Download PDF | The Reception Of Byzantium In European Culture Since 1500, Edited by Przemystaw Marciniak and Dion C. Smythe, Taylor And Francis ( 2017).
270 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book was conceived as a part of a larger project entitled “Transformations and Adaptations of Byzantine Heritage in Modern Europe 1500-2010’ (2012-2015) funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the framework of the National Programme for the Development of Humanities. We express our gratitude to the Polish Ministry of Science for financial support, which allowed organisation of the conference on the reception of Byzantium held in Katowice, Poland on 5-6 September 2014.
We thank John Smedley of Ashgate, for all his help and endless encouragement getting our volume through its various stages; we also want to thank Lianne Tapscott, our desk editor, for all her patient help dealing with the many ‘final’ queries that emerged.
Introduction
Przemystaw Marciniak' and Dion C. Smythe’
Analyses of the reception of the classical tradition have recently become an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used and abused in later times. Students of the classical tradition research the influence of ancient literature, its use in political discourse, and its manifestations in films, TV series, graphic novels and computer games. A recent flood of publications, including companions, handbooks and dictionaries, now addresses these issues.’
The Eastern Roman Empire, however, has not been so lucky. For a long time it was described as a ‘lost empire’ and remained largely ignored and misunderstood.‘ Its history was replaced by a series of stereotypes. To some extent this is understandable: the Byzantine tradition was cultivated primarily in those countries that either used to be a part of the Byzantine Empire or had close relations with it. This does not mean, however, that Byzantium always enjoyed popularity in the Slavia Orthodoxa. Resentment against Byzantium seems to have always been a part of the Byzantine heritage, as demonstrated, for example, by trends in its Russian and Bulgarian reception. In the Western European tradition, Byzantium was reduced to a vague and indeterminate space full of exoticism, gold, icons, eunuchs and degenerate, murderous rulers.
In modern culture, Byzantium is most commonly associated with the word ‘Byzantine’ — we hear about ‘Byzantine administration’, “Byzantine politics’ and “Byzantine luxury’. Though the word may have slightly different meanings in every language, almost all such uses are pejorative. Yet, during its long existence, the Eastern Roman Empire was never called ‘Byzantium’. Since they were heirs to the Roman Empire and to Greco-Roman culture, the people we now call Byzantines were to themselves just Romans. Until the nineteenth century, the Eastern Empire was considered a natural continuation of the Roman Empire, though one that had grown degenerate over the course of centuries. When Nicolaus Copernicus translated the letters of Theophilactus of Simocatta into Latin, he treated him like any other Greek author.’ For Montesquieu, it was obvious to include the fate of the Eastern Empire (Empire d’Orient) in his Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734).*
Among the first people to use the term Byzantine to describe a political phenomenon beginning in the fourth century was Hieronymus Wolf (1516-1580). The edition of Byzantine writers he prepared in 1562 was called Corpus Byzantinae Historiae.’ \t is difficult to say when the Eastern Empire became Byzantium for good. One possible candidate for popularizing this term is the ‘Patriarch of the Byzantinists’, Charles DuCange, whose history of Byzantium, published in 1680, was titled Historia Byzantina.”® Yet, according to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise, the adjective ‘byzantin’ is used in French to describe the Eastern Empire only from the eighteenth century onwards. By the time Gibbon was writing his history, the word ‘Byzantine’ in English might have been widely accepted.’ One of the first recorded uses of this term in Modern Greek comes from 1803, when it was employed by Adamantios Korais.’* In the nineteenth century, the word ‘Byzantium’ and its derivatives came to signify, with very few exceptions, various negative features of the empire — overgrown bureaucracy, pompous behaviour, luxury, cunning and deceptiveness.'’? The notion of a degenerate and corrupt Byzantium was present in almost all European languages regardless of their prior relationship with the empire. Echoing Montesquieu’s statement about the madness of Byzantine theological disputes, Napoleon declared on 9 June 1815, “Let us not follow the example of the Late Empire, which pressed from all sides by the barbarians, made itself a laughing stock for posterity by being occupied with abstract discussions while the city gates were being rammed’.'* For Napoleon, Byzantine civilization had become the embodiment of decay and failure. When Theodore Roosevelt described President Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional address as ‘worthy of a Byzantine logothete’, he drew on the idea of Byzantium as an over-bureaucratized, sclerotic state. This idea of a subtle, complicated, completely useless discussion reverberates in the very modern computer-related expression “Byzantine fault’, which describes a situation when the system has a malfunction but, rather than shutting down completely, continues instead to send false signals.
