Article

Introduction: Identity and Byzantine Historiography

Byzantine conceptions of the Seljuk Turks’ and Turkish nomads’ communities in Asia Minor from the 11th to the mid-13th century. By developing a vocabulary with which to address the Seljuk and other Turks, Byzantine historiographers left us with telling traces of how they perceived belonging to a social and political community in the world around them. Such information, I suggest, broadens our understanding of the Roman imagined community in light of Byzantine authors’ understandable lack of theoretical engagement with romanitas. Byzantine authors did not after all dwell on their own nationhood since this matter was more or less clear to members of the Roman polity. Historiographers, however, did explain who these foreigners were and how they encountered the Roman nation. Thus, while the Seljuk Turks were not overly preoccupied with their Persian-/Turkish-ness, putting instead “the emphasis on the dynasty, rather than the land” (D. Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century, Oxford 2014, 109), Byzantine historians developed a strict system of naming the Seljuk and other Turkish societies according to their own understanding of identity and belonging

For the Seljukid dynastic titular and identity constructs see:

Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 96–110 and D. Korobeinikov, ‘The King of the East and the West’: the Seljuk Dynastic Concept and Titles in the Muslim and Christian Sources, in: The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and S. N. Yildiz, London-New York 2013, 68-90. For the Seljuk Turks’ self-perception and naming practices as well as that of other Muslims see: A. Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim-Turkish Anatolia ca. 1040–1130, London–New York 2017, 33-36.
**By comprehending Byzantine naming patterns of the Seljuk Turks, we learn two important things about the medieval Romans. First, Byzantine historiographers employed specific names for their neighbours, whom they would always address by their national names, and not by the names of rulers and dynasties. This very fact is telling about the Byzantines’ conception of nationhood: nations are built around people and not individual sovereigns **(C. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London 2000, 44-46).

1. By comprehending Byzantine naming patterns of the Seljuk Turks, we learn two important things about the medieval Romans. First, Byzantine historiographers employed specific names for their neighbours, whom they would always address by their national names, and not by the names of rulers and dynasties. This very fact is telling about the Byzantines’ conception of nationhood: nations are built around people and not individual sovereigns (C. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London 2000, 44-46).
2. Second, Byzantine historians conceptualized shifts in identities. As we will see, they were able to argue that one becomes or stays Roman, Persian, or Turkish. The very possibility, however rare, of naturalization and integration into a different national group allows us to make more sense of Byzantine romanitas. For let us not forget, Roman identity, since the early days of the Republic, stemmed from Roman citizenship more than one’s location of birth. Oftentimes we have seen people born in the city of Rome itself, who were not citizens at all, while people in Roman colonies were born Romans (C. Ando, Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, Philadelphia 2011, 1-18). As Anthony Kaldellis puts it, “a number of primary sources do suggest that the Romans of Byzantium [same as those before the 4th century CE] viewed themselves as an ethnic or national community defined on the one hand by cultural traits such as language, religion, customs, food, and dress, and on the other by belonging to a specific named polity (the πολιτεία of the Romans) in which they were shareholders” (Kaldellis, The Social Scope [as in n. 5], 200). It was these cultural traits and a willing allegiance to the polity of the Romans that made one Roman rather than an exclusive sanguine connection to the earlier inhabitants of Rome.

