The narrative sources of Byzantine history, that is chronicles, saints' lives and imperial decrees, mostly carry the voice of the capital and of the politics around it. The everyday administration of provincial towns appears in these texts only indirectly. The material that does most to fill this gap is not the documents themselves but the small lead seals used to close them. Pressed onto the cord of a letter or an official paper, these small metal discs survived for centuries in the soil after the written document had rotted away, and today they tell us the owner's name, his office and sometimes the region in which the seal circulated. For Amaseia (Amasya) this material is especially valuable, because in the Byzantine period the city was both the centre of a vast military and administrative district and the head of the church organisation in the interior of the Black Sea region.

What a Lead Seal Is and How It Was Made

Sealing was known in the Roman world as well, but in the Byzantine Empire, especially from the seventh century onward, the lead seal became widespread as a security device proving that a document really came from the person it claimed to come from and had not been opened on the way. Called molybdoboullon in Greek, or simply boulla, these seals were made from two separate round pieces of lead. The pieces were placed over the cords attached to the document, or over strips partly cut from the document itself and wrapped around the letter, and then pressed together with pliers called a bouleterion. The engraving on the pliers made the seal unique to its owner, and the cord was embedded in the lead. The letter could be opened only by breaking the seal or cutting the cord. Lead was cheap and easy to shape, and because it does not decay it was also well suited to the purpose; indeed, when the written document was lost, the seal attached to it often remained.

Early seals usually carried a plain animal figure or a simple pattern. After the eighth century seals developed and began to bear long Greek inscriptions in heavily abbreviated form. These inscriptions listed the owner's titles, sometimes his lineage, and a protective prayer. The prayer formula meaning "Lord, help your servant so-and-so" (Kyrie boethei to so doulo) is the most common, followed by the person's name and office. One face of a seal could show the Virgin, Christ or a saint. As an alternative to long inscriptions, complex monograms were also used, interlacing the letters of a name, a rank or a wish. Deciphering these monograms still demands specialist skill, and some of them have still not been read with certainty.

Seals generally belonged to the elite of their time. In the eleventh century their use spread to the upper middle class, but having a document sealed in lead still required a certain social and economic standing. For this reason seals are something like the records of the relatively small part of Byzantine society that took part in government.

Sigillography: Writing History with Seals

The discipline that studies seals is called sigillography or sphragistics. The word is derived from the Latin sigillum (seal) and the Greek graphe (writing, description), and is generally held to have been introduced in its Italian form by Anton Stefano Cartari in 1682. Within Byzantine studies, sigillography has gained particular importance because so few documents survive while seals are so numerous. More than forty thousand seals are said to be known; Christos Malatras gives the number of Byzantine lead seals preserved today as more than eighty thousand. The difference between the two figures must depend on which collections and unpublished pieces are counted. Gustave Schlumberger's large work Sigillographie de l'empire Byzantin, published in 1904, is one of the classic reference works of the field. The first international colloquium on Byzantine sigillography met at Dumbarton Oaks in August 1986.

Seals often document officials whose names appear in no other source. In some cases they give clues to the everyday duties of generals or patriarchs we know from narrative sources. The place where a seal was found is a separate piece of information. At least eighty percent of the seals whose findspot is known are thought to have been sent by people located in that region. Yet of the tens of thousands of seals preserved today, only a small fraction have an exactly known findspot. Because most pieces entered collections through dealers and collectors, the building and the layer from which a seal came is often unrecorded.

Amaseia as Capital of the Armeniakon Theme

Amaseia's place in Byzantine administration is best understood from its role as the centre of the Armeniakon theme. The theme was one of the four original themes, established in the middle of the seventh century on the territory of Lesser Armenia, and was formed from the remnants of the old eastern army, that is the units under the magister militum per Armeniam. These units were settled in Pontus, Paphlagonia and Cappadocia, and the region came to be named after them. The mention in 629, during Herakleios's Persian campaigns, of "George, tourmarches of the Armeniakoi" suggests that the theme may already have existed then, but the sources mention it for the first time with certainty on the occasion of the revolt of Saborios in 667/668. One of the earliest records of the theme is also a seal dated 717/718. In other words, the traces of the theme lie not only in narrative sources but also on a lead seal.