This over-simplified representation of a Byzantine Empire in constant and continuous decline was created during the Enlightenment and reinforced by the authority of authors such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.’% This unholy trinity is to a large extent responsible for creating this vision of Byzantium, a vision that persisted as an intellectual paradigm for years to come. Although it would be simply unfair to equate the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu and Gibbon and their aims, their enormous influence on subsequent generations contributed to the creation of a grim and decadent image of Byzantine culture. Their attitude towards Byzantium, however, was a complicated mix of repugnance and fascination. Both Montesquieu and Gibbon devoted a good deal of their writings to the decadent Empire, while Voltaire’s tragedy Iréne (1778) was set in Constantinople during the Komnenian coup d’état.'? Though Voltaire despised Byzantine religiosity, he sympathized with the Byzantine antipathy towards Rome and the papacy.’*
Much has been written about the main culprit Gibbon and his Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire.” As has been pointed out by David Womersley, Gibbon was fascinated by Byzantium; fascination, however, does not exclude disgust.”” According to Panagiotis Agapitos, Gibbon’s idea was to present Byzantium as an organism undergoing a millennium of long decline, thus transforming the Byzantine State into a medieval version of the Ottoman Empire:
This point of view, an immediate result of orientalism and nationalism, helped Western Europeans to place the origins of the European states in the Latin Middle Ages [...] and also to claim the heritage of ancient Greece civilization
through Rome and the Renaissance.”!
Anthony Bryer concluded that the sixth volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (i.e. from chapter 58, the First Crusade, onwards) was ignored rather than abused, before the publication of Bury’s edition (1896-1914). Regardless of whether Gibbon truly contributed to the abandonment of the study of Byzantium or whether his influence was largely mythologized, his work nevertheless entered the popular imagination.” The views of the Enlightenment writers were repeated and reinforced in the nineteenth century. Even Friedrich Hegel in his Vorlesungen tiber die Philosophie der Geschichte [Lectures on the Philosophy of History] succumbed to the vision of the history of an empire full of the coups d’état, poisoned emperors and courtly intrigue.” However, the nineteenth century also saw the rise of Byzantine Studies as an academic discipline. The combined efforts of George Finlay, John Bagnell Bury and Karl Krumbacher launched a gradual appreciation of the Eastern Empire. However important their work was, the true battle for Byzantium was fought not in university classrooms but in popular works — novels and plays that were able to influence popular imagination. Charles Diehl, an eminent Byzantinist, wrote that Victorien Sardou, Sarah Bernhardt (the author of the once-famous drama Theodora and the actress who played the title role) and Jules Massenet (the composer of the ‘Byzantine’ opera Esclarmonde) did more for Byzantium than many academic books.” The byzantomania, which was sweeping France when Diehl wrote his article, was indeed both a blessing and a curse for the newly emergent field of Byzantine Studies. French and Italian writers were interested in exactly those aspects of Byzantine culture that Byzantinists wanted to downplay and rectify — its supposed decadence, grandeur and intrigue. That is why scholars reviewing Jean Lombard’s Byzance and Paul Adam’s Basile et Sophie found them irritatingly wrong.” The chasm between academic and popular writers has only recently been bridged with the publication of novels about Byzantium authored by highly regarded Byzantine scholars such as Panagiotis Agapitos, a professor of Byzantine literature and culture in Cyprus, and Harry Turtledove, a science-fiction author with a PhD in Byzantine History.
