Reading Constantine

Constantine Porphyrogenitus was not exactly what his self-given title implies, namely the generally acknowledged legal heir to the East Roman throne. That he was born "in the purple" is true, in the sense that he first saw the light of this world inside the "holy" palace of the Constantinopolitan emperors. But his mother was not the legal consort of the emperor Leo VI, and therefore as far as the other contenders for power were concerned the offspring of that union, whatever the venue of its generation, precisely lacked the requisite legitimacy. The sickly and intellectual boy, thus, made a point of attaching to his name the famous epithet, through which he has impressed his presence on the tablets of historical memory, in order to bolster a disputed status. He did eventually accede to highest office, but not before a protracted struggle with the faction of General Lecapenus whose issue nevertheless did manage to possess the coveted prize after Constantine's demise.

All this simply points out the tricky nature of the recording and transmission of what "exactly" occurred in the more or less distant past. It is also roughly on par with the political mode and mores -especially regarding imperial succession- of late Roman times, a rough and tumble of competing dynastic and military interests that very often degenerated into murderous violence (as, among numerous other examples, the accession and bloody regime of the tyrant Phocas and the deeds of the empress Irene that de-legitimized the eastern throne show). This ethos of political savagery survived, even predominated, into late medieval times in the Christian East as well as in the Christian West.

This needs to be stressed, because for a very long time cruelty, treachery, violation of filial bonds etc. were seen as somehow the monopoly of "Byzantine" society, thus implicitly absolving the western barbarian kingdoms founded upon the ruins of Roman institutions there of any political chicanery and misdeed. This is of course patently absurd and ridiculous. The Byzantines were merely more refined, subtle and duplicitous in their intrigue, as opposed to the raw brutality of the "Franks", simply because they saw themselves rightly as the inheritors and preservers of the Roman tradition which had been smashed to smithereens by the barbarian invasions elsewhere in Europe. One can see, if one so chooses, the Eastern Roman tradition as a long and tedious story of debauchery and degeneration (something that suited the theoretic purposes of someone like Montesquieu for instance) -and there are elements of that as part of the picture surely. But whether this is the whole and complete story is another question.

One could, alternatively, detect in the interminable series of conflicts and convulsions, foreign and domestic, that Constantine delineates, as well as in the rigid ceremonialism that he expounds, a certain touching cultural heroism, the desperate care to hold on to an intellectual and spiritual patrimony, eventually mediated through the Greek language, without which the world of nature and man would be demystified into utter senselessness. It is in this frame, I believe, that one must try to understand the infamous theological -and theocratic- obsession of the Byzantines. By anchoring their polity in God, by referring all worldly issues to the beyond, they were hoping to salvage the intelligible moral structure of existence in the face of an onslaught of raw physical power, of which the marauding Frankish knights were a most palpable manifestation.

By doing that, of course, they gradually lost their hold on their material reality, both in political and military terms. They were forced to forfeit the actual Imperium, which remained a mere idea in their minds and in their legal codes. This was, indeed, patently un-Roman, as the Enlightenment eagerly historians pointed out. But what the latter maybe disregarded was that Roman times were by the tenth century irrevocably superseded, and that the concurrent Western attempt to resurrect a "Holy Roman Empire" (of the Teutonic nation to boot!!!) was an equally, or even more blatantly, hopeless and reactionary project compared to the Byzantine rear-guard actions -even if one overlooks the beastliness also involved in the realization of the Western Christian mission (Charlemagne Christrianized those that survived his military butcheries, although as always this fact is not of itself enough to found an adequate historical judgment on his career). This account is not meant to absolve the Byzantines of any enormities that they may have committed. Their "Cesaropapism", for one, was certainly illiberal and opprerssive, whereas their theological penchant propelled the masses into a blind fanaticism. But religious intolerance and closed-mindedness was not the exclusive possession of the "Greeks". Medievalism in general was infused with this spirit, and it was only local social and political conditions that enabled western Christendom to emerge from that darkness -while simultaneously preserving the solid cultural achievements of that period.

For the rest, reading through Constantine's De administrando imperio one cannot but be struck by a couple of things that are not usually referred to in the analyses that bring out mainly the political significance of the text. To begin with it is impressive how deep and genuine is the religious faith that informs his admonitions and instructions to his son and presumed successor to the throne. This fact is often debunked and/or mocked by modern accounts of the medieval period, under the interpretative technique of "false consciousness". But what this overlooks is that what might be false consciousness for us, was indeed the truest kind for the historical epoch that adhered to it and in a manner that infused all aspects of its thought and practice. For instance, Constantine, in line with the tradition of chroniclers that he cites, considers the miracles of St. Andrew at Patras as literally true, in the same manner as the popular imagination of the times. That the men of that era may have violated occasionally, or even mostly, the precepts of their faith is neither here nor there, because this is a universal, diachronic trait of the human condition. What is of primary significance is the existential import of those axiological commitments even in the midst of their violation. And of this existential dimension of the faith there is ample and moving evidence in the emperor's writing.

