The frontier dream of Pachymeres: why Byzantine Anatolia had to fall

Wiktor Ostasz

This paper is a contribution to the question of why Byzantine Asia Minor was lost to the Turks
in the reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos. A review of the literature on this subject impresses one
with the contingency of this outcome. Although a host of single causes (weakness or despotism of
rulers, alienation and neglect of the provinces, particularism of the elites, or Turkish demographic
pressure) are proposed to explain the collapse, the authors typically find that sufficient conditions
existed for a potential recovery up until the eve of disaster. The final determinant continues to elude
us. The unsustainability of monocausal accounts has recently led Anthony Kaldellis to reject all
internal explanations – for the analogous crisis of the eleventh century, where we already encounter
all of the above symptomatically Byzantine complaints – in favour of an enigmatic and extraneous
Turkish factor. Totalisation is a correct move here: unless we treat the Turks as “the sum of all fears”
the narrative cannot be closed. However, the key question is veiled: what fissure do the Turks exploit
in the imperial social structure, where do they enter into it? Only by addressing this problem can we
come to appreciate the internal necessity that governed the Byzantine empire’s descent into the abyss.
A common trope of Byzantine social history is the nostalgic reference to a preceding era when
the thematic troops composed of free peasant-soldiers (seen as model Roman citizens) were able to
prosper and serve the empire without falling into debt and dependence on the powerful. The
smallholding stratiotai operate as an index of the polity’s health and a cornerstone of its defences –
yet Byzantium’s crises always come hot on the heels of its expansion. It was the reconquest of
Constantinople in 1261 which hurled the empire into its death throes in Anatolia. Where the Nikaian
levies once were, rewarded with land and liberties on the frontier, bands of Turkic raiders emerged,
which then congealed into principalities mapped onto the existing grid of small thematic provinces,
as all efforts to reverse the process failed miserably. Were the emperors deliberate in alienating their
troops, or the Anatolians implacably seditious? Resolving the contradictory social grievances in
Pachymeres leads us to uncover a troubling identity between the frontiersman and the mysterious
Turk, but also between the emperor and the Turk – and ultimately to question that the prosperous
thematic soldier ever existed except as a spectral promise of success. The Roman dream, captured in
the epic of Digenis Akritis, ensured social reproduction. It propelled Byzantium to its best efforts, but
reduced to abstraction contributed to its downfall. The empire was apathetic by choice: it could only
sabotage the success of its native armies and delegate own struggles to barbarians if it was to preserve
the wealth and status of its ruling elites and the reigning emperor’s hold on the throne. It remains to
be seen what was worth rescuing from this lose-lose situation – the universal legacy of its own that
Byzantium betrayed through inertia.