Life and Society in Byzantine Cappadocia

by Michael J. Decker, Eric Cooper

Cappadocia, in central Turkey, is an unforgettable region. A land best known for its striking volcanic landscape pocked with underground cities and richly ornamented churches, Byzantine Cappadocia has long been considered a sparsely inhabited holy land of solitaries and monasteries. This is the first history of a vital area that elucidates key aspects of economy, faith and society along the frontier of the thousand-year Byzantine Empire. Drawing on extensive textual and archaeological evidence, this book reveals images of a dynamic landscape and a Christian society at whose apex lay a fluid body of aristocratic elites. The land over which they lorded was far more populous, diverse and economically vibrant than has been supposed and supported a caste of wealthy, intensely competitive landowners. The relics of settlements and beautifully decorated churches that they left behind obscure the frequent violence of frontier life, in which the landed aristocrats battled with one another, the Muslim Arabs, and even the emperor for power.

354 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 27, 2012

Reviews

[Anatolikon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooper and Decker set out to provide an up-to-date survey of scholarship on the Byzantine period of occupation in Cappadocia. They are the first to acknowledge the patchy nature of the evidence: only limited references exist in the written sources, and the archaeological picture is very far from complete. Nonetheless, this is a useful book that makes a number of key arguments. The first part of the book deals with the idea that Cappadocia was a remote backwater, and instead the authors argue persuasively for the employment of a wide variety of agricultural techniques and crops and wide-range exchange patterns. The second part of the book argues against the idea of Cappadocia as a monastic holy land. The authors posit that most of the "monasteries" are in fact elite residences, and that instead of a Christian landscape we would do better to think about a landscape populated by Christians. The third part of the book turns to those elites and charts their history from late antiquity to the Komnenian period, with the authors arguing that elite cultural and patronage networks put Cappadocia into an awkward position when its sons became emperors.
While this is a good book, it has a few problems. Its chapters on the religious landscape are over-long and add little: they are primarily short general histories of Byzantine monasticism and the church. Who qualifies as a Cappadocian elite is also never made clear by Cooper and Decker, and many of the same families that are hear claimed as Cappadocian can have other labels applied to them as well. The selection of images and plans is also disappointing, not least because the authors regularly invoke wall painting as a potential source of dating structures, but never actually show us any!