Episode 304 - Questions XIV

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 304,

Questions 14.

Thank you all so much for another batch of thoughtful questions on this period of narrative.

Let's clear up some easy ones to start with.

Listener V asks to what extent was the Latin Empire just a Venetian puppet?

Were the Italians dictating policy behind the scenes?

I don't think so, no.

As you heard in our discussions with John Giebfried, the Latin administration was always active trying to make things happen.

It's just that after 1220 or so, their options were extremely limited.

The Latins were dependent on the Venetians for naval defence, but I don't think it went beyond that.

In part because the Venetians were a very procedural procedural and legalistic state.

They kept meticulous records, ran decisions past multiple councils, and were always dealing with legal disputes.

The podestar at Constantinople, the Venetian in charge of affairs there, had his hands full just administering his own people.

He wasn't in a position to manipulate the Latins into doing his bidding.

The impression I get is that in the long run, the Venetians were fairly indifferent to who ran Constantinople.

One of the reasons they fought with the Byzantines against the Ottomans was a desire to prevent a new unitary empire from dominating the Eastern Mediterranean.

But we'll talk a lot more about that when we get there.

Listener V also sees parallels between Baldwin II and the final few Byzantine emperors who also travel Western Europe begging for aid.

An astute observation, and again one we will come back to.

Listener C asks, does the Varangian Guard still exist?

Yes, axe-wielding Celts, as the sources sometimes call them, are described as guarding prisoners and the treasury in the new Nicene state.

So their role may have changed a little over time, but they were still being trusted with the most serious security assignments.

Most recruits seem to have come from Denmark, England, and Scotland by this point, and they'll still be knocking around until the 1330s.

What about liquid fire?

says Listener C.

Sadly, Greek fire seems to have been lost by the time of the Fourth Crusade.

Rather than being a formula kept in a filing cabinet, I suspect the whole operation was part of the infrastructure of the Navy.

Remember, you had to import the right oil, mix it with the right substances, then build a pump and a siphon, and then if you're operating from a ship you have to build a foredeck designed to house it with a shield to protect the operator from the heat, and so on and so on.

This logistical inheritance may have been lost when the fleet itself disappeared.

In eleven eighty five Isaac Angelos sent the fleet to Cyprus, where it was hobbled by Latin pirates.

Presumably in the chaos which followed, over the next twenty years, all the little details needed to operate liquid fire fell away.

As I always have to remind everyone, though, Greek fire was not a magic weapon.

It definitely didn't operate like wildfire does in Game of Thrones.

It was a very delicate operation.

In modern recreations of the process, it's easy for the equipment producing the oil to malfunction.

No surprise when working at such high heat.

The operators must have been regularly burnt or scolded.

As such, it was not a very practical weapon, and would not have stopped the Crusaders in 1204, whether used on land or sea.

Listener Jay-Z asks, what happened to Dandelo's tomb after the Byzantines retook Constantinople?

A great question to which I don't have an answer.

Some report that the Byzantines threw his bones out, but I don't see that in the sources.

There are traditions that the Ottomans dismantled the tomb in 1453, but I'm not in a position to analyze those claims yet.

It's entirely possible that the Byzantines respected the dead or didn't want to offend the Venetians and so left him undisturbed in the Achia Sophia.

I don't think Dandelo was viewed as a hate figure as he is by some today.

I think the Romans of 1261 understood that the crusade was not the work of one man.

Several listeners messaged to say that that Constantine I and John Vitazis are not the only Roman emperors to be canonized as I suggested.

Some lists online have ten different emperors venerated as saints, including of course Justinian.

Remember that Coniates noted that his body had not decayed when the Crusaders came across his tomb because of the incorruptibility of the body of some saints.

As ever with Orthodoxy, my knowledge is limited limited and I need to be more precise with my words.

So unlike the Catholic Church, there wasn't a formal process of canonization.

So some emperors are called saints and some even have a vita, a saint's life written about them, without any formal cult, as in, no one was actively remembering them as a saint.

There was no shrine, no relics, no following.

