Revisiting Byzantine Society’s Roman Origins
The premise that “Byzantium around the year 1000 had become a medieval Greek Empire” (Papoulia, Das Ende der Antike (as footnote above)) has been refuted with the plausible argument that the Byzantine élite did not identify itself as Greek, whereas Arabs, Armenians, Bulgars, Slavs and other ethno-cultural collectivities resided within the borders of the Empire in this period, the members of which were regarded as Roman subjects (Koder, Ethnogenesis). This plausible thesis has been complemented by a comprehensive statement on the self-identification of the Byzantines, according to which “the average Byzantine understood him/herself beyond any doubt as Roman, their language and literature was Roman (i.e. Greek), their cultural and religious centre was also beyond doubt New Rome, namely Constantinople”. This preponderant view on Byzantine society as a multi-ethnic society in which Roman self-identification was, nevertheless, predominant, raises some questions. First of all, did the average Byzantine who identified himself as Roman and correspondingly understood his political, religious and “educational” culture as undeniably Roman also apply to the average member of all aforementioned ethno-cultural collectivities, at least some of which (e.g. Slavs) were further subdivided internally in sub-ethnies? About the Slavs as a non-monolithic group, see ( F. Curta, Still waiting for the Barbarians? The making of the Slavs in ‘Dark Age’ Greece, in idem (ed.), Neglected Barbarians. Turnhout , 415-416). Or did it primarily refer to a Greekspeaking population in the territorial core that was almost continuously until 1204 under the Roman imperial rule of Constantinople?
Anthony Kaldellis opened this discussion a few years ago in his monograph “Hellenism in Byzantium”. There he argued for the transformation of the socalled Byzantine Empire into a Nation-State up from the seventh century onwards, in which the Roman political culture had assimilated the masses and abrogated ethno-cultural diversity within the state-frame to create a Roman nation (Kaldellis, Hellenism, 42-119). From a theoretical perspective, the argument about the abrogation of ethnic diversity through the gradual configuration of Roman nation-ness falls under the concept of the state-framed nation or Staatsnation (Meinecke’s Staatsnation, see R. Brubaker, Ethnicity without groups), since it points to the Roman imperial state and its political culture as the main factors that configured mass Roman nationhood (Kaldellis, Hellenism).
From a sociological point of view, the role of social stratification in the construction of collective identity in a pre-modern imperial order cannot be simply ignored. As it has been stressed, the political system of territorial empire was founded on the configuration of an empire-wide extended Roman ruling class that incorporated local élites in the conquered provinces (See M. Mann, The sources of social power, I: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. ). This class was able to develop a common identity due to vested economic and political interests in the Roman imperial system as well as to high level of literacy that made access to a quasi-uniform education based on a shared language possible (predominately Latin for the West and Greek for the East).Instead, the largest part of the common people in the provinces, in particular the illiterate masses of the countryside. Only around 20% of the empire’s population (of an around 60 million total) is estimated to have resided in urban centers (Hopkins, The political economy of the Roman empire). Within this socio-economic framework, widespread economic or political/ideological interaction on a supra-local level among provincial peasantry masses was practically impossible.
Multi-Ethnic Empire vs. Nation State
The fall of the western parts of the Roman Empire to the Germanic peoples in the fifth century set in motion certain political, social and cultural developments. These refer to the continuance of Roman imperial structures in the East, the gradual linguistic Hellenization of the imperial administration, and the apparently increased cultural homogeneity. The latter refers to the conclusion of the process of Christianization in the sixth century as well as to the survival of only one lingua franca (Greek) within the contracted Eastern Empire after the seventh century. These developments seem to represent a better starting point for the formation of a state-framed national identity, or alternatively of a (Graiko‐)Roman ethnic identity among a core population (Koder, Ethnogenese), within the post-seventh century Eastern Roman imperial order. In this regard, one needs to scrutinize the premise that Constantinople’s realm after the seventh century represented a Nation-State rather than the domain of an imperial city-state, and that the political ideology of Roman ecumenism played no significant role in the Eastern Roman vision of community (Kaldellis, Hellenism; 100-111).
The period of radical contraction of the empire’s borders from the late sixth to the early eighth century was followed by a period between roughly the mideighth to the early eleventh century, during which the imperial power incrementally expanded its territories and almost doubled the number of its subjects (W. Treadgold, A history of the Byzantine state and society; A concise history of Byzantium; J. F. Haldon, The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine history). Large parts of the Greek peninsula that had been occupied by Slavic tribes since the late sixth century came slowly under imperial authority after the mid-eighth century. This re-assertion of territorial rule meant the integration of a new subject population that built a distinct ethno-cultural category within the Eastern Roman order (F. Curta, The Edinburgh history of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050 The early middle ages). During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the borders of empire were rearranged through the occupation of parts of Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and the annexation of parts of Armenia and Iberia in the East (C. Holmes, Basil II and the governance of empire) as well as through the subjugation of the Bulgar Kingdom and the extension of imperial authority over the Slavic political entities in the northern Balkan Peninsula (P. Stephenson, Byzantium’s Balkan frontier. A political study of the Northern Balkans).
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