Download PDF | Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin (Author), Princeton University Press 2009.
416 Pages
Introduction:
A Different History of Byzantium
One afternoon in 2002, two workmen knocked on my office door in
King’s College, London. They were doing repairs to the old buildings and
had often passed my door with its notice: ‘Professor of Byzantine
History’. Together they decided to stop by and ask me, ‘What is
Byzantine history?’ They thought that it had something to do with
Turkey.
And so I found myself trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history
is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots. Many years of
teaching had not prepared me for this. I tried to sum up a lifetime of
study in a ten-minute visit. They thanked me warmly, said how curious
it was, this Byzantium, and asked why didn’t I write about it for them?
For someone dedicated to publishing on Byzantium I felt like objecting,
but of course I knew what they meant.
Endless books are written on
Byzantine history – too many to count and most too long to read. Often
they describe the succession of 90 emperors, and about 125 patriarchs of
Constantinople, and innumerable battles, in predictable categories of
political, military and religious activity, relentlessly across eleven
hundred years. Few are attractive enough to engage the interest of
construction workers, or indeed non-specialists of virtually any other
kind. So I began to compose an answer to the question: ‘What is
Byzantine history?’
Immediately I got into difficulties – I made too many assumptions,
couldn’t resist the abstruse anecdote. But I had always prided myself on
being able to make Byzantine history interesting to audiences unfamiliar
with it. As I searched for a method, I knew very well that in its long
millennium Byzantium had enough colourful, shocking and tragic
aspects to attract those who were seeking the sensational. But this
reduced its history to dramatic episodes without depth, flattening the
whole experience. Byzantium means more than wealth, mastery of the
sea and the exercise of imperial power. I wanted them, and you the
reader, to sense why Byzantium is also hard to grasp, difficult to place
and can be obscure. This difficulty is compounded by contemporary
newspapers’ use of ‘Byzantine’ as a term of insult, for example in phrases
like ‘tax regulations of positively Byzantine complexity’ (a recent
description of EU negotiations).
Byzantium conjures up an image of opaque duplicity: plots,
assassinations and physical mutilation, coupled with excessive wealth,
glittering gold and jewels. During the Middle Ages, however, the
Byzantines had no monopoly on complexity, treachery, hypocrisy,
obscurity or riches.
They produced a large number of intelligent leaders,
brilliant military generals and innovative theologians, who are much
maligned and libelled by such ‘Byzantine’ stereotypes. They never
developed an Inquisition and generally avoided burning people at the
stake. But there is a mystery associated with this ‘lost’ world, which is
hard to define, partly because it does not have a modern heir. It remains
hidden behind the glories of its medieval art: the gold, mosaics, silks and
imperial palaces.
To explain my appreciation of Byzantium, in this book I aim to set out
its most significant high points as clearly and compellingly as I can; to
reveal the structures and mentalities which sustained it. In this way I
want to keep you interested to the end, so that you feel you get to know
a new civilization. Crucially, I want you to understand how the modern
western world, which developed from Europe, could not have existed
had it not been shielded and inspired by what happened further to the
east in Byzantium. The Muslim world is also an important element of
this history, as is the love–hate relationship between Christendom and
Islam.
What are the key features of this important but little-known history?
First, Byzantium was a thousand-year-long civilization which influenced
all the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and Western
Europe throughout the Middle Ages. From the sixth to the fifteenth
century, this influence waxed and waned but was a constant. Its
civilization drew on pagan, Christian, Greek, Roman, ancient and
specifically medieval components. Its cultural and artistic influences are
now recognized as a lasting inheritance. But in addition, fundamental
aspects of government such as the development of an imperial court
with a diplomatic service and civilian bureaucracy, the ceremony of
coronation, as well as the female exercise of political power, all
developed in Byzantium.
