A frontier comparison no-one’s made

In the aftermath of the workshop on frontiers recently described, I seem for a while to have flung myself back into relevant reading on the field. Now, if you work on the Christian-Muslim frontier in the Iberian Peninsula – which I do – then sooner or later you will run up against someone writing about the quintessential and indeed semi-legendary Iberian frontiersman, Rodrigo Díaz or el Cid, usually as epitomising the way in which that frontier worked.¹ Likewise, if you work on the Christian-Muslim frontier in Byzantine Anatolia – onto which subject I have been known to venture – you will sooner or later run across someone writing about the quintessential but actually legendary folk hero Digenes Akritas as if he also somehow typified that border zone.² And once you’re watching either field, every few years or so you’ll see someone trying to compare the two.³ I have developed quite strong views by now about why that is a waste of effort, and I will write about them here before long, but this is not that day. Instead, this post was prompted by my reading about something that looked like a much better point of comparison, but about which no-one seems to know (except, obviously, the person from whose work I got it, Sara Nur Yıldız).

Political map of Anatolia  1300 CE, by Gabagool – own work, licensed under CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

The text in question is known as the History of the Karamanids, by someone we only know by a pen-name, Şikari.⁴ The Karamanids ruled the southern part of Cilicia when they ruled, and at the height of their power, which came very close to their end, their control stretched over a considerable area. The map above shows them under pressure from the Mongols in a world where lots of polities were their size; the one below gives the full extent, a full extent that would soon be abrogated by a somewhat shortsighted attempt to bounce the now-substantial power of the Ottomans out of the crucial city of Konya. Nonetheless, for a while they were major players.

Political map of the Eastern Mediterranean around 1450 CE, by MapMaster – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5, Wikimedia Commons

But the world picture that Dr Yıldız draws from the History comes more from the earlier patch, which she describes as follows:

“We are confronted with a frontier devoid of central control, a no-man’s land dominated by fortresses and those who held them, petty warlords operating in a world of fleeting political and military loyalties and fluid, often unstable, vassalage relations. Power is played out between fortress lords of various ethnic backgrounds, whose loyalty is demanded and bought by those ruling from the faraway centres. Although fortress lords in the frontier region theoretically ruled in the name of a greater sovereign, whether it be the Seljuk sultan or the Armenian king, in practice they operated independently. The sultan, in Şikari’s account, although the power at the centre with large forces at his disposal, is a less than powerful ruler on the frontier. At most, he can only hope to coerce the various fortress holders along the periphery into nominal loyalty. The sultan, at the same time, is obliged to keep the various local rulers from attacking one another, primarily in order to avoid the difficult situation of having to choose between defending one vassal over another….⁵

And this sounds awfully familiar. This is not the land or politics of el Cid, of course, where big armies led by kings or people of that weight are a regular feature and the hero’s achievement is to become one of them. This is instead the land of Digenes, where there is an emperor and there is a sultan and you might meet them but you never aim to equal them, you just want your little patch of border where no-one else dares to challenge you.⁶ In the tenth century, as we saw long ago, when the Byzantine emperor was back in the ascendant, you might have to deal with him in order to secure that relative autonomy against your fellows.⁷ But by the time of which Dr Yıldız is writing, that kind of power had receded. It would return with the rise of the Ottomans, of course, and that would end that, but still, this is the kind of source material with which I underpin my James-Scott-like sense that a lot of political communities would rather aim for autonomy than connectivity.⁸ The area is good turf with which to do that, and Nik Matheou, among others, has done so.⁹ (I mention Nik not least because he is the person I’ve seen actually applying Scott to this area and period, but Dr Yıldız also gives a good account of the vexed historiography of Armenian autonomy in this area.¹⁰) So, why is there so much ink used on comparing Digenes Akritas, which is actually set in Anatolia in a period not too far from this text, to the foreign and rather different Poema del Mio Cid when there’s this much better comparator so close by?

The first page of the manuscript does admittedly make the prospect of working with it a little offputting… Image from “Karamanname of Şikari /History of the Karamanids (Mid-16th century)” in Janissary Archives for 15th October 2015, linked through

Well, there are lots of good reasons this text is not more widely used. The primary one of these is that it’s in Seljuk Turkish and is preserved only in one mid-16th-century manuscript, in Konya (ironically), which was only edited in 2004.¹¹ As a result, I myself obviously know nothing that’s in it except through Dr Yıldız’s report. Secondly, it’s a history of a single Turkmen dynasty who were removed from power by the time of the manuscript; so even its original readership was probably pretty small, wherefore, I suspect, only the single copy surviving. Thirdly, as Dr Yıldız puts it in a footnote:¹²

“Şikari’s History of the Karamanids, significant for being the only internal work dealing with Karamanid history, has been dismissed as unreliable by historians of Anatolian Turkish and Ottoman history. The work is characterized by an idiosyncratic mix of history and legend, and contains much tendentious, chronologically absurd, and anachronistic material. The circumstances as well as the date of this work’s composition remain unknown, although internal textual evidence suggests that it was produced some time in the mid-sixteenth century, with much of its contents possibly based upon an earlier source dating from the late fourteenth century.”

This is, of course, the luxury of having other sources; if this were all that survived from the zone and area I expect more would have been made of it, as witness Digenes Akritas. Still, you can see why people haven’t prioritised getting it into the discourse. Even Dr Yıldız only adds it as a kind of epilogue to a chapter which is mainly about Armenian Cilicia. I can also see why, given the opposed historiographies and nationalisms, it might still be a while before we get scholars of Greek literature reaching for Turkish pseudo-history as comparative material or scholars of Turkish political history looking to Greek literature either. Still, I very much wish there were an English version of this text, as I personally would go a-plundering in it…

Since I can’t, however, all I can do from here is speculate and wonder. In particular, I wonder what political control actually was in such an area. Did the Karamanid lords take tax? They presumably didn’t farm or raise livestock themselves, so they must have had some means of appropriating surplus, and they raised armies, but did they raise them through obligations laid upon their population or by paying the troops from tax? Did they hold courts of justice? Did people bring quarrels to them? Outside their towns, did anyone know who they were? Or were they actually surviving on the kind of local solidarity that means that everyone knew who they were locally even if the Sultan or King of the Armenians might struggle to pick them out from their fellows? What kind of power did those greater lords have here? Was it only as much as they could persuade the Karamanids to wield for them or were they alternative power sources that the wily subjects could use to limit the Karamanid grasp in the way that the lords of Taron had used the Byzantine emperor against their family rivals? Were the Karamanids’ towns centres and the countryside periphery, or were they nomad lords of whom the towns were somewhat terrified? Why did they want Konya, for state-building or simply because it was a source of tolls and jurisdictional revenue? Were they aiming to place themselves as indispensable local partners for the bigger players here or did they aim to push themselves up to the point where the bigger players couldn’t displace them? (Are those questions even different?) There is a lot I could do here even with a “semi-historical Turkish work”, “ultimately based on oral traditions.”¹³ Short of acquiring a suitably-interested Turkish-reading Ph. D. student, I can’t see how I do in fact do it… But the world’s full of interesting things all the same, isn’t it?

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1. For the basic story of el Cid, see even now Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (London 1990); for a recent and useful treatment of him as frontiersman see Pascal Buresi, “Frontière politique et appartenance religieuse dans la Péninsule Ibérique : les communes frontalières et le phénomène des « Cid » (XI^e-XII^e siècles)” in Henri Bresc, Georges Dagher and Christine Veauvy (edd.), Politique et religion en Méditerranée : Moyen Âge et époque contemporaine (Paris 2008), pp. 137–163.

