BYZANTIUM AND THE TURKS: THE FALL AND RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Conversely, the Turks looked upon Constantinople with admiration and envy, much like how people today view cities like New York or Paris. A story is told of a medieval migrant woman who sought her fortune in the principal metropolis of the world at that time. Though her name is unknown, she is referred to as a Scythian, a term used by Byzantines to describe the inhabitants of the Great Steppe. This wealthy woman resided in the territory of the Golden Horde, possibly in present-day Kazakhstan, and did not have a husband or children.

Having heard about the wonders and comforts of Constantinople, this Scythian woman was eager to move there and was even willing to be baptized. One day, she noticed Greek slaves—prisoners from ThraceiThrace is a historical region in southeastern Europe. It is now divided between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey.—being escorted from near her house or yurt. Keeping her long-term goal in mind, she decided to ransom one of them, marry him, and even have two children with him. Against the backdrop of saksauls, feather grass, and tulips, one might think that their life was idyllic, but the allure of the wider world beckoned to them nonetheless.

Soon, her husband's first wife, a Greek woman, who was also taken by the Tatars from Thrace, found herself in the same area. The good Scythian woman, rather than feeling jealous, bought her to comfort her husband and assist with household chores. It is hard to imagine this medieval love triangle, but somehow they made it work. However, the time had come to fulfill their long-planned emigration. The Scythian woman underwent baptism and settled in Constantinople, together with her husband and his first wife, who stayed with them as their slave.

At first glance, happiness seemed to be in their grasp, but the first wife must have had a very different perception of what had occurred. One can easily imagine her mourning her husband's capture into slavery, envisioning the terrible deprivation and cruelty he was enduring. What did she witness instead? She saw a contented husband, well-fed on koumiss and horse meat, who had acquired a new wealthy wife and fathered two children with her. In the steppe, in Scythian territory, she likely had little freedom to express her emotions and reluctantly accepted the situation. However, once she breathed the air of her homeland again, she decided to take action.

Perhaps she had secretly hoped—or maybe her husband played along, not wanting to extinguish her hope—that in Constantinople, they would rid themselves of the despised Scythian woman and resume living together. However, things didn't unfold as she had anticipated. The husband was quite content with the Scythian woman, her wealth, and their children. But the first wife refused to accept her fate. Channeling her anger, she approached the patriarch and accused the Scythian woman of stealing her husband.

The Scythian woman appeared before the court and presented her perspective. She had freed her husband from slavery but had left his first wife in bondage, offering to redeem her for the price originally paid for her. Supposedly, the money was needed to support her own children, although one can imagine that the real motive was quite different. What if once freed the husband and his first wife ran away together? Moreover, the ungrateful Greek woman needed to be taught a lesson. The patriarch and the other dignitaries involved in the proceedings applauded the decision of the newly converted Christian, considering it exceptionally generous and fair.

However, divine justice soon prevailed. As soon as the first wife had gone to Thrace to collect the ransom money from her former neighbors, the Tatars invaded once again and abducted her, condemning her to permanent slavery. The husband finally returned to the good Scythian woman and lived with her happily ever after. This story dates back to approximately 1337–38.iНикифор Григора. История ромеев / Пер. Р. Яшунского. Т. 1–3. СПб., 2013–2016. Т. 1. С. 415—416.

Such a story, with its happy ending, holds significant meaning in various aspects. Within the context of our course, we should first emphasize the Scythian woman's desire to move to Byzantium. For centuries, civilization was a powerful magnet attracting hordes of invaders, caravans, and fleets of merchants. It also drew inquisitive individuals, those seeking knowledge, comfort, or new experiences. The Scythian woman pursued her dream in stages, starting by marrying a Byzantine subject and having children with him. Even today, many people begin their emigration in a similar manner.

It is worth noting that in those ancient times, when language instruction was not the norm, the Scythian woman and her Greek husband quickly learned to understand each other. Further, in a world entirely unaware of visas, refugee status, and residence permits, religious and cultural differences were not insurmountable barriers to a union. Later, we will see that many sultans had Christian mothers—Greek, Slavic, and others. Harems even had Christian churches within their palaces, authorized by the rulers themselves.

In this context, in our times, it is interesting to note that the relationship between Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, a Christian princess and a Muslim, both subjects of the same country, caused much more controversy than any other such union in the past. Moreover, the notion of a mosque at Windsor Castle would have seemed utterly unbelievable had Diana and Dodi married.

