Democracy in an Autocratic System: the Case of Byzantium

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Democracy in an Autocratic System: the Case of Byzantium

In the Byzantine Empire, the term “democracy” ( δημοκρατία ) was used to denote demonstrations of discontent, unrest, and similar occurrences, mainly in the cities, that reflected political tension and the population’s hostile attitude towards the authorities. In a word, the expression was used to designate the disruption of the system ( τάξις ), that is to say, the system of government, the order of things, the social or economic order. Therefore, in Byzantium the term we are dealing with here had practically nothing to do with the meanings that were its hallmark in the preceding (ancient) or following (modern) times—meanings that in one way or another implied institutional government by the people, that is by the majority of freemen in a society.

This terminological peculiarity should not be unexpected if one considers that an autocratic form of government of the state and society was characteristic in the Byzantine Empire, which in many views of world history in the course of the last two centuries has been considered to be a paradigm of autocracy, almost in the same way as ancient Athens was considered a paradigm of democracy. Moreover, there have been some claims that as a theocracy, the Byzantine case could even be regarded as a rarer, and one could say more rigid form of autocratic government. However, ever since the argument regarding so-called Byzantine Caesaro-papism died down, because it emerged that that form of government was certainly not in question, the “theocracy” in Byzantium can no longer be viewed in an essentially different light from the role of the Church in other Christian countries of medieval Europe.

In fact, Byzantium could be thought of as a kind of secular state, an earthly replica of the Kingdom of Heaven that provided an indisputably Christian foundation for the lay institutions inherited from Rome, and that at the same time placed the emperor in a position above any spiritual authority, in almost all except canonic matters. Thus we have a system in which, in political theory and in the daily practice of administering the country, the emperor ( βασιλεὺς καὶ αὐτοκράτωρ ) was seen to be Christ’s omnipotent representative on earth, his living representation, the thirteenth apostle. This Christian monarch lacked the apotheosis that had characterized the pagan Roman emperors until the beginning of the fourth century. Instead, he was considered the earthly emanation of the Divine Will of the One and Only God, personified in the Holy Trinity. The adoratio Diocletiani of the pagan era was also retained in Christian Byzantium, in the form of proskunēsis, during all the emperor’s official appearances to his subjects, even those of the highest rank. Actually, it was Eusebius of Caesarea who essentially established this order of things in the fourth century, and thus they remained, albeit with certain additions, until the end of Byzantine history in the fifteenth century; if not in every single circumstance of life, at least in the principal aspects.

Basically, the emperor’s position was the product of a dual heritage that was both Roman and Hellenistic (absolute rulers succeeding Alexander the Great) and it also included certain features that appeared in the case of the monarch-priests of the Old Testament. Before one begins to consider in detail the interaction of such a ruler with his subjects, it is necessary to highlight the question of succession to the throne, an essential factor in preserving the continuity of authority, which is part of that interaction. In the medieval European world of hereditary rulers, who were usually the first-born sons, the case of Byzantium, at least theoretically, is quite distinct. As part of the essentially Republican Roman heritage, the idea of being governed by an elected ruler never died out in Byzantium. Accession to the throne consisted of three successive stages, which were not directly connected within a definite time frame: election ( ἐκλογή ), proclamation ( ἀναγόρευσις ), and coronation (στέψις). In the first two acts, the constitutional elements of the Empire participated nominally: the senate, the army, and the dēmos of Constantinople. Even though by the very beginning of the Byzantine era the act of election had already become the discretionary right of the ruling emperor, who usually saw his eldest son as the candidate, the proclamation always retained a connection with public opinion, the opinion of those same constitutional elements. There will be further reference to what this procedure involved in concrete terms; however, it is necessary to underline immediately that it preserved the vestiges of the democratic rights of the people from Roman times. Although no longer so explicit and almost lost in the machinery of the Empire, it revealed part of the civic liberties left over from the Roman epoch, which tells us that there was some kind of corrective to imperial autocracy, especially at the important moment of elevating a new emperor to power. The third act—the coronation—became from the fifth century onward a symbol of the link with heavenly authority, and it was performed by the patriarch of Constantinople in the cathedral church of St. Sofia.

