IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

SEVGİ GÖNÜL BYZANTINE STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

ISTANBUL, 23–25 JUNE 2016

IDENTITY AND THE OTHER EDITORS SYMPOSIUM HONORARY CHAIRMAN
IN BYZANTIUM Koray Durak Ömer M. Koç
Ivana Jevtić
PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD
INTERNATIONAL SEVGİ GÖNÜL BOOK DESIGN Prof. Dr. Engin Akyürek
BYZANTINE STUDIES SYMPOSIUM, Burak Şuşut, FİKA Dr. Vera Bulgurlu
23–25 JUNE 2016 Prof. Dr. Melek Delilbaşı
PRE-PRESS PRODUCTION
Prof. Dr. Sema Doğan
© THE KOÇ UNIVERSITY Duygu Güven, FİKA
Assoc. Prof. Koray Durak
STAVROS NIARCHOS FOUNDATION
Prof. Dr. Zeynep Mercangöz
CENTER FOR LATE ANTIQUE AND PUBLICATION COORDINATION
Prof. Dr. Nevra Necipoğlu
BYZANTINE STUDIES (GABAM), 2019 Barış Altan
Prof. Dr. Ayla Ödekan
Deniz Yasemin Önen
Dr. Brigitte Pitarakis
HISTORY | ART HISTORY |
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ARCHAEOLOGY | COPY-EDITING and
BYZANTINE STUDIES PROOFREADING
Prof. Dr. B. Yelda Olcay Uçkan
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Koç University Suna Kıraç Library Haris Theodorelis-Rigas
Cataloging-in-Publication Data EXECUTIVE BOARD

International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine PRINT Prof. Dr. Nevra Necipoğlu

Studies Symposium (4th : 2016 : İstanbul, Ofset Yapımevi Prof. Dr. Ayla Ödekan
Turkey) Çağlayan Mah, Şair Sok. Prof. Dr. Engin Akyürek
Identity and the other in Byzantium : No:4, 34403 Assoc. Prof. Koray Durak
papers from the fourth International Sevgi Kağıthane/İstanbul Dr. Brigitte Pitarakis
Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, Certificate No: 12326 Assist. Prof. Günder Varinlioğlu
İstanbul 23-25 June 2016 / edited by Dr. Buket Coşkuner
Koray Durak, Ivana Jevtić.-- İstanbul : Koç FIRST EDITION Hülya Bilgi
University Stavros Niarchos Foundation Istanbul, June 2019 Melih Fereli
Center for Antique and Byzantine Studies, Seçil Kınay
2019. ISBN 978-605-2116-96-8 Erdal Yıldırım
372 pages ; 25 cm. -- Koç University KOÇ UNIVERSITY
ISBN 978-605-2116-96-8 Certificate No: 18318
1. Byzantine Empire--History--Congresses.
2. Turkey--Antiquities, Byzantine. 3. COVER IMAGE
Excavations (Archaeology)--Turkey. 4. Dog-headed men
Prosopography--Byzantine Empire. I. from the fourteenth-century Kievan Psalter

Durak, Koray. II. Jevtić, Ivana. III. Title. (Photo © National Library of Russia)

DF501.5.I58 2016

©2019, All rights reserved. All rights of the images and texts published in this volume belong to the person and institutions concerned.
No part of it, or all, may be published, printed, reproduced, using any mechanical, optical or electronic means including photocopying without prior written
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IDENTITY AND THE OTHER
IN BYZANTIUM

PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

SEVGİ GÖNÜL BYZANTINE STUDIES
SYMPOSIUM

EDITED BY

KORAY DURAK
IVANA JEVTIĆ
 CONTENTS

ix
Abbreviations

xiii
Acknowledgements

xv
Preface
ÖMER M. KOÇ

xvii
Opening Speech
NEVRA NECİPOĞLU

3
KORAY DURAK and IVANA JEVTIĆ
Identity and the Other in Byzantine Studies: An Introduction

I. IDENTIFYING THE OTHER: ETHNICITY, CLOTHING, BODY

27
NICHOLAS DE LANGE
The Byzantine Jewish Other

41
ANTHONY KALDELLIS
Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium

53
MAJA KOMINKO
Changing Habits and Disappearing Monsters – Ethnography between Classical and Late Antiquity

71
PAMELA ARMSTRONG
Ethnicity and Inclusiveness in the Development of Religious Cults:
Saint Christopher the Dog-Headed and Saint George
II. IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN SPACE
83
ARIETTA PAPACONSTANTINOU
The Desert and the City: The Rhetoric of Savagery and Civilization in Some Early Byzantine Narratives

93
GÜNDER VARİNLİOĞLU
“Imagine There Is No (Is)land”: Conceptualizing Byzantine Islands in Southern Asia Minor

113
BUKET KİTAPÇI BAYRI
Byzantine Universalism and Patris: Geographic Identity Markers in the Late Byzantine Martyria

III. IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN MEMORY

129
LYNN JONES
Visual Evidence for the Mutability of Identity in the Middle Byzantine Period

143
RUSTAM SHUKUROV
The Byzantine Concepts of Iran: Cultural Memory and Its Reactualization

IV. ON THE MARGINS OF ORTHODOXY: BELIEF CARVED IN STONE

171
B. YELDA OLCAY UÇKAN AND SEÇKİN EVCİM
The Other Beliefs in Byzantine Phrygia and Their Reflections in Rock-Cut Architecture

189
SERCAN YANDIM AYDIN
Marginalizing Traditional Religious Groups, Cults, and Beliefs in the Early Patristic Period:
Asceticism in Phrygia and Lykaonia

205
HENRY MAGUIRE
Magic in Byzantine Pottery: The Other Within
V. MANIFESTATION OF IDENTITY THROUGH PATRONAGE
225
SCOTT REDFORD
Rum Seljuk Emir Mübarizeddin Ertokuş and His Madrasa: Reading Identity through Architectural Patronage

245
IOANNA RAPTI
Art from Another Byzantium: The Sculptural Decoration of the Church of Bghno Noravank‘

269
SUNA ÇAĞAPTAY
The Laskarid Moment: Building an Empire with Constantinople in Mind

VI. APPROPRIATING THE OTHER

295
ALICIA WALKER
Courtly Objects, Courtly Identities: Middle Byzantine Luxury Arts and the Material Culture of Elite Leisure

