Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland
Byzantine Studies riven by risible arguments, perpetual cognitive dissonance, Roman denialism, an orgy of contempt; Byzantine Empire is an ideological construct in the western imagination..
Anthony Kaldellis wrote:
Preface
In modern languages, the term empire follows the adjective Byzantine with the same ease off the tongue that democracy follows Athenian. But the parallel ends at that superficial level, and the problems begin. For the ancient Athenians really did call themselves Athenians, and they called their state a democracy. When they wanted to refer to their power (or “empire”) over non-Athenians, they called it their hegemony or tyranny. The Byzantines, however, did not call themselves Byzantines and did not call their state an empire. Instead, they consistently called themselves Romans, and they called their state variously the monarchy, polity, power, or public affairs “of the Romans”.
They also had a proper name for their state, Romanía (i.e., Romanland), which is absent from most modern discussions. It is debatable which—if any—of these terms might have meant “empire” and in what context. This problem of terminology, moreover, hides a deeper historical one: Does the primary evidence establish whether or to what degree Byzantium actually was an empire? We call it that all the time, but it has never actually been proven or even systematically studied, and here is why.
Let us begin with empire. In plain English, as well as in many scholarly fields that have recently taken up the topic with vigor, “empire” refers to the domination exercised by one ethnic, ethnoreligious, or ethnopolitical group over a range of others that are perceived as different by the ruling group in the metropole. Empire is not constituted by mere relations of power within a single group, which is a question of political hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality. It focuses specifically on how ethnic differences are reproduced, constituted, or effaced at the level of governance, discourse, and economy. Thus, empire is also not about the form of the regime; that is, about whether it is headed by a monarch who claims the title “emperor.” Republics and democracies also have empires. In fact, the Roman Republic was far more “imperialistic” than the Roman Empire—a paradox that is created by the modern labels “republic” and “empire,” which we use in a way different from the Romans. For the purposes of modern study, the philology of monarchical titles is less important than the history of conquests that are inflected by perceptions of ethnic difference and followed by governance marked by ethnic inequality, regardless of the shape of politics in the metropole.
In other words, empires are by definition multiethnic, taking a broad view of ethnicity. Byzantium too is often called multiethnic, largely on the grounds that it was an empire. However, both the premise and conclusion are premature. Even though we are now experiencing an “imperial turn” in the study of history, modern theories and definitions of empire have not been systematically applied to Byzantium, where the term is used as if it were self-evident, carried on by the momentum of lingering medieval taxonomies. The Byzantine emperors and their western counterparts famously squabbled over who had the rights to the Roman imperial title, and they quibbled over how exactly their imperator or basileus was superior to other kings, earning him the label “emperor” in modern discussions. We can here dispense with this arcane and esoteric philology of titles. Such hoary antiquarian notions buttress conventional terminology and exclude Byzantium from the comparative discussion of empires that is now flourishing.
A proper study of empire in the case of Byzantium, as the present book aspires to be, requires that we understand who the ruling group was—these “Romans” of Byzantium—and how they were constituted as a group, who the ruled were, and how their relationship was configured within “the polity [etc.] of the Romans.” This, in turn, requires a direct engagement with the problem of ethnicity, which is abundantly attested in the primary sources but rarely (in fact, almost never) discussed in scholarship on Byzantium. Book and article titles that combine ethnicity and Byzantium are virtually nonexistent. Nor are modern theories of ethnicity used much in them, with the result that in some quarters nineteenth-century notions of fixed “race” still circulate. The study of Byzantium as an empire is, therefore, blocked by the field’s refusal to engage critically and directly with ethnicity.
Why, then, is ethnicity such a problem for Byzantine Studies at a time when it is energetically being discussed and debated in most other disciplines of premodern historical research? The difficulty, in fact, stems not from all the ethnic groups that formed part of Romanía at any given time, but from only one of them, the Romans, who encompassed the majority of the population. Scholars have no difficulty identifying others, who formed larger or smaller minorities, by name (Slavs, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, Franks, foreign mercenaries, and the like). This is justifiable, for they appear in the sources as different from the dominant Roman group and as subject to various policies of assimilation, distinction, or discrimination. However, I note two peculiarities in how these other groups are treated in the scholarship. First, they are usually discussed individually and not as part of a general mapping and articulation of how the nondominant ethnic groups were governed by the ruling one (the Romans). Historians interested in Jews in Byzantium work only on them, and likewise for Armenians, Lombards, and so on. No historian has tried to map all the ethnic groups that existed in the empire. There is much talk of multiethnicity, of the “variety of ethnicities, languages, and religions” that coexisted in the empire, but there is no standard study that backs this talk up with an “ethnic inventory” that weighs the relative presence of each group in the mix.
