transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Hello, everyone, and welcome to The History of Byzantium, episode 350, questions 19. Today, we continue looking at listener questions. These are somewhat timeless inquiries. Listener VA asks why teenage emperors in the earlier Roman period, Caligula, Nero, Elagabalus, Commodus, turned out to be terrible people, while Byzantium produced a series of teenagers like Constans II, Constantine IV, and Theophilus, who turned into mature adult emperors. I suspect I've answered a variation of this before. Why do we have very few mad bad emperors in Byzantium? The first part of the answer is that for the Julio-Claudians, the whole concept of the emperor was new. It wasn't yet clear what an emperor was, or what limits should be placed on their power. Augustus worked very hard to make it clear that he wasn't a king, and yet some of his successors felt they were, and acted accordingly. Elagabalus and Commodus came centuries later, but in general, most emperors after the Julio-Claudians are better behaved than Caligula and Nero. Then I think Christianity plays a big part in better behaved emperors. You could argue that that's because of improved moral behaviour, by insisting on more obvious virtues, like humility and forgiveness. But I also think Christianity just imposed a stricter sense of ceremony on all those involved. The looser framework of the pagan world gave earlier emperors more freedom to create their own court. Whereas once you have to be at church on time, and have to pay respect to certain physical items and spaces within the building, then your behaviour is hemmed in. Both Commodus and Elagabalus wanted to dramatically change things about political and religious life in a way that's just hard to imagine in a Christian system. An emperor who openly rejected Christianity would be one who was committing a sacrilegious act that instantly delegitimised him in a way that wasn't the same in the pagan world. A few more things to consider. The bureaucracy at Constantinople was much more organised than that earlier period of the empire, giving later emperors stricter guidance on how to behave and what they could and couldn't do. And I think the decline in Roman power also plays a role in this. There's a sense with Caligula that he runs the world and can do anything he likes, and a failed policy isn't going to change the empire's fate. By the time Constantinople is founded, the Roman world is already living in a post-crisis of the third century reality, where the borders are always under pressure. And so there's less room for outlandish policies that could damage the fabric of the state. And finally, the mechanisms for overthrowing an emperor are better established by the Byzantine period, meaning the Vasilevsk is much more responsive to public opinion, and mad policies are likelier to start a riot rather than be obeyed out of fear. Listener VA asks another perennial question. Would the emperors have broadly known who their predecessors were and what they got up to? If we assume Constantine XI had a top-notch education and perhaps a personal interest in history, would he have known who Michael VIII was? What would he have known of, say, Alexios Komnenos, or Basil II, or Constantine V, or Heraclius, or Hadrian? What about less well-known figures like Michael Ragaway? What would the emperor have known of the past history of his office? Sorry, I paused there because it's been so long since I've said Michael Ragaway. I can't even remember if that's how you pronounce his name. He is the son of Nysaphorus I, who gets a spinal injury during the route after the Battle of Pliska. Poor thing. And is emperor for, I don't know, a week or two before dying. Anyway, so I think the answer to Listener VA's question very much involves the part of your question where you said, top-notch education and personal interest in history. I think those are the key elements there. We mentioned Michael Pselos in our last episode, the amazing polymath of the 11th century. And we saw how he had read all the previous histories of the Macedonian period. So he knew all about the murky rise of Basil I. Men like Pselos would have known who all those previous emperors that you mentioned were. He might not remember Michael Ragovet off the top of his head, but he would have read about the Battle of Pliska in passing. So educated Romans had access to world chronicles. Essentially, history books compiled in Constantinople that told the history of the world from Adam all the way to the present day. This would summarize things like the Peloponnesian War and Alexander the Great, before a quick run through of all major Roman figures, you know, from Cincinatus to Fabius the Delayer to Julius Caesar to Hadrian to all the rulers of Constantinople. Now, of course, most educated men probably read a text like that once, and so wouldn't remember all those obscure names and reigns. Their education steered them towards the classics, so they might know more about Achilles and Pericles than about more recent figures. Those with an interest in history would then read the actual dedicated histories of secular periods, so Procopius and Celos and Cognates. So, Manuel Palaiologos, the father of Constantine XI, who was very literary, he probably would have known who all those figures you mentioned were, except probably for Michael Ragovet. Let's assume Constantine XI wasn't as scholarly as his father, and go through the