Byzantium or Constantinople revisited

I came across this reconstruction of the city of Constantinople or Byzantium, later Istanbul,  in 1200 AD via Vivid Maps. I hadn't seen this site before, but it is worth a browse because it does contain some interesting maps. The original map comes from the Byzantium1200 website. The Byzantium 1200  project aims to create computer reconstructions of the Byzantine Monuments located in Istanbul as of the year 1200 AD. This, too, is worth a browse.

By 1200, Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire) was reduced in size, but it remained the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, a position it had occupied since the mid fifth century. The city was protected by massive walls that remained unbreached for 900 years before the city was taken in 1204 by the Crusader armies of the Fourth Crusade.

Looking back at past posts, the following is a somewhat random selection linked in some way to the city or the Byzantine Empire:

• March 1, 2008 Saturday Morning Musings - Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian
• December 18, 2008 Byzantium, Turtledove and the power of imagination in history
• December 20, 2008 Saturday Morning Musings - Byzantium, ARIA and Australian public policy
• December 29, 2008 Cultural change and indigenous Australia
• January 21,  2009 Byzantium finished
• January 22, 2009 Byzantium, agriculture and the movement of peoples
• October 29, 2010  Rethymno and the complicated history of Crete 

The mystery of Armenia

One of my friends, Noric Dilanchian, is Armenian. Over the years we have known each other, he has often Educated (lectured?) me on Armenia. Now this quote from Wikipeda, "the important role played in the history of Byzantium by that talented minority, the Armenians, has been generally unrecognised" may seem like special pleading, but there is a grain of truth to it.

This is a map of Armenia in Byzantine times. A brief comment follows the map. 

Despite all Noric's lecturing and my own writing on the Byzantine period, I do not have a firm historical picture of Armenia or the Armenians. Maybe it's time that I properly educated myself!

Postscript

In a comment, Ramana pointed me to this Wikipedia entry on Armenians in India. From time to time I have written about the way location affects our view of the world. Growing up in a Western European/Australian/Greek-Roman centric view of the world, I was impressed by the way that Alexander the Great struck of east into the apparently unknown. We can see the same mind-set in classical or ancient history and the way it centres on Rome, Greece, and Egypt.

We tend to forget that between the Mediterranean sea and the Indian sub continent lay a series of big empires. If you look at the Persian invasions of what is now Greece, we (those with a Euro-centric view) see them as Persian invasions of Greece, a threat from the east. If you look at it from a Persian perspective, they were trying to tidy up on the eastern edge of their empire.

When Alexander headed off to India, he wasn't heading into the unknown, just the opposite. There were well travelled routes. To the Persians, I am using that phrase as a generic term to cover all state entities, what is now India was on the western edge of empire. Remote perhaps, but in world view.

To be worth a "history", you have to have an entity in which to centre the history. At a tiny parochial level, I write about my New England, a place that never existed in a formal sense. and is therefore not recognised. The Armenians are New England writ large. They had entities, but they are a people who generally always "belonged" to others, to the various larger bodies that controlled them.

Just interesting, that's all.  

Byzantium, agriculture and the movement of peoples

One of the nice things about reading history is the discovery of new things, the way it generates new ideas. The ideas may not be new in an absolute sense, but they are new to the reader.

I have mentioned before just how closely Harry Turtledove based his Videssos series on Byzantium. It is Byzantium with religions changed and the addition of magic.

There are a number of places in the series where Turtledove refers to the forced relocation of farming peoples.

In one case, the invading nomads seize farmers and forcibly relocate them to one of their own farming areas. They detest farmers, wrong life style, but need their produce. Videssos finally buys them back, resettling them in another area. Krispos, the young hero, asks his father why they are not returning to their own farm. His father explains that other people will have been settled on their land.

In another case, the Emperor is fighting against a group of religious fanatics, a splinter from the main church. Upon defeat of the rebels' army, the decision is made to forcibly break the population up and re-settle them in different parts of the Empire. Their place will be taken by peasants loyal to church and state.

In Turtledove, I noted this as part of the story. I don't think that I realised until reading Treadgold on Byzantium just how important this resettlement process was.

The first key is transport costs.

Writing of Australia, Geoffrey Blainey notes that transport by land was twenty times more expensive than by ship.

It cost more in 1820 for a Sydney merchant to send a barrel of whale oil (whaling was then a major Australian industry) 100 miles inland than around the world to London. This meant that only commodities that were extremely valuable on a per ton basis could afford transport from areas more than 40 miles from deep water.

This was even truer in the period we are talking about. Byzantium and the earlier Roman Empire before it needed food to feed its cities and towns and to support its armies. Initially food was shipped from the granaries of Eygpt and North Africa, taking advantage of sea transport. Following the loss of Eygpt, Byzantium relied upon other parts of the Empire closer to the capital to feed its people.

Agriculture needs farmers. This introduces the second key, population change.

From time to time, the Empire was devastated by disease. Famines caused by drought and pests such as locusts as well as war could depopulate individual areas in whole or part.

Say the word plague and those brought up on Western History think Black Death. This outbreak affected Byzantium in its last days, but in the huge expanse of Byzantium history it was only the latest of a series of outbreaks that had taken place with gaps over the previous centuries.

The third key is security.

Throughout its long history, the Empire was constantly pressed not just by rival Empires such as the Persians and then the emerging Western European states, but also by the constant arrivals of new peoples looking for land and plunder.

For its part, the Empire was looking to expand, to recapture territory lost. The dream of re-building the Roman Empire exercised a continuing fascination over the centuries, as indeed it did in the west. Rome did not vanish - it continued to affect the pattern of life to the present time.

These three keys dictated what today we would call population policy.

Depopulated farming areas were resettled to grow food and to provide security. Land grants were made to support locally based military forces drawn from different parts of the Empire and beyond. Invaders were fought, but sometimes also settled within the Empire's boundaries. Whole peoples from client states or outer parts of the Empire under threat might be relocated to another location.

As the Empire's boundaries expanded and contracted, people were lost and gained. As boundaries contracted, the composition of the peoples beyond the frontier changed, in some cases permanently. As boundaries expanded, new peoples were incorporated in the Empire, changing people composition within the Empire.

This process extended over centuries, continuing into the Ottoman period. One outcome was the creation of an ethnic patchwork quilt, a complicated pattern that continues to exercise influence today.