Eleventh-century Byzantium then was a wealthy, powerful state with wide borders but one which did not define itself in terms of those things but rather through a carefully worked out political and spiritual ideology. As in most human societies, however, theory and practice were often at variance in Byzantium and there were plenty of occasions when the ideological stance masked a much more down-to-earth reality. That certainly seems to have been the case as regards the absolute nature of the emperor’s power. He was, in theory, nothing less than the vicegerent of God on earth. Such a position, of course, involved awesome responsibility. The emperor was expected to imitate God, displaying appropriate piety and philanthropia (love of mankind) in order to fulfil his allotted task of ensuring the temporal welfare of God’s people. The emperor was answerable to no one and received his power directly from God, an idea made visual in Byzantine art through portrayals of Christ or the Virgin Mary crowning a haloed emperor. He alone, as an earlier theorist had put it, ‘pilots affairs below’. There was no room for majority decision making since ‘anarchy and civil war result from . . . polyarchy based on equality’.1
Given the theory, it would be reasonable to conclude that the empire was ruled by the emperor and him alone but it is quite clear that in fact this was not the case. An imperial portrait in an eleventh-century manuscript now in Paris, gives an insight into the real state of affairs. The emperor sits on his throne, attended by allegorical figures representing truth and justice but he is not left alone with these manifestations of divine favour. Behind him are four smaller, standing figures, dressed in long robes and with turbans on their heads. To his right stands the Protovestiarios, who played an important role in government and administration. Next to the Protovestiarios stands an imperial secretary, charged with drawing up letters and documents. To the emperor’s left stand two more individuals with the title of Proedros.
These are the emperor’s advisers, the members of the imperial civil service.2 The existence of a secular bureaucracy was one of many aspects of Byzantine life that marked it out from western Europe in the same period. In
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the early medieval West, kings relied on priests to fulfil what administrative tasks there were, few laymen at all having the necessary level of literacy. The more complex and developed nature of Byzantine society required rather more than that: a secular, educated elite, trained to the task of administration.
Few emperors ruled without their help; Basil II is said to have done so in the later years of his reign, but his attitude was unusual enough to have invited surprised comment as an exception to normal circumstances.3 This state of affairs had profound repercussions for the way that political decisions were made in Byzantium. It meant policy was not formulated on the spur of the moment by one individual to meet immediate needs. Rather, it was something that had developed over centuries and was often even committed to writing by a cohesive, administrative group, who preserved, studied and elaborated the fruits of past experience. While emperors came and went, both political aims and methods could be passed from generation to generation, preserving a remarkable continuity.
In discussing the interaction between Byzantium and the crusades, therefore, it is the education and ideology of the imperial civil service, rather than just the characters of individual emperors, that lies at the heart of the question. It is necessary to understand who the members of this political elite were, the ways in which they defined themselves and distinguished themselves from outsiders, the principles they adopted in advising the emperors on foreign policy and the methods they employed to achieve their goals. Only then can any assessment be made as to whether the policies they adopted were sensible and successful or whether they were inherently flawed and ultimately bound to lead to disaster.
A number of factors gave a man entry to the Byzantine political elite and civil service. Strange though it may seem, being castrated as a child was one. Since eunuchs were specifically prohibited from occupying the imperial throne, they were regarded as being more trustworthy. Ten posts at court that involved close contact with the emperor were specifically reserved for them.4 By no means all Byzantine bureaucrats were eunuchs, however, so in effect entry to the charmed circle came down to two indispensable factors:
education and patronage. Both had profound implications for who made up the elite and how they regarded themselves and their office.
Education at a high level had been the key to entry into the higher positions in the imperial civil service throughout the empire’s history. Back in the year 360, the emperor had specifically commanded that ‘by no means shall any person obtain a post of the first order unless it is established that he excels in the practice and training of the liberal studies, and that he is so polished in the use of letters that words proceed from him without the offence of imperfections . . .’ That meant following a traditional course of higher education, based, at least in theory, on the Trivium of poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, and the Quadrivium of sciences, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. In practice, it consisted of the study of the literature of
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ancient Greece and especially that of Classical Athens, which the Byzantines regarded as embodying the most perfect examples of Greek poetry and prose.
Authors studied included the poets Homer and Hesiod, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and the orators Demosthenes and Lysias. It was not merely a question of reading these works but of internalizing their language and imitating it. The most common exercise for students, therefore, was to write dialogues in the style of Plato or Lucian, couched in the archaic phraseology of the ancients. This was what the emperor had in mind when he spoke of the ‘polished use of letters’.5
Many Byzantine bureaucrats during the period of the Crusades were therefore men of high culture. This was certainly true of Michael Psellos, who came to dominate the Byzantine court in the mid-eleventh century. As a young man he was reputed to have learned the whole of the Iliad by heart and had studied under the learned John Mauropous in Constantinople.
