Byzantine society

"Il saggio traccia una sintesi della civiltà bizantina, dalla fondazione di Costantinopoli alla Quarta Crociata. A tutti gli effetti continuazione dell'impero romano, Bisanzio riuscì ad assimilare positivamente le Völkerwanderungen che determinano il crollo della prima Roma, facendo della multietnicità e del dinamismo verticale delle élites un punto di forza e una costante. Se nell'effimero progetto giustinianeo di riunificazione dell'impero universale prevalevano ancora una gravitazione occidentale e un’ottica vetero-romana, il superamento, a partire da Eraclio, della prospettiva italocentrica segnò il vero inizio dell'età bizantina. A Eraclio vanno ascritti due traguardi fondamentali: la creazione del sistema dei temi e il definitivo soggiogamento dell’impero persiano, nella gran parte dei cui ex-territori subentrerà ben presto, tuttavia, il nuovo interlocutore arabo. Tra il VII e l’VIII secolo, con l'accentuazione dei tratti aneuropei in campo economico, sociale, artistico, culturale, si assiste alla vera e propria nascita della concezione bizantina del potere. L’età dell'iconomachia, a lungo giudicata “buia”, coincide in realtà con una fase di prosperità economica: il compiersi del processo di deurbanizzazione e la trasformazione territoriale favoriscono l’accentuarsi della vocazione statalista e predispongono il grande “risorgimento culturale” del IX-X secolo. La sconfitta dell'iconoclasmo vede anche la sconfitta del platonismo e l'affermarsi dell'aristotelismo come filosofia ufficiale del cristianesimo medievale. Il regno di Basilio I e della dinastia macedone segna la cosiddetta "età d'oro" dell'impero bizantino. Il X e XI secolo conoscono più tormentati rapporti tra stato e chiesa, che culminano nello scisma del 1054 tra chiesa d’oriente e chiesa d’occidente (in definitiva sfida del patriarca Cerulario al basileus) e un incremento politico ed economico della nobiltà militare provinciale, che si affermerà definitivamente con la dinastia dei Comneni. Proprio con il regno comneno, in particolare con la concessione dei privilegi commerciali a Venezia da parte di Alessio I, deve farsi coincidere l’inizio della fase calante dell'economia bizantina, ininterrotta fino al XV secolo, simmetrica e inversa all'ascesa del protocapitalismo occidentale dei traffici, cui l’antica egemonia di Bisanzio sarà progressivamente sottomessa e la sopravvivenza stessa della basileia infine sacrificata. Al riaccendersi della prospettiva di restaurazione dell'impero universale corrisponderà – nelle forme del ripiegamento sociale e dell'indebolimento statale – maggiore vulnerabilità nella politica pratica. Con queste premesse Bisanzio subirà, nel 1204, la forza distruttiva della “deviazione” della Quarta Crociata: una catastrofe inaspettata e forse per questo ancora più traumatica della definitiva caduta del 1453 sotto i turchi osmani.

