Download PDF | Jonathan Harris, The Lost World Of Byzantium Yale University Press ( 2015)
293 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book is a personal journey through the long history of Byzantium, built around the questions that have always puzzled me and the personalities and events that have long intrigued me. Above all, I wanted to investigate why Byzantium lasted for so long in spite of all the upheavals and invasions that threatened its existence and why in the end it disappeared so completely. Inevitably, in pursuing that line, I left a great deal out which another author would have put in while aspects that others might consider peripheral or even irrelevant have found their way in. The same applies to the Further Reading section at the end. It is not meant to be comprehensive - rather, just a few ideas for the next step — and it is restricted to works in English that are widely available.
A great deal more has, of course, been written. Then there is the matter of Byzantine names. While in general I have tried to transliterate them as closely as possible to the original Greek, I have not stuck rigidly to that. So I have Phokas rather than Phocas, and Kantakouzenos rather than Cantacuzenus, but Heraclius rather than MHerakleios and Porphyrogenitos rather than Porphyrogennetos or Porphyrogenitus. Where there is a recognised English equivalent of a Greek first name, I have used it, so Constantine rather than Konstantinos, John rather than Ioannis. The spelling, like the coverage and the reading, is my own choice.
On the other hand, however personal a take on Byzantium The Lost World might be, in writing it I have been deeply influenced both directly and indirectly by others. As it now is, the book has benefited enormously from the comments of two supportive anonymous reviewers and from those of Heather McCallum and Rachael Lonsdale of Yale University Press. Liz Hornby meticulously copy-edited the text. Andrew Sargent kindly read a draft as an interested non-specialist and saved me from numerous inconsistencies, solecisms and omissions. Working in the History department at Royal Holloway has also been a significant influence. I could not have written the book at all if [had not had the opportunity to try out my ideas on the undergraduate students who have taken my courses on Byzantium and its Neighbours and the Fall of Constantinople.
Their responses, questions and objections forced me to clarify and refine my ideas and in some cases rethink them altogether. I am indebted, as well, to three heads of department - Jonathan Phillips, Sarah Ansari and Justin Champion - for the support that they have given to my research and teaching, and to Penelope Mullens and Marie-Christine Ockenden for making the administrative side of things run so smoothly. At the end of the day, it is a great privilege to write history from inside an academic department, especially one that is so large and diverse.
Royal Holloway, University of London January 2015
Prologue
In many places there are remarkable remains of ancient monuments, though one cannot help wondering why so few have survived... Ogier Ghiselin de Busbeq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople, 1555-1562
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the capital city of the Ottoman sultan was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world, its streets thronged by a rapidly growing population of over 400,000 people, the centre of an empire that stretched from the Crimea to Algiers. Popularly known as Istanbul, its official name was Kostantiniyye, or Constantinople. Its ruler, Stileyman the Magnificent (1520-1566), was not only one of the greatest military leaders that the empire had ever produced but also the caliph of Islam, so the city boasted some three hundred mosques to reflect his spiritual as well as his worldly power.
On a hill in the centre of town, a huge and splendid new mosque was under construction. When finished it would boast four minarets and a complex of schools, bath houses and hospitals. Known as the Siileymaniye, in honour of the reigning sultan who had commissioned it, the mosque formed a fitting centrepiece to the capital city of the leader of the faithful and the most powerful Muslim ruler of the day.
In 1544, a Frenchman called Pierre Gilles arrived in this imperial metropolis. Classically educated and a keen naturalist, Gilles was on a mission for his sovereign, Francis I, to seek out ancient manuscripts to take back to the royal library at Fontainebleau. He ended up staying much longer than he intended, for, when King Francis died in 1547, the scholar and his mission were forgotten and Gilles found himself marooned in Constantinople without the money for his passage home. After three years, to make ends meet, he had to enlist as a mercenary in the sultan’s army as it marched east to do battle with the Persians. In the meantime, during his enforced stay in Constantinople, he wandered through its streets and came to know its layout intimately. It was not the contemporary city that intrigued him, though.