313
BRIGITTE PITARAKIS
Jewelers, Coppersmiths, and Clientele: Between Byzantium and the Arab World

339
Index
 ABBREVIATIONS

AASS Acta sanctorum (Paris, 1863–1940)

AnatSt Anatolian Studies
AnnalesESC Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations
Apoph.patr. Apophthegmata Patrum
Ἀρχ.Δελτ. Ἀρχαιολογικὸν δελτίον

ArtB Art Bulletin

ASE Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi
AST Araştırma Sonuçları Toplantısı

BAcBelg Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques,

Académie royale de Belgique
BHG Biblioteca hagiographica graeca, SubsHag 47, 3rd ed., ed. F. Halkin, 3 vols.
(Brussels, 1957; repr. 1969)
BHL Biblioteca hagiographica latina antiquitae et mediae aetatis, SubsHag 6
(Brussels, 1898–1911; new suppl. 1986)
BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
BSCAbstr Byzantine Studies Conference, Abstracts of Papers
BullJRylandsLib Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
ByzF Byzantinische Forschungen
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift

CahArch Cahiers archéologiques

CCAG Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum, 12 vols. (Brussels, 1898–1953)
CIA Corpus Inscriptionum Armenicarum
CPG Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum, ed. E. L. von Leutsch, 2 vols.
(Göttingen, 1851; repr. Hildesheim, 1958)
CSCO Corpus scriptorium christianorum orientalium
CTh Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad
Theodosianum pertinentes, ed. Th. Mommsen and P. M. Meyer (Berlin, 1905)

DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers

ΔΧΑΕ Δελτίον τῆς Χριστιανικῆς ἀρχαιολογικῆς ἑταιρείας
x IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

ΕΕΒΣ Epeteris Hetaireias Byzantinon Spoudon

EI 2
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden; London, 1960– )

GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte

GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

HTR Harvard Theological Review

IstMitt Istanbuler Mitteilungen

JEChrSt Journal of Early Christian Studies

JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
JMedHist Journal of Medieval History
JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik [note: before 1969, JÖBG]
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
JSAH Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
JSav Journal des savants
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
JWalt Journal of the Walters Art Gallery
JWarb Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

MAMA Monumenta Asiae Minoris antiqua

MélRome Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’École française de Rome
MHR Mediterranean Historical Review

NC The Numismatic Chronicle [and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society]

OCP Orientalia christiana periodica

ODB The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan et al., 3 vols.
(New York; Oxford, 1991)
 ABBREVIATIONS xi

P.Cair.Masp. Papyrus grecs d’époque byzantine, catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes
du Musée du Caire, ed. J. Maspero (Cairo, 1911–1916)
PG Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857–1866)
PLP Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, ed. E. Trapp et al., 12 vols.
(Vienna, 1976–1996)
PmbZ Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit
PO Patrologia orientalis
ProcBrAc Proceedings of the British Academy

RA Revue archéologique
REArm Revue des études arméniennes
REB Revue des études byzantines
RESEE Revue des études sud-est européennes
RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions
RN Revue numismatique

SC Sources chrétiennes

TIB Tabula imperii byzantini, ed. H. Hunger (Vienna, 1976– )

TLG Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
TM Travaux et mémoires

VizVrem Vizantiiskii vremennik

ZPapEpig Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

 Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium

Anthony Kaldellis
The Ohio State University

Ancient and medieval ethnography typically employed dress as a category by which

to describe the cultural profile of nations, ethnic groups, and tribes. The presumption
was that each nation had its own distinctive way of dressing. For example, the sixth-
century historian Agathias described the Franks of his own time as similar to the Romans
(i.e., Byzantines) in all aspects of their social and political organization except for their
barbaric clothes and dress.1 Agathias provides few details here about these sartorial
differences.2 When a tribe or ethnic group was conquered or absorbed into another,
Byzantine authors assumed that distinctive clothes were one way by which it could
cling to, and signal, its separate identity, and they sometimes describe those clothes.3 Yet
for the most part we cannot visualize what is being referred to and only rarely can we
match it up with surviving artistic representations. “A precise picture of what was worn
is impossible.”4 Clothes must have varied by wealth, social status, proximity to a ruler,
and occupation, especially those of priests and soldiers.5 A great deal of effort has been
put into teasing out the scattered information contained in our sources and matching

1 Agathias, Histories 1.2.3–4, ed. R. Keydell, Agathiae Mirynaei Historiarum libri quinque (Berlin, 1967), 11: “τὸ
βαρβαρικὸν τῆς στολῆς καὶ τὸ τῆς φωνῆς.”
2 E.g., Agathias, Histories 2.5.3 (trousers), ed. Keydell, Agathiae Mirynaei Historiarum, 46.
3 Prokopios, Wars 5.12.17–19, ed. J. Haury and G. Wirth, Procopii Caesariensis opera omnia, 4 vols. (Leipzig,
1962–1964), 2:65; Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio 37.50–57, ed. and tr. G. Moravcsik
and R. J. H. Jenkins, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio (Washington, DC, 1967), 168–169.
4 J. Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting (Basingstoke,
2005), 7.
5 A. Muthesius, “Textiles and Dress in Byzantium,” in Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453),
ed. M. Grünbart et al. (Vienna, 2007), 159–169. Other important contributions on Byzantine dress include
Ph. Koukoules, Βυζαντινῶν βίος καὶ πολιτισμός, 6 vols. (Athens, 1948), 2.2:5–59, esp. 10–20 for class and
occupational differentiation, and 6:267–294; and P. Kalamara, Le système vestimentaire à Byzance du IVe jusqu’à
la fin du XIe siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1997). For the court, see E. Piltz, “Middle Byzantine Court Costume,” in
Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. H. Maguire (Washington, DC, 1997), 39–51.
42 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

it up with representations of dress in extant Byzantine art.6 This essay will trace how
garments were perceived to mark ethnic differences, treating the Romans of Byzantium
as an ethnic group in its own right.7
On the positivist side, and focusing for now on the Middle Byzantine period,
it appears that the clothes worn by the Romans of Byzantium – both those high and
low, Constantinopolitan and provincial – were homogeneous and distinctive enough at
any time that one could be recognized as a Roman by his or her dress; conversely, the
Romans could also infer that a person was foreign by his or her dress. Even if they could
not always identify the ethnicity correctly, at least they thought that they could do so,
which is just as important. A number of saints who looked odd or had spent time abroad
were arrested as spies when they approached Byzantine cities because of their strange
appearance.8 Basil the Younger, for example, got into trouble and was arrested because
he was acting weird and wearing foreign clothes.9 The story may be fictitious but still
reveals contemporary perceptions (of the tenth century). When the Norman adventurer
Bohemond emerged from the coffin in which he had been secretly traveling from Antioch
to Kerkyra, in 1105, the locals saw his “foreign and barbarian stole” and asked him about
his genos and generally who he was.10
Byzantine texts imagine that Persian spies (in the early period) or Saracen
spies (in the middle period) would don “Roman clothing” in order to travel through the
provinces without being suspected. Their authors and readers evidently believed that
the general provincial population of the Roman Empire dressed differently than that of
Persia or the caliphate.11 In military narratives, this “Roman garb” might signify military
gear or uniforms.12 The Romans, of course, did the same. In the initial stages of his war

