Anatolia pre-Turks
- Thread starter RedRalph
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Kraznaya
Princeps
It's funny how the entire discussion on ethnicity in the previous thread that you also created flew over your head completely.
yeah, up until around ~1600 Greek was spoken from about baghdad to naples. It's part of the reason Alexander succeeded so easily, because of all the fifth column efforts on behalf of the native Greek population in the Iranian Republic.
Caseyboy97
The past is irrelevent
For many centuries there was a Greek ethnicity throughout the region. but before that, the people were mostly descended from the Hittites.
sophie
Break My Heart
This is a complicated question.
For most of the lifetime of the Roman Empire, as far as we can tell, the majority of people in Anatolia spoke a variety of Greek. Perhaps as late as the fourth or fifth century, there were people in Anatolia in sizable numbers who spoke another language - for instance, a descendant of Katpatukan, or one of the Iranian-family languages - but it's reasonably safe to say that most people in Byzantine Anatolia spoke Greek.
Anatolian Byzantine Greeks spoke a different dialect of Greek than did the Greeks of Byzantine Europe - both in Italy and in what's now modern Greece - by the eleventh century, which is when the Turks made their appearance. This does not mean that Anatolia was populated by people who were descended from people who had lived in Greece. The Byzantine state was a bit of a mess, especially after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century, and had resettled all manner of people in Anatolia, from Iranians and Lebanese to Slavs and Armenians. But as far as we can tell, by the eleventh century, these people spoke Greek, and, more importantly, were Orthodox Christians. (The Armenians are a special case, and they're rather confusing - but that's true of basically anything that's involved in Armenian nationalism.)
"Greece" in the eleventh century was a small administrative region that didn't even take up all of what is modern day Greece. No state named "Greece" existed until the nineteenth century. So, um, that's kind of a weird question. But Anatolia was the economic, territorial, political, and military heartland of the Byzantine Empire. It would be rather silly for them to not have considered the Greek-speaking people who lived there "Greek enough". The only meaningful difference in terms of Greek culture between Anatolia and the rest of the medieval Byzantine state was that, by the eleventh century, Anatolian Byzantine Greek had slightly diverged from the Greek spoken in, well, Greece - part of the natural creation of dialects, of course.RedRalph said:
One might even say that Anatolian Greek was more Greek than the Greek spoken in what's now modern day Greece. For a century and a half, the Byzantines lost control of most of Greece to various disorganized Slavic groups, and only retook that area in the early ninth century. I think that the "European Byzantine Greek" dialect had a good deal of influence from Slavic languages, though I'm not sure.
In general, Kraz basically hit the nail on the head, though. It seems like you're asking a question in the same tenor as the one you asked in the Turkic peoples thread - without a whole lot of attention given to the answers provided in the thread. We can say that the overwhelming majority of people in Anatolia on the eve of the Saljuq invasions spoke Greek, and most of those people were Orthodox Christians of varying stripes. But there is no such thing as a "Greek" bloodline, or any genetic markers that made them "Greek". Within three centuries, many of those Greek-speaking people's descendants spoke Turkish or Arabic and were Muslims.
Would this have been considered a viable principality or statelet for some displaced and ambitious magnate/warlord, or in case of independence would it likely be split into smaller regions (Achaea, Morea, or w/e)
What does "regular, run-of-the-mill Greek" mean?
In classical times, people in Anatolia spoke Greek and were culturally pretty close to people on the Greek mainland and islands. However, people on the Greek mainland and islands certainly saw Anatolians as "foreign" in some way beyond how they viewed people from other islands or other cities. You can see this if you look at Greek religion in this period. The cult of the Great Mother was perceived as an Anatolian cult, and so was the associated cult of Attis. The wildness of the Great Mother had something to do with her supposedly Phrygian roots, and Attis is usually represented in art as wearing a Phrygian hat (even though there is no evidence that the myth of Atttis was Phrygian in origin, still the character was conceived as Phrygian). So for Greeks to the west of Anatolia, this supposedly Anatolian cult was conceived and portrayed as Anatolian and "other". Now you can argue about whether that means that Anatolians were considered "regular, run-of-the-mill Greeks" or not, but that argument is going to revolve around how you define that expression, not around any material facts of the matter.
In classical times, people in Anatolia spoke Greek and were culturally pretty close to people on the Greek mainland and islands. However, people on the Greek mainland and islands certainly saw Anatolians as "foreign" in some way beyond how they viewed people from other islands or other cities. You can see this if you look at Greek religion in this period. The cult of the Great Mother was perceived as an Anatolian cult, and so was the associated cult of Attis. The wildness of the Great Mother had something to do with her supposedly Phrygian roots, and Attis is usually represented in art as wearing a Phrygian hat (even though there is no evidence that the myth of Atttis was Phrygian in origin, still the character was conceived as Phrygian). So for Greeks to the west of Anatolia, this supposedly Anatolian cult was conceived and portrayed as Anatolian and "other". Now you can argue about whether that means that Anatolians were considered "regular, run-of-the-mill Greeks" or not, but that argument is going to revolve around how you define that expression, not around any material facts of the matter.
Where I come from, it has a very interesting meaning indeed, but I doubt it has anything to do with what RRW was asking.
Basically, exactly what Dachs said. The Anatolians certainly spoke Greek, but that doesn't make them Greek. Nor does it make them non-Greek. Modern-day ethnic constructs don't work well when you try to artificially force people into their molds, and that works in the past as well.
The Hittites were one group among many in ancient Anatolia.