When our Scythian character faced the threat of prosecution, the Byzantine legal system sided with her, despite her being a recent migrant and a neophyte, while a Greek woman accused her of being a victim of Scythian raids. Byzantine law did not favor any particular ethnicity and supported the Scythian woman. This case exemplifies how the legal framework protected immigrants from unscrupulous actions by native individuals, a practice not commonly seen today. Nevertheless, the empire operated under a logical framework, free from ethnic prejudice.

Before we start our first conversations on Byzantine-Turkic relations, let me share some introductory remarks and give the general outline of this course. The leading idea that threads my lectures is the fate of the empire, or even more broadly, the fate of civilization: what allowed an advanced civilization to find successful answers to the time challenges, why, at one moment in history, it could not find such solutions. In other words, why does civilization perish, and the diverse and profound experience accumulated over centuries and millennia does not help it to sustain itself? That is why Byzantium will stay the focus of our talk - what was the mechanism for the demise of a great civilization that lived and survived so well?

Within the following discourse, I will describe the Turks as the Byzantine Greeks saw them and put this vision in the context of our current knowledge about the Turks. There is a distinct advantage in such an approach as the Byzantine writers left modern science a rich body of knowledge on this you can hardly find anywhere in other presently known sources.

So, let us start with Byzantium. Byzantium has no beginning. No chronological point or event that modern scholarship would recognize as the beginning of Byzantium exists. Byzantium conventionally refers to the Late Roman Empire, which, having recovered from the upheavals of the Migration Period, continued to live in the new world we call the Middle Ages. We might say that Byzantium was born in 753 BC with the foundation of Rome. Alternatively, in 330 BC, when Alexander conquered the Achaemenid Empire.iThe Byzantines called the Sassanid Empire ‘Persia’. Or, in the era of Homer (eighth or ninth century BC). Or, in the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the first third of the IV century, when he legalized Christianity in the empire. These four proposed beginnings of Byzantium can be thoroughly acceptable for Byzantine self-description and self-awareness. The rare distant horizon of its beginnings and, therefore, people’s cultural memory, rooted either in prehistory or deep antiquity, distinguish Byzantium from other European and Near Eastern medieval cultures that emerged comparatively recently.

Modern scholars (not without good reason) extend the upper chronological frame of antiquity in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean to the VIII-IX centuries. For example, the historian Hervé Inglebert speaks of post-Roman antiquity, the second phase of the ancient period, namely antiquity that survived Roman statehood and inertial reproduced the social and cultural Romanitas. To agree with Inglebert means to admit that the history of medieval Byzantium is nothing but post-antique Romanitas, which has undergone profound Hellenization and Christianization. Anthony Kaldellis, a Greek-American historian, vividly and persistently discusses the preservation in Byzantium of the structural link with Romanitas and Helleno-Latin culture. In this sense, the Byzantine experience mixes up the cards of periodizers of the historical process rather strongly, as cannot be consistently described as exclusively medieval.

With no medieval beginning Byzantium, at least, has a medieval end. In 1453, the Asian conquerors ended the Roman Empire. The long medieval existence of the Roman Empire, viewed through the prism of this catastrophic perspective, appears, on the face of it, a series of defeats and a gradual surrender of positions. It is how early European scholarship tried to describe its history. Yet, over time, especially in the second half of the XX century, ideas about the evolution of the empire became more complex - a series of defeats and crises gave way to victories, stabilization, and progressive development. Changing from within (but still keeping a deep connection with tradition), the medieval Roman Empire succeeded in finding the answers to the Slavic conquests, the Arab challenge, the aggression of the steppe, and the expansion of Western Europeans.

Despite this, the Byzantines did not find an adequate response to one challenge - the conquest movement of Asian peoples to the West, which began in the XI century. In the XI century, Turkic nomadic tribes from the north and Seljuk conquerors from the east attacked the empire almost simultaneously. The latter deprived the state of a large part of Anatolia, a vast area of strategic importance for its economic stability. With curbing the Turkic threat in the Balkans, the Seljuk problem remained unresolved, hanging over the future. Thus, the Anatolian aliens sowed the seeds of the future in the XI century and reaped their shoots later in the XV century.