In the end, only Constantine I is actually venerated the way other major saints are, but John Vitazis did have a local cult which actively commemorated him, with a vita and a special liturgy which went on for decades, and that is more than any other emperor can claim, and hence why he gets a special mention in that category.

John's son Theodore Lascaris II was the scholar who I said had written more works that survive than any emperor since Julian the Apostate.

So listener CM asks, what works do we have from Theodore?

We have letters, we have orations, a satire, polemics, political instruction, philosophy, hagiographic and hymnographic works, theological treatises and other essays.

To flesh that out a bit, he wrote a satire about his tutor.

He wrote in praise of his father, the city of Nicaea, and our historian, George Acropolites.

He wrote letters and instructions to his great friend George Mussolon, he wrote saints' lives and hymns of praise to the Virgin, and then there's quite a lot of theological and philosophical musings.

He also wrote several texts about Latin errors.

Speaking of whom, the Latins, as you know, are very disparaging about the Romans in their writing.

One of the most frequent charges is that they weren't as manly as the Latins were, because they didn't fight as often.

Listener M asked whether their tune changed after Nicene troops defeated them repeatedly during this period.

And the answer is, of course, no.

This wasn't about the actual record of Roman armies, it was about two very different cultures.

The Latin West was a very militarized place.

To be an aristocrat was to be a man who fights on horseback in armor.

And basically, you would be fighting all the time because the culture of the West saw violent disputes over lands and titles break out all the time.

In Byzantium, there was a civilian culture.

The legal system was trusted to settle disputes, and landowners were not expected to be soldiers.

The state actively prevented men from building castles and encouraged them to live at the capital and serve the government.

So when Latin nobles met their Byzantine counterparts, they were often surprised to find them wearing silk rather than steel.

Now, of course, most elite Byzantine males did serve in the army, but they rarely fought in the heavy cavalry style of Latin knights, and they rarely put themselves in the front line.

That would have been an abrogation of their responsibilities as a commander.

The Romans also hired mercenaries to fight alongside them.

Nicene armies were made up of Latin, Balkan, and Turkic soldiers, so you can understand why the Latins felt that they were tougher than their Byzantine counterparts.

But it's really a difference of culture and of demographics.

The Latin West had more second sons to throw at the Crusade.

In Byzantium, life became ever more precious as the territories the empire controlled grew smaller.

We're also talking about the whole of Western Europe versus a state that now, you know, before 1204 only controlled

you know, Greece and Thrace and a bit further north and western Anatolia.

So Byzantium was constantly being attacked by fresh armies drawn from a much, much larger pool of people

who would then turn up and criticize the Byzantines for not riding out to fight in heavy armor and throw themselves

against Turkic warbands.

But then the Byzantines would have all died and

they had no

France, Britain, Germany to call on to grab more men.

Anyway, it didn't matter how many times Alexius defeated Bohemond or Vitatsis defeated Baldwin II, the Latins had their demeaning stereotypes about the Romans and they weren't going to change them.

Listener T.O.

asks, how did all the other states react to Nicaea capturing Constantinople?

We don't have access to contemporary responses in most cases.

The Islamic histories tend to just report that the Latins took Constantinople in 1204 and the Byzantines took it back in 1261, which from their point of view was a perfectly coherent narrative.

The papacy was furious, as we'll discover in a couple of episodes' time, as were the Venetians, particularly when they heard that the Genoese would be moving in to their old quarters.

We can only guess how the Epirates and Bulgarians felt.

Jealous, I imagine, and anxious for the future.

I suspect there were warmer sentiments in Trabizond, since they were no longer in the race, but were pleased to see Romans back in charge of the city.

Listener KP has a bunch of questions.

Why didn't the Lascarids try to capture more territory in Anatolia, either after their victory in twelve eleven, the one where the Sultan was killed in the melee,

or after the Mongol invasions?

The basic answer is that in neither case would that have been a good idea.

In twelve eleven the Nicene army was decimated by their victory, and the Latins invaded when they heard that.

As for the Mongols, the last thing you want to do is provoke them, and they had turned the Seljuks into their vassals.

So, if Nicaea were to attack a Mongol vassal, well, you were just asking to be destroyed.