2. For the actual text, see best John Mavrogordato (ed.), Digenes Akrites, edited, with an introduction, translation and commentary (Oxford 1956), though there are other translations (and even a graphic novel). For a reasonable example of someone using him as an archetype, see Ralph-Johannes Lilie, “The Byzantine-Arab Borderland from the Seventh to the Ninth Centuries” in Florin Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 12 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 13–22.

3. I’m sure I’ve seen it done more than this, but two cases that I have stored are Ioannis Kioridis, “The wife’s prayer for her husband in the Cantar de mio Cid and the Escorial version of Digenis Akritis” in Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 1 (Stockholm 2015), pp. 65–80, and Marina Díaz Bourgeal and Francisco López-Santos Kornberger, “El Cantar de Mio Cid y el Diyenís Akritas (manuscrito de El Escorial). Un estudio comparativo desde el legado clásico” in Estudios medievales hispánicos Vol. 5 (Madrid 2016), pp. 83–107.

4. Covered in Sara Nur Yıldız, “Reconceptualizing the Seljuk-Cilician Frontier: Armenians, Latins, and Turks in Conflict and Alliance during the Early Thirteenth Century” in Curta, Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis, pp. 91–120 at pp. 114-119, details on the text at p. 115 & n. 107.

5. Ibid., p. 117.

6. This is very much my own reading of the text; cf. Lilie, “Byzantine-Arab Borderland”, pp. 18-19.

7. Recounted in Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, ed. Gyula Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins, Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae 1, 2nd edn (Washington D.C. 1967), c. 43 (pp. 188-199).

8. Referring to James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven CT 2009), online here.

9. Admittedly Nik hasn’t actually published his work on the Armenian Zomia yet, but I think it will be in the volume of papers arising from the 50th Sping Symposium of Byzantine Studies on which I reported a while back.

10. Yıldız, “Reconceptualizing the Seljuk-Cilician Frontier”, pp. 93-113 with pp. 93-94 explicitly covering historiographical approaches.

11. Şikârî, Karamannâme: Zamanın kahramanı Karamanîler’in tarihi, ed. Metin Sôzen & Necdet Sakaoğlu (Istanbul: Karaman Belediyesi, 2005), online here.

12. Yıldız, “Reconceptualizing the Seljuk-Cilician Frontier”, p. 115 n. 107.

13. Ibid., p. 115.

Reporting on the International Medieval Congress of 2017

I’m sorry for another long absence. Teaching in the time of Covid is just doing me in, and largely for reasons of our beloved government. History at Leeds are currently teaching online, to which we switched at pretty much the last minute possible. Prior to that we had been getting ready for mixed face-to-face and online teaching, because the Office for Students had indicated that they might support fees refunds for students offered only online teaching. However, we obviously knew that we’d have some students who could not come in, because of being infected or shielding or whatever, and so there had to be online provision as well, which had to be as good as the face-to-face in some unmeasurable way that, if we didn’t manage it, could also result in fees refunds. So at least we had it ready, if some of us more than others, but in addition to this we simultaneously had new legislation that is nothing to do with the pandemic, about making digital resources maximally accessible to the disabled, according to the W3C’s rules; that’s now English law, and again if we don’t do it we can expect fines, at least in theory. What this all means in practical terms is that quite a lot of the last week has gone on correcting closed captions for my and other people’s pre-recorded or live-recorded lectures, and this has been a relatively good week, or I wouldn’t be writing at all; the last three were worse… So here we are.

So, for all those reasons I can’t do my normal scale of justice to a report of a conference from three years ago, even though it was a good and big one. Indeed, the idea of being among that many fellow academics with something worthwhile to say seems almost impossibly distant right now, and indeed my own involvement in it was unusually small, suggesting that I was short of time to organise something decent. I certainly can’t do my usual list of papers attended. But I will try and address the conference’s main theme a bit, because a number of people did make me think differently about it with their contributions; I will also light on four sessions in particular that I thought were notable for one reason or another; and I will give a few snippets of reflection on other single papers, and hopefully then there’ll be something interesting to read even if the whole conference can’t be here.

Otherness

The conference theme was Otherness. As usual, many papers continued as normal without paying much attention to that, but there were certainly plenty that did pay attention, some (as the academic media made abundantly clear for the next few days) with less care than others. A rapid trawl through my notes looking for the asterisks that mean something struck me at the time note a couple of things here, about how the category of Other is philosophically constructed and about how it is then put to social use. The idea that a community or interest group establishes its identity by means of identifying something that it is not and then defining against it is now a pretty established one in sociology and history has not been as slow as it often is to borrow this bit of theory, but as so often when you use theory to reflect on the past it bounces back looking different…

Two sharp points about this came out of two of the keynote lectures on the first day, for me, which is as it should be I suppose, but they were these. Firstly, Felicitas Schmieder, talking about “The Other Part of the World for Late Medieval Latin Christendom”, made the point that invocation of ‘the Other’ is inherently a binary system that can support only two categories: there’s Them, and there’s Us, and no room for anyone not to be either. Earlier in the day Nikolas Jaspert, talking about “The Mediterranean Other and the Other Mediterranean: perspectives of alterity in the Middle Ages”, had made a similar point, which I think is about scale (as so many things are); invoking competing mercantile élites as a case, he pointed out that, for example, the Venetians and Genoese might well have been each other’s ‘other’ at times but when a Muslim city (or indeed Constantinople) rose against Italian merchants, they were the same from the mob’s point of view and indeed right then probably each other’s; so both perspective and size of the lens matter a lot when we make these categorisations from where we now stand with respect to the medieval (or any) past. Much later in the conference, Rebecca Darley, in a response to a session about ‘Writing the Other in the Middle Ages, III: discovering new knowledge of the world‘, pointed out that for some medieval people everything was inside the group, her example being the unknown author of the Christian Topography, a sixth-century author determined to prove theologically that the Earth was flat in surface and constructed in the image of the Biblical Tabernacle, and who therefore has to encompass everyone on it as part of God’s scheme, even the Persians for whom he plainly had little but disdain. Detecting othering may sometimes therefore miss the point…

The world map from the Christian Topography of Cosmas. “WorldMapCosmasIndicopleustes” by Cosmas Indicopleustes, 6th century – “Les Sciences au Moyen-Age”, “Pour la Science”. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

There were also three sharply-pointed examples of othering being used as a political tactic; in fact, I’m sure there were more but these ones talked to me because of referencing contexts that I interest myself in. Firstly, in the second keynote of the conference, entitled “Drawing Boundaries: inclusion and exclusion in medieval islamic societies”, Eduardo Manzano Moreno posed that contentious document, the so-called Covenant of ‘Umar, as a marker of a change of direction within Islam, from a position that, like the Christian Topography‘s theology, could potentially include everyone in the world, to one which would actually prefer to slow assimilation to Islam, maintaining an Other so as to preserve the superior position of the in-group.¹ Subsequently, Nik Matheou, speaking about “Armenians in East Roman Cappadocia, c. 900–1071: settlement, the state apparatus, and the material reproduction of ethnicity”, invoked James Scott’s idea of the Zomia to classify rural populations in Armenia during a phase of Byzantine control as being subjected, by the laying out of an administrative structure but also by church-building, to an ‘Armenian’ identity they might well not have felt had anything to do with them, since it was largely being imported by a foreign power; in that respect at least this version of ‘Armenian’ identity was an Other constructed around these people.² I found the argument here possible but remembered the deliberate production of an Armenian identity in a foreign space less than a century later and wondered if, assuming those groups were in fact uncontrolled, the Byzantine construction of Armenian-ness was necessarily the first which had been imported there.

