Chapter 12 Rome in the Seventh-Century : A Migrant’s Network Perspective from the Circle of Maximos the Confessor

Philipp Winterhager

Introduction

“Why do you love the Romans and hate the Greeks?” – “I love the Romans for being of the same faith, and I love the Greeks for being of the same language.”1 That is how Maximos the Confessor answers the question of the Constantinopolitan during his high treason trial in the year 655. Although Maximos is being judged for supporting an African usurper, the financial secretary’s question reveals that there must be something bigger at stake, at least from the viewpoint of a member of the capital’s elite. From the perspective of this volume, the question can be understood as an attempt to put one city, Rome, in precarious relation to the rest of the empire. Such an East-West dichotomy in the early medieval world has become highly questionable today, and we should not take it at face value. Indeed, for Early Byzantine historians from , Italy and Rome were at the very edge of the Empire; contemporary Rome hardly ever appears in their works.2 That applies especially to the seventh century, an era which sees Constantinople itself and its immediate surroundings in military danger from

1 See Relatio motionis, in and his Companions. Documents from Exile, ed. and trans. Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil (Oxford, 2002), 10, pp. 70–71: “Διὰ τί ἀγαπᾷς τοὺς Ῥωμαίους, καὶ τοὺς Γραικοὺς μισεῖς; [. . .] Ἀγαπῶ τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ὡς ὁμοπίστους, τοὺς δὲ Γραικοὺς ὡς ὁμογλώσσους”. My translation differs here from the editors’, but is the same as theirs in the following notes. The corpus was first edited by the same editors in Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia (Turnhout, 1999). One should note that the unusual term Graikoi (Γραικοί) seems to reflect a migrant’s perspective, too. It seems to be of Roman origin. That fits the assumption that the Record of the Trial was penned by a close disciple of Maximos, who had probably been in Rome with him and had, therefore, adapted a migrant’s identity, too. 2 James Howard-Johnson, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2013); Antonio Carile, “Roma vista da Costantinopoli,” in Roma fra Oriente e Occidente, ed. Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medievo, 2 vols (Spoleto, 2002), 1:49–100. Of course, Rome is a matter of particular interest to Byzantine historians, but mainly

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307742_014 192 Winterhager the Persian, Arab, and Slav incursions. Modern historians have therefore long seen Byzantium and ‘the Latin West’ as parting civilizations after the end of the united .3 In recent decades, however, both Byzantinists and Medievalists have stressed the meaning of the Mediterranean oecumene also after the end of the Old Empire and the rise of Islam. The seventh century, from this perspective, has in recent approaches become one of a “World Crisis” or a “Crisis of Empire” rather than one of end, decline and fall – a crisis that could be coped with by the historical actors in that they created new narratives and understandings of their world.4 One of these recent works especially deals with Maximos the Confessor,5 the man who had to answer the sakellarios why he loved the Romans and hated the Greeks, focussing on theology and politics. Over the following pages I would like to approach Maximos as a migrant between Rome and other parts of the Empire. After introducing his biography, this paper argues for a social network perspective on his migration, focusing on individual migratory deci- sions rather than ecclesiological and political narratives. Subsequently my paper analyses some of the functional characteristics of this network.

Eastern and Western Identities in the Seventh Century?

The life and migration of Maximos the Confessor are best understood in the light of two major themes that dominated seventh century Byzantium: the Arab

as the ancient capital of the Empire and concerning papal theology. See also Franz Dölger, “Rom in der Gedankenwelt der Byzantiner,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 56 (1937), 1–42. 3 I limit myself here to judgements on Italy in some classic works. See, for example, Hans- Georg Beck, Das byzantinische Jahrtausend, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1994), p. 15: “Italien ist seit dem 5· Jahrhundert ein Spielball der Barbaren. Die Welt, in der sich der Hellenismus frei entfal- ten konnte, wird kleiner und kleiner”. Cf. also the titles of the influential works by Ottorino Bertolini, Roma di fronte a Bisanzio e ai Longobardi (Bologna, 1941), and Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, 8 vols (Oxford, 1880–1899). With strong words, Hodgkin makes Italy a battlefield between East and West: “Had such a confederacy [i.e. between Justinian and the Ostrogoths] been possible, the Hesperian land would have escaped the extortions of Byzantine blood-suckers on the one hand, the ravages of half-savage Lombards on the other”: Hodgkin, Italy, 3:12. 4 Howard-Johnston, Witnesses of a World Crisis; Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2014). An important step to the re-­evaluation of the seventh century was also John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge, Engl., 1990). Haldon, though, largely leaves out Italy, considering it “too different and too distant a world to be directly relevant to the history of the central lands of the empire”: Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, p. 4. 5 Booth, Crisis of Empire.