ABSTRACT
In a couple of rare autobiographical asides, the twelfth-century chronicler John Zonaras complains that he is having to write his history of the world 'in this place at the back of beyond' (icapd tfi loxati§ tatrn), where he suffers from an acute shortage of books.1 According to the title of the work in some manuscripts, the author was a monk of Hagia Glykeria. The straightforward reading of this information has met with some incredulity because it means that the back of beyond was a small island, one of the Princes' Islands, in the Sea of Marmara, a short sea journey from Constantinople. Today the island is the well-appointed summer retreat of a wealthy Turkish industrialist, and in Byzantine times it was the site of a 'posh monastery', re-founded about 1100 by a high-ranking aristocrat, and served by an hegoumenos, Joseph, who went on to become abbot of the Pantokrator monastery.2 Hagia Glykeria had also received a substantial endowment from one Naukratios Zonaras, possibly the father of John the chronicler; in any event, the latter was working in a suburban monastery with family connections. It was hardly the *back of beyond'. We can explain his words as the rhetoric of exile;3 we can also point to the reality of exile suffered by many Byzantines who were banished to the Princes' Islands in political disgrace; and we can point to modern examples of islands near big cities which are places for the isolation of undesirables. But when we have done everything to get Zonaras's notion of the *back of beyond' in proportion, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is what it appears to be: a reflection of the Byzantine equivalent of
the attitude caricatured in the cartoon of the New Yorker's view of the world, where New Jersey gives way to the Mid West beyond a Hudson River that is definitely on the edge of civilization. Other writers of the period contain little that qualifies, and much that confirms, this literal reading, John Tzetzes lumps ethnic foreigners together with Greeks from the Aegean islands as undesirable aliens.4 Bishops and government officials always want to be back in Constantinople and not where they happen to be posted. It is bad for a monastery to be rich in Thessalonike, Archbishop Eustathios tells the people of that city, but good in Constantinople, because they do things properly there.5 Theodore Balsamon, the canonist, agrees, being, in his own words, 'a Constantinopolitan through and through' (Kcov0tavfivoi)icoXitii? &Kpai9v£0tat05).6 In his canon law commentaries, he repeatedly distinguishes between Constantinople, where people know and keep the rules, and the 'outer territories' (I|co %d*pai), where anything goes, including heresy/ Three writers of the generation of 1204 - Michael Choniates, Niketas Choniates, and the patriarch Germanos II - have left an unforgettable picture of smug Constantinopolitans assuming that the world owes them a superior living just because Constantinople is the place to be, and to be bom.8