Below the emperor, as the uncontested head of state, was the imperial state machine that was, directly and quite evidently, essentially of Roman origin in the first centuries, and later still reflected its general spirit and rules of organisation. That system relied on a strict code of subordination; nevertheless, one can speak of the existence of some kind of legal state, although pretty far from today’s notion of the idea. Byzantium certainly must be treated as a state in which the law ruled. Even though the emperor was at liberty to change the laws (on the principle of princeps legibus solutus ), of which he was the principal promulgator (the legal acts of the senate, the so-called senatus consulta , were of secondary importance), the state and society lived and functioned on the basis of numerous laws and a legal order that implied the existence of effective courts with judges, legal procedure, witnesses, juries, and suchlike. From today’s viewpoint, those courts may have demonstrated many shortcomings, such as the insufficient separation of the judiciary (because the court’s organs also performed administrative or tax duties), the ban on Jews and women appearing as witnesses, the penalty of the cutting off of limbs during one period, and the penalty of blinding that endured throughout the entire period of Byzantine history. But nevertheless, the rights of all people were respected and protected by judicial proceedings. In other words, in Byzantium there was no officially recognised institution of the so-called trial by ordeal, nor were there Inquisition-like ecclesiastical court trials. Failure to play by the judicial rules of the game, if it occurred, was found in the political trials of members of the elite, which were usually orchestrated from the highest places.

The stability of the legal order somewhat mitigated the omnipotence of the state apparatus, which controlled the essence and often the details of social and economic trends at least until the eleventh century. Thus some of the groundwork was in place for strengthening and broadening freedoms in various aspects of life, if not for creating democratic institutions. Still, in Byzantium throughout that same period, and later to a lesser extent as the aristocracy developed, another characteristic phenomenon signalled an important prerequisite and a necessary condition for any possible process of democratisation.

Unlike the majority of medieval caste societies, in Byzantium one of the essential forms of organised life was vertical accessibility, which enabled capable or favoured individuals to move up the ladder of society. Although it was governed by a complex, hierarchic state apparatus with vast prerogatives that exceeded the conduct of strictly administrative affairs, for a long time Byzantium made spectacular use of the opportunities this practice offered. Thus it was possible for an illiterate peasant in the ninth century to achieve a meteor-like ascent to the pinnacle of the state, and under the name Basil I the Macedonian to become the emperor and the founder of one of the most important Byzantine dynasties. Later, for instance, when the strengthened aristocracy with its family-based rule had narrowed the possibilities for this kind of social ascent, it could still happen that a man of insignificant origin, foreign to Constantinople high society—a certain tax official, Alexios Apokaukos—could attain the all-powerful position of regent of the Empire. Moreover, in the specific type of melting-pot that Byzantium was, foreign ethnic elements, whether they came from communities that had traditionally inhabited the Empire or were just newly arrived foreigners, had the same open door to success in life, on the condition that they professed to be Orthodox Christians, knew the official Greek language, and were known to be loyal subjects. For life as it was in those times, such conditions cannot be considered great limitations.

Most of these phenomena undoubtedly represent part of the legacy that Byzantium inherited from the Roman state organization, after having moulded it to its own spirit. And the spirit of Byzantium and its essence were described long ago as a specific civilisational phenomenon—the creation of a new era; a unique combination of the inherited Roman state organisation and legal order, the inherited Hellenic culture, and the Christian faith in its Orthodox form. Respecting our theme, the Roman aspect, as we have seen, functioned through the institutions and the way they operated. As the institutions were part of the autocratically organised state, democratic elements were visible in outline, more as (unachieved) possibilities than as recognisable realities.

On the other hand, the segments of society that one could describe as being active in the political sense— mainly the social elite as a whole or in part, but also the members of the urban middle class with their different occupations—based their daily lives on Hellenic urban traditions, whether social, economic, or cultural. This was a complex and numerically strong environment in which public opinion was formed; its outward expression could be seen in the free discussion of views, on an endless range of themes, in the streets and the squares, beneath the porticos, in the taverns and inns. However, their sublime form of public expression on the agora , so characteristic of the ancient epoch, acquired other forms and another place of expression, which we shall specially highlight here.

In considering Byzantium as a basically secular state, in which at the same time the Church ha d important prerogatives and the religious feeling of the population was deep, the question arises as to the relationship between State and Church. The supposed democratic notions should have also been influenced, among other things, by the manner in which temporal and spiritual power interacted. The situation in this domain is not quite simple. During the early Byzantine era, until the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, the existence of practically equal ecclesiastical centres (Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria), which often opposed one another during the Christological debates, provided imperial power with additional maneuvering space in the political sphere, reinforcing its institutional predominance in relation to the entire body of the Church.

