Sailing from Byzantium (23 page)

While owing its inspiration to its Byzantine origins, this burgeoning Slavonic tradition preserved a degree of cultural autonomy that no doubt would have gratified Boris, Bulgaria's last khan. Clearly, though, it was not enough to satisfy his son Symeon, Bulgaria's—and the Slavic world's—first tsar.

he ancient world had been split in two linguistic halves, Latin and Greek. During the Middle Ages, a shadow version of this same dividing line was extended north from the Mediterranean to bisect the colder, wetter Slavic world. Running right through the Balkans and up into Eastern Europe, the line was drawn by missionaries such as Cyril and Methodius and their Western counterparts.

This shadow line marked the divide not between two languages, for the people nearly all spoke Slavic, but between two alphabets. Slavs on one side looked west, to Rome, accepting the Catholic faith and using the Latin alphabet. Today, they are Poles, Czechs, Slovenes. Slavs on the other side looked east, to Byzantium, accepting Orthodoxy and using the Cyrillic alphabet. They are Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others who in the past made up the Byzantine Commonwealth. Some, such as the Hungarians and
Czechs, straddled the line.
^∗
In most cases, the original Slavic has branched out into the separate languages spoken today, but the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats still speak the same language, Serbo-Croatian. They just write it differently. A shadow line runs between them.

The Slavs who became the Serbs and Croats had arrived around the time of Heraclius. Some scholars speculate that they took their names from two groups of Iranian mounted warriors who had ruled over a previously undifferentiated Slavic population in the northwest Balkans near the end of the seventh century. Others, following Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, suggest that the name
Serb
comes from the Latin
servus,
“servant” or “slave”: “ ‘Serbs’ in the tongue of the Romans is the word for ‘slave,’ whence the colloquial ‘ser-bula’ for menial shoes, and ‘tzerboulianoi’ for those who wear cheap, shoddy footgear,” Constantine, no doubt a stranger to menial shoes himself, informs us. “This name the Serbs acquired from their being slaves of the emperor of the Romans.” A similar derivation has also been put forward for the English word
slave,
which is thought to have come from the name
Slav
(more likely than the other way round, which is sometimes also suggested).

Both etymologies show how common slaves were in the Mediterranean world. Menially shod or not, many were of Slavic origin, captured in war or caught for trade. Along with furs, honey, and wax, slaves were a basic export from Slavic lands.

Bulgaria had pushed itself into the Byzantine consciousness on its own, as a powerful neighbor and rival,
before entering Byzantium's cultural orbit. Serbia was a Byzantine creature from the start. As an identifiable political entity, Serbia owed its very origins to Byzantium—and to Byzantium's need for a willing ally against the emerging might of the Bulgar state.

“The prince of Serbia has from the beginning, that is ever since the reign of Heraclius the emperor, been in servitude and submission to the emperor of the Romans, and was never subject to the prince of Bulgaria.” So writes Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, spreading, as he often does, a gauzy layer of imperial fantasy over what historians can only hope is a foundation of truth. Serbia instead begins to take shape in the decades after the terrifying reign of the Bulgar khan Krum in the early ninth century, as Byzantine diplomats and agents arrived and got to work with their purses and their promises.

Perhaps to counter Byzantine infiltration, the Bulgars invaded Serb territory in the 840s, but were driven out by the Serb ruler Vlastimir after several years of heavy fighting. Although Vlastimir expanded Serb lands, as was customary with the Slavs he divided his dominions among his three children. The resulting feud between the three branches of this ruling family helped ensure that for the time being Serbia remained a pawn in the contest between Byzantium and Bulgaria that reached its first crescendo in the time of Symeon.

Serbia came under Bulgarian control during Symeon's rule, but after his death the Serbs won independence. They were led by a descendant of Vlastimir, Caslav, who had been born
in Bulgaria and spent most of his life as a hostage there before escaping back to Serbia to lead the revolt. The exact date of Caslav's escape and the revolt aren't known, but it all probably happened within a few years of Symeon's death. Caslav ruled for three more decades, remaining a loyal Byzantine ally for all ofthat time.