The deeper answer, though, is that it just wasn't practical to try and capture land on the Anatolian plateau.

It would be too vulnerable to attack from the nomads.

Please listen to episode two hundred and fifty for more on this.

Listener KP then ponders why it was that Western Anatolia was able to dominate the other regions of the Roman world.

Why were the emperors at Nicaea suddenly able to command more resources than all the powers in Europe?

Since when is Western Anatolia so much richer and stronger than everywhere around it?

Great question.

The answer is about state structures rather than geography.

Western Anatolia did have a lot of rich farmland, but so did Thrace.

The Nicene state commanded a slightly larger population than the European states that it was up against, as in not combined, as in it had a bigger population than Bulgaria, than Serbia, than

Epirus, than what the Latins controlled at Constantinople.

But the difference was not so vast that that becomes the explanation for their success.

Some listeners will be rolling their eyes as I talk once more about the importance of the tax system.

Nicaea kept intact the taxed registers and the currency of the Komnenian state, which meant that Lascaris and Vitazis had a huge pile of gold coins each spring to spend on their army.

This was a much more efficient means of exploiting the wealth of a region than the localized arrangements which predominated in the Latin Empire, in Bulgaria, and in Serbia.

Epirus did maintain the Byzantine tax system as far as we can tell, but it was a smaller region with far more rugged terrain, i.e., less productive land.

Nicaea then followed the Roman playbook of hiring mercenaries, Turks, Latins, Cumans, Hungarians, Serbs, Varangians, and so on, pre-made soldiers from militarized cultures.

Serving under Roman officers, they performed well and outclassed the local levies and aristocracies of the Balkans.

Listener KP wanted to know if Nicaea had an advantage in natural resources.

Again, the answer is no, not really.

Western Anatolia is a big place, so they had more than the Latins at Constantinople say, but it was more the tax revenue which allowed them to buy in timber or steel or whatever they needed at that moment.

Listener KP remains confused, though, as to why Nicaea could suddenly defend itself from attacks by Trebizond, the Latins and the Turks when previously that region had been an embattled part of the Komnenian world.

Well, they got lucky with the Turks.

The Seljuk army they defeated in 1211 was bigger than theirs, and if the Sultan hadn't died, they would have struggled.

The Mongols then finished the Seljuks off, which really was a boon for Nicaea and allowed them to expand into Europe.

As for the Latins and Trebizond, the answer here is that these are very small armies, no more than 2,000 men and sometimes much less.

The money and logistics needed to recreate Komnenian armies of 10,000 to 15,000 men were long gone.

I mean, if you learn about the history of Western Europe, you know, Latin states rarely

put out armies of more than 2,000 men.

It's only the crusading ventures where you see, you know, high Imperial Roman size armies of 20,000 or more.

So in this era,

between 1204 and 1261, an army of, say, 2,000 eperates could capture Thessaloniki and all the surrounding countryside because there was no opposition.

So when Nicaea really gets its act together under Vitazis, they are able at certain points to put out 6,000 men into the field, which allows them to march all the way to Dorachium and swat aside those who oppose them.

them.

Finally, listener KP asks why Venice didn't attempt to capture any ports on the Anatolian coast.

The answer there is that they just didn't need to.

Their primary goal was to secure the routes to Alexandria.

So you sail down the Adriatic, you stop over in Greece and then Crete and then Cyprus and then you're on your way.

Their next priority was Constantinople and so control of Euboea and some other Aegean islands was important.

And then they focused on getting up through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea because they wanted to access the markets there.

Anatolia was never a priority in this system.

It wasn't rich enough or rich enough in particular materials to be worth their time.

And of course, Nicaea would have fought them for any ports that they tried to grab.

Several listeners asked about all those forts in Europe changing hands so many times in the past 57 years, you know, from Byzantine to Latin to Bulgarian to Epirate to Nicene control.

And listener CC asks what this meant each time.

Was there a change of government in each town?

Were local notables forced to switch their allegiance?

Did those people then have to advance in the hierarchy of the state that was now in control of them?

Or were the locals simply changing the banners each time and carrying on as usual?