The strategos of the Armeniakon ranked, together with the strategoi of the Anatolikon and Thrakesion, among the first-tier strategoi and received a salary of forty pounds of gold a year. In the ninth century the theme fielded about nine thousand soldiers and included seventeen fortresses. Its size and its position on the eastern frontier made its strategos a powerful figure, and in the eighth century theme troops took part in several revolts. For this reason the theme was broken up in the ninth century. Charsianon and Cappadocia (first as kleisourai, then as full themes) were created in the south and east, around 819 Paphlagonia and Chaldia were split off on the coast, and later Koloneia too was separated as its own district. What remained to the Armeniakon was a section covering western Pontus. Because the boundaries of the Armeniakon changed in this way, knowing the period to which the theme name on a seal connected with Amaseia belongs is important for interpreting the seal correctly.

The project run by Olga Karagiorgou on the themes of Hellas, Opsikion and Armeniakon is a step toward using seals as a source for the history of the themes. It aims to gather all the known published and unpublished seals of officials who served in a given theme. The seals are examined one by one, dated as precisely as possible, and the number of officials they represent is established, since the same person may be attested by several seals and by different pliers. The officials are then arranged by century and by sector, whether military, civil, financial, judicial or ecclesiastical. In this way it becomes clear who held a given post, for example the strategia, and in what order, and undated seals can more easily be placed within spans of a decade. The study also investigates which families were traditionally linked with which sector in a theme, while the preference for particular saints or scenes in seal decoration sheds light on regional artistic taste. The fourth volume of the Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg Museum seal catalogue, edited in 2001 by McGeer, Nesbitt and Oikonomides, is likewise devoted to "The East" and is among the references drawn on for the Armeniakon.

The Seal from Amaseia

The clearest example that can be tied directly to the city is a seal in the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. The core of the collection was formed by Anthony Bryer, who gathered 152 pieces on research trips around Trebizond in the 1970s and donated them to the museum. Of the 165 pieces in all, 146 are Byzantine lead seals, and 111 of these come from Pontos. The seals date between the sixth and thirteenth centuries, most of them to the seventh to twelfth. Christos Malatras studied the collection in 2018 and published his results in the journal Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. The weight of the article lies on Trebizond and eastern Pontos. Amaseia is mentioned with only one seal. This piece, numbered SL-53, belongs to a "kouboukleisios and oikonomos of the Great Church" and was found in Amaseia, inland Pontos.

The titles suggest what kind of document the seal accompanied. The Great Church is the name given to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the seat of the patriarchate. A kouboukleisios was a chamberlain in the close service of the patriarch, and an oikonomos an administrator who handled the financial affairs of the church. The seal thus belongs not to the local church in Amaseia but to an official of the Constantinopolitan patriarchal staff, and carries the trace of patriarchal correspondence that reached or was handled in Amaseia. The part of the article I read does not give a date for the seal, so it is not possible to say to which century it belongs. Whether it was attached to private or official correspondence also cannot be determined.

Malatras mentions this seal together with other ecclesiastical seals in the Barber collection. The collection also contains seals of two metropolitans of Trebizond (Konstantinos around 1027-28 and Niketas in the late twelfth century), a metropolitan of Sardeis, an abbot of the monastery of Kedron, possibly in Bithynia, and the bishopric of Konstantia in Cyprus. The seal from Amaseia is therefore part not of a single city but of a wide, interconnected network of church and state communication. A caution is in order here. It would not be right to draw broad conclusions about the volume of correspondence in Byzantine Amaseia, or about how its church organisation worked, from a single seal. I could not verify the phrase "about four hundred recorded seals from Pontus" found in the earlier text of this article with an independent source; the reliable figures available are the 111 Pontic seals given for the Barber collection and the general figures given for Byzantine seals.

What the Seals of Neighbouring Pontos Say

Although the seal community of Amaseia itself is represented here by a single piece, the seals of eastern Pontos help us understand how the communication network of this region worked. About half of the Barber collection belongs to officials who state on the seal their title or office in the state or church hierarchy. Nine are from the provincial administration and also name their area of duty. Three are civil officials of the theme of Chaldia: a krites of the second quarter of the tenth century, a protonotarios and genikos kommerkiarios of the first half of the ninth century, and an anagrapheus of the mid-eleventh. This distribution shows that the financial and civil side weighed heavily in local affairs.

