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Greece

Although the unsettling bellows motion of the imperial frontiers did not stop, the attrition of Greek-language areas effectively now did, for the next four hundred years. This would not have been clear at the time, for while the southeastern lands of the Levant were being lost, the north too was in turmoil.

It was touch and go whether Greek would survive in its own heartland. After invasions from Germanic-speaking Goths in 378, Turkic-speaking Huns in 441-7, Germanic Ostrogoths in 479-82, and Turkic-speaking Bulgars in 493, the mayhem continued in the sixth century. Fifty years after the crisis, the Byzantine historian Procopius recounted:

Illyricum and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the Adriatic] to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese, was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured…34

Then, in 581, as John of Ephesus records: ‘an accursed people, called Slavonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the country of the Thessalonians, and all Thrace, and captured the cities, and took numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own’.35

This was not a temporary phenomenon, and it led to large-scale emigration by Greeks. According to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, by the year 587/8 scarcely any part of Greece was immune to the Slavic scourge, this time from the Avars (another Turkic group): ‘Only the eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the country.’

This might have been expected to lead to a permanent spread of Slavic languages, as indeed it did in Serbia and Bulgaria farther north (see Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309). But somehow the preponderance of Greek over Slavic speakers was restored in the south. In the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries the empire organised a series of resettlement programmes and missionary campaigns, moving Slavs into northern Anatolia, and bringing others into southern Greece. We hear that in 805 Nicephorus I ‘built de novo the town of Lacedaemon and settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thracēsians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it into a bishopric’.36

Likewise, in the 860s, Basil I was hard at work to convert the Serbs in the north: ‘having greeked them [graik$oTbar;sas], he subjected them to governors according to Roman custom, honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression of their own rulers’.37

The details are impossible to clarify, if the aim is to explain why some communities became Greek-speaking, as well as Christian; certainly the religious liturgies they learnt would have been in Greek. Later, service in the army would also have served to bring many Slavs into the Greek-speaking world. But the net effect is clear. Greek remained, or was re-established as, the dominant language of its traditional homeland.

Anatolia

Greek dominance in Anatolia lasted until 1071: in that year the empire lost the battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt, north of Lake Van) to a new power dominating the Muslim world, the sultanate of the Seljuk Turks.* Even so, it could still have avoided the loss of its whole heartland that resulted: the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, with other wars to fight, had attempted to reinstate the defeated emperor, Romanus Diogenes, on terms that would have established an alliance between the two powers, and given the Turks access to the Mediterranean through Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch in northern Syria. But Romanus, and the proffered