THE ROLE OF war in shaping and reshaping various types of polities and visions of community in the Middle Ages is a topic that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. In historical sociology, it is commonplace to claim that collective identifications, group solidarity, and homogeneity are not a cause but rather a product of warfare and intergroup violence.1 Historical evidence, on the other hand, demonstrates that the impact of war on the stability, cohesion, and/or cultural homogenization of various kinds of groups such as ethnic or national communities, as well as kingdoms, empires, and nation-states, can be both constructive and destructive. This means that, even if warfare is a situation that often enhances discourses of collective demarcation and othering, thus sharpening group boundaries and hardening stereotypes, collective identities can be considered as neither a natural nor an automatic result of war.

When I conceived the idea of a workshop on the relationship between war and collective identities in the Middle Ages that would result in a comparative volume, one of the main incentives, besides cross-cultural comparison, was to encourage a more direct dialogue between the fields of historical sociology and social history— in particular, the history of collective identities in the Middle Ages. While I delved into modern sociological theories on ethnicity and nationhood for the purposes of my own research on collective identity in the so-called Byzantine Empire some years ago, it became increasingly apparent to me that historical sociologists often avoid serious engagement with the debates of medieval specialists on identities. Historians, on the other hand, can be prone sometimes to base their methodology on a single sociological approach, usually the one that has established itself as the current orthodoxy in the field. The result of that is, often, books or articles based on evidence from the sources that is cherry-picked to suit and confirm the theory. Both these strategies testify to a lack of proper communication and meaningful dialogue between the two fields, with notable exceptions of course; a dialogue which would help both sides refine their arguments and address evident problems which they are often allowed to overlook in the safe environment of their respective field bubbles.

AS I HAVE already stated in the introduction of the current book, our cross-cultural approach to the relationship between war and collective identities in the period between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries does not claim to offer a wholistic coverage of the topic. In this light, my effort in the current chapter to draw some comparative conclusions from the presented case studies cannot do justice to many aspects of that relationship in the period under examination; especially if we consider the significant number of cultures that were inevitably left out of the picture. The goal when we started this dialogue was, of course, not to state the obvious, namely warfare's diachronically important role in the processes of configuration or renegotiation of different types and visions of community. It was rather to problematize the multifaceted character of war's impact on high-level identifications. The individual chapters speak to each other in many ways when it comes to the question of when and how warfare in the form of interstate conflict, conquest, or civil war converged with institutions, political ideologies, religion, and ethnicity, or informed practices of memorialization in order to shape collective attachments, enhance or weaken groupness, and construct otherness.

The role of religious identifications and religious– political proto-ideologies looms large in the two case studies on civil wars. The well-studied events of the Albigensian Crusade testify to civil war in medieval western Europe as a phenomenon that was circumscribed by the imagined community of western-European Christendom, attributing a secondary role to the state and/or shared ethnicity. Even though the nominal kingdom of France provided the political-territorial scene of the conflict that has been interpreted as an attack of the northern French against the Occitan elites, the southerners distinguished themselves from the French ethnicity of the northerners. Philippe Buc highlights the two main visions of identity that emerge from the narrative sources: the first, a product of Crusading ideology and practice, was a vision employed to demarcate the opposite parties in terms of Catholic versus Cathar and pious versus sinful in order to justify the actions of war; even though such distinctions were by far not clear-cut on the ground.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN warfare and identity formation in the medieval East Roman Empire, known under the terminus technicus Byzantine Empire, is a relatively understudied topic. In this chapter, I intend to explore collective identification as this emerged from and was conceptualized in Byzantine accounts of civil wars in the period from the seventh century onwards. This is the period when the imperial state of Constantinople was ultimately confined territorially to the eastern Mediterranean and its elite culture ceased to be divided between Latin and Greek as had been the case in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. After the seventh century, the merging of Hellenic cultural elements with the Roman political culture gave birth to a hybrid, non-Latin Roman identity which has become an object of revisionist research in roughly the last decade.