An unusual number of kommerkiarioi, thirty-three, is recorded for Chaldia, whereas in most themes only a few such officials are known. Kommerkiarioi inspected and sealed imported and exported goods, collected the tax called kommerkion and issued receipts for it. The reason is that Trebizond lay on the silk road and was an important transit station in Byzantium's eastern trade. In Islamic sources Trebizond appears as the principal transit centre through which eastern merchants entered Byzantium, and the duty collected was so large that the strategos of Chaldia drew half of his salary, twenty pounds of gold, from this tax. According to Malatras, most seals of these kommerkiarioi have been found not in Chaldia but in Constantinople or in other regions of the Black Sea. This is because the imported luxury goods were not destined for the local market but went to the capital together with their documents and receipts. For this reason the place where a seal was found does not always coincide with the place where its issuer served.

The other provincial seals in the collection show how wide the correspondence network was. One belongs to the anagrapheus, a tax and property assessor, of the theme of Charsianon around Kaisareia. Another belongs to the ruler of Taron, the autonomous Armenian principality west of Lake Van, to whom the emperor had granted the title of strategos of his own principality. The remaining four seals come from very distant regions: a protonotarios from Sicily, the strategos of the maritime theme of the Kibyrraiotai in southern Asia Minor, a kourator of Mitylene and the strategos of the Islands. What all four have in common is that they come from maritime regions, which confirms that sea routes remained an important means of communication even when the Arabs took Crete and then Sicily in the first half of the ninth century. Three of these four seals belong to the second half of the eleventh century, a period of high geographical and social mobility among provincial officials. Nikephoros Botaneiates (r. 1078-81), who served as doux in eight different themes within twenty years before his accession, is cited as an example of this mobility. Malatras notes that such seals may belong not only to institutional correspondence but also to communication between officials who were relatives or friends.

Titles and Local Particularities

Another feature of the Pontic seals is that most of their owners were of local origin. Seals that mention neither an office nor a place name are predominantly local, and only the most prominent members of the local elite could attain the higher dignities. The only example in the Barber collection is Theodoros Gabras, the sebastos and imperial in-law. The most frequent dignities on seals of the seventh to tenth centuries are spatharios and spatharokandidatos. In the eleventh century spatharokandidatos and protospatharios come to the fore; by then these dignities had rapidly lost their prestige and after the middle of the century were given only to lesser officials of the central and provincial administration. In the twelfth century the mention of dignities on seals declines, replaced by metrical seals and praise of family origin. In the Dumbarton Oaks collection, formed largely of finds from the capital, higher dignities such as magistros and patrikios and middle dignities such as spatharios and spatharokandidatos appear in roughly equal numbers.

Animal figures also stand out as a regional feature. About twenty percent of the Byzantine seals from the Trebizond area carry animal depictions such as lions, peacocks, eagles, ducks or the mythical griffin, and all of these date between the late ninth and the eleventh century. In the same-period seals of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum this proportion is around one percent. Malatras leaves open whether these motifs reflect eastern influence or a revival of classical motifs. He interprets their persistence in Pontos, longer than in other regions, as a local fashion and perhaps an attitude opposed to the traditional values of the capital. These motifs appear only on seals of middle and lower-ranking dignitaries and of unlabelled "private persons". The portrait of the local saint Eugenios occurs on just one seal of the late thirteenth century. No middle Byzantine metropolitan of Trebizond ever placed the city's supposed patron Eugenios on his seals. The cult of Eugenios rose to imperial level under the Grand Komnenoi, after the middle of the thirteenth century.

Malatras's overall conclusion is that the Byzantine state had little interest in this region beyond governance and taxation, above all the trade tax collected through the kommerkiarioi, that the local elite was weakly integrated into the state system, and that this led to the growth of local particularities. When central control thinned at the end of the eleventh century, this tendency turned into separatism in the autonomous rule of Theodoros Gabras. This interpretation was developed for eastern Pontos and cannot be said to apply unchanged to Amaseia. Amaseia was an inland theme capital, not a transit station on a trade route like Trebizond.

The Metropolis of Amaseia

It is no coincidence that the seal from Amaseia carries an ecclesiastical title. From the third century the city was the seat of a Christian metropolitan bishopric. In the Late Roman period, as capital of the province of Helenopontus, it was also the seat of a metropolitan archbishopric, and the bishoprics of Amisos, Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope, Zaliche and Zela were subordinate to it. In the tenth century Amaseia ranked eleventh among the metropolises of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Among the figures remembered from the city's Christian past are the warrior saint Theodore, who died before 319, and Bishop Asterius, who died around 410 and some of whose polished sermons survive.

