Krystina Kubina

The late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was marked by both cultural fecundity and political fragmentation, resulting in an astonishingly multifaceted literary output. This book addresses the poetry of the empire’s final quarter-millennium from a broad perspective, bringing together studies on texts originating in places from Crete to Constantinople and from court to school, treating topics from humanist antiquarianism to pious self-help, and written in styles from the vernacular to Homeric language. It thus offers a reference work to a much-neglected but rich textual material that is as varied as it was potent in the sociocultural contexts of its times.

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Hochsprachliche rhetorische Texte waren ein wichtiges Mittel der sozialen Positionierung in Byzanz. Von besonderer Bedeutung war dabei die enkomiastische, d. h. lobende Dichtung. Das Buch widmet sich den enkomiastischen Gedichten des wichtigsten Dichters der Palaiologenzeit, Manuel Philes (ca. 1270 – nach 1332), dessen Werk trotz seiner Bedeutung weitestgehend unerforscht ist. Die Arbeit bietet eine Untersuchung von etwa 17.000 Versen, d.h. etwa 2/3 des von Philes überlieferten Werkes, und verbindet eine philologische mit einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Analyse. Zunächst stehen literarische Fragen, insbesondere die Gattung, Motivik und Formelemente im Zentrum. Darauf aufbauend werden die literarischen und sozialen Funktionen der Gedichte modellhaft erläutert. Schließlich werden die Umstände der Produktion und Rezeption untersucht, insbesondere die Motivationen für das Verfassen von Gedichten, die Darbringung der Texte in schriftlicher und mündlicher Form sowie Fragen der Rekontextualisierung. Diese Monographie bietet die erste komplexe Analyse von Manuel Philes’ Werk und gewährt tiefe Einblicke in das literarische und soziale Leben in Konstantinopel.

Poems in the Late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) were marvelously multifaceted in their contexts of production, functions, genres, subjects, forms, and language registers. For the purposes of this book, poetry is defined in a purely formal way as “everything in verse”, thus encompassing both shorter texts, such as epigrams and monodies, and long verse narratives (overall c.170,000 verses). The temporal framework, which might seem merely a politically-inspired convenience, is in fact broadly valid, as the calamities of the Fourth Crusade and the Ottoman conquest which bookend this period led not only to a break of some decades in poetry production, in the early thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries respectively, but also influenced the forms and functions of the poems. Spatially, the centers of poetry production were far apart from each other and situated in various political contexts, including the Salento, Nicaea, Epirus, Trebizond, Crete, Cyprus, Thessaloniki, the Peloponnese, and humanist Italym as well as, of course, in Constantinople. By mapping this rich and multifarious literary landscape, this first chapter offers the framework for the following case studies gathered in this volume.

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople not only destroyed the Byzantine Empire as a political entity but caused the collapse of patronage networks vital to all aspects of Byzantine cultural life, including literary production. After 1453 authors had to seek sources of support under new lords and divergent cultural imperatives: Ottoman Constantinople, Crete, and humanist Italy became major centres of Greek poetic production and intellectual life. Through the analysis of poems by George Amiroutzes, Michael Apostoles, Bessarion, Andronikos Kallistos, and others, this article examines how these authors adapted their compositions to new communities, substantially transforming their (literary) identity.

Stephanos Sgouropoulos, a little-known Trapezuntine protonotarios and poet of the early and middle fourteenth century, has left us about 1,500 verses, most of them addressed to the emperor Alexios III Megas Komnenos (1338–1390, r. 1349–1390), who had ascended the throne in a period of political upheaval and instability. Between 1349 and the early 1350’s, Sgouropoulos addressed some poems to the young emperor, instructing him on appropriate imperial behavior and offering political advice. Later, however, the author, probably dismissed as a counsellor, abuses the emperor for the latter’s misdeeds and wishes him to hell. Laced heavily with irony, Sgouropoulos’s poems play cleverly with a rich diversity of topics, as well as rhetorical and literary guises. Yet, his small poetic oeuvre has been both neglected and misunderstood in scholarship. This study, offering the first in-depth analysis of his poems, proceeds in two steps: first, Sgouropoulos’s poetic corpus is introduced by outlining the historical parameters of its being: its transmission, its content, its date, as well as its use of language and meter. Second, the entanglement of praise, abuse, and advice, essential to its composition, is analyzed through a close reading of the single poems as well as some considerations on the generic logics behind these texts. It turns out that, while Sgouropoulos’s poems are deeply embedded in Byzantine literary tradition, they have no equal in later Byzantine poetry. In their volatile literary character, they mirror poetically a world in turmoil.