With the invasion by the Arabs, who conquered the territory of the three Eastern patriarchies in the seventh century, and the changes in the West that led to the withdrawal of Rome from the sphere of Constantinople’s political control in the eighth century, only one patriarchy remained within the borders of the Empire: the Ecumenical Patriarchy, with its seat in the capital. This fact turned it, as the centre of spiritual authority, into the real and true counterpart to the temporal authority of the emperor. Although the emperors were still above the Church, the mere fact that the creation of new organizational units of it was in their hands, and they had the last word regarding the election of a new patriarch, meant that a certain balance of forces was established—if not always a real one, at least one in which both sides either had to pay closer attention to each other than before, or else find themselves in more or less open conflict. The struggle over the icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, the greatest internal crisis in all of Byzantine history, represented precisely such a conflict, that is the outer expression of trends that were not always open or clearly defined . The final victory in that conflict was on the spiritual side, although it seemed at the time that the lay structures of power, including the position of the emperor himself, emerged from the crisis without any serious injury.

Understandably, in this entire conflict, including its consequences, one cannot pinpoint the elements that would testify to the development of democratic thought or democratic relations. Nevertheless, the monolithic unity of absolute obedience, as the prevailing precondition for the exercise of power was undoubtedly broken. Many people of the Church sacrificed their lives for their convictions; many monks were either banished or left the country of their own accord for the same reason, and founded new communities in southern Italy, beyond the reach of the authorities to whom they refused to submit. After the iconophilic victory, the relationship of the lay and the Church leaderships was different than it was in the previous period, even though the supremacy of imperial authority was not essentially threatened, nor did the order of things essentially change. The perceptions of a “more equitable” relationship between secular and spiritual authority, which had taken a long time to mature, even acquired a legal basis towards the end of the ninth century.

The well-known paragraph of the controversial law-draft, the Eisagogē ( Epanagogē ) is rather explicit in that sense, saying that the imperial power should take care of the material, whereas the Church should take care of the spiritual side of the life of the subjects. In this context, the role of the Church cannot be viewed exclusively within the framework of a hierarchical institution which was the official interpreter of the faith and the first on the front line of the battle against heretics. It was all those things, but it had also certain essential democratic elements that are important for the overall problem we are dealing with. The strict episcopal organisation did not have centralised monastic orders, and the collective adoption of the most significant canonic decisions, and phenomena such as the idiorhythmic monkhood, peasant-priests and peasant-monks, and anchorites with their independent influences, not to mention the role played by “holy fools,” all rendered the Church less rigid, in a certain sense, than the autocratically organised state. Finally, the Byzantine οἰκονομία , as a special kind of pragmatic behaviour, to which we shall ultimately return, was born within the Church and from there gradually spread to the different layers of society.

Bearing in mind the circumstances of life that defined the general atmosphere of society in Byzantium, it would seem more pertinent to speak about individual democratic phenomena than about the existence of at least a minimum of general conditions for the development of democracy. Therefore, it is easy to understand why in those times there was no proper, consistent theoretical approach either in the philosophical or political sense. In other words, although they were usually not explicit enough, we can and should regard some features of social life and its official organization as heralding a democratic spirit: some social freedoms, social and geographical mobility, respect for some human rights, a functioning legal state, and the possibility of a critical, even satirical attitude towards the authorities that extended to the very highest ranks ( Kaiserkritik ). It is another matter, as I believe can be perceived from what I have said so far, as to whether these features were inherited from ancient Greece or Rome, or whether they arose in the setting that prevailed in the Middle Ages, i.e. in the Byzantine period. This question may even make it possible to understand how complex the historical development of the Byzantine Empire was. To clarify, I would like to draw attention to some examples that illustrate the spirit of liberty and free association in the life of the people in Byzantium.

Without any doubt, the most prominent institution of general importance inherited from ancient Rome, where public opinion was expressed regardless of state policy, was the hippodrome and the parties connected with it—the dēmoi ( factiones )—that actually created public opinion. The hippodrome took over the role of the Hellenic agora and the Roman forum . However, this meant that not only the venue where the citizens expressed their political opinion, but the very way in which it was done had changed. There is no direct genetic connection between the Roman people’s assemblies ( comitiae ) and the dēmoi , although both were part of the unique ancient Greek and Roman tradition in which the people gathered and expressed their opinion and mood. Therefore, the role of the dēmoi was a broad and complex one. Even if they had begun as cheering parties at the hippodrome races, these parties were organized to perform special collective tasks in the social life of the city, and for that reason they were nominally under the supervision of special civil servants. However, these officials could not control mass expressions of public opinion concerning the people’s own problems of life, which could even reach the level of mutiny, such as the one experienced by the emperor Justinian I, who in AD 532 almost lost his throne during the all-out mutiny of the dēmoi . As we observed at the beginning, the Byzantines would call such a turn of events “democracy in action.”