He felt that all the grand new mosques only had the effect of making the place even more dingy at street level. Rather, as a classically trained man of letters, he looked for remains of the ancient past when the city had been known as Byzantion. Disappointingly, there was almost nothing classical to see, but Gilles soon became fascinated by the survivals from later centuries when Constantinople had been the capital of a Christian rather than a Muslim empire and Greek rather than Turkish had been spoken in its corridors of power. His contemporaries were coming to refer to this defunct body politic as the Byzantine empire, or Byzantium, and since it had finally disappeared only a century before, much more remained to be seen than is visible today. Whenever he could, Gilles eagerly sought out the surviving monuments of this lost world.
He prowled around the most obvious Byzantine building, the towering former Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom’), which still dominated the centre of the city opposite the sultan’s palace of Topkapi. Outside the cathedral, he slipped and fell down a trench, where he discovered seven mysterious standing columns. Some people told him they were part of what had once been the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors but Gilles himself was quite sure that they were the remains of a portico which once surrounded the city’s main square, the Augousteion.
He descended beneath the streets and, in a small boat, glided between the mighty columns of an underground cistern, its vaulted roof lit only by his flickering torch. He clambered on to the portico which marked the eastern end of the Hippodrome where the Byzantines had once gathered to watch chariot races, and from his vantage point he could see the dolphins leaping and diving in the Bosporus beyond.
Uncovering the Byzantine past was not, he discovered, an easy task. Too great an interest in antiquities was liable to arouse suspicion from the locals, the Christians living in the city being as hostile as the Turks in this respect. Taking measurements, something for which Gilles was rather obsessive, was to invite denunciation to the authorities as a spy. If one attracted such unwelcome attention, the only way to escape unpleasantness was to offer to buy everyone some wine.
The old Land Walls that guarded the western edge of Constantinople were easy enough to visit and Gilles could pace out the distance between the inner and outer fortifications. Hagia Sophia, on the other hand, had to be viewed with rather more circumspection since it was now the mosque of Aya Sofya and non-Muslims were not welcome inside. Gilles managed to get in by mingling with the crowds and so was able to examine its soaring dome unnoticed. When it came to the measurements though, he had to pay a Turk to do it for him.
Fascinating though these survivals from the past were, Gilles was only too well aware that they represented but a fraction of the Byzantine monuments that had once adorned Constantinople’s skyline. So many churches, monasteries and palaces mentioned in the literary texts, in which he was widely read, had simply disappeared. He knew that there had once been a second palace of the Byzantine emperors at Blachernae near the Land Walls, but he was quite unable to locate it. He looked for the church of the Holy Apostles, said to be second in grandeur only to Hagia Sophia, but no trace of it was to be found, not even the foundations. One monument was being dismantled before his very eyes. Outside Hagia Sophia, he came across a gigantic bronze leg protruding from a pile of scrap.
He was tempted to measure it but dared not, for fear of attracting attention. Even without measuring, he could see that the leg was longer than he himself was tall. Further studiedly casual glances at the scrap heap revealed a nose that was about twenty centimetres long, and the legs and hooves of a horse. From his reading, Gilles knew exactly what this was. He was one of the last people ever to see the great equestrian statue of the emperor Justinian I, which for a thousand years had stood on a tall column in the central square of Byzantine Constantinople.
The emperor had sat astride his prancing steed, his right hand imperiously raised in warning to his foes, his left grasping an orb surmounted by a cross. Now his statue lay in a heap on the ground, awaiting its final destruction, and already workmen were starting to cart the pieces off to a foundry where they were to be recast into cannon. The Turks, Gilles concluded, had always been the enemies of statuary, and indeed of all architectural design and decoration, which was hardly fair given the splendid buildings for which they were responsible. For all his preoccupation with its monuments and their dimensions, Gilles did not warm to contemporary Constantinople or its people, and as he departed he vowed he would never go back.
