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Byzantine Empire (Ca 600-1200): I.1 INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ SECTION OF BYZANTINE RESEARCH ΤΟΜΕΑΣ ΒΥΖΑΝΤΙΝΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ NATIONAL HELLENIC RESEARCH FOUNDATION ΕΘΝΙΚΟ IΔΡΥΜΑ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ EFI RAGIA ANTHONY KALDELLIS THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION THE SOCIAL SCOPE OF ROMAN IDENTITY IN BYZANTIUM: OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE (CA 600-1200): I.1. THEA ANPO ETVIDHEKAIENC OFE-B AASSIAED M AINOPPROACH (7TH-8 TH C.) ΑΘΗΝΑ • 20092017 • ATHENS ANTHONY KALDELLIS THE SOCIAL SCOPE OF ROMAN IDENTITY IN BYZANTIUM: AN EVIDENCE-BASED APPROACH* qui iam cognoscit gentes in imperio Romano quae quid erant, quando omnes Romani facti sunt, et omnes Romani dicuntur?1 Who now knows which nations in the Roman empire were which, when all have become Romans and all are called Romans? After centuries of denials and evasions, the debate over the nature of Roman identity in Byzantium is finally picking up. I have previously argued that the Byzantines’ view of their own Roman identity was a national one, making Byzantium effectively a nation-state. Being a Roman was premised on common cultural traits including language, religion, and social values and customs, on belonging to the ἔθνος or γένος on that basis, and on being a “shareholder” in the polity of the Romans2. This conclusion has been challenged by Ioannis Stouraitis, who offers “a critical approach” * The author thanks the journal’s two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions for improvement. 1. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 58.1.21, ed. E. DEKKERS and J. FRAIPONT, Augustinus: Enarrationes in Psalmos [CCSL 38-40], Turnhout 1956, here v. 39, 744. 2. A. KALDELLIS, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, Cambridge 2007, ch. 2; From Rome to New Rome, From Empire to Nation State: Reopening the Question of Byzantium’s Roman Identity, in: Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, ed. L. GRIG – G. KELLY, Oxford 2012, 387-404. Polity of the Romans: The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, Cambridge, MA 2015. BYZANTINA ΣΥΜΜΕΙΚΤΑ 27 (2017), 173-210 174 ANTHONY KALDELLIS to the issue3. He suggests that Roman identity was limited to a tiny elite in Constantinople, and sees the empire as a system of exploitation of the provincials that precluded meaningful identification between the two. The Roman label was part of a misleading homogenizing discourse used by elites and implied no horizontal community. Both positions are revolutionary, albeit in different ways. The nation-state proposal breaks from the tradition of viewing Byzantium as a multi-ethnic empire with a “universalist” theocratic ideology, while the elite reading disrupts the assumption of many historians that all or most Byzantines at least called themselves Romans, that it was part of their identity4. Most Byzantines were either far more Roman than anyone had thought, or not Roman at all, with the second option leaving their ethnic identity indeterminate. Clearly, there is much to debate. This contribution will not tackle all the relevant issues, for example whether Byzantium had the institutions necessary to create or maintain a national identity, or whether it had a notion of a homeland. It concerns a specific point that no one has so far elucidated fully with reference to the evidence found in the sources: What was the social scope of attributions of Roman identity in Byzantine sources? In other words, when the sources refer to Romans in Byzantium do they mean a narrow Constantinopolitan elite or do they refer to a much larger population, including that of the provinces, which crossed the divides of social class? This article will scrutinize a broad array of diverse sources and argue that the evidence consistently points toward a broad Roman community defined by ethnic and not class criteria. The analysis begins with elite sources and then steadily moves away from the capital by examining the social valence of Roman identity claimed for and by the Byzantine army; by provincial sub-elite or non-elite sources; and also by foreign sources describing Byzantine society. In all cases, the evidence is consistent and clear: the Romans of Byzantium were a large ethnic group, the largest by far in the empire, making up the vast majority of its population. Elite, non- 3. I. STOURAITIS, Roman Identity in Byzantium: A Critical Approach, BZ 107 (2014), 175-220. 