Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (60 page)

Perhaps because Greek remained the language of the neighbouring superpower, the Roman empire, its prestige lasted in Parthia long after its use must have actually died out. The Parthian kingdom in Iran lasted for five centuries. In AD 224 the last Parthian yielded to Ardashir, the first king of the next dynasty, the Sassanids, who spoke Persian. And yet when his son Shapur came to have his own achievements inscribed on rock at Naqsh-i Rustam, facing the tombs of the Persian kings at Persepolis, he wrote them up in three languages: Persian, Parthian and Greek.
³⁰

Iran was never part of the Roman empire, and Mesopotamia only in very small part.† So they never acquired the sense of permanent Greek possessions that came to characterise Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They had been incorporated into the empire of Alexander, hence ‘Hellenised’, in 332 BC; in 64 BC the Roman general Pompey had incorporated Syria and Palestine as a directly governed province of the empire; and in 30 BC Augustus had added Egypt, deposing Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies. These Roman conquests, as we have seen, had no linguistic effect, except to introduce some use of Latin in the army and the courts. But they did serve to underline the sense that this part of the world, the far south-east of the Mediterranean, was to be permanently, and as far as possible stably, under western control. Greek remained widely spoken there by foreign elites, and in some special cities such as Palmyra, Gaza and Alexandria by many more.

A sense of the language situation in a centre of international pilgrimage in the region is given by Egeria, who visited Jerusalem around AD 400:

Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac, another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and never in Syriac, there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them. Similarly for the lessons that are read in church: since these must be read in Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin.
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We have already considered (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic — eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93) the series of lightning campaigns by the newly declared Muslims which reversed this state of affairs, and so created the linguistic situation that has lasted to the present day. A single decade from the death of Muhammad in 632 sufficed to draw a thin, but indelible, line under 950 years of Greek control and Greek language, and to turn the page, opening what is so far 1300 years of Arabic sway in these same lands. A shock for all concerned, but particularly so since it came a couple of years after the emperor Heraclius had reasserted the imperial defences, and in four years of campaigning rolled back a Sassanid invasion of these same territories which had denied them to the Greeks since the beginning of the century.

This was a devastating blow to the empire politically and economically: the losses included Egypt, still after 650 years the major supplier of grain to the empire’s capital. And the best estimates
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suggest that the Arab conquests deprived the empire of over half its population. But it could have been worse. The Arabs failed in repeated attempts to take Constantinople itself, and also failed to detach Anatolia, despite raiding it virtually every year for the next two centuries.
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The region had been reorganised by Heraclius, effectively combining civil and military administration, and imposing martial law. The clear perception that the enemy was at the gate imposed this new discipline, and kept the empire effectively mobilised for defence.

There is an interesting pattern to the Byzantine losses in the mid-seventh century. The places that held firm were precisely those where Greek was the majority language, spoken by the people at large and not just elites. This had an effect on the linguistic self-image of the Roman empire (for they still considered themselves Roman). Latin had been dropping out of use for some time, losing even its last redoubt in the law: since the time of Justinian, a century before, most legislation had been drafted in Greek; and the emperor’s second-in-command, the praetorian prefect, was now often a man who knew no Latin. The empire still held much of southern Italy, and would hang on to parts of it for another four hundred years, until the middle of the eleventh century. But now for the first time Greek, not Latin, was seen as the unifying language of the whole community. Confusingly for moderns, they called Greek
rōmaíika
, ‘Romanish’, contrasting it with
latiniká.
But looking back from the mid-tenth century, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus remarked that it had been in the time of Heraclius that the Romans ‘had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue’.
³³

Although the unsettling bellows motion of the imperial frontiers did not stop, the attrition of Greek-language areas effectively now did, for the next four hundred years. This would not have been clear at the time, for while the southeastern lands of the Levant were being lost, the north too was in turmoil.

It was touch and go whether Greek would survive in its own heartland. After invasions from Germanic-speaking Goths in 378, Turkic-speaking Huns in 441-7, Germanic Ostrogoths in 479-82, and Turkic-speaking Bulgars in 493, the mayhem continued in the sixth century. Fifty years after the crisis, the Byzantine historian Procopius recounted:

Illyricum and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the Adriatic] to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese, was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured…
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Then, in 581, as John of Ephesus records: ‘an accursed people, called Slavonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the country of the Thessalonians, and all Thrace, and captured the cities, and took numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own’.
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This was not a temporary phenomenon, and it led to large-scale emigration by Greeks. According to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, by the year 587/8 scarcely any part of Greece was immune to the Slavic scourge, this time from the Avars (another Turkic group): ‘Only the eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the country.’

