The shape of the market

The perspective of this paper could certainly be judged as somewhat narrow by urban historians of ninth-century Constantinople. For the sake of clarity we should like to stress from the very start that it is the Bulgarian aspect of the problem that interests us. Whatever the answer to the question whether Byzantium was ‘dead or alive’ at the time, for Boris (who forced Bulgaria into Christendom), for his son Symeon (who became Bulgaria’s first tsar), and for Symeon’s son Peter (who took the first Byzantine princess to Veliki Preslav), the empire was certainly very much alive. These three rulers of the first Bulgarian kingdom lived at the time when the renovatio encapsulated by Theoktistos and Theodora in A.D. 843 was taken over by the usurper Basil; when, subsequently, the ascending genos of the dysgenes killer recreated — and at the same time distanced itself from — the broader framework of the Justinianic age; and, finally, when eugenes usurpers triumphed within the already established ‘Macedonian’ universe. Among the three of them, however, only Symeon had the rare opportunity of living in Constantinople, for fourteen years or so — between 872/4 and 887 — and in its First Region at that. Symeon became no Theodoric but what was it that he saw which made him ‘half-Greek’ and could have moulded or influenced some of his policies that led to the establishment of a new empire in the Balkans

Byzantine Studies and History · History

• The Monk versus the Philosopher

  Open Access•Mirosław J Leszka, Katarzyna Gucio•Studia Ceranea Journal of the…•2011

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