There's an awful lot we don't know about this situation, but aside from the actual governor or military officer in charge of a town or a fort, I don't think there was much expectation of loyalty from those below.

This isn't a Game of Thrones situation where everyone is accused of disloyalty to the one true king and executed for oath-breaking.

The Romans worked with Bulgarians and Latins all the time.

They were well aware that these men might prefer the Tsar or a Latin king to the Romans that they were faced with.

But if someone did their job and was reasonably competent, then you kept them on.

You needed able-bodied men and you needed the cooperation of the local population.

So chopping heads off would not have helped.

In the actual urban centres, I don't think much changed in these situations.

You just swapped one garrison for another, or one governor for another.

At smaller forts or fortress towns, it it might be more complicated because the soldiers were more intimately involved in daily life.

But often the local garrison would serve multiple administrations because they weren't a threat.

They weren't really field troops.

They were closer to a police force, usually.

So it really was those at the top who had to be careful what they did.

They would be moved into the hierarchy of the new state who'd taken over the region, and if they betrayed that state for another, then there would be reprisals down the line.

We're now into the what-ifs and counterfactuals.

Listener MB asks whether it would have been better for the Roman government to stay at Nicaea even after Constantinople was retaken.

A question that really only exists with the foreknowledge that the Ottomans are coming, which Listener MB acknowledges.

If you think about it, there really isn't any decision to make about where the capital should be once you've retaken Constantinople.

Ideologically, geographically, geopolitically, economically, it just makes more sense to be on the Bosphorus.

I probably don't need to waste too much time explaining why, but I will add two practical points.

First, if you leave Constantinople vacant, then someone else will try to seize it.

And frankly, the governor of New Rome that you appoint may well just have himself declared emperor if you stay at Nicaea.

And second, Roman government, as Antony Caldelles explains in his new book, is designed around the elites all living in one city, so that they can invest their interests in the state rather than their home region.

So if the emperor stays at Nicaea he is encouraging the elites to live wherever they like and that will encourage the separatist tendencies which the Latins had unleashed.

Look at Epirus for an example of Romans choosing to stay away from the imperial centre to look after their own affairs.

As we will discuss when we get there, the Romans would always have struggled with the rise of the Ottomans, no matter where they lived.

Listener L asks whether Nicaea could have restored the Roman world to its old centralized state.

For example, if Theodore Lascaris II, who had centralizing instincts, had reigned for like 30 years, could he have brought places like Epirus back into the orbit of Constantinople?

Yes, it's possible, but it was an uphill battle.

Decentralization had been taking place since before 1204, and it's hard to whip your elites into line when they can look over the border and see that their cousins in Epirus or Trebizond or Bulgaria have more freedom than they do.

The borders of the Roman world are now constantly tugging at the empire, encouraging it to decentralize.

And the Komnino Dukan Balaologan aristocrats don't have the collective ethos in the way the elites of earlier centuries did.

Listener C.

F.

wanted something similar, asking whether the survival of the Komnenian system of government actually hindered the Roman recovery.

He suggests a Diocletian-like reset would have been better for the state, which I think is true, but Diocletian had huge resources at his disposal to effect that change, whereas the Lascarids did not and had to work with the local aristocracy, who of course did not want to be disempowered for the good of the state.

Listener L also asks whether there could ever have been a Roman emperor of Asia and an emperor of Europe working together in harmony or even just disharmony.

Based on the question, I think he's thinking about, let's say, if Epirus had taken Constantinople, could Nicaea have just accepted that and left them alone?

And the answer is inevitably no.

The Romans believed in one emperor and one city and one state state and were never likely to leave it alone unless geographically removed from the game, like the rulers of Trebizond.

Listener L is also hinting at the question of why Epirus didn't want to be back in the imperial fold once Nicaea took Constantinople.

We will touch on this moving forward, but Listener L asks if the Epirates really enjoyed their independence or if that they felt they had to be anti-Nician to avoid being attacked by the Latins.

Though the latter is a factor, I think they just enjoyed being independent.

Listener N.M.

asks whether the Roman Empire could have recovered from its post-Manawheel Komninos chaos if the Fourth Crusade had not happened.

