Few are the periods in the history of Greece for which continuity is a more sensitive issue than the early Middle Ages. For none is ethnic (as opposed to any other kind of) continuity more important for writing the history of Greece and the Greek nation. Discontinuity was first proposed by the German journalist Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861), who in the early nineteenth century claimed that modern Greeks were descendants not of ancient Greeks, but of Slavs and Albanians, whose ancestors had settled in Greece during the Middle Ages and had learned to speak Greek from the Byzantine authorities. Writing in the political climate created by the treaties of Adrianople (1829) and Constantinople (1832), which placed the newly created Greek state under the protection of the Great Powers, including Russia, and vouchsafed its independence from the Ottoman Empire, Fallmerayer was not as concerned with the Slavs per se as he was with what he viewed as the catastrophic consequences of their migra¬tion into Greece (Fallmerayer 1830, 1835, and 1845; see also Lauer 1993: 140). Driven both by the political liberalism of the Vormärz years and by apprehensions about Russia's increasing influence in the Balkans, Fallmerayer saw the proclamation of an independent Greek state as a weakening of the Ottoman Empire and a strengthening of Russia. He was therefore enraged by the political naivete of the European Philhellenes and attempted to prove that the Greeks and the Russians shared not only the same religion, but also the same ethnic origin (Fallmerayer 1830: iii-iv; see Thurnher 1995; Skopetea 1997: 99–132).

Judging by the extant and distribution of the network of bishoprics, sixth-century Greece must have been a thoroughly Christianised province of the Empire. By 550 there were fifty-seven episcopal sees in Greece, with the large concentration in the province of Achaia (Zeiller 1926: 225). Bishops had a wide variety of ecclesiastical and civilian powers and the large number of churches in existence or built during the sixth century illustrates the ubiquity and considerable influence of the church in the life of the inhabitants of the provinces of Achaia, Epirus Vetus, Thessaly, Macedonia Prima, and Rhodope during the last century of Roman power (see Chapter 1). The highest-ranking man of the church in sixth century Greece was the archbishop of Thessalonica, but his influence over the Achaian, Thessalian, Macedonian, and Epirote bishops had diminished considerably by 550, primarily because of the Monophysite archbishop Dorotheos and the opposition he faced from the bishops of the Dacian and Macedonian dioceses. The bishops of Epirus Vetus and Thessaly turned to Rome, soon followed by their colleagues in other sees in Greece. However, such developments had no immediate consequences, primarily because of the accelerated regionalisation of the church organisation after c. 600 and the subsequent abandonment of the provinces in the southern Balkans by the Roman army and administration, whose presence was maintained only on a few key coastal points. During the subsequent centuries, several other archbishops of Thessalonica espoused non-Orthodox beliefs.

It has been a major argument of this book that, following the general abandonment of the Balkan provinces under Emperor Herakleios, the army, either land (thematic) troops or the navy, played a fundamental role in the early medieval history of Greece. The military created the political and administrative infrastructure which secured the survival of Roman (Byzantine) power in coastal areas and on several islands. Land troops may have been responsible for the repopulation of large parts of Peloponnesos in the early ninth century, while the first social hierarchies in ‘Dark-Age’ Greece were essentially military. Around 1000, high-ranking officials such as Krinites, the strategos of Hellas, or Christopher, the katepano of Longobardia, were prominent patrons of churches. The presence of the navy also created the need for local markets on which monetary exchanges continued, albeit on a much reduced scale. As late as the early eleventh century, the military continued to be a key factor in the injection of coins into the local economy, both in urban centres and in the countryside.

Within the general framework defined by the ubiquity of the army in early medieval Greece, three features are especially striking. The first is the remarkable absence of any attempts at usurping the imperial power, which are otherwise well documented for the themes of Anatolikon, Opsikion, and Armeniakon. In Greece, all such attempts were nipped in the bud, most famously at the beginning of Romanos I and Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos’ joint rule (920–944).

Despite being often accused of having brought the ancient civilisation of Greece to an abrupt end, the Avars and the Slavs have rarely been associated with the destruction of specific cities or monuments (for Avars and Slavs responsible for a wave of destruction throughout Greece, see Weithmann 1985: 103). Shortly after World War II, the Greek historian Dionysios Zakythinos wrote of the Dark Ages separating Antiquity from the Middle Ages as an era of devastation and ruin brought about by the Slavic invaders (Zakythinos 1945: 72 and 1966: 300, 302, and 316; see also Lemerle 1951: 343). Georgios Sotiriou believed that the destruction of basilica A in Thebes was the result of a barbarian invasion, an event ultimately responsible for the settlement in the region of Thebes and Demetrias, around the Bay of Volos, of the Slavic Belegezites (Sotiriou 1929a: 8–9). A French archaeologist attributed the destruction of Corinth and Argos to the Slavic invasion of 586, despite the fact that neither has any such destruction been documented for Corinth, nor is Argos mentioned in any source pertaining to the Slavic and Avar attacks of the 580s (Aupert 1989: 418–19). The absence of any solid evidence of destruction to be attributed to any sixth-century invasion is in sharp contrast to the interest historians have shown in the numismatic evidence, particularly hoards of sixth-century coins. The first to treat coin hoards as a class of evidence pertaining to barbarian invasions was the French numismatist Adrien Blanchet (Blanchet 1900).

