Byzantium, Its Neighbours and Its Cultures

302 Pages·2017·11.942 MB·English

by  Danijel Džino, Kenneth Parry

Byzantium, Its Neighbours and Its Cultures
Byzantina Australiensia
Editorial Board
Ken Parry (Macquarie University)
Amelia Brown (University of Queensland)
Meaghan McEvoy (Macquarie University)
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (Monash University)
Danijel Dzino (Macquarie University)
Wendy Mayer (Australian Lutheran College | University of Divinity)
Roger Scott (University of Melbourne)
Volume 20
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/byza
Byzantium,
Its Neighbours and
Its Cultures
Edited by
Danijel Dzino
Ken Parry
LEIDEN | BOSTON
This paperback was originally published as Volume 20 in the series Byzantina Australiensia,
Australian Association for Byzantine Studies.
Cover illustration: Fol 98v of Cod. Laur. Plut. IX.28, containing the Christian Topography of
Cosmas Indicopleustes, is reproduced on the cover with the kind permission of the Biblioteca
Laurenziana, Florence.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940746
issn 0725-3079
isbn 978-18-76-50301-7 (paperback, 2017)
isbn 978-90-04-34491-4 (e-book, 2017)
isbn 978-1-876503-01-7 (paperback, 2014)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Εἰ δὲ καὶ περὶ τῶν ἀντιπόδων ἐπεξεργαστικώτερον θελήσειέ τις ζητῆσαι,
ῥᾳδίως τοὺς γραώδεις μύθους αὐτῶν ἀνακαλύψει.
Cosmas Indicopleustes, I,20.
⸪

