Map 4.2: The Byzantine Empire, c.1025
All this openness went only so far, however. Toward the middle of the eleventh
century, the Jews of Constantinople were expelled and resettled in a walled quarter in
Pera, on the other side of the Golden Horn (see Map 4.1). Even if they did not expel
Jews so dramatically, many Byzantine cities forbade Jews from mixing with
Christians. Around the same time, the rights of Jews as “Roman citizens” were
denied; henceforth, in law at least, they had only servile status. The Jewish religion
was condemned as a heresy.
Ethnic diversity was in part responsible for new regional political movements that
threatened centralized imperial control. More generally, however, regional revolts
were the result of the rise of a new class of wealthy provincial landowners, the
dynatoi (sing. dynatos), “powerful men.” Benefiting from a general quickening in the
economy and the rise of new urban centers, they took advantage of the
unaccustomed wealth, buying land from still impoverished peasants as yet untouched
by the economic upswing. In his Novel (New Law) of 934, Emperor Romanus I
Lecapenus (r.920–944) bewailed the “intrusion” of the rich
