A Sociocultural History of Violence in Twelfth-century Byzantium

Abstract

The present study addresses experiences and narrative representations of violence in the long twelfth century in Byzantium. This unique period was characterized by instability, transition, and a collision of cultures in the eastern Mediterranean. The authorial voice of the Byzantines explodes in this period, and modern historians are privy to an unprecedented amount of narratives, records, and chronicles that are steeped in graphic violence reflected in the political and social climate. Writing was a public activity that impacted how groups of people thought, understood their social environment, and behaved. Therefore, cataloguing instances of graphic descriptions of violence, placing them within their historical context, and comparing them with other accounts can help us recognize how Byzantine writers (and those who commissioned those writers) influenced their audience, and culture and society more broadly. In my dissertation, I describe the various forms and representations of violence in this crucial period in the history of the Byzantine Empire. By examining sources such as historical chronicles, civil and canon law and jurisprudence, and literature, dating between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, I present how Byzantines reckoned with major violent events in their lifetime, communal and individual violence, punishment and discipline in the eyes of the state and the church, and how and why they incorporated narratives of violent acts in their literary storytelling. My research offers a more nuanced understanding of complex dynamics and interactions between social groups, social hierarchy and stratification, ideas of morality, reconceptualization of the human body and its value, understandings of justice and punishment, practices of forgiveness and reestablishment of social harmony, public memory, legitimacy and order, and institutional power in the long twelfth century in Byzantium.