Some years later, while he was living in Rome after his return from the east, Gilles wrote up his experiences in his Antiquities of Constantinople, which was published posthumously in 1561. The disappearance of so many of the physical remains of the powerful and prosperous society that Byzantium had once been prompted him to ask the obvious question. How had it happened that the once mighty Christian rulers of Byzantine Constantinople had lost everything and come to be enslaved by ‘infidels’? It was, he concluded, simply a matter of character formed by the climate of that particular part of the world:
For this reason, although Constantinople seems, as it were by nature, formed for government, its people have neither the decencies of education nor any strictness of discipline. Their affluence makes them slothful ... [and] wholly incapable of making any resistance against those barbarous people by whom, for a vast distance, they are encompassed on all sides.
Gilles was by no means the first person to attribute the downfall of Byzantium to indolence and moral laxity and he certainly was not the last. The theme was taken up some two centuries later by Edward Gibbon, who in the later volumes of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emphasised the ‘cowardice and discord’ of the ‘Greeks’ as he and many others preferred to call the Byzantines. Even today, a perception remains that there was something wrong with the Byzantines which explains why they are no longer marked on the map.
They ignored political and economic reality in favour of ceremony, antiquarianism, dogmatic disputation and church decoration when they should have been equipping legions to defeat their numerous enemies. Consequently, while the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome are seen as having deeply influenced the world as it is today, and feature regularly in television programmes and school curriculums, Byzantium is largely ignored. There is, however, one very inconvenient fact that suggests that Byzantium should not be dismissed so lightly. Ifits inhabitants really were so utterly supine and pathetic that they were incapable of defending themselves, then why did their society last so long? History is littered with ephemeral power blocs, like those of Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, built up through brilliant military conquest only to fall apart after the death of the charismatic founder.
Byzantium, by contrast, was one of the longest lasting human institutions. If the inauguration of Constantinople in 330 cz is taken as its beginning and the capture of the city by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 as the moment of its downfall, it endured for over a thousand years. That record of survival is all the more impressive in that it took place in the most adverse of circumstances. One of the perennial trends of human history is that people are constantly on the move, whether fleeing oppression or ecological disaster, seeking a better life or in some cases aiming to conquer and plunder.
There are times when the movement slows to some extent. Between 31 BcE and 180 cz, the Roman empire benefited from just such a situation, allowing it to maintain very wide borders that were never challenged at multiple points. Byzantium, which was a continuation of the Roman empire ina very different form, had no such luxury. Throughout its history, it found itself at the end of a kind of ethnic bowling alley where waves of peoples moved westward from the steppes of Asia and from the Arabian peninsula.
It was this one factor, more than anything else, that determined what Byzantium was to become. Its distinctive society and ethos were formed in response to the phenomenal and constant pressure on its borders. In the face of the challenge, military prowess alone was no longer enough. Defeat one group in battle, and three more would arrive to take their place.
A completely new way of thinking would have to emerge that sought other ways of defusing the threat, whether by integration and settlement, or by bribery and covert action - or, most extraordinary of all, by creating a visual splendour that would overawe their enemies and draw them into the fold as friends and allies. The empire regularly met with catastrophe and yet was able to survive and recover time after time.
If these aspects of Byzantine civilisation have not been as fully appreciated as they might have been, the Byzantines themselves are partly to blame. In their literature, art and ceremonies, they pulled off one of the greatest deceptions in history, presenting their society in terms of absolute continuity with the past: to the very end they insisted on describing themselves as ‘Romans’ as if nothing had changed since ancient times. In reality, Byzantium was constantly evolving and adapting in the face of endless threats. It is easy to accept the Byzantines at their own estimate and miss the very nature of Byzantine society.
Consequently Gilles, Gibbon and all the others who have pondered on why Byzantium disappeared have been asking the wrong question. The real issue is not why it came to an end but why it survived at all, and even at certain times flourished and grew in the face of such overwhelming odds.
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