Kekaumenos and the Vlachs of Thessaly: the Tax Revolt of 1066

In Thessaly, the people preparing to rise against new tax burdens, “increases and reassessments” (αὐξήσεις καὶ φανερώσεις), gather and swear oaths. In Larisa, a council is held in the house of Verivoi the Vlach. One warning weighs on the deliberation: the families and flocks of the Vlachs are far away, in the mountains, and could be captured^[1][3].

The scene dates from 1066, and we know it from a single author, conventionally called Kekaumenos. His text offers the fullest eleventh-century description of communities explicitly called Βλάχοι, Vlachs. The author is hostile to them. What kind of community does his account nevertheless describe: herders without settlements, on the margins of the empire, or organised people, integrated into it? And how much of what he says can be believed?

The author and the text

The author’s name has not survived; he is conventionally called Kekaumenos, a name borne by his father and grandfather. The older identification with the general Katakalon Kekaumenos is generally rejected. The work was written around 1075–1078. The traditional title, Strategikon, is incomplete: Advice and Stories (Consilia et narrationes) better describes its mixture of advice, family experience and historical examples. The text has survived in a single fourteenth-century manuscript, Moscow Synodalis 298 / Vladimirus 436, folios 136v–229r.

For 1066, Kekaumenos has a close source. Nikoulitzas Delphinas, the leader of the movement and a relative by marriage of the author’s family, is said to have sent a written account from exile to the author’s father. This makes the concrete details valuable. But it also introduces an apologetic tendency: Kekaumenos tries to present Nikoulitzas as loyal, drawn into the revolt against his will.

A provincial revolt, not only a Vlach one

The movement in Thessaly was not exclusively Vlach. The text describes a coalition of Vlachs, Bulgarians, Larissans, people from Trikala and members of the local elite, which rose against the new tax burdens^[1]. The account documents:

• assemblies and oaths among the participants;
• Vlach leaders and leading men;
• the formation of a regional military force;
• actions at Kitros and Servia;
• negotiation with Emperor Constantine X Doukas;
• the withdrawal of the new burdens and the promise of an amnesty;
• the later punishment of Nikoulitzas, the intermediary, by exile.

The mobilisation thus had a concrete political result, even if the imperial agreement was not fully honoured in Nikoulitzas’s case.

Leading men, houses and towns

The Vlachs do not appear as a crowd without structure. Slavota Carmalakes is called their leading man and archon. The council takes place in the Larisa house of Verivoi the Vlach. For notables and leaders the text uses terms such as prokritoi and archontes. And an ancestor of the author is said to have received, in the time of Basil II, the command of “the Vlachs of Hellas”.

Verivoi’s house in Larisa and the participation of the Vlach leaders in local political deliberations show that the Vlach economy cannot be reduced to itinerant herding. Seasonal mobility went together with property, urban relations, taxation in coin and administrative integration.

From April to September, in the mountains

The clearest passage says that the flocks and families of the Vlachs stayed from April to September in “the mountains of Bulgaria”, in high and very cold places^[1]. That is all Kekaumenos says. The mountains were probably in the area the Byzantines then called Bulgaria, north of Thessaly, mainly towards western Macedonia; the exact limits do not follow from the passage, and the term does not designate the borders of modern Bulgaria.

This is organised seasonal transhumance, not nomadism without settlements: a repeating calendar, known destinations, flocks moving up together with the families, ties maintained with Larisa and the plains of Thessaly. Precisely this separation created a political vulnerability in 1066: the people involved in the revolt were far from their families and flocks in the mountains.

Vlachs, not just herders; “Dacians and Bessi”

Kekaumenos consistently calls them Vlachs and distinguishes them from Rhomaioi, Bulgarians, Larissans and Serbs. For him the word functions as the name of a community, not merely as a synonym for “herder”. The text, however, gives no sample of their language.

In a retrospective passage, the author identifies them as “the so-called Dacians and Bessi”, links them to Decebalus and Trajan, and says that they had lived near the Danube and the Sava before spreading into Epirus, Macedonia and Hellas^[1].

How far can it be believed?

Kekaumenos’s hostile diatribe against the Vlachs is not a neutral description: it serves the moral and political purpose of the work and the defence of Nikoulitzas. And the concrete account contradicts the author’s own stereotypes: the communities it describes have property, leaders, deliberation, military contingents and institutional relations with the empire.

Confidence therefore varies by layer. The logistical and political details of the revolt merit high confidence, thanks to the family source, but must be read with the apologetic tendency in mind. The calendar of transhumance and the existence of Vlach leaders and their urban ties are equally solid. The Dacians–Bessi–Danube–Sava genealogy is interpretative and open to dispute. The hostile generalisations about the character of the Vlachs are weak as a neutral social description.

Alongside other sources

For an episode of 976, John Skylitzes gives an early mention of Vlachs involved in movement through the mountain corridors between Prespa and Kastoria, but the transmission of the text calls for caution. Later, the Descriptio Europae Orientalis describes a numerous Vlach population and a rich pastoral economy in Thessaly. Kekaumenos explains the internal mechanisms (leaders, taxation, transhumance, negotiation) that the Descriptio sees from a Western geopolitical perspective.

Together, these sources support the existence of distinct South Balkan Vlach communities, mobile and important both economically and strategically. They should not automatically be turned into direct evidence for every thesis about continuity north of the Danube.

Conclusion

What kind of community does Kekaumenos describe? Not herders without settlements, on the margins of the state. The Vlachs of Thessaly appear as a distinct population integrated into the Byzantine Empire, yet with their own economic networks, leaders and solidarities. Pastoral mobility did not take them out of the empire; it tied them to taxation, roads, towns, military service and the negotiation of power in the province. These are the most solid layers of the account of 1066. Weaker are the genealogy of the “Dacians and Bessi”, a medieval representation of origins, and the author’s hostile generalisations, which serve the purpose of his work.