6 See esp. M. G. Parani, Reconstructing the Reality of Images: Byzantine Material Culture and Religious Iconography
(11th–15th Centuries) (Leiden; Boston, 2003), 11–158 (focusing on imperial, noble, and military attire).
7 For the ethnic aspects of clothing in the Late Antique and Early Medieval worlds, see W. Pohl, “Telling
the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity,” in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities,
300–800, ed. W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (Leiden; Boston, 1998), 17–69, at 40–51. For clothes and gender, see M.
Harlow, “Clothes Make the Man: Power Dressing and Elite Masculinity in the Later Roman World,” in Gender
in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. L. Brubaker and J. M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2004),
44–69. For the Romans of Byzantium as an ethnic group, see A. Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire
in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA, 2019).
8 N. Koutrakou, “‘Spies of Towns’: Some Remarks on Espionage in the Context of Arab-Byzantine Relations,”
Graeco-Arabica 7/8 (2000): 243–266, at 264.
9 The Life of Saint Basil the Younger 1.4, ed. and tr. D. F. Sullivan, A.-M. Talbot, and S. McGrath (Washington, DC,
2014), 70: “τὸ ξένον τοῦ ἤθους καὶ τοῦ σχῆματος αὐτοῦ.”
10 Anna Komnene, Alexiad 11.12.4, ed. D. R. Reinsch and A. Kambylis, Anna Comnenae Alexias, 2 vols. (Berlin;
New York, 2001), 1:355.
11 Vita Epiphanii in PG 41:37 (the Persian king tells his spies to set aside “τὸ σχῆμα τὸ Περσικὸν” and to put
on “τὸ σχῆμα τῶν Ῥωμαίων” in order to go into Phoenicia, and so they changed their στολαί). The Life
of the Emperor Basileios I.68 says that Arab spies were sent out “Ῥωμαϊκῇ στολῇ καὶ γλώσσῃ χρώμενον,”
ed. I. Ševčenko, Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur liber quo vita Basilii imperatoris
amplectitur (Berlin; Boston, 2011), 234.
12 Theophylact Simocatta, History 3.7.4, ed. C. de Boor, rev. P. Wirth, Theophylacti Simocattae Historiae (Stuttgart,
1972), 123: “ῥωμαϊκὴν ἐσθῆτα.”
 Anthony Kaldellis | Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium 43

against the Rus’ in Bulgaria, John Tzimiskes (r. 969–976) sent bilingual men, dressed like
“Scythians,” to spy on the enemy camps.13 The logothetes tou eidikou kept Saracen clothes
in storage, possibly for use by spies to be sent to caliphate.14
There was, then, such a thing as “Roman dress” that went beyond what
magistrates wore at the court or soldiers in the army. It could be used to identify Romans
amidst a complex ethnic environment, such as in southern Italy. An early twelfth-century
addition to the history of Skylitzes notes that Basil I (r. 867–886) founded the city of
Kallipolis on the coast of Italy by resettling people there from the city of Herakleia, on
the Black Sea coast. “This explains why that city still uses Roman customs, dress (stolai),
and a thoroughly Roman social order, down to this day.”15 Here too, being Roman is
defined in ethnographic terms: one can tell who is a Roman and who not by the presence
or absence of mundane ethnic traits such as dress. Interestingly, a Roman in southern
Italy shares those traits, presumably, with one from a coastal Black Sea city. Michael
McCormick noted the matrix of relative cultural uniformity that linked Byzantines from
the farthest provinces to the capital and, by extension, to each other.16 Jennifer Ball
examined representations of donor portraits and found that “remarkably, many of the
garments we find in Kastoria are the same as those in Cappadocia, despite their being
separated by thousands of miles.”17
In some cases, we can be reasonably certain that references to “Roman dress”
meant either elite or court garments. Pope Hadrian wrote to Charlemagne, informing him
that Arechis II (r. 756–787), the Lombard duke of Benevento, had sought to escape Frankish
control and side with the Byzantines. In 788, he promised the emperor Constantine
V (r. 741–775) that henceforth he and his people (presumably his nobles) would dress
and cut their hair like the “Greeks,” and the latter had duly sent men with garments,
a sword, combs, and scissors.18 In the poem Digenes Akritas, when the hero’s father, a

13 Leo the Deacon, History 6.11, ed. C. B. Hase, Leonis diaconi Historiae libri X (Bonn, 1828), 108: “Σκυθικὸν
ἠμπισχημένους ἱματισμόν.”
14 N. Oikonomides, “The Role of the Byzantine State in the Economy,” in The Economic History of Byzantium from
the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed. A. E. Laiou, 3 vols. (Washington, DC, 2002), 3:973–1057, at 993.
For some of the logothesion’s holdings, see Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, The Book of Ceremonies 2.45,
ed. and tr. A. Moffatt and M. Tall, Constantine Porphyrogennetos: The Book of Ceremonies, 2 vols. (Canberra,
2012), 2:677–678, for the 949 expedition to Crete.
15 Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, ed. I. Thurn, Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis historiarum (Berlin; New York, 1973), 151;
tr. J. Wortley, John Scylitzes: A Synopsis of Byzantine History 811–1059 (Cambridge; New York, 2010), 146.
16 M. McCormick, “The Imperial Edge: Italo-Byzantine Identity, Movement and Integration, A.D. 650–950,” in
Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire, ed. H. Ahrweiler and A. E. Laiou (Washington, DC,
1998), 17–51, esp. 18–19.
17 Ball, Byzantine Dress, 71. I am not, however, persuaded by the argument that dress in the provinces was
different from that of the capital, because it was sooner influenced by foreign cultures. If I am reading
the argument correctly, it hinges on the alleged late arrival of turbans in Constantinople. But turbans are
attested there earlier on. M. Parani, “Optional Extras or Necessary Elements? Middle and Late Byzantine
Male Dress Accessories,” in Studies in Honour of Prof. Maria Panagiotide, ed. P. Petrides, A. Drandake and V.
Foskolou (Athens, 2015), 425; eadem, “Cultural Identity and Dress: The Case of the Late Byzantine Costume,”
JÖB 52 (2007): 95–134, at 110 n. 53.
18 Hadrian I, Letter 3 to Charlemagne, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epp. III (Berlin, 1892), 617; J. Shepard,
44 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