The emperor Constantine IX (1042–55) had been so impressed with his eloquence and fluency that he made him his secretary and one of his closest advisers, thus launching a career that was to last over 30 years. Similarly, Niketas Choniates, who held high office under the emperors of the Angelos family in the period 1185–1204, had been sent as a young man from his home town of Chonai in Asia Minor to Constantinople in order to pursue higher studies and was later to become the author of voluminous theological and historical works. George Akropolites, an adviser to the emperors of the thirteenth century, was a product of the same system, an author and scholar in addition to his role as political adviser.6
The higher education in which these men had all been schooled was, before 1204, only available in Constantinople and was enjoyed by a tiny minority of the inhabitants of the empire. It has been calculated that no more than two or three hundred individuals were being educated in this way at any one time in the middle Byzantine period (843–1204).7 As a result, this group formed something of a closed caste, differentiated from the rest of the population by their superior knowledge. That divide is nowhere better illustrated than in a story told by Michael Psellos himself. One day Constantine IX was walking through the palace accompanied by his mistress and a crowd of courtiers.
One of the courtiers, wishing to gain favour with the emperor, murmured softly, but audibly, the words ‘It were no shame . . .’ That was enough to send a ripple of admiration through his fellow courtiers. They had all been educated and recognized the allusion at once, as coming from the Iliad: ‘It were no shame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should suffer pain long time for woman such as she’, a reference to the fabled beauty Helen of Troy. Unfortunately, the act of gallantry fell flat because its object, the emperor’s mistress, could not understand what it meant and had to call for a translation, such was the divide between those who were educated and those who were not.8
Erudite as these men were, their careers were, in the last analysis, dependent upon patronage. This might come from some relative already
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ensconced in an influential position. Psellos was able to purchase the title of Protospatharios for his future son-in-law, Elpidios, for 20 pounds of gold.
The uncle of a young man called Symeon no doubt used the same methods to have his nephew appointed as Spatharokoubikoularios, although Symeon later gave it all up to become a monk.9 The most effective patronage, however, was that of the emperor himself. It allowed the eunuch and chief imperial adviser, Basil Lekapenos, to obtain his position not by virtue of education but because he was the illegitimate son of a previous emperor.10 By the same token, a change of ruler could mean a dramatic reversal of fortune. Psellos embarked on his successful career because he impressed Constantine IX, but the accession of Romanos IV Diogenes (1068–71) saw him sidelined. One of the first actions of Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) as emperor was to purge Psellos’s pupil, John Italos, on a charge of heresy.
The coup which brought Alexios V Mourtzouphlos to power in 1204 was immediately followed by Choniates’ dismissal from his post of Logothete of the Sekreta.11
As a result of the vagaries of imperial patronage, titles were regarded as extremely important by the Byzantine elite, because they marked very clearly the exact point in the hierarchy that an individual had reached and the level of imperial favour that he enjoyed. During the ninth and tenth centuries, numerous taktika, official lists of titles, offices and the duties that went with them, were lovingly drawn up, such as that compiled by the Protospatharios Philotheos in 899. Possibly these taktika represented an attempt to codify the whole system. If so, it was labour lost as titles changed their meaning and importance as often as emperors came and went. The function of a Protospatharios had once been military, but by the eleventh century it was a post at court. The Protovestiarios, whose office was of the highest importance by the time of the First Crusade, had originated simply as keeper of the wardrobe. The office of Logothete conferred control of one of the departments of the administration, but the departments, like the titles, waxed and waned in importance. Alexios I introduced a whole new set of titles with which to honour his supporters, and probably to demote those who held existing ones.12
With the titles went an annual pension in gold and some kind of silk garment, both proportionate to the importance of the office. Particular robes were attached to specific court offices. The Magistros was entitled to wear a gold embroidered white tunic, the Kouropalates a red tunic and belt. As for the money, a special ceremony was held over seven days during the week before Palm Sunday, when each official appeared before the emperor to receive his due. So lavish were the stipends of some of the higher officials that they brought with them helpers to drag away their heavy sacks of gold.13
The importance of education and imperial patronage, expressed through titles and pensions, in bolstering the identity and ethos of the elite is nowhere more apparent than in the outraged scorn which they heaped on rivals whom they believed to lack the essential prerequisites. Psellos, temporarily thrust
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aside from his position as imperial adviser by Leo Paraspondylas, questioned his rival’s fitness for office on the grounds that he did not have ‘long-standing qualifications in the realm of literature or oratory’. Choniates fulminated against the judges appointed by Manuel I because they ‘spoke broken Greek and drivelled in their speech’. Akropolites was mortified when an emperor bestowed impressive titles on ‘pitiful men, worth no more than three obols’.
