Angeliki E. Laiou

Thessalonikiand Macedonia in the Byzantineperiod

"Thessaloniki is a great city, the most important of the cities of Macedonia. It is notable for all the things that exalt a city, and ... excels in piety ... It is large and wide, fortified with many walls and barriers, so that its inhabitants are secure. To the south, there is a port ... which gives easy access to the ships that sail into it from all parts of the world ... To the east, the land boasts of large trees, intricate gardens, endless supplies of water ... Vineyards, planted close to each other, crown the villages, and urge the aesthetic eye to rejoice in the abundance of their fruit ... There are two great lakes, ... containing fish both large and small, many in number and varied in kind, which fill the tables of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages as well as of the city ... There was no aspect of the good life that we did not enjoy, from the rich yield of the land and the products of trade. For the land and the sea, which from the beginning were destined to serve us, gave their gifts generously and freely ... "1 This is one of many descriptions of Thessaloniki in the Byzantine period, stressing the size and wealth, as well as the piety of the city. It is, indeed, a fact that after the permanent loss, in the seventh century, of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire, with their large cities, such as Alexandria and Antioch, Thessaloniki became and remained the second most important city of the Empire, after the capital, Constantinople. It was certainly, throughout the Byzantine period, the largest city in the Balkans. The Byzantine period is a formative one for the areas ruled by the Byzantine Empire, as it is for the peoples and states of western Europe. It is, for one thing, the period of Christianisation, with all that this entails in terms of culture and mentalities. It is a period, a very long period, of about a thousand years, in the course of which there was much movement of peoples and considerable demographic upheavals, which set the basis for the demographic composition of the area during the early modem and modem periods. Political institutions - imperial governance, strong local communities - as well as political ideology were developed, which influenced the subsequent history not only of the areas governed by Byzantium but also of important states which were outside its political control or which eventually supplanted it, such as Russia or the Ottoman Empire. Even in economic terms, it can be argued that the developments and structures of the medieval period had a very long life. In general discussions of the Byzantine Empire, it is usually the role of Constantinople that is stressed, and with some justification. In purely formal terms, it was the shift of the permanent capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the new city of Constantinople that gave impetus to the process of differentiation of the

I. Kameniates490, 491, 494, 500.

ByzantineMacedonia. Identity Image and History. Edited by John Burke & Roger Scott (Byzanti11aAustraliensia 13, Melbourne 2000). 2 A11gelikiE. Laiou

two parts of the Roman Empire, and to the development of the Eastern Roman Empire into a fundamentally new state and society. As the seat of the Emperors and the capital of the state from 330 to 1453, Constantinople had an obvious importance. It was, ultimately, the centre of the collection of resources, in the form of taxes, and the centre of their redistribution, in the form of salaries to officials and generals, or in the form of public expenditures in palaces, churches, and foundations whose role was, in part, that of mechanisms of propaganda. It was, for long periods of time, the arbiter of taste and a major centre of intellectual life. Its role, therefore, is rightly stressed, even though sometimes it was detrimental to the interests of the provinces. If Constantinople was the capital of an Empire, Thessaloniki was a city of regional and inter-regional importance. Its role was fundamentally different from that of Constantinople for it functioned less as an imperial centre and more as a focus of economic integration and cultural diffusion. I will argue that it played an integrating role for an area that included both the geographic region of Macedonia and also, at times, a much larger area: Thessaly and areas to the North-West, along the Axios-Morava route, deep into Serbia. It is this integrating role of the city that I should like to discuss. The first important period for the history of Byzantine Thessaloniki starts in the late sixth century and ends in the early or mid-ninth century. It is a time of internal crisis in the Byzantine Empire and serious external dangers from both the Persians and (after the 630s) the Arabs. In the Balkans there were great Avaro-Slav invasions, which threatened both the countryside and the cities. It was in the late sixth century that the A vars (a nomadic, Central Asian people) and the Slavs (for the most part an agricultural people, who, however, were organised into warlike activities by the A vars) crossed the Danube and launched a series of catastrophic invasions into the Byzantine Empire. Soon they acquired the art of building siege engines, which made it difficult for the cities to resist. In 586 (or 597 according to some scholars), a very large army of Avaro-Slavs appeared at the gates of Thessaloniki. The Miracles of St. Demetrios, the major source for the events of these years, claims that the chief of the A vars realised that Thessaloniki was the richest and most populous city, whose capture would be a major loss for the Empire, and so he camped outside it with "an immense army". "And," writes the author, "we heard that, wherever they camped, the streams and the rivers dried out, and the earth became a field of destruction (itE~iov aq,avtcrµou)." 1 The pages of the

I. Lemerle,Miracles I 134.The text was writtenin two stages,in 620 and 680. On the subject of the Slavic incursionsin the Balkanssee, for two oppositeviews, P. Lemerle,"Invasions et migrations dans les Balkans depuis la fin de J'epcque romaine jusqu'au VIiie siecle" RH 211 (1954) 265-308, and J. Karayannopoulos,Les Slavesen Macedoine;La pretendue interruptiondes communicationsentre Constantinopleet Thessa/oniquedu 7emeau 9eme siec/e (Athens 1989). On Byzantine Thessaloniki in general see, apart from the older studies of 0. Tafrali, Thessa/onique des origines au X/Ve siec/e (Paris 1919) and Thessa/oniqueau X!Ve siec/e (Paris 1913), and the more recent studies by R. Browning, "Byzantine Thessaloniki: A Unique City?" Dialogos:Hellenic Studies Review 2 (1995) 91-104; H. Hunger, "LaudesThessa/onicenses" (Thessaloniki 1992) 101-113; A. Laiou,