II - The social views of Michael Attaleiates

Summary

The eleventh-century Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates was no faceless annalist, no impersonal and impartial recorder of heterogeneous and disconnected facts. The story he tells is subjective and individual. He himself was both an observer of, and a participant in, the events which he describes. He passes judgement on these events, and he manipulates his material with all manner of artful artifice, such as speeches, episodic digressions and rhetorical invective.

The modern reader is faced with a problem: are Attaleiates' views peculiarly his own, or are they typical of the views of some broader social group? Does Attaleiates merely articulate an arbitrary set of personal opinions on specific events, or do his attitudes reflect, in any way systematically, the interests, prejudices and aspirations of an identifiable section of Byzantine society? Nobody has examined these questions in great detail, but some scholars have nevertheless produced answers. The result is confusion. Ostrogorsky sees Attaleiates as a supporter of the feudal military aristocracy; Tinnefeld proposes that his views are those of a rich landowner who idealizes the emperor Nicephorus III Botaneiates (Botaneiates came from the military aristocracy of Asia Minor); and Litavrin suggests that Attaleiates ‘expresses the interests of the senate’, but is at the same time not absolutely opposed to the military aristocracy.