Obverse of a silver tram of King Levon I of Armenian Cilicia struck in 1198-1219, Leeds, Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, CC/TH/MED/AR/1, which you will notice if you look is lettered in Armenian and represents the king, somewhat Byzantine-like, but fundamentally on a throne made of lions, a bit of a unique iconographic departure…

Lastly, and furthest off my normal map, Reinier Langelaar, in a paper called “Tales of Foreign Descent in Tibetan Ruling House Genealogies”, made the point that in zones of particular cultural coherence—like medieval Tibet—a hint of difference might actually distinguish one usefully from ones’s competitors, which was, he thought, why so many would-be ruling families in the area attempted to claim some kind of outsider descent. Quite what the advantages of such distinction might be I needed more time to work out, but it was at least a positive spin on Otherness that some other papers were finding it harder to find.

Stand-Out Sessions

Not every session I might remark on here would stand out for good reasons, but quite a few did and it seems nicest to concentrate on those. Simplest to pick out was a round table on “An Other Middle Ages: What Can Europeanists Learn from Medieval Chinese History?” Naturally enough, this was essentially composed of some people who work on China who wanted the rest of us to realise that China is cool and useful to think with, and some people who thought that sounded great but had no idea how to start, especially if they don’t read Chinese as most scholars of the European Middle Ages don’t. (Wǒ huì shuō yīdiǎn, yīdiǎn zhōng wén… now, but I couldn’t then and I certainly can’t read it. Yet.) That was itself not too surprising – the language barriers exist and so does Otherness – but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a round table where so many people contributed, from all over the discipline, Sinologists, Byzantinists, late medieval Italianists, high medieval Germanists, high medieval Englishists (Anglologists?) and several more I couldn’t identify, all there because one way or another they did want to know more. I may later look back and see a sea change as having started here.

After that, and much much closer to my home interests, was a session entitled “10th-Century Uses of the Past, II“—I’d missed the first one—in which Simon Maclean, no less, managed persuasively to set the epic poem Waltharius into the context of the struggle between the last Carolingians and upcoming Ottonians in the middle tenth century, in which the dedicatee of the poem, Bishop Erchembold of Strasbourg was deeply involved; this did, as Simon said, explain why he might have laughed.³ Elina Screen then looked at the history of the monastery of Prüm, important to her as the burial place of her great subject, Emperor Lothar I (ruled 817-55, kind of) and best known to us through the Chronicle of one of its abbots, Regino (which indeed Simon has translated) and the monastery cartulary, the so-called Liber Aureus.⁴ Regino is famous for his gloomy opinion of the Carolingians, whose collapse of power he lived through, partly in exile; the Liber Aureus however makes a huge deal of them, and Elina suggested that a lot might be explained if we notice that Regino was apparently unable to extract any donations from the Carolingian kings and that his specific relationship with the royal family might have been one of the reasons his tenure as abbot didn’t work out, in which case we might want to be careful about generalising from him!

There were also two sessions on another bit of my tenth-century world, mainly Galicia, that overlapped a bit. The first, entitled “Ladies and Lords in 10th and 11th-Century Iberia: rivalries, factions, and networks“, featured Lucy K. Pick, in “The Queen, the Abbess, and the Saint’s Body: Faction and Network in 10th-Century Galicia”, recounting the use made by Queen Elvira of León of the body of Saint Pelagius, supposedly a boy martyr killed because he would not submit to the homosexual lusts of the future Caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III. Although there certainly were some Christians put to death for denouncing the Prophet in tenth-century al-Andalus, this story is probably not true (despite what Wikipedia currently says); but it was put to serious work positioning the queen and her husband King Ramiro I as heads of the resistance to Islam in a Leonese court world then quite divided by faction.⁵ I’ve always wondered why that cult became such a big deal, given its likely fictionality, and some kind of home context for it—Pelagius was claimed as a local boy from Galicia—would certainly help with that.

The questions in the other session, “Iberian Monasticism, II: Early Middle Ages“, involved quite a discussion about Galicia, indeed, which another of the papers in the first one, by Rob Portass, had also featured. In this one, Rob resisted the idea that Galicia was a frontier, wanting I guess to frame it as a centre of its own, and Jorge López Quiroga and Artemio Manuel Martínez Tejera maintained that basically everything in the north of early medieval Iberia was a frontier space because of its vulnerability to attack from the south. The context was that Rob was contending for a movement of ideas rather than people to explain material-culture similarities between south and north, and the others were still basically looking for fugitive Mozarabs from the south with heads full of architecture they wanted to keep, and I don’t really know how we solve that.

Last in this list of sessions that struck me was one of two whole sessions, quite early on, on the Alans, one of the more obscure but long-lived migratory peoples of the early Middle Ages, called “Bringing in the Alans, II: Society and Economy of Alania“. Apparently Turkic of language and best known around the Caspian Sea, some people so considered were already up on the Rhine by the early fifth century and some settled in Gaul, eventually to become the source of some really quite overstretched historiographical claims.⁶ Two of the papers in the session, “Alans in the North Caucasus: settlement and identity”, by Irina Arzhantseva, and “Population and Society in the Sarmatian and Early Alanic North Caucasus: the cemetery of Klin-Yar (near Kislovodsk, Russia)”, by Heinrich Härke, were mainly about identifying Alan settlement in one of the zones to which these people supposedly migrated, which was a bit pots-means-people to be honest, but the third one, Nicholas Evans‘s “Alans on the Move: a case study in the archaeology of mobility”, despite coming out of the the same project as Härke’s, stood out for mentioning the Alans who stayed behind, still to be a factor in Caspian-era politics in the ninth century and dealings with the Khazars, and apparently looking quite different in material-cultural terms. The fact that all these people were called Alans by outsiders really became the question that was getting begged for me here.

Individual notes

Also, two things that don’t really fit anywhere else. In a session I will actually write about separately, “The Transformation of the Carolingian World, III“, Charles West, in a paper he had written with Giorgia Vocino called “Why Shouldn’t Judges Get Married? An Ottonian Perspective”, noted in passing that Emperor Otto III owned a copy of a commentary on the Codex Justinianus, the sixth-century Roman lawcode that was supposedly forgotten in the West until the twelfth century but which, as we’ve seen here before, wasn’t, at least in Rome, where Otto III also hung out.

Then lastly, there was my paper. I might have organised more sessions on frontiers, but I had been hoping to do something with the proceedings from the previous year and hadn’t really felt I could ask people to contribute more things with which I could not promise to do anything. So I wound up accepting an invitation to participate in a session being run by a friend of a friend, entitled, “Writing the Other in the Middle Ages, I: Travellers and their Cultural Preconceptions“. This was, as is so often the case for me, the morning after the dance, and my paper was called “Hagrites, Hagarenes, Chaldeans and Saracens: Missing Muslims on the Spanish march, 800-1000”. This wasn’t really much to do with travellers, but picked up on the scholarship I’ve mentioned here once or twice on people with Arabic names in tenth-century León, the very people about whom that debate over cultural transfer or physical migration already mentioned mainly arises, and tried to replicate it for Catalonia.⁷ And what I basically found is that you can’t; despite a much denser sample of charter evidence, there are all of 13 such persons in the documents I could check, as opposed to maybe 300 in the Leonese stuff. It is possible that, not having access then to the documents from Barcelona, I was missing out the capital to which, as in León, such migrants might have flocked, but the order of difference is still significant, and furthermore, I do now have the Barcelona documents and on a very quick run through the indices just now I don’t think they would add more than three or four.⁸ So that is something which might need explaining, but I think it must show support for the idea of a very low level of Islamization or Arabicization during the eighty-odd years in which the future Catalonia was in fact Muslim-run, no matter what some people would have you believe.⁹

Books!