This network weakened after the twelfth century with the Turkish migrations. In 1317 the metropolitan Kallistos, appointed in 1315 to a long-vacant see, could not enter his city because of a violent Turkoman attack. With the permission of Patriarch John XIII, the metropolitanate was moved to Limnia, which was considered safer because it lay within the Empire of Trebizond. In 1384 the bishop of Limnia temporarily administered the metropolis of Amaseia because its own metropolitan could not reach the region. A record from this period says that the metropolis of Amaseia, once famous and great, had been reduced to ruin and poverty by the invasion of foreigners. The Orthodox metropolis survived until the population exchange of 1923; in 1922 around forty thousand Christians lived in this area, about twenty thousand of them Greeks. The last serving metropolitan was Germanos Karavangelis.

The End of the Armeniakon

The Armeniakon theme remained in Byzantine hands until the end of the eleventh century. In 1073, after the defeat at Manzikert, Frankish mercenaries under Roussel de Bailleul took control of the region and governed it until the future emperor Alexios Komnenos restored Byzantine authority in 1075. Soon afterward the region fell to the Seljuk Turks, and only some coastal forts held out. The Komnenian emperors managed to regain the coastal regions, but the Armeniakon theme was never re-established. Amasya itself fell in 1075 to the Turkmen Danishmend emirs and became the capital of the Danishmendids. With this date about seven centuries of Byzantine rule are considered to have come to an end.

The seals reflect this end in their own way. According to Malatras, the mention of offices on seals declined in the twelfth century, and the holders of the high dignities connected with the Komnenian dynasty lived almost entirely in Constantinople. Among the examples from the Trebizond area there is no provincial seal bearing a dignity from the twelfth century. Whether any seal from Amaseia dates from that century cannot be determined from the sources consulted.

The Limits of Seals

Every interpretation based on seals meets limits that come from the nature of the material. A seal preserves not the official correspondence itself but only the point at which it was closed, and the content of the letter is lost. Few pieces have a known findspot. Moreover, the examples in collections represent a small social segment able to afford a seal. For this reason most of everyday life in Amaseia, that of villagers, tradesmen and those who wrote no letters, remains invisible in this source. Read correctly, seals show the shape of the administration, the movement of officials and the relation of the church to the city. A social history beyond that requires excavations, inscriptions and church records.

What remains to be done for Amaseia is to gather in one catalogue all the Byzantine seals found in and around the city or passed into other collections. Karagiorgou's project for the Armeniakon theme is a step in that direction. I could not verify the results of this project for Amaseia, or the number of seals that come directly from Amaseia, while preparing this article.

Chronology

629: During Herakleios's Persian campaigns "George, tourmarches of the Armeniakoi" is mentioned; this is taken to suggest that the theme may already have existed.

667/668: Revolt of Saborios, strategos of the Armeniakon; the first event in which the theme is mentioned in the sources with certainty.

717/718: The Armeniakon is mentioned on a seal.

around 819: The themes of Paphlagonia and Chaldia are split off from the Armeniakon.

Tenth century: The metropolis of Amaseia ranks eleventh among the metropolises of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

1073-1075: Roussel de Bailleul takes control of the region; Alexios Komnenos restores authority in 1075; in the same year the Danishmend emirs take Amasya.

1315-1317: Metropolitan Kallistos is appointed and cannot enter his city because of a Turkoman attack; the metropolitanate is moved to Limnia.

1384: The bishop of Limnia temporarily administers the metropolis of Amaseia.

1904: Schlumberger's Sigillographie de l'empire Byzantin is published.

1986: First international colloquium on Byzantine sigillography at Dumbarton Oaks.

2023: Malatras's article on the Barber collection is published online (printed issue October 2024).

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Christos Malatras, "Remarks on the collection of Byzantine lead seals of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (University of Birmingham): mobility, networks, and identity in eastern Pontos", Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 48/2 (2024), pp. 207-234, DOI 10.1017/byz.2023.17. barber.org.uk

Books

  • McGeer, Nesbitt, Oikonomides (ed.), Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art, Volume 4: The East, Washington D.C., 2001.
  • Gustave Schlumberger, Sigillographie de l'empire Byzantin, Paris, 1904.

Other sources

Online sources