As the popularity of Agapitos’s and Turtledove’s novels suggests, the popular vision of Byzantium in many Western countries is shaped to a large extent by its representations in novels, graphic novels and films rather than by academic books. The latter, however, have had a not insignificant impact — the works of Steven Runciman and John Julius Norwich have undoubtedly helped popularize the subject.
It is also telling that there has never been a Byzantine blockbuster although the first film inspired by Byzantine history was the short (2’56) French film Les Torches Humaines (Justinian’s Human Torches), directed by Georges Méliés, a director famous for not being terribly fussy about historical details.”° A recent production Fetih 1453, tells the story of the Fall of Constantinople from the Turkish perspective, offering a naive narrative of conquest that evidently should be seen as a part of a reborn Neo-Ottomanism.” Yet, to quote the interview with renowned fantasy writer Tom Holt, the story of the Byzantine Empire ‘is more enthralling and richer in extraordinary characters than any novel. If I was a screenwriter, I'd love to write a film script about the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and another one about Michael IV. Both of those stories are crying out for someone like Ridley Scott to put them on the screen’.*®
This lack of interest is to be explained by the fact that Byzantium does not feature prominently in Western school curricula, though a preliminary survey by Stefan Albrecht shows that students in France, Great Britain and Germany have the opportunity to learn about landmarks in Byzantine history (such as Justinian’s civil code) as well as about Byzantine culture.” Small wonder, then, that Byzantium plays a much more prominent role in Greek education. As for the East, for example in Polish schools, Byzantium is discussed mostly when its history intersects with other historical events more important from the Polish point of view (e.g. the Great Schism of 1054) or recognized as universally significant (such as the Fall of Constantinople as the end of Middle Ages).*° Such fragmentary education results in creating a fragmentary vision of Byzantium that cannot compete with the fuller narrative of the histories of Antiquity or the Western Middle Ages.
It would not be true, however, to say that the reception of Byzantium is a completely understudied issue. Some of its aspects, such as the Greek reception of Byzantine culture, are well researched.*! Similarly, the French byzantomania at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries met with relatively high interest from scholars. However, only a few books have been published that directly address questions of the reception of Byzantine culture.”
The main focus of the present volume is on those aspects of Byzantine reception that are less known to English-reading audiences, which accounts for the inclusion of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian perspectives. Four contributions focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Byzantine culture in these Slavonic countries, each of which mediated this inheritance in culturally specific ways very much dependent on their own relationships with the Eastern Empire. Those countries that were part of the Byzantine Empire had a different attitude towards it than, for instance, Poland, where Byzantium was equated with Russian invaders. This volume tackles also more general issues concerning the reception of Byzantine culture as it opens with Helena Bodin’s survey defining “Byzantinism’ and how it was understood in different countries. Diether Reinsch presents the philological methods of the father of Byzantine Studies, Hieronymus Wolf, the editor and translator of the texts of Byzantine historians. Ingela Nilsson surveys the translations (or rather adaptations) of Byzantine novel Hysmine and Hysminias in eighteenth-century France, the topic especially fascinating since the work on early modern translations and adaptations of Byzantine literary texts is almost non-existent in modern scholarship. Byzantine culture as reflected in Modernist texts is the topic of Adam Goldwyn’s contribution. The volume includes articles that discuss the use of Byzantine elements in art history (Albrecht Berger, Tonje Sorensen and Helen Rufus-Ward) as well as Dion Smythe’s article, which looks at Byzantium in opera.
We have decided to organize the text thematically rather than chronologically; this appears to be a better way of showing how certain ideas, be it in literature or in art history, were used throughout centuries. We hope that this volume will contribute to the ever-growing debate on the role of the Byzantine Empire in early modern and modern culture.
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