Today, however, when we speak of certain democratic phenomena that occurred in Byzantine society and were linked with the hippodrome, first of all we must focus our attention on the institutional frame of such events. The hippodrome was the proper and most official place for the proclamation of a new emperor. The hippodrome was the only place where at least some kind of rudimentary political dialogue could take place between the supreme authority, personified in the emperor, and the people who came to the hippodrome to see the emperor and convey their reactions to him, whether of support or discontent. These reactions had their official names, especially at the emperor’s proclamation: euphēmia ( εὐφημία ) and dusphēmia ( δυσφημιά ), which undoubtedly indicates that their display was part of a system, a system that contained a democratic outline of some kind. This was even more so because the dēmoi —the blues and the greens —demonstrated the religious and political differences that constituted an essential part of social life in the empire during the early centuries of its existence. In the later period, the hippodrome lost its significance, in terms of both its sporting purpose and all the accompanying events related to it.

Some other aspects of life in Byzantine society also had roots in antiquity, but they had a less clear-cut profile as guardians of democratic options than the hippodrome. Here one should certainly include artisans’ corporations ( συντεχνίαι ) and commercial “companies.” The fact is that the artisans’ corporations, as we know them from the time when they flourished up to and including the tenth century, were rather an instrument of the state intended to regulate manufacturing than associations that strove to protect the interests of their members. Through its representatives, as one can see above all in the so-called Book of the Eparch, the state defined in the tiniest detail the form of these corporations and how they functioned and manufactured, and it was only the retailers of foodstuffs who had some maneuvering space in the management of their own business. Therefore, here, one cannot speak of any democratic rights, but it was of great importance for daily life that certainty and predictability were established. This may have been the basis for rights such as those later achieved by the craftsmen’s guilds in western Europe, but which did not acquire a distinct profile in Byzantium due to the crisis and decline of urban manufacturing that followed by the end of the eleventh century.

It was a different matter with associations or merchant “companies,” which were smaller, mobile, and very often formed ad hoc to carry out some particular business transaction. Yet even in this sphere, the method of doing business was prescribed in detail, as one can see from the so-called maritime law of Rhodes ( Nomos Rodion Nautikos ), but the business of commerce was exposed to many unknown dangers (pirates, bad weather and shipwrecks, lack of demand for the goods where they had been delivered, problems with credit lines, etc.). So private initiative was able, or occasionally even forced, to make the necessary adjustments to circumstances. This practice became an essential and integral part of the business of commerce. In any case, all this was the prerequisite for the further development of equal relations among people, and also for different democratic options. However, from the twelfth century onwards, the overall crisis in Byzantium’s urban economy narrowed down the relevant opportunities.

There is no doubt that Byzantium’s gradual and eventual departure from the Greek and Roman way of life also weakened the influence of that segment of its ancient heritage that could be considered as belonging to democratic traditions. It is important, however, to notice that even in this sphere, the development of Byzantium as a medieval state gave rise to some new forms of social needs, which if nothing else represented a divergence from the monolithic autocratic system.

As a huge as well as important example, , let us take the mode of service in the army in the so-called Middle Byzantine period, between the seventh/eighth and the tenth/eleventh centuries, when the system of themes ( θέματα ) represented the most massive and most militarized army system in all of Byzantine history. It was the era when imperial autocracy had reached its zenith and when a significant feature of that system was that it relied on military landholdings; the holders of which, from generation to generation, were under the obligation to do military service, and laws regulated in detail the functioning of this entire mechanism. But all the state was interested in was to secure these two basic elements of the system—the landholdings and their holders. It often happened that the “soldiers,” stratiōtes ( στρατιώτης ), who lived on the lands, for various reasons could not or did not wish to do military service themselves, especially when there were widows or small children among them. In such cases, agreements were signed between the soldiers who held the land, stratiōtes , and those, strateuomenoi ( στρατευόμενος ), who performed military service on their behalf—one or more of them depending on the economic power of the estate. They could be relatives, but that was not always the case. Thus the recruitment of soldiers, as one of the most important aspects of every military system, largely became a matter of personal relations and private initiative.

