Some Trends in the Social Development of Eleventh-Century Byzantium

The social history of the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century is abundant in specific features. Some of them affect the military élite in particular. Among them are the “private” wars and conflicts and the establishment of personal retinues (hetaireiai). These regiments of theirs enabled the aristocrats to pursue individual ambitions and take firmer hold of their estates and regions of influence. Two early (second quarter of the 11th c.) cases of private conflicts are examined in details. The first one involves Basileios Skleros and Presianos/Prousianos, the eldest son of the Bulgarian ruler Ioan Vladislav (1015–1018). The second case is the notorious rivalry between Georgios Maniakes and Romanos Skleros, which in the end led the former to an open rebellion. Those and other examples help establish a specific line of development, which eventually resulted in the foundation of military aristocracy similar to that in Western Europe during the Komnenian dynasty. It was very much a consequence of the chaos in Anatolia after the defeat of Mantzikert and the ensuing civil war. However, the examined earlier cases are distant forerunners of this state of affairs