emperors you mentioned. Would he have known who Michael VIII Palaiologos was? Yes, that was his great-great-great-great-grandfather. But more importantly, he was the man who retook Constantinople from the Latins, and would have been known as such in popular memory. Alexios Komnenos? Yes, I think so. As we saw in our Trebizond episode, the Komnenian dynasty there remembered their origins well, and so Constantine would have been aware of the Komnenoi, and that Alexios was the big sort of founder of that dynasty, without necessarily knowing all the details of his reign. What about Basil II? Maybe. This is trickier because it would have been four centuries removed, and Basil was not a great builder or patron of the arts. In other words, objects around the capital that would remind you of an emperor. But he might be known as the Bulgar Slayer in popular memory still. It's also worth remembering that Michael VIII found Basil's skeleton and re-buried it. Seemingly, Latins or possibly locals had looted his sarcophagus in the church by the Hebdomen, the Imperial Parade Grounds. So that might have brought it, again, closer to Constantine's day in terms of memory. Constantine V seems much less likely to me. Constantine XI might have read about his reign in passing, but equally he may not have, and there was no particular reason to remember him in the 15th century. Heraclius, maybe he was still remembered in the popular imagination because of his association with the restoration of the True Cross, but the details of his reign probably weren't relevant to Constantine XI. Hadrian, again, might have been known in passing because he was such a prolific builder, and Michael Ragavé too obscure for anyone to remember. So the brief answer to your question is that information did exist in 1453. An interested person could absolutely have discovered all of that. But, you know, I would ask whether you know all the American presidents or the British prime ministers. I couldn't tell you that I do, and I'm into history. I certainly couldn't put them in order, though obviously I would be better informed than most people. And I think it's worth remembering that anyone listening to this, you are very into history compared to the average person. Now, you might say, well, a Roman emperor should be interested in history, but not all politicians are interested in the history of their state or of politics, you know. So we shouldn't assume emperors would know all about their predecessors, even though they could. I think the average emperor probably just knew the sort of broad sweep. So Romulus, Caesar, Constantine, Justinian, and then obviously the five or ten emperors before them that they had some kind of collective living memory of. And I'm sure they'd all heard of lots of other names, but couldn't necessarily put them in order, as we just discussed. We certainly know from the accounts of tourists to Constantinople that the average tour guide or man in the street who, you know, guided them for money had only that level of trivia and misunderstood who various statues were or who'd built certain buildings. Listener GW asks whether the Romans ever attempted to attack the herds of nomadic people who invaded the empire. In other words, fighting step people is always difficult because of their speed, but why not target the livestock who their lifestyle depends on? Listener GW does acknowledge the practical difficulties of this, but wants to know if anyone tried it. So I don't remember this coming up in the sources. There are a number of practical problems with it. The main one being that step people would doubtless be standing between you and their animals. Listener GW suggests that if the enemy are in Roman territory, so the Turks or the Pechenegs, for example, then the Romans could have men behind the walls of nearby towns who could do this while the main army lures the nomads away. I think a couple of things probably prevented this. One is that combined action like that was extremely hard to organise. And how many men would you need in a town like that to make the plan effective? Another thing is that I suspect local Romans would have stolen the animals for themselves rather than just hack them down. And I mean that seriously. The animals are money. Strategically, attacking the herds wouldn't have always made sense. So in the case of, say, the Turks in Anatolia, I think it would have been pointless, since it's such a big place that though it could damage an individual tribe, and they might leave an area, it wouldn't make much difference to the overall strategic situation, as in they would just go and find more animals or buy more animals or try to steal animals off their neighbouring tribe. But I see your point. The Roman army did think about how to defeat steppe tribes. The advice of the strategic arm was to fight them out of season, when the grass wasn't thick, and therefore they would struggle to maintain their herd of horses. You know, one of the things that made steppe tribes so hard to fight was that they would run their horses ragged, then go back to their camp and get a fresh horse. And so that's why the strategic arm is kind of saying, you know, disable that aspect. You know, if there isn't enough grass to maintain a herd, they will be limited in where they can fight and how. The closest I can come to an example that fits the spirit of your question is when Maurice sent troops across the Danube to attack the Avars in their home