The grandeur of Constantinople, at the centre of a vast empire, with
an inherited system of imperial government, and the variety of sources
that inspired it, combined to give enormous confidence to both rulers
and ruled. It is necessary to emphasize this aspect of Byzantium. By the
time of the Emperor Justinian (527–65), the underlying structures of
empire were two hundred years old and so firmly embedded that they
appeared unchangeable. They had created a deeply rooted culture that
sprang from ancient Greek, pre-Christian sources, as well as Roman and
Christian ideas, both ideological and practical (for instance,
philosophical arguments and military fortifications). The entire system
was celebrated in imperial rhetoric and displayed in imperial art
intended to elevate it to an everlasting permanency. However vacuous
the sentiments expressed, they nonetheless confirmed and further
engrained the self-confidence of Byzantine emperors, their courtiers and
more humble subjects. They provided the bedrock of Byzantium’s
exceptional ability to respond to severe challenges in the seventh
century, again in the eleventh and most spectacularly in 1204. Each time
it was able to adapt and reform by drawing on these deep inherited
structures that combined in a rich awareness of traditions.
In this sense, Byzantine culture embodies the French historian
Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue durée, the long term: that which
survives the vicissitudes of changing governments, newfangled fashions
or technological improvements, an ongoing inheritance that can both
imprison and inspire. While Braudel applied this idea more to the
geographical factors that determined the history of the Mediterranean,
we can adapt it to distinguish Byzantine culture from those of its
neighbours. For in contrast to other medieval societies both in the West
and among the Muslims, Byzantium was old, many centuries old by the
time of Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid in AD 800, and the structure of
its culture was both a constraint and a source of strength. Indeed, as we
will see, it was born old, importing into its capital city at its construction
the authority of already antique architecture and statuary. Its established
cultural framework, condemned as conservative, praised as traditional,
provided a shared sense of belonging, commemorated in distinctive and
changing fashions all dedicated to the greater glory of Byzantium. This
created a flexible heritage which proved able to respond, often with
great determination, to enhance, preserve and sustain the empire
through many crises.
Byzantium’s imperial identity was strengthened by a linguistic
continuity that linked its medieval scholars back to ancient Greek
culture, and encouraged them to preserve texts by major philosophers,
mathematicians, astronomers, geographers, historians and doctors by
copying, editing and commenting on them. Above all, Byzantium
cherished the poems of Homer and produced the first critical editions of
the Iliad and Odyssey.
Although public performances of theatre died
away, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes
were closely studied and often committed to memory by generations of
schoolchildren. They also learnt the speeches of Demosthenes and the
dialogues of Plato. A strong element of ancient pagan wisdom was thus
incorporated into Byzantium.
This ancient heritage was combined with Christian belief, which
gradually replaced the cults of the pagan gods. Byzantium nurtured early
Christian monastic traditions on holy mountains like Sinai and Athos,
where spiritual teachings still inspire monks and pilgrims. It undertook
the conversion of the Bulgarians, Serbs and Russians to Christianity,
which is why large parts of the Balkans are still dotted with Orthodox
churches decorated with medieval frescoes and icons. And it maintained
contact with those Christian centres that passed under Muslim control
during the seventh century, supporting the patriarchs of Jerusalem,
Alexandria and Antioch, as well as communities even more distant like
the churches of Ethiopia and Sudan, Persia, Armenia and Georgia.
Using the inheritance of Roman technology and engineering skill,
Byzantium continued to build aqueducts, fortifications, roads and
bridges, and huge constructions such as the church of Holy Wisdom, St
Sophia in Constantinople, which still displays its massive sixth-century
form, complete with the largest dome ever built until St Peter’s in Rome
a thousand years later. Its Byzantine dome has often been repaired but
remains intact, and is copied in numerous smaller versions found in
churches all over the Orthodox world. It also inspired the form for
covered mosques, constructed when the Arabs moved out of their desert
homeland where they worshipped in open courts. The Dome of the Rock
in Jerusalem is aptly named to commemorate the Muslim occupation of
a holy place cherished by Jews and Christians. Not only its circular roof
but also its vivid mosaics display Byzantine origins, since the seventhcentury Emperor Justinian II was asked by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik to send
Byzantine craftsmen to cut the coloured stone and glass tesserae, which
shimmer whenever they catch the light. They may also have set the 240-
metre-long inscription from the Qur’an, running round the base of the
dome, that Islam is the final revelation of Allah (God) and is superior to
all others.
From Rome, Byzantium also inherited a developed legal system and a
military tradition. Both supported its long history. In theory, Byzantine
society lived by the rule of law; judges were trained, salaried and
presided over the resolution of disputes. Throughout the empire people
brought their grievances to the courts and accepted their judgments.
