Byzantine Heroes and Saints of the Arab–Byzantine Border (Ninth–Tenth Centuries)

This chapter shows that much of the modern scholarly conception of the Islamic-Byzantine borderland as a bilingual, even bicultural, frontier society, a separate cultural space of its own between two civilisations, is actually predicated upon the heroic romance of the border warrior Digenis Akritas and similar figures, especially in their chronologically later forms, many of which were produced in Constantinople. Many previous scholars have therefore concluded that the heroic border epic was merely a Constantinopolitan production, a vehicle used to legitimise and justify the ascension of aristocratic families in the capital city who were descendants of the commanders glorified in these border epics. This chapter analyses the development of the heroic border epic tradition in the ninth and tenth centuries, especially those connected with hagiographic lives of militant saints, such as Antony the Younger, in order to show that this consensus is certainly wrong, at least regarding the border epics of this period, which are certainly not Constantinopolitan fabrications, confected to honour an aristocratic progenitor. Rather, the development of these heroes takes place within the context of the territorial expansion of the Byzantine Empire; the heroes portrayed in these stories are heroes of the conquests/reconquests, not resistance fighters.