3 City and Sovereignty in East Roman Thought, c.1000–1200: Ioannes Zonaras’ Historical Vision of the Roman State

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other pre-modern polity the Eastern Roman Empire has been defined by its urban centre, even sometimes being described as a form of city state.1 Prior to the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the empire had had institutional continuity in a city unconquered since Septimius Severus' reign a thousand years before, which became the eastern empire's undisputed centre from 395. Around a broadly stable urban core, however, the wider polity changed radically over this period. With the ever-changing external situation, Constantinople cannot but have assumed greater proportions in East Roman historical thought over the early and central Middle Ages. Moreover, Constantinople's literary construction was inevitably informed by the City's real structural position as the hub of the East Roman state. By the period c.1000-1200, the exponential growth of Greek literature allows us a kaleidoscopic view of the discourses through which the medieval Romans of the east framed their world.2 In particular, this 'Golden Age' of historiography * I would like to thank Phil Booth, Michael Jeffreys, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Peter Frankopan for their help reading and commenting on this paper through various drafts. It could not have been produced without their invaluable comments, criticisms, and suggestions. 1 See, for example, Anthony Kaldellis' arguments concerning the East Roman view of their world as a city: Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 42-119; he has nuanced this view more recently to present the empire as a republic, consisting of several "sovereign" cities, held together by the Constantinopolitan centre, see: Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 2015). For another recent work on the Constantinopolitan 'imperial city state' , see Ioannis Stouraitis, "Roman Identity in Byzantium: A Critical Approach," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107 (2014), 175-220. 2 This period, especially the twelfth century, has been appropriately described as the "Third Sophistic": Kaldellis, Hellenism, pp. 225-307.