Although the celebrated Roman legions did not continue beyond the
seventh century, fighting forces, both foot and cavalry, were trained
according to Roman military manuals. Strategies for fighting on land and
at sea, siege weapons, methods of supplying the forces, their armour and
protective clothing were all adapted from older practice. The
composition of ‘Greek fire’, a sulphurous substance that burns on water,
remained a state secret and we still do not know the precise combination
of its components. While a similar weapon was developed by the Arabs,
Greek fire terrified those unfamiliar with it both in sea battles and in city
sieges.
Byzantium considered itself the centre of the world, and
Constantinople as the replacement of Rome. Though Greek-speaking, it
saw itself as the Roman Empire and its citizens as Romans. It exercised
leadership over the Greek-speaking communities in Sicily and southern
Italy which were a product of ancient Greek emigration. It both
sheltered and stimulated the growth of Italian coastal cities, such as
medieval Amalfi and Venice, which lived off international trade. In due
course these centres overtook Byzantium as economic centres in their
own right and developed superior naval and mercantile capacity. But
their debt to Byzantium is clear. Bronze doors commissioned in
Constantinople adorn their cathedrals, which are frequently decorated
with marble, mosaic and icons in Byzantine style. Their prosperity was
born under the wing of the empire.
Perhaps for us today, the most significant feature of Byzantium lies in
its historic role in protecting the Christian West in the early Middle
Ages. Until the seventh century, Byzantium was indeed the Roman
Empire. It ruled North Africa and Egypt, the granaries that fed both
Rome and Constantinople, southern Italy, the Holy Land, Asia Minor as
far east as Mount Ararat, all of today’s Greece and much of the Balkans.
Then the tribes of Arabia inspired by the new religion of Islam
conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean. They fought in the name
of a revelation that presented itself as the successor to the Jewish and
Christian faiths. Byzantium checked their expansion into Asia Minor and
prevented them from crossing the Dardanelles and gaining access to the
Balkans. Constantinople held out against numerous sieges.
The Muslims’ aim of capturing Constantinople, making it their capital
and taking over the entire Roman world was more than legitimate. It
was also logical. Since Islam claimed to supersede both Judaism and
Christianity, its forces would naturally replace Rome and take over the
political structures of the ancient world. If one follows the ambitions
recorded in the Qur’an, the entire Mediterranean should have been
reunited under Muslim control. The Persian world of Zoro-astrian beliefs
would also succumb to Islam. In extraordinarily swift and successful
campaigns between 634 and 644, the Arab tribesmen came close to
achieving this goal. They provoked the first major turning point in
Byzantine history.
Had Byzantium not halted their expansion in 678, Muslim forces
charged by the additional resources of the capital city would have
spread Islam throughout the Balkans, into Italy and the West during the
seventh century, at a time when political fragmentation reduced the
possibility of organized defence. By preventing this potential conquest,
Byzantium made Europe possible. It allowed western Christian forces,
which were divided into small units, time to develop their own
strengths. One hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad
in 632, Charles Martel defeated Muslim invaders from Spain in central
France near Poitiers and forced them back over the Pyrenees. The
nascent idea of Europe gradually took on a particular form under
Charles’s grandson and namesake, Charles the Great. Charlemagne and
his successors fought their own battles and were responsible for creating
their own Europe.
During the Middle Ages, most western clerics and rulers were aware,
however dimly, of the Christian civilization of Byzantium in the East.
Although Byzantium controlled a much smaller empire than Rome at its
height, from the seventh to the fifteenth century this medieval state
developed new political and cultural forms. It combined different strands
from its past to forge a new medieval civilization, which attracted many
non-Christian northern tribes. In turn, the Bulgars, Russians and Serbs
adopted Christian faith and elements of Byzantine culture. For about
seven hundred years Byzantium remained a beacon of orthodox belief
and classical learning.
The period of the crusades put Byzantium at the centre of the
Christian effort to win back the Holy Places from Muslim control. From
the eleventh century onwards, Byzantium and the West became mutually
more familiar, often with very negative results. Despite the success of
the First Crusade in establishing the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the
Fourth Crusade turned against Constantinople and sacked the city in
1204. This was the second great turning point in Byzantine history. The
empire was never able to restore its previous strength or form. Although
they regained the capital, Byzantine emperors ruled over what had
become in effect a city-state from 1261 to 1453, when Constantinople
was finally captured by the Ottoman Turks.
