ABSTRACT
Byzantine rhetoric and symbolism persistently depict the emperor as upholding equity and order on behalf of Christ – for his subjects and for the wider world. Serving as lawmaker, judge and virtual ‘world policeman’, his actions had the force of moral sanction.1 By this thinking, military action against outsiders constituted punishment, physical sanctions in response to immoral acts against the empire and her subjects. is did not mean that physical force had to be applied whenever the state’s vital interests were imperilled. On the contrary, a standard epithet of the emperor was ‘peacemaker’; court ceremonial celebrated him as the Christ-like harbinger of a new ‘peace’ and benign order for mankind and, in practice, eorts were made to use force in a disciplined way,2 with frequent recourse to non-violent means of protecting the empire’s interests – grants of court titles, gifts and tribute payments to foreign leaders, meddling in their internal politics, and other staples of ‘Byzantine diplomacy’.3 ese twin roles of ‘punisher’ and ‘peacekeeper’ through non-violent roles are not inherently incompatible, but they are easily lampooned or rationalised in twenty-rst-century terms. Buying o one’s enemies was the obvious course to take when one was at a military disadvantage, as Byzantium so often was; and the ‘carrot-and-stick’ treatment for some barbarians advocated in Constantine VII’s handbook, the De administrando imperio, might seem to take
1 ese qualities are paraded clearly, their accentuation varying with circumstances, in preambles to imperial laws and other pronouncements: H. Hunger, Prooimion: Elemente der byzantinischen Kaiseridee in den Arengen der Urkunden (Vienna, 1964), 84-94, 99-109, 114-17, 159, 180-6.
