The Lands In-Between in John VI Kantakouzenos’ Histories

Scholars have long studied John VI Kantakouzenos’ Histories for the text’s military matter, character portrayals, and, more prevalently, its author’s overwhelming self-bias. Just like many other aspects of this long and detailed work, Kantakouzenos’ descriptions of his state’s power structures and his representations of identity, despite being recurring themes throughout the Histories, remain under-examined. This paper will investigate how Kantakouzenos represented the extent of his state’s borders, while also looking at his portrayal of identity in these places. Over and over again, the Histories refer to a vague idea of Byzantine territorial authority juxtaposed with that of its neighbors–particularly the Bulgars and the Serbs–through words such as hegemonia, arche, and oikeia. The historian divided these lands by applying the term orion, meaning ‘boundary’ or ‘border.’ On many occasions though, Kantakouzenos preferred to use methorion in its plural form methoria, implying a kind of ‘frontier’ or ‘borderland’ made up of multiple towns and cities across a large swath of territory. The methoria in the Histories impart a weak sense of political and ethno-cultural identity; they seem to have been areas where local needs and concerns with safety took precedence over any concept of belonging to a larger group. This fact becomes clear when we look at Kantakouzenos’ general narrative of constant foreign incursions and internal strife which would have affected these sites, as well as social and prosopographical studies done by scholars such as Angeliki Laiou. When taken together, the possibility arises that in mid-fourteenth century Byzantium’s methoria, we are viewing what were more localized or regionalized communities, with rather mixed identities, attempting to navigate a time of political chaos.