Almost at the same time, a similar process was going on in the organization of the tax-collecting service, which beside the army was the second pillar of the Byzantine state. Distributive taxation of the taxpayers and their estates, which had been the cornerstone of the financial system since the reforms of late antiquity, was replaced by collective taxation, which meant paying a predetermined sum of taxes. At the same time the state was less and less concerned, if at all, about how this kind of taxation was to be paid by each taxpayer. Understandably, this too opened tremendous scope for private relationships, private initiative, concessions to collect taxes, and in general the weakening of the autocratic authorities’ supervision of tax officials, collection methods, and other elements in the collection of revenue. Thus the privatization of what once belonged to the official domain gradually became daily practice in Byzantium, and this broadened the scope for free initiative and was particularly significant for the status and the rise of a social elite.

If the social elite of the early Byzantine period can be identified with the state elite—which would be one of the rare cases of this kind in world history—the foundations for establishing the Byzantine aristocracy were laid with the increasing opportunities for the privatization of property and privileges acquired in the state service. This process was merely intimated rather than fully confirmed in the eighth century (by the end of that century the first family surnames appeared), but over the next two centuries it gained momentum. By the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth century, during the reign of the emperor Leo VI (886–912), members of the aristocratic families had already begun to take priority when important posts were being awarded.

Quite understandably, the Byzantine aristocracy incessantly strived to enlarge its wealth. Born in the lap of the classes of civil servants and soldiers, and always remaining an integral part of those classes, the aristocracy saw one of the ways to become richer and more powerful in strengthening its private attitude towards the official duties it was entrusted with, as the state ceased to deal with the details of its own prerogatives. Nor should one fail to remark a fact which complemented these tendencies: namely that earlier on, and certainly by the seventh century, the state had already begun to give up its comprehensive social and cultural policies in the cities, and had stopped both the free distribution of basic foodstuffs to the poor and its attention to the maintenance of social and cultural institutions, such as public baths, orphanages, public hospitals, theatres, etc.

The privatization of public offices developed gradually from the eleventh century, and was accompanied by another phenomenon that was characteristic of medieval circumstances, even outside Byzantium. The state gradually waived its right to collect taxes, in different degrees and in different places, from the temporal aristocracy and the Church (for instance, from important monasteries), which were frequently already in the hands of lessees. This tax immunity ( ἐξκουσσεία ), very rarely and much later, acquired its parallel in judicial immunity and finally in administrative immunity, for example prohibiting civil servants from entering estates protected by immunity rights. In some extreme cases, such as in the Peloponnesus in the fifteenth century, a private property and an administrative district in the hands of one person or one family were formally equated. All this creates the impression that Byzantium in its late period was well on the way to becoming an aristocratic democracy. That this qualification is not far from the truth is best illustrated in the case of some cities, perhaps even more of them than it has been possible to ascertain nowadays because of the poor condition of the relevant sources.

Since the social elite in the late Byzantine cities consisted of the aristocracy, it should come as no great surprise that particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cities in different parts of the Empire, such as Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Kroia, Phanarion (in Thessaly), and Monembasia, were granted collective ( κοινῶς ) charters containing privileges similar or identical to those which imperial charters had also granted to individual members of the aristocracy. Besides, these cities, in the same context, signed proper contracts with the imperial government concerning their rights and privileges, almost as if they were foreign cities, partners of the imperial government with whom separate contracts had been signed long ago. In some cases, one can clearly see that the ἄνθρωποι καλοί held power in these cities, recalling the boni homines in the free Mediterranean cities, and that some cities had assemblies of the estates—the ἐκκλησία τοῦ δήμου — that included the nobility, the clergy, and ordinary citizens. In these cases, as in that of the semi-private appanages that assumed part of the state’s sovereignty and the prerogatives of the official administrative system within which they had developed, one can distinguish quite clearly signs of the process of the confederalisation of Byzantium.

To what extent all these processes had characteristics that might be considered through a democratic prism is a question without a definite answer, but it is certain they did not have much in common with the classical notion of Byzantine autocracy. In this context, it would be worth examining the possible role in these processes of the well-known Byzantine οἰκονομία— a method of fundamentally democratic and pragmatic behavior that can be characterized as a balanced approach to life and a balanced life style. In any event, in the case of Byzantium we are confronted with an ambivalent society, rich in contradictions and quite different from the stereotypes through which it is often seen.