Overnight, in 1204, the unexpected and illogical attack of the Knights of the Fourth Crusade1¹The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204)was organized by Pope Innocent III. Like his predecessors, Innocent called on European knights to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule. In order to transport the army of the Crusaders to the Holy Land, a fleet was needed, which was possessed by the then maritime superpower—the Venetian Republic. In turn, Venice, which traditionally competed with Byzantium for primacy in trade with the East, involved the Crusaders in an internal conflict in Byzantium on the side of the deposed Emperor Isaac II Angelos. Since Isaac II could not pay off the Crusaders, the Crusaders took Constantinople by storm and plundered the city for three days. In place of Byzantium, the Latin Empire was created, which controlled Constantinople, Thrace, and lands in Greece, and lasted until 1261. on Constantinople broke the back of the empire, at that point still a Mediterranean superpower. The state lost some territories of prime strategic importance and fell into three parts. Although Byzantium survived the events of the early XIII century, this disaster gave the Anatolian Muslims a chance to develop a conquest and end the empire in 1453.

The year 1453 would not have happened without the year 1204, no doubt. It should be stressed, however, that it was the Asian people, not the LatinsiThe Byzantines called Catholics ‘Latins’ because they used Latin as their language of worship. This designation often had a negative connotation. or Slavs, who succeeded in overthrowing a power that had been wise from more than two thousand years of experience. The reasons for the success of the Anatolian conquerors are very complex, multidimensional and still have no unambiguous and generally accepted explanation. Later through the course, we will take another step in our search for the reasons for the existential defeat of Byzantine civilization under the onslaught of its Asian neighbors.

It is a case of the Byzantine adversaries, habitually referred to in modern science as Turks. These are the northern tribes that invaded the Balkans from across the Danube, including the Seljuks conquering most of Asia Minor from the Byzantines. Turkic tribes inhabited vast areas of Inner Asia and South Siberia in the III-II millennia BC. Even early in their history, they began to spread to the West. We will consider the medieval stage of this movement.

Please, pay attention, however, that the movement of Turks to the West was an episode of a much larger process of migration of peoples over vast areas of Europe and Asia that stretched for thousands of years. The medieval stage of such moving is often referred to as the Migration Period.

The essence of the Migration Period phenomenon can be described as follows. From East to West, from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, a narrow ribbon of highly sedentary civilizations, a civilized oikumeneiThe Greek term oikoumene means ‘inhabited land’. The term oikoumene could also refer to the land inhabited by Greeks specifically or to all lands known to man in general., composed of the regional cultures of the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Semites, Greeks, and Romans, stretched. These civilizations were known for their complex religious, social, and economic structures, high technology, sophisticated art, and daily routine. To the north, they bordered many tribes in earlier stages of development and much plainer forms of life (less sophisticated social relations, religions, and cultures). As a rule, these were nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes. People who lived in the civilized zone called their northern neighbors (each civilization in its language) barbarians and savages.

The relationship between the zones of civilization and barbarism was complex and mixed. For civilization, the barbarian zone has always been a source of human resources - slaves who have become an important, structural element of the civilized economy and life. For nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, the civilized world has always been a source of super-expensive and high-tech (thus, valuable) things they were unable to create themselves and captured during the raids to the civilized lands. The worlds of civilization and barbarism were closely linked and dependent on each other. Both spaces were steadily striving for each other. This striving often took the form of conquest outside one’s world, an attempt physically to take possession of another world’s space.

The Migration Period is precisely about the invasion of Mediterranean civilization by barbarian peoples from the interior regions of Europe and Asia who had not yet learned civilization. The resettlement resulted in profound changes in the ethnic and cultural map of Europe and Asia. Paradoxically, its outcome was the expansion of the civilized oikumene. Civilization, even while losing in the military struggle, defeated the barbarians through their cultural improvement. The civilization, when the barbarians entered its area, assimilated them in the second and subsequent generations. (Note in parentheses, though, that there may have been some exceptions).