base. An attack that was largely successful, since it caught the nomads by surprise, and presumably they had to defend their animals and were struggling to maneuver. I suppose practically as well, it's worth saying that the Romans did occasionally employ kind of scorched earth policy in areas where they were attempting to deny nomads the resources they needed to keep invading. So one example would be in the Dobruja, the land just south of the Danube where steppe tribes, of course, constantly crossed. And there were various periods where the Romans tried to leave the fields there fallow and kind of remove settlers to deny the nomads resources that they could then use on their way further south into Thrace. So it's not quite attacking their herds, but making the landscape less hospitable for them to travel across. Sadly, there's no story of Roman troops actually ambushing sheep in the highlands in order to defeat the Pechenegs, but it's a nice thought. Listener L asks, Where did the Byzantines get all their gold? I understand that it was circulating amongst the population, but there seemed to be many ways for gold to exit the system and few for it to enter. For example, Balkan provinces who paid tax in kind and didn't pay any cash, or tribute payments made to foreign enemies and steppe tribes over the centuries, or mercenaries like the Varangian Guard serving for pay and then taking their wealth home with them. Plus, the Romans seemed to have few export items other than silk and manufactured products while importing lots of other goods. So this whole question of money and of trade has been a perennial question across the course of the podcast. And I understand why it causes confusion, and maybe I haven't helped with some of my answers. You know, lots of listeners thinking with a modern hat on or even with a medieval one, think, you know, surely trade is the way that gold, you know, the Romans became rich, and gold entered the system. And then obviously I've talked about how the Romans did not prioritize trade, and it wasn't seen as an elite activity. And I think basically this is to do with our source base. So trading, because it's not a valued activity amongst the elites, it doesn't appear much in our sources. You know, our sources are concerned with war and politics. That's where men make a real name for themselves. What we don't hear is about how a leading general, you know, went home after the war and dealt with the lands that they'd acquired or used the cash they'd earned to buy more land and what they did with their produce and who they sold it to. The reality is that the Byzantines sold goods just like every other human being on the planet always has. People aimed to buy more land, to grow more things, to sell them, to make money, to become rich, or just richer. So in that sense, obviously the way gold enters the system is the Romans selling stuff to other people. The fact that it wasn't a particular concern of the state, I think reflects the fact that for most of its existence, the Roman Empire is a very large place. Now if you're Venice and you have very little land, then trade becomes an overriding priority. Whereas if you have borders in Syria and on the Danube, then you don't get overly concerned with trade as like a need of the state, because you just assume that enterprising provincials will be trading at the border, and that at big cities like Thessaloniki and Constantinople, people will come to buy things and obviously to sell things. So your concern is more just to capture some of that activity in tax revenue. You're not... you don't need to have policies that push trade. So, as I say, you know, listeners perhaps are surprised when I've pointed out that trade was not how Constantinople grew rich. It was through taxing its citizens. But of course, a lot of those citizens generated revenue through trade. So maybe I should have been more explicit about that. So, obviously, it depends where you live. If you live nowhere near the borders or the sea, then your trade will be internal with other Romans or the state. You're selling food to them or products that you make or services that you offer. And then you're using the money that you make to pay your taxes. And so the gold circulates. But if you live near the borders or you live near some kind of foreign or outsider group, who live in the mountains maybe, or you live near a big city, or you live on a trading road or a route where middlemen can buy things from you, then you are involved in selling things that will generate money outside of the empire and bring gold into the system. So the most basic purchases were food. Grain, livestock, fruit, wine, cheese, oil were all sold to other nations. A bad harvest in one region led to demand for products from the neighbouring region or the nearest place that had a good harvest. Or obviously, there are lots of communities who can't produce wine or cheese or oil, so they have to buy them from another. Nomads are a good example for people who need all sorts of products that require a settled civilisation to produce, that require furnaces and workshops and logistics. And obviously, the steppe tribes bring their own products from their herds to trade or to sell to make money to buy the products they need. And obviously, cities always need grain to feed their populations because they can't produce them, can't produce food within their walls. And then there are lots of other materials that the Romans