Saracen by birth, converts to Christianity and goes over to the Romans, he changes to
“Roman clothing,” which is described as an ornamented coat of silk and gold.19 But other
cases are not so clear-cut. For example, the Miracles of Saint Demetrios (seventh century)
describe how the Slavic chief Perboundos was arrested in Thessalonike, where he had
been living, and taken to Constantinople, where the emperor eventually set him free
and gave him “clothes and every mark of hospitality.” Yet he managed to escape the City
by simply walking out of the gate, because he “was wearing Roman clothing and could
speak our language.” He passed “as one of the citizens.” When they began to search for
him and shut the gates, they did not know that he had already left, which means that
they had probably not given him anything terribly fancy.20 He was probably wearing
ordinary Roman clothes, not a court uniform. A similar case is that of Boris II, the son
of the Bulgarian tsar Peter I. Boris had lived for some time at the Byzantine court but
when he returned to his own country he was shot and killed by a Bulgarian border guard
because he was wearing “Roman clothes.”21 To be sure, Boris had certainly been given
court garments, but one did not normally travel in a skaramangion.
Before going further, let us preemptively acquit our sources of simplification
and naivety. Their concept of “Roman dress” need not imply that all Romans dressed in
exactly the same way, like some Star Trek culture set in the past. Our authors knew that
was not the case: the concept of a national dress encompassed the spectrum of outfits
that Romans typically wore across the range of their occupations and social classes. No
text purports to tell us what all Romans wore. As we will see, however, they may not have
been as careful when it came to foreign cultures. Moreover, Byzantine clothing changed
over time, but each text was concerned only with the norms that prevailed at the time
when it was written. It is a separate question whether the Byzantines were aware of how
much those norms changed over the centuries.
What place did foreign clothes have within Byzantine culture (meaning among
the Romans of Byzantium, not the ethnic minorities of the empire)? Here we need to
make a theoretical distinction. Byzantine culture, like its Roman predecessor and, indeed,
all cultures in history, adopted practices, objects (including clothes), words, and ideas
from its neighbors.22 We are not concerned here with clothing that we know, through our

“Emperors and Expansionism: From Rome to Middle Byzantium,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and
Practices, ed. D. Abulafia and N. Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 55–82, at 72–73.
19 Digenes Akritas G 3.257, ed. E. Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions (Cambridge,
1998), 58: “στολὴν … περιβαλῶν ῥωμαίαν.” G. de Boel, “L’identité ‘romaine’ dans le roman Digénis Akritis,” in
Constructions of Greek Past: Identity and Historical Consciousness from Antiquity to the Present, ed. H. Hokwerda
(Groningen, 2003), 157–183.
20 Miracles of Saint Demetrios, Miracle 4.231–235, ed. P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint
Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans le Balkans, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979–1981), 2:208–210: “φορεσίαν καὶ
πᾶσαν θεραπείαν … φορῶν ῥωμαῖον σχῆμα καὶ λαλῶν τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ διαλέκτῳ … ὡς εἷς τῶν πολιτῶν.”
21 Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, ed. Thurn, 329: “ῥωμαϊκὴ στολή.” For the chronology and circumstances of his
problematic death, see A. Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to
the First Crusade (Oxford, 2017), 82, 318.
22 See esp. Ball, Byzantine Dress, e.g., 1, 44.
 Anthony Kaldellis | Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium 45

own researches, that the Byzantines borrowed from other cultures but that then became
naturalized in their own culture and were subsequently regarded as part of the native
norm.23 Such innovations may in fact have been cast as a return to a more authentic
original Roman tradition.24 Instead, we are concerned with clothing that they actively
perceived as foreign and branded as such, regardless of whether or not it actually was.
Foreignness can be as constructed and imagined just as it can be real. Foreign clothes can
also be fully naturalized within a culture, but still always retain the aura of being foreign.
Let us begin at the court. Philotheos’ manual for organizing court receptions, the
Kletorologion, (899 CE) devotes separate attention to “all of the ethnikoi men who serve the
emperor, such as Pharganoi, Khazars, Arabs, and Franks … who are to enter and depart
dressed in their proper ethnic garment, namely the one that they call the kabbadin.”25 It
was apparently important to mark these men off as non-Roman but, unless kabbadin at
this point referred to a range of diverse foreign costumes (which is highly unlikely),26 the
different ethnic origins of these men were to be marked off collectively in the same way.
Moreover, the kabbadin was probably native to none of their cultures, and would in any
case have already been formatted according to the style of the imperial court. This, then,
was a generic way of marking foreignness (“You’re foreign; here, put on this kabbadin”).
Bulgarian elites had by this point adopted Byzantine court dress. In 927, it was
noteworthy that two of tsar Symeon’s sons were, as a Byzantine chronicle commented,
“still wearing Bulgarian clothing.”27 When Bulgarian dignitaries visited the court, they
likely had their own skaramangia, especially the “Bulgarian friends” of the emperor who
sat at his table. Their Bulgarian retinue, who sat to the side, were allowed to wear “their
own clothing,” whatever that was.28 When the Saracen dignitaries from Tarsos visited the
court in 946, they seem to have worn their own clothes during the rest of the visit but
were given “sown tunics and the other formal attire” in order to dine with the emperor
at the ensuing banquet.29 Arab prisoners were even brought out to attend the banquets:
they were dressed in white but were not to wear a belt (which was a symbol of power).30
Why the white clothes for the Arabs? Some Byzantines considered them an Arab ethnic

