“Democratic” Action in Eleventh-Century Byzantium: Michael Attaleiates’s “Republicanism” in Context

The History of Michael Attaleiates is one of the most important sources for the study of eleventh-century Byzantium. It is representative of Byzantine efforts to come to terms with the important social and political changes that affected the empire in the course of the eleventh century. In his work Attaleiates often returned to the world of republican Rome in order to seek models of political agency that he then set up against the portraits of his contemporaries. Attaleiates’s fascination with Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paulus, and Quintus Fabius Cunctator is intriguing to modern readers of the History, but his use of republican language and democratic terminology in two accounts of violent popular political activity is evidence of an effort to explain and potentially legitimize some form of popular participation in the empire’s politics. This article examines the History’s account of two popular rebellions and argues that Attaleiates’s take on the actions of the Byzantine populace is part of a bold reassessment of the place of the empire’s urban strata in the world of Byzantine politics. Attaleiates’s “republicanism” is examined here next to the work of Psellos, Xiphilinos, Zonaras, and Anna Komnene, to reveal the depth of Byzantine engagement with republican political history and ideology.