Oh, also, it would not be a Leeds IMC report if I didn’t also report on books. The world’s second-biggest medievalist bookfair is a dangerous thing when you are paid for being an academic, and I came away with this list:

• Norman H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (Westport 1974), I admit I’m now not sure why;
• Neil Christie and Hajnalka Herold (eds), Fortified settlements in early medieval Europe: defended communities of the 8th-10th centuries (Oxford 2016), because by and containing friends and papers I’d been to in previous years;
• Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca 2015), largely because I had been telling students to read it without having done so myself and wanted to know why, having done so, they never seemed to cite it for anything;
• Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600–1025 (Basingstoke 1996), because it’s great; and
• Patrick J. Geary (ed.), Readings in Medieval History, 1st ed. (Peterborough 1991), because it’s the archetypal sourcebook except for all those other older ones and has a wider idea of what sources might be than they do.

Even this seems to speak somewhat of being subdued, doesn’t it? And of course, I haven’t read them, not so much as opened two of them except to get them into Zotero. Oh well… But I did have fun at the conference, even if I was exhausted for a lot of it. It just seems a very long time ago now!

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1. It has been established since 1930 that the Covenant of ‘Umar probably does not date, as it seems to claim, from the reign of Caliph ‘Umar I (634-644 CE), but perhaps from that of ‘Umar II (717-720), for which see A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of ‘Umar (London 1930), online here except in China, but the article in which I first read about it, Norman Daniel, “Spanish Christian Sources of Information about Islam (ninth-thirteenth centuries)” in al-Qanṭara Vol. 15 (Madrid 1994), pp. 365–384, raises doubts about even that, pointing out that no-one in al-Andalus ever seems to have been aware of it, which suggests that it should come from the ‘Abbāsid period of rule in the East, not the Umayyad one.

2. Scott’s relevant work is James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven 2009), online here, but you can hear Nik’s application of it here if you like.

3. There is still no better account of that sporadic contest between a failing and a rising royal dynasty who shared claims on some territories than Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London 1983), pp. 305-339; one day either I or Fraser McNair, or, most worryingly as a possibility, both of us, will have to write one…

4. For the Chronicle, therefore, see Simon MacLean (ed./transl.), History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of Metz (Manchester 2009); for the cartulary, you have to go to H. Beyer, L. Eltester & A. Goerz (ed.), Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Mittelrheinischen Territorien, band I: von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1169 (Koblenz 1860; reprinted Aalen 1974), which has most of the documents in.

5. On this story see Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus (711 – 1000) (Richmond 2002), pp. 88-101; there were certainly martyrs in the reign, as witness C. P. Melville and Aḥmad ‘Ubaydlī (edd.), Christians and Moors in Spain, Volume III: Arabic Sources (711–1501) (Warminster 1992), pp. 38-43, but perhaps not as many as have been claimed; see Christys, Christians in al-Andalus, pp. 80-88 and 101-107 for critical review.

6. Meaning Bernard S. Bachrach, A History of the Alans in the West (Minneapolis 1973) and his pathfinder work for that book, idem, “The Alans in Gaul” in Traditio Vol. 23 (Fordham 1967), pp.476-489, reprinted in idem, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West, Collected Studies 405 (Aldershot 1993), chapter III.

7. Such work being mainly Victoria Aguilar Sebastián and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, “Antroponimia de origen árabe en la documentación leonesa (siglos VIII-XIII)” in El reino de León en la alta edad media VI, Fuentes de Estudios de Historia Leonesa 53 (León 1994), pp. 497–633, Sebastián, “Onomástica de origen árabe en el Reino de León (siglo X)” in al-Qanṭara Vol. 15 (Madrid 1994), pp. 351–364 and Rodríguez, “Acerca de la población arabizada del reino de León (siglos X y XI)”, ibid. pp. 465–472, now added to by Richard Hitchcock, Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: identities and influences (Aldershot 2008), pp. 53-74.

8. They now being published as Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (eds), Catalunya carolíngia volum VII: el Comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, my copies of which I owe to the great generosity of Professor Josep María Salrach.

9. Most recently, Ramón Martí, “De la conquesta d’al-Andalus a la majoria musulmana: el cas dels territoris de Catalunya (segles VIII-X)’ in Pilar Giráldez and Màrius Vendrell Saz (edd.), L’empremta de l’Islam a Catalunya: materials, tècniques i cultura (Barcelona 2013), pp. 11–35.

Globalizing Byzantium from Birmingham

The last thing I promised I’d write about from the quarter-slice of 2017 through which this blog’s backlog is presently proceeding was the 50th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, from 25th to 27th March of that year. There are plenty of stories that could be told about this conference, starting with the whole story of the Spring Symposium, which has, as that title suggests, been happening for 50 years, rotating away from and back to Birmingham like a short-duration comet; or one could tell the story of its founder, Anthony Bryer, who had died the previous year and so was being extensively commemorated here; or how it had fallen in this year upon Professor Leslie Brubaker and my two erstwhile Barber Institute collaborators, Rebecca Darley and Daniel Reynolds, to organise it (which earns one the title of ‘Symposiarch’); but for me the chief story is probably always going to be how I arrived as a guest and was converted to presenter at twenty minutes’ notice and still more or less got away with it. So if that intrigues you, or if an international conference on Byzantine Studies does indeed, read on, and for the rest of you, since this post is long, I shall simply set out the running order of what I saw, then stick a cut in and expound at greater length beyond it. So! Here we go.

By now-ancient tradition, the organisation of the Spring Symposium wherever it is held is two-level, with keynote lectures and plenary sessions to which the whole gathering can go at one level, and at the other ‘communications’, these being shorter papers which run in parallel strands. On this occasion there was also a third part, in the form of a postgraduate workshop following the main proceedings. All this together means that my academic itinerary through the conference went like this:

25th March
• Michael Whitby, “Welcome”
• Leslie Brubaker, “What is Global Byzantium?”
• Catherine Holmes, “Global Byzantium: a Whirlwind Romance or Fundamental Paradigm Shift?”

Coffee break

• Rebecca Darley, “India in the Byzantine Worldview”
• Antony Eastmond, “Constantinople: Local Centre and Global Peripheries”
• Francesca dell’Acqua, “What about Greek(s) in Eighth- and Ninth-Century Italy?”

