The Social History of Byzantium

326 Pages·2008·15.302 MB·English

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM
The Social History of Byzantium. Edited by J o hn Haldon
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13240-4
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF
B Y Z A N T I U M
EDITED BY JOHN HALDON
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition fi rst published 2009
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The social history of Byzantium / edited by John Haldon. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-3240-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-3241-1
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Byzantine Empire–Social conditions. I. Haldon, John F.
HN11.S63 2009
306.09495–dc22
2008031714
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed and bound in Singapore by Utopia Press Pte Ltd
01 2009
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors vii
Foreword ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Maps xiii
1 Towards a Social History of Byzantium 1
John Haldon
2 Men, Women, Eunuchs: Gender, Sex, and Power 31
Liz James
3 Family Structure and the Transmission of Property 51
Angeliki E. Laiou
4 The Social Function of the Law 76
Bernard Stolte
5 Social Relations and the Land: The Early Period 92
Peter Sarris
6 Land and Power in the Middle and Later Period 112
Peter Frankopan
7 The Producing Population 143
Michel Kaplan
8 Social Élites, Wealth, and Power 168
John Haldon
9 Court Society and Aristocracy 212
Paul Magdalino
vi CONTENTS
10 Church and Society: Iconoclasm and After 233
Michael Angold
11 A Monastic World 257
Alice-Mary Talbot
Glossary of Byzantine and Medieval Terms 279
Index 286
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at Edinburgh University.
He has published widely on the history of the later Byzantine empire and the church,
and is the editor of Eastern Christianity (Cambridge History of Christianity, V.
2006).
Peter Frankopan is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. His
research interests include the Komnenoi, Byzantium and its neighbors, and medieval
Greek secular literature. He has published extensively on the reign of Alexios I
Komnenos and on the Alexiad.
John Haldon is Professor of Byzantine History in the History Department, Princeton
University. His research focuses on the history of the early and middle Byzantine
empire; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from
late ancient to early modern times; and on the production, distribution, and con-
sumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world, especially in the
context of warfare.
Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. Her research inter-
ests vary between issues of gender and the representation of women in Byzantium to
questions about light and color in Byzantine art and the manufacture of Byzantine
mosaics. Among other things, she has published Empresses and Power in Early
Byzantium (Leicester University Press, 2001).
Michel Kaplan is Professor of Byzantine History, Université Paris I (Panthéon-
Sorbonne). He has written and published widely on Byzantine social and
economic history, in particular on rural society, estate organization, the economy
of imperial estates and their management, as well as on aspects of Byzantine
hagiography.
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Angeliki E. Laiou is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History in the History
Department at Harvard University. Her research interests include Byzantine social
and economic history; the Byzantine family and women; the history of the Mediter-
ranean in the later middle ages; the crusades; medieval economic history; and the
history of Modern Greece. She is editor of the Economic History of Byzantium.
Paul Magdalino is Bishiop Wardlaw Professor of Byzantine History in the History
Department at St Andrews University. His research interests include the society,
culture and economy of the Byzantine world from the sixth to the thirteenth centu-
ries, in particular the city of Constantinople, medieval prophecy, astrology and reli-
gion, and Byzantine relations with Western Europe.
Peter Sarris is University Lecturer in Medieval History and a Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge. He is author of Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian
(Cambridge 2006) and has written extensively on various aspects of late Roman, early
medieval and Byzantine social, economic, and legal history.
Bernard Stolte is Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute at Rome and Professor
of Byzantine Law in the University of Groningen. His special research interest lies in
the history of Roman and Byzantine legal sources, of their text as well as of their
infl uence in later times and different cultures. He has published widely on the civil
and canon legal literature of the sixth and seventh centuries.
Alice-Mary Talbot is Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washing-
ton, DC. She served as Executive Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, has
published widely in the areas of monasticism and hagiography, and was a major
contributor to a collection of translated monastic rules published by Dumbarton
Oaks in 2000.
