Basileia: the idea of monarchy in Byzantium, 600-1200

Abstract

The middle Byzantine period (c. 600-1200) was the golden age of the Byzantine imperial monarchy. In this period the Empire of New Rome achieved its highest level of political cohesion and common identity as a state centered upon the emperor in Constantinople. The late antique emperors, of whom Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian were emblematic, had wielded immense resources and built up a formidable ideology of absolute monarchical power, yet they ruled a vast, heterogeneous collection of culturally diverse and inward-looking communities. From the late twelfth century, and especially after the crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204, internal forces of disintegration and centrifugal drift prevailed under the impact of outside aggression. Regional separatism, aristocratic factionalism, class conflict, and religious schism undermined the unity and the credibility of the monarchical system. It was thus in the period between late antiquity and the later Middle Ages that this system came closest to perfection. From an ideological perspective, it was during the era of the clash of monotheisms, from Muhammad to the failure of the crusades, that the political ideology generated by monotheism in late antiquity came closest to the reality of a Christian Roman empire. What was distinctive about middle Byzantine ideas of the monarchical ideal? Perhaps the most striking feature of middle Byzantine political culture is the paucity of political theory: the dearth of treatises on government and of philosophical discussions about the ideal constitution and the function of the state. This might be regarded as a reflection of the relative perfection of the system: the merits of monarchy were too self-evident to need justification or provoke serious debate. A related point is that since, as we shall see, the Byzantine state was officially considered, from the seventh century, to be a theocracy, monarchical theory pertained essentially to divine kingship and therefore belonged to the realm of theology. It is not that Byzantines lacked an intellectual conception of political monarchy; on the contrary, the ideal of monarchy pervaded their collective imagination, dominated their cultural output, and was fundamental to their self-presentation. The distinctive feature of their political thought is that it was not solely or even primarily distilled into abstract statements, but embedded in the actions, contexts, and representations of the political performers