2 - Ruling Elites and the Common People: Some Considerations on Their Diverging Identities and Ideologies

Summary

In Byzantium, the political ideology of the emperor and the governing class strongly emphasised the term Rhōmaios as a self-designation for all imperial subjects. This ideological approach regarded the Byzantine Empire as the Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn or Rhōmania, and Constantinople as Nea Rhōmē, the new ruling city of the entire ecumene. This claim went along with a high level of socio-political organisation of the state by the standards of the time. However, this conception was probably very remote from the views and behavioural patterns of the majority of the population, the ‘lower strata’ of Byzantine society.

For example, the decision to start a war (including a civil war) was in Byzantium – as elsewhere – primarily a matter determined by the ideological and economic aims and concerns of the ruling elite. Declarations of war did not need the approval of the masses. While the Byzantine power elite's discourse emphatically celebrated the ideal of peace, in practice warfare could be deployed as a means of politics irrespective of ideological and ethical reservations. After the seventh century, unfavourable economic and military conditions in the geopolitical sphere of Byzantium meant that the emperors and the ruling ‘senatorial class’ (ἡ συγκλητικὴ τάξις) were not keen on avoiding warfare out of conformity to pacifist convictions. Instead, they waged wars either for territorial defence or for expansion whenever the equilibrium of power was in the empire's favour. In this context, one may question the efficiency of the imperial state's ideological mechanisms in widely propagating their differentiated conceptions of peace, upon which the justification of defensive or offensive warfare depended. My aim in the current chapter is to offer, relying on several disiecta membra, some thoughts regarding the potential channels through which the ‘lower strata’ could have been influenced ideologically, as well as regarding the need to problematise the degree of that influence.

Who are the ‘lower strata’? Until now I could not find in Byzantine texts a description of them that would offer something like a definition. General terms like dēmos, ethnos, genos, laos, ochlos, phylon, plērōma, politēs or taxis, which are used in Byzantine texts, often with political connotations, are not sufficient to describe the delineated social groups of the empire's population.