Entangled Histories. Network Analysis, Complexity Theory and Relational Sociology as Tools of Historical Analysis

E. MITSIOU – M. POPOVIĆ – J. PREISER-KAPELLER (eds.), Multiplying Middle Ages. New methods and approaches for the study of the multiplicity of the Middle Ages in a global perspective (3rd–16th CE). Proceedings of the Conference in Vienna in November 2012. Vienna 2014

“Most cultural theorists saw network analysis as located squarely in the positivist camp, reducing cultural richness to 1s and 0s and lacking attention to processes of interpretation and meaning-construction.”; thus Ann Mische in 2011 summed up attitudes towards network analysis which are still strong also in many circles of historical studies. Of course, these verdicts were not entirely unfounded, as Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin pointed out in 1994 in their influential paper on „Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency“: “despite its powerful conceptualization of social structure, network analysis as it has been developed to date has inadequately theorized the causal role of ideals, beliefs, and values, and of the actors that strive to realize them; as a result, it has neglected the cultural and symbolic moment in the very determination of social action.” Although meanwhile various theoretical concepts and models of “relational sociology” have been developed , the cultural dimension is still underrepresented in many works of quantitatively oriented social and also historical network analysis. In this paper, I will present the explanatory value of some of these relational approaches to social reality for historical research and their combination with quantitative network analysis. For various case studies, the actual interplay between the structural and the cultural dimension of social, religious, economic, political or intellectual linkages between individuals, groups, communities, but also cultural concepts will be demonstrated.

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Pre-print, to be published in: Ch. Gastgeber - E. Mitsiou - J. Preiser-Kapeller - V. Zervan (eds.), The Patriarchate of Constantinople in Context and Comparison. Vienna 2015 (forthcoming) At a time when the Byzantine political sphere of influence almost constantly contracted, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century across the Eurasian landmass despite all devastations opened new horizons for the activities of merchants, clergymen, scholars and other highly mobile groups from the Far East to the Mediterranean. With the dioceses in Russia, at the Black Sea and in Anatolia, also large areas of the ecclesiastical province of the Patriarchate of Constantinople were integrated in the Mongol states of the Golden Horde and the Il K̲h̲āns. Byzantine Emperors and Patriarchs tried to arrange with these powerful new neighbours; for this purpose, the ecclesiastics of the Patriarchate, who profited from the relative tolerance of the Mongol rulers in religious regards, could serve as intermediaries. For the metropolitans of Alania and of Zekchia at the Black Sea, we were able to discuss these aspects for the relations between Constantinople and the Golden Horde in a recently published paper. In our presentation, we intend to analyse the role of ecclesiastics also for the connections between Byzantium, the Patriarchates of Constantinople and of Antioch on the one side and the Mongol Il K̲h̲āns in Persia and Anatolia on the other side; with the famous astronomer Gregory Chioniades (ca. 1303-1310) and the infamous “impostor” Paulos Palaiologos Tagaris (ca. 1371-1375) we even find two “Greek” bishops of the Il K̲h̲āns´ capital of Tabrīz in Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān in Byzantine documents of the time. In addition, a survey of Greek, Latin and Armenian as well as Syriac, Arabic and Persian sources allows us to describe the entanglements between Byzantine ecclesiastics and their multi-religious and multi-ethnic environment in these regions in greater detail, thus setting the Patriarchate as well as the documents in its Register within the wider context of the “globalised” Mongol world of the later Middle Ages.

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""In more than 1000 years of history, the Byzantine Empire experienced several severe times of crisis which brought it almost to the point of destruction. Yet, Byzantium proved to be one of the most resilient polities of medieval Europe and endured; even after the loss of its capital to the Crusaders of 1204, Byzantine statehood and church were able to regenerate in exile and to reclaim Constantinople after 57 years. But the political and economic environment had changed dramatically, and Byzantium could not re-establish its own imperial sphere in the Eastern Mediterranean; the commercial centres of Italy (Venice, Genoa) had integrated Byzantium´s former territories in the late medieval “Worldsystem” , in which Byzantium only occupied a position at the periphery; and new expansive Turkish polities had emerged in Western Asia Minor, which reduced Byzantium to a South-Eastern European regional power and finally after 1350 extended their power to the politically fragmented Balkans. Internally, competing aristocratic factions, ecclesiastical disputes and a “lack of unity and social cohesion” weakened the central state´s ability to adapt to the challenges of this new environment. Despite this complex of factors and developments, contemporary scholarship still often considers Late Byzantium a “Pseudo-Empire”, more or less “programmed” for destruction after 1204 (or even earlier) , and interprets the development of these 250 years from the perspective of its endpoint – the Ottoman conquest of 1453. Our paper challenges this view; it aims at a new analysis of Byzantium´s “last centuries” not as an isolated case, but from the perspective of a pre-modern polity facing the same dramatic changes and challenges as others societies did at the same time of the “Late Medieval Crisis”, which took hold of the entire old world from China to England in the 14th century. At the same time, we implement concepts, models and tools provided by the new fields of complexity studies and social network analysis in order to include the historical dynamics of crisis and adaptation in all its complexities at the level of macro-processes (in demography, climate and economy), of the structural framework of political, economic, social and religious networks, of individual and collective decision making and reaction to crisis phenomena. Thus, it becomes possible to identify similarities and peculiarities of Byzantium´s development in comparison with other contemporary polities and to find answers to the question why some segments of the Byzantine framework were able to adapt and to survive beyond 1453 within the new Ottoman framework while the Byzantine polity in its totality collapsed.""