For this reason, scholars assume that Byzantine influences spread in Serbia during Caslav's rule. Many Serb refugees had fled to Byzantine territory during the wars with Symeon and the Bulgarian occupation, and they now returned, perhaps bringing Christianity and other Byzantine ways with them. But little is known for sure, and we should keep in mind that, unlike Bulgaria, Serbia was not yet a cohesive nation but still a fluid ethnic confederation. Caslav's Serbian state, whose borders aren't known, was only one of several. Others included Zachumliya, Duklja (Dioclea), Trebinja, and later Raska, which by the twelfth century would become the most important center of Serb power.

It was from Raska that the Serbs began expanding in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, struggling, like the Bulgarians earlier, to prove themselves and their identity against Byzantium even as they were drawn ever more tightly into its cultural orbit. By this time the Byzantine emperors considered the Serbs to be their subjects. Serb rulers, called grand zhupans, held power at the emperor's pleasure, and when they revolted—which they did with some regularity—they were seen as treacherous mutineers. This was dramatically illustrated in 1172, when the emperor Manuel Comnenus defeated the grand zhupan Stefan Nemanja. Stefan was brought before the emperor bareheaded and barefoot, with a rope around his neck, to proffer his sword and prostrate himself at the emperor's feet.

Such demonstrations make good theater, but this one
failed to take. A few years later, the emperor was dead, the empire fell into dissarray, and Stefan returned to the offensive, conquering or annexing considerable Byzantine territory in the Balkans. Eventually, the Byzantines defeated him all over again, but this time they placated him by marrying him into the imperial family and giving him the high rank of
sebastocrator.
Privilege served better than humiliation, with the result that Stefan and Serbia now became full-fledged members of the Orthodox Byzantine Commonwealth.

When Stefan abdicated in 1196, he took monastic vows, entering an Orthodox monastery he had founded at Studenica. Shortly afterward, he joined his son Sava, also a monk, on Mt. Athos, in an old monastery called Hilandar that the two had refounded as a Serbian establishment.

Mt. Athos—the Holy Mountain, as it is still called—was the center of Orthodox monasticism long before Stefan's day. Athos is the easternmost of the three fingers that grope southward into the Aegean from the Chalkidike peninsula, between Thessalonica and the river Strymon in northern Greece. About thirty miles in length and five or six miles wide in most places, with a mountainous spine running down the middle, the rocky, hilly strip of land is joined to the Chalkidike by a slender isthmus just over a mile wide. Through this isthmus, Herodotus tells us, the Persian king Xerxes cut a canal in order to avoid taking his ships around the dangerous headlands during his abortive invasion of Greece in the fifth century
BC.
The canal's remains can still be seen. The mountain itself lies at the promontory's far tip, its
white marble peak jutting sharply from the sea to some 6,000 feet above sea level.

This astonishingly beautiful and rugged landscape is dotted with twenty ancient monasteries, less than half of the forty-six that existed around the year 1000, Athos’ medieval heyday. Most hug the coast, where they cling determinedly to the hillsides or squat in the fragrant valleys, surrounded by carefully tended olive groves, gardens, and orchards.

Today, Athos is a semiautonomous religious community governed by the church and controlled by Greece's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Entry requires a special internal visa from the ministry (which to my great frustration was on strike when I visited Greece, so be warned). Tradition dictates that no women are allowed there, though lapses involving Vlach shepherds and their families were recorded around 1100. Generally, however, even donkeys, chickens, goats, and other livestock have been restricted to the males of the species. Eggs and milk have thus been imported in the past, though some of these restrictions have been relaxed in recent years.

The first monastery, called the Great Lavra, was founded near the tip of Athos in 963, though it's thought that eremetic (from the Greek
eremetikos,
“of the desert,” which also gives us
hermit)
monks had begun arriving on the promontory perhaps a century earlier. While the monks of this first establishment were Greek, they were rapidly joined by Orthodox from other lands, and especially by Slavs, who came in great numbers during the twelfth century.