sold. So, timber, metal, linen, wool, alum. And you mentioned manufactured goods, weapons, sales, books, icons, furniture, jewellery, clothes, ceramics. All of this was produced for export everywhere. Obviously, the larger the empire was, the more internal the trade was. But then you're up against Persia and the Indian Ocean trade when you're a large state. Then as the empire gets smaller and smaller, more and more of your trade will be external. Some goods were made in government workshops, like weapons. And obviously, silk is the main export we know of because it was so expensive that it could be used as part of payments to officials and gifts to foreign dignitaries. Another way the Romans brought money into the system was mining. You know, either state-owned mining operations or private enterprises that were taxed. Iron was available all over the mountains of Anatolia and the Balkans. Copper was found on Cyprus and in the Pontic and Caucasus mountains. Some silver was found in Attica and on Cyprus, and plenty more came from Armenia. Gold was occasionally found in the mountains of the southern Balkans. You know, lots of this had been mined centuries earlier, but occasionally someone would find a new deposit. In terms of regions that paid tax in kind, those goods and food were used to pay and feed state officials and soldiers. So that saved the government money, and eventually all those areas were turned into cash economies. As for tribute paid to foreign enemies, this did cause anxiety in imperial circles, because you're sending crates and crates of coins off to the Avars or whoever. But some of that money immediately comes back, because these are steppe tribes, and so they may use those coins to buy things from Roman markets, especially luxury goods, if they've just been paid tribute. And of course, the Romans did do their own conquering at periods we've covered and were paid tribute themselves. And of course, any war you fight will generate slaves who can then be sold for profit. So gold did have plenty of ways of entering Byzantium, as well as exiting, even without the government having a global trading strategy. And perhaps it is our focus on elite concerns and the state that has led to me underemphasizing the role of trade. It just was a private concern and regionally specific, and so it hasn't come up as a major element of state policy. The final point to make about Roman gold is the coinage itself. So plenty of peoples and even states that we've covered didn't have their own currency. And even those that did rarely had a gold currency as trusted as the Roman Solidus or Nomisma. You know, most states just didn't have the infrastructure and the reserves which the Romans had to control the weight and the content and the quality of their coins in the same way. So this gave the Romans a structural advantage in the Eastern Mediterranean and further afield. Their currency was trusted. It became an international standard. Merchants and foreign governments would prefer to be paid in the Byzantine currency since it was so trusted. This meant that Roman coins were hoarded and valued. They would survive outside of the empire for centuries and might return. Crucially, this demand shaped behaviour. Merchants were drawn towards Roman markets because that was where they could reliably earn this trusted currency. And that helped to pull goods and trade towards the empire. Listener TCOJA asks another classic question. Why did France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. keep their Latin-based language, but not, say, Dalmatia? Why no Latin Yugoslavia? For that matter, why aren't there any derived languages from Greek as there are romance languages derived from Latin? And how the hell did the Romanians come out of all this speaking a romance language? He's brilliantly captured a bunch of key questions in one paragraph, so thank you for that. The easier one to answer is the differences between the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern. When the Goths, Franks, and Vandals took over the West, they were large armies with their families following them. But we're talking about, say, a group of 80,000 people who came to be the governing class of areas with millions of people in them. So obviously the linguistic weight of their subjects' demography pushed them into adopting the local language rather than vice versa. And they had no religious or cultural need, as the Arabs did to maintain their traditional tongue. It was easier to adapt and benefit from smoother political and economic interactions, which followed when everyone spoke the same language. The situation in the Balkans was quite different. It's a much smaller place geographically compared to the whole of Western Europe and it's much more fragmented by mountains. So even before the Slavs arrived, there were those who lived a pastoral life with homes in the mountains who spoke differently from those living in Roman cities, even if the root language was Latin or Greek at the time. Slavic migration begins during Justinian's reign and then floods over the region during Heraclius' war with the Persians. With no Roman armies to oppose them, the door is open and Slavic tribes migrate in and begin to dominate many regions. Lots of Roman towns are eventually abandoned, and most people with money just leave and head for coastal enclaves like Dereachium or Monumvesia or Constantinople itself. What we see then is whole regions, like Dalmatia, slowly emptied