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„There are few theoretical approaches to which historian respond so negatively as to the explanation of historical processes by such theories“, the German historian Rainer Waltz states most accurately in his study on „Theories of Social Evolution and History“; there he also presents two main causes for this rejection: a moral one, the perversion of evolutionary thinking in so-called Social Darwinist theories in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a scientific one, the fear of a biologistic interpretation of human history by adopting evolutionary models (Walz, 2004). This distinguishes historical studies from other social sciences and humanities such as anthropology or sociology and even other historical disciplines such as archaeology, where evolutionary models have become part of the methodological toolkit (Renfrew & Bahn, 2008; for a rare example from the field of history of literature cf. Moretti, 2009). Although most historians are reluctant to adopt evolutionary models (yet alone in their mathematized or sociobiologist form) for the interpretation of human past (respectively the larger or smaller period of time they are specialised in), terms such as “evolution” and concepts of evolutionary thinking such as “adaption” or “selection” are used in numerous descriptions of historical events and processes, albeit often in a metaphorical way (Walz, 2004). At the same time it is evident that major developments in human history such as the emergence of the human kind itself, of human culture and of complex social structures such as states as well as phenomena of long duration (up to the scale of “Big History” from the Big Bang until present times as it has been attempted in the last decades, Spier 2010) cannot be explained without the help of evolutionary concepts (cf. Blute, 2010; Voland, 2009); but again, these subjects refer mainly to the fields of evolutionary biologists and psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists or (prehistoric) archaeologists (cf. Yoffee, 2004). Some specialists from these disciplines have also tried to adapt such concepts for the entire human history beyond its “beginnings”, but have equally found mixed reception among historians, especially if they try to demonstrate some kind of progress in the development of humanity as for instance Steven Pinker has done most recently in his study on “Why Violence has declined” (Pinker, 2011; see also Atran, 2002; Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Morris, 2010). In contrast to this (non)-use of evolutionary concepts for historical studies, we intend to demonstrate the benefit of a complex evolutionary approach for the analysis of a specific period of late medieval/early modern history between 1200 and 1500 CE, which has been attributed central importance for the so-called “Rise of the West”, since it saw the beginning of European overseas expansion at its end (cf. Goldstone, 2009; Morris, 2010). In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it (1978), the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century (Behringer, 2007; Atwell, 2001; Benedictow, 2004; Brook, 2010). The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them (Diamond & Robinson, 2011); accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies (cf. also Borsch, 2005). In particular, we will analyse and compare five polities in the “Old World”, England, Hungary, Byzantium, Egypt and China, of which three disappeared around the end of this period due to the expansion of the most successful newly emerged Ottoman Empire (Byzantium in 1453, Mamluk Egypt in 1517, Hungary in 1526/1541; cf. also Preiser-Kapeller, 2011). In order to be able to capture variations and complexities within this sample, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. We understand complex systems as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists also tried to use concepts of complexity theory for the description of phenomena in their own fields, but again often only in a “metaphoric” way (Gaddis, 2002; Hatcher & Bailey, 2001). Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field (Kiel & Elliott, 1997; Preiser-Kapeller, 2012). Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development (Goldstone, 1991; Turchin, 2003; Turchin & Nefedov, 2009). In addition, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of “systems theory” developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) in order to capture the interdependencies between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment (Luhmann, 1997; Becker & Reinhardt-Becker, 2001; Becker, 2004). Luhmann´s theory is valuable for our analysis in various aspects; it makes us aware of the reduction of environmental and social complexity which is reflected in our historical sources, and it provides a framework to approach complex mechanisms within and the dependencies between various social spheres and their environment. Its evolutionary aspects have also been analysed by Walz (2004). In addition, we employ methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals (Gould, 2003; Lemercier, 2005). Overall, our analytical approach allows us to capture the “diversité véritable” without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them, 2009) with regard to the transformation of polities and societies and their adaption to this “first world crisis”. Thereby, the value of a framework of evolutionary dynamics for the exploration of human history will be demonstrated References Atran, S. (2002). In Gods We Trust. The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Atwell, W. S. (2001). Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200–1699. Journal of World History 12/1, 29-98. Becker, F. & Reinhardt-Becker, E. (2001). Systemtheorie. Eine Einführung für die Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag. Becker, F. (Ed.). (2004). Geschichte und Systemtheorie. Exemplarische Fallstudien. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag. Behringer, W. (2007). Kulturgeschichte des Klimas. Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung. Munich: C. H. Beck. Benedictow, O. J. (2004). The Black Death 1346–1353. The Complete History. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Inc. Blute, M. (2010). Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution. Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borsch, St. J. (2005). The Black Death in Egypt and England. A Comparative Study. Austin: University of Texas Press. Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brook, T. (2010). The troubled Empire. China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press. Diamond, J. & Robinson, J. A. (Eds.). (2011). Natural Experiments of History. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press. Gaddis, J. L. (2002). The Landscape of History. How Historians map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstone, J. A. (2009). Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850. New York: Mcgraw-Hill Higher Education. Gould, R. V. (2003). Uses of Network Tools in Comparative Historical Research. In: J. Mahoney & D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.). Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (p. 241-269). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatcher, J. & Bailey, M. (2001). Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England´s Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kiel, L. D. & Elliott, E. (Eds.). (1997). Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences. Foundations and Applications. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Lemercier, Cl. (2005). Analyse de réseaux et histoire. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 52/2, 88-112. Lieberman, L. (2009). Strange Parallels. Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 Vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Moretti, F. (2009). Kurven, Karten, Stammbäume. Abstrakte Modelle für die Literaturgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Morris, I. (2010). Why The West Rules For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future. London: Profile Books. Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature. Why Violence has declined. London: Viking. Preiser-Kapeller...

