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c h a p t e r 2 Byzantine Information-Gathering Behind the Veil of Silence Byzantine Sources of Information About Foreign People The contention of the next section will be that the writing of ethnography declined severely in the middle Byzantine period (in fact, until the fourteenth century), certainly in comparison to the rich collection of sources that we have for late antiquity. This decline was not, however, due to a lack of knowledge, and that is what this section establishes. There were many people in Byzantium who had extensive and detailed information about the empire’s neighbors and peoples farther away. This section will document the channels of its transmission. To say, then, that ethnography declined is to say that Byzantine authors chose not to put that information into literary form. We have seen that they had the models for doing so, but refused to take up the challenge. For now, we must document the indirect traces of this knowledge. To start at an obvious place, we know from many texts that the Byzantine state used spies (katavskopoi), but our evidence is patchy and indirect (these spies would not have been worth much if our evidence for them was extensive). We do not have any “classified” state information about their activities , which were presumably as secret as the manufacture of Greek Fire. One cannot but cite here the testimony of Prokopios, even though it is earlier than the period under consideration. In the Secret History, he says this about the katavskopoi: “Many men had always been maintained at public expense who would infiltrate the enemy and enter the palace of the Persians on the pretext of trade or something else, and there they would carefully investigate Information-Gathering Behind the Veil of Silence 27 everything. When they returned to Roman territory, they were in a position to reveal all the enemy’s secrets to the magistrates.” His accusation that Justinian fully decommissioned this corps may be exaggerated; nevertheless, his account provides us with an explicit statement about their activities as state agents. It was not only foreign lands, then, that spies would investigate, but even the very palace of the Persian kings. Syrianos’ treatise On Strategy, now dated to the ninth century, contains a brief but intriguing section on spies. Their function was still primarily military. They are advised to pose as merchants (as Prokopios says too). “They must never be of the same race as the enemy” but “must be acquainted with the customs (ta; e[qh) of the enemy to whom they are assigned, fluent in their language, and experienced travelers in their country.” In short, the spy network consisted of men with considerable “local” ethnographic expertise. It is for this reason that modern states employ anthropologists and archaeologists as spies. However, by stipulating that they must leave their families behind to guarantee their loyalty, the author of this text indirectly expresses his fear that spies may go over to the other side. Insider knowledge was a doubleedged asset. Emperor Leon VI also discussed military spies briefly in his Taktika, saying that they should be able to pass as natives among the enemy. As we will see, these military manuals, and the Taktika in particular, are among our best sources for middle Byzantine ethnography. At the end of the Taktika, Leon addresses his generals and instructs them that in times of war they need to know the “nature” (ϕuvsi~) of the enemy. This is a demand for military ethnography , which he in part provides earlier in his text. Likewise, an anonymous military treatise from the tenth century specifies that generals posted along the borders are to place their spies among Bulgarians, Pechenegs, Turks (i.e., Hungarians), and Rus’. Conversely, we hear of Byzantine scouts being tricked by Persian spies who were dressed as Romans. Historical sources occasionally reveal Roman spies in action. They were sent by Konstantinos V to abduct enemy leaders among the Bulgarians in 764 and to inform him about Bulgarian movements in 773. In 970, in advance of his massive campaign against the Rus’ in Bulgaria, Ioannes Tzimiskes “sent bilingual men, clothed in Skythian garb, to the camps and abodes of the enemy , to learn their plans and communicate them to the emperor.” In the tenth century, Ibn Hawqal suspected that Byzantine merchants in Arab lands were actually spies. If they were, they would have been following the prescriptions of the treatises that we read above. Another disguise for...

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