23 For the naturalization of foreign elements, see C. López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies
and the Near East (Cambridge, MA, 2010) 45. For our topic, see Ball, Byzantine Dress, 66.
24 Parani, “Cultural Identity and Dress,” 122–123.
25 Philotheos in N. Oikonomides, Les Listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles (Paris, 1972), 177–179.
26 For its later history, see R. Macrides, J. A. Munitiz, and D. Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos and the Constantinopolitan
Court: Offices and Ceremonies (Farnham; Aldershot, 2013), 41, n. 37.
27 Theophanes Continuatus, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1838), 412: “ἔτι στολῇ ἐκοσμοῦντο Βουλγαρικῇ.” L. Simeonova,
“Constantinopolitan Attitudes toward Aliens and Minorities, 860s–1020s (Part Two),” Études balkaniques 1
(2001): 83–98, at 92, and below.
28 Philotheos in Oikonomides, Listes, 203.
29 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, Book of Ceremonies 2.15, ed. and tr. Moffatt and Tall, 2:584.
30 Ibid., 2:592; Philotheos in Oikonomides, Listes, 203, line 30; belts: Parani, “Optional Extras or Necessary
Elements?,” 407–427, at 420–422. Liliana Simeonova believes that the white clothes symbolized the Arab
prisoners’ status as quasi-catechumens. L. Simeonova, “In the Depths of Tenth-Century Byzantine
Ceremonial: The Treatment of Arab Prisoners of War at Imperial Banquets,” BMGS 22 (1998): 75–104, at 91–97.
46 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

trait. We read in the History of Leo the Deacon that when Nikephoros Phokas (r. 963–
969) was besieging Mopsuestia the Hagarenes inside “were dressed in white as was
their custom.”31 When Nikephoros triumphed in Constantinople after the conquest of
Crete in 961, his Saracen prisoners were made to parade in white clothes, following
an ancient Roman tradition of making defeated captives dress like ethnic stereotypes
of themselves.32 Thus, at court banquets and triumphs they were dressed up as ethnic
stereotypes, according to the Byzantine imagination. Not all Byzantines imagined them
in the same way, however. In the tenth-century Life of Saint Andreas the Fool, a demonic
apparition is said to be able to appear as a Hagarene, “dressed in a black cloak.”33
There were clothing items that were marked as ethnic but that a Byzantine could
wear without being perceived as a foreigner (just as I can wear Italian shoes or a Russian hat
without being either Italian or Russian). In these cases, ethnicity was a way of organizing
a domestic field of fashion or consumption. For example, certain silk garments produced
entirely in Constantinople and regulated in the Book of the Eparch (ca. 900) are marked
as “Persian” or “Slavic.” These terms stood for their style or cut.34 In the afterlife fantasy
Timarion (ca. 1100), the judges in the underworld, who include ancient Greek figures such
as Hippokrates and the emperor Theophilos, wear soudaria on their heads in the manner
of Arab rulers.35 Soudarion is an ancient term (from Latin) for a towel or napkin, so what
was allegedly “Arab” here was presumably the way in which it was worn.
There is evidence that the dressing habits of the Byzantine elite were becoming
more diverse during the twelfth century. We hear from Choniates that John II Komnenos
(r. 1118–1143) took to policing his courtiers’ clothes and hair styles to make sure that
they were not following silly fashions. Nothing is said here specifically about foreign
items.36 Later in the century, Andronikos I Komnenos (r. 1183–1185) was the figure most
associated with foreign clothes, which reinforced his reputation as a chameleon among
his countrymen. To disguise himself at one point, he wore Italian clothes instead of his
usual ones, but here he did mean to be mistaken for an Italian because of his clothes.37 As

31 Leo the Deacon, History 3.11, ed. Hase, 53.

32 Pseudo-Symeon, Chronicle, ed. I. Bekker, Theophanes Continuatus (Bonn, 1838), 759–760. For the text at
this point, see A. Kaldellis, “The Byzantine Conquest of Crete (961 AD), Prokopios’ Vandal War, and the
Continuator of the Chronicle of Symeon,” BMGS 39 (2015): 302–311. For the triumphal aspect, see M.
McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West
(Cambridge, 1990), 168. For the staging aspects of the ancient Roman triumph, see I. Östenberg, Staging the
World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession (Oxford, 2009).
33 The Life of Saint Andreas the Fool 12.799–800, ed. L. Rydén, The Life of St. Andrew the Fool, 2 vols. (Uppsala,
1995), 2:66: “Ἀγαρηνὸν ἐνδεδυμένον μέλαν ἱμάτιον.” For demons betrayed by their “foreign dress,” see Life of
Neilos of Rossano 5, ed. and tr. R. L. Capra, I. A. Murzaku, and D. J. Milewski, The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano
(Cambridge, MA; London, 2018), 16–17.
34 Leon VI, Book of the Eparch 8.1, ed. J. Koder, Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisens (Vienna, 1991), 102–103.
35 Timarion 33, 37, ed. R. Romano, Pseudo-Luciano, Timarione: testo critico, introduzone, traduzione, commentario
e lessico (Naples, 1974), 78, 82–83.
36 Niketas Choniates, History 47, ed. I. A. van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae Historia (Berlin; New York, 1975), 47.
37 Ioannes Kinnamos, History 3.18, ed. A. Meineke, Ioannis Cinnami Epitome (Bonn, 1836), 102.
 Anthony Kaldellis | Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium 47

emperor, on one occasion he wore a costume made of Iberian (Georgian) fabric.38 When
he was making his escape at the end of his reign, he donned a barbarian hat shaped like
a pyramid, clearly not caring about being inconspicuous.39 His relative, David Komnenos,
whom he appointed to govern Thessalonike, liked to wear Iberian (Georgian) hats.40 We
cannot know whether these fashions were truly imported from abroad and designated
as foreign because they were, or were domestic products branded within a Byzantine
gamut of choices by ostensible ethnic associations.41
Let us turn from ethnic clothes that Byzantines could wear to their perceptions of
what foreigners themselves wore. The most evidence that we have for the middle period
concerns the Bulgarians. The Byzantines either knew or imagined that they generally
wore different clothes, except for their highest dignitaries, who eventually adopted
Byzantine court fashion. For example, in the Miracles of Saint Georgios, a boy is captured
during a raid and taken to Bulgaria, where he is made a servant. The saint, however,
miraculously teleports him back to his family, dressed as he was in Bulgarian costume.42
As he was a servant, this must mean that Bulgarian clothes were viewed as different
from Roman clothes even on the most common level.
In one of his scholia on ancient authors, Arethas, the bishop of Caesarea (d. ca.
939) noted that each land and nation had its own proper customs. “The Saracens wear
broad sleeves and girdles on account of the excess of heat, in order to cool down. As the
northern parts are colder, Bulgarians have tight sleeves and collars, and they wear wools
and skins.”43 What are we dealing with here? On the positivist side, the Hispano-Arab (or
Jew) Ibrahim ibn Yaʿqub (tenth century) reported that Bulgarian envoys to the Byzantine
court wore tight-fitting clothes, and the Menologion of Basil II (ca. 1000) seems to depict
Bulgarians with tight-fitting cloaks or tunics.44 Beyond that, we must be dealing with
a stereotypical image, perhaps some kind of outfit that the Bulgarian elite viewed as
traditional or authentic – probably that which Symeon’s two sons were wearing in 927.
It is possible that they had engaged in an early phase of inventing tradition, a term that
had been much used by scholars for the reimagining and codification, in the eighteenth

