War and peace and war, p.10
War and Peace and War, page 10
Apart from the name, the Romans and the nation that we now call the Byzantines had almost nothing in common. They spoke different languages (Latin versus Greek), practiced different religions (paganism versus Christianity), and their core territories were in different parts of Europe. They also had a different political organization—the Byzantines were ruled by an avtokrator who, at least in theory, had a total power over all matters of life and death, whereas the Romans were a republican people. (Even during the imperial period, the legal fiction was that the emperor was only a princeps—“the first among the senatorial class.”) The substance of power might not have changed a lot, but its external trappings and the ideological basis did. Princeps was legitimized via election by the senate, whereas the avtokrator’s legitimacy stemmed from the divine mandate. The Byzantines and the Romans even dressed differently—by A.D. 500, the Roman toga was replaced in the Empire with oriental-style long brocaded coats.
The collective psyche of the two nations also could not be more different. The Romans were a worldly and eminently practical people, whereas the Byzantine culture had very strong otherworldly and deeply mystical elements. Indeed, during the fifth and sixth centuries, the whole Mediterranean world was transformed from the naturalism and rationalism of the ancient Hellenistic civilization to the transcendentalism and mysticism of medieval Christianity. Were a medieval Byzantine and the Roman of classical antiquity to be brought together by a time machine, their meeting would be one of mutual incomprehension, akin to the encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth. In short, it seems incontrovertible that the Byzantines were an entirely new people, and therefore their empire was a new thing, not a lingering splinter of the Roman Empire. How did the Byzantine nation arise, then?
The birth of a nation—ethnogenesis—is not an instantaneous event, but a process that usually takes many centuries. For the Byzantines, the beginning of the process can be traced to the first century, when the swath of northern Balkans south of the Lower Danube (Roman provinces of Illyria/Dalmatia, Moesia, and Thracia—roughly modern Serbia, Bulgaria, and European Turkey) became part of the Roman frontier. Just as the pressure by the Romans molded the nations north of the frontier, the pressure from the “barbarians” molded the frontier society on the “civilization” side. We can measure this social evolution with a variety of metrics, but perhaps the most striking one follows the geographic origin of recruits for the Roman legions. In the first century A.D., Italy contributed roughly 10 times as many troops as came from the Lower Danube provinces. By the third century, the situation had completely reversed—there were 10 times as many recruits coming from the Balkans as from Italy. While Italians lost taste for the army service, the hardy Danubian frontiersmen took up the slack. In fact, as the historian Ramsay MacMullen wrote in Corruption and Decline of Rome, the longer a population enjoyed security, the less likely its youth would be enrolled in the legions. Other frontier areas—the Upper Danube, the Rhineland, northern Africa, and Syria—also heavily contributed troops, while Italy and such nonfrontier provinces as Spain contributed fewer and fewer. The inevitable end result of this process was the leakage of power from the center toward the peripheries.
During the third century, the Roman Empire went through a catastrophic phase of political decentralization, marked by decades-long civil war between various aristocratic factions, popular uprisings, devastating epidemics, and barbarian invasions. Earlier in this chapter, I described how the Germanic invaders were able to break through the Rhine frontier and pillage the Gaul and even penetrate as far south as Spain. In the East during the 250s, 260s, and 270s, the Goths crossed the Danube and pillaged Moesia and Thrace (including the area of the future capital of the Byzantine empire). They then took to boats, broke through the Bosporus and Dardanelles into the Aegean Sea, and pillaged the shores of Greece and Asia Minor.
With the collapse of the authority in the center, the frontier provinces were left to pick up the pieces and look toward their own defense. To legitimize their power, army commanders had their troops declare them as emperors. The process of social dissolution reached the peak during the reign of the emperor Gallienus (253-268), “the age of Thirty Tyrants.” We know of at least 18 of these usurpers; history did not preserve the names of the other 12. Most of the pretenders were killed soon after assuming power, often by their own troops. The longest lasting were usually those whose base was in the frontier provinces, partly as a result of the location of legions, but, more importantly, because the population inhabiting frontier areas had higher group solidarity than the central areas. For example, in 260, Gallienus controlled only the middle third of the empire (see Map 3). The western third was controlled by the Gallic Empire of Postumus, with the capital in Trier on the Rhine. The eastern third was part of the Palmyrene Empire of Odenathus, and after his death, Queen Zenobia. This was also an incipient frontier state, because Palmyra was a trading city on the frontier with Parthia/Persia.