The thing that annoyed them more than anything else was the tendency of their imperial masters to try and cut through the system, by inventing new offices and titles to bestow on their own creatures, while downgrading traditional ones by granting them to all and sundry. It was tantamount to conferring honours ‘indiscriminately on a multitude of persons’ or selling offices ‘as vendors peddle their fruit’.14
From this distaste for unqualified outsiders, it followed that the educated elite considered themselves as the people best placed to fulfil the functions of their office. Among the lower ranks these functions included service as tax collectors, governors of provincial cities and judges. Even military leaders were drawn from their ranks: the eunuch Eustathios, who held the office of Kanikleiou, later became admiral of the fleet.15 They were often entrusted with embassies to foreign courts because education and rhetorical powers were considered to be the quintessential qualifications for the task. John the Grammarian was chosen for a mission to Baghdad in the ninth century because he was ‘formidable in debating skills’, while, hundreds of years later, Niketas Choniates wrote enthusiastically of how his fellow intellectual Michael Italikos charmed the king of Germany with his eloquence. No doubt the same reasoning was behind the choice in 946 of John Anthypatos as ambassador to Damascus, where he impressed his hosts with his knowledge of history and philosophy.16
The most highly placed at court were generally not sent off to lead armies or charm foreign potentates, however. Their main task was to advise the emperor, and to formulate domestic and foreign policy. Of course, some office holders were more influential than others and they were always at pains to trumpet the fact. Psellos claimed that some emperors followed his opinion without hesitation and implied that one even abdicated on his advice. Michael Attaleiates carefully recorded how Emperor Romanos IV had specifically asked him for his views. In reality, of course, various factions at court competed for the imperial ear. Niketas Choniates was part of a group which succeeded in persuading Isaac II Angelos (1185–95) to reverse his policy towards the Third Crusade, presumably overturning the advice he had received earlier. Being in the wrong group could be dangerous: George Akropolites was beaten up on the orders of the emperor over a disagreement about a treaty with the Bulgarians. Nevertheless, whatever the standing of individual officials or factions with particular emperors, as a group the courtiers were seen as the people best placed to advise on policy.17
To the modern mind, there is something faintly absurd about the conviction of the Byzantine elite that their classical education gave them
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all the skills they needed to fulfil this weighty responsibility. Psellos went so far as to claim that the experienced general, Romanos IV, had lost the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 because he neglected Psellos’s advice. Psellos had probably never been on a battlefield in his life but he had read up on the subject in the ancient authorities. The same point emerges from a letter sent to the government of Genoa in 1199. Whoever wrote it could not resist throwing in an allusion to Hesiod, no doubt because such a display of erudition would have been thought likely to impress the recipients.18
Literary skills nevertheless played a very important role in the participation of the civil elite in government and foreign policy, since it was they who produced the documents which articulated, defended and sometimes even criticized the policy aims of their imperial masters. For example, they drafted letters and treaties with foreign powers. Psellos, as usual, claimed to excel in this task and was entrusted with drawing up letters to be sent to the Fatimid caliph and probably also with that of drafting the treaty concluded between Michael VII Doukas (1071–8) and the Norman duke of Apulia and Calabria, Robert Guiscard, in 1074.19
The numerous manuals of military tactics and foreign policy which survive under the names of particular emperors, such as the De Administrando Imperio and other treatises associated with Constantine VII (945–59), were probably also ghost-written by members of the elite. These preserved the accumulated wisdom of the centuries, on such matters as the reception of foreign envoys or how to bring about the swift surrender of an invested town, and so helped to bring about a certain continuity in imperial policy.20 Byzantine courtiers also presented and explained that policy in public, by means of panegyrics, delivered on feast days in formal and archaic Greek, praising the reigning emperor and his achievements. These speeches always heaped hyperbolic praise on their subject, one orator assuring the emperor that there was no one on earth more like God. Behind the sycophancy and stilted phrasing, however, the panegyrics could be used to communicate veiled criticism and to advocate a change of policy.21
Perhaps most important of all, there was the writing of history. Michael Psellos, Niketas Choniates and George Akropolites all wrote major histories of their own times, in the archaic, classical Greek in which they had been trained. So did Michael Attaleiates, who served the emperors Romanos IV and Nikephoros III Botaneiates (1078–81), and John Kinnamos, the secretary of Manuel I. There is an almost unbroken succession of historian bureaucrats right down to Nikephoros Gregoras in the fourteenth century.
To this list one might add Anna Komnene, who wrote the life of her father, Alexios I. Even though as a princess of the blood she was not part of the elite corps of bureaucrats, she shared their educational background, having first taken lessons secretly with the palace eunuchs, before moving on to the traditional Trivium and Quadrivium. She was well placed to present the aims behind Byzantine policy during the reign of Alexios.22
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From the point of view of those looking back at Byzantium over the centuries, these histories are particularly important because, unlike panegyrics, they could be openly critical. As Anna Komnene dryly observed,
‘all men flatter the current ruler but no one makes the slightest attempt to overpraise the departed’. Most of the histories were written at some remove
‘all men flatter the current ruler but no one makes the slightest attempt to overpraise the departed’. Most of the histories were written at some remove