Second, only the minority ethnic groups in Byzantium are recognized by historians, never the majority. This is illogical because the boundary between a minority ethnicity and the majority must, by definition, be an ethnic boundary, meaning that the majority group was also bounded ethnically. If we follow the sources, moreover, we see that the majority clearly defined itself as Roman in a multiplicity of discursive, social, and political sites. Yet in most scholarship this majority remains opaque behind the invented term Byzantine. This term, in turn, creates fundamental confusions: Does “Byzantine” encompass all subjects of the “Byzantine empire” or only the (otherwise unnamed) majority from whom the (named) minorities were ethnically differentiated? Books vary in their usage. No clarity has emerged, and little effort has been made to seek it. This reticence is strange.
There is a reason behind it, which we need to take by the horns. As an ideological construct in the western imagination, “Byzantium” was shorn of its Roman identity already in medieval times. The dominant conceit in the medieval West was that the majority population of the eastern empire were not Romans as they claimed but rather “Greeks”. This at least recognized that they had an ethnic identity, even if it was mislabeled for political purposes. This tradition of Roman denialism then passed directly from medieval prejudice into modern scholarship, where it continues to fester. In the nineteenth century, moreover, these medieval “Greeks” were stripped of ethnicity and became deracinated “Byzantines”.
Roman denialism is today one of the pillars of Byzantine Studies. Whereas visitors from outside the field can easily see that the primary sources speak clearly of a Roman ethnicity, most experts within the field continue to deny the obvious, sometimes zealously, asserting various pretexts, denials, and risible arguments by which to assert that the Byzantines were not “really” the Romans that they claimed to be. In some scenarios, “Roman” was allegedly just an empty label, a relic of past imperial glory or crusty antiquarianism; or it was a hollow piece of political propaganda; or an act of deception performed by a few elites for some reason; or a meaningless claim made by a population that was deluding itself; or it was equivalent to “Orthodoxy”; or any alternative that might avoid the ethnic implications that stare us in the face through so many sources, genres, and contexts, both social and geographical. The modern reading of “Byzantine identity” as religious, and even metaphysical, makes sense only after it had been stripped of its Romanness by self-interested western medieval powers and then stripped of its distorted alter ego, Greek ethnicity, by scholars in the nineteenth century.
As they say in Greece, we have to pull the snake out of this hole. We have to come to terms with the fact that the Byzantines were what they claimed to be, Romans, in ways that were simultaneously (and comprehensively) legal, ethnic, and political.
That Romanness is the great taboo, the inconvenient truth, that has held us back in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance. There is now simply no theoretical justification left for outright denying the ethnicity of a society and imposing upon it an incoherent medley of invented alternatives to accompany the invented label (“Byzantium”) that we have also foisted upon it. Another way of saying this is that we have to align our field with the practice adopted almost universally by the social sciences and humanities during the twentieth century, namely to study identity through the claims and narratives made by the culture in question.
Otherwise, we are not understanding who they thought they were and the choices that they made but devising narratives that suit our politics and preconceptions. After we remove this blockage, the path opens for studying ethnicity in Byzantium in a way that is no longer limited to the minorities but can encompass the majority as well. And then we will finally be able to study empire in a rigorous way, because if we cannot ask basic ethnic questions—Who were these self-professed Romans and how did they differ from others?—we cannot answer the basic issue of empire—How did they govern non-Romans? Thus, we can properly constitute the study of Byzantium as an empire. …
… As we will see, Byzantium sometimes veered close to being a homogeneous national state, with a vast majority of Romans and small ethnic minorities in the provinces (e.g., in 930 AD), whereas at other times, after a phase of conquests, it veered nearer to being a true empire, the hegemony of Romans over many non-Romans (e.g., by 1050). Sometimes Byzantium was an empire and sometimes not. This requires detailed empirical study for each period using consistent definitions for ethnicity and empire. This book aims to provide both working definitions and empirical evidence.
A Note on the Term Byzantium
It is well known that the term Byzantium is a modern label for the eastern Roman empire and its people, most of whom called themselves Romans. It is less well known that this term is only the most recent in a series of invented names that the West has devised during the last thousand years precisely in order to avoid using any Roman label in connection with the eastern empire and its people. This book exposes the politics of these invented labels and the historical misunderstandings that result from them. For example, the label “Byzantine” obscures the difference between imperial subjects who were ethnically Roman and those who were not, making it impossible for us to study ethnicity, which in turn makes it impossible to study this state as an empire.
