EDITED BY JOHN HALDON
This edition first published 2009
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A social history of Byzantium / edited by John Haldon. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-3240-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-3241-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Byzantine Empire–Social conditions. I. Haldon, John F.
HN11.S63 2009
306.09495–dc22
2008031714
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at Edinburgh University. He has published widely on the history of the later Byzantine empire and the church, and is the editor of Eastern Christianity (Cambridge History of Christianity, V. 2006).
Peter Frankopan is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. His research interests include the Komnenoi, Byzantium and its neighbors, and medieval Greek secular literature. He has published extensively on the reign of Alexios I Komnenos and on the Alexiad.
John Haldon is Professor of Byzantine History in the History Department, Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of the early and middle Byzantine empire; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world, especially in the context of warfare.
Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. Her research interests vary between issues of gender and the representation of women in Byzantium to questions about light and color in Byzantine art and the manufacture of Byzantine mosaics. Among other things, she has published Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium (Leicester University Press, 2001).
Michel Kaplan is Professor of Byzantine History, Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He has written and published widely on Byzantine social and economic history, in particular on rural society, estate organization, the economy of imperial estates and their management, as well as on aspects of Byzantine hagiography.
Angeliki E. Laiou is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History in the History Department at Harvard University. Her research interests include Byzantine social and economic history; the Byzantine family and women; the history of the Mediterranean in the later middle ages; the crusades; medieval economic history; and the history of Modern Greece. She is editor of the Economic History of Byzantium.
Paul Magdalino is Bishiop Wardlaw Professor of Byzantine History in the History Department at St Andrews University. His research interests include the society, culture and economy of the Byzantine world from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, in particular the city of Constantinople, medieval prophecy, astrology and religion, and Byzantine relations with Western Europe.
Peter Sarris is University Lecturer in Medieval History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is author of Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge 2006) and has written extensively on various aspects of late Roman, early medieval and Byzantine social, economic, and legal history.
Bernard Stolte is Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute at Rome and Professor of Byzantine Law in the University of Groningen. His special research interest lies in the history of Roman and Byzantine legal sources, of their text as well as of their influence in later times and different cultures. He has published widely on the civil and canon legal literature of the sixth and seventh centuries.
Alice-Mary Talbot is Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. She served as Executive Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, has published widely in the areas of monasticism and hagiography, and was a major contributor to a collection of translated monastic rules published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2000.
When I was invited by Blackwell in 2005 to edit a collection on the social history of Byzantium I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to put together a set of contributions that would open up new ways of looking at Byzantium and its culture. With hindsight, I think my optimism in this regard entirely justified, but I underestimated how difficult it would be adequately to deal with all the possible topics that one might expect to find in such a collection. In the end, I have to confess that I have not succeeded in doing all the things I originally hoped – the coverage is incomplete, and perhaps inevitably so, given the range of possible questions we would like to ask and possible or actual topics or themes we would like to read about. We planned originally to have a chapter on art and society, or at least – that title being perhaps a little trite – on how Byzantines perceived, understood, and instrumentalized color and form and how these were deployed ideologically and symbolically; we planned likewise to have a chapter dealing specifically with marriage, kinship and identity. Sadly, both authors fell by the wayside as a result of circumstances beyond their control, and we were unable to replace them at short notice – understandable, given the challenge of dealing with such complex and difficult topics, although other contributors take up several of the issues which would otherwise have been addressed in these more specialist chapters. There are undoubtedly other topics that readers will expect to find in a book with the words “social history” in its title, and I can do no more than admit that our coverage is not as complete as I hoped or planned. It would have been good, for example, to have something more analytical and theoretically broad on the relationships between different social-economic groups, although most chapters do touch on that theme in some way. Likewise we could have included a chapter or two on specific groups outside the elite and aristocracy, the church, or the monastic world, yet nevertheless identifiable by their role, dress, beliefs, or otherwise – soldiers, for example, or religious minorities, such as Jews, or ethnic groups, and so forth. Broad and complex though such themes are, they deserve treatment.
Nevertheless, this is, I believe, an exciting and provocative collection which will encourage discussion across a wide range of subjects and, perhaps most importantly, one which will encourage scholars with very different expertise and interests to build bridges to others with different priorities and perspectives and contribute thereby to a more holistic appreciation of the complex social phenomenon we call “Byzantium.” It is in one sense very obvious, yet nevertheless worth underlining the fact that Byzantium was never a single, monotonic cultural system. Regional variations in time and space, differences of scale between town, countryside, and village or between and within province and locality, all nuanced and inflected the way things were and the way those who lived in Byzantium experienced and perceived their different worlds. It is perhaps inevitable that many such inflections are near impossible to grasp except by very crude means, and that generalizations, which conceal so many of these variations, will tend to dominate any attempt to understand the different phenomena the contributors to this volume address. We hope our readers will bear this in mind when engaging with the volume.
I am immensely grateful to the contributors to the volume. They all without exception were enthusiastic about the project, and if it succeeds in opening discussion and stimulating research, then it is due to their efforts. The editor’s instructions were relatively open-ended in respect of what each author was to write about – some have chosen to focus on description and clarification, others on analysis or the examination of current debates, others again have placed emphasis also on the methodological or theoretical issues with which one has to contend in addressing a particular theme, one or two on all of these. A single author would, of course, have produced a very different sort of book, with a set of common themes and a single guiding principle, and this book cannot be that. On the other hand, since I believe that we are not yet in a position to write a single-authored social history of the Byzantine world – and whether anyone can ever hope to achieve such an aim satisfactorily may be doubted – a collection such as this has certain merits, in particular that of showing how diverse the range of possible approaches to the social history of any period or any culture can be, yet at the same time how useful the juxtapositioning of such diverse approaches can be in encouraging discussion and in throwing up new questions and new approaches.
I should like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reproduce some of the maps from my Atlas of Byzantine History; and, of course the usual suspects in such enterprises: friends, colleagues with whom I have had discussion on various issues to do with my own chapters or the book as a whole – they know who they are; and last, but of course by no means least, my family, for their continued benevolent forbearance.
Map 1 The Roman empire, ca. 400 CE
Map 2 The Byzantine empire, ca. 1050
Map 3 The Byzantine empire at the end of the 12th century
Map 4 The empire in its international context, ca. 850
Map 5 The empire in its international context, ca. 1050
Map 6 Land use and resources in the 5th–7th century
Map 7 Land use and resources in the middle Byzantine period
Map 8 Land use and resources in the later Byzantine period
Map 9 Towns and monasteries in the later period
Map 10 International trade and commerce, 12th–14th centuries
Map 11 Church administration in the late Roman and early Byzantine period
Map 12 Church administration in the 11th century
Map 13 Monasteries in the 9th century and afterwards in the west
Map 14 Monasteries in the 9th century and afterwards in the east
Map 15 Monasteries of Mt. Athos