This essay outlines the history of Byzantine civilisation from the founding of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade.  In every way a continuation of the Roman empire, Byzantium succeeded in assimilating to positive effect the Völkerwanderungen that determined the fall of the first Rome, creating a point of strength and allegiance out of the multi-ethnic, ascendant vertical dynamism of the élites.  If gravitation toward the West and an antiquated Roman perspective still prevailed in Justinian’s ephemeral project to reunify the universal empire, the shift beyond the Italo-centric perspective from Heraclius on marked the true beginning of the Byzantine era.  Two fundamental achievements are ascribed to Heraclius: the creation of the system of themes and the definitive subjugation of the Persian empire, to whose ex-territories, however, the new Arab interlocutor would soon succeed.  Between the 7th and 8th centuries, with the accentuation of non-European traits in economic, social, artistic, and cultural fields, we begin to see the emergence of the authentic Byzantine concept of power.  Long considered “dark,” the age of iconomachy coincided, in reality, with a phase of economic prosperity.  The culmination of the process of de-urbanisation and transformation of the territory favoured the accentuation of a state-centred vocation and set the stage for the great “cultural revival” of the 9th and 10th centuries.  The defeat of iconoclasm also saw the defeat of Platonism and the affirmation of Aristotelianism as the official philosophy of Medieval Christianity.  The reign of Basil I and the Macedonian dynasty marked the so-called “golden age” of the Byzantine empire.  The 10th and 11th centuries saw more tormented relations between church and state, culminating in the Schism of 1054 between the Eastern and Western churches (ultimately the patriarch Cerularius’ challenge to the basileus) and a political and economic increase in the provincial military nobility that would assert itself definitively with the Comnenian dynasty.  The beginning of the decline of the Byzantine economy - uninterrupted until the 15th century, symmetrical in nature and the inverse of the ascent of Western trade proto-capitalism to which the ancient hegemony of Byzantium would be gradually subjugated and the very survival of the basileia ultimately sacrificed - began precisely with the Comnenian dynasty, in particular, with the concession of commercial privileges to Venice by Alexius I.  To the reawakening of the prospect of a restoration of the universal empire would correspond – in the form of social withdrawal and weakening of the state – greater vulnerability in political practice. Under these conditions Byzantium would, in 1204, be subjected to the destructive force of the “detour” of the Fourth Crusade: an unforeseen catastrophe and perhaps for this reason even more traumatic than the definitive fall in 1453 at the hands of the Osmanli Turks. 
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Article in the proceeding:
A Book of Psalms from Elventh-Century Byzantium: The Complex of Texts and Images in Vat. gr. 752
edited by Barbara Crostini & Glenn Peers
Studi e Testi 504
Città del Vaticano 2016, 193-225

The publishing house has mistakenly blackened passages in the list on pp. 224-225. This preprint version displays all entries.

Collective identity in the so-called Byzantine Empire is a much-debated issue that has drawn a lot of attention over the years. The current paper attempts a critical assessment of the hitherto main lines of thinking about Byzantine identity, focussing on the period between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. By proposing an alternative view on source material based on a comprehensive theoretical framework, I argue that a conceptualization of the collective identity of this medieval imperial social order with its constantly fluctuating geopolitical and cultural boundaries needs to be disconnected from essentialist and reifying views on perennial ethnicity as well as from the modern phenomenon of the nation-state.

download full text in: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789692624
Representations of warriors, a favourite theme of Byzantine glazed pottery, especially in the second half of the twelfth and the thirteenth century, are primarily connected with Incised Sgraffito Ware and the so-called Free Style group. These warriors, depicted marching fully armed or combating a dragon, reflect the ideals and the literary tendencies of their time.

The army and the soldier: their image in historiography and rhetoric (10th-12th centuries), in:  Histories of war in South-Eastern Europe. An approach in the longue durée, Athens 2018, 277-206
The soldier, both as an individual and as a member of a particular group, and the army, as one of the most essential components of maintaining the integrity of the Byzantine Empire - to the extent that this was possible at times - and of carrying out its foreign policy, are subject to very frequent references by historiographers. They are also quite often referred to in panegyrics, while they are present also in letters composed by scholars. The texts belonging to these categories were studied with the aim of exploring, on the one hand the image of the soldier (rank-and-file and the leadership) as a person who is active in the context of a larger whole and in different circumstances every time, and on the other the image of the army as the whole itself. The objective of this particular research is to establish: a ) what is the ideal and what the actual image of the Byzantine soldier and army b)  to what degree the picture given by historians is consistent with that of orators and correspondents c ) the possibility of a differentiation  in the way the soldiers and the army are  presented  and judged by the specific sources of the 10th century and by those of the 11th and 12th centuries, since the relevant authors write in different political and socio-economic circumstances, and d ) what is the attitude of the society  towards  the military and the army during the period considered.

The paper examines the relation between three concepts: a child's will, children's agency and child labour. Addressing the current debate about children's agency, this paper shows how these concepts were developed in Byzantine society in order to advance a religious agenda that encouraged the child to run away from home in favour of a new life in a monastery. Children were attributed with a will of their own and acted upon it before they reached the age of puberty. This perspective took the child out of the private sphere by attributing agency to it. The paper addresses the current debate about children's agency revealing the conceptualization of this term as motivated by an economic agenda in which the need to profit from the child's labour plays an important role.