Why then, I am often asked, do I still use the term Byzantium? The term is still the internationally recognized and conventional name of a specific and still fairly coherent academic discipline: Byzantine Studies. I am a member of that field and address it as such with a contribution to an ongoing debate. Also, we will not solve this problem by making a word taboo. It is better to improve our understanding of the historical reality that lay behind the words that we (fallibly) use. Once we get the substance right, we can then reassess these labels. As noted above, “republic” and “empire” are conventional labels for previous phases of Roman history that were not used that way by the Romans themselves, and this results in more misunderstandings. In the short term, it is possible to retain the label “Byzantium” as a general term for the field and the civilization as a whole, for example in the titles of our books and articles, while referring inside them to Romans and Romanía.
Conclusion
For over a thousand years, the western European world has falsely denied the Romanness of the eastern empire and its majority population. Prejudice and polemic were piled on top of the original sin of denialism in an orgy of contempt that lasted well into the twentieth century. The eastern Romans were viewed as effeminate “Greeks”, then as schismatics and heretics, as degenerate Christians, servile subjects of an oriental theocratic despotism, and the source of Soviet oppression. The “Greek” label was a fundamental distortion of east Roman culture, but it nevertheless preserved the idea that it represented a nation. Even that was lost, however, in the later nineteenth century due to the imperial anxieties of the Great Powers. When Byzantine Studies emerged as a professional academic discipline, the field retreated from the politically charged “Greek” label and fully embraced the empty abstraction of “Byzantium,” whose majority population was seen as lacking ethnicity and nationality. The “Byzantines” were henceforth defined by their faith, Orthodoxy, which therefore drew the lion’s share of both scholarly and popular attention during the twentieth century.
The unambiguous evidence of the sources for the polity of the Romans was disregarded, a feat of intellectual discipline that can be accomplished only after years of graduate training. The national basis of Romanía was marginalized in favor of theological abstractions lifted from the writings of a few bishops, such as Eusebios of Kaisareia.
At the same time, the existence of minority ethnic groups in the empire, urged by modern national states and their historians, was taken at face value. The result was a monstrously inverted riddle, the only “empire” in history about which it was possible to identify ethnic minorities but not the majority. More than that, it became unclear whether this was an empire or some other kind of state. Were there ruling and ruled ethnic groups specific enough to be named, or only a deracinated Orthodox “elite” that ruled over a majority with no name and various minorities that could be named if only they enjoyed the advantage of modern national spokesmen? Were “the Byzantines” the ones ruling this state, and were they the ones who are called “Romans” in the sources? Or were all of the empire’s subjects “Byzantines,” both those who “called themselves Romans” and the rest? Could minorities exist with no majority?
Such were the confusions that resulted when the empirical commitments of scholarship yielded to the ideological commitments of denialism. As a result, our books are full of baffling statements. Consider, for example, the claim that a Greek identity and the Greek language were not requirements for anyone to be considered a Byzantine. What is this trying to say, if we were to translate it from the invented terminology of modern scholarship into real-world terms? That one did not have to be a Roman to be a subject of the emperor? But isn’t that merely to say that the Romans had an empire? This is true but also redundant, because there were never any requirements for being the subject of an empire.
The field of Byzantine Studies, tangled up in the terminological weeds that it itself has sown, has operated in this state of cognitive dissonance for over a century. Its scholars read the name “Roman” in the sources, but many of them cannot “see” it. The goal of this book has been to make it harder to unsee.
To remove this blockage and understand Byzantium as an empire, we have to take the evidence of our sources regarding ethnicity seriously. This requires that we remove the edifices of denial that have been built up to block our view.
As the evidence piles up, the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point. The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would de damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room. [Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now]
The evidence is extensive and incontrovertible.
What we call Byzantium was a Roman polity populated overwhelmingly by identifiable ethnic Romans and a number of ethnic minorities. [✓]
“Roman” was not an elite court identity or a literary affect: it was a nationality that extended to most of the population regardless of its location, occupation, gender, and class (i.e., roughly to all who were Greek-speaking and Orthodox). It was common Romans who began to call their land and state Romanía, “Romanland,” and to call their language Romaic. They had a reasonably clear awareness of who in their state were not Romans. The size of these ethnic minorities was usually quite small (e.g., in the early tenth century), although it grew in phases of imperial expansion (in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries).
Therefore, for most of its history in this period, the Roman state was not much of an “empire”. Even in those phases, the size of unassimilated ethnic minorities was probably not so great in relation to the Roman population that it necessarily tilted the balance toward “empire” as the primary category that we should be using. To be sure, historians have not found a minimum threshold ratio of ethnic diversity for a state to qualify as an empire, nor have they sought one. But generally speaking Byzantium usually lay closer to the national state end of the spectrum (as Romanía), though it made occasional forays in a more imperial direction (as the hegemony of the Romans over others). All states, including nation-states, are multiethnic. The standard for empire is found in the regimes of difference by which nonruling groups are governed. In Romanía, there is evidence for assimilation and inclusion as well as for intolerance, persecution, second-class citizenship, guest-elite status, grudging toleration, and differential access to power.
