The Internet Movie Database lists dozens of separate entries for actors playing Pontius Pilate, and it is likely not complete. The film tradition about Pilate is an especially rich one, of course, because films about the life of Jesus are as old as film itself: indeed, in America, it is at the movies rather than at the theatre that the idea of the Passion as a drama was first generally formed. In Europe, of course, there had existed a long tradition of staging the death of Christ – Oberammergau’s Passion Play, in performance since 1634, is perhaps the best known, although the Benediktbeuern Passion Play can be dated to the 1200s – but such productions were strongly resisted in the US well into the twentieth century. The first theatrical production of the Passion in the US, the brainchild of the energetic young impresario David Belasco and written by the irrepressible Salmi Morse, opened in San Francisco in 1879 and, despite its great popularity, was shut down by local authorities after an outcry among influential church leaders. Attempts to restage the show the following year in New York City met with a similar reaction, and no other Passion Play found its way to the American stage for many decades afterward. Due to the fact that in its early years film was such an obscure medium, however, the sort of protests that hounded Belasco and Morse did not materialise at the movies. As Doris Alexander has noted, those who might have complained about film production ‘were sufficiently unaware of what was going on in the hardly respectable novelty of films to raise no serious opposition’.

In 1897, the Klaw and Erlanger company had released a movie called The Horitz Passion Play, the initial success of which prompted New York theatre owner Richard G. Hollaman to produce a film of the famous Oberammergau Passion Play. While purportedly shot on location in Germany, Hollaman’s movie, employing Morse’s script, was shot on the roof of New York City’s Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue (a fraud exposed by the New York Herald at the time).

Byzantium's leadership was keenly aware of the impression its activities and the sheer longevity of its empire made on outsiders, and this was one reason for its encouragement of external potentates to send envoys or to pay a visit to Constantinople themselves. Yet in the early Middle Ages only a few persons made the round trip to Constantinople, whether as traders, envoys or potentates. Even Arab observers seem to have been less than well informed, and fresh, accurate data about material resources and current goings-on in the empire were correspondingly hard to come by. Rumours throve, many being propagated deliberately by the imperial authorities. So long as means of verification were few, such disinformation was often effective, especially as few ‘barbarian’ regimes were capable of crosschecking the latest intelligence with written reports of even a few years earlier. Such conditions gave the imperial government scope to ‘change its story’ – literally so, in the refashioning of narratives of quite recent episodes and bilateral agreements, but also figuratively, accentuating different facets of the empire according to circumstances.

Our aim here is to consider the workings of imperial image-projection towards foreign courts in the early Middle Ages and to compare them with the ways in which the empire's condition was presented subsequently, in the era of Alexios I Komnenos. The underlying question is what adjustments occurred at a time when Constantinople was attracting outsiders in sizeable numbers. Most obviously, it is a matter of communications, the fact that travel grew more frequent and outsiders were better-informed about the empire. But this is not the full story. One seems to observe in Alexios Komnenos’ era something deeper-seated than tactical shifts in image-projection to cater for the many foreigners – especially westerners – with whom he had to do business. Prolonged quasi-social interaction with the ‘Latins’, especially Normans, observing their manners, appreciating their values and partaking of a kindred soldierly outlook, may have helped to foster a rather different self-image on the part of Alexios and some other members of the ruling elite.

How far the change was, in Alexios’ case, calibrated is virtually impossible to adjudge. It begs the question of where the border between contrived image and a sense of personal identity lies. At his deathbed, Alexios’ wife deplored his penchant for, and mastery of, ‘all sorts of deceits, decking out your language with contradictory meanings’.

The story of the development of Christendom, specifically Byzantium’s portion of it (the Byzantine commonwealth, or oikoumene), is a familiar one; it unfolds across Pontic-Caspian Eurasia. But like all great historical trajectories, it had an inchoate period subject to great debates. These discussions typically hinge on the question: how should we interpret the imperial relationship with the populations of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia throughout their respective ninth- to tenth-century monotheisations? Obolensky supposed the process of establishing the Orthodox commonwealth to have begun in about the sixth century, but was it exclusively Orthodox? And did it actually begin c. 500 as Obolensky supposed, or could it be argued that it began instead with ninth- to tenth-century Byzantine Christianisation? This has major implications for our discussions of both ethnicity and sovereignty in the framework of top-down adoptions of monotheism – in this case, of Byzantine Christianity.

Yet the successful Rus’ Christianisation was possible because of the failure of political détente between Byzantium and Khazaria following the latter’s attempted Judaisation, since tenth- to eleventh-century Byzantine policy was able to expand its ecclesiastical administration in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia only by abandoning the attempts at Christianising Khazaria. Along with the Almušids’ Islamisation, the late-tenth-century Rjurikids’ increasing embrace of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity contributed to Khazaria’s isolation and decline, which is demonstrated in emperor Konstantinos VII Porphyrogennetos’ mid-tenth-century DAI. Because Khazaria’s disappearance was central to the monotheistic foundations of several other dynasties (Rjurikids, Almušids, Piasts, etc.), the topic is the last major debate about Khazaria concerning the larger themes of ethnicity and sovereignty amid the monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia.

Khazaria’s Decline and Disappearance

The word ‘decline’ is frequently, if contentiously used by historians. My advisor at the University of Birmingham was not fond of the word. Despite wide disagreement about the word’s usage, it fulfils the vague function of defining certain periods, even if the word choice is seldom explained.