38 Choniates, History 252, ed. van Dieten, 252; cf. 139 for his penchant for outlandish outfits in general. For
changes in clothing-styles during this period, see, in general, A. Kazhdan and A. Epstein, Change in Byzantine
Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley, 1990), 74–79.
39 Choniates, History 346, ed. van Dieten, 346.
40 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Capture of Thessaloniki 64, ed. and tr. J. R. Melville-Jones, Eustathios of Thessaloniki,
the Capture of Thessaloniki: A Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Canberra, 1988), 82–83.
41 Cf. J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago, 2009).
42 Miracula S. Georgii, ed. J. B. Aufhauser (Leipzig, 1913), 33: “βουλγαρικὴν στολήν.” The collection is dated to the
eleventh–twelfth century, but the story is obviously set in a previous time.
43 L. Westerink and B. Laourdas, “Scholia by Arethas in Vindob. Phil. gr. 314,” Hellenika 17 (1962): 105–131, at 129:
“τοῦ δὲ βορείου μέρους ψυχροτέρου ὄντος διὰ τοῦτο ἔχουσιν οἱ Βούλγαροι στενὰ μανίκια καὶ μανιάκια μετὰ
μαλλῶν καὶ ἐκδαρμάτων.”
44 L. Simeonova, “The ‘Avar Costume’ versus the Skaramangion: Symbolism of the Male Aristocratic Dress in
Bulgaria, Ninth–Tenth Centuries,” in State and Church: Studies in Medieval Bulgaria and Byzantium, ed. V.
Gjuzelev and K. Petkov (Sofia, 2011), 129–155, at 132–133 (who does not know the evidence of Arethas).
48 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

and nineteenth centuries, of allegedly primordial national traditions.45 The Byzantines

would have subsequently processed these notionally ethnic garments through their
own semantic code. For example, the reference to wool and animal skins was, for the
Byzantines and probably not for the Bulgarians, a reminder of the latter’s primitive past.
It could easily be redeployed in ethnic abuse, for example, if relations soured.46 “Go tell
your leather-gnawing ruler in his cheap leather jerkin that the emperor of the Romans
is coming for him,” Nikephoros II Phokas is alleged to have yelled at Bulgarian envoys.47
The late tenth-century Byzantine dictionary of classical studies, the Souda, says that the
Bulgarians had formerly adopted their style of dress from the Avars, a people akin to the
Huns in dress, but unfortunately it does not elaborate on the details.48
It thereby became possible to (mis)identify Bulgarians in the empire. Consider
a story that is told about the tenth-century saint Neilos the Younger, from Rossano in
Calabria, a predominantly Greek-speaking city in the farthest corner of the empire. One
day he found a fox pelt thrown by the side of the road and he tied it around his head. In
this way, he went around the entire town and no one recognized him. “Some children saw
him dressed like that and began to throw stones at him, saying, ‘Hey you Bulgarian monk!’
whereas others called him a Frank and some an Armenian.”49 So not only did the imperial
periphery share in the center’s sartorial code, it also shared in its ethnic stereotypes.
There is only one Byzantine author who goes beyond these stereotypes about
Bulgarian clothes: John Tzetzes. Here is what he says about Bulgarian (“Paionian”)
women and how they adorn their posteriors:

On Paionian daughters, who adorn their buttocks

Hesiod said to his brother Perses:
“Don’t let an ass-fancy (pygostolos) woman deceive your mind.”50
There are two ways in which she may be called pygostolos.
Either because she adorns her arms and forearms (pygôn),
and so is called pygostolos for putting on bracelets.
Or because she adorns her buttocks (pygê), by her hind-quarters,
with broad girdles done up with tassles and fringes.
Such are the daughters of the Paionians [i.e., Bulgarians],
And even so they remain today in the total conquest
which the most powerful Basileios the Great [i.e., Basil II]

45 The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983).

46 Simeonova, “Constantinopolitan Attitudes,” 89–90.
47 Leo the Deacon, History 1.5, ed. Hase, 62, an almost certainly fictitious episode: Kaldellis, Streams of Gold,
55–56.
48 Souda s.v. Boulgaroi. Cf. Theophanes the Confessor, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor, Theophanis Chronographia,
2 vols. (Leipzig, 1883–85), 1:232 (the Avars dressed like the Huns). Late Antique sources give conflicting
accounts of what the Huns wore. Pohl, “Telling the Difference,” 48.
49 Life of Neilos of Rossano 41, ed. and tr. Capra, Murzaku, and Milewski, 132 (I have made my own translation).
50 Hesiod, Works and Days 373.
 Anthony Kaldellis | Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium 49

imposed upon the entire race of the Paionians.

For still those women around their own buttocks
wear broad girdles, tattered, many-tassled.
They adorn their arms likewise,
with bracelets of iron, bronze, and glass.
Sometimes even with small knuckle-bones,
and other such things in the form of bracelets;
they wear scarves that they tie around their arms.51

When I say that this is not a stereotype, I do not mean that it is an accurate report, free
of ethnographic signposts. I mean only that, unlike the animal skins, it is not reported
in any other extant source and so cannot be said to form a conventional way of talking
about Bulgarian women. At any rate, it certainly makes them foreign and even exotic by
Roman norms, with all that implies. Tzetzes’ description was prompted by a letter of his
to the possibly fictitious monk Heliopolos who had gone to “Paionia” in order to check
out the shapely behinds of the local women.52
We have much less information about Byzantine perceptions of the clothing of
other ethnic groups in the empire. The report in Skylitzes that Alousian, a leader of the
Bulgarian revolt of 1040, evaded Byzantine attention by dressing “in Armenian clothes”
is often quoted. Scholars have assumed that this referred to lower-class or servants’
clothes.53 But Psellos, who knew Alousian and spoke to him about those events, specifies
that he disguised himself as a “mercenary,” so if we combine the two reports we must
conclude that he disguised himself as an Armenian mercenary.54 Here clothes blur into
arms and armor, which are not our topic. These also were ethnicized in the Byzantine
view of the world, to judge from the military manuals of Maurikios (ca. 600) and Leon
VI (ca. 900).55 There is an episode in Choniates that captures a tragic instance of ethnic
profiling based on dress between a soldier and civilian, and then between the latter’s
killer and another soldier. After the capture of Zeugminon, a Hungarian was being led
away captive, “wearing a local hat and his ancestral clothes.” A Roman soldier killed
him and donned the hat. He was then mistaken for a Hungarian by another soldier, who
attacked and killed him in turn.56 Perceptions of ethnicity based on clothes could be fatal.