The paper studies the donations and privileges early Palaiologan emperors conceded to middle-class individuals or groups. In spite of their frequency, these concessions had until now remained essentially unobserved as attention was usually directed to donations and privileges in favor of powerful ecclesiastical institutions and aristocrats. The paper first examines the collective grants awarded to various towns of the empire. It suggests that the practice must have been widespread covering a large portion of the towns and underlines the fact that the grants concerned all inhabitants independently of their social position. The main part of the article is devoted to cases of imperial grants awarded to individuals who, although well-off, were relatively insignificant in terms of social rank and power. The frequency of concessions done by imperial chrysobull seems to have led to the emergence of a new social group, that of the chrysoboullatoi, who were below the archontes or the aristocracy. The study argues that these concessions cannot be seen as the result of pressure upon the ruler. They were rather a tool the emperors used to associate directly to their regime a wide segment of society in order to consolidate their control of provincial towns.

International audienceAlthough he has drawn famous portraits of Byzantine aristocrats in a number of studies, Paul Lemerle did not explicitly address the relation with the provincial territories as an important factor in creating a Byzantine aristocratic identity. The issue was first explicitly raised by Hélène Ahrweiler, who pointed to the progressive detachment of Byzantine aristocrats from their provincial bases during the eleventh century and to their subsequent « constantinopolisation ». In later years, scholars, such as Jean-Claude Cheynet, Alexander Kazhdan and John Haldon, have further scrutinized the importance of provincial bonds as a source of social power and political influence. The authors of this paper provide a fresh look at long-debated questions by reconsidering Byzantine aristocratic attitude toward the eastern regions of the Empire on the eve of the Turkish invasions. Evidence related to the physical presence of prominent individuals and families in the eastern p...

""Questo saggio introduttivo ripercorre la formazione intellettuale di Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan e il retroterra politico-ideologico della sua visione storica e produzione storiografica. Ultimo erede della scuola economico-sociale russa, ma influenzato anche dalla scuola francese delle Annales, nell’URSS della stagnazione brezneviana, all’inizio degli anni Settanta, Kazhdan aveva condotto uno studio statistico e prosopografico sulla struttura della classe dirigente bizantina dell'undicesimo e dodicesimo secolo, una prima versione dei cui risultati era stata pubblicata in russo nel 1974 con il titolo Sotsial'nyj sostav gospodstvujuščego klassa Vizantii XI-XII vv. Le deduzioni e teorizzazioni presenti in nuce in quel breve volume furono sviluppate da Kazhdan dopo la sua fuga dall’URSS e il trasferimento negli USA, presso il Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Byzantine Studies, a partire dal 1978. A metà degli anni 80 Kazhdan deciderà di riscrivere e ristrutturare ex novo l’opera, con l’aggiunta di un’ampia messe di nuovi dati, l’introduzione di un’analisi propriamente filologica delle fonti e il perseguimento di nuove e più circostanziate conclusioni sia empiriche sia teoriche. A questo lavoro attenderà per oltre dieci anni, in collaborazione con Silvia Ronchey, fino alla morte nel 1997. La nuova versione dello studio, pubblicata in lingua italiana nello stesso anno, vede compiutamente enunciata, fra l’altro, la teoria storica e sociologica sul “dinamismo verticale delle élites bizantine”, che la co-autrice illustra nella sua introduzione al volume, rilevando inoltre l’attualizzazione implicita della struttura statale bizantina in quella sovietica, che si insinua nella visione kazhdaniana, e lo specifico transfert fra aristocrazia bizantina e nomenklatura sovietica, che ne influenza sottilmente l’analisi storica.

