By
Alexander J. Billinis
The Byzantine Empire rose from an administrative division of the Roman Empire in the Third Century AD. The Roman Empire covered the entire Mediterranean basin and was a true multinational imperial domain. The Greco-Roman culture, religion, and Greek and Latin, however, provided a certain unity to the empire. This Greco-Roman “mass media” culture provided a means for the spread of Christianity, which eventually became the state religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great.
This administrative division of the Roman Empire ran roughly along the lines of the Adriatic Sea. The lands to the East of the Adriatic were primarily Greek speaking, and the lands to the West were Latin speaking, which gave some administrative and cultural cohesion to the division. At the time of the division, there was little of the cultural and political distinctiveness between East and West which arose in later centuries.
Italy: The Peninsula of Two Languages
The Italian Peninsula, though on the western side of the Roman linguistic divide, had a dual linguistic and cultural identity. The reason for this is that Greek colonists and Greek speech were present on the Italian peninsula from at least 700 BC. Some of the greatest cultural centers of the ancient Greek world were in Southern Italy and Sicily. This area was, and in vernacular often still is, known as “Magna Grecia.” With the Roman conquest of Magna Grecia and Greece itself, Latin made huge inroads into Southern Italy, but the Greek language and connections with Greece were never eliminated. Under no circumstances could the Greek element be considered alien to Italy.
The Western Roman Empire was subjected to the onslaught of Germanic and Asian barbarian tribes in the 300s and 400s, and finally one of these tribes, the Ostrogoths, destroyed the Roman Empire and conquered Italy in the 470s. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire also suffered under barbarian onslaughts, but managed to survive and start expanding in the 500s. Byzantine Emperor Justinian re-conquered all of Italy until the Lombards, another Germanic tribe, ejected imperial rule from much of northern and interior Italy in the seventh century. Nonetheless, much of mainland Italy south of Naples remained firmly in Byzantine control until the eleventh century.
The Arabs swept through the southern and eastern Mediterranean, ending Byzantine rule in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The Arabs then set their sights on the Byzantine islands of Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily, all of which succumbed to Arab armies in the 800s. The Greek-speaking populations of these islands remained, though large numbers of Greeks left Sicily for Calabria to remain under Imperial and Christian rule. Crete and Cyprus were re-conquered by Byzantium, but only small parts of Sicily were periodically restored to Byzantium (1038-40) before the final Norman Conquest of Sicily in 1093.
Venice: From Byzantine Vassal to Byzantine Nemesis
Among the Byzantium’s Italian vassals was a small collection of waterlogged islands off the northeastern coast of Italy. The inhabitants of these islands originally were refugees fleeing the onslaughts of barbarians who destroyed the Western Roman Empire. Venice enters history in the fourth century as a fledgling maritime state in vassalage to Byzantium, relying on its huge market and on the prestige of connection with the Eastern Roman Imperium. Venice’s growing commercial and naval power were often useful for Byzantium in its wars to hold its Italian and Balkan coastal cities.
Venice and Byzantium eventually found their interests diverging. Venice’s growing naval and commercial power could be used for the Republic’s own interests, which often conflicted with Byzantium. Byzantium was the wealthiest state in the European-Mediterranean world, and controlled vital East-West trade routes that Venice coveted. At the same time, the Venetians were Western Christians, who found a religious-ideological justification to their anti-Byzantine feeling.
By the late 1100s, Byzantine-Venetian rivalry had often exploded into open conflict and massacres. In 1204, the Crusaders, spearheaded and masterminded by the Venetians, actually captured Constantinople and for a short while dismembered the Byzantine Empire. Though the Byzantines regained Constantinople, numerous major Greek islands, such as Crete, Corfu, Cephalonia, and Evia, along with mainland port cities, such as Methoni, Nauplion, and Naufpaktos (Lepanto), remained Venetian for hundreds of years.
Back in Southern Italy
Byzantium’s firmest hold in Italy was in the two provinces of Calabria and Apulia. Here Greek-speakers were in the majority, reinforced by Greek-speakers from Greece itself fleeing Slavic invasions of the Balkan Peninsula. Greeks were so numerous in this part of Italy that the Byzantine authorities resettled Calabrian and Apulian Greeks in parts of Greece overrun by Slavs to rehellenise the Greek Peninsula itself!
Though Southern Italy was firmly under Byzantine control, local Lombards, Arabs from Sicily, Germanic kings from the north of Italy, and the newly arrived Normans constantly eroded Byzantine authority in Italy. Just as Byzantine authority in Italy was weakening, the political and relatively small doctrinal differences between Western and Eastern Christianity led to a formal split of the Churches in 1054, providing a religious-ideological justification to Byzantine-Western rivalry.
