Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84070-5 — Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic Edited by Magdalena Skoblar Excerpt More Information Introduction A complex, fragmented space in a complex, fragmented time, the Medieval Adriatic is often subsumed into grand historiographic narratives focusing on the great powers that governed it throughout this period. By taking a different perspective, centred on the Adriatic itself, this volume paints a more nuanced picture, which attends to and illuminates the realities of the local communities of this region and their entanglement, first with the Byzantine empire, and then with Venice. Despite being a major channel of communications between East and West in this period, long-standing political fragmentation and linguistic differences have led to a lack of dedicated scholarly attention to this region as a whole. This volume addresses this gap by bringing together the work of an international group of sixteen scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, to generate powerful new perspectives on the Medieval Adriatic, and makes much material available to a wider audience for the first time, particularly new archaeological evidence and existing scholarship previously only published in Italian or Croatian. This introduction sets up the volume by outlining the broad context for the Adriatic in this period, before underlining the scholarly rationale for this volume in more detail and providing an over- view of each chapter. Positioning the Adriatic Separated from the rest of the Mediterranean by the length of Italy, the Adriatic resembles an elongated lake, or a sea within a sea; it is only 70 km wide at its southernmost end, the Straits of Otranto, where it becomes the Ionian Sea and laps at the shores of Greece (Map 1). Through Venice, sitting at the top of the sea in the north, the Adriatic is a gateway to the Alps. The settlement that gave the sea its name, Adria near Rovigo, is also found in the north and Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and Thucydides referred only to the northern half of the sea as the Adriatic (ὁἈδρίας), while the southern section was called the Ionian Gulf. Conversely, Strabo and Ptolemy called the present-day Ionian Sea the 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84070-5 — Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic Edited by Magdalena Skoblar Excerpt More Information 2 Adriatic Sea and, in the sixth century, Procopius used the same name for the body of water between Malta and Crete (Rapske 1994; Smith 1878, vol. 1, 28). The long east and west coasts could not be more different, prompting Jacques Le Goff (2001, 7) to call the Adriatic an ‘asymmetrical sea’. While the western, Italian side is gently undulating with very few offshore islands, the crenellated eastern shoreline (predominantly in present-day Croatia) features many inlets and island archipelagos with natural anchorages. As ‘not only a sea with two shores, the western and the eastern, but also with two spaces, one northern and another southern’ (Sabaté 2016, 11), the Adriatic is a quartered sea, easily given to fragmentation and compartmen- talisation. Only the Roman empire managed to claim the whole sea as a unified space and, even then, when Diocletian divided the empire the separation line split it in two down its east–west axis. Following short- lived unifications under Constantine I, Julian the Apostate and Theodosius I, the final division in 395 assigned the Adriatic to the western half of the empire. But this was only the brief endgame of Rome: in the fifth century the western empire collapsed and the Goths made their way into Italy and Dalmatia. It would take two military campaigns, from 535 to 554, by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I to regain Italy and Dalmatia and bring them under the administration of Constantinople, that is, Byzantium. From this point onwards, what we call the Byzantine empire had a vested interest in the Adriatic. It established an exarchate at Ravenna (584–751), dispatched its own fleet when the Franks advanced too far into the Veneto and Dalmatia (805 and 808), battled against the Normans in Durrës/Dyrrachion (1081) and regained the eastern Adriatic during the reign of Manuel I Komnenos in the second half of the twelfth century. It also fostered the diplomatic practice of bestowing prestigious titles, gifts of luxury objects, money and relics on local rulers and elites in exchange for their support and loyalty. Without this application of what Jonathan Shepard (2018, 4–5) termed Byzantium’s ‘Soft Power’, there would have been no Venice as we know it. This hybrid city, tied to the sea but open to the hinterland, neither western nor eastern, was never Byzantine, and yet has traditionally been perceived as such in the scholarship. Of all the Adriatic cities Byzantium wanted to keep in its sphere of influence, only Venice – a city of no Roman substrate – proved to be a long-term ally, albeit not without challenges. The loss of the unified Adriatic space of the Roman empire created a vacuum filled by the memory of it, and it is this aspect of Byzantium – Byzantium as the heir of Rome – that proved to be irresistible to the local © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84070-5 — Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic Edited by Magdalena Skoblar Excerpt More Information Introduction 3 communities once included in the western half of the empire. Despite this connection, the Latin-speaking men and women of Ravenna, which remained in the hands of Byzantium as the seat of its exarchate until 751, had different mores and concerns to those of faraway Constantinople, which too frequently remains the only yardstick for all things Byzantine. The same can be said about Venice. In fact, in the early eleventh century, the difference between Venice and Byzantium was so great that when Maria Argyropoula, the Byzantine aristocratic bride of Duke Pietro II Orseolo’s son Giovanni, had to leave Constantinople for her new home in the lagoon, she did so with a heavy heart (John the Deacon, Istoria Veneticorum 4.71), knowing that she was leaving a society where food was eaten with a fork and regular baths were considered normal. In 1006, not long after she arrived in Venice, Maria, Giovanni and their small son all died of the plague. Maria’s ways became the stuff of legends – another indication of a culture difference – and by the second half of the eleventh century St Peter Damian (Opusculum quinquagesimum, col. 744), the Ravennate reformer, was using her tragic story as a warning about the ‘decadent and sybaritic ways of the east’ (Nicol 1999, 46–7); in his inter- pretation she was a self-indulgent Byzantine princess who was punished for her vanity with an awful death. Her depravity consisted of collecting rainwater for personal hygiene rather than trusting the Venetian water supply, using cutlery and attempting to block out the stench of the canals in her rooms with perfume and incense. Generating New Perspectives on the Medieval Adriatic Following the lines of its historical complexity, the areas of the Adriatic and the region as a whole have been fragmented in knowledge, through the compartmentalising processes of different national historiographic narra- tives. The southern part can be regarded as an offshoot of the Ionian Sea with no focus beyond Apulia and Durrës. The eastern coast can be under- stood to be interchangeable with the Croatian shoreline and never to include the Albanian portion. The Adriatic as a whole can be understood and portrayed as nothing more than the domain of Venice. The Adriatic as a sea can be interpreted within the framework of the wider Mediterranean and, without specific discussion, subsumed into everything that is argued for the mother sea. In contrast, the work collected in this volume generates a new and different perspective. It draws attention to the complexities of © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84070-5 — Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic Edited by Magdalena Skoblar Excerpt More Information 4 the Adriatic during the period which coincided with the Middle Ages in western Europe and the existence of the Byzantine empire in the East. It challenges grand narratives and broad generalisations. By looking at differ- ent topics, periods and areas, it demonstrates that, after the sixth century and the stability of Justinian’s reign, the Adriatic entered a long phase of fragmentation during which local elites created their own power bubbles – a situation that lasted into the eleventh century, when Venice began its expansion. In illuminating the complex histories of different parts of the Adriatic and their relationship with Byzantium, the sixteen chapters collected here fill a gap in the scholarship. Despite being a major channel of communi- cation between the East and West, this region has so far received little attention. There is more than one reason for that. For much of the twentieth century, political restrictions closed the majority of the eastern coast to researchers from western Europe and America. Extensive trans- national projects require funding, collaboration and management that go beyond the remit of the national institutions in control of key collections of material. Sharing of information, often in minority languages, was cum- bersome, especially before the advent of the digital age. With Croatia’s transition from post-Communist nation state to EU member (1991–2013) and the gradual opening up of Albania in the 1990s, followed by its application for EU membership in 2009, barriers facing Western scholars have diminished. A number of important archaeological excavations in the Adriatic also necessitated a re-examination of this region and its relation- ship with the transalpine world and the East.