BYZANTIUM IN THE YEAR 1000 THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES, ECONOMIES AND CULTURES, 400-1500 EDITORS Hugh Kennedy (St. Andrews) Paul Magdalino (St. Andrews) David Abulafia (Cambridge) Benjamin Arbel (Tel Aviv) Mark Meyerson (Toronto) Larry J. Simon (Western Michigan University) VOLUME 45 BYZANTIUM IN THE YEAR 1000 EDITED BY PAUL MAGDALINO BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003 Cover illustration: Basil II Bulgaroctonus, miniature (Cod. Marc. Gr. Z. 17 (=421) f. IIIr, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Byzantium in the year 1000 / edited by Paul Magdalino. p. cm. (The Medieval Mediterranean, ISSN 0928 5520 ; v. 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9004120971 (hbk.) 1. Byzantine Empire History Basil II Bulgaroctonus, 976 1025. I. Title: Byzantium in the year one thousand. II. Magdalino, Paul. III. Series. DF595 .B97 2002 949.5'02 dc21 2002034276 Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Byzantium in the year 1000 / ed. by Paul Magdalino. -- Leiden ; Boston: Brill 2003 (The Medieval Mediterranean ; Vol 45) ISBN 90-04-12097-1 ISSN 0928–5520 ISBN 90 04 12097 1 © Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands To the memory of Nikos Oikonomides and Lenos Mavromatis This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................ ix Abbreviations .............................................................................. xvii List of Contributors .................................................................... xix Marriages towards the Millennium .......................................... 1 Jonathan Shepard Political Elites in the Reign of Basil II .................................... 35 Catherine Holmes Basil II and Asia Minor ............................................................ 71 Jean-Claude Cheynet The Balkan Frontier in the Year 1000 .................................... 109 Paul Stephenson Between Two Empires: Southern Italy in the Reign of Basil II .................................................................... 135 Vera von Falkenhausen Turning Sisinnios against the Sisinnians: Eustathios Romaios on a Disputed Marriage ...................... 161 Ludwig Burgmann Byzantine History Writing at the End of the First Millennium .................................................................... 183 Athanasios Markopoulos Byzantine Poetry and the Paradox of Basil II’s Reign .......... 199 Marc Lauxtermann viii Hagiography under the Macedonians: the Two Recensions of the Metaphrastic Menologion ...................... 217 Christian Høgel The Year 1000 in Byzantium .................................................. 233 Paul Magdalino Index ............................................................................................ 271 PREFACE This volume grew out of the Byzantine session of the 19th Congress of Historical Sciences at Oslo. With the Congress scheduled for August 2000, it did not require much effort of imagination to find a theme. The subject of Byzantium at the end of the first millen- nium A.D. would have suggested itself even if the date had been completely devoid of historical significance. In fact, the choice was far from being purely arbitrary or symbolic. The year 1000 A.D. marks the middle of a century which saw the medieval Byzantine Empire at the height of its military and political power. Between 950 and 1050, the empire of New Rome reconquered the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and went on to regain a substantial amount of continental territory in Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, the Balkans and Southern Italy, which it had lost in the seventh and eighth cen- turies, as well as annexing more of Armenia than had ever been ruled by the ancient Roman Empire. Its political and cultural influence extended beyond its frontiers, not only to the principalities and tribes which were its immediate neighbours, and to the ancient centres of the Christian world, Rome and Jerusalem, which remained tantalis- ingly beyond its military grasp; with the conversion of Rus, symbol- ised by the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 989, its magnetism reached far to the north of the Black Sea, into what for the Romans had been the dark wastes of Scythia. The decades before and after the year 1000 also tend to be seen as the high point of Byzantine imperial absolutism, the period when centuries of administrative, eco- nomic and ideological centralisation came to fruition, and the Byzantine emperor controlled the resources, the lives and the beliefs of his sub- jects as never before or since. The emperor in the year 1000 and the generations on either side of it was Basil II (976–1025), whose name is emblematic of the great- ness of the medieval Byzantine state. It is not just that Basil’s reign came chronologically at the end of a series of interrelated develop- ments which characterise the political and cultural ‘renaissance’ of Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries: a long succession of strong and effective emperors, all more or less closely identified with the dynasty founded by Basil II’s great-great grandfather, Basil I the x ‘Macedonian’; an ideology of restoration, recovery and renewal, expressed in an imperially-sponsored programme of collecting, cod- ifying, excerpting and re-issuing the written legacy of the Greco- Roman past; a growing professionalism in the armed forces, backed by a revival of military theory; a closer identification of the Church with the interests of the State, and particularly of the ruling dynasty; a consistent effort to advance the cause of the imperial fisc by leg- islation and in the administration of justice. Basil himself has gone down in history as the Byzantine ‘l’état c’est moi’, the paradigm of efficient, successful state control—so much so that the problems of the Byzantine state in the late eleventh century have been blamed on his excessive insistence on the domination of the imperial periph- ery by the bureaucratic, Constantinopolitan centre. To some extent, his reputation was created after the eleventh-century crisis by nos- talgia for the better times which he had seemed to incarnate. Thus the Grottaferrata text of Digenes Akrites, a work dating from the twelfth century and set in the eastern borderlands which by that time had been lost to the empire, refers to him as ‘Basil who took imperial glory to the grave with him’. It was not until the late twelfth cen- tury, with the revolt of Peter and Asan and the establishment of the ‘Second Bulgarian Empire’, that Basil became known as Boulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer. But the idealisation of Basil as a model emperor began before the twelfth century. It has been detected in the two main Greek sources for his reign, the Chronographia of Michael Psellos and the Synopsis of John Skylitzes, which can be seen, in their different ways, to reflect the agenda of imperial revival under the first two Comnenian emperors, Isaac I (1057–1059) and Alexios I (1081–1118), whose family had done well under Basil and had good reason to identify retrospectively with his regime. Both sources have endur- ingly shaped later perceptions of his reign. To Psellos we owe the portrait of Basil as the harsh, austere, parsimonious despot with no time for luxury or literature, while Skylitzes is responsible for the view that Basil concentrated on the Balkans and the destruction of Bulgaria at the expense of Asia Minor and the advancement of the eastern frontier. Both historians have by their emphasis created the impression of a reign dominated at the outset by massive military rebellions, and dedicated thereafter to eradicating aristocratic faction and civil war. Ultimately, however, the image of Basil II the grim autocrat stems from his own publicity: from the threatening anti- magnate rhetoric of his Novel of 996, and from the miniature of xi the Venice Psalter depicting him armed and triumphant with bar- barians grovelling at his crimson-shod imperial feet. The composite picture of Byzantium at the peak of its achieve- ment under Basil II was central to modern perceptions of Byzantium in the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century. This was not only because the different components fitted together so plausi- bly, but also because the composition represented what Byzantinists and the regimes or ideologies they served most wanted to find in Byzantium: the perfect moment of a state system with an impecca- ble Greco-Roman pedigree which was triumphant over Islam and northern barbarism, yet did not have—indeed, energetically resisted— the dark forces of feudalism and Catholic clericalism which were the bane of the Western Middle Ages. This basic consensus united Greeks, Slavs and Western scholars with a classical education. It received its fullest articulation in the synthetic histories of the mid-twentieth cen- tury which remain among the most coherent and readable narra- tives of Byzantine history, and it continues