ancient or a modern
sense. It has been argued that the Byzantine state had no coherent
strategy of expansion in the east, and that its expansionism in
the early tenth century was primarily concerned with securing the
personal loyalty and co-operation of Christian elites in Armenia and
the Caucasus, rather than with the annexation of Muslim-dominated
territory to the south. The subsequent military reconquest of Cilicia
and northern Syria by a new model army driven by an official programme
of holy war has been interpreted as the unpremeditated
extension of an initially defensive and rhetorical reaction against the
aggression of an especially formidable border emir. When new territories
were annexed and their resources assigned to the imperial
fisc, it is suggested that the imperial government relied for their
exploitation on previously existing structures and local elites rather
than on the imposition of fiscal bureaucracy. On the European side,
the map that is now emerging of the northern Balkans after the liquidation
of the Bulgarian kingdom no longer shows a solid, purplecoloured
bloc of imperial provinces separated from the barbarian
world by the hard black line of a fortified Danube frontier; rather
it shows a permeable frontier zone where the permanent imperial
military presence was restricted to the lower Danube and scaled
down fairly soon after the initial occupation. Further south, in the
western heartland of the Bulgarian kingdom that Basil conquered
from Tsar Samuel, his treatment of the Bulgarian church has been
viewed as evidence that Basil initiated or promoted the policy of
fiscal exemption which led to the growth of ‘feudal’ privilege in the
late Byzantine period. ‘In other words, Basil II, the emperor who
tried to break the powerful and to restrict the church, would sem
at the same time to have permitted (if not introduced) policies favouring
the formation of client retinues by certain magnates.’1
The contours of the peak of Byzantine achievement represented
by Basil II are thus not as clear as they were fifty years ago. Yet
on the map of Byzantine history, this remains an area of impressively
high altitude. In military and political terms, it was undoubtedly
Byzantium’s finest moment. Basil’s reign was one of superlatives:
it was the longest in Byzantine history, and the one in which the
1 N. Oikonomidès, Fiscalité et exemption fiscale à Byzance (IX e–XIe s.)
(Athens, 1996),
177.
PREFACE xiii
emperor, the only Byzantine sovereign who never married, was most
completely above private interests and personal relations. For the
first ten years of it, the government was dominated by an extraordinarily
long-serving, capable and versatile eunuch ‘prime minister’,
the parakoimomenos Basil; the young emperor also faced not just
one but two military rebellions, each on a scale not seen since 821.
Having overcome these internal threats to his power, he went on to
terminate the existence of a formidable neighbouring state which for
three hundred years had threatened the security of Constantinople
and the empire’s hold on its European provinces. It is not only the
rhetoric of Basil’s legislation and his historians which portrays him
as extraordinarily devoted to the interests of the imperial fisc. Further
evidence is provided by the eleventh-century judge Eustathios Romaios,
who spent much of his early career under Basil. In one of his judicial
decisions (analysed below by Ludwig Burgmann) Eustathios stated
that the patriarch Sisinnios had issued his famous decree of 997 ‘with
the emperor’s intention’. The decree extended the degrees of relationship
by affinity within which in-law relations were forbidden to
marry; since it inhibited repeated intermarriage, and therefore the
accumulation of inherited wealth, among small groups of aristocratic
families, its promulgation in the year following Basil II’s Novel against
the acquisition of land by the powerful cannot be coincidental. It
seems to be a clear instance of the church serving the interests of
the state at the emperor’s bidding. In the Peira, the collection of case
law based on Eustathios’ judicial decsions, the anonymous compiler
records how Eustathios had remarked that the emperor Basil used
to move the imperial paroikoi, the peasants who cultivated state land,
around frequently, in order to prevent them from acquiring rights
of ownership (15.2).
It could be objected that the imperial judge who articulated these
‘facts’ in such a pro-imperial sense was himself projecting, or reflecting,
a rhetoric rather than a reality of imperial power. But when a rhetoric
of power is so persistently articulated, at first and and second hand,
does it not become part of that reality? The Peira shows Eustathios
to have taken a consistently pro-fiscal line in his judicial pronouncements
that upheld the land legislation of Basil II. His role in preserving
and idealising Basil’s memory is a tribute to Basil’s effectiveness
in imbuing his subordinates with a mentality corresponding to the
emperor’s rhetorical image. Eustathios was not an isolated phenomenon,
to judge from the way in which the interests of the fisc were
xiv PREFACE
also upheld by two of his contemporaries, John the Orphanotrophos
and Isaac Komnenos, who had been close to Basil in their youth.
What Eustathios represented for the judiciary, John and Isaac represented
for the fiscal bureaucracy and the army respectively.
The shape, dimensions and quality of the Byzantine imperial
achievement around the year 1000 thus continue to deserve attention
and require interpretation. The following chapters focus the
attention of ten scholars who specialise in the interpretation of
Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The collection is not
a synthesis, nor does it claim to be comprehensive—the church and
the fiscal economy are among notable omissions—but it attempts to
cover a broad spectrum. The first five chapters are concerned with
imperial power. Jonathan Shepard analyses the context of two momentous
foreign marriages which were arranged for Byzantine princesses
in the late tenth century: that of Theophano to Otto II, and that
of Basil II’s sister Anna to Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Catherine Holmes
discusses aspects of the relationship between the image and the reality
of Basil’s regime. The next three chapters consider the empire’s
territorial power base in Asia Minor ( Jean-Claude Cheynet), along
the Balkan frontier (Paul Stephenson), and in southern Italy (Vera
von Falkenhausen). The transition from government and politics to
culture is made in the chapter by Ludwig Burgmann, who analyses
a judicial decision by Eustathios Romaios documenting a failed
attempt to use the decree of Sisinnios to contest a marriage; it also
provides a rare opportunity to study the hero of the Peira in unabridged
and unexcerpted form. The following three chapters look at developments
in three types of literature which flourished under Basil II
despite a general lack of imperial patronage and the tension which
evidently existed between the emperor and the three main authors
involved. Athanasios Markopoulos considers history writing, especially
the work of Leo the Deacon. Marc Lauxtermann surveys the
work of John Geometres and other poets. Christian Høgel reviews
the evidence for the execution of the most ambitious project in
medieval Greek hagiography: the improved, standardised edition of
the complete corpus of Greek saints’ lives undertaken by Symeon
Metaphrastes. The volume concludes with an essay by the present
author which attempts to demonstrate that the year 1000 meant
something to Byzantines as well as to modern academics on the lookout
for round-number anniversaries.
Chapters 2–7 originated in papers delivered at the Oslo Congress