The subjects of the Migration Period include the Germanic and Slavic tribes who lived in central and northeastern Europe, the Finno-Ugric (namely Hungarians), Turkic, and Mongolian peoples who came from the Altai steppes and modern Siberia. The medieval stage of the migration period began in the first centuries of our era and lasted through the Middle Ages: this is the movement southward to the Mediterranean coast of the Germans, Slavs, and Hungarians within IV-XI centuries, which ended with the Hungarian and Norman conquests in Europe. Another line of migrations is the movement of Turkic peoples and Mongols from Siberia to China, pre-Muslim and Muslim Asia, and into Christian Europe. Strictly speaking, one shall not consider the resettlement of peoples completed until the XVI century, with the ending of the Turkic invasions and the setting of a new ethnic map of Eurasia. The mass migrations of barbaric peoples eventually led to their inclusion in the civilized oikumene, the merging and homogenization of the former zones of civilization and barbarism.

Our conversations focus on the Turkic component of the Migration Period as the Byzantines saw it. The Byzantines encountered Turkic nomads predominantly in two directions - the northwestern Danube and eastern Anatolian. The Byzantines knew the Turks made the main body of both conquerors’ armies, yet still preferred to call northern Turks Scythians and eastern Turks Persians, using generalized, social and cultural, rather than narrow-ethnic terms.

Although modern scholarship rests on very different epistemologicaliFrom the Greek ‘scientific knowledge’. grounds than Byzantine scholarship, moving the Byzantines from narrow ethnic definitions is unexpectedly consonant with current historical research, which avoids ethnocentric interpretations of medieval societies. That is why sometimes I will refer to the Byzantine enemies in the north and east as Asian peoples in general terms. The fact is that both the Danubian and Anatolian conquerors represented no ethnic unity in their language or culture. As we shall see, the Turks could numerically prevail among the conquerors, but they always existed together with the Indo-Europeans, be they nomadic, semi-nomadic, or sedentary. For example, the culture that was forming in the conquered Anatolia from the end of the XI century typologically was rather Neo-Persian than any other. Pure ethnicity was not spread in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, though serving the conceptual scientific constructor as the most representative of the XIX-XX centuries’ societies.

My use of the term Asian peoples instead of Turkic peoples also makes it possible to avoid terminological inconveniences about Mongol invaders, not to mix with Turks, Alanian nomadic Iranians, who played a significant role in the invasions, and also sedentary Iranians and Arabs, who also made the nomadic societies in some degree. In their culture and existential experience, peoples who came from deep Eurasia and the Middle East to the borders of Byzantium, whatever language they spoke, belonged to the specific of Asia, which determined their alienation from the post-antique Roman paradigm. They were different yet of Asian types, accumulating a diverse and contemporaneous Indo-European, Semitic, Altaic, and partly Chinese experience. Having formulated these reservations, I will further use, along with other designations, the more general definitions of Turks, Persians, and Arabs. It is important to remember that the social and cultural background of medieval ethnonyms does not coincide with their linguistic-ethnic content and is not limited to it.

Through our lectures, I will try to synthesize some general concepts of the relations between Byzantines and Asian peoples comparatively. Doing so, I will deliberately limit our conversation to Byzantine-Asian relations, avoiding, wherever possible, a discussion of problems of the internal life of Byzantine and Asian societies. I am most interested in the general logic of the relationship, analyzed mainly in the context of Byzantine history.

In the first part of the course, I will speak about the early coming of the Turks within the Byzantine political and intellectual horizon. For many reasons, up to the X century, the direct contacts between Byzantium and various Turkic peoples were very episodic, local, and unstable. Therefore, we cannot speak about any critical transformation of the Byzantine and Turkic societies under the influence of such contacts. At the same time, this early period is the first acquaintance between Byzantines and Turks, when Turks gain their generic name within the Byzantine intellectual space.

The second part will focus on Byzantine-Asian relations in the XI-XIII centuries, both with the Balkan nomads and the Anatolian hybrid sedentary and nomadic world. The discussion of significant military-political and diplomatic events will be supplemented by portraits of notable persons of Asian origin who in some form influenced Byzantine domestic life or impressed the Greeks, as well as references to the social, cultural, and economic phenomena of the era relevant to our topic. It will give our conversation a broader and, at the same time, more detailed sociocultural and anthropological dimension.

The third part will be devoted to the time of the decline and fall of the Byzantine states in the XIII-XV centuries. The sources have brought us rich material about this epoch, much more detailed and diverse versus what we know about the early times. My prime goal is to highlight the logic and plot twists of the Byzantine-Asian drama in a mass of mixed information. We will talk about the degradation of Byzantium from a world power to a regional one, the rapid decline of the empire, its transformation into a tributary of the Turks, and, finally, its collapse.