But curiously, Byzantine cultural influence expanded almost in
inverse proportion to its political strength. From 1204 when numerous
works of art were taken back to Western Europe, Byzantium’s
contribution to the revival of western art and learning is notable. In the
fourteenth century, Byzantine teachers of Greek were appointed to
Italian universities and they and their pupils began to translate the
writings of Plato. Aristotle’s works had already reached the West via the
Muslim world, but most of Plato’s philosophy remained unknown.
During the negotiations in Florence which led to a reunion of the
western and eastern churches in 1439, public lectures on Plato by the
famous Greek scholar and philosopher George Gemistos Plethon inspired
Cosimo de’ Medici to establish his Platonic Academy. The Byzantine
contribution to the Italian Renaissance thus began much earlier than
1453, when the Turks made Constantinople their own capital. Following
the fall of the city, refugees who fled to Italy with their manuscripts
strengthened the new learning and new art. And a few decades later,
when the Protestant reformers condemned religious art and argued for a
more spiritual style of Christian worship, they employed all the biblical
and patristic texts collected by Byzantine iconoclasts of the eighth and
ninth centuries.
Throughout this book I seek to illuminate what Byzantium was, how it
worked and what it stands for. This intensely personal view grew out of
my previous research for The Formation of Christendom on the
significance of religion in early medieval history. Matters of faith were
vitally important for people who lived in the Middle Ages in ways which
are unfamiliar to most in the modern West, and secular scholarship and
popular appreciation of medieval art needs to understand how this was
so. In addition to the issues that both united and divided Christians,
their religious world was filled by other beliefs: unconverted polytheists,
adherents of the eastern cults, followers of Zoroaster and Mani, as well
as long-established Jewish communities. Islam made a profound impact
throughout this world on all who lived on the eastern and southern
shores of the Mediterranean, in Syria and Spain and all regions in
between. In the eighth century, the first official destruction of icons
(iconoclasm) in Byzantium provoked ordinary people to die for the sake
of their religious images. While Islam developed a strict ban on holy
images, Rome discovered its allegiance to icons, and Charlemagne’s
theologians began to doubt theirs.
The eighth and ninth centuries were
thus critical to the development of three separate but related regions: the
Byzantine East, the Islamic South – Egypt, North Africa and Spain – and
the Latin West which became Europe. In different forms, this division
has lasted until our own time.
A further fascination with this period of history lies in the apparent
devotion of women to religious icons in medieval Byzantium, which may
be related to the exclusion of women from the official church hierarchy.
It also raises questions about the motives of the two female rulers I write
about in Women in Purple, who restored the veneration of icons in 787
and 843. When Empresses Irene and Theodora reversed the iconoclast
policy, introduced and supported by their husbands and more distant
male relatives, they seem to me to have acted with all the ruthlessness
and guile of men. But in taking these initiatives, they also assumed a
political prominence that is unparalleled in other medieval societies. So
while chroniclers of the time assume that their love of icons is a feature
of feminine weakness, there is clearly more to this link, which I would
connect with a Byzantine tradition of female rule, ‘the imperial
feminine’.
Digging up Byzantium was another way of discovering the Byzantines.
On excavations in Greece, Cyprus and at Kalenderhane Camii, a major
site in the heart of Constantinople, modern Istanbul, I worked with the
material culture on which its civilization was built.
Exploring the
churches of Crete and Kythera, an island off the south coast of mainland
Greece, and recording pottery finds at the medieval manor house of
Kouklia in southwest Cyprus, brings you very close to their medieval
inhabitants. In my first archaeological season at Paphos, also in Cyprus,
we found the remains of a female skeleton in the ruins of the castle of
Saranda Kolonnes, with the gold and pearl rings she was wearing when
the earthquake of 1222 struck. In Istanbul, workmen investigating a
winter leak at the mosque of the Kalendars discovered a hollow behind a
wall close to the monumental aqueduct which still dominates the old
city. One of these skilled restorers felt round the edge of a panel and
identified the tesserae of what turned out to be an early Christian mosaic
of the Virgin presenting the Christ Child to Symeon. It had possibly been
covered by a wall to protect it from iconoclast destruction. Similarly, an
entire chapel with fragmentary frescoes dedicated to St Francis of Assisi
had been bricked up in 1261 when the friars fled from Constantinople
after the Latin occupation.