Lunch

• Matthew Kinloch, “Historiographies of Reconquest: Constantinople, Iberia and the Danelaw”
• Maroula Perisanidi, “Clerical Marriage in Comparative Perspective”
• Kristian Hansen-Schmidt, “Constantine’s Μονοχυλα: Canoe or Viking Ship?”
• Lauren Wainwright, “Import, Export: the Global Impact of Byzantine Marriage Alliances during the 10th Century”
• Jeffrey Brubaker, “What is Byzantine about ‘Byzantine Diplomacy’?”
• Adrián Elías Negro Cortes, “Tributes Linked to Military Actions in Both Ends of the Mediterranean: from Byzantium to Spain”

Tea

• Corisande Fenwick, “Forgotten Africa and the Global Middle Ages”
• Tim Greenwood, “Composing History at the Margins of Empire: Armenian Chronicles in Comparative Perspective”
• John Haldon, “A ‘Global’ Empire: the Structures of East Roman Longevity”
• Robin Milner-Gulland, “Ultimate Russia – Ultimate Byzantium”

Champagne Bus and Conference Dinner¹

26th March

• Liz James, “Byzantine Art – A Global Art? Looking beyond Byzantium”
• Hugh Kennedy, “The State as an Econmic Actor in Byzantium and the Caliphate c. 650-c. 950: A Cross-Cultural Comparison”
• Angeliki Lymberopoulou, “‘Maniera Greca’ and Renaissance Europe: More Than Meets the Eye”
• Henry Maguire, “Magical Signs in Byzantium and Islam: A Global Language”

Coffee

• Julia Galliker, “Silk in the Byzantine World: Transmission and Technology”
• Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “Attracting Poles: Byzantium, al-Andalus and the Shaping of the Mediterranean in the 10th Century”

Lunch and Auction

• Claudia Rapp, “Secluded Place or Global Magnet? The Monastery of Saint Catherine on the Sinai and its Manuscript Collection”
• Robert Ousterhout, “The ‘Helladic Paradigm’ in a Global Perspective”
• Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Spice Odysseys: Exotic ‘Stuff’ and its Imaginary”

Tea

• Hajnalka Herold, “How Byzantine was 9th-Century Moravia? An Archaeological Perspective”
• Nik Matheou, “New Rome & Caucasia, c. 900-1100: Empire, Elitedom and Identity in a Global Perspective”
• Alexandra Vukovich, “A Facet of Byzantium’s Ideological Reach: the Case of Byzantine Imitation Coins”
• Andrew Small, “‘From the Halls of Tadmakka to the Shores of Sicily’: Byzantine Italy and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 11th century”, read by Nik Matheou
• Flavia Vanni, “Transferring Skills and Techniques across the Mediterranean: Some Preliminary Remarks on Stucco in Italy and Byzantium”

Wine Reception

27th March

• Peter Sarris, “Centre or Periphery? Constantinople and the Eurasian Trading System at the End of Antiquity”
• Linda Safran, “Teaching Byzantine Art in China: Some Thoughts on Global Reception”
• Daniel Reynolds, “Jerusalem and the Fabrication of a Global City”

Coffee, then a closing round table session as follows:

• Fotini Kondyli, “Material Culture”
• Margaret Mullett, “Global Literature”
• Joanna Story, “The View from… the West”
• Scott Redford, “Byzantium and the Islamic World: Global Perspectives?”
• Naomi Standen, “East Asia”
• Chris Wickham, “Final Remarks”

That’s exhausting even to have typed out, and I certainly can’t come up with something to say about every paper at three years’ remove without basically repeating my already-somewhat illegible notes, so instead I’ll try to pull some general trends out of that list and then focus particularly on the theme and people’s approaches to it. What with me not really being a Byzantinist, that may mean a slightly odd selection, but you’re used to that, I know. Everybody involved deserves a better press than this will give them, but there just isn’t sensible space.² In any case, now you can see what the rest of the post may look like, this is a good place for the cut and then the deeply interested can continue at their leisure.

Leeds IMC report for 2015, part 1

It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it, this backlog, but yet it does reduce, and as a result I am now into the veritable height of the European medievalist’s conference season, the International Medieval Congress at what is now my home base at the University of Leeds. Now, in fact on this first day of the Congress there was a lot of sorting out of that ‘home’ aspect, so I missed the keynote lectures and the first session of papers, but finally arriving during the Monday lunchbreak, I was able to begin the academic day like this:

233. The Early Islamic World, II: Provinces and Frontiers – Syria and the West

• Corisande Fenwick, “Berbers and Borderlands: frontier society in North Africa”
• Anna Leone, Marco Nebbia, Ralf Bockmann, Hafed Abdouli, Moftah Haddad and Ahmed Masud, “Changing Landscape in the 8th Century to the 10th Century: the case of the Jebel Nefiya and Tripolitania”
• Denis Genequand, “Elites in the Countryside: recent research on the Umayyad ‘desert castles’

I went to this session partly because of knowing Corisande, partly because of a vague fascination with the Umayyad desert palaces that has occasionally shown itself here and mainly because Corisande had waved the words ‘frontier’ and ‘borderlands’ at us, usually guaranteed to catch my interest. Certainly the area she was looking at challenges our usual ideas of borders, since the vast area of Africa taken over in the Umayyad conquests of the seventh century was so huge as for the presence of the notional occupiers to have to be very sporadic and consequently very concentrated, which leaves a distinct archæological profile marked off by garrison architecture, mosques, a greater range of foodstuffs and, most of all, coins from military pay, and beyond it, really very little presence. For me this paper was problematised by an assumption that Corisande verbalised in questions, that new buildings mean new people; if there were in fact assimilation of local populations into these fortress settlements going on, you could not detect it that way. Still, the extremity of the social division was a point well put.




Ironically, the best images I can find from the sites named in this paper are of the Christian church at Henchir al-Faouar in Tunisia


Of the other two papers, the former was the more peculiar, as only one of the authors had in fact been advertised on the program and she had been unable to come, so the paper was read by Andrew Marsham and had a title that was also different from that advertised. Nonetheless, it was interesting: the team in question have been carrying out a survey of mosques over much of the old province of Tripolitania in what is now Libya and were now proceeding to join this up to a survey of settlements. Oddly, the mosques are not all at the settlements, which tend to cluster on hilltops in defensively-clustered fashion at distances of 5-7 kilometres from each other, whereas the mosques could often be in the wilds between them. Dating all this is the next problem, since some of the settlements began in the fourth or fifth centuries and some are Ottoman, with pretty much everything in between too, so the changing landscape had yet to become visible but the possibilities were considerable.



Also, the architecture is amazing. This is thirteenth-century, apparently, but I don’t care; it is the fortified granary of Qasr Kabaw in the Jebel Nafusa, about which you can read slightly more here


Lastly Dr Genequand took an overall survey of the various buildings in Syria that have been classed as Umayyad ‘desert palaces’, although he tried to avoid both of the words ‘palace’ and ‘castle’ because the variety between the 38 such sites is such as to make generalisations like that difficult; they are more normally estate centres, with areas around them irrigated for intensive farming and produce collection facilities in the complex, and while some are luxurious, with their own baths and mosque complex and so on, and some are fortified and a few are both, and they seem to have grown and changed over time, they are still probably more like really big desert villas than either palace or castle, if you have to find a single word at all.



One of the erstwhile dams at Wadi al-Qanatir, the area around the Umayyad ‘palace’ of Umm al-Walid, in Jordan, image from Museum With no Frontiers

Then tea and a chance to see an old colleague kick up some fuss, as follows.

