Warren Treadgold

Photius Before His Patriarchate

Photius (patriarch of Constantinople 858–67, 877–86) was born c. 813. His father Sergius, a wealthy official, was exiled along with Photius for opposing Iconoclasm, evidently in 833. During this exile, which lasted until 842, Photius read voraciously. Later, probably in 845, he catalogued his reading in his Bibliotheca . Yet Photius composed neither the Bibliotheca nor his other pre-858 work as formal scholarly literature, for which the contemporary audience was exiguous. Indeed he found no satisfactory use for his talents as the leading scholar of his time until he was rewarded for his learning with the patriarchate.

Standardized Numbers in the Byzantine Army

Many of the statistics that appear in sources for Byzantine armies and their pay show a pattern of roundness and uniformity. While some scholars have taken this as evidence that the statistics are unreliable, the consistency of the pattern indicates that the Byzantine army, like the Roman army, deliberately preferred standardized numbers. Such standardization offered great advantages in mustering, deploying, and paying a large and well-organized force without the help of modern methods of record keeping. Other medieval armies, and the Byzantine army after the eleventh century, did without such standardization because they were smaller and more loosely organized.

The Dark Age

No contemporary Byzantine historian recorded the empire’s seventh-century crisis. The reason was not simply that Byzantine readers were few, because Byzantines wrote a number of sermons, saints’ lives, and theological works during this time.1 The reason was not even that a history of these years would have been unpleasant to read, because the empire’s surviving so many calamities was actually a remarkable achievement. Unresolved crises, however, have always caused problems for contemporary historians. As long as the Byzantines were unsure whether their empire would prosper or founder, they were unable to decide whether to celebrate its merits or to decry the sins for which God had punished it. As long as they harbored similar doubts about their current emperor’s ultimate success, they were unsure whether to praise or condemn him. If they wrote about the contemporary Church without knowing which of two rival doctrines would prevail, they feared that they might be unintentionally endorsing a heresy or denouncing saints. Most actual or potential historians therefore preferred to postpone writing about a war until it was over, about an emperor until he died, or about a disputed doctrine until an ecumenical council had taken a clear position on it.

Book Review: The Byzantine Art of War by Michael J. Decker

A general book on Byzantine warfare, while desirable, is difficult to write in the present state of research. Studies of Byzantine military manuals and military technology have avoided general questions, and studies of the Byzantine army as an institution have disagreed about the army’s role in the state and economy. The late Michael Hendy and I have summarized the evidence at different dates for the army’s numbers and pay, concluding that the loss of the empire’s richest provinces to the Arabs in the mid-seventh century would speedily have forced replacement of much of the army’s cash pay with the military land grants attested later. R.-J. Lilie and John Haldon have declared that such evidence is unreliable, and conjectured that the military land grants evolved gradually over a period of two centuries, during which the empire paid its soldiers mostly with requisitioned supplies. Hendy and I have conjectured that the military land grants were taken from state land, which comprised up to a fifth of the empire in the sixth century but scarcely anything after the seventh, but Lilie and Haldon cannot reconcile their neoMarxist views with the idea that the empire survived through a form of ‘privatisation’ – by distributing state land to individual soldiers. As they realize, however, they can only be right if most of our recorded statistics for military numbers and pay are much too high, because these indicate that the empire faced a massive fiscal crisis in the mid-seventh century that the command economy they postulate would simply have aggravated. Such is the discordant scholarship that Michael Decker tries to summarize ‘for a nonspecialist audience and students of military history’ (p. ix). Decker’s book has eight chapters. The ‘Historical Overview’ is inevitably rapid, and novices may find it hard to follow. The chapter on ‘Leadership’ rightly emphasizes the importance of Byzantium’s most talented commanders, such as Belisarius and John Tzimisces. In ‘Organization, Recruitment, and Training’ Decker at first (pp. 78–9) mentions without comment the disparity between Haldon’s estimate for the tagmata (4,000 men) and the Arab statistics I accept (24,000 men); then (pp. 79–80) he adopts an organization that presupposes the second figure, without noting that the sixfold difference would determine whether the tagmata were what Haldon calls ‘Praetorians’ or (as I believe) a centralized mobile army. Decker realizes that the emperor Constans II ‘probably replaced 547299WIH0010.1177/0968344514547299War in HistoryBook Reviews research-article2014

George Syncellus and Theophanes Confessor

When George Syncellus began writing his world chronicle in 808, the dark age of Byzantine historiography was already over, along with the military, political, religious, and economic emergency that had lasted through most of the seventh and eighth centuries. Twenty-odd years after the abolition of Iconoclasm in 787, iconophiles had made important progress in education and scholarship, even if their success in writing elegant literature had been less striking. Nicephorus I (802-11) was proving to be an energetic and talented emperor, under whom Byzantine soldiers and settlers had reclaimed most of Greece and Thrace from the Slavs. After the last outbreaks of the bubonic plague had ceased in the mid-eighth century, the Byzantine population and economy had begun to expand strongly, and both Church and state shared in the general prosperity.