This introduction provides an overview of the intellectual development of Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan and the political and ideological background to his historical vision and historiography.  The last heir of the Russian social-economic school in the USSR during the period of stagnation under Brezhnev - though also influenced by the French Annales School - Kazhdan conducted statistical and comparative research on the structure of the Byzantine ruling class of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, a first version of which was published in Russian in 1974 with the title: Sotsial'nyj sostav gospodstvujuščego klassa Vizantii XI-XII vv.  The hypotheses and deductions present in nuce in that volume were further elaborated by Kazhdan after his flight from the URSS and his move to the U.S.A. to the Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Byzantine Studies from 1978 on.  In the mid-1980s Kazhdan would decide to rewrite and restructure the work ex novo, with the addition of an extensive collection of new data, the introduction of rigorous philological analyses of sources, and the pursuit of new, more detailed conclusions, both empirical and theoretical. In collaboration with Silvia Ronchey, he would work on this study for over ten years until his death in 1997. In addition, the new version of the work, published in Italian that same year, presented the completed elaboration of the historical and sociological theory of the “ascendant vertical dynamism of Byzantine élites,” which the co-author illustrates in her introduction to the volume. The co-author detects an implicit transference between the Byzantine state structure and the Soviet state, on the one hand, and Byzantine aristocracy and Soviet nomenclature, on the other, subtly influencing Kazhdan’s historical analysis and overall vision.
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The positions of the Greek Christian Fathers, especially those of the fourth century, on savings and hoarding exerted long influence on Byzantine relevant concepts. Facing socio-economic issues of intense inequality, they attempted to reconcile Christian ethics with ancient Greek philosophical ideas, while admitting the influence of the monastic movement. Their perceptions formed an ideal, in which hoarding wealth is damnable, while the rich as the ‘manager’ of common resources ought to redistribute them through charity. Although the Fathers generally did not try to dissuade believers from investing their savings in interest-bearing lending, they tried to show that the ‘investment’ of wealth and ‘usury’ in heaven were much preferred activities.
Perceptions of trade, this dynamic element of a pre-industrial economy, serves in this article as a representative criterion of the degree of productive or non-productive saving, especially from the middle Byzantine period onwards. At times scholars related to Byzantine aristocracy reproduced the patristic ideals, implying that social conventions disrupted the exoneration of trade, and hence the investment of savings within it. On the other hand, the hagiographical texts and ‘beneficial tales’ seem to move away from the notion of finite wealth, evident in patristic thought, and convey the reward for charity from Heaven to earth. Moreover, as lay literature, they praised investing savings in trade which was appropriately conducted. It took, however, the Ottoman expansion and the loss of land property, in order for the aristocracy, the largest potential investor, to fully exonerate trade and financial activities, and to allocate its savings to them.

The study of a number of letters by the metropolitan of Neai Patrai Euthymios Malakes reveals that he was concerned with the protection of both his flock and the interests of his see from heavy taxation and the often unscrupulous tax collectors. These letters complete the picture we have concerning the unseemly practices of Byzantine fiscal officials, with focus on twelfth-century Greece. Since relevant complaints by other prelates during this period are not scarce, Euthymios’ letters are valuable in that they do not express such vague complaints but they highlight specific practices of fiscal officials: the forced recruitment of peasants and the seizure of assets of deceased bishops or vacant bishoprics. Moreover, concerning the latter issue, Euthymios’ reference to an imperial act by Manuel I Komnenos, aiming at the protection of ecclesiastical institutions from fiscal agents, offers interesting information about the measure, its dating and its implementation.

Κεντρική Διάθεση-Εκδοτικός Οίκος: Αντιναυάρχου Κωνσταντίνου Πανανά 159, 18546 Πειραιάς, τηλ. 6980496262.
Ανωνύμου, Αριθμητική, Έκδοση Μαρία Χάλκου [Τα Βυζαντινά Μαθηματικά, σύμφωνα με τον κώδικα 65 του 15 ου αι. της Εθνικής Βιβλιοθήκης της Αυστρίας], τόμ. ΙΙ Γεωμετρία, 3 η Έκδοση, Αθήνα 2014 (epub) Το βιβλίο χαρακτηρίστηκε από το HARVARD ''Πηγή'' για τη μελέτη και διδασκαλία των Μαθηματικών, και ευρίσκεται ψηφιοποιημένο με ελεύθερη πρόσβαση στη Βιβλιοθήκη "Ανέμη" του ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΚΡΗΤΗΣ
http://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/metadata/4/8/e/metadata-1464949978-419166-20739.tkl