This volume, the twenty-sixth in the series Byzantina Australiensia, is the fruit of a conference convened by Ken Parry and Danijel Džino at Macquarie University, Sydney, in July 2019, under the auspices of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Its chapters have been chosen to highlight salient moments in 800 years of eastern Roman history, from the first imperial edicts on Christianity to the condemnation of John Italos in 1082. The Byzantine empire was rarely a stable and harmonious state over these eight centuries. Its leaders were called upon to defend the empire’s borders against external foes and to defend their power against internal rivals and dissidents. With so much power invested in its political and ecclesiastical structures, it sometimes seemed ready to implode.
These tensions were frequently cited in justification of actions to silence dissident voices from various quarters of society. The mechanisms by which the authorities controlled civil disorder and dissent, as well as discouraging criticism of imperial policies, could be brutal. In what sense was it possible, if at all, to enjoy freedom of speech and action in Byzantium? Was the law upheld or ignored when vested interests were at stake? How vulnerable did minorities feel and how conformist was religious belief at the end of the day? These are questions that are still pertinent in our era, and different societies deal with them in a range of ways, some of which bear a startling resemblance to the methods adopted by the Byzantine state to suppress resistance.
The contributors to this volume, scholars from the United States, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Australia, and the United Kingdom, discuss the use and abuse of power within the history of Byzantium on many fronts. Their common themes include:
Several chapters deal with usurpers and their attempts to justify the necessary violence associated with regime change. The rise in popularity of apocalyptic rhetoric from the 7th century onward reflects its importance as an explainer of military and other upheavals across the empire, as Ryan Strickler and Danijel Džino show. These upheavals fed popular eschatological concern and gave rise to consolation stories, such as the coming of a saviour-messiah or the Last Roman emperor. Debates over icons and their capacity to circumscribe the divinity of the God-man Jesus also attracted greater heat. The significance of the obscure Synod in Trullo for Iconoclasm is examined by David Olster and Stephanie Forrest. Ivan Basić, Džino, and Forrest show that it was not just the Greeks in the imperial court of Constantinople but also Armenians, Dalmatians, Western Romans, and others on the periphery of the shrinking Roman empire, who were involved in a constant cycle of regime change and military conflict. The rise in persecution as external tensions rose only amplified religious conflict and eschatological expectations.
In every chapter, we find that the meanings of terms like ‘dissident’ and ‘persecutor’ depend entirely on the perspective of those who employed them. From a Christian point of view, a Byzantine dissident was likely to be a different sort of Christian, a Jew, or in later centuries a Muslim. Chapters by Niels de Ridder and Michail Kitsos investigate the characterisation of Jews in Adversus Judaeos literature and hagiography. Even the respected philosopher and theologian John Italos was condemned as a dissident for his insistence on the idea of universal salvation, as András Kraft demonstrates.
From a legal point of view, a dissident was one who opposed any kind of official dictate, whether on the destruction of temples or on the necessity to accept or keep silent about the doctrine of Christ’s single will or activity. Our contributors reveal many examples of historiographers and commentators exaggerating violence or minimising it to fit their own ideological agenda on righteous dissidence or persecution. Even though the degree of violence associated with silencing dissenters in these centuries is difficult to establish, it is clear that many kinds of conflict – including interreligious, intrareligious, and military clashes – were interlinked in the 4th to the 11th centuries.
I recommend these studies to readers with an interest in the methods of dissidents and persecutors throughout human history, and especially those concerned with the proper limits of censorship versus freedom of speech. I hope that historians and students of the Byzantines and other civilisations will find something of value, and even perhaps learn some lessons relevant to contemporary challenges. My sincere thanks go to the editors of this volume and its contributors, as well as the editorial board of Byzantina Australiensia, the team at Brill, and especially our anonymous peer reviewers, without whose labours this series would be impossible to produce.
Bronwen Neil
Macquarie University
21 March 2021