Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Byzantine Diplomacy

Byzantium preferred paying, marrying and flattering its enemies to fighting them. How imperial diplomacy worked — embassies, subsidies, dynastic marriage, intelligence and ceremony.

The adjective “byzantine,” used in English to mean devious and over-complicated, comes almost entirely from the reputation of Byzantine foreign policy. The reputation is unfair in its moral judgement and roughly accurate in its description. The empire did prefer to buy, marry, divide, flatter and outmanoeuvre its enemies rather than fight them, and it said so openly in its own handbooks. Fighting was expensive, risky and slow to recover from; a subsidy was none of these things.

This was a considered doctrine, not a symptom of weakness. The empire’s strategic problem for most of its history was that it faced threats on three or four fronts at once and could concentrate against only one. Diplomacy was the instrument that kept the other fronts quiet, and the state invested in it at a level no medieval rival matched: permanent archives, professional interpreters, a corps of experienced envoys, systematic intelligence, and an elaborate ceremonial machine designed to overawe visitors.

The Doctrine

Byzantine writers are unembarrassed about the priority. The Strategikon attributed to Maurice opens its discussion of war by observing that a general should try every other means first. Leo VI’s Taktika is blunter: the emperor should regard war as a last resort and should exhaust bribery, incitement of the enemy’s neighbours and internal subversion before committing an army.

The classic statement of practice is the De Administrando Imperio, written in the mid-tenth century by Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos as a private manual for his son. It is not a work of theory. It is a briefing document: who the Pechenegs are, where they camp, what they want, which of their clans can be bought, and — crucially — which peoples can be set against which. Constantine’s central insight is that the Pechenegs, sitting on the steppe north of the Black Sea, are hostile to the Rus, the Magyars, the Bulgars and the Khazars alike, and that keeping them friendly therefore neutralises four other problems at once.

He is equally frank about deceit. Asked for an imperial crown, he tells his son, reply that such regalia were brought down from heaven by an angel for Constantine the Great and cannot be given to foreigners; asked for Greek fire, say the same. The invented tradition is recommended explicitly as a diplomatic tool.

The Instruments

Money

Subsidies were the workhorse. They were paid to Huns, Persians, Avars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Rus, Serbs, Hungarians, Normans and Turks, and they were recorded in the sources as gifts, never as tribute — a distinction the recipients frequently did not accept.

The scale could be enormous. Justinian’s peace with Persia in 562 committed the empire to an annual payment of 30,000 gold pieces for fifty years. The Avars in the early seventh century were extracting somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 200,000 solidi a year. Critics at the time and since have called this a purchased peace, and so it was; the counter-argument, made by contemporaries, is that a campaign cost more, risked the field army, and settled nothing permanently either.

The payments were made in the empire’s gold coin, which held its value for seven centuries and circulated as far as India and Scandinavia. Byzantine diplomacy and Byzantine coinage were two aspects of the same instrument, as Byzantine coinage explains.

Marriage

Sending a princess abroad was the most expensive concession the empire could make, and for centuries it resisted. Constantine VII tells his son flatly that imperial women are not to be married to foreigners — with an exception carved out for the Franks alone, on the grounds of Constantine the Great’s supposed western ancestry — and blames Romanos I Lekapenos for having broken the rule by marrying his granddaughter to the Bulgarian tsar.

The rule was broken repeatedly anyway. Anna, sister of Basil II, was married to Vladimir of Kiev in 989 in exchange for six thousand Varangian troops and Vladimir’s baptism — a transaction that converted the Rus and gave the empire the Varangian Guard. Theophano, a Byzantine noblewoman of the Skleros family, went west in 972 to marry Otto II and left a deep mark on Ottonian art and court culture. By the Komnenian and Palaiologan centuries, imperial marriages to Hungarians, Germans, Normans, Georgians, Mongols and Turks were routine.

Religion

Conversion was diplomacy by other means, and the empire was better at it than any contemporary. The missions of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia in the 860s produced a Slavonic alphabet and liturgy and are described in the Cyrillic alphabet and the Byzantine missionaries; the baptism of Bulgaria under Boris I in 864, and of the Rus in 988, brought two large neighbouring states inside the Byzantine cultural system permanently.

The arrangement had a built-in strategic logic. A newly converted ruler received clergy, books, church architecture, a script and a body of law from Constantinople, and his church was placed under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Boris of Bulgaria understood this perfectly well and spent several years shopping between Rome and Constantinople for the best terms, including the promise of an autonomous church.

Titles

The empire had an enormous stock of honorific ranks and distributed them to foreign rulers as a way of placing them inside a hierarchy with the emperor at its apex. A Serbian prince or an Italian duke who accepted the dignity of patrikios or sebastos accepted, at least formally, a position in the imperial order. The internal version of this system is described in Byzantine court titles.

The letters of the imperial chancery were graded with corresponding precision: the weight of the gold seal, the form of address, the colour of the ink and the size of the sheet all varied according to the recipient’s standing. A slight in any of these was understood on both sides.

Ceremony

Foreign envoys were managed through a carefully staged process: met at the frontier, escorted by a fixed route, lodged at state expense, kept waiting, and finally received in the Magnaura palace.