‘The outpost at Thermopylae had from early times been under the care of the farmers of that region, and they used to take turns in guarding the wall there, whenever it was expected that some barbarians or other would make a descent upon Peloponnesus’ (Prokopios of Kaisareia, Secret History 26.31–4). So writes Prokopios of Kaisareia in one of the last chapters of his Secret History, a work written in direct response to Emperor Justinian's legislation and financial reforms initiated by the imperial agents in the provinces. At this point, Prokopios' bête noire is the discussor (logethetes) Alexander, nicknamed ‘Snips’ because of his ability to clip coins. In 540 or 541, Alexander apparently introduced a series of changes concerning the defence of Thermopylae, which, although not appearing in any surviving edict of Justinian, were apparently sufficiently outrageous to incriminate the regime:

According to the Synekdemos of Hierokles, by 500 there were about eighty cities in the province of Achaia, apparently one of the most highly urbanised regions of the eastern Mediterranean (Honigman 1939: 7 and 16–19; see also Bon 1951: 21 and 23–4). Most of them had no appropriate defence. Prokopios mentions fortifications being renewed for all cities south of the Thermopylae Pass, and specifically mentions Corinth, the walls of which had been ruined by ‘terrible earthquakes which had visited the city’, Athens, Plataea, and ‘the towns of Boeotia’ (Buildings 4.2). But he also claims that the fortifications of cities in central Greece and Peloponnesos had fallen into ruin long before Justinian's reign. The Emperor's intention was apparently to rebuild the walls of all the cities south of the Thermopylae Pass, but realising that the operation would take too long, he decided ‘to wall the whole Isthmus securely’. The implication is that most, if not all cities south of the Hexamilion remained unfortified. North of the Thermopylae Pass, Prokopios mentions the rebuilding of fortifications at Echinos, Thebes, Pharsalos, Demetrias, Metropolis, Gomphi, and Trika (Trikala), with only Kassandria (Potidaea) mentioned in Macedonia (Buildings 4.2). Conspicuously absent from this list is the great Macedonian metropolis of Thessalonica, the largest city in the Balkans and the second city of the Empire after Constantinople. Indeed, the evidence available so far suggests that although Emperor Justinian certainly contributed to the decoration or endowment of the basilica of St Demetrios in Thessalonica, the repair or extension of the city fortifications is a much earlier work, some of which at least was paid for by private citizens.

On a hot summer day in the 990s, St Nikon was on his way back to Sparta from Corinth in the company of a group of men who enjoyed ‘the sweet grace’ of his words. They were all travelling by foot and as they passed by Amyklion and were approaching Sparta, Nikon's companions witnessed one of his most astounding miracles.

‘Nikephoros was holding the scepter of the Romans, and these Slavs who were in the province of Peloponnesus decided to revolt.’ They first attacked their Greek neighbours, whose settlements they plundered, and then laid siege to the city of Patras, ‘having with them African Saracens also’. Shortage of both food and water persuaded the inhabitants of Patras to consider the option of surrender. However, before doing so, they decided to try one more thing. Since the leaders of the city (archontes) had already informed the military governor (strategos), who at that time was in Corinth, about the attack of the Slavs, the Patraeans sent a scout ‘to the eastern side of the mountains’ in order to see if the military governor was indeed coming to their rescue. If he were to see the troops of the military governor approaching, the scout was to return to the city and dip his standard, but if not, he was to hold the standard straight, ‘so they might for the future not expect the military governor to come’. The scout did not see anyone coming and was about to return to Patras with the standard erect when, through the intercession of St Andrew, God made his horse slip and the rider fell off, in the process dipping the standard. Emboldened by what they took to be good news, the Patraeans attempted a sortie against the Slavs. At this point, they saw St Andrew, ‘mounted upon a horse and charging upon the barbarians’, whom he routed and scattered and drove away from the city.

The secular elites of sixth-century Greece formed an evanescent social group. By 500, most of them lived in urban villas lavishly decorated with mosaic floors or marble revetment, as in Argos, Delphi, or Athens (see Chapter 2). They laid their dead in frescoed burial chambers, often inside basilicas for the building or decoration of which they served as patrons (see Chapter 1). While urban villas completely disappeared before 600, the use of burial chambers attached or adjacent to existing basilicas continued well into the seventh century. However, those burying their dead in Nea Anchialos shortly after 600 neither had the same social status nor employed the same elements of material culture for the representation of their power as their sixth-century predecessors. Although the privileged status of the woman buried in a chamber built next to basilica Δ in Nea Anchialos was rendered visible by access to a Christian burial site, the message encoded in her burial dress combined cultural elements of different origins in an attempt to create a new way of expressing social power (see Chapter 4). Similarly, the ‘wandering soldier’ from Corinth was buried in a stone-lined grave – a type of grave most common in the circum-Mediterranean region – but with grave goods hinting at barbarian fashions from the Middle Danube region or the steppe lands north of the Black Sea. The archaeological evidence thus suggests that the withdrawal of the old, city-based aristocracy both from political life and, quite possibly, from Greece altogether was followed by a dramatic transformation of the cultural construction of social power.