The celebrated scholar and literatus Maximos Planoudes (c. 1255–c. 1305) was a leading exponent of the study of ancient literature in the late Byzantine world. While best known for this engagement – embodied in his collection of epigrams, the Planudean Anthology; in his critical editions of, and scholia for, classical texts; and in his translations of Latin literature – he also composed an undeservedly little-known poem in the tradition of the ancient Greek idyll. A humorous piece, drawing on numerous ancient sources, particularly on bucolic poetry in the tradition of Theocritus, and on Lucian’s satires, it exhibits a refreshing jocularity not usually evident in his other literary activities. This article offers a close reading of the Idyll, highlighting its themes of love and homoeroticism, the alterity of otherworlds, and magic and the marvelous; the article furthermore investigates the Idyll’s connections to other literary traditions, and to Planoudes’ scholarship as a whole; and it finally considers the reception of the poem in Byzantium. In composing an idyll – unprecedented in Byzantine poetry – Planoudes creates a parody of ancient texts and authors that is both entertaining and instructive, while being unique in its setting and context.

Germanos II (r. 1223–1240) was patriarch of Constantinople in Nicaea in a time of political instability as several states competed to claim rulership over the former territories of the Byzantine Empire. During his patriarchy, he helped the Nicaean empire gain supremacy over its rival state Epirus and handled the contentious relationship with the Latin Church. Best known for his sermons and treatises, Germanos also left a small poetic corpus, consisting of a canon, some hymns and a catanyctic poem as well as epigrams and metrical prefaces. The patriarch used his verses to communicate and publicly defend his positions on Nicaean supremacy and the Latin Church. This poetry idiosyncratically included theology and ideology in high-register poems. Two epigrams for a crozier, a gift to the new metropolitan of Thessalonike, underline his claim for the submission of the Epirote church under his governance. His liturgical poems endorsed Orthodoxy and rebuked historic heresies. A cycle of epigrams for the Church of the Holy Fathers in Nicaea takes the same stance against heretics and was likely inscribed in this church as a constant reminder of Nicaea’s prominence in the Christian world. Two other poems (an epigram and a metrical preface), edited here for the first time, show how the private or public context influences the relation between devotion and polemics. This article undertakes an analysis of Germanos’ poetry as an essential part of his political and theological agenda.

Manuel Philes’ œuvre contains a large number of hitherto neglected verse letters. Many of these have been treated as “begging poems.” This term, however, is not suitable as a genre name nor does it suffice to describe Philes’ epistolary poetry. In order to come to a better understanding of these texts, this essay offers a comparison with the prose letters of Philes’ contemporary Theodore Hyrtakenos. Hyrtakenos’ and Philes’ letters have several topics and addressees in common. Moreover, they both belonged to the same social class: educated men with strong connections to the wealthy elite to which they themselves did not belong. This comparison raises questions such as: Is there a crucial difference between prose and verse? Which textual features must be understood as individual characteristics of the authors and which are genre conventions? What are the (literary, social, pragmatic) functions of these letters?

This article presents the critical edition of eight hitherto unpublished poems by Manuel Philes together with a translation and a commentary. The poems are verse letters addressed to various high-ranking individuals. Poem 1 is addressed to the emperor, whose power is emphasised in a request to help Philes escape from his misery. Poem 2 is a fragment likewise addressed to the emperor. Poem 3 is a consolatory poem for a father whose son has died. In poem 4, Philes addresses a patron whose wife hurried to Constantinople after she had become the object of hostility of unknown people. Poem 5 is addressed to the month of August and deals with the return of a benefactor of Philes to Constantinople. In poem 6, Philes writes on behalf of an unnamed banker and asks the megas dioiketes Kabasilas to judge the latter justly. Poems 7 and 8 are tetrasticha
including a request for wine.

