Abstract:

The constant Arab campaigns on its eastern border between the second half of the seventh and the second half of the tenth century largely affected the border politics and military landscape of the Byzantine Empire. The invasions brought about the creation of military units under the authority of a strategos or a kleisourarches. Likewise, the border politics were based upon the maintenance of a soldier who would do his military service, and upon providing the supplies that would make the local commune to maintain its life and defend itself at the same time. In the inner side of the border, this defensive strategy was to hinder the routes easily passible by the enemy with control posts and strongholds or to strengthen them, while the strategy for the outer side of the border was to create a no man’s land and a buffer zone. Herein, we should keep in mind that the very presence of villages and the surrounding arable land had utmost importance for both the civil village commune and for the soldiers who made their living on the land. Parallel to that, the land legislation of the Macedonian emperors in the 10th century shows that the social, economic and fiscal solidarity of the village as the principal unit of the countryside was meant to be protected. In the second half of the same century, the reconquests and control especially on the southern and south-eastern border ensured a population increase, the use of land with a higher economic yield, and the creation of more organized settlements, mostly villages. Furthermore, the local aristocracy and “the powerful/the powerful magnates” of which the legislative and military texts of the era referred to derived from this organization and became a very crucial part of it. The present study deals with the “powerful” soldiers and military men who were certainly a part of that group defined in a direct way in the legislative texts of the 10th century. The primary aim is to understand in what kind of settlements the soldiers became donors, whether they had any organic link to the very settlement or monument, and whether the continuity and chronology of the settlements can be followed up. The article includes the religious buildings which bear the inscriptions, portraits of the military donors along with their offices and titles. As it will be seen, the soldiers became donors and made bestowments for monastic complexes, domestic complexes, burial chapels, and hermitages. Although the military became donors in different settlements and of churches with different religious meanings, the way the donors carried on their economic welfare and the main motif of their being settled exactly at the geographical points become more apparent in village settlements.

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