THE DEVELOPMENT OF the aristocratic genos in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was intimately connected with contemporary politics, especially at the highest level. The influence of emperors or ...empresses was felt primarily in two ways. First, elite families in Byzantium were never completely independent from imperial influence. Throughout the period covered here (and beyond), imperial office and title, alongside the support of the imperial throne, continued to play a decisive role in determining the fortunes of aristocratic families.² The Byzantine aristocracy remained an aristocracy of imperial office-holders. Second, the changing of imperial dynasties and the nature of imperial legitimization had
JOHN ZONARAS, THE twelfth-century theologian and author of a history of the world, delivers an aside in his Epitome of Histories regarding the family and ancestry of Emperor Constantine X Doukas (r. ...1059– 1067). In it, Zonaras questions the legitimacy of Constantine’s claim to membership in the genos of the Doukai.¹ The sentiment is an odd one on its own, as no other surviving source seems to share Zonaras’s view of the emperor’s descent, but it is made even more so by the reasons Zonaras gives for his cri-tique. He tells his readers that all the male members of the
This dissertation focuses on changes in the form and function of kinship as a means of analyzing larger social and cultural changes in the tenth through twelfth centuries in Byzantium. The tenth and ...eleventh centuries witnessed the rise to prominence of a group of aristocratic families in Byzantium who originated outside of Constantinople and whose wealth and influence were not entirely dependent upon the support of the imperial state. These families brought with them certain social and cultural norms that differed significantly from earlier political elites, in particular their deep-seated sense of loyalty to and identification with their extended family group or lineage, which surviving Byzantine histories, wills, court records, and lead seals refer to as their "genos." The influence of these families and their ideas reached the very pinnacle of Byzantine socio-political organization with the ascent to the throne of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081, whose dynasty's reorganization of the imperial bureaucracy over the following century saw the bonds of kinship take precedence over older systems of political order. For decades, modern scholars have interpreted these changes as the 'expansion' of the Byzantine family, though the precise details of this phenomenon remain obscure. The central goal of my research is to ascertain the role and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or genos, as a distinct social entity, particularly its political and cultural role, as it appears in a variety of sources in the tenth through twelfth centuries. The genos was arguably the single most fundamental element of both individual and collective identity in Byzantium from at least the tenth century, if not earlier. It was the dominant form of the family as a singular social unit in questions of inheritance and marriage, and it formed the basic building block of political alliances within the aristocracy of Byzantium in this same period. The bond formed by shared membership in a single genos was among the strongest of any social bond in Byzantium. It was both affected by and instrumental in the social and cultural changes occurring in Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In these ways, the genos was at least as, if not more important than the oikos/household, yet it remains much less well understood among modern historians.
CONCLUSION NATHAN LEIDHOLM
Elite Byzantine Kinship, ca. 950-1204,
08/2019
Book Chapter
THE PREVIOUS PAGES have shown that it is possible to define the genos in such a way that is broadly consistent with Byzantine sources and that this definition, however imperfect, allows for a greater ...degree of precision in modern studies of Byzantine kin-ship and society. Changes in the vocabulary of kinship between the ninth and thirteenth centuries attest the central place of the genos in the Byzantine understanding of kin-ship, and its importance steadily increased over this time. The genos was the principal form of the singular family in questions of marriage law, and debates in marriage law in eleventh-and
INTRODUCTION NATHAN LEIDHOLM
Elite Byzantine Kinship, ca. 950-1204,
08/2019
Book Chapter
“BASIL VATATZES D. 1194, the scion of an undistinguished family (γένους μὲν ἀσήμου), had been honoured with the office of Domestic of the East and girded with the ducal command of the Thrakesion ...theme because he was married to the emperor’s second cousin on his father’s side.”¹ With these words the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates describes the beginnings of the meteoric rise of the family of Batatzes (alternately written as Vatatzes). Within a single generation, Basil’s descendants could be counted among the most politically and socially influential people in Byzantium and its successor states after 1204. By the first few