The numismatic, sphragistic, and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that after 620, Greece entered a relatively long period of political instability and sharp demographic decline. For some fifty years between c. 620 and c. 670, Greece disappears from the radar of the written sources, which some have interepreted as the'Dark Ages' separating Antiquity from the Middle Ages, an era of decline and ruin brought by Slavic invaders (Zakythinos 1966: 300, 302, and 316; Avramea 1997: 49). It has indeed been suggested that the significant number of hoards with latest coins struck in the early seventh century are an indication of the Slavic invasions of Greece at the beginning of Herakleios' reign (Metcalf 1962a and 2001: 129–0). Their composition, based almost exclusively on new coins, suggests, however, the presence of the Roman troops. The cluster of their latest coins between 610 and 620 strongly suggests that those small collections of copper were never retrieved because of the general withdrawal of Roman armies from the Balkans. With few exceptions, there are no coins of Herakleios post-dating the withdrawal of troops on any site in Greece. Although in the early seventh century hoards of gold were still buried in Greece, after c. 630 gold finds are very rare in the southern Balkans. Only three hoards, two of gold and one of copper, are so far known for the entire period between c. 630 and c. 900. With just one exception, all stray finds of seventh- and early eighth-century coins are of copper (Fig. 4.1).

The Edinburgh History of the Greeks is a multi-volume, chronological series covering the history of the Greek people from Antiquity to the present. Each volume combines political history with social and cultural history in order to tell the story of the Greek people over the course of recorded history in an exciting, novel, and innovatory way. Drawing on resources from anthropology, archaeology, and history, as well as political science, philology, art, literature, and law, the books will be rich and diverse in their coverage.

The Greeks suffer from too much history, some have said. Indeed, library bookshelves sag under the weight of the massive number of tomes devoted to the history of Greece during the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. This series differs from them by focusing on the history of a people, the Greeks, and not a place, Greece. The story will reflect the fluctuating dynamics of change while primary sources and accounts of the lives of individuals and communities will give life to the text.

The history of the Greeks over the long durée must be told on a vast and at times even global scale, and so the Greek world is not just taken to include the area traditionally associated with ancient Greece or the territory of the modern Greek state, but encompasses all areas where Greeks have settled, including the diaspora of modern times.

The series of victories against the Arabs obtained in the late ninth century by the Byzantine fleet in the Aegean and Ionian seas was abruptly interrupted after 900 by a number of bold, even spectacular attacks on major cities in Greece. Following an attack on Lemnos in 901, a Syrian fleet commanded by the emir of Tarsos, Damianos, sacked in 902 the city of Demetrias in the Pagasic Bay in Thessaly (Theophanes Continuatus, in Bekker 1838: 365; John Kaminiates, The Capture of Thessaloniki 14). Shortly after that, the protospatharios Petronas, who had been commissioned by Emperor Leo VI to take temporary charge of the defence of Thessalonike, arrived in that city from Constantinople with alarming news of an impending Arab attack by a large fleet under the command of Leo of Tripoli (Abū Harith).

John Kaminiates does not give any details as to the nature of the rumours, but historians have speculated that Leo of Tripoli, who had initially planned to attack Constantinople, may have been invited to do so by a conspiracy against Emperor Leo VI organised by Andronikos Dukas and Eustathios Argyros in cooperation with Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos (Jenkins 1948; Farag 1989: 138).

In the eyes of the Romans a freedman could never become equal to an ingenuus. The experience of slavery had destroyed his honour and irreversibly degraded his mind and body. Despite his legal transformation the freedman still possessed his ‘servile ingenium’, and he would always remain inferior to those untainted by servitude. His natural place was therefore at the bottom of the hierarchy of status which formed the basis for Roman society. The stability and success of Rome was founded – at least from an elite perspective – on the maintenance of proper distinctions between people of different class and personal ability. The gradus dignitatis – or ‘scale of honour’ – remained the cornerstone of any free and just society, and Cicero stressed the fundamental inequality entailed by complete equality which ignored the natural differences that are bound to exist between people. He famously declared that: ‘So-called equality is most inequitable; for when the same honour is accorded to the highest and the lowest (who must be present in every nation), equity itself is most unequal.’ The gradus was not just a question of formal rank; it defined who was allowed to exercise authority over whom, and as such reflected the given hierarchy by which the higher being dominates and controls the lower – in the interest of all parties. Disregard for this rule was therefore more than a social transgression; it was in effect a violation of the natural order.