Now that we have a working model of ethnicity and empire we can begin to write the history of Byzantium along these lines, as historians have long been doing for other empires. But to study the management of difference, we have to first be able to “see” the ethnoreligious distinctions on which it was based. This, in turn, requires that we recognize the Romans as a group distinct from the rest, as in fact they are consistently presented in all the sources, both Byzantine and foreign.
It also requires that we discard notions of immutable ethnicity, or race, which retain a hold on Byzantine Studies due to the claims pressed by nationalist schools of historiography and the field’s own unreconstructed view of ethnicity, which predates the mid-twentieth century.
In most fields of research since then, ethnicity is understood as mutable, as a cultural artifact produced by societal change, not something that inheres in biologically defined groups. Historians of Byzantium in particular have to accept this approach for two reasons. First, ever since antiquity foreign groups and individuals who entered the empire could assimilate and become Roman, discarding their former identities or retaining only symbolic traces of them. Ro- manness was a cultural-political identity that could on occasion represent itself through largely symbolic narratives of shared ancestry. By assimilating to its institutions, foreigners could make themselves part of those narratives of belonging. And second, the very existence of Romanía itself was the product of ethnic change among the eastern subjects of the ancient Roman empire. It emerged from specific processes at a particular time in history, and likewise later disappeared. There are now no more eastern Romans. But that does not authorize us to deny that they ever existed.
At the same time, I would caution against the extreme use of “fluidity” for studying ethnicity. In fields that have accepted the paradigm of ethnic change, it has become fashionable in some quarters to treat ethnicity as infinitely malleable, negotiated and renegotiated on a daily or instantaneous basis, and ultimately as an evanescent or unreal social artifact. One can allegedly wake up in a Serbian household, play the Greek in the marketplace in the morning, then switch to an Albanian persona at a wedding in the evening, pray at a Muslim shrine, and correspond with Jewish relatives at night. I suspect that such models reflect the ideals and hopes of late modern liberalism and are inherently political. They are a misleading and even fictional basis for studying historical ethnicities, which are not that easy to perform in a native way. Most people can manage only one in a convincing way, two at most. Truly “fluid” people are extremely rare. Moreover, ethnicities are social and not individual constructs, and, if they survive for a significant period, are deeply grounded in the maintenance among a large group of narratives, institutions, and specific markers such as language. These are hard to change. It can happen, but it takes time, effort, powerful incentives, or a dramatic change of circumstances. If we must use the metaphor, the “fluid” in question is more like honey, tar, or glue, and less like water or blood. If you doubt this, go to any group with a fairly well-defined identity and try to change its narrative about itself.
The Romans of Byzantium did come into being and did go extinct, but both events were processes that lasted for centuries and were precipitated by conquest, incentives, and dramatic historical change on either end. In between, however, they kept their Romanness together for over a thousand years through the maintenances of their narratives, institutions, and specific culture. Now, a group of this size that names its homeland, state, language, common culture, and monarch after itself is what we call a nation. This has significant implications. One set of implications has to do with Byzantine history as a national narrative. Consider, for example, the reaction of the Romans to the loss of their capital in 1204 and the dismemberment of their polity. That reaction in all ways refutes the attenuated and anemic versions of Roman identity served up by the denialist tradition, while conversely it exactly matches what we would expect of an ethnic group deprived through aggression of its national state. The language of ethnic and even racial difference between Romans and others is pervasive in this period. Moreover, the Romans could recognize each other across the lines of the different and competing states that they set up in the aftermath of 1204: they knew who was Roman, independent of statehood. They were, moreover, insistent on reclaiming and restoring their lost homeland, by which they meant more than just Constantinople. Also, they did not have an “Orthodox” state in mind, as the Bulgarians and Vlachs were among their major opponents. All these elements of ethnicity did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1204. They had been there all along and were only amplified now by outrage and loss.
The second set of implications is more theoretical and points to a need for more research on the formation and subsistence of premodern national states. Many historians are slowly but surely rejecting the modernist doctrine, which avers that only modern developments (e.g., telegraphs, newspapers, industry, and universal schooling) can create nation-states. I intend to situate Romanía within the growing rejection of this doctrine in a separate book, which will focus, beyond ethnicity, on institutions and governmentality. …
… It remains then to show in detail how the institutions and public ideology of the state could create, sustain, reflect, or be enmeshed with the Romanness of the majority of its subjects. Through what mechanisms did Romanía constitute itself as a national state, and by what channels was governmentality disseminated? Were average Romans so oppressed by their own elites, as some believe, that there could be no meaningful community of interest between them, or was Romanía a state whose existence and extraordinary survival required the efforts and attachment of an entire people and not just the short-term ambitions of a narrow elite? [END]
The Source:
Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland, Harvard University Press 2019
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