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Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed
Читать онлайн.Название Salonica Terminus
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isbn 9780889229907
Автор произведения Fred A. Reed
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
Kazantzis’ three sentences were enough to set me off on my own quest for the Zealots of Salonica. But, three years later, as I strolled across the grassy slopes of the citadel, I could find not a trace of those mysterious proto-communists, precursors of proletarian revolt who overthrew the ruling nobles and administered the city for nearly five years during the fifth decade of the fourteenth century. No commemorative plaque marks their passing. Like the Iconoclasts five hundred years before, the Zealots have been relegated to the near oblivion of the footnotes by the academic establishment and its handmaiden, mainstream historiography. As with the Iconoclasts, no primary sources survived their demise and ideological defeat. What little is known of them can be inferred only from the writings of their foes. All the more reason to search out their invisible traces.
Like the Iconoclasts, whose purpose was the suppression of the visible appurtenances of worship, the elimination of dross so that only the pure metal of spirit would remain, the Zealots, whose proclaimed mission was civil equality—a program as radical in 1342 as it is today—left no monuments. Nothing but a vague rejection, as diffuse as it was intense, of injustice; a tradition of popular resistance that would emerge in the last years of Ottoman rule in the form of the Fédération socialiste, and find its most recent incarnation in the combative working-class movement of the 1930s. Though my rendez-vous would have to be an imaginary one, I was determined to see it through. Its premise was presumptuous of course. Was it an enterprise in futility, like the attempt of the visionary poet Angelos Sikelianos to resuscitate a corpse?38 Probably. But though the task was impossible, it had to be attempted.
The Byzantine Empire had painstakingly reconstituted itself after being hacked apart by the Crusader hordes more than one hundred years before. Once again the basileus reigned, heir to Rome, over the southern Balkans from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus. But the respite was short lived. Civil strife and the rise of a mighty Slav kingdom under the Serbian kral, Stefan Dusan, eroded the Byzantine domains, until by the mid-fourteenth century Constantinople’s writ extended—politically and militarily—no farther than eastern Thrace and the region surrounding Salonica.
All but abandoned by the capital, the second city of the empire had become, out of cruel necessity, a semi-independent city-state which relied on the acumen of its traders and on the skilled hands of its workmen for its prosperity. Though the Byzantine empire was shrinking rapidly into terminal decline, Salonica remained a commercial powerhouse. Toward it, by land and by sea, flowed the raw materials, agricultural products and finished goods of the Slav-speaking Balkans, Albania and Thessaly. There they would be sold then transshipped to the ports of Western Europe and the Middle East, most of it in Genoese vessels. Venice’s chief rival in the bitter competition for Mediterranean trade had won the favor of the ruling Paleologue dynasty. The old Roman Via Egnatia which passed through the city remained the only practicable overland route from the Adriatic to Constantinople, but it was plagued by political instability, and had long been superseded by the sea routes.
Trade, Salonica’s lifeblood, reached its peak during the yearly festival of Saint Demetrius. Greek traders who had settled in the farthest-flung corners of the once-great realm of the Eastern Roman Empire—Asia Minor, Syria, Cyprus and the marshy lands of the Danubian delta—congregated at the lateOctober fair, rubbing elbows with Slav, Spanish, Italian and French merchants. There were to be found, in rich variety, oriental spices, dyestuffs, carpets and aromatic plants; fine silks and rough Bulgarian goat-hair cloth; woven fabric from France, Flanders and Tuscany; silver and gold thread from Lucca, Genoa and Venice; Italian, Cretan and Greek wines; aromatic soaps from Ancona and Puglia; figs from Spain and nutmeats from Naples; olive oil from Sicily and the Morea, laudanum from Cyprus and precious gum mastic from Chios, the orange blossom isle.39
The wealth which trade brought to the city created a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. Artisans, sailors, indentured laborers and slaves made up the bulk of the inhabitants, most of whom were then Greeks and Slavs, along with smaller Jewish and Armenian minorities. Its reputation for cosmopolitan diversity was upheld by a foreign colony of Genoese, Venetians, Spaniards, and perhaps even a few Turks, though the Ottomans had yet to begin their westward thrust which was to redraw the boundaries of the entire region. Salonica’s large population and special status within the empire—its official designation was “great city,” a title to which only Rome and Constantinople could lay claim—had also assured it virtual administrative autonomy. Unlike the patriarch and the emperor, their absolutist masters in Constantinople, the archbishop and the governor ruled on sufferance of the people. While artistic activity, scientific inquiry, philosophical and theological disputation flourished in the absence of direct imperial control, so also did class conflict, which found expression in bitter political and religious controversy. In the mid-fourteenth century these latent conflicts finally flared up, culminating in the political and religious crisis which sealed the fate of the Byzantine state and the future of Eastern Orthodoxy.
The counterweight to Byzantine Salonica’s ostentatious prosperity and cultivated elegance was widespread—extreme poverty, the sort of situation which the dominant class, the landed nobility, was only too happy to perpetuate. This it accomplished by the usual application of force, and through the ideological ministrations of the ecclesiastical elite and the monastic establishment whose land holdings made it an economic power in its own right. The nobles ruled as absolute masters; their pride in the aristocratic lineage which bestowed on them the right to rule was exceeded only by their scorn for the upstart traders, the nouveaux riches who had begun to challenge their lordly prerogatives. And all the while, the common folk chafed under a crippling burden of taxation and repression. Contemporary chronicles speak of public torture of those courageous enough to protest social and economic injustice. Protests against usury were frequent, eloquent and vain. Before the tribunals only the voice of wealth could be heard. All was governed by one of the periodically recurring variants of the inevitability doctrine which counseled passive acceptance of poverty, exclusion, dispossession and social disintegration—exactly as it does today. It was only a matter of time before the ambition of the emerging bourgeoisie and the misery of the impoverished free citizens and slaves would coalesce into an explosive combination of hatred and hope.
The life of a city—of a nation, a people—is infinitely more than the blindly colliding freaks’ ballet of market forces, those immutable laws which, intone the high priests of the World Church of Economic Determinism, regulate the universe. So it was with Salonica, where against a background of incipient revolt fueled by mass deprivation, a philosophical and intellectual renaissance was in full flower, nourished, as was its coeval counterpart in the West, by the study of the ancient Greeks in all their subversive, polymorphous humanist perversity. The city considered itself the home and hearth of Hellenism, the Athens of the age, a beacon for philosophers, artists and rhetoricians. Any aspiring philosopher, be he native Salonician or visitor, Greek or non-Greek, was free to open schools, to teach, to propound radical interpretations of religious dogma and to challenge the assumptions of the age. Into this atmosphere of intellectual and political ferment strode an itinerant Calabrian monk named Barlaam, ostensibly to study eastern mysticism, but whose real aim was to preach ideas inspired at once by ancient Athens and the West of the early Renaissance. Barlaam’s message not only contested the ideological dominance of the monkish conservatives; it implicitly challenged the material prerogatives of the religious establishment. He was a dangerous man with a dangerous message.
To speak today of Byzantine argument is to conjure up images of tortuous complexity, convoluted abstruseness and hairsplitting hyper-subtlety. The Hesychaste controversy which came to a climax with the arrival in Salonica of Barlaam had the makings of all this, and more. Yet the dispute which swirled around the doctrine of monastic quietism contrived to become the vehicle for an intellectual, religious and social debate which engaged the greatest spirits of the age and mobilized the forces of the Empire. Prior to the