51 Ioannes Tzetzes, Histories (Chiliades) 10.318, ed. P. A. M. Leone, Ioannis Tzetzae Historiae (Naples, 1968), 396.
52 Tzetzes, Letter 67, ed. P. A. M. Leone, Ioannis Tzetzae Epistulae (Leipzig, 1972), 96–97.
53 Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, 413, ed. Thurn, 413: “στολὴ Ἀρμενίων”; cf. Ioannes Zonaras, Chronicle 17.17,
ed. T. Büttner-Wobst, Ioannis Zonarae Epitomae Historiarum libri XIII–XVIII (Bonn, 1897), 598; N. Garsoïan,
“The Problem of Armenian Integration into the Byzantine Empire,” in Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the
Byzantine Empire, ed. H. Ahrweiler and A. E. Laiou (Washington, DC, 1998), 53–123, at 102–103; Simeonova,
“Constantinopolitan Attitudes,” 88.
54 Psellos, Chronographia 4.46, ed. D. R. Reinsch, Michelis Pselli Chronographia, 2 vols. (Berlin, 2014), 1:74.
55 J. E. Wiita, “The Ethnika in Byzantine Military Treatises” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1977); J. Haldon,
A Critical Commentary on the Taktika of Leo VI (Washington, DC, 2014), 331–388 on the relevant Constitution
18.
56 Choniates, History 135, ed. van Dieten, 135.
50 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

Conversely, Westerners perceived the Byzantines as having their own distinct

“Greek” way of dressing, which, together with their language and customs, formed a
package of ethnic indicia which proved that they were not Romans as they claimed.57 It
was possible, in the imperial periphery, to be perceived as “dressed in the Greek way.”58
But here too, particular items or styles, specifically court garments of silk, probably
became stereotypical, a kind of elite shorthand in the West for Byzantine fashion. This is
what Liudprand of Cremona had in mind when he said that the Greeks boasted of being
superior to all other nations in their dress as much as in their wisdom.59
This brings us back to the court and its importance for maintaining Roman
tradition within the empire. More than any other person, the emperor represented
Romanness to his subjects, and so his appearance and comportment were symbolically
important as well. When Romanos IV Diogenes (r. 1068–1071) was captured in battle by
the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, he was treated hospitably and generously. This included
giving him a new set of clothes, which happened to be Turkish. For days, the Roman
emperor was dressed like a Turk. While there were many worse things that he could
have suffered, this was by itself a symbolic humiliation and reminder of his defeat, with
Turkishness literally overwriting his Roman body. Byzantine historians noted that when
Romanos was eventually released and returned to the empire, he was still wearing
“Turkish” or “barbarian” clothes, whereupon he changed back into “something more
Roman.”60 One of those historians was Zonaras, who, for a Byzantine, was unusually
sensitive to innovations, especially when made by the Komnenoi. Narrating the wars
of Octavian and Mark Antony, he pauses to note that Antony wore foreign dress. “If
he, a consul and general of the Romans, was blamed for wearing clothes that were
not ancestral, how could one exempt from blame and reproach the emperors of today
who dress in a way that violates ancestral tradition and wear barbarian clothes, not
sometimes but all the time?”61

57 Liudprand, Embassy to Constantinople 51, tr. P. Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona
(Washington, DC, 2007), 270. See also the letter (871 AD) by Louis II to Basil I, in Monumenta Germaniae
Historica Epp. VII (Berlin, 1928), 385–394. For specific observers, see Ball, Byzantine Dress, 46–47.
58 E.g., Melo (Meles) of Bari, in PmbZ (Berlin, 2000–), ser. 2, 25033, cites the chronicle of the Monastery of
St. Bartholomew: more Graecorum vestibus indutum. For dress as a marker of distinction of “Greeks” in
southern Italy, see A. Peters-Custot, “Le barbare et l’étranger dans l’Italie méridionale pré-normande (IXe–Xe
siècles): l’Empire à l’éprouve de l’altérité,” in Le barbare, l’étranger: Images de l’autre, ed. D. Nourrisson and Y.
Perrin (St-Étienne, 2005), 147–163, at 152.
59 Liudprand, Embassy to Constantinople 54, tr. Squatriti, 271–272. For Byzantine garments in Anglo-Saxon
England, see K. N. Ciggaar, Western Travellers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium, 962–1204 (Leiden,
1996), 134–135; in general, A. Muthesius, “The Impact of the Mediterranean Silk Trade on Western Europe
before 1200 AD,” in Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving, ed. A. Muthesius (London, 1995), 135–146.
60 Michael Attaleiates, History 166, ed. and tr. A. Kaldellis and D. Krallis, Michael Attaleiates: The History
(Cambridge, MA; London, 2012), 302–303: “Τουρκικὴ στολὴ … ῥωμαϊκὴ σκευή.” Zonaras, Chronicle 18.14, ed.
Büttner-Wobst, 703: “πρὸς τὸ ῥωμαϊκότερον.”
61 Zonaras, Chronicle 10.28, ed. M. Pinder, Ioannes Zonarae Annales, Volume 2 (Bonn, 1844), 395; cf. 7.17 (ibid.,
65) on long braided hair (“… just like many have in the palace today. Once this evil was introduced into
the polity, it is possible to see Cincinnatuses everywhere”); cf. R. Macrides and P. Magdalino, “The Fourth
 Anthony Kaldellis | Ethnicity and Clothing in Byzantium 51

