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6 The Christological issues were addressed again in a second Council of Ephesus in 449, (known as the ‘Robber Council’), which condemned a monk called Eutyches for arguing that Christ had only one, divine, nature. The matter was felt to be unresolved, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which declared that Christ had two natures, human and divine, but that they were indivisible, is crucial for understanding the later relations between the Eastern and Western Churches. Western Church historians tend to believe that Chalcedon settled the issue once and for all, and many Western-based histories of the early Church end with it.

51 Byzantium presents yet another problem in terms of its written source material in that it is much easier for us to hear the voices of the elite than of the governed. However, this difficulty can be exaggerated. The literature of Byzantium, like that of the classical world, is on the whole an elite and high-style literature, but it is not only that. Scholars are increasingly interested in stories, apocrypha, ‘low-level’ saints’ lives and non-literary texts, and if properly used, these can help us a great deal.

Minorities and Social Cohesion Whatever the immediate conditions, for much of the history of the Byzantine Empire political coherence was less a matter of policing fixed frontiers than of finding ways by which to hold the allegiance of populations that were often highly varied. How this was achieved in military and economic terms will be considered later. There were, however, other mechanisms of assimilation and integration. As we have noted, Byzantium was from the start polyglot and cosmopolitan.