Yes, but it still would have been a difficult ask, as we've just talked about.

You know, when you look at this period of narrative, the vigour shown by Nicaea and Epirus indicates that the Romans pre-1204 were perfectly capable of getting their act together, but in a way they only managed to once Constantinople was off their backs.

The crisis going on before the Fourth Crusade seemed to have short-circuited the Roman government, and I wonder if some kind of break from normality was needed to shut the whole system down and reboot.

Perhaps a power like Bulgaria, or later the Mongols, seriously threatening Constantinople, would have allowed a reforming emperor to take charge and get the state back on track.

The Angeloi certainly didn't seem to know how to get out of the loop of chaos that they were in.

Listener N.M.

wonders how the situation in 1261 compares with the situation just after the Battle of Manzikert.

Both are very difficult situations.

At least after Manzikert, the European provinces remained productive and loyal, which gave Alexios Komnenos a base to rebuild from.

He also had a peaceful Aegean, which kept trade flowing, something the Byzantines have much less control over in 1261.

Final question.

Several listeners asked about the Roman identity of the Romans in 1261.

Were they becoming more Greek by this point?

This is in part inspired by those who've read a bit more about Theodore II Lascaris.

So let me talk about this in a little more detail and then we'll get back to him.

So as you know there was no Greek nation or nation-state before modern times.

Communities who spoke Greek did recognize one another as part of the same world,

but not as part of one nation.

They might make common cause, famously at Thermopylae and Salamis, but there was never a recognized Greek nation-state or just

a Greek nation.

The Romans were doing something very unusual in the ancient world by offering citizenship to those who were not born in Rome.

And so they absorbed many peoples who they convinced to become Romans themselves.

Eventually, of course, they conquered a whole empire and the coming of Christianity then aided people across that empire to be able to feel Roman because it removed the obvious difference in local cult religious practice

that made it seem obvious why an Egyptian was different from a Roman or a Spaniard or whatever.

As we discussed back in episode 41 of the podcast, local Greek identities dropped away as the Roman state became more entrenched.

To be from Athens ceased to mean what it used to, particularly once the religion changes.

You were now just another Christian Roman citizen, and so most people referred to themselves as Roman when their identity was in question.

Two episodes ago I confirmed that the citizens of Byzantium referred to themselves as Romans in the face of Latin attempts to call them Greeks, even when they had been removed from the embrace of Roman government for a century or more.

And you see this in Anatolia and in any Muslim state where Romans are called Rome.

You know, they're called Romans.

Nobody there is calling them Greek, only the Latins call them that.

Now,

here's where it gets interesting.

Within that Roman identity, there were, of course, many strands to draw from.

For example, amongst the ancestors who the Byzantines could claim, you have Aeneas of Troy, the clans of the Republic, the Israelites of the Old Testament, and the great Greek philosophers.

The Byzantines saw no contradiction in receiving their language from Homer, their religion from Christ, and their laws from Rome.

This was the rich cultural stew which made them the premier civilization of their world.

Now, identity is often expressed in the face of an outside presence.

So in the 8th century the Byzantines would have looked at a brutish frank and said, you know, we are Romans, we have this proud civilized tradition which makes us better than you.

While also,

you know, receiving sword blows and defeats from superior Arab armies, they were able to say, you know, each wound only confirms me in my superior Christian faith.

So you express a different part of your identity depending on who you're talking to.

In the Komnenian centuries, the challenge was a different one.

The Latins were Christians too, and though charges of heresy and impiety were often hurled at them, no one could doubt their commitment to their faith.

The Latins were also Roman, or at least they claimed to be.

You know, they claimed descent from the Romans too.

They had their own Roman emperor.

They often came from Italy, the people the Byzantines were coming up against, and their faith was dictated by the Church of Rome.

So although the Byzantines could argue with them that they weren't really Roman, it was an argument which it was hard to win.

You know, if your opponent doesn't accept the premise of the question.

On top of which, the Latins, of course, had won.

They had sacked the Byzantine capital and now dictated policy to them.