Gallienus was a representative of the Italian senatorial class, and by all accounts not a bad emperor. By the third century, however, the Italians had become a weak reed upon which to build a power base. In 268, a cabal of his own officers, all originating from the Danubian frontier provinces, assassinated Gallienus and produced a string of capable emperors (the so-called “Illyrian soldier-emperors”) from their ranks who were gradually able to bring order to the empire. The best known of them is the emperor Diocletian, who was born in 245 to a poor peasant family in Dalmatia, served on the Danubian frontier, and rose through the ranks to high military command. In 284, Diocletian was proclaimed by the legions as emperor. During the next 10 years, he and his generals defeated all other pretenders and reunified the Roman Empire. However, when Diocletian retired in 305, the empire was again thrown into civil war, and the task of putting it together, yet again, was left to Diocletian’s successor, Constantine the Great.
Constantine was born in Naissus (modern Nish in Serbia) in 285, a son of Helena, an innkeeper’s daughter, and Constantius Chlorus (“the pale”). His father, like Diocletian, was born in a poor Danubian family, served in the army, became a trusted associate of Diocletian and then was named “Augustus” (one of two co-rulers of the empire) upon the abdication of Diocletian in 305 until his own death in 306. Thus, Constantine the Great was a second-generation Illyrian emperor-soldier. Apart from reunifying the empire, Constantine left two lasting accomplishments that shaped the course of Byzantine history: He adopted Christianity as the state religion and built Constantinople, the Byzantine capital.
Map 3 Roman Empire divided: A.D. 260
The importance of Christianity in Byzantine history cannot be overstressed. It permeated the whole society, philosophy, and art. Most importantly, it provided the glue that kept together the heterogeneous ethnic elements of which the Byzantine state was initially composed: Latin-speaking inhabitants of the Balkan and North African provinces; Greek-speaking inhabitants of Greece, Anatolia, and all the large cities of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, such as Alexandria and Antioch; and Coptic and Aramaic speakers of Egypt and the Levant.
The founding of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 324 was a stroke of genius, and played not the least role in the subsequent survival and flowering of the Byzantine Empire. The geographic location on the Straits of Bosporus, where the Black Sea flows into the Sea of Marmara and then through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean, made Constantinople a crossroads of North-South and East-West traffic, and ensured that it would be an important trading center for centuries to come. It also allowed the Byzantines to conduct military campaigns both in Europe and in Asia. At the same time, it was relatively easy to make Constantinople virtually impregnable. It was situated on a promontory protected by the sea from two sides and by strong land fortifications on the third side. So long as the Byzantines controlled the seas, Constantinople could not be starved by a siege. Even more important, however, was the move of the capital from central Italy, which was dominated by selfish and fractious Roman nobility, who by the fourth century had lost all ability for cooperative action. Establishment of the capital in Thracia on the Danubian frontier moved the empire’s center of power close to the areas where it recruited its military strength.
The key factor in understanding the Mediterranean world in the fourth through sixth centuries is the “imperiopathosis” of the Roman nation, and its displacement by a new and yet incompletely formed imperial nation, gradually crystallizing along the Lower Danube frontier. This period is a sort of transitional phase between Rome, which really fell in the third century, and Byzantium, which fully formed only after the shock of the Arabic conquests. Like most transitional phases, this was a period of much instability. First, the incipient Byzantine nation was still in the process of formation. Second, similar processes to those operating along the Danube frontier were affecting other frontier areas, most notably northern Gaul and Syria. Any empire that has more than one imperial nation is unstable, because each power group is unwilling to submit to the others, and if it has the necessary degree of internal cohesion it will have the means to resist. As a result, late antiquity was a period of endemic civil war, in which rival centers of power contended for the command of the empire. Third, new imperial nations arose outside the Roman frontiers—the Franks, Goths, and others. Now that internal divisions weakened the empire, these new aggressive nations looked to expand at its expense.
