Orthodoxy and Religious Antagonism in Byzantine Perceptions of the Seljuk Turks (Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries)

This paper focuses on religiously based concepts in the Comnenian dynasty's ideology when propagating Byzantium's political and military antagonism with the Muslim-Turkish principalities of Asia Minor. Whereas during the conquest period in the second half of the eleventh century Byzantine perceptions were mainly determined by the classical bipolarity of barbarism vs. Roman civilisation and therefore defined the Seljuk Turks as an ethnic rather than a religious entity, in the 1130s a tendency to identify them with the “sons of Hagar”, i.e. the Muslims, prevailed. At the same time the court rhetoricians of Emperor John II developed forms of imperial representation exhibiting allusions to Old Testament prototypes (Moses) and certain features of western crusader ideology. The image of his successor, Manuel I, instead draws more intensively on the idea of the emperor's Christ-like position and the motif of the tireless defender of the true faith.