The article deals with the problems of genre definition in the work of Manuel Philes. Previous scholarship has claimed the existence of a genre of ‘begging poems’. I argue that poems connected with pleas cannot be regarded as one genre. Instead, most such texts are verse letters, as can be demonstrated from internal textual evidence. Such evidence includes the address of living individuals, the vocabulary of writing and sending, formal elements of letters and various motifs and functions associated with epistolography. The literary mode of pleading, which occurs frequently in verse letters, but also in other genres such as epibateria and propemptika, should be distinguished from the hitherto completely neglected genre of epistolary poetry. In general, one should avoid the term ‘begging’. Its pejorative connotations fail to do justice both to the literary quality of the poems, and to the literary games in them that subvert the status of both the sender and the addressee. Philes often deals with the problem of reciprocation and asserts the legitimate character of his claims. Although connected to pragmatic aims, there are manifold ways of constructing pleas literarily. Typical themes and motifs are the suffering ‘I’, the topos of the begging intellectual and the pleas for a cloak, which are used creatively in various contexts. Both the genre of verse letters and the literary mode of pleading have many facets in Philes’ poetry, showing the versatility of the author and his ability to use his texts for his own purposes.

This study gives the editio princeps of two poems by Manuel Philes and looks at the relationship between the poet and the Asan family, which commissioned the poems. The first text is an epitaph for Irene Asanina Komnene Palaiologina, the daughter of Michael VIII Palaiologos. The second poem is an epigram written for a church that Irene’s son Isaac commissioned. I argue that both poems were commissioned by Isaac Asan, who donated a church as burial place for his family, where both texts were inscribed. When the two poems are read in the context of others connected with the Asan family, one can prove contact between Philes and three of Irene’s sons from at least 1316 to 1332. The literary analysis shows that, in commissioned poetical works, the Byzantines sought individual responses to specific situations and the genre of occasional poetry should not be neglected as an arbitrary mixture of common topoi.

The 15th century was a time of radical political and cultural subversions, emblematically represented by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This epochal event marked the end of the Byzantine Empire, a culmination of Ottoman and Islamic endeavors to acquire the symbolically charged city, and a profound change of diplomatic relationships for the Latin West and the eastern Mediterranean. This session examines the way these upheavals were reflected in and fostered by literary composition in various forms and languages: verse and prose, orations, letters, and epigrams, in Greek, Ottoman, and Latin. By taking a transcultural perspective, this session aims to elucidate how literature functioned as a driving cultural force in this dynamic age.

Conference at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
February 9–11, 2022

The composition and consumption of poetry was fundamental for the cultural life of the Byzantines, from the beginning of the Empire until its end in the middle of the 15th century. In the schools, poetry was omnipresent both as an object of study (such as that of Homer, the tragedians, and Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as of more contemporary authors, e.g. Michael Psellos or Theodore Prodromos), and as a teaching method (didactic poems, metrical schede). Epigrams were omnipresent in Constantinople and elsewhere, inscribed on the surfaces of churches and towers, icons, and portable objects, as well as in many other places and settings. Members of the upper class regularly gathered in literary salons, the so-called theatra, where rhetorical texts were read in both prose and verse. Moreover, beyond its undoubted aesthetic value, the writing and patronage of poetry could have a significant impact on the social standing of authors and patrons alike. While these aspects have recently been studied for the poetry produced from late antiquity up to the twelfth century, the poetic production of the late Byzantine period (13th to 15th c.) has been largely neglected. This conference will, for the first time, shed light on the corpus of late Byzantine poetry in its entirety. We invite the submission of papers with a focus on metrical texts from the Byzantine world from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

Organizer: Dr. Krystina Kubina
Please send a title of your paper and an abstract (max. 300 words) to Krystina Kubina (krystina.kubina@oeaw.ac.at) no later than June 30, 2021. The speakers will be notified by the end of July. Travel and accommodation expenses (3 nights) will be covered.

In recent years, scholarship has turned its attention to the historical setting, the Sitz im Leben, of Byzantine poetry. In this context, the most prolific poet of the early 14th century, Manuel Philes, was taken into account. However, due to the vast number of texts transmitted under his name (more than 30,000 verses in more than 150 manuscripts!) no attempt has been made to look at the full picture of how his poetry was read. Without aiming at a complete evaluation, I shall offer an overview of the ways of reception. Philes’ poems were read in a variety of different contexts: from private readings of verse letters over performed enkomia to epigrams inscribed on public buildings. The form of reception also altered the way of how Philes was perceived as an author: from self-conscious reflections of an authorial ‘I’ in letters to the total absence of the author in inscriptions. The example of Manuel Philes shows the wide presence of poetry (and literature in general) in Late Byzantine society.