The fragile equilibrium established by Constantine was upset when the Visigoths wiped out the emperor Valens and his army at the battle of Adrianople (A.D. 378). This catastrophe set in motion a chain of events that resulted in the failure of frontier defenses in Europe and the inundation of the western empire by the barbarian hordes. In 476, when the last Roman emperor in the West was deposed, the only area in the western empire remaining in Roman hands was northern Gaul under the Roman patrician Syagrius. If left alone, perhaps the kingdom of Syagrius would have eventually grown into a Gallic empire, just like the Lower Danubian frontier was transformed into the Byzantine Empire, but the new Germanic nations proved to be too strong for it. In 486, Clovis defeated Syagrius and incorporated his fledgling kingdom into the Frankish Empire. The ultimate fate of the Romance-speaking inhabitants of northern Gaul was to be ethnically fused with the Germanic-speaking Frankish colonists and to give birth to the kingdom of France five centuries later (as discussed in Chapter 7).
The eastern empire, on the other hand, was able to withstand the barbarian pressure, although its emperors for a while fell under the sway of barbarian strongmen. Nevertheless, under the emperors Justin (518-527) and especially his son Justinian (527-565), the Byzantine Empire reconquered the majority of the western Mediterranean lands: North Africa, southern Iberia, and Italy. At the same time, Justinian was able to hold his own against the Sassanian Persia, which was trying to expand west at the expense of the Byzantines. Despite these impressive feats, religious controversy was one structural problem that plagued the late Roman Empire and eventually played the key role in its loss of African and Middle Eastern possessions.
The religious controversies centered on the two natures of Christ. The Nestorians argued that Christ had two separate natures, one human and one divine, in the same person, but not commingled. Monophysites, by contrast, claimed that Christ’s two natures were fully combined into one. Finally, the Chalcedonians maintained a middle-of-the road position that Christ was completely human and completely divine, one and the same Christ having two natures without confusion or change, division, or separation. This probably sounds like complete gibberish to many readers, and it does to me. It is hard to believe that anyone other than a handful of theologians steeped in their arcane lore could make any sense of this distinction. How could a soldier, a peasant, or a boot maker get passionate about this question? Yet, when in 457 a pro-Chalcedonian bishop was imposed on Monophysite Alexandria, the Alexandrians rioted, lynched him, and installed a Monophysite in his place.
One way to make sense of this is to remember that religion often provides a symbolic marker that is used by people to distinguish “us” from “them.” A modern example of such a usage is the war in Yugoslavia between the Orthodox Serbs, the Catholic Croats, and the Muslim Bosnians—ethnically closely related peoples who, in fact, speak essentially the same language (Serbo-Croatian), yet are willing to commit genocide against each other. In the Byzantine Empire, the Aramaic-speaking Syrians, for example, and the Greek-speaking Anatolians both professed the same religion. However, they must have felt that they were distinct peoples, and did not want to “belong together.” It is doubtful that a Syrian boot maker in Antioch understood the fine points of distinction between the Chalcedonian and Monophysite creeds, but he knew very well that the Greeks were “them,” not “us,” and he wanted to emphasize the difference. Monophysite Christianity provided a source of identity distinct from the dominant imperial one. The struggle over the nature of Christ was an external manifestation of deep centrifugal tendencies tearing apart the social fabric of the empire. The geographic distribution of the sects confirms this conclusion. Monophysite and Chalcedonian bishoprics were not intermixed—the Balkans, Greece, and Anatolia were solidly Chalcedonian; Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were Monophysite. The separate state of Sassanian Persia was the stronghold of Nestorianism.
In the second half of the sixth century, the Byzantine Empire went into a secular disintegrative phase. Internal civil war coupled with repeated invasions by Persians, who at one point conquered all of the Levant and Egypt, removed the last restraint on the centrifugal forces forcing Chalcedonian and Monophysite areas apart. Even though Byzantium was able to regain Egypt and the Levant from Persia in 630, these territories stayed within the empire less than a decade. In 636, the Arabs defeated the Byzantine army at the battle of Yarmuk, and Syria fell to the caliphate. The next year, Jerusalem surrendered, and between 640 and 642 the Arabs conquered Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of committed Christians (mainly of Chalcedonian persuasion) immigrated to Byzantium rather than submit to Islam. The majority of the Monophysite population did not have any particular loyalty to the Byzantine Empire and acquiesced to the Muslim rule. The Byzantine loss of Egypt and the Levant was to be permanent.