The Official Histories of Constantine Porphyrogenitus

The reign of Romanus I Lecapenus (920-44), although it was a time of growing prosperity and military success, apparently failed to attract contemporary historians. A poorly educated man of humble origins, Romanus had little interest in patronizing literature. Potential historians, who typically preferred not to record a reign until they knew how it would end, faced problems under Romanus even if they wanted to record earlier times. His predecessor was Constantine VII (913-20), whom Romanus had displaced as both senior emperor and heir apparent after he made his own eldest son, Christopher, the ranking junior emperor. Yet Constantine still held the imperial title. He was married to Romanus’ daughter, had crowned Romanus in the first place, and had an hereditary right to the throne, even after he was declared a bastard when his father’s fourth marriage was condemned. He also enjoyed enough popular support that he was eventually able to take power. Thus contemporary historians risked Romanus’ displeasure if they wrote about Constantine and his dynasty too favorably but also if they wrote too unfavorably, or indeed if they wrote anything at all that reminded readers of Romanus’ ambiguous situation. While the aging maverick Nicetas the Paphlagonian could ignore such concerns when he wrote in retirement around 921, any ambitious writer in Constantinople had to contend with them. Only after Constantine’s restoration as senior emperor in 945 did aspiring historians know where they stood.

Nicephorus Bryennius and Anna Comnena

The momentous reign of Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118) was a promising subject for a dramatic narrative. Alexius left the empire larger, richer, and stronger than it had been at his accession, even if smaller, poorer, and weaker than it had been ten years before his accession. At the worst of the military emergency, early in Alexius’ reign, Byzantium had been in real danger of complete disintegration; but Alexius recovered almost everything that the empire had lost in the Balkans, as well as the most fertile and populous part of Anatolia. He also restored the stability of the Byzantine coinage, though not its full purity, and under him the Byzantine economy recovered from the disruptions caused by the Seljuk and Norman invasions. Since the mid-eleventh century, when the empire had enjoyed clear dominance over the eastern Mediterranean, it had acquired some troublesome new neighbors—the Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, the Crusader states in Syria and Palestine, and the Norman state in Sicily and southern Italy—but none of these was as strong as Alexius’ Byzantium. Better still, the empire remained stable, strong, and prosperous during the long reigns of Alexius’ son and grandson. While Alexius might have done more—especially by increasing the size of the army and retaking the rest of Anatolia—he achieved a great deal.

Anna Comnena’s Contemporaries

In the middle of the twelfth century, after an interval of comparative quiescence, Byzantine historiography regained its vigor. Before Nicephorus Bryennius died leaving his history unfinished, in 1138, Byzantine writers had produced only two histories over more than fifty years: the world chronicles by John Scylitzes and George Cedrenus, who say nothing about the reigns of the two emperors under whom they wrote. By contrast, during the fifty years beginning with 1138, seven histories appeared, including those of Bryennius and Anna Comnena. Three of these were world chronicles, but six dealt partly or entirely with contemporary events. Moreover, to judge from the number of our surviving manuscripts, the three world chronicles were among the most popular of the whole Byzantine period. All seven histories were substantial works, and one of them was the longest to be written in middle Byzantine times. Thus Byzantine historians and readers of history seem to have been relatively abundant during this prosperous, momentous, and ultimately disastrous period.

Historians under Leo the Wise

In the last quarter of the ninth century, during a period when both education and literature in general were recovering, Byzantine historiography seems to have been briefly interrupted.1 The long, unedifying, and inconclusive controversy over the patriarchates of Ignatius and Photius would have made an intractable topic for any writer who wanted not to offend powerful people. Because Basil I had murdered Michael III but had been adopted by him, and Leo VI thought Michael was his father but had to pretend he was Basil’s son, historians under Leo were unsure how to treat either Basil or Michael.2 While almost everyone agreed that the restoration of icons in 843 had been a splendid triumph, subsequent events took a less favorable turn. The empire did win some victories over the Arabs and Paulicians in Anatolia, but these were overshadowed by the Arab conquest of Syracuse in 878, losses to the Bulgarians between 894 and 896, and the Arab sack of Thessalonica in 904. Although Leo VI (886-912) later acquired the epithet “the Wise,” his reign seemed particularly contentious and unsuccessful. Although none of the reverses that the empire suffered was truly devastating, they were too important to ignore completely in any full-scale history. Historians therefore had to choose between recording both the good and the bad, giving prominence to the bad, or writing on restricted subjects. Thus nobody wrote a history of the twenty-six years of Leo’s reign as such, but several historians wrote about parts of it or included it as part of a more comprehensive history.

Historians of the Age of Expansion

In retrospect, the years roughly from 950 to 1050 were a Byzantine century, when Byzantium became the greatest power in the Western world and a promising subject for its historians to celebrate. Yet contemporaries often fail to see which advances or setbacks are temporary and which represent lasting change. If today we may be too ready to believe that whatever has just happened will transform the future, the Byzantines, conservative by tradition and used to a far slower pace of change than ours, were more likely to overlook the significance of new events than to exaggerate it. Of course they saw and welcomed their victories over the Arabs and the increasing quiescence of the Bulgarians after 925; but the Arabs and Bulgarians had suffered defeats before yet recovered to attack the empire, and soon they did recover under the Fatimids and the Cometopuli. Certainly the Byzantines realized that their state had become quite strong and prosperous; but it had been quite strong and prosperous for some time, and was nonetheless weaker and poorer than it had been in late antiquity, as all educated Byzantines knew. Only in the later part of the tenth century did many Byzantines begin to see that the empire’s fortunes had taken a decisive turn for the better.