Rereading the Story of the City of Cherson and the Maiden Gykia in De administrando imperio as Arts of Rule Narrative

The story of the castle or city of Cherson (located in the southern Crimea) and the Maiden Gykia serves as the concluding chapter of the significant tenth-century treatise on Byzantine imperial governance, known since the sixteenth century by its Latin title De administrando imperio (henceforth Dai).¹ Compiled and in part directly authored by Konstantinos VII (Konstantinos Porphyrogennetos) (913–959), Dai was intended as a confidential handbook on Byzantine diplomacy and foreign and security practices for the heir to the imperial throne. It provided pragmatic and systematic descriptions—albeit interwoven with antiquarian information of questionable validity—about the governance of the state and various peoples and their lands (in Περί Διοικήσεως τοῦ Κράτους βιβλίον καί τῶν διαφόρων Έθνῶν) [Concerning the Administration of the State and Various Peoples], and in Περί θεμάτων Άνατολῆς καί Δύσεως [Concerning the Administrative-Military Provinces of the East and West], the latter also known as De thematibus). In this article I question the conventional reading of the story of Cherson, and propose a new interpretation of it.

Byzantinists have to date attributed scant value to the story of Cherson in Dai, deeming it material either submitted by regional representatives of Byzantium at the behest of the scholarly emperor (which casts doubts on its reliability), or, as Francis Dvornik and others claim, included in error.² Garnett suggests that “internal evidence shows it to have been written at Cherson, or at least by someone well acquainted with the city,” claiming that “it is probably derived from some Chersonite historian or some record of the deeds of heroines, although the diction is Konstantinos’s own Byzantine.”³ Ellis Minns, in his Scythians and Greeks, suggests that the story was fabricated as an explanation for the remains of the ancient settlement, which included statue bases that figure in the story.⁴ Benjamin Nadel writes in 1977 that “historians . . . [S. P.] Shestakov, Alexander A. Vasiliev, G. D. Belov, [Nadel], Janos Harmatta and Victor F. Gajdukevic investigated the materials gathered by Konstantinos from the points of view of history of Christianity, the Goths in Crimea, Chersonesian past and history of the Bosporan kingdom,” with a view to elucidating their historical reliability in light of epigraphical and numismatic evidence.⁵ Most recently, Stefan Albrecht reaffirms the consensus that the chronology of the events described in Chapter 53 range from 47 b.c.e., the end of the third and into the fourth centuries, to the first half of the sixth century. ⁶ Thus, the value of the story has been consistently gauged by its qualities as a reliable history of the city, its inhabitants, and as a useful (or not so useful) guide to understanding the relationship of that region to Rome.

A Region and City of Supreme Geopolitical Significance

The character and scope of these assessments may misinterpret the political value of the stories of the city of Cherson and of the Maiden Gykia, as these may be important instructions on the arts of rule presented, on the one hand, in rhetorical and synecdochal narrative forms, and on the other, as amplifying in the mind of the heir the importance of protecting strategic places on the northern frontier. Indeed, Cherson is discussed at length and in different places in the narrative. As a forward outpost, a fortified place, and a strategic location, Cherson retained into the tenth century its exceptional geopolitical significance: it was situated on the northern Black Sea littoral and in close proximity to the empire’s all-important Pecheneg sometime adversaries and sometime security and commercial partners.

Konstantinos notes in De thematibus that the Chersonese, as an essentially autonomous territory within Byzantium’s sphere of influence, is elevated to a theme (administrative-military province) in the ninth century, thus formalizing its security and administrative status in the empire.⁷ He remarks in Dai that until the reign of Emperor Theophilos, Cherson was governed by local notables, which strongly suggests that at some point during Theophilos’s reign, governance passed to a Byzantine strategos (military governor), a clear sign of the military-administrative incorporation of the region into Byzantium. Suggesting to his emperor that it...