The Arab conquests reduced the Byzantine Empire to its core on the Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas (plus some territory in southern Italy), inhabited by Greek-speaking people following the Chalcedonian creed. The whole empire, or what was left of it, became a frontier zone (see Map 4). From the east, it was pressed by the Arabs, and from the west by the steppe nomads—Avars and Bulgars, as well as by the Slavs migrating from eastern Europe. The invading armies reached Constantinople on numerous occasions. For example, the Arabs besieged Constantinople by land and sea in 678 and again in 717. These repeated hammer strokes forged the Byzantine nation. When the pressure abated at the end of the eighth century, the Byzantines resumed their empire building. During the next three centuries, the Byzantine Empire doubled its territory. When the Carolingian Empire fragmented in the ninth century, Byzantium became Europe’s most powerful state. With half a million inhabitants, Constantinople was the largest city in Europe. The wealth of the Byzantine rulers was fabulous, and attracted mercenaries from as far away as Norway to serve in the elite Varangian Guard. By 1025, the Byzantine treasury had accumulated an enormous surplus of 14.4 million nomismata—which is more than 60 tons of gold, a cool $1 billion at today’s prices! The cultural brilliance of the Byzantines rivaled that of the contemporary Islamic and Chinese civilizations, and dazzled the Westerners who saw it. In Chronicle of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres wrote, “Oh, what an excellent and beautiful city! How many monasteries, and how many places there are in it, of wonderful work skillfully fashioned! How many marvelous works are to be seen in the streets and districts of the town! It’s a great nuisance to recite what an opulence of all kinds of goods are found there; of gold, of silver ... and of holy relics.”
Map 4 Byzantium encircled: A.D. 559-718.
OUR TEST OF THE EFFECT OF the Roman frontier on the political development in post-Roman Europe yields a resounding confirmation of the hypothesis advanced in Chapter 2. All new states of the second half of the first millennium arose in the Roman frontier zone. Consider that observation in quantitative terms. The total area of Europe is 3.8 million square miles. The length of the Roman frontier, from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube, is a bit longer than 1,200 miles. Assuming that the frontier influence extended 100 miles to each side, the total area of the frontier zone is 240,000 square miles, or less than 7 percent of the total area of Europe. All of the seven large European states of the post-Roman period (and the three smaller-sized or shorter in duration) arose within this narrow band of territory.
None of the nonfrontier regions of the Roman Empire—Italy, Greece, Spain, and southern Gaul—showed any signs of incipient empire formation. This is contrasted with the frontier areas. In northern Gaul south of the Rhine, there were two attempts at empire building, the Gallic Empire of Postumus in the third century, and the kingdom of Syagrius in the fifth, both of which, however, proved to be abortive (destroyed by stronger rivals). In the Balkan area south of the Danube, the empire-building effort was successful and produced the magnificent and long-lived Byzantine Empire.
Similarly, the only non-Roman territories that generated empires were those within the frontier zone. Rhineland was where the Frankish empire was born, profoundly affecting the whole subsequent course of European history. The people of other less-successful German states, such as the Alamanni and the Burgundians, were absorbed by the Franks. The Danube frontier produced an even greater number of empires. The Hungarian plain north and east of the Middle Danube generated a succession of states: Dacia, the short-lived Hunnish empire; the mighty Avar khanate; and, finally, the kingdom of Hungary. To the east, along the Lower Danube and in the Black Sea steppes was where the Goths coalesced as a nation, before splitting into Visigoths and Ostrogoths. Ostrogoths established a short-lived empire with the center in Italy, but succumbed to the Byzantines. Visigoths traveled farther, crossing the whole Roman Empire to establish a kingdom in southern Gaul and Spain, which they held for more than two centuries before falling to the invading Muslim hordes of Arabs and Berbers.