Liudprand of Cremona, who came twice as an ambassador — once for Berengar of Italy in 949, once for Otto I in 968 — left the most vivid description of the reception, and being Liudprand, he described it twice with opposite feelings. On the first visit he was impressed in spite of himself by the mechanical throne:

Before the emperor’s seat stood a tree of gilded bronze, whose branches were filled with birds of the same material, uttering different cries, each according to its varying species. The throne itself was so marvellously fashioned that at one moment it seemed a low structure, and at another it rose high into the air.

On the second visit, sent by a western emperor whose title Constantinople refused to recognise, he was insulted, served food he found inedible, given a bad seat and detained; his report is a masterpiece of furious invective. Both reactions were foreseeable outcomes of a system designed to place the visitor exactly where the empire wanted him.

Intelligence

The empire ran what amounted to a standing intelligence service. The logothetes tou dromou, originally the official in charge of the imperial post, became the minister responsible for foreign affairs, for the reception of envoys, and for the information they brought back. Ambassadors were expected to report on roads, fortifications, harvests, factional disputes at court and the health of rulers; the questions asked of returning envoys are visible in the detail of works like the De Administrando Imperio.

Merchants, clergy and captives were all sources. The Byzantine practice of ransoming and exchanging prisoners with the caliphate — conducted at formal exchanges on the river Lamos in Cilicia, several times a century — served intelligence purposes as well as humanitarian ones.

Diplomacy with Islam

Relations with the caliphate settled into a pattern of raid, counter-raid, truce and exchange that was far more regular than the rhetoric on either side suggested. Embassies travelled between Constantinople and Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo for six centuries, carrying gifts, scholars, doctors and manuscripts. The caliph al-Ma’mun is said to have asked for a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest as part of a peace settlement; the story may be embroidered, but the traffic in books was real, and its consequences are traced in Byzantium and the Islamic world.

Diplomacy with the West

The hardest relationship was with the Latin west, because it involved a question Byzantium could not concede: who was the Roman emperor. The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 created a rival claimant, and every western embassy thereafter involved a negotiation over titles. Byzantine chanceries settled on calling western rulers rex or “emperor of the Franks,” never simply basileus ton Rhomaion.

From the eleventh century the balance shifted. The empire needed western troops and ships more than the west needed anything from Constantinople, and the instruments that had worked for centuries — subsidy, title, ceremony — lost their force. The commercial privileges granted to Venice in 1082 and to Genoa and Pisa afterwards were diplomacy conducted from weakness, and they transferred the empire’s maritime economy to its creditors. The last Palaiologan emperors travelled to Italy in person to ask for help, which by Constantine VII’s standards was an admission that the system had failed.

The Balance Sheet

Byzantine diplomacy kept a state with limited manpower alive in the most contested strategic position in the medieval world for eight hundred years after it had lost the resources to defend itself by force alone. It also had costs that are easy to underrate: subsidies invited escalation, converted neighbours became rivals with their own imperial ambitions — Simeon of Bulgaria and the tsars of Moscow both learned the ideology from Constantinople — and the habit of managing enemies rather than defeating them left the empire without allies when it finally needed them.

The Machinery

Diplomacy on this scale needed an office, and the Byzantines built one.

The logothetes tou dromou headed it. Originally the minister of the public post, he acquired responsibility for foreign envoys, for the interrogation of returning ambassadors, for interpreters and for the archive. By the tenth century he was one of the four or five most important officials in the state.

Under him ran a permanent apparatus that no western kingdom possessed before the Renaissance:

  • An archive of treaties, precedents and correspondence, consulted when a question of protocol or a lapsed agreement arose
  • Interpreters for Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Georgian, the Slavonic languages, Latin, and the steppe tongues
  • A reception establishment — the Book of Ceremonies specifies who meets an ambassador at which frontier post, what he is fed, where he lodges, and how long he waits
  • A graded chancery, with the seal, salutation, ink and format of a letter varying by the recipient’s standing

The waiting was deliberate. Foreign envoys were routinely kept for weeks or months, partly to establish precedence and partly because a delegation lodged at state expense in Constantinople could be observed, questioned and impressed.

Where It Failed

The system had characteristic weaknesses, and they are as instructive as the successes.

Subsidies invited escalation. A neighbour paid to stay quiet learns that pressure produces money. Avar demands rose from modest annual sums under Justinian to something in the region of 100,000–200,000 solidi by the 620s, and the Bulgars followed the same curve. The empire had no mechanism for ending a payment except a war it had been paying to avoid.

Converted neighbours became rivals. Bulgaria and Rus received Christianity, literacy, law and imperial ideology from Constantinople, and both produced rulers who claimed the imperial title. Simeon of Bulgaria was educated in the capital and spent his reign trying to take it.

The west was unmanageable. The instruments that worked on steppe confederations and Caucasian princes — money, titles, ceremony, marriage — did not work on the papacy, which wanted recognition of a rival source of universal authority, or on the Italian republics, which wanted commercial terms. By the twelfth century the empire was granting trade concessions it could not afford, which is diplomacy conducted from weakness rather than from strength.

It depended on being worth conciliating. The whole structure rested on the assumption that an emperor’s friendship was valuable and his hostility dangerous. Once that ceased to be obviously true — after 1204, and decisively after 1371 — the ceremonies continued and the effect did not.

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