12 - Adjustable Imperial Image-Projection and the Greco-Roman Repertoire: Their Reception among Outsiders and Longer-Stay Visitors

Summary

Byzantium's leadership was keenly aware of the impression its activities and the sheer longevity of its empire made on outsiders, and this was one reason for its encouragement of external potentates to send envoys or to pay a visit to Constantinople themselves. Yet in the early Middle Ages only a few persons made the round trip to Constantinople, whether as traders, envoys or potentates. Even Arab observers seem to have been less than well informed, and fresh, accurate data about material resources and current goings-on in the empire were correspondingly hard to come by. Rumours throve, many being propagated deliberately by the imperial authorities. So long as means of verification were few, such disinformation was often effective, especially as few ‘barbarian’ regimes were capable of crosschecking the latest intelligence with written reports of even a few years earlier. Such conditions gave the imperial government scope to ‘change its story’ – literally so, in the refashioning of narratives of quite recent episodes and bilateral agreements, but also figuratively, accentuating different facets of the empire according to circumstances.

Our aim here is to consider the workings of imperial image-projection towards foreign courts in the early Middle Ages and to compare them with the ways in which the empire's condition was presented subsequently, in the era of Alexios I Komnenos. The underlying question is what adjustments occurred at a time when Constantinople was attracting outsiders in sizeable numbers. Most obviously, it is a matter of communications, the fact that travel grew more frequent and outsiders were better-informed about the empire. But this is not the full story. One seems to observe in Alexios Komnenos’ era something deeper-seated than tactical shifts in image-projection to cater for the many foreigners – especially westerners – with whom he had to do business. Prolonged quasi-social interaction with the ‘Latins’, especially Normans, observing their manners, appreciating their values and partaking of a kindred soldierly outlook, may have helped to foster a rather different self-image on the part of Alexios and some other members of the ruling elite.

How far the change was, in Alexios’ case, calibrated is virtually impossible to adjudge. It begs the question of where the border between contrived image and a sense of personal identity lies. At his deathbed, Alexios’ wife deplored his penchant for, and mastery of, ‘all sorts of deceits, decking out your language with contradictory meanings’.