military history – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

I chose these four fortresses as representations of the observable differences between Byzantine fortified sites. Not all fortifications were made equal. Differences lie not only in the choice of how walls and towers are constructed, but also in the placement of these fortified sites in the landscape. Careful analysis of these features can reveal the underlying assumptions and motivations of the builders. I have chosen among these four fortifications a military base, a refuge, a center for agricultural exploitation, and a fortified residence within the Maeander River valley.

The Locations of the Fortresses, made by author in QGIS.

Kadıkalesi[1]

Kadıkalesi is a great example of a military fortress likely built and used by the Byzantine armed forces. The entrances, not just the main one but the two postern entrances too, had a bent gate, which denies an attacker a good view inside the fortress (see Figure 2). The towers project from the walls and include a larger circular tower which is more resilient to projectiles than a square tower. Throughout the entire circuit of walls, platforms known as battlements were built for soldiers to be able to view the landscape. The walls were caped with crenulations, which provided coverage for those soldiers from fire from below (see Figure 3). This fortress was found on a small hill above a road, about 50 meters above sea level. On the one hand, this elevation gave the soldiers good visibility of the surrounding countryside, but, on the other, it was low enough that the soldiers could quickly do something about a threat (see Figure 2).

The Bent Gate of Kadıkalesi, photo by author.

The Battlements of Kadıkalesi, photo by author.

Fındıklı Kalesi[2]

Fındıklı Kalesi was a large fortress on the top of a mountain, enclosing an area of seven hectares at an elevation higher than 600 meters above sea level. Like Kadıkalesi, the walls were built with military concerns in mind; a series of towers and periodic battlements defend the portions of wall spanning the gaps between rocks, while a double gate fortifies the most vulnerable part of the fortress in the southeast. The size of the fortress was partly determined by geology; the walls follow the edges of a massive rock outcropping. Unlike Kadıkalesi, however, the fortress was isolated from the Byzantine roads that cross the mountain and unable to serve in the policing of routes. I agree with scholars who see Fındıklı Kalesi as a refuge for times of invasion with only a small permanent peacetime population.[3] This was a fortress, not of lords or soldiers, but of farmers and shepherds, who needed its great size to house flocks of sheep and its isolated location to keep just far enough away from any potential raiders that this ‘bluff in stone’ may appear like a formidable military fortress.

View North from Inside Fındıklı Kalesi, photo by author.

Mersinet İskelesi[4]

The impressive fortress found on the southern coast of Lake Bafa appears to be a military fort like Kadıkalesi. The use of blind arches to support the battlements even shows an improvement over the thick walls of Kadıkalesi. However, I argue that military effectiveness was not the main concern of this fortress. The defining element of the fortress is a great tower bisected by the enceinte wall. However, there is no communication between the walls and the tower; anyone stationed in the tower could not advance into the battlements in response to a threat. Second, the tower does not protrude from the wall, which decreased its visibility and potential range of fire. While Mersinet İskelesi’s position does provide a good view of the eastern half of Lake Bafa, nearby hills could provide a better view. Instead, this fortress has more in common with the isolated towers found around Lake Bafa and in the wider Maeander Valley. Mersinet İskelesi is an isolated tower with an increased budget. I suspect that this fortress and the other towers have something to do with the exploitation of agricultural estates as these towers lie at the edge of the most plentiful area of farmable land adjacent to Lake Bafa, even if this fortress is usually interpreted as a fortified monastery[5] or military base.[6]

View of Tower of Mersinet İskelesi from Lake Bafa, photo by author.

Central Tower of Mersinet İskelesi from inside the Fortress, photo by author.

The Monastery of Stylos[7]

The final fortress is the monastery of Stylos. Its walls aided the defense of a community which resided in isolated places like a type of fortified residence. However, this monastery was never intended to operate like a military fortress. For instance, the battlements were limited to walls located at known entrances on the north and south side. They were only interested in watching visitors who intended to use a proper gate and not in observing the wider region. Nor was it a refuge. While the monastery was deep in its mountain like Fındıklı Kalesi, Stylos is near a branch of an ancient road network, which gives the monastery a greater ability to interact with others on and off the mountain. Finally, the division of interior fortification betrays a uniquely monastic concern: the proper veneration of the founder of the monastery. The inner bastion of the monastery contains the hermitage of Saint Paul the Younger cut in a tower of rock and decorated with a painted program of religious images (see Figures 6 and 7). I suspect the fortification of the hermitage likely served to encourage the veneration of their founder and to connect that founder with the builder of the walls, likely Christodoulos of Latros who would go on to found the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos. Whatever the purpose of the inner gate was, it is hard to imagine it served the defense of the monastery.

