The story of Alexios and John is that of imperial officials, rulers of Thasos and founders of Pantokrator Monastery at Mount Athos, as well as that of self-made men, adventurers, seasoned in warfare.1 They originated from Bithynia in Asia Minor and, leading a band of armed men and a small fleet across the Aegean, fought against Serbian and Turkish armies and managed to bring under their control territories in Eastern Macedonia and Thasos, thus creating a mini-state under their rule. For a moment in the midst of the fourteenth century, it seemed like they were living their wildest dream.

Resilience seems an odd choice of word for a period so closely connected to notions of decline and fall. Yet the concept of decline cannot be an effective analytical tool, since it only succeeds in dividing the past into “good” and “bad” periods. Such categories can be then easily manipulated to support ideas of cultures worthy and unworthy of study, and therefore of cultures that are better than or superior to other cultures – a dangerous path for the future of scholarship, let alone humanity. In a Late Byzantine context, the framework of decline has frequently influenced the way we have come to think about the socioeconomic and political phenomena of that period. It turns our attention to political and military conflicts, the devastation caused by the Black Death, and the socioeconomic and demographic challenges, but glosses over the constellation of possibilities, choices, and new trajectories created in times of change. It also makes it easier for us to believe in suffering and passive rural communities that lacked agency and were thus unable to adapt to new circumstances and successfully navigate crises.

The crises of the Late Byzantine period were complex and multifaceted; they included episodes that resulted in gradual change as well as sudden events that triggered immediate and unforeseen effects. A steady population increase until the thirteenth century had contributed to soil degradation and the exhaustion of resources as well as to the rise of economic and political superstructures (i.e., the landed nobility and monasteries). The efforts of revival and restoration of the empire in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and the ongoing political and military conflicts with new rising powers such as the Serbian Kingdom and the Ottomans further contributed to the strain of resources. Environmental changes in the fourteenth century, which included cooler temperatures and an increase of rainfall, also affected rural communities throughout Europe and could be catastrophic for some types of agriculture, including viticulture and olive cultivation.1 Such phenomena made societies even more vulnerable to the demographic and economic crisis caused by the sudden arrival of the Black Death.

In AD 1299, a village in the area of Kake Rache on the island of Thasos was celebrating the construction of a new church dedicated to Prophetes Elias. An inscription commemorating this event survives immured in the west façade of the early modern church of Metamorphoses (Fig. 1.1). The inscription also lists the donors involved: the priest Kaloioannes and his entire village, who bore the expenses for the church, as well as the mason Loukas from Christoupolis (modern Kavala, a town opposite Thasos on the Greek mainland), who was responsible for its construction.1 This inscription thus bears witness to a collective act of donation in which an entire village pooled its resources to create a new focal point of prayer and ritual while reaffirming its collective identity by collaborating in an act of gift-giving and thanksgiving to God.

“As rural people try and access resources they do so through engaging in relationships with other actors who are both present but more often than not usually absent from the day-to-day activities of rural people,” writes Anthony Bebbington on contemporary Latin American rural communities and their livelihood.1 This multiplicity of actors, all active in the rural landscape and all interacting with each other, was already introduced at the beginning of this book with the dispute between the Kondylis family and Lavra Monastery in which a variety of individuals, monks, imperial officials, local elites, and villagers were involved in its resolution.2