325. Byzantium in Context, II: Environment, Economy and Power – Crisis and Renewal in the Byzantine World

• Mark Whittow, “Byzantium and Global History: towards a new determinism?”
• Adam Izdebski, “The Middle Byzantine Revival from an Environmental Perspective: a return to antique models”
• Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, “Topography, Ecology and (Byzantine) Power un Early Medieval Eastern Anatolia and Armenia, 750-1000”
• Myrto Veikou, “A Concerted ‘Discourse’: interplay between environment and human agency in the area of Smyrna (modern Izmir) in the 13th century CE”

This session had gathered a much bigger crowd than would fit into the tiny room it had been allocated to, which is a lesson about the revival of interest in Byzantium more generally in medieval studies, I think. Mark, coming very visibly from his involvement with the Global Middle Ages project, accordingly set out a manifesto for a new medieval European history in which the continuing Byzantine Empire was the default comparator, not the weird remnant, a sign of what ‘should’ have happened everywhere. This would, he then further defined, need to include the perspective that in the Middle Bzyantine period prosperity became rural rather than urban, a phenomenon that we also see in other places and which Mark bravely suggested might have something to with climate. The obvious point of reference here was Ronnie Ellenblum’s work, which Mark hoped one might be less deterministic than, but mainly I wonder how once you have scaled up to the level of climate one can make any single place central to a hypothesis, however big it was.¹ The other papers tried to make such connections more explicit, nonetheless, Dr Izdebski comparing coin circulation and pollen patterns across central Greece (the only place where adequate survey evidence exists, he said) and determining two very similar-looking phases of expansion in the fourth to sixth centuries and the first half of the second millennium, but the coins and the pollen don’t agree about when the latter was and neither make a great deal of sense next to the supposed climate profile. Dr Preiser-Kapeller, meanwhile, ran us very summarily through the history of Armenia from the seventh to tenth centuries and concluded that while the fragile local ecology would impact the two surviving noble houses’ grip on power in the area after the year 1000, up till that point military conquest by Persians and Arabs was a far better explanation of how the area wound up with only two such houses from fourteen than was anything environmental. The point of Ms Veikou’s paper, lastly, was mainly to put the URL of her project before us, a project that as far that URL now shows had by then already wound up and has produced no further publications since it did. So no points from me for that, I’m afraid.




The tenth-century church of Akdamar Island, in the salt Lake Van in Armenia, from which lake Johannes’s climate evidence was largely coming, and fair enough


I found the three actual papers in this session a paradoxical combination, and this came out in discussion. All three speakers were attracted by the idea that large-scale survey that factored in changes in the ecological sphere alongside more material evidence of human usage could tell us something, but when approached on what had to admit either that the data was not yet collected (as in Cappadocia, where much is visible but very little dated or interpreted, or that when it had been it had made sense only on a regional basis and not compared well with anywhere else or the global pattern (as at Lake Van or Miletus in Greece). The effect was to leave the audience, and indeed one at least of the speakers, much more sceptical that this was a useful approach than they had been when we all entered the room, as if Ellenblum’s book, like the first Velvet Underground album, has made every one of its readers determined to have a go too and then discover that trying to be less erratic and offhand than Lou Reed somehow doesn’t produce better rock and roll. I suppose the real point for us to work on here is the junction between macro-scale and micro-scale pictures; if at a local level one can entirely escape what is apparently the global trend one has to ask what difference the global trend really made to people, a problem that we have of course been seeing with generating concern about the current global ecological situation since, well, as long as I can remember really.

Presumably there was then food, as my conference program is pretty much marked up with receptions for the evening so there wouldn’t have been time later. Between the food and the wine, however, came one final academic event for the day.

401. Early Medieval Europe Lecture

The modern state of the abbey church of Corbie, from Wikimedia Commons


The annual Early Medieval Europe lecture was this year given by none other than Professor Mayke de Jong, speaking with the title “Carolingian Cultures of Dialogue and Debate”, so as you might expect I went. Mayke was speaking about a difficult text on which she has been working for a long time, the Epitaphium Arsenii of Paschasius Radbertus. This is an anonymised critique of the policies of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious written in the form of a dialoguic account of the life of one of his relatives, Abbot Wala of Corbie (as he ended his earthly career).² Just explaining what it is isn’t simple, therefore, but Mayke is one of three people who have recently written about it, all coming into the field (as she explained) with different historiographical demons to slay.³ The particular one she tackled here was the idea that the early Middle Ages was an era in which there was no public sphere and the ancient tradition of ‘speaking truth to power’ died off, in which rulers were influenced not by the voices of the crowd but a closed circle of advisors. Texts like the Epitaphium show that this is not true, at least if Mayke’s right that its much more polemical second book was intended for an audience beyond the monastery at Corbie where it was written. The whole text rests on the idea that it was not just all right but morally necessary to try to correct the emperor about his mistakes, after all, and that this could be done by this kind of literary device. Mayke had other examples of people rewriting events in literary fashion to put their view across, but it now strikes me after teaching it for a term again that another obvious one of these texts is Einhard’s Vita Karoli, because whatever its date and purpose was it’s certainly using praise of Charlemagne in the reign of his successor to do something. The whole lecture was full of wry wit and sharp observations about the way that people’s intellectual traditions have constructed their opinions, and she was quite right that if we as scholars of the early Middle Ages want to get our field away from the old idea of the Dark Ages we need better to understand why people find it useful to put it there.⁴ But her final point, that the Carolingian religious sphere was a public one that included laymen, shows how far our categories are crumbling as we better understand what authors like Paschasius were doing with their texts.

And so that wound up the first day of the IMC of 2015, and I will alternate the reports on the remaining three with shorter and more discursive content but I will, by my blogger’s pledge, get it done, and then continue onwards!

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1. Ellenblum’s work referred to here is R. Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: climate change and the decline of the East, 950-1072 (Cambridge 2012), to which at some point I am also going to have to pay attention I suppose. On issues of scale, it always seems worth my citing Julio Escalona, “The Early Middle Ages: a scale-based approach” in idem & Andrew Reynolds (edd.), Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages: exploring landscape, local society, and the world beyond, The Medieval Countryside 6 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 9-29.

2. It is available in a deprecated but still unique translation for the English-speaker as Allen Cabaniss (trans.), Charlemagne’s Cousins: contemporary lives of Adalard and Wala (Syracuse NY 1967).

3. Referring to M. de Jong, The Penitential State: authority and atonement in the age of Louis the Pious, 814-840 (Cambridge 2010), but also to Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: the penance of Louis the Pious and the decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia PA 2009) and some unnamed work by Steffen Patzold that I don’t know, but which might be (or be referred to in) his “Consensus – Concordia – Unitas: Überlegungen zu einem politisch-religiösen Ideal der Karolingerzeit” in Nikolaus Staubach (ed.), Exemplaris imago: Ideale in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Tradition, Reform, Innovation 15 (Frankfurt 2012), pp. 31-56 (non vidi).

4. Mayke cited, among other things, Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford 2013), and I might add, with my original cautions as linked, Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time (Philadelphia PA 2006).

