Late Byzantine Poetry

The production and reception of poetry was an important means of cultural expression during more than 1000 years of Byzantine history. This project deals with the poetry of late Byzantium, i.e. from c. 1204 (the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in the 4th Crusade) to the middle of the 15th century. Byzantium in this period was marked by political fragmentation. In the area of the former empire several polities emerged that were influenced by Byzantine culture, among others Nicaea in Asia Minor, Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, and Epiros in Northern Greece. Furthermore, Byzantine culture continued to thrive in regions which were no longer part of the Byzantine empire, such as Salento in Southern Italy, Crete and Cyprus. After the reconquest of Constantinople in 1261, the capital saw a cultural and literary heyday. Poems have survived from all of these regions. They were recited at specific events and ceremonies, inscribed on buildings or works of art, and read and discussed in the literary salons (theatra) of the educated class. Their content and form were adapted to the specific political and social circumstances under which they were produced. For example, there are poems in the Byzantine tradition praising an Ottoman emperor, as well as highly archaizing difficult texts in ancient metres that were only addressed to a small group of intellectuals. The production and reception of poetry were an important means of building ones own Byzantine identity when political unity had been destroyed. This project has three aims. The first is to map the literary landscape of poetry in late Byzantium. Poems should be understood as part of the cultural, social and political networks that were integral to their production. Of special importance is the fact that almost none of the authors were full-time poets. Instead, most of them held political or clerical positions or worked as teachers. The second is to use detailed case studies to examine the production and reception of poetry, as well as its specific aesthetic qualities. The third is to make selected unpublished texts available in critical editions. Byzantine poetry has seen growing interest from scholars in recent years. However, unlike the poetry of late antiquity through the 12th century, which has been the subject of both extensive studies and major research projects, late Byzantine poetry has been almost entirely neglected. This project deals with late Byzantine poetry as a whole for the first time and analyses the variety of forms and functions of poetry in an age of political fragmentation, when it served as a means of identity-building and cultural cohesion.

This project dealt with Greek poetry from the late Byzantine period, i.e. from c. 1204 (the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in the 4th Crusade) to the middle of the 15th century (the end of the Empire marked by the Ottoman conquest of Byzantine lands). In this period, poetry was composed and consumed in a great variety of political and social contexts: in schools and scholarly circles in Constantinople; at the imperial court of Trebizond at the Black Sea coast; in the patriarchate of Nikaia, situated in Asia Minor; among the clerics in the Byzantine Empire and the Peloponnese; and many more. The results of this project are published in seven case studies, four of which deal with poetry from early fourteenth-century Constantinople. Article no. one offers an edition and commentary of some unpublished poems by the most important poet of this period, Manuel Philes. A second article compares his verse letters with the prose letters of the teacher Theodore Hyrtakenos, a contemporary from the same social stratum. This comparison sharpens our understanding of generic conventions and literary choices in prose and verse respectively. The third article deals with the motivations for writing poetry, including material from various authors of the early 14th century. Article no. four offers a close reading of an idyll by the scholar Maximos Planoudes, which combines multifarious ancient and Byzantine literary traditions. By decrypting the allusions and their interrelationships, the reader is confronted with a text as instructive as pleasant, which turns the picture of Planoudes as a pious and ultraconservative monk upside down. The other articles deal with very different contexts. Article no. five analyses the poetry of patriarch Germanos II, who composed highly ideological epigrams in 13th-century Nicaea, aimed at positioning the author and his church in quarrels with the Byzantine successor state Epirus as well as the Catholic Church. The sixth article, co-authored with the historian N. Aschenbrenner, deals with John Eugenikos, a cleric from the 15th century, who used his literary skills to negotiate his position in a time of ideological and political rifts within the Greek-Orthodox community. Finally, the seventh article is dedicated to the bureaucrat and poet Stephanos Sgouropoulos, who around the middle of the 14th century composed some poems addressed to the boy-emperor Alexios III Megas Komnenos in Trebizond. In these poems, he first instructs the emperor, but later abuses him in a way that has no equal in Byzantine literature. While this project resulted in multifaceted case studies, a follow-up project (Elise Richter Grant, FWF no. V919) will produce a monograph on the topic "The Power of Poetry in Late Byzantium".