Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society (review)

154 Reviews Anthony Bryer and Heath Lowry (editors), Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society. Birmingham (England): The University of Birmingham Centre for Byzantine Studies; and Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks. 1986. Pp. vii + 343. This collection of conference papers, brought out under joint Anglo-American auspices, provides the text of 12 of the 13 papers presented in May 1982 at a Dumbarton Oaks symposium organized under the same title by the editors of the present work. The symposium itself was the outcome of a four year pilot project sponsored by the University of Birmingham and Dumbarton Oaks, which had as its aim an investigation of the degree to which what the editors define as 'elements of continuity and change' in late Byzantine and early Ottoman society (namely in the southern Balkans and in Anatolia) could be studied and compared on the basis of late Byzantine praktika or monastic charters and the earliest surviving Ottoman tahrir defters, commonly regarded as a cross between province-wide cadastral surveys and records of fixed and movable (land, crops, livestock, subject population) taxable resources. The intellectual catalyst for the whole enterprise appears to have been the near-simultaneous appearance, little more than a decade ago, of Angeliki Laiou-Thomadakis' wellknown study of late Byzantine (principally Macedonian) peasant society , based on the surviving relevant praktika, and Heath Lowry's tahrir-based Ph.D. dissertation on the Turkification and Islamization of Trebizond during the first century and a quarter of Ottoman rule. What, then, could be more potentially fruitful than to bring together late Byzantine and early Ottoman specialists to attempt a comparison of the available evidence for 'change and continuity' in, at least, certain selected areas of former Byzantine, later Ottoman territory? In the event, the three areas which were chosen for investigation —the Chalkidiki, the Matzouka/Maçuka valley in the hinterland of Trebizond, and the island of Lemnos/Limnos — were selected not so much for their intrinsic historical significance but because there exists for these regions, and not for others, a sufficiency of both charter- and defter-based material. Two of the three regions came into Ottoman hands relatively late (Trebizond in 1461; Limnos not until 1479), while for the Chalkidiki there is a gap of virtually a century between the beginnings of Ottoman conquest and settlement and the date of the oldest surviving defter for the region. Bridge-building across such historical chasms is a risky business. The caesura in Balkan (as mainly earlier in Anatolian) society brought about by the disappearance of old state and social forms, by depopulation and war, and by plague or mass deportation, during the mid- Reviews 155 14th to mid-15th century, when taken together with the imposition of an entirely new governing and religious superstructure is a series of linked historical processes for which the present study supplies no authoritative overview. This lack, when taken together with the (source-determined) differing approaches to their common subjectmatter displayed by the distinguished symposiasts, makes of their collected papers an object-lesson in historiographical discontinuity, in which the almost entire lack of any common form of discourse is the most startling discovery. The fourth, general section of the papers is devoted to urban themes, yet Vryonis' reworking of Theodore Anagnostes' lamentations on the fall of Thessaloniki has nothing in common with Bryer's careful toponymie observations on Nicaea, or Lowry's unrestrained triumphalism on Mehemmed II and the conquest of Istanbul. We are, it seems, what we study. Also highlighted is the disparate level of human resources which were able to be brought to bear on the subject from the Byzantine and Ottoman sides. Each of the four sections into which the Symposium was divided, produced two papers in what may be described as a major (i.e., prescriptive) and one in a minor (i.e., descriptive) mode. As far as the 'major' themes are concerned, on the Chalkidiki and its 'sample' (but how far representative?) village of Roadolibos/ Radilofo the Byzantinists were able to draw on the expertise of Jacques Lefort; on the Matzouka valley ('Late Byzantine Rural Society in Matzouka '), on the doyen of Pontological studies Anthony Bryer; on Lemnos , on John Haldon...