The Inner Gate of Stylos Leading to the Hermitage, photo by author.

View of the Hermitage of Saint Paul the Younger, photo by author.

Tyler Wolford, PhD
Byzantine Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen im südlichen Jonien,” IstMitt 11 (1961): 19-23.

[2] Hans Lohmann et al., Survey in der Mykale 1, Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 2014-2017, II.510-513 (MYK 65).

[3] Jesko Fildhuth, Das byzantinische Priene, Berlin: DAI, 2017, 96-98; for an opposing view see Lohmann et al., Survey in der Mykale, I.284-290.

[4] Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen,” 17-19.

[5] Urs Peschlow, “Latmos,” Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst 5 (1995): 695-696.

[6] Müller-Wiener, “Mittelalterliche Befestigungen,” 18-19.

[7] Theodor Wiegand, Der Latmos, Milet III.1, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913, 61-72.

This short research blog focuses on the development of the word ἁμαρτάνω “to sin” from the advent of Christianity to the late Byzantine era. The word, ἁμαρτάνω, is widely used in the Bible as it appears forty-three times. To word’s primary meaning in the Bible was to “err and sin”; however, from time to time, it was also used to signify the action of offending. ἁμαρτάνω occurs in many different forms in the New Testament as we see it in aorist first-person singular active form Ἥμαρτον” eight times, second-person singular indicative middle six times, and second-person indicative active plural form three times.[1] I will trace the different nuances in the meaning of this word in the subsequent periods, especially in the late Byzantine period. My argument is that as several Greek and non-Greek sources indicate, the word ἁμαρτάνω began having a military connotation in this period as it was applied to the Christian military units who had cooperated with the enemy forces, especially the Turks.

Inscription, in The Collection of Ancient Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum

In Homeric times, ἁμαρτάνω had no religious connotation. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament suggests that, initially, the word was used to convey the action of “missing” i.e failure to follow rules and signify a moral deficit or immoral physical undertaking. [2] However, in the later periods (c. 400 BCE), we begin seeing a shift from legal to religious use since ἁμαρτάνω made its way to the Book of Kings in the old testament, meaning “to rebel” against the god and his order in the earth.[3] From a theological standpoint, rebelling against the will of God means to err from the true path and therefore to sin. In this way, those who had intentionally deviated from moral or religious standards came to be defined as αμαρτωλός “the sinful one” in the later Christian religious texts.[4]

Early Christian symbols on an Egyptian textile, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

ἁμαρτάνω is mostly used to signify the action of “sin” and neglecting the commands of God with an exception of “offending” in the New Testament.[5] In the Book of Romans, for instance, we see the following structure: “γὰρ ἀνόμως ἥμαρτον ἀνόμως καὶ” which means “Indeed without law I sinned without law also[…]”.[6] Here, ἁμαρτάνω was used in the aorist, active, and indicative form. In another example, this time from the Book of Corinthians, the word is used in such a construction: “οὕτως δὲ ἁμαρτάνοντες εἰς τοὺς” meaning “thus moreover sinning against those […]” in the participle, present, active form.[7] Besides the action of sinning, ἁμαρτάνω seems to be used in a different meaning, “to offend”, in the Book of Apostles although a minor disagreement exists between various interpreters. Regarding the following phase: “Καίσαρά τι ἥμαρτον[…]” while New American Standard Bible renders the word as “committing”, the King James version translate the term as “offending”. However, the new international version disagrees with these suggestions, interpreting the whole phrase as “Caesar [in] anything sinned […]”.[8]

Nicolle, David. Armies of the Ottoman Turks 1300-1774. London: Osprey, 1983.

