Abstract
Well-dressed citizens were found throughout the empire and not confined to Constantinople. The aristocracy of the provinces, who portrayed themselves in dedicatory images in regions such as Cappadocia and Kastoria, had the means to buy expensive clothes and to show themselves off in those clothes. Unlike the prescribed dress of courtiers, the Byzantine upper classes participated in fashion by desiring certain types of clothing and thereby driving the taste for those clothes. Dedicatory portraits, which comprise the majority of our evidence for the dress of the elite outside of the capital, present two paradigms of Middle Byzantine dress. First, these portraits found in borderland regions reflect the bordering culture rather than the Byzantine capital. Cappadocians had Georgian, Armenian, and Islamic neighbors. Kastoria bordered a large population of Armenian and Georgian refugees in Thrace; Bulgaria ruled Kastoria from the mid-ninth century until the early eleventh centuries; the Normans briefly occupied Kastoria beginning in 1083 and stayed long after Alexius’s reconquest in 1093.1 While some of these aristocratic citizens had ties to Constantinople and even held official titles, their dress demonstrates their participation in the borderland cultures in which they lived. Local fashions, and not those of the capital, dictated their clothing choices. This situation leads to a second paradigm for Middle Byzantine dress: taste for these borderland fashions often spread to the capital city from the outskirts, moving in the opposite direction from what modern fashion theorists are accustomed.2
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Notes
John V.A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), pp. 7–9.
A.P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) p. 77.
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Y.K. Stillman, Female Attire of Medieval Egypt According to the Trousseau Lists and Cognate Material from the Cairo Geniza (Ph.D. Thesis, Art History University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 1972).
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For example, in studies such as: N.P. Kondakov, “Les Costumes Orientaux a la Cour Byzantine,” Byzantion 1: 7–49. and Mary G. Houston, Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine Costume and Decoration (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1954).
Armenian historians refer to the “Georgians” of the eighth century on as Armenians. The Armenian naxarar, Bagratuni, controlled Georgia by the ninth century. Georgian historians refer to the Bagratids as Georgians because they occupied much of Iberia, where Georgians historically lived, and for other more complex political and social reasons. I will use the terms Georgian when referring specifically to the artistic output of the region to the northeastern border of the empire as I am using some of the research of Antony Eastmond, who uses the term Georgian. The term Armenian will be used to denote the people of the other naxarars of Armenia, especially the Artsruni, who ruled to the eastern border of the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor by the ninth century. See Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 194–220 for a detailed history of the Transcaucasus in relation to Byzantium.
Nina G. Garsoian, “History of Armenia,” in Treasures in Heaven, ed. T.F. Mathews and R.S. Wieck (New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1994) for dates of Armenian Byzantine relations.
For example, Thomas F. Mathews and Annie-Christine Daskalakis Mathews, “Islamic-Style Mansions in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Development of the Inverted T-Plan,” The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 56: 3 (1997): 294–315
and Spyros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
For a complete survey of the site see: Veronica Kalas, Rock-Cut Architecture of the Peristrema Valley: Society and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia (Ph.D. Thesis, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York, 2000).
For more information see: Lyn Rodley, Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
and Catherine Jolivet-Levy, Les Églises Byzantines de Cappadoce (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, 1991).
On the portraits see: Lisa Bernardini, “Les Donateurs des Eglises de Cappadoce,” Byzantion 62 (1993): 118–40.
For more information see: Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) pp. 14–15.
Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 12.
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and A. Starensier, An Art Historical Study of the Silk Industry (Ph.D. Thesis, Art History, Columbia University, New York, 1982), pp. 657–60.
Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, vols. 1–4 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966).
M.-H. Fourmy and M. Leroy, “La Vie de S. Philarète,” Byzantion 9 (1934): 12. See earlier in this chapter for the full quotation.
W. Bjorkman, “Turban,” The Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition ed. P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000).
Antony Eastmond and Lynn Jones, “Robing, Power, and Legitimacy in Armenia and Georgia,” in Robes and Honor, ed. S. Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 150 argues that the turban and large robe with wide sleeves comprised the national royal dress of Armenia, as distinct from images of rulers in Islamic clothing of a crown, caftan and pants.
Jean-Michel Thierry, Armenian Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987) p. 140.
A. Cutler and J.-M. Spieser, Byzance Médiévale 700–1204 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) p. 196.
Thomas T.F. Mathews and Annie-Christine Daskalakis Mathews, “The Portrait of Princess Marem of Kars, Jerusalem 2556, fol.135b,” in From Byzantium to Iran: Armenian Studies In Honour of Nina Garsoian, ed. J.P. Mahe and R.W. Thompson (Atlanta: Scholars Press 1996).
Dominique Sourdel, “Robes of Honor in ‘Abbasid Baghdad During the Eighth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Robes and Honor, ed. S. Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar, The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650–1250 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), figures 41–43.
Marcell Restle, Byzantine Wall Painting in Asia Minor, vol. 2, trans. LR. Gibbons (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1967), entry II.
For a discussion of Bulgarian culture in Kastoria see: A.W. Epstein, “Middle Byzantine Churces of Kastoria: Dates and Implications,” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 190–207 and Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025, pp. 262–98.
For a history of the region in general in this period: John V.A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991).
Michael Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy 300–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 212–16.
David Jacoby, “Silk in Western Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade,” in Byzantine Zeitschrift, 84–85 (1991–92): 452–500 for a history of the Normans in the Pelopponese, and the region around Thebes and Corinth.
Paul Stephenson, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) for a history of the Normans in Northern Greece.
Manolis Chatzidakis, Kastoria (Athens: Melissa Publishing, 1985), p. 38.
Dora Piguet-Panayotova, Recherches sur la peinture en Bulgarie du bas Moyen Age (Paris: De Boccard, 1987).
Henry Shaw, Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages from the Seventh to the Seventeenth Centuries (London: William Pickering, 1843), engravings pp. 9–10; C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Medieval Costume (London: Faber and Faber, Limited, n.d.), pp. 26–27, 36–41; N. Bradfield, Historical Costumes of England from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century (London: George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd.), pp. 20–25.
Francoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. C. Beamish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 78–79.
The women pictured in these sleeves are: Eudokia, wife of Theodore Synedonos, Euphrosyne Doukaina Palaiologina, wife of the protosebastos Constantine Komnenos Raoul Palaiologos, Eirene Kantakouzene, wife of the Sebastokrator Constantine Palaiologos and Anna Kantakouzene, wife of Michael Laskaris Bryennios Philanthropenos. Published in Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Two of the major sources that outline the role of Cappadocia on the Silk Road: Gui Asatekin et al., Along Ancient Trade Routes (Belgium: Maasland, 1996);
Anna A. Ierusalimskaja and Birgitt Borkopp, Von China Nach Byzanz (Munich: Herausgegeben vom Bayerischen National Museum und der Staatlichen Ermitage, 1996).
Liudprand of Cremona, The Embassy to Constantinople and Other Writings, trans. F.A. Wright (Vermont: Charles E. Tottle Co., 1993), p. 202.
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© 2005 Jennifer L. Ball
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Ball, J.L. (2005). Dress of the Borderland Elite. In: Byzantine Dress. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05779-2_4
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