These two fine works of Christian art, eastern
and western, were later restored by Ernest Hawkins and are now on
display in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul.
My understanding of Byzantium was also coloured by far-flung
witnesses to its medieval dominance. As a teenager I was taken to
Ravenna in northern Italy and was astounded by the mosaic portraits of
the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his wife, Empress Theodora, the
stars in the heavenly firmament of Galla Placidia’s tomb, and the
processions of saints and flocks of sheep that decorate the city’s
churches. In 2005, over forty years later, I was privileged to climb into
the roof of the church of St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai peninsula,
which was built by the same imperial couple, despite the 2,000 miles
between the north Adriatic and the Red Sea. There, on what was thought
to be the site of the Burning Bush, where Moses was instructed to take
off his sandals because the ground was holy, I read the inscriptions that
record the patronage of Justinian and Theodora, carved on the original
sixth-century beams which survive perfectly in the dry, termite-free
conditions of the Egyptian desert. Such physical experiences give
immediacy to what Byzantine historians wrote about the emperor and
his wife.
In Rome, Sicily, Moscow, and of course most clearly in Constantinople,
all over Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, you can see Byzantium
preserved. But there is nothing like the amazement of finding Byzantine
mosaics in the mihrab of the Mezquita, the Great Mosque of Cordoba, in
Spain, which were commissioned by the tenth-century Caliph al-Hakam
II; or the surprise of arriving late in the afternoon at Trebizond on the
Black Sea after the long journey through the Pontic Alps, and looking up
at the palace above the city.
Byzantium also lives on in the experience of witnessing the descent of
the Easter fire at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, when in darkness the
metropolitan emerges from the tomb with a lit candle marking the
Resurrection of Christ, from which all the faithful light their own. Even
in modern Athens today, the crowds descending Mount Lykabettos with
their candles after midnight on Easter Sunday are a forceful reminder of
the power of ceremonies which have commemorated the event for
nearly two millennia.
For reasons that will become apparent in this book, Byzantine objects
have been scattered throughout Europe and are preserved in unexpected
museums. Coming across the Byzantine silk called the Cloak of
Alexander in Bavaria, or finding the tenth-century marriage contract of
Theophano and Otto II in Wolfenbüttel, or tenth-century ivories now
used as book covers, makes you aware of the craftsmen who produced
them and the culture in which such luxuries were made. In the West
these have been treasured for centuries, although western medieval
scholars and churchmen were also responsible for encouraging many of
the misleading stereotypes of what ‘Byzantine’ means.
Byzantium became more familiar to me every time I prepared courses
on its history. I specially want to thank all those students who
challenged my views. While it is customary to acknowledge this
influence, in my case my appointment to Princeton in 1990 brought an
unexpected bonus in the exposure to a particularly brilliant group of
graduates attracted by an unrivalled history faculty. Among such
stimulating colleagues and intellectually curious students, I was
encouraged to try out new ways of communicating my passion for
Byzantium. Christine Stansell, one of those colleagues, later visited me in
London and asked with sympathy and expectation whether it was not
‘time to bring in the harvest’. This book is partly due to her, as well as to
my unexpected visitors.
This brings me back to the question of form. In Shakespeare’s London,
the bezant and caviar were equally familiar: a gold coin named after
Byzantium and the fish roe consumed in such quantities by its
inhabitants. In such indirect ways, the heritage of Byzantium can be
found in unexpected places. This book attempts to show why. Rather
than follow the pattern of numerous earlier introductions and studies, I
decided to select particular events, monuments and individuals
characteristic of Byzantium and to explore them within a framework that
observes the basic divisions of Byzantine history. The first seven chapters
are devoted to essential subjects such as the city of Constantinople, law
or orthodoxy, and range right across the Byzantine millennium. Other
chapters overlap if they approach the same events from different
perspectives. My chief problem has been one of exclusion, for it is hard
to leave out so many rich examples and intriguing details. I can only
provide a selection of meze, a dish of starters. The recommended further
reading at the end of the book may encourage many additional, fuller
courses. Here I try to answer the question posed by the builders at
King’s, and to explain why we should all know more about Byzantine
history.
Link
Press Here