of Latin and Greek speakers, either through people leaving or those who stay adapting to the local Slavic tongues which become dominant. And since those regions tend to be boxed in by mountains, there isn't a flow of new people arriving to threaten the new normal. The Roman state in Constantinople, of course, survives, which slowly affects those left behind who speak Greek still, reincorporating them into the empire. So this further encourages those who speak Greek to migrate south into territories that are safe for Roman civilization, which further divides the Balkans into Slavic areas and Roman areas. So that's why Greek doesn't form Romance languages, as it were, derived languages from Greek, because Slavic takes over and there isn't political or demographic resistance to Slavic dominance. And it's also worth saying that Constantinople's survival means that the Greek language maintains a certain consistency and doesn't divide into local vernacular tongues, which it could have done in further away places. So, it's just a kind of geographic and demographic difference, really, between Eastern and Western Europe. And of course, large Greek-speaking areas that are lost to the Arabs and then the Turks do not recover because Islamic civilization comes with those invaders, and it maintains the need to speak Arabic, and eventually comes, you know, the Turks come with Persian civilization attached. So, it comes with its own ideological commitment to different languages, which the German invasions did not. Anyway, the trickier question to answer is, how do the Romanians survive, or, you know, the people who then became modern Romanians, as a Romance-speaking group, despite all the, you know, 1800 years between the first Roman settlers north of the Danube and the modern era? So, this one's really odd because, so the territory we're talking about is just north of the Danube. So, that's where every step tribe under the sun seems to have come through into our narrative. So, the Avars, the Khazars, the Magyars, the Pechenegs, the Cumans have all ruled that area and used it to cross over into the Balkans. The Rus tried to hold sway there briefly. The Magyars become the Hungarians just over the mountains to the west. So, you think that might have influenced the people there. The Bulgarians, of course, controlled the lands just up to the Danube for long periods. So, you might think there'd be some Bulgarian influence. So, it seems completely bizarre that the ordinary people of this region could have maintained a Latin based language given to them by the settlers under Trajan a millennium earlier. And yet, that seems to be what happened. How can we explain this? Obviously, I'm not a Romanian historian, nor is this my area, but it seems that the land of Romania contains both mountains and forests and is therefore hard to control as is much of the Balkans to the south. So, we must assume that the steppe tribes who dominated the area politically did not attempt to displace or culturally dominate the people's living there, simply trading with them or taxing them depending on the situation. The nomads, of course, didn't bring written language or complex administration that might have attempted to convert or control these people. So, we must assume it's that these people lived in a sort of semi-steppe land area, moving about the highlands away from the nomads who dominated the plains to the south and maintained friendly relations with them. Much of the local Romanian population, as it were, they weren't called that yet, lived a sort of semi-nomadic lifestyle, spread across the hills and the mountains, and kept their language to themselves. We saw something similar briefly in our episodes on Trebizond when talking about the Crimea. There are groups of Goths still live there, a millennium after they first settled there, and still speaking a version of the Gothic language. And then closer to home, we see the Vlachs and the Albanians in the Balkans, living largely in the highlands and avoiding domination from the cities to the south. So we must assume that the culture survived in what's now Romania for centuries and centuries and centuries, without a settled people trying to change them. I didn't really talk about this on the podcast, but right at the end of our narrative, the Wallachians appear on the political stage. And these were politically organized groups from what is now Romania, and they were usually fighting against the Ottomans in the last few crusades in the 1400s. Their emergence as a settled community, with its own armies, was made possible by the Mongol domination of the steppe. You know, the Mongols brought all the steppe tribes under their political authority, and tried to control them and discipline them. And then, the Mongol empire itself broke into different parts, and the Golden Horde were the branch who controlled the area north of the Black Sea. And so, by the 1400s, their control over outlying provinces was weaker. So, the Wallachians, you know, future Romanians, were able to form political entities for the first time, or the first time that appears in our sources anyway, because the Steppe tribes were under control by the Golden Horde, but the Golden Horde was losing control of the edges of its territory. And with the Ottomans threatening to cross the Danube, there was an incentive for people like the Wallachians to join forces with the Hungarians and the Bulgarians to fight against Muslim