This might have been expected to lead to a permanent spread of Slavic languages, as indeed it did in Serbia and Bulgaria farther north (see Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309). But somehow the preponderance of Greek over Slavic speakers was restored in the south. In the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries the empire organised a series of resettlement programmes and missionary campaigns, moving Slavs into northern Anatolia, and bringing others into southern Greece. We hear that in 805 Nicephorus I ‘built
de novo
the town of Lacedaemon and settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thracēsians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it into a bishopric’.
³⁶

Likewise, in the 860s, Basil I was hard at work to convert the Serbs in the north: ‘having greeked them
[graik$oTbar;sas]
, he subjected them to governors according to Roman custom, honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression of their own rulers’.
³⁷

The details are impossible to clarify, if the aim is to explain why some communities became Greek-speaking, as well as Christian; certainly the religious liturgies they learnt would have been in Greek. Later, service in the army would also have served to bring many Slavs into the Greek-speaking world. But the net effect is clear. Greek remained, or was re-established as, the dominant language of its traditional homeland.

Greek dominance in Anatolia lasted until 1071: in that year the empire lost the battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt, north of Lake Van) to a new power dominating the Muslim world, the sultanate of the Seljuk Turks.
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Even so, it could still have avoided the loss of its whole heartland that resulted: the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, with other wars to fight, had attempted to reinstate the defeated emperor, Romanus Diogenes, on terms that would have established an alliance between the two powers, and given the Turks access to the Mediterranean through Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch in northern Syria. But Romanus, and the proffered terms, were rejected: the consequence was the Seljuks’ swift advance through most of Anatolia, a territory that was thenceforth to be dominated by speakers of Turkish, and known—in curious reminiscence of the old empire’s origins in Italy—as the Sultanate of Rum.

This spread of Turkish hordes, who rapidly converted into Turkish settlers, within a hundred years had deprived the Greek language community of the heart of its major territory. The population of Greek speakers worldwide was therefore set to fall rapidly, whether by emigration, or simple loss of later generations of learners. Some whole communities of Greek speakers would depart en masse; many individuals would leave their homes to find better opportunities elsewhere; and the children of some Greek families, assimilating to the new environment, would grow up speaking Turkish.

This was a direct blow to the survival of Greek as a major language. Five generations later, it suffered a political blow that shattered its remaining prestige. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, made up of knights from western Europe, turned aside from its appointed mission of attacking the Muslim powers that held Palestine, and captured Constantinople, as well as parts of Greece and the coast of Anatolia. It then proceeded to hold its gains as a ‘Latin Empire’, masterminded by the Venetians, which lingered on pointlessly for a couple of centuries before being absorbed by the Turks. The Fourth Crusade had reduced the East Roman Empire to a set of five separate statelets: although one of these did manage to retake Constantinople in 1261, and reconstitute itself as a rump of empire, no Greek state was ever again more than a minor constraint on the growing power of the Turks. The empire was finally extinguished by the Turks in 1453, and the last Greek statelet, Trebizond, in 1471. It had taken the Turks just over 380 years to advance from Manzikert to Constantinople—the same interval of time that Greece was subsequently to spend under
Tourkokratía
, as they called the domination of the Turks.

From being the language of a universal empire, so catholic in its aspirations that it scarcely noticed whether its language was Hellenic or Roman, Greek had now become the tongue of a conquered people, the Orthodox Christians, just one of the
milletler
(’nations’—really, religious groupings) that had a place in the cosmopolitan empire of the Ottoman Turks. Humbled at last, the Greeks now did notice what language they were speaking: it was inseparable from their Orthodox faith, and became an important token of their identity for the long centuries in which they lacked their freedom.

Given that Anatolia had been, in the late first millennium BC, no less Greek-speaking than the Balkan peninsula that culminates in the Peloponnese, the place that we now think of as the farthest natural extent of Greece, it is almost an accident that the Greek-speaking community ended up concentrated in the same place from which it spread two and a half thousand years before. Looking back, we can see that this only reflects the fact that the Muslim powers that threatened from the east, the Arabs and above all the Turks, were better organised, and more coherent in the long term, than the threats that came from the north, the Goths, Avars and Slavs. Slavs could be assimilated; Turks could not.

Greek had been undone: it was no more the language of a community with universal aspirations. When the Renaissance took hold in western Europe, it did enjoy a resuscitation as a source of scholarly wisdom. Ability to read the language, and a familiarity with its classics (focused on the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as ever—though with more attention now to Aristotle), became a useful touchstone of authenticity for scholars, but it never rose to the level of a lingua franca among them: that position was held by its old colleague, Latin.

But Greek itself, as a living language, was now the property of a number of small communities, with no right or power actively to influence others. And their sense of unity one with another was diminished by the breakdown of any link with traditional Greek literary education, a development that had begun in the thirteenth century, a century and a half before the Turkish triumph, when the Latin powers had first taken control of so many of the empire’s old domains.