Where John II Komnenos had once monitored the clothes of his courtiers, that
task increasingly fell to critical historians who had lost out in the game of power. In
the fourteenth century, it was Nikephoros Gregoras who took it upon himself to defend
the integrity of ancestral Roman customs when it came to dress, especially to hats. He
complained in his Roman History that, during the reign of Andronikos III Palaiologos (r.
1328–1341), everyone, whether they were in the fields or the palace, wore strange hats:
Latin, Serbian, Bulgarian, or Syrian, each according to his random taste, and with no
regard to the age-distinctions that had formerly been maintained. This, he believed,
was a sign of the decline of the state.62 In a later passage, Gregoras rants about how
the empire was declining and degraded under John VI Kantakouzenos (r. 1347–1354), the
emperor who supported Gregoras’ theological opponent Gregory Palamas. New habits
and customs were introduced that entirely undermined the former good order and
culture of the Romans. Specifically, he talks about clothing and about how “one could
no longer tell whether a person was a Roman or belonged to some other genos. For their
clothing was not entirely in the Persian fashion, or purely in the Latin, or even entirely
Gothic, or Serbian, Bulgarian, or Hungarian.” Instead, these elements were all jumbled
together, even on the same body.63 It is easy to see this as a metaphor for the precarious
and confusing state of the empire in the mid-fourteenth century. Economic historians
see it as a reflection of the decline of the Byzantine silk industry and the empire’s need to
import its luxury clothes from abroad.64
Late Byzantine society was penetrated on many levels by the Latin presence:
socially, politically, economically, religiously, and intellectually.65 For as close and similar
as they were to the Byzantines, the Latins or Franks became a kind of symbolic antithesis
against which some Byzantines, including Gregoras, defined their own culture. Gregoras
used the category of ethnically appropriate clothing in marking transitions in both
directions. He wrote a dialogue à clef about his other theological opponent, Barlaam of
Calabria. According to this work, when Barlaam decided to come to Byzantium, he had
to learn to speak Greek properly and generally fit in with his new culture, and so he

Kingdom and the Rhetoric of Hellenism,” in The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. P.
Magdalino (London; Rio Grande, 1992), 117–156, at 129.
62 Gregoras, Roman History 11.11, ed. L. Schopen and I. Bekker, Nicephori Gregorae Byzantina Historia, 3 vols.
(Bonn, 1829–1855), 1:567–568. For changes in Late Byzantine ceremonial attire, see Parani, “Cultural Identity
and Dress.”
63 Gregoras, Roman History 37.46, ed. Schopen and Bekker, 3:555. For Byzantine hats in particular, see Parani,
“Optional Extras,” 425–427; T. Kiousopoulou, “Στοιχεία της βυζαντινής ενδυμασίας κατά την ύστερη εποχή:
Τα καπέλα,” in Το Βυζάντιο ώριμο για αλλαγές: Επιλογές, ευαισθησίες και τρόποι έκφρασης από τον ενδέκατο
στον δέκατο πέμπτο αιώνα, ed. C. Angelidi (Athens, 2004), 187–196.
64 A. E. Laiou and C. Morrisson, The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge, 2007), 191–192.
65 A. Kaldellis, Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and People in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia, 2014),
166–183. For the encounter in the realm of dress, see M. Parani, “Encounters in the Realm of Dress: Attitudes
towards Western Styles in the Greek East,” in Renaissance Encounters: Greek East – Latin West, ed. M. S.
Brownlee and D. H. Gondicas (Leiden; Boston, 2013), 263–301.
52 IDENTITY AND THE OTHER IN BYZANTIUM

changed his language, beard, dress, outfit, manners, and, in a word, “everything.”66 But it
never quite gelled, and he returned to his native Italy. Conversely, Theodoros Palaiologos,
who was whisked away at a young age to the West to become the Marquis of Montferrat,
returned to Byzantium and shocked everyone by displaying how thoroughly he had been
transformed into a Latin. For Gregoras, the markers of this transformation included his
mindset, faith, clothing, shaven chin, and, in general, all his habits.67
Whether it was possible to identify a Frank or Latin by his clothes in the later
Byzantine period remains uncertain, and must have varied by context. Already in the
twelfth century, Choniates had noted that Venetians in Constantinople had so thoroughly
assimilated to local norms and fashions that you could tell them only by their name (or race:
genos).68 Still, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, a dreambook associated with Manuel
II Palaiologos (r. 1391–1425) noted that to dream of “Frankish clothes” was a premonition of
“freedom,” because the Franks, just like the Tartars, Turks, Indians, Scythians, and all other
types of people, “indicate freedom.”69 All but the Romans, apparently.
In conclusion, we will probably never know exactly what most Byzantines wore
most of the time. But sufficient references in texts of the middle and late periods indicate
that clothing was treated as a marker of ethnicity. At any given time, the Romans were
associated with a particular manner of dress and so were the other ethnic groups that
lived inside and outside the empire. We might assume that this ethnically distinctive
style of dress was derived from the fashion of the imperial court, and this is sometimes
the case but not always or even for the most part. Our sources give the impression that it
was possible to tell the difference between, say, an average Roman and Bulgarian based
on their clothing, though in practice other ethnic indicia presumably came into play
as well. Starting in the Komnenian period, the clothing of the aristocracy began to be
morally policed for its perceived deviations from ethnic tradition. Conversely, when it
came to the dress of ethnic others, the Romans had stereotypes, of course, which in some
cases, especially the Bulgarians, supposedly revealed that nation’s backward character.
At the court, however, foreigners in the emperor’s service were sometimes expected to
wear the same ethnic garment, which reinforced on the sartorial level the ideological
difference between Romans and others that we find in Byzantine texts.

66 P. L. M. Leone, Niceforo Gregora: Fiorenzo o Intorno alla sapienza (Naples, 1975), 71. Unfortunately, the sentence
that follows about his decision to change or not change his stole seems to be corrupt and it is hard to follow
what is being said (the apparatus gives a variant that throws even more confusion onto this passage).
67 Gregoras, Roman History 11.1, ed. Schopen and Bekker, 1:396. T. Shawcross, “‘Do Thou Nothing without
Counsel’: Political Assemblies and the Ideal of Good Government in the Thought of Theodore Palaeologus
and Theodore Metochites,” Al-Masaq 20 (2008): 89–118, at 115.
68 Choniates, History 171, ed. van Dieten, 171. See G. Page, Being Byzantine: Greek Identity before the Ottomans
(Cambridge, 2008), 90.
69 A. Delatte, Anecdota Atheniensia, 2 vols. (Liége, 1927–1933), 1:516: “Περὶ στολῆς Φράγγων.” See S. M.
Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction
(Aldershot, 2008), 204.