encroachment. So, yes, amazingly, a Romance-language-based state emerged hundreds and hundreds of miles from its cousins, thanks to its geographical isolation. Finally, listener TCOJA also wants to know more about polo, or zykanion, as the Byzantines called it. Looking at a map of Constantinople, you can't help but notice just how much prime real estate is devoted to the zykanisterion, or polo grounds. At least two emperors died from playing polo. I assume it was exclusively for rich folks. Was it considered a martial sport similar to jousting? How many spectators do we think watched one of these games? Where else was it played and by home? And how did it filter down to modern rich people and their polo grounds? So first off, I'm not aware of emperors dying from playing polo. I know there's a popular story that the emperor Alexander, brother of Leo VI, died from exhaustion after over-exerting himself on the polo field. But as far as I'm aware, more sober historians suggest he just died from illness. There are certainly some recorded injuries. I believe Tartikios fell on Alexios Komnenos, according to Anakomneni. And it was certainly possible to get badly injured playing. But I can only think of Theodosius II, Basil I, and John II Komnenos dying from hunting injuries rather than Polo. But you'll have to remind me if I've missed someone. Anyway, Polo's origins are in Persia, which had a long history of elite horsemanship. They have their own plateau in Persia, so being dominant on the horse was key to elite life and political control. So they've invented this game that you play with sticks and a ball, and requires sort of nomad-esque skills of holding your saddle with one hand while you lean right out to smack the ball around. And the Byzantines seem to have adopted the game around the 4th century AD. Theodosius II may be the man who constructed the Polo ground on one of the terraces of the great palace in Constantinople. Our knowledge of the actual layout of the palace is speculative. We don't have the sources to be 100% certain about where certain buildings were or how long they were in use, but we assume large areas were outdoor spaces for gardens and park land. And certainly, a polo ground was there and would have required a large chunk of space. Polo is a game for the aristocracy. You know, the logistics of running a game, of having the space and marking out the court, and then obviously having stables full of horses and manufacturing specific gear for people to play with and play in. It's an elite pastime. It's not hard to see why the Byzantines loved it, because elite Roman men would already be horsey people because they have to serve in the cavalry, and because hunting is so popular as a sort of pseudo sport amongst aristocrats. So polo now provides a literal sport where teams could develop tactics and men could display their riding skills to one another. It's very much a court-based game because of the resources required to run the game and run it over time and to have elite men all gathered in one place where they can train. I imagine they're playing these games just for the court, or maybe the wider aristocracy gather on special occasions. We have no record of any kind of competition or annual event or any sense that these games were ever put on for mass entertainment. They couldn't have been staged in the Hippodrome because the spina, the spine around which the chariots raced was a fixed obstacle that would have been in the way of a polo game. So to answer your specific questions, jousting seems to me a bit different, at least in the popular imagination. Jousting is about personal competition between individuals with crowds and courage to watch. We don't really know how jousting functioned in Byzantium. We hear about friendly jousting competitions, particularly once Latin troops are a regular feature of imperial life. But, you know, we know of one competition that Manuel Comiños took part in personally. So we can only assume that lances were blunted, and that the competition was not cutthroat on that occasion anyway. So as far as we know, polo is a bit removed from jousting. It only takes place amongst elites at the court. And it's not a sport that can be enjoyed by the wider public. And perhaps it's just too dangerous to have all your elite men trying to outdo each other for a large crowd, and things turning violent, and so on. In terms of the connection between Byzantine polo and the modern day, this is not my area of expertise. I have not done any independent research on this, but a quick Google tells me that the game passes from Persia to India, and that it is the British who rediscover it when they take over India, and then obviously pass it to the rest of Western Europe. But someone out there may know better than me. That's it for today. We have one more batch of listener questions to go through before we move on to other topics. And while you're waiting for that, why not listen to some episodes of the History of Venice podcast? I know lots of you have questions about Venice and its rise to prominence in our narrative, and I can thoroughly recommend the show. I was recently interviewed by Simon and Jess alongside Marco Capelli about the Fourth Crusade. Check out episode 57 to hear that. I think you'll really enjoy it. In it, I compared Latin treatment of the Byzantines to the Spanish dealing with the Incas and Aztecs, which went down really well with the hosts, as you can imagine. So plenty to enjoy there.