Byzantine Political Theory: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Kingship
Angelakis, Constantinos V.
2019
- The Byzantine empire lasted for a millennium under almost uninterrupted monarchy. Recent scholarship has challenged the sovereignty of the imperial office to suggest that the empire was actually a continuation of the ancient Roman republic. While this view offers valuable nuance to the established idea of pure theocracy in Byzantium, its suggestion of revolt and usurpation as a mechanism of ... read morepopular sovereignty goes too far. Byzantium lacked formal mechanisms for popular participation in politics, and there were a number of forces that played a role in the selection of emperors, including the military and elites. Focusing on the history of the early and middle Byzantine periods, and using evidence from the emperor Constantine VII’s text De Ceremoniis, one can see that the Byzantine emperor was fully sovereign, although the people were able to challenge him based on certain ethical criteria passed down through the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions. These ethical criteria functioned as a shared ideology between ruler and ruled, while the actual mechanisms of politics in Byzantium often came down to dynamics of power. Additionally, although Byzantium could loosely be defined as a republic according to the ancient definition, it did not resemble post-eighteenth-century republics, and there was certainly no popular sovereignty.read less
- ID:
- 3j333f489
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