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"“Mobility” has been identified as a central aspect of socio-economic and political, cultural and religious developments in historical and social research in the last years; some scholars even speak about a “mobility turn”: “The mobility turn connects the analysis of different forms of travel, transport and communications with the multiple ways in which economic and social life is performed and organized through time and across various spaces.” (John URRY, Mobilities. Cambridge 2007, p. 6). These new conceptual frameworks can be fruitfully combined with traditional methods of historical analysis as well as with more recent tools for the mapping of mobility (such as HGIS) or the entanglements of communities across space (such as network analysis) in order to explore subjects, objects, motives and consequences of labour mobility in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Middle Ages with a special focus on the Byzantine Empire. In particular we will identify levels and scales (social levels, levels of organisational complexity; scales with regard to geographical distances, to numbers of individuals involved and to frequency, duration and permanence of mobility) as well as motivations and strategies of or towards labour mobility (in their socio-economic, cultural, political or environmental dimension, also with regard to the dichotomy forced/deliberate mobility and the efforts to control mobility by political and social actors). For this purpose, also the mobility of objects and of know-how through human agency will be examined as evidence for the mobility of labour. Thereby, the toolkit of concepts and instruments for the analysis of labour mobility in pre-modern societies will be expanded

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2001

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century. The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies. In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels. Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals. Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

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Il-Ḵh̲ānid Tabrīz became not only a nodal point in the spatial imagination of Christian merchants and missionaries, but was promoted even to a significant landmark in the Biblical and apocalyptic topography of 13th and 14th century Christianity. As this processes were very much connected to the rise of the city as centre of Mongol Iran, its prominence on the (mental) maps dwindled with its political and mercantile importance; yet, the case of Tabrīz provides a most interesting example for the imagination and organisation of space respectively the modification and adaption of these phenomena within the Christian communities confronted with the rise and fall of Mongol power in Iran.

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Published in Medieval Worlds Issue 2/2015: ›Empires in Decay‹ (peer reviewed, open access: http://www.medievalworlds.net/medieval_worlds?frames=yes) The project “Complexities and networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and Near East” (COMMED) at the Division for Byzantine Research of the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences aims at the adaptation and development of concepts and tools of network theory and complexity sciences for the analysis of societies, polities and regions in the medieval world in a comparative perspective. Key elements of its methodological and technological toolkit are applied for instance in the new project “Mapping medieval conflicts: a digital approach towards political dynamics in the pre-modern period” (MEDCON), which analyses political networks and conflict among power elites across medieval Europe with five case studies from the 12th to 15th century. For one of these case studies on 14th century Byzantium, the explanatory value of this approach is presented in greater detail. The presented results are integrated in a wider comparison of five late medieval polities across Afro-Eurasia (Byzantium, China, England, Hungary and Mamluk Egypt) against the background of the “Late Medieval Crisis” and its political and environmental turmoil. Finally, further perspectives of COMMED are outlined.

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The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains many valuable documents of the period 1315-1402, is one of the most important sources for the (church) history of this time of renewed Muslim expansion at Byzantium's cost. In this paper it will be analyzed how Islam is being described in those documents in regard to the terminology and the framework of traditional Byzantine polemics. A further topic is the reaction of the Byzantine laymen but also of the lower and high clerics to the Islamic expansion - whether in form of confrontation, collaboration, or even conversion. (The slides for the presentation of the paper are in the talks section of my academia.edu-website).

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Within this paper, the focus on one selected and relatively well-documented elite family within a well-studied period of Byzantine history (I refer to the older works of Seibt, Winkelmann and Kazhdan and more recent studies of Cheynet, Holmes, Beihammer and Haldon) allows us to reflect on the relational framework of the emergence and dynamics of elite status and elite networks, which may be of interest also for other cases across the medieval world.

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