So if these quote-unquote Romans were superior in arms and clearly favoured by God, it was hard to look them in the face and argue that they weren't really Romans on any practical ground.

From this dynamic, it was perhaps only natural that Byzantine writers stressed the one area of their identity which was different and manifestly so they thought superior, and that was the Greek language and the learning which came with it.

Educated Byzantines did what men had done for a thousand years or more.

They studied Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Hesiod, Plato, and so on.

They were trained in grammar, rhetoric, and at least the basics of philosophy.

They could write clever speeches on any number of topics.

They thought logically.

So they thought.

Those who went into the church would bring this training to bear on the scriptures and the writings of the church fathers, so that both secular and ecclesiastical Byzantines felt they could go toe-to-toe with any Latin on any topic and win the argument.

Pride in this pre-Christian collection of Hellenistic texts had been frowned upon in earlier centuries, but during the Comninian period, outward expression of Hellenism had become more common, something I want to explore in a future Byzantine story.

Again, this did not contradict the Roman or Christian nature of elite Byzantines.

It was just a different expression of one aspect of their inheritance.

Now of course after 1204 this did stand out.

It stands out to us looking at their texts.

In the face of Latin aggression many Byzantine writers began to identify themselves with their Greek-speaking ancestors more than their Latin ones for obvious reasons.

Now Theodore Lascaris II was one of these men.

He begins to refer to fellow Byzantines as Hellenes,

as in Greeks.

He seems to accept that all Greek-speaking people of the past are his ancestors, that, for example, Alexander the Great was a fellow ruler of a Hellenic kingdom.

He is essentially agreeing with the Latins that the Byzantines are a Greek-speaking nation with roots in the Greek past, even if he would also claim that they had then inherited the Roman Empire as well.

Now, this stands out now when you read Wikipedia summaries of history because it chimes with what Greek nationalists in the last couple of centuries were thinking.

So in a way you can look back to Lascaris as someone rejecting the Roman label and embracing his true Greekness.

But as Antony Caldellus patiently points out, that isn't what is happening here.

Lascaris is still defining the identity of the Roman nation.

He is not arguing that the Byzantines aren't Romans.

He's merely stressing one aspect of that inheritance.

And it is clearly personal to him.

As a lover of Greek texts, he is inclined to see them as a key element in Roman identity.

But we have texts from his tutor and from Acropolites, the historian, and their writing doesn't say the same thing.

They don't express the same sentiment about the Roman identity.

So you can see that the Niceneans in particular were struggling with their identity and how to express it,

but only because they were having to express it in the face of an enemy who was trying to deny the Roman label.

And with their state gone, the Byzantines had to find new ways to talk about themselves, their values, and their destiny.

Just to give you a practical example of this problem,

Byzantine writers write in this attic style, the same way people wrote in classical Athens.

And within that style, because it's a bit like if I was doing this podcast in Shakespearean English, they use archaic place names or names for peoples.

So Constantinople might be called Byzantium, even though you're writing about what happened in 1204.

And you might call Turks Persians, and you might call Pechenegs Scythians, because these are the terms that Herodotus and others used.

And for centuries, Byzantine writers have referred to themselves, to the Romans of Anatolia and Greece, as Orsones,

the term for Italians, which the Greeks of Democratic Athens had used.

Well, it's difficult to write about the Orsones, the Italians, in a text about Romans fighting Venetians in 1204.

So Orsones had to go, and sometimes Hellens or Elines steps in.

So Greek speakers, in this case, clearly referring to the modern Byzantines, as they struggled with their Latin-speaking Italian opponents.

We know that Roman identity was going to remain a contentious issue, both in the face of continued Latin aggression and then eventually Ottoman occupation.

And so Theodolas Garris's musings are relevant to that ongoing story, but he wasn't doing anything especially radical.

He did not imagine the Romans would one day have to rebrand themselves as Greeks in order to become a nation-state.

Next time, it's back to the narrative.

We introduce our new emperor properly as Michael VIII Palaeologos prepares to enter Constantinople for the very first time.

Next time will be in two weeks.

Next week there will be no episode on the free feed.

There will be an episode for Patreon members though, just answering another listener question.

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