In my latest contributions to the topic, I have tried to show that the exploration of Byzantine Romanness needs to break free from a rigid methodological framework which, based on a cherry-picking approach to the evidence of the sources, seeks to reveal or rather to reconstruct an East Roman ethnonational identity that was allegedly shared by the majority within that social order. Such approaches depart from a rather superficial constructivism which tends to reify ethnicity, arbitrarily turning the latter into the basis for political loyalty. Consequently, they tend to ignore or misrepresent three important issues: first, the boundaries of the East Roman political community were not imagined as delimited in cultural-territorial terms. Second, ethnicity or indigeneity were not the principal criteria for full membership in the Roman political order. Third, the Greek-speaking Romans did not perceive themselves as a natural community of descent, the narratives about the community's historical origins being malleable, something which is interrelated with the changing content and the situational nature of Roman ethno-cultural discourses over the centuries.

In this light, collective attachments in the East Roman political community were determined by the idea of a hierarchical political order circumscribed by the fluctuating limits of enforceable authority of the Roman emperor of Constantinople.

Modern scholarship has devoted a great deal of attention to the research of collective identity and political ideology in the so-called Byzantine Empire. In the context of the revived scholarly dialogue on these topics in roughly the last two decades, a workshop that was organised at the University of Vienna in 2015 aimed to approach ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in the Byzantine world through a broader perspective. Our intention was to redirect the focus of the discussion on various kinds of identifications, the forms they took and the means through which they were articulated, as well as on the content and social function of various sets of ideas and beliefs in the medieval East Roman geopolitical sphere between roughly the sixth and fifteenth centuries. The current volume is the product of that discussion, which was enriched with additional contributions on the way. It represents what we believe to be the first effort to address a wide range of different aspects of the ways in which various groups or individuals in the geopolitical sphere of the medieval East Roman Empire perceived themselves and one another, as well as the world they lived in.

Our main goal was to broaden our knowledge about the nature of the different types of sources that throw light on ‘identities’, about how these ‘identities’ were ascribed and attributed or adopted and about the understandings and misunderstandings that different modes of identifying oneself, one's kith and kin and those outside these circles generated, while unravelling the potential interrelation between identification practices and various sets of ideas and beliefs. Moreover, we wanted to address the ways in which modern researchers have attempted to describe these phenomena and make sense of them and the dynamics of ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in a past culture. With respect to that, this introductory chapter will touch upon the central concepts of the discussion, namely ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’, whose content may vary according to author and whose analytical usefulness is still a focus for disagreement. By offering some insight into the definitional background and the various uses of these terms, we hope to provide readers with a conceptual framework that will allow them to better assess the individual contributions to the present volume.

It is well known that Byzantinists, when addressing a broader audience, often feel obliged to clarify that there never was a Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was the ancient name of the city of Constantinople before its refoundation by Constantine I, and it was only occasionally used by classicising Byzantine authors to refer to the imperial city. The terms mainly used by the people of the time to designate the medieval empire were Rhōmaiōn archē, Rhōmaiōn basileia, Rhōmaiōn politeia, Rhōmania and Rhōmaïs. This discrepancy between modern and historical terms and labels is in itself not a unique phenomenon confined to the Byzantine Empire. The problem in the Byzantine case, though, is related to the ideological connotations of relabelling and their interrelation with an established negative modern image of Byzantine culture.

Scholars have often raised this issue and sought to deconstruct Byzantium's negative image. Averil Cameron was among the first to point to Byzantium's essentialised identity and its orientalised image as in opposition to the ‘West’. Dimiter Angelov has provided a vigorous deconstruction of the notion of ‘Byzantinism’ as ‘an essentialist and negative understanding of a medieval civilisation that places it into rigorous analytical categories from a Western and modern view-point’. He argued that this essentialised, negative image of Byzantine culture needs to be deconstructed by examining its structures and usages while studying the Empire of Constantinople in its proper historical context without idealising it. In a similar vein, Przemysław Marciniak has recently pointed out the close relationship of ‘Byzantinism’ with Said's Orientalism, a relationship which Olof Heilo has addressed sceptically. While accepting the orientalising aspects of the image of Byzantium in the works of scholars of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Gibbon, Heilo argued that, contrary to the term ‘Oriental’, the term ‘Byzantine’ should be seen as having foremost a chronological instead of a spatial-cultural dimension, thus not presupposing or, for that matter, tacitly imposing a certain historical-cultural prejudice.

In the current chapter, I shall revisit the question of kinship between the concept of Orientalism and that of ‘Byzantinism’, which I define here as a historiographical discourse of negation.