macedon - Byzantium in Dark-Age Greece (the numismatic evidence in its Balkan context)

Byzantium in Dark-Age Greece (the numismatic evidence in its Balkan context)

Tuesday, 23. January 2007, 09:00:47

© 2005 Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 29 No. 2 (2005) 113–146

Florin Curta
University of Florida

Much has been made of the presence or absence of seventh- and eighth-century coins
on several sites in Greece, primarily in Athens and Corinth.
Kenneth Setton and Peter Charanis have paved the way for a cultural-historical interpretation of coin finds, but a thorough comparison of both single and hoard finds from Greece with others from the Balkans suggests a very different interpretation. Instead of signalising decline, lowdenomination coins, especially from Athens, may point to local markets of low-value
commodities, such as food, as well as to the permanent presence of the fleet.

Almost half a century ago, three polemical articles appeared in Speculum on seventhcentury
Corinth. Apparently, the debate opposing Peter Charanis to Kenneth Setton was
about an obscure episode, the alleged conquest of Corinth by a group of nomads known
to Byzantine sources as Onogurs.1

In fact, at stake was more than just the interpretation of a confusing passage in a late source, namely a letter of Isidore, the fifteenth-century metropolitan of Kiev, who had allegedly preserved ‘a reminiscence of a Peloponnesian tradition’.2

In his first article, Setton reacted against Charanis’s earlier work,3 in which he
had treated the Chronicle of Monemvasia, one of the most controversial sources for the
early medieval history of Greece, as ‘absolutely trustworthy’.
According to Setton, the Chronicle was no more than ‘a medley of some fact and some fiction’ that historians should use ‘with caution’.4

Charanis had taken the Chronicle at face value.
By contrast, Setton believed it was ludicrous to claim that the Peloponnese had remained under Avar-Slavic domination for 218 years. According to him, ‘much of the Slavonisation of the Balkans and of Greece’ was the result of peaceful settlement: ‘unknown numbers of Slavs’
came ‘at unknown times and under unknown circumstances’.
There was, however, no such thing as a Slavic conquest of Greece. ‘The Slavs came, but they did not conquer.’5

In response, Charanis wrote of Slavic domination and great numbers of settlers coming to
Greece during the entire period from ‘just before the beginning of Maurice’s reign
[582–602] to the early years of the reign of Heraclius [610–41]’.6
He attacked the ‘official version of the Slavic problem in Greece’ espoused by Stilpon Kyriakides: ‘no Greek scholar, writing in Greece, has ever acknowledged that Slavs settled in Greece during the sixth century’.7

At a first glimpse, the Setton-Charanis debate was nothing new.
Many of the arguments used by both sides were almost a century old.
The Chronicle of Monemvasia was first used as a primary source for the history of the Slavs in Greece by Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, the German journalist who claimed that the modern Greeks were descendants not of ancient Greeks (TRUE OR FALSE?), but of Slavs and Albanians whose ancestors had settled in Greece during the Middle Ages and had learned to speak Greek from the Byzantine authorities.8

In fact, Setton went as far as to claim that although Charanis seemed to hold Fallmerayer up to opprobrium, his views were not ‘unlike those entertained by Fallmerayer more than a century ago’.9
In 1952, comparing one’s work with that of Fallmerayer was a serious charge.
In Greece (HE..HE..HI..HI..WHY?), Fallmerayer had been demonised to the point that, although actually an enemy of Russia, he came to be regarded as a Panslavist and as an agent of the tsar.10

Long before its first translation into Greek, Fallmerayer’s work was stigmatised as ‘anti-Greek’.11

During and after the Civil War, the ‘Slavs’ became the national enemy.
By 1950, those embracing the ideology of the right saw their political rivals as the embodiment of all that was anti-national, Communist, and Slavic.
A strong link was established between national identity and political orientation, as the Civil War and the subsequent defeat of the left-wing movement turned Slav Macedonians into the
Sudetens of Greece.12

To hold Fallmerayeran views was thus a crimen laesae maiestatis.
Dionysios A. Zakythinos, the author of the first monograph on medieval Slavs in Greece,
wrote of the Dark Ages separating Antiquity from the Middle Ages as an era of decline
and ruin brought by Slavic invaders.13

Some insisted on the beneficial Byzantine influence that forced the Slavs to abandon their nomadic life of bandits.14

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?...
HELLENES?
NO..
..ALL PICS ARE..
GREEKS..