Besides its use in legal and religious spheres, towards the late Byzantine period, we begin seeing the word, ἁμαρτάνω, or its variants in Greek and Turkish texts in the military context. With the Turkish advance towards western Asia Minor and the Balkans in the later 13^th and early 14^th centuries, the local Greek-speaking people began adjusting to the newly established political reality in their respective territories by means of cooperating with their new rulers. A significant portion of the Greek population in these regions had converted to Islam, while others participated in the Ottoman military system as auxiliary units. As the later Byzantine writer Pachymeres states in his Ιστορία, the Greeks from Anatolia, “ἐπιμιξάντων καὶ Ῥωμαíων ἐξ ἀνατολῆς”, had occasionally joined the Turkish forces to raid the Byzantine territories in the hopes of acquiring material gain.[9] Besides Pachymeres, Doukas also refers to these Greek collaborators in his historical work, calling them “μιξοβαρβαροι” meaning half-Greek and half-Turks.[10] Although these authors shunned using the word, ἁμαρτωλός, several Turkish authors borrow this term from their Greek correspondents. An early Ottoman called Aşıkpaşazade reports that the founder of the Ottoman principality, Osman Gazi, had a “martolos” ( مارتلوس) by the name of Artun who acted as a spy in the Byzantine territories for the Ottomans.[11] After the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans, as the land surveys indicate, the Ottomans had given landed estates to several Christian military units who were also called “martolos”.[12]

Greek Armatolos by Carl Haag (1820–1915).

Lastly, after the mid-fourteenth century, the Ottomans also formed provincial forces in mainland Greece named “armatolos” which had a clear phonetic resemblance with the word “amartolos”. Although several scholars argued that this term had derived from a medieval loan word from Latin arma “weapon” via Greek αρματολός it is also within the boundaries of possibility that the development of that word might have originated from αμαρτωλός since the use of the latter preceded the former. During the Greek War of Independence (1821-1828), these αρματολός units had actively participated in military encounters against the Ottoman forces as we are able to trace their role in Greek folk songs: “συλλογιστείτε το καλά, /ότι (: γιατί) σας καίμε τα χωριά· / γρήγορα τ’ αρματολίκι,/ οτ’ ερχόμαστε σαν λύκοι” “Think well, / that [why] we burn your villages; / quickly the armatoliki, / that we come like wolves”.[13]

In sum, ἁμαρτάνω had no religious implications during Homeric times as it was used to convey the idea of “missing” (i.e. “missing the mark”). However, in the later periods, it started appearing in the Bible as the word began to signify the act of transgression against the word of God. In the late Byzantine period, however, a derivation of this word, ἁμαρτωλός, was used for Christians who cooperated with the enemy forces since it was thought that they rebelled against God by aligning themselves with the non-Christian adversaries.

[1] Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Search for word: ἁμαρτάνω.

[2]Danker, Frederick W. et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Exeter: Eerdmans, 1974) 44.

[3] Ibid. 43.

[4] Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary, ed. James Morwood and John Taylor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

[5] Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Exeter: William Eerdmen Publishing, 1985. 49.

[6] www.biblegateway.com, Romans 2:12-16.

[7] www.biblegateway.com, Corinthians 8-12.

[8] www.biblegateway.com, Acts 25:8.

[9] George Pachymeres, Relations Historiques, ed. Albert Failler, 5 vols (Paris, 1984–2000) 4:643.18.

[10] Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks by Doukas, ed. Harry Magouilas. Detroit, 1975. 33.

[11] Aşıkpaşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi ed. Kemal Yavuz and Yekta Saraç. İstanbul: MAS Matbaacılık, 2003. 324.

[12] Suret-i Defter-i Sancak-ı Tirhala, ed. Melek Delilbasi and Muzaffer Arikan, (Ankara: TTK, 2001) 296-334.

[13] Demetrius Petropoulos, ελληνικα δημοτικα τραγουδια Vol1 (Greek Popular Songs), (Athens: Βασικη βιβλιοθηκη, 1958): 3-65.

Tag: military history

Why Fortify? A Short Introduction to Four Byzantine Fortifications in the Maeander Valley

The “Sinful” Soldiers of the Early Ottoman Military Structure: οι ἁμαρτωλόι