His language is tinged with emotion and his style and diction deliberately imitates that of the Psalms. Quite noteworthy is his statement that he is not going to lay out his thoughts in the attic style of official scholars, but in the spoken language of everyday life. One could thus include the emperor among the champions of the demotic, something that would run counter to the sensibilities of our modern left for which ideological obsession is an end in itself even if it drastically violates both facts as well as historical awareness and judgment (which they do not cease invoking ad nauseam). The emperor's demotic is, as mentioned, shot through with ecclesiastical locutions but in a theological era one could expect no less. The spoken language is always the outcome of the cultural ethos of its times, all of whose multifaceted thrusts and tendencies exercise a formative influence. A demotic is never and can never be a uniform and one-dimensional practice, but is structured by layer upon layer of historical sediments and survivals. In contradistinction, what counts for demotic in today's Greece is only what is sanctioned by the dominant party-political interests of the moment, i.e. a lifeless abstraction deracinated from its historical soil and denuded of all aesthetic and semantic multivalence, ambiguity and suggestiveness. To be sure, these linguistic exertions of the emperor are dedicated to the defense and exaltation of (what else?) the imperial ideal itself, which is however not identified with the person of the reigning monarch but constitutes a supreme ideal to which he himself is simply a servant and executor -again, in harmony with popular perceptions of the matter. Indeed, this treatise could be seen as an exercise in the vein of the "mirrors" of christian princes. Except, that it is not merely an idealized exposition, but is also filled up with rich historical matter. It is this fusion, I believe, that renders it one of the master texts of medieval scholarship.

Another element of the imperial script that ought to be stressed is its express declaration of cultural affinity between the Greek-speaking East Romans and Latin Christianity. This is a remarkable feature, the precludes any employment of this text for the purpose of bolstering the inane Greek nationalist and anti-western reading of Byzantine history that has prevailed in modern Greek education and the public mind -in increasingly crude and repulsive forms as we moved towards the end of the twentieth century. In his instruction to his son on how to contradict barbarian requests to marry into the East Roman imperial family, Constantine explains that intermarriage is permissible only in the case of the "Franks" with whom the Byzantines share a cultural ethos. Old Rome is considered the mother of the new one on the banks of the Bosporus. The Christian Church is still united under the primacy of the bishop of Rome, and this despite the severe rifts that have already transpired in previous centuries (such as the Anastasian schism occasioned by that emperor's Henotikon decree, as well as the iconoclastic controversy in which the Constantinopolitan throne was for a considerable period on the side of what was subsequently recognized as a heresy). Constantine's official statement, thus, is proof that the strong sense of Christian unity across linguistic borders in Europe was a constant in Byzantine cultural and political awareness, surviving acute political crises. In fact, the chief Byzantine complaint against the crusaders later on was going to be that they were in violation of that Christian and Roman unity and solidarity that the eastern empire still upheld. The present imperial text thus reinforces another notion that has disappeared from modern Greek education, and even scholarship I would venture to add, namely that one cannot understand Byzantium except as an integral part of European society and culture despite its unique and distinctive features (all particular European cultures have unique and distinctive features). This messianic understanding of a Greek Byzantium as the only genuine repository of cultural and spiritual values against an alien and decadent West may have been provoked by the anti-Byzantine bias of the 18th century. But this can no longer be an excuse for the persistence of this ideological delusion in modern Greek popular culture and official education, given that the West has long outgrown any shrill anti-Byzantinism. The hegemony of these nationalist fictions can only be explained by crude political and ideological manipulation -and also by utter ignorance of the Byzantine sources themselves.

I will not here comment on the most contentious parts of Porphyrogenitus' writings, namely ch. 49 and 50 of De administrando and the reference in the De Thematibus to the "theme" (or imperial district) of the Peloponnese during the early middle ages, upon which Fallmereyer's famous theories about the de-Hellenization of Greece were based. One reason is that these segments have been analyzed and interpreted to death over the years, and in a manner that strikes me as rather irrelevant today -namely, from a narrowly racial or ethnic point of view. I will only make this preliminary comment: that we usually attribute political bias to the opponents of Fallmereyer (such as Hopf and Paparrigopoulos) whereas in fact political concerns also infuse the Austrian's own arguments. If we abstract from political prejudices on both sides, we may come to see that there is a genuine issue of interpretation concerning the sources which does not allow for any iron-clad claim as to their historical import and meaning. But we may return to this later.