4. Countless citations can be provided to this effect, e.g., A. CHRISTOPHILOPOULOU, Τὸ πολίτευμα καὶ οἱ θεσμοὶ τῆς βυζαντινῆς αὐτοκρατορίας, 324-1204, Athens 2004, 76: “Everyone, from the emperor down to the last citizen of the most distant frontier had a deeply rooted sense of Roman continuity, as is manifestly shown in Byzantine literature”. BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA27 (2017), 173-210 THE SOCIAL SCOPE OF ROMAN IDENTITY IN BYZANTIUM 175 elite, and foreign sources agree on this. By contrast, while Stouraitis finds room to cite T. Eagleton, M. Mann, L. Althusser, and P. Bourdieu, he quotes no Byzantine text that unambiguously (or even ambiguously) states that Roman identity was limited in its social scope to a Constantinopolitan elite. Ethnic vs. elite identities Before we turn to the sources, some key terms that frame the debate must be elucidated. Specifically, in sociological research ethnic and elite identities present quite different profiles. To argue that Roman identity in Byzantium was national rather than ethnic, in prior publications I relied on a specific model of ethnicity that is slowly losing ground among scholars. According to this specific model, a group’s ethnic identity presupposed a myth or awareness of a common ancestry, whether real or imagined5. To be sure, Byzantine sources do not emphasize such a notion in connection with Roman identity. But although many scholars still hold to that definition of ethnicity, most seem to have shifted to a more flexible one according to which an ethnic group can be identified also on a basis of its common name (or ethnonym), shared culture, common language and religion, homeland, an awareness of its difference from neighboring groups (e.g., Romans vs. Bulgarians or barbarians more generally), common political institutions, a sense of having a common history, perceived kinship beyond the immediate family, or any partial but significant combination of those factors. No single rigid definition will cover all ethnic groups in history: some factors will inevitably be more important for one group than for others. The rise of this more expansive definition of ethnicity can be traced, for example, in the programmatic statements made by many of the contributors to the Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean6. In many historical 5. Emphasized, for example, by J. HALL, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Cambridge, 1997, and many other theorists. 6. J. MCINERNEY, ed., A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, Malden, MA 2014, see esp. 2, 35, 67, 104, 112, 115, 122, 143, 158, 178, 216, 217, 221, 298, 341, 350, 371, 517. A large amount of modern theoretical bibliography could be cited here, but it is more conventient to refer readers to the studies cited there by the contributors. The application of the same definitions to late antiquity is surveyed by A. BECKER, Ethnicité, identité ethnique. Quelques remarques pour l’Antiquité tardive, Gérion 32 (2014), 289-305. BYZANTINA ΣΥΜΜΕΙΚΤΑ 27 (2017), 173-210 176 ANTHONY KALDELLIS contexts, this definition makes ethnicity and national identity almost equivalent, and indeed some theorists do not believe that there is always much difference between the two7. The goal of this paper is not so much to demonstrate that the Romans of Byzantium actually were an ethnicity, which would require extensive evidence as to the historical reality of the components of that definition. Its goal is rather more specific: to show that the Byzantines used the identity label Roman in an ethnic way, as pointing to an ethnic group, a group moreover that included the vast majority of the population of Byzantium. The sources presented below will demonstrate that, for the Byzantines, the term Roman had a valence that covered most of the constituent elements of what modern scholars call an ethnicity. The Byzantines themselves often called it an ἔθνος. Though they certainly did not use that word with semantic consistency as a technical term8, we will find many cases of significant convergence and overlap between their terminology and the modern definition of ethnicity given above. Class exclusions are usually not a criterion for an ethnic identity. The latter is assumed to be held by a population or people as a whole, including all its classes, professions, and age-groups, and both genders. Thus, its ethnonym must be seen to be applied consistently across all those divisions9. That is why it is important to study carefully whom our sources mean when they refer to the Romans: only the elite, or the majority of the provincial population too? As we will see, they refer collectively to the Greek-speaking and Orthodox population of free citizens (not slaves) of the empire. This paper will argue that elite sources call this entire population Roman and 7. T. SPIRA, Ethnicity and Nationality: The Twin Matrices of Nationalism, in: Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World, ed. D. CONVERSI, London 2002, 248-268; G. DE VOS, Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation, in: Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation, 3rd. ed., ed. G. DE VOS and L. ROMANUCCI-ROSS, London et al. 1995, 5-41, here 24-25. For the modernist bias of much scholarship on these issues, see below. 8. For a typological study of terms related to ethnicity and identity in Byzantium, see Θ. ΠαΠαδοΠούλού, Συλλογικὴ ταυτότητα καὶ αὐτογνωσία στὸ Βυζάντιο: Συμβολὴ στὸν προσδιορισμὸ τῆς αὐτοαντίληψης τῶν Βυζαντινῶν κατὰ τὴν λόγια γραμματεία τους (11ος - ἀρχὲς 13ου αἰ.), Athens 2015. 9. For the importance of the ethnonym used in discursive identity-claims, see N.
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