By 1200 or so, there were monasteries for Orthodox Armenians, Georgians, and Italians, as well as Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. The Russians took over the Panteleemon monastery, the Bulgarians moved into Zographou, and later
in the century the Serbs refounded Hilandar, which would become especially famous. In these and other monasteries, the monks carried out the tasks of translating Byzantine theological and liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic. From Athos the texts would be distributed to other monasteries throughout the Byzantine Commonwealth.

Through Hilandar, and especially through the work of the brilliant Sava, Serbs came to constitute a leading presence at Mt. Athos. Stefan Nemanja had won much territory for Serbia and founded an important ruling dynasty, but his farthest-reaching contribution to Serbian culture was in fathering Sava. Both would later be canonized as Orthodox saints. It was Sava who played the biggest part in giving medieval Serbia its heavily Byzantine flavor.

A man of widely diverse abilities and interests, Sava had started life as a provincial governor under his father before fleeing to Athos, where he escaped his father's wrath at his desertion by joining the Russian monastery of Panteleemon and then the Greek one of Vatopedi. Later, the sources claim, it was Sava's influence that prompted the old warrior to don a monk's robes himself.

On his father's death Sava took over at Hilandar, working the Byzantine imperial establishment hard to obtain full autonomy and a secure income for the monastery. Hilandar was a great success, soon harboring close to a hundred monks, and assuming a vital place in Serbia's cultural and religious life. Sava himself became an influential figure on the Holy Mountain, acting as patron to a dozen other monasteries as well as to Hilandar. Yet, we're told by his hagiographers,
it was the life of quiet contemplation that drew him most strongly, and he spent long periods in ascetic prayer in a special meditation room called a
hesychasterion.

In 1204 the Latins took Constantinople, and a few years later they seized Athos. Sava made his way to Studenica, where he deposited his father's remains. He spent the next eight years as abbot there, often occupied with trying to control the bickering and malfeasance of his older brothers, but also writing works honoring their newly canonized father and founding new monasteries. The most important of these was Zica. Richly decorated by Byzantine artists, its church soon emerged as Serbia's leading place of worship.

In 1219, Sava was consecrated first archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church by the Byzantine patriarch. After guiding his church through the perilous waters of papal encroachment, and twice making pilgrimages to Crusader-occupied Jerusalem, Sava died while visiting the Bulgarian capital of Turnovo in 1236. His body was laid to rest in a Serbian church founded earlier by the royal family at Mileseva, where a wall portrait survives of Sava that may have been painted from life in the 1220s.

Saint, mystic, pilgrim, warrior, and hero of many epic poems, Sava stood in popular imagination as Serbia's most inspiring national figure during the long Turkish occupation. The strength of his cult—even local Turkish Muslims venerated St. Sava—led Ottoman authorities to burn Sava's coffin in 1594.

Serbian art reached glorious heights in the decades after Sava's death. It's best exemplified in the majestic frescoes at the monastery church of Sopocani, which were done in the 1260s. Within decades, the Serbian artists’ distinctive touch was lost, as Byzantine styles and influences from the Paleologan Renaissance won out.

Yet, in the mid-fourteenth century, even as its artistic originality declined, medieval Serbia reached its greatest military and political strength, during the reign of Stefan Dushan. His determined attempts to claim the Byzantine throne very much recall those of the Bulgarian tsar Symeon more than four centuries earlier. Just as Symeon had dreamed of establishing a Byzantine-Bulgarian empire with himself as emperor in Constantinople, so did Stefan Dushan now attempt to seat himself at the helm of a Byzantine-Serbian empire, taking advantage of the civil strife that wracked the empire in these years. Though unsuccessful in pressing his claim to be “emperor of the Serbs and Romans,” he modeled his court and administration on those in Constantinople and Byzantinized Serbia's civil administration and law codes.