Naming the Seljuk and Other Turks in Byzantine Historiography

Byzantine historiography, following the models of the Classical Greek and Roman historiographic tradition, took pride in promoting the concept of truth-telling. In this way, Byzantine historiography was different from rhetoric which was used to subjectively praise or blame somebody (S. Papaioannou, The Aesthetics of Historiography: Theophanes to Eusthatios, in: History as Literature in Byzantium: Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. R. Macrides, University of Birmingham, April 2007, Surrey, England, 2010, 3-24; also, on rhetorical practices including the truth in historiography: A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, Portland 1988; M. J. Wheeldon, ‘True Stories’: The Reception of Historiography in Antiquity, in History as Text: the Writing of Ancient History, ed. A. Cameron, Chapel Hill 1989, 33-63; M. Mullett, Novelisation in Byzantium: Narrative after the Revival of Fiction, in: Byzantine Narrative: Papers in Honour of Roger Scott, ed. J. Burke et al., Melbourne 2006, 1-28. On different techniques used by historians vis-à-vis rhetoricians to depict emperors in Byzantium see: A. Angelov, In Search of God’s Only Emperor: Basileus in Byzantine and Modern Historiography, Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 123-141). This is not to say, of course, that the Byzantine ‘engaged’ historiography had no agenda and was in no way distorting, omitting facts that did not correspond with the image of the period an author wished to forge for posterity (D. Krallis, Historiography as Political Debate, in: The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. A. Kaldellis and N. Siniossoglou, Cambridge 2017, 599-614).

1. It does tell us, however, that this “truth,” as Neville argues, “was displayed through composition of persuasive rhetoric. Good historical narrative needed to be persuasive, meaning that the audience had to be convinced through force of presentation that the author’s claims were true” (Neville, Heroes and Romans [as in n. 18], 33). Moreover, while the language was often archaizing and the guidelines of rhetoric were followed by historiographers much as they were by court encomiasts, the content was rooted in present realities of the Roman Empire. In forging the image of truthfulness, historians had to come up with their own ways of presenting real life opponents and allies of the Roman Empire that would avoid direct essentialization of a foreign political entity.
2. Encountering the Seljuk Turks in the first decades of the 11th century, Byzantine authors had to come up with appropriate names for these newcomers and develop a stable set of ethnonyms in doing so. Following the battle of Manzikert in 1071, after these newcomers started conquering and settling traditional Byzantine lands in Asia Minor, the Seljuk Turks and other Turkish nomads became a political reality in the life of the empire (Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence [as in n. 8], 169-386). From then on, many authors writing in the late 11th and first decades of the 12th century offer us short accounts of the Seljuk Turks’ history and background. These authors reused existing, and introduced new, ethnonyms in labelling different groups of Turks. To differentiate between specific groups and polities of the Turks, Byzantine historiographers adopted both already existing vernacular and classicizing ethnonyms, such as Turk and Persian, as well as borrowed terms for other languages, such as Turkoman (Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks [as in n. 21], 401). By making recourse to a rich palette of ethnonyms, these writers sought to accurately mark the new socio-political communities with which they came into contact. Taking a closer look at the labeling of Turkish communities by authors from Michael Attaleiates in the later 11th century to George Akropolites in the second half of the 13th, we can more clearly comprehend the ways in which Byzantine historiographers conceptualized Turkish ethnicity in the years preceding the emergence of the Ottomans.

Ethnonyms in Roman historiography from the 11th to the 13th centuries had a social life of their own. By looking at the ethnonyms’ socio-political traits, I suggest that the term Persian was employed only in cases when it referred to a persianized polity –the Great Seljuks and subsequently the Seljuks of Rum– that is, those polities that the Byzantines perceived as Persianite. The Byzantines perceived societies and polities as Persian based on these states’ Persian practices. For example, in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum histories, as well as official documents, were written in Persian (Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks [as in n. 7], 22-35) and Persian polities have retained Persian governing practices in conjunction with the broader Islamic governing traditions introduced by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates in Persia (Korobeinkov, Byzantium and the Turks, 84-90; Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence [as in n. 8], 70-74). For Seljukid naming patterns based on Persian and Islamic traditions see: R. Shukurov, AIMA: The Blood of the Grand Komnenoi, BGMS 19 (1995), 176-78.

