Innovations in Poetry at the Comnenian Court

Abstract

Popularity of vernacular vocabulary, style and metric form in poetry at the Comnenian Court maybe is the best illustration of how innovations were not only accepted, but also appreciated and encouraged by Byzantine aristocracy. The authors using vernacular vocabulary and grammar, did not belong to the upper nobility, but wrote for the highest members of the aristocracy.

As vernacular vocabulary was being introduced into literature, metrical structure was changing. The distinction between long and short syllables on which ancient meters had been based, disappeared from everyday speech from before the foundation of Constantinople. And after centuries of general decadence there appeared only one striking experiment - so called political verse/ πολιτικὸς στίχος - which succeeded so magnificently that it produced a popular form still alive today. The first samples with this fifteenth-syllable tonic metrical structure are known in Byzantine poetry beginning from the tenth century.

Like the vernacular idiom, political verse was ambiguously received in literary circles. Despite the fact that, many poets (Planudes, Eustathios of Thessalonike, Tzetzes and others) refuse to acknowledge it as a legitimate. Members of the Comnenian aristocracy, in contrast, evidently found the fifteenth syllable meter quite attractive and poets complained that their noble customers expected his poems to be written in political verse.