v
Table of Contents
Table of Contents v
Introduction: Byzantium, its neighbours and its cultures
Danijel Dzino and Ken Parry 1
Bunkers, open cities and boats in Byzantine diplomacy
Jonathan Shepard 11
Imperial ideology and commemorative culture in the Eastern Roman Empire,
284-450 CE
Caillan Davenport 45
Church with incomplete biography: plans for the consolidation of Byzantine
rule on the Adriatic at the beginning of the ninth century
Mladen Ančić 71
Local knowledge and wider contexts: stories of the arrival of the Croats in De
Administrando Imperio in the past and present
Danijel Dzino 89
Female virtue, Euripides, and the Byzantine manuscript tradition in the
fourteenth century
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides 105
Exchange of palatine architectural motifs between Byzantium, Persia and the
Caliphate
Nigel Westbrook 129
Rome and Persia: rhetoric and religion
Tim Briscoe 155
Faith as a frontier: the Photian homilies on the invasion of the Rus
Dimitri Kepreotes 169
Egypt in the Byzantine imagination: cultural memory and historiography,
fourth to ninth centuries
Ken Parry 181
History of Wars: narratives of crises in power relations between Constantinople
and Italy in the sixth century
Renato Viana Boy 209
vi
The barbarians and the city: comparative study of the impact of the barbarian
invasions in 376-378 and 442-447 on the urbanism of Philippopolis, Thrace
Ivo Topalilov 223
Between the old Rome and the new: imperial co-operation ca. 400-500 CE
Meaghan McEvoy 245
Sailors, merchants and the maritime cults that sailed into the ports (and
streets) of early Byzantium
Janet Wade 269
Index 289
Introduction: Byzantium its neighbours and its cultures 1
Danijel Dzino and Ken Parry
Macquarie University, Sydney
Introduction: Byzantium, its neighbours and its cultures
Byzantium was one of the longest lasting empires in history.1 Throughout the
millenium of its existence, the empire showed its capability to change and
develop under very different historical circumstances. Formed in Late
Antiquity, it survived the transitions of the late antique world and severe
territorial contraction in the seventh century to return in a few centuries as a
supreme political power in southeastern Europe. This remarkable resilience
would have been impossible to achieve without the formation of a lasting
imperial culture and a strong imperial infrastructure, both ideological and
geo-political. The Byzantines needed functioning imperial culture and
ideology in order to enable the continuing reproduction of imperial social
structures. Imperial ideology required, among other things, to sort out who
was ʻinsiderʼ and who was ʻoutsiderʼ, and develop ways to define and describe
ones neighbours.2 No empire, including the Byzantine, could function and
survive without a working relationship of the imperial centre with the
periphery and frontier zones.3 Frequent contractions and expansions of the
empire shifted these zones significantly through the centuries, changing who
the Byzantine provincials and neighbours were. Consequentially, the nature of
the Byzantine interaction with their neighbours evolved in different
directions. A peculiar geo-strategic position connected the Byzantines with
the post-Roman and early Medieval West, the South Slavic polities in the
Balkans, the Pannonian, Ukrainian and Russian steppes, the Caucasus
mountains and the world of Islam. The empire witnessed the rise (and fall) of
different competing empires and states: the Sassanids, Avars, Bulgars, Arab
caliphates, the Carolingian empire, Venice, Serbia, the Ottomans, and the Rus,
making their relationship with their neighbours diverse and perpetually
changing.
Our understanding of Byzantium’s external and internal interactions
has changed as a result of recent scholarship. The significance of this empire
to a millennium of developments throughout Eurasia has been examined
through the nature of contacts between Byzantium and its Eurasian
1 Recently on Byzantium as an empire - Cameron 2014, 26-45.
2 See Smythe 2000; 2010 for the insiders and outsiders in Byzantium; Kaldellis 2013 for
ethnography.
3 The scholarship on the creation and role of imperial cultures is perpetually growing, e.g.
Colás 2007, 116-57; Münkler 2007, 80-107; see also Haldon 2009, 236-40 for Byzantium.
2 Danijel Dzino and Ken Parry
neighbours.4 Models for understanding Byzantium’s interactions with its
neighbours have moved from imperial centre and periphery, to the concepts
of ‘commonwealth,’ to ‘overlapping circles,’ depicting parallel and mutual
developments in political and cultural identity.5 The Byzantine millennium
now seems more connected, by commerce, diplomacy, and common cultural
heritage, than before. Artefacts and ideologies were acquired, appropriated, or
mediated between Byzantium and its neighbours, and even prolonged conflict
did not preclude exchanges, and indeed sometimes sprang from shared
developments. At the same time, what we think of as the distinctively
Byzantine milieu of Constantinople also interacted with regional cultures that
at various times formed part of its empire. The Coptic and Syriac cultures in
Late Antiquity, the Latin and Arabic regions in later periods, displayed both
ambivalence and engagement with Constantinople and its imperial and
ecclesiastical leaders.6 As with Byzantium’s external connections, ‘centre and
periphery’ models of intra-imperial networks are giving way to more dynamic
models seeing metropolis and provinces as parts of broader, common
developments.7 In addition, our knowledge of the ways the Byzantines
perceived and described their neighbours has become more sophisticated and
diverse, recognizing different literary and discursive ethnographic strategies
used for their depiction.8
There is an indefinite number of possibilities for the exploration of
relationships between Byzantium and its neighbours. The essays in this
collection focus on several interconnected clusters of topics and shared
research interests. Shepard, Davenport and Ančić look into the place of
neighbours in the context of the empire and imperial ideology. The paper of
Dzino sits in between that cluster and the following one, which is the transfer
of knowledge with neighbours, explored by Anagnostou-Laoutides and
Westbrook. The next cluster of topics focuses on the Byzantine perception of
their neighbours, which is the interest connecting the papers by Briscoe,
Kepreotes and Perry. Another field of shared interest in this volume is the
political relationship and/or the conflict with neighbours, which inspired the
papers of Viana Boy, Topalilov and McEvoy. In addition, there is the paper of
Wade, which looks into maritime cults and sub-cultures of merchants and
sailors, neighbours and ‘outsiders’ visiting Byzantium.
4 E.g. Shepard & Franklin 1992; Pevny 2001; Stephenson 2004; Pagès et al. 2005; Howard-
Johnston 2008; Shepard 2010; 2011; Laiou 2012, to mention just a few.
5 Obolenski 1971; Shepard 1992. Obolenski’s thesis of a multi-national ‘Byzantine
Commonwealth’ throughout the Balkans in the middle ages has been criticised recently,
e.g. Kaldellis 2007.
6 Magdalino 2000.
7 Holmes 2010.
8 Kaldellis 2013.