From the Sources XIII: a Who’s Who of the tenth-century Caucasus

Ivory depiction of Constantine VII being crowned by Christ, now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, image from Wikimedia Commons

Let me return for one last post—for now, at least—to the De Administrando Imperio of Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959).¹ I’ve described already how rambling and personal this text can be as one gets closer to Constantine’s own recollections, and how sharply tuned to its purpose it can be beneath that exterior when one presses. At times, the two things coincide, and this is sharpest of all in the sections that cover the disputed and often-autonomous territories at the east end of what is now Turkey heading into the Caucasus, what is now Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and was then Armenia, Lazica, Iberia and a number of other small polities whose number scholars in Baghdad, at least, considered impossible to count.² These were areas where by the tenth century, after a long period of stand-off diplomacy, the Byzantine Empire had found it more and more possible to take a direct military interest, which was as Constantine wrote unbalancing local power relations left, right and centre.³ Imperial intervention for one side or another regularly increased the local instability, and it is in this section of the De Administrando Imperio that one really sees how it was done. This was where the kind of mind Constantine had, which could track tiny details of interpersonal relations for dozens of people and work out where a well-aimed gift or sanction would split them out, was exactly the right tool for the job, and having the statecrafter himself to tell you about it is really illuminating.

Map of Armenia and its neighbours in the early- to mid-tenth century. By www.armenica.org – www.armenica.org, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12515076

We begin in the middle of an account “of the country of Taron”, which in the time of Constantine’s father Leo VI was ruled by one Krikorikios (Grigor, or, as we might put it, Gregory).⁴ Krikorikios was essentially a vassal of the Sultan of Baghdad at this point, but was also contending for the rule of Taron with his cousin Ashot Arkaïkas, and at an uncertain point he managed to capture Ashot’s sons in battle. Ashot wrote for help to Sembat, Prince of Princes of Armenia, and Sembat wrote for help to Emperor Leo. Leo sent a couple of embassies, and with the second one, led by one Constantine Libos, brought Krikorikios’s brother Apoganem (or Abu Ghanim, it’s mixed-up out here) and the two prisoners to Constantinople, honoured Apoganem with the imperial rank of protospatharios and got to keep the kids at the capital. This is where we enter the story:

“After this the said Constantine spent some time in Chaldia, and was then commissioned by imperial mandate to go to Taron and take Krikorikios, prince of Taron, and come to the imperial city; and this he did. When this same Krikorikios had entered the city protected of God, and had been honoured with the rank of magister and military governor of Taron, he was also given for his residence a house called the house of Barbaros, now the house of Basil the chamberlain. He was, moreover, honoured with an annual stipend of ten pounds in gold and a further ten pounds in miliaresia, making twenty pounds in all. After some sojourn in the imperial city, he was escorted back again to his country by this same protospatharius Constantine.

This weighs two-and-a-half grams, so ten pounds of them would pile up a bit… Silver miliaresion of Emperors Leo VI and Constantine VII, struck at Constantinople between 908 and 912, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B4812

“After this, Apoganem came once more to the emperor, of blessed memory, and was advanced by him to the rank of patrician; and he was also permitted to take to wife the daughter of the said Constantine; and on this ground he asked for a house as well and he too received the house of Barbaros, without a golden bull. After receiving the emperor’s bounty, he then returned to his country, with intent to come again and complete the celebration of his marriage; but no sooner was he escorted back to his country than he ended his life, a few days afterwards. His brother Krikorikios sent letters asking that he might come to the imperial city and receive from the hands of the holy emperor the stipend granted to him and sojourn for some while in the city protected of God. Thereupon he proceeded to demand for his residence the house which had been set aside for his brother, and the emperor, of blessed memory, handed it over to him, both because he had lately submitted himself and in order to excite in other princes of the east a similar eagerness for submission to the Romans; but he issued no golden bull making a deed of gift of this house to him.

About three hundred years too late, but, this is one of those golden bulls the text keeps going on about, a chrysobull of Emperor Andronikos II to the church of Monemvasia from 1301 (Athens, Byzantine and Greek Museum BXM534), made of four sheets of parchment glued together

“Several years later, when the emperor Romanos, of blessed memory, had laid hold upon the sceptre of the empire of the Romans, this same Krikorikios reported that he had not the means to keep the house of Barbaros, but demanded that he should receive in its stead a suburban estate in Keltzini, either that of Tatzates or some other, whichever the emperor directed, in order that, when the Agarenes should make an incursion into his country, he might be able to send thither his personal relatives and substance. The emperor, who did not possess an accurate knowledge of the facts, and supposed that the Taronite held the house of Barbaros in virtue of an imperial golden bull of Leo, of blessed memory, gave him the suburban estate of Grigoras in Keltzini and, of course, took back the house; but he too issued no golden bull in favour in respect of the suburban estate.

Modern Erzincan, Turkey, central town of the old province of Keltzini where Krikorikios wanted his estate, a lot further from the capital but within plausible fleeing range of Taron all right

“Thereupon Tornikis, nephew of the Taronite and son of the late Apoganem, wrote to this same emperor:

«The house of Barbaros was presented to my father by the emperor Leo, of most blessed memory, but after my father’s death, because I was under age and an orphan, my uncle, in virtue of his authority, took possession of his house, always promising that when I should come of age, I should take over the paternal house; and now, as I have learned, my uncle has given this house to your imperial majesty, and has received in exchange for it the suburban estate of Grigoras in Keltzini.»

“And because of these imperial gifts bestowed on the prince of Taron, envy towards him was implanted and grew up in Kakikios, prince of Basparaka [Gagik Ardzrouni prince of Vaspurakan], and Adranasir, the curopalate of Iberia, and Asotikios [Ashot Erkot], the prince of princes [of Armenia], who wrote to the emperor grumbling at the cause whereby the Taronite alone enjoyed an imperial stipend, while all of them got nothing.

«For what service – they said – is he performing more than we, or in what does he help the Romans more than we do? Either, therefore, we too should be stipendiary as he is, or else he too should be excluded from this largesse.»

The emperor Romanos, of blessed memory, wrote back to them, that the stipend in favour of the Taronite had not been granted by him, that it should now lie with him to cut it off, but by the emperor Leo, of most blessed memory; nor was it right that what had been done by former emperors should be undone by their successors. However, he wrote to this same Taronite informing him that the said parties were vexed and offended. He replied that he could provide neither gold nor silver, but promised to give, over and above the gifts regularly sent, tunics and bronze vessels up to ten pounds in total value, and these he did give for three or four years. But thereafter he reported that he could not provide this tribute, and demanded either that he should receive the stipend gratis as in the time of the emperor Leo, or else that it should be cut off. And so, that it might not cause offence to Kakikios and the curopalate and the rest, the said emperor Romanus, of blessed memory, cut it off. But to console him, as it were, he afterwards honoured his son Asotios, when he came to Constantinople, with patrician rank and entertained him munificently before sending him home.

“On the death of the magister Krikorikios [in 929], Tornikios [Thornik], son of Apoganem, reported that he heartily desired to come and behold the emperor; whereupon the emperor sent the protospatharius Krinitis, the interpreter, who brought the said Tornikios to Constantinople, and the emperor advanced the same Tornikios to the honour of patrician rank. He put forward his claims to the house of Barbaros, and having heard that his uncle had resigned his ownership of it on receipt of a suburban estate in Keltzini, declared that his uncle had no power to effect an exchange in respect of his paternal inheritance, and demanded that he should be given either the house or the suburban estate, failing which, he was for resigning both to the emperor, so that his cousins might not have them. Therefore the emperor, since the old Taronite was now dead, resumed the suburban estate but did not give the house in exchange for it, because, as has already been stated above, no golden bull had been issued in respect of any of these transactions.