On the other hand, the term Turk was used to express the ethnic, or crudely put, ‘racial’, origins of any Turkish entity regardless of its socio-cultural or political affiliations and allegiances, ergo, regardless of a person’s nationality. The name Turk could therefore refer to the predecessors of the Seljuks, Turkish emirates and beyliks in Asia Minor, as well as some Roman citizens of the Byzantine Empire. Standing in sharp contrast to the deployment of Persian to mark the Turks who adopted Persian civilizational values and served one of the Turkish Persianite dynastic states, the vernacular ethnonym Turkoman was employed exclusively to denote nomadic Turkish communities that inhabited the border regions of the Sultanate of Rum, and with whom the Byzantines were in direct contact, especially from the reign of Alexios I Komnenos. On the Turkomans and their habitats in the border zone of the Seljuk state see: D. Korobeinikov, How ‘Byzantine’ were the Early Ottomans? Bithynia in ca. 1290-1450, in: Osmanskij mir i osmanistika: sbornik statej k 100-letig so dnja rozhdenija A. S. Tveritinovoj (1910-1973), Moskva 2010, 224-230.

Conclusion

The deployment of ethnonyms associated with specific socio-political traits, was a peculiar characteristic of Byzantine historiography. The use of classical ethnonyms to denote contemporaneous peoples based on coincidental geographical habitats, on the other hand, was a trait of encomiastic literature, as seen in the numerous works of the Komnenian court rhetoric. Other than being one of historiography’s distinct markers, the socio-political valence of ethnonyms, allows us to gain a better perspective of how the Romans conceptualized identity. Byzantine writers of history used the ethnonyms Persian and Turkoman to refer to different societies that we, from today’s perspective, would simply label as Turkish or Turkic. Furthermore, the unique deployment of the ethnonym Turk shows us how historians understood the distinction between ‘blood’ and ‘race’ on the one hand and political or cultural allegiance on the other. Thus, a Turk (that is, somebody of Turkish ‘race’), could be Persian (Great Seljuk or a Seljuk of Rum), Turkoman, or even Roman (Nikephoros Rimpsas). This peculiarity in the system of naming the Turks helps us understand the Byzantines’ notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. For the Byzantines, the traits that determined which nation one belonged to were based on a set of sociocultural and political characteristics. The precise use of ethnonyms in Byzantine historiography suggests that authors went far beyond the simple use of classicizing language in their descriptions of foreign peoples. Byzantine historians were, I suggest, keenly aware of both the socio-cultural and political qualities in one’s identity.
This approach to naming foreign peoples according to their political affiliations, as well as socio-cultural characteristics, in turn, sheds light on Byzantine authors’ keen interest in depicting the ‘other’ in a more nuanced and specific manner, outside the “distorting mirror” of pre-established classical models.84 The detailed information and explanations Byzantine historians provide for the communities of others thus serve as a mirror reflecting the Romans’ own ideas of what it takes to be a member of their own community. The qualities Byzantine authors ascribed to romanitas become clearer when set against an array of socio-political and cultural traits that corresponded to specific ethnonyms employed to describe the Turks. Romanitas was a term that signified one’s ‘race’ (just as ethnonym Turks does) and as well as nation (same as the name Persian) –thus, it was loaded with socio-cultural and political qualities. One could retain the race but lose their political Romanness, as we have seen on the example of the Romans around lake Pousgouse, who remained Romans by race but lost their political Romanitas once they joined the Seljuk Turks and started appropriating different aspects of Persian culture. These lapsed Romans were going through the similar process, albeit as a collective, much as Nikephoros Rimpsas became Roman, in spite of being of Turkish race. Thus, according to Byzantine historians, individuals and groups would still retain the ‘racial’ features obtained at birth even as they changed their socio-cultural and political identities. By examining Byzantine writers’ conceptualization of communities of the ‘other’ in closer detail, we release the Byzantines from the shackles of a sterile and supposedly mindlessly reproduced classical antiquity that we have ourselves imposed on them and gain a clearer comprehension and better appreciation for the layered construction of their own political and social romanitas.