It's worth noting that Hellenistic and early Roman Anatolia was decidedly different from Byzantine Anatolia in terms of who spoke what and what religions they followed, of course. Nobody was worshiping Attis or Kybele in the eleventh century, or speaking Katpatukan. To all intents and purposes, there was very little difference between the Greek-speakers in Anatolia and those in modern-day Greece during the middle Byzantine period - just a slight difference in dialect later on.
RedRalph
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I should have been clearer.
I didn't mean ethnically Greek (nor did I use the word ethnic in any way, shape or form, but don't let that put any of ye off having a go agt me for doing so), I meant culturally. Generally, would these people be regarded as Greeks, just as the inhabitants of Athens would have been? Would there have been striking differences in their culture compared to what would be regarded as the Greek heartland? I know full well there was no state called Greece, but I meant was the area considered a fundamental part of Greece, or was it seen as somewhere that Greek culture had penetrated but not fully assimilated?
I think Plotonius understood the question best.
I didn't mean ethnically Greek (nor did I use the word ethnic in any way, shape or form, but don't let that put any of ye off having a go agt me for doing so), I meant culturally. Generally, would these people be regarded as Greeks, just as the inhabitants of Athens would have been? Would there have been striking differences in their culture compared to what would be regarded as the Greek heartland? I know full well there was no state called Greece, but I meant was the area considered a fundamental part of Greece, or was it seen as somewhere that Greek culture had penetrated but not fully assimilated?
I think Plotonius understood the question best.
Linguistically, they spoke almost the same Greek as everybody else. Religiously, they were Greek Orthodox. The nobility maintained broadly similar literary traditions, although the magnates of the Anatolian Plateau (as distinct from the coast) were interested in somewhat different things than everybody else. Tastes in food, insofar as we know about them, obviously, varied by region. What else is there?
Princeps
More bombs than God
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Anatolia was mostly Greek before the Turks got through. It became rapidly Turkish because the Byzantine landowners had turned Anatolia into a huge pasture to grow their sheep. The primarily pastoral semi-nomadic Turks could quickly move into these lands as a result. Then, as the Byzantines figured that Anatolia was a lost cause, they made population transfers as part of peace treaties, futher "Turkifying" Anatolia. I don't think that the loss of anatolia was a huge blow to Byzantine manpower, as is often said, but a major blow to byzantine income, which had come before from two major sources, anatolian pastures and Constantinopolitan trade taxes and sound tolls. The crusader disintegration of the Byzantine heartland had a much larger impact on manpower.
Insofar as there were cultural divides in Byzantine society during the middle period - and there were a lot of them - they weren't generally between Anatolian inhabitants of the Empire and the ones in Europe. The urban/rural divide was much more interesting, but it was only in Anatolia that this mattered for a long time, if only because the Empire's only territory in Europe was a couple of coastal cities (until Eirene and Nikephoros I fought their Slavic wars). Athenian notables like Eirene Sarantapechaina's family weren't really different in any regionalizing ways from notables in, say, Ephesos.
Now, during the eleventh century, it's been argued that there was a genesis of identity among the magnates of the Anatolian plateau - basically analogous to the rich herders of the American West, right down to the fact that they had to fight off jihadi cattle rustlers - and that this is visible in literary traditions like the Digenes Akrites, an epic poem, and things like the testament of Kekaumenos Katakalon, who wrote a guidebook for his son. I think this is all well and good, but that one mustn't overstate the political or social importance of these Anatolian aristocrats - highlighting their regional frontiersman stockherding culture is one thing, but claiming that these men were mounting a threat to state central authority in the manner of French nobles at the same time is entirely something else, unsupported by the evidence. And, of course, this is aristocratic culture, not shared by anything but a certain slice of society even in the region to which it applied.
I agree with almost everything here - although I can't quite imagine what other kind of economy the Anatolian Plateau could have had, if not a pastoral one, and the way I read your post you're implying that it could've been good for something else.
But I don't think (well, this isn't my opinion, it's Jean-Claude Cheynet's 
) that the loss of the Anatolian plateau was particularly bad for Byzantine state finance in a direct sense. Financially, the early Komnenoi were in much the same situation as were the later Makedonian emperors. The western Anatolian coastline and even, arguably, the ephemerally-controlled Byzantine Syrian territories were much more important than the plateau in terms of manufactures and agriculture. What the loss of the plateau did was create a strategic context that made it almost impossible for the Byzantine state to hold onto what it had. Instead of being able to concentrate defenses at the Taurus Mountain passes, which had been the course of action since the Herakleian dynasty, the Komnenoi were forced to heavily garrison points all around the Anatolian coast, all of which were vulnerable to attack from the plateau. The first three Komnenoi pursued offensive operations to lessen the defensive burden on these places, but that took military competence that not all emperors were bound to share, and ultimately, with Andronikos I and the Angeloi, it turned out that they didn't.
Princeps
More bombs than God
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It's completely possible to farm in Anatolia. Turkey is self-sufficient in agricultural products after all.
Perhaps I should have clarified that it made byzantine finances less stable. Sure, they still could rake in large sums from sound tolls and trade, but that's not enough alone and trade is affected by many variables. Agriculture and pastoralism were more certain providers in those days.
I don't disagree with this.
hahahahahahahahahano.
The Celtic people in Galatia during the Hellenistic period were never much more than a few groups of soldiers superimposed over a native population that retained their language and some of their customs because they were in charge, more or less. By 200 AD - if not much earlier - their descendants were definitely no longer speaking a Celtic language, and their gods were, if anything, curiosities, not objects of worship.
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