Genealogy of the various princes involved here, taken from Romilly J. H. Jenkins (ed.), Constantine Porphyrogenitus: De Administrando Imperio. A Commentary (London 1962 repr. Washington DC 2012), p. 161

“After this, the late Pankratios, eldest son of that magister Krikorikios the Taronite, came to the imperial city and was advanced by the emperor to the dignity of patrician and was also made military governor of Taron. He asked that he might also be given a wife from among the ladies related to the imperial family, and the emperpr gave him to wife the sister of the magister Theophylact. And after his marriage he made a will, in which he stated: «If children are born to me of this women, they are to have all my country for their ancestral inheritance.» Thereupon he asked the emperor that he might be given the suburban estate of Grigoras for the patrician lady, his wife, to reside there, and after he death this suburban estate should revert to his imperial majesty. The emperor sanctioned this too, and after presenting him with many gifts, sent him with his wife away to his country. Now, the sons of the magister Krikorikios, the same patrician Pankratios and the patrician Asotios, greatly vexed and oppressed their cousin, the patrician Tornikios, who, finding their aggressiveness unendurable, wrote to the emperor to send a trustworthy servant and take over his country, and conduct himself and his wife and their child to the emperor. The emperor sent the protospatharius Krinitis, the interpreter, to take him and conduct himself and his wife and their child to the emperor. But when Krinitis arrived in that country, he found that Tornikios had already departed this life, having devised before his end that all his country should be subject to the emperor of the Romans, and that his wife and child should go to the emperor; and to her, on her arrival, the emperor gave for her residence the monastery in Psomathia of the protospatharius Michael, formerly collector of Chaldia. The said Krinitis was sent back again by the emperor to take over the country of Apoganem, that is, the portion of the patrician Tornikios. But the sons of the Taronite, the cousins of the deceased, sent back a demand that they should give up Oulnoutin [now Ognut] and retain the country of their cousin, for they were quite unable to live if the emperor were to occupy their cousin’s country as his own. The emperor, yielding to his own goodness of heart, fulfilled their request and gave them the country of Apoganem, their cousin, and himself took Oulnoutin with all its surrounding territory. The whole country of Taron was divided in two, one half of it being held by the sons of the magister Krikorikios, the other half by their cousins, the sons of the patrician Apoganem.”

I realise that this is not easy to follow, and I bet it wasn’t at the time either. I can easily picture Romanos’s face when each of these cousins turned up demanding that they should have the estate he’d just been given back by someone who seemed to own it. Problems he didn’t have at sea! But nonetheless, the end result is that the empire, without at any point going to war or even, apparently, more than the implicit use of force presumably involved in escorting all these ambassadors, wound up with a frontier town deep into what had been foreign territory and no tributes to pay. How?

Almost the only image I can find of Ognut as it now is is this rather odd little video promoting a dead website, which suggests that the place may not now be quite what it was in Constantine's days...

Well, none of this would have worked without that very dense family tree, it seems clear. The problem was that there were too many Taronites competing for too little Taron, and Leo had cleverly inserted the empire into this as a source of support, with the result that since the various princes were already in competition they quickly came to compete for that support too. The first generation of princes we’re talking about were fighting with their cousins; by the time we get to the end their own children are all fighting each other. The stakes were small and blood was, apparently, high. It didn’t therefore really matter that the support was very little material use to them, as we can see; indeed, it could apparently cost them more than they could afford in the barely-mentioned but presumably usual tribute arrangements that paid for this promotion. It was worth being an imperial patrician back home in Taron all the same, presumably, even if all it meant was that you had the evidence of having friends in the highest of places. Of course, once all your cousins were also patricians that wore off also, but maybe you could get some symbolic capital out of owning a nice house in Constantinople or a manor in Mesopotamia even if your other cousin was, for now, the recognised governor. When Krikorikios gave the estate in Keltzini back to Romanos, Tornikios was thus cut out of the competition; no wonder he made a stink about it, what did he now have to lose? And he was sufficiently desperate, and apparently sufficiently unable to reach any kind of modus vivendi with his cousins, that even a guarantee that the emperor would not give them stuff was enough to buy his loyalty right up to the contrary end where rather than let his cousins have it (and deprive his son) he would rather hand his whole province over to the empire. That is the kind of enmity you can use! The emperors, both Leo and, once he got a grasp of the situation, Romanos, thus roped these princes into something like a card game in which the dealer was able every now and then to take a card from their hands and make them carry on without it. They don’t seem to have fancied their chances challenging the casino bouncers, and so the house won.

All of this seems quite a lot like the kind of pacts with individual princes, declarations of protection and interventions in defence of its own interests that extended the British power in India; the end of the Maratha Empire has some especially relevant-looking parallels. The difference is, of course, that whereas those deals were negotiated by various officers of the East India Company, this is a lot more like the King (or Queen) of England playing host to the Maharaja at Windsor Castle and lending him a small chunk of Yorkshire to call home in the cricket season. The emperors themselves were deeply involved in this interpersonal network, not least because as Romanos found if you didn’t stay at least passingly familiar with it things went sideways, but also because that connection to the emperor was actually what the Byzantines primarily had to offer; we’ve already seen that it wasn’t about money, and I suppose that the various offices only meant what they could be made to mean once you were back in Taron. It meant keeping the whole web of relations not just present but past in your head, but Constantine was obviously good at that, and wrote it down for his son because he thought his son would need to be good at it too.

The other part of it that interests me is these high-powered ambassadors knitting it all together, not just grand dignitaries but people whom the emperors could send, presumably as I say with a small but powerful contingent of troops, into what is essentially a city under siege to get the ruler’s family out; again, parallels from the British involvement in Southern Asia spring to mind and I wonder what stories could be told about Constantine Libos and Krinitis and what kind of men they were.⁵ Doubtless our imperial author could have told a few such stories, and it’s annoying in a way that he did not, but there is, you have to admit, plenty to go on here already…

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1. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperii, ed. Gyula Moravcsik & transl. Romilly J. H. Jenkins, new edn., Dumbarton Oaks Texts 1 (Washington DC 1967, repr. 1993).

2. Stephen Runciman, “Cc. 43-46/165″, in Romilly J.&ngsp;H. Jenkins (ed.), Constantine Porphyrogenitus: De Administrando Imperio. A Commentary (London 1962, repr. Washington DC 2012), pp. 156-180, at p. 158: “The Caucasian nations to the north and east, of which Mas’udi says that ‘God alone knows the number’…” Runciman gives no citation, but if you want to hunt it down there’s a translation of the first book of al-Mas’udi’s Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems online here and at the moment Wikipedia gives links to the full edition and French translation.

3. My grip on the historical context is all coming from Jonathan Shepard (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500-1492 (Cambridge 2008), here especially Shepard, “Equilibrium to Expansion (886–1025)”, ibid. 493-536 and Tim Greenwood, “Armenian Neighbours”, ibid. pp. 333-364, the latter of which the author appears sportingly to have put online here, although a lot of the detail in the commentary comes from Runciman, “Cc. 43-46/165″.

4. Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, c. 43, whence also translation quoted below. Ordinarily in these posts I provide a text of the original to go with my translation, but since the DAI is online I figure you can just go and look there. Names in square brackets are modern Armenian or Turkish, transliterated into English as per Runciman, “Cc. 43-46/165″.

5. Ibid. pp. 162-163 & 165, suggest that some such stories could be told: there is apparently enough in Theophanes Continuatus to explain that Constantine’s byname, which Runciman renders as ‘Lips’ but I have changed to try and minimise confusion, means ‘son of the south wind’ and comes from an event at the dedication of a church he built, for example, and there are some data on a man who may be the right Krinitis. Still: Constantine would have known more…