FOREWORD
When I was invited by Blackwell in 2005 to edit a collection on the social history
of Byzantium I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to put together a set
of contributions that would open up new ways of looking at Byzantium and its
culture. With hindsight, I think my optimism in this regard entirely justifi ed, but I
underestimated how diffi cult it would be adequately to deal with all the possible
topics that one might expect to fi nd in such a collection. In the end, I have to confess
that I have not succeeded in doing all the things I originally hoped – the coverage
is incomplete, and perhaps inevitably so, given the range of possible questions we
would like to ask and possible or actual topics or themes we would like to read
about. We planned originally to have a chapter on art and society, or at least – that
title being perhaps a little trite – on how Byzantines perceived, understood, and
instrumentalized color and form and how these were deployed ideologically and
symbolically; we planned likewise to have a chapter dealing specifi cally with mar-
riage, kinship and identity. Sadly, both authors fell by the wayside as a result of
circumstances beyond their control, and we were unable to replace them at short
notice – understandable, given the challenge of dealing with such complex and dif-
fi cult topics, although other contributors take up several of the issues which would
otherwise have been addressed in these more specialist chapters. There are undoubt-
edly other topics that readers will expect to fi nd in a book with the words “social
history” in its title, and I can do no more than admit that our coverage is not as
complete as I hoped or planned. It would have been good, for example, to have
something more analytical and theoretically broad on the relationships between
different social-economic groups, although most chapters do touch on that theme
in some way. Likewise we could have included a chapter or two on specifi c groups
outside the elite and aristocracy, the church, or the monastic world, yet nevertheless
identifi able by their role, dress, beliefs, or otherwise – soldiers, for example, or
religious minorities, such as Jews, or ethnic groups, and so forth. Broad and complex
though such themes are, they deserve treatment.
x FOREWORD
Nevertheless, this is, I believe, an exciting and provocative collection which will
encourage discussion across a wide range of subjects and, perhaps most importantly,
one which will encourage scholars with very different expertise and interests to build
bridges to others with different priorities and perspectives and contribute thereby to
a more holistic appreciation of the complex social phenomenon we call “Byzantium.”
It is in one sense very obvious, yet nevertheless worth underlining the fact that
Byzantium was never a single, monotonic cultural system. Regional variations in time
and space, differences of scale between town, countryside, and village or between and
within province and locality, all nuanced and infl ected the way things were and the
way those who lived in Byzantium experienced and perceived their different worlds.
It is perhaps inevitable that many such infl ections are near impossible to grasp except
by very crude means, and that generalizations, which conceal so many of these varia-
tions, will tend to dominate any attempt to understand the different phenomena the
contributors to this volume address. We hope our readers will bear this in mind when
engaging with the volume.
I am immensely grateful to the contributors to the volume. They all without excep-
tion were enthusiastic about the project, and if it succeeds in opening discussion and
stimulating research, then it is due to their efforts. The editor’s instructions were
relatively open-ended in respect of what each author was to write about – some have
chosen to focus on description and clarifi cation, others on analysis or the examina-
tion of current debates, others again have placed emphasis also on the methodological
or theoretical issues with which one has to contend in addressing a particular theme,
one or two on all of these. A single author would, of course, have produced a very
different sort of book, with a set of common themes and a single guiding principle,
and this book cannot be that. On the other hand, since I believe that we are not yet
in a position to write a single-authored social history of the Byzantine world – and
whether anyone can ever hope to achieve such an aim satisfactorily may be doubted
– a collection such as this has certain merits, in particular that of showing how diverse
the range of possible approaches to the social history of any period or any culture
can be, yet at the same time how useful the juxtapositioning of such diverse approaches
can be in encouraging discussion and in throwing up new questions and new
approaches.
I should like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reproduce some of
the maps from my Atlas of Byzantine History; and, of course the usual suspects in
such enterprises: friends, colleagues with whom I have had discussion on various
issues to do with my own chapters or the book as a whole – they know who they are;
and last, but of course by no means least, my family, for their continued benevolent
forbearance.
John Haldon
Princeton, June 2008
ABBREVIATIONS
AB Analecta Bollandiana
Annales ESC Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations
AS Acta Sanctorum
B Byzantion
BCH Bulletin de correspondance Hellénique
BF Byzantinische Forschungen
BMGS Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies
ByzSlav Byzantinoslavica
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CahCM Cahiers de civilisation médiévale
CFHB Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae
CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium
CSHB Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
EHR English Historical Review
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
JÖB Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik
JÖBG Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinischen Gesellschaft
JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
OCP Orientalia Christiana Periodica
MPG Patrologiae Cursus completus, series Graeco-Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
REA Revue des Études Arméniennes
REB Revue des Études Byzantines
REG Revue des Études Grecques
RESEE Revue des Études Sud-Est Européennes
RH Revue Historique
ROC Revue de l’Orient Chrétien