By the late Tenth Century, Byzantium had too many fronts to defend. Byzantium was an empire of four peninsulas (the South Italian, the Balkan, Asia Minor, and the Crimea), all of which had to be defended against land based armies massed against them on each peninsula. Fending off the Arabs in Asia Minor and holding the Balkans against the powerful Orthodox Bulgarian Empire had bled Byzantium. The Normans slowly devoured the remaining Byzantine provinces of Italy, capturing the final fortress, Bari, in 1071. The Normans then went on to conquer Sicily from the Arabs, in this case with the support of the Greek Christians. Apart from sporadic Byzantine expeditions in the 1100s and temporary occupation of cities such as Ancona, Byzantine rule ended in Italy, never to return.
While Byzantine rule may have ended, a large Greek population remained in
Norman-ruled Italy and Sicily, along with ecclesiastical institutions
celebrating Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity. In newly-conquered Sicily,
Greeks represented a majority of the Christian population; Greek remained an
official language of the Norman kingdom, and Greek monasteries, though forced
to recognize Papal authority, retained links with the Byzantine capital of
Constantinople and the great Byzantine center of monasticism, Mount Athos. The Normans were great builders, and Byzantine art and artisans were well-employed in the Norman Kingdom; some of the most beautiful examples of Byzantine art and architecture in Sicily are actually from the post-Byzantine era.
These Greek monasteries were able to provide spiritual and intellectual
guidance to the Greek populations of Italy. Nonetheless, the
slow Catholicization and Latinization of the Greek populations of Italy and
Sicily began.
The Fall of Byzantium and Byzantine Immigration
As a slow assimilation process began in southern Italy and Sicily, events in
the Balkans soured for Byzantium. Byzantine-Western antagonism, reinforced
by ecclesiastical differences, continued with the Crusades. In an act of
duplicity and utter vandalism, the Western Christians of the Fourth Crusade,
led by Byzantium’s former Northern Italian vassal Venice, sacked
Constantinople in 1204 and temporarily dismembered the Byzantine Empire.
Though the Byzantines recovered Constantinople in 1261, Venice and Genoa still held parts of the Empire, notably coastal cities and islands such as Crete.
The Byzantine Empire was a shadow of its former self, its back broken and
beset by enemies from the east, north, and west. Constantinople finally fell
in 1453 to the vigorous Ottoman Turks, defended to the death heroically by
the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI Dragases Paleologus, with the assistance of his people and small bands of Italians.
Constantine’s subjects often accepted Turkish rule with exhaustion, or
in some cases preferred Turkish barbarism to the supposed charity of their
Western Christian brethren. Nonetheless, many Byzantine refugees flocked to
Italy, notably to major Italian cities such as Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Naples, and
most of all to Venice. Many of these immigrants were intellectuals from the
last intellectual flowering of Byzantium; like many societies in political
decline, Byzantium and Byzantine successor states such as the Serbian Kingdom had a cultural flowering during their final years. These refugee
intellectuals contributed to the birth of the Renaissance in Italy and
elsewhere in Europe. A steady flow of immigrants, noble and humble, from the parts of Greece still under Venetian control, notably the Ionian Islands and Crete,
continued.
Other Byzantines, Greek and Albanian, became soldiers for warring Italian
kingdoms, principally Venice and the Neopolitan Kingdom. Other Greeks and
Albanians settled in dense pockets of former Byzantine areas of Southern
Italy and Sicily, particularly in Calabria, Salento, and the Palermo area.
In some cases these settlers bolstered dwindling Greek communities, such as
in Salento and in Calabria. In other cases, whole new towns were
founded by the newcomers, such as the villages of Piani dei Albanesi and Spezzano Albanese. The newcomers preserved the Byzantine church liturgy where possible, but in some areas, notably Salento, the Byzantine liturgy
disappeared by the late 1700s. Other communities in Calabria and Sicily,
however, retain the Byzantine liturgy to this day, though the communities
are under Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
These Greco-Albanian linguistic and cultural communities remained relatively
stable from the 1500s to the mid 1800s, despite the advance of
Catholicism. The middle Nineteenth Century was a period of profound political and economic change which would challenge the existence of “Byzantine Italian” as a living identity. Italy was united in the 1860s under the powerful industrial Kingdom of Sardina. The new Italian state was highly centralized and intent on imposing linguistic and national uniformity on a rather diverse peninsula. Standard Italian began its assault on regional Italian dialects, or local languages such as Italic Greek (Griko or Grecanic) and Italic Albanian (Arberesh). In the schools, in state administration, and in the army, Southern Italians learned, or were forced to learn, the Florentine dialect that became Standard Italian.
While the unification of Italy was certainly a profound event for the remaining “Byzantine” communities of the Italian South, the mass emigration from the region spurred by Italian Unification, grinding poverty, and the acceleration of the industrial revolution had an even greater effect on these communities. Millions of Southern Italians immigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Northern Italy, and to other European countries. Uprooted from insular villages were everyone spoke the same dialect or language into a strange world of the immigrant, Calabrians, Sicilians, and Salentines lost their distinctive culture and language and became Italian-Americans, and eventually Americans, or Argentines.
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