Ethnography After Antiquity by Anthony Kaldellis

Author:Anthony Kaldellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

CHAPTER 5

Ethnography in Palaiologan Literature

An Introduction to the Palaiologan Period and Its Sources

In 1204 the armies of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople and set about the conquest and dismemberment of the Byzantine empire. They were to have only partial and temporary success. The Byzantines-in-exile managed to hold on to many regions, chiefly western Greece, Trebizond and its hinterland, and most of western and northwestern Asia Minor, from where they retook the capital in 1261. The Palaiologan dynasty reigned over the reconstituted empire for the next two centuries, but the geopolitical context had changed irrevocably. Asia Minor was gradually lost to a number of post-Seljukid emirates, of which the Ottomans would prove the most ambitious and successful. This process was complete, more or less, by 1337. Mainland Greece and the islands were a patchwork of mercantile, feudal, and mercenary Latin colonies mixed up with regional Byzantine, Slavic, and Albanian principalities. The Palaiologan empire actually made considerable progress against them, especially in the Peloponnese, most of which it managed to recapture by the fifteenth century, but the Byzantine cause was hampered by a series of civil wars that broke out in earnest in 1321 and continued, on and off, until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and even beyond (the despots of the Peloponnese continued to squabble until 1460). These wars, and the distractions of the Hesychast religious controversy, which tore the Byzantine leadership apart after the mid-fourteenth century, enabled other powers to dominate the Balkans, first the Serbs and then, after 1371, the Ottomans, who had been brought over as mercenaries in the civil wars but decided to conquer the whole for themselves. After the 1370s, Byzantium was on and off a vassal and tributary state of the Ottomans. A grace period of fifty years was granted to its existence by the defeat of sultan Bayezid by Timur at the battle of Ankara in 1402. But the blow to Byzantine prestige and imperial self-confidence had already been struck.

One of the great paradoxes of the Palaiologan period is that it was marked by a thriving and innovative literary culture, for all that it was a period of rapid and demoralizing imperial decline. A great deal of this literature is fault-finding, of course. Who was to blame for the decline? Fingers were pointed and the case made at length against both the Palaiologoi and their critics, as well as against the Latins, infidels, Hesychasts, anti-Hesychasts, Unionists, anti-Unionists, Serbs and Bulgarians, the partisans of innumerable factions, and the sins of the Byzantines generally. At any rate, this vigorous and confusing debate generated a rich body of literary and documentary evidence. The culture's image of self-subsisting and aloof autonomy partly gave way, as foreign influences, especially from the Latin world, made their presence felt both physically and intellectually. There was much more interpenetration now: the borders of the state did not coincide with those of the culture, and the foreigner was now everywhere, at the court, in the army, Church, and aristocracy, as an in-law, or ruling an adjacent territory.

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