The year 1182 was marked by one of the most notorious episodes of the high Middle Ages:
the extermination or enslavement of almost all westerners in Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium or, to use contemporary parlance, the ‘Empire of the Romans'. News of the calamity travelled far.
According to William, archbishop of Tyre, who spoke with eyewitnesses, the quarter of the capital in which the Latins resided was torched and its inhabitants put to the sword. Temples and shrines suffered ferocious acts of cruelty directed against clergy and monks. The papal legate was seized and decapitated, his head fastened ‘to the tail of a filthy dog as an insult to the church'. Respect was shown to no one, William reported: the ill were dispatched in the sickbeds where they lay; the able-bodied were pulled out of hiding and either killed or ‘sold into perpetual slavery among the Turks and other infidels'; even corpses were ‘torn from the tombs' and ‘dragged through the streets and squares as if the insensate bodies were capable of feeling the indignities offered them'. None of the victims, the archbishop's account concluded, had ‘anticipated] anything of the kind'. Bloodshed seemed to have erupted suddenly and without cause between two populations previously living in harmony.1In fact, the massacre represented the boiling over of long-standing tensions arising from the empire's struggle to dominate the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean. In the eleventh century, this effort had included armed conflict in the Adriatic against Normans who had acquired a foothold in Apulia and Calabria, and subsequently expanded into Sicily and the
The author thanks Nora Berend, Tassos Papacostas, Mark Pegg and Deborah Tor, as well as audiences at the University of Cambridge, King's College London, and Notre Dame University for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
1 William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, 2 vols, ed.
R. B. C. Huygens et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), vol. ii, pp. 1,022-4; see also Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers' Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, revised C. N.L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 174-8.Balkans.[533] Largely as a consequence of alliances formed to contain this threat, Venice, and later other Italian cities, had been accorded mercantile privileges that facilitated the spread of their citizens throughout the empire. It was said that, towards the end of the twelfth century, 60,000 westerners were to be found in the capital alone, and many more in the provinces.[534] The bandying about of such figures suggests a society that was worried about the porousness and vulnerability of its territory to migration. It is therefore tempting to view the slaughter of westerners in 1182 as a pogrom: a spontaneous aggression by the majority population against a minority it viewed as compromising its way of life and undermining its interests. Yet the population's actions can be shown to have merely supplemented an institutional endeavour carried out by professional imperial troops taking the field at the behest of the man who would soon become emperor, Andronikos I Komnenos (1183-5).[535]
This chapter evaluates the role of the imperial regime in generating and directing the use of force not through the pursuit of warfare outside the empire's borders, but rather through the selective policing and intimidation of populations residing within them. Beginning with a discussion of the role played by ethnicity - and its relationship to religious controversy - in defining people's identity, we shall sketch out the transformations state violence underwent within the ‘Empire of the Romans'. A brief consideration of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages will be followed by a more detailed examination of the historical period around which many of the extant sources cluster: that of the high Middle Ages, and in particular of one of the most notable imperial dynasties, the Komnenoi, who reigned from the late eleventh to the late twelfth centuries.
As we shall see, the dynastic founder, Alexios I Komnenos, promoted a particular judicial model, whereby an individual would be put on trial for heresy, often together with a group of followers, and threatened with the ultimate penalty of burning at the stake. The ascription of heretical beliefs and practices constituted less a reflection of observable realities than an attempt by the regime to secure political dominance by casting religious diversity as deviance. The construction of ethnic communities, and the corresponding patrolling of their boundaries, served similar ends.The emperors who succeeded Alexios initially continued to associate themselves closely with carefully managed, highly dramatic proceedings against those they identified as heretics. Across their reigns, officially sanctioned persecution gradually shifted from attacks against a few representative targets to more blanket arrests and incarcerations - and ultimately killings - directed against the masses. But mass murder requires the arming of the masses, or at the very least the creation of a mob. As policy, violence is insidious: if its goals are not achieved rapidly and conclusively - and they rarely are - it seeps into the whole of the body politic, producing a more aggressive society.[536] This process, as will become apparent, can - and did - spin badly out of control.