Download PDF | Alexander Kazhdan, Simon Franklin - Studies on Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries-Cambridge University Press (2009).
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Prooemium
The essays in this book are based on articles written in Russian before my departure from the Soviet Union in 1978. I am fortunate in having this opportunity to present them to a wider audience of my western colleagues.
In my approach to Byzantine literature I have been chiefly concerned with three questions. The first is traditional and, so to speak, documentary: the examination, or re-examination, of dates and facts. When was Eustathius promoted to the see of Thessalonica? Was the uncle of Theodore Prodromus really John II, metropolitan of Kiev? The importance of this kind of investigation is self-evident, even though individual factual arguments do not substantially alter our general impression of Byzantine literature and literati.
The second question is more controversial. I perceive Byzantine literati, or at any rate the greatest among them, as being involved in the real life of their time. Nor was this involvement only political (although many of them were in fact politicians, or wrote about political events): they belonged to various groups in Byzantine society, and their writings thus reflect various social concepts and moral tenets. One of my major goals has been the ‘social localization’ of Byzantine writers. Some of my specific conclusions may, I admit, be somewhat fragile, but the problem remains intriguing and worthy of study.
The third question is purely literary. Is Byzantine literature merely a collage of traditional stereotypes and borrowed situations, or did Byzantine authors use their imagery to serve their own particular purposes? Without hesitation I accept that the latter was the case. In some of these essays I have tried to analyse how this imagery worked: how, for example, Nicetas Choniates used the imagery of colour to express his own attitude towards people and events. The literary analysis of Byzantine texts is still at an embryonic stage. My own contribution is far from adequate to the scale of the problem, but no progress is possible without initial, perhaps over-tentative, steps.
The tasks of social localization and literary analysis are not simple. Byzantine literature is far removed from our own model of literary activity. Its hints and allusions frequently escape us. It can seem so monolithic, so homogeneous, so static and unvarying. How can one best penetrate this facade? How can one ‘crack the code’, so as to discover the individuality behind the formulae? The method I have generally applied is one of comparison: not the traditional comparison of Byzantine copies with their ancient originals, which seeks to demonstrate the degree of Byzantine mimesis or plagiarism; but a comparison between authors of one and the same period; a comparison of their attitudes, their ethical values, and their artistic methods. Chrysoberges and Mesarites both describe the same rebellion, but how very different are the tales they tell: different not in their political stance, but in their style. By ‘style’ I do not mean merely grammar, or the distinction between the vernacular and the learned, but a system of imagery, a mode of presentation, which reflects the author’s perception of life. [have tried to treat writers in pairs, or in even larger groups, since it is more instructive and productive to discover contemporary contrasts than to show lexical and formulaic continuity over time.
I give pride of place not to the genre, but to the writer. In order to construct a portrait of Eustathius, I combine the evidence of his historical works, his speeches and letters, his sermons and pamphlets, his commentaries on Homer and on John of Damascus. I attempt to demonstrate that Zonaras the canonist developed the same ideas as Zonaras the historian. An author — even a Byzantine author — deserves to be regarded as an entity, not to be torn to pieces in the interests of proving the eternal stability of genres. Since I have concentrated on authors rather than on genres, and since I have tried to present Byzantine literati in relation to each other, I have felt it necessary to stay within fairly strict chronological limits. This book deals mainly with the twelfth century, although there are occasional excursions into the late eleventh century. My aim has been to show the pattern of Byzantine literature over a limited span of time. The pattern as presented here is far from complete: many individuals and many subjects are not discussed. The gaps in this collection are not difficult to spot. But this book is not intended to be a work of reference. We already have several good reference books on Byzantine literature. But there exists no proper history of Byzantine literature. I hope these essays may be seen as a contribution to that as yet unwritten history.
The idea of the book was born in the hospitable confines of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, in Paris, and was supported by the Cambridge University Press. The National Endowment for the Humanities breathed life into the project by supplying funds for the translation. To all these institutions, and to their representatives who have dealt with the project, I am happy to acknowledge my sincere gratitude. I am grateful, too, to my ‘American home’, Dumbarton Oaks, where I found not only an abode, but also the warmth so desirable for one whose life was so radically changed on the eve of his sixtieth year.
All the articles have been thoroughly rewritten. I believe that the reader will be interested in the subject, not in Kazhdan’s scholarly biography, so the essays have been revised and brought up to date. Some texts which I originally used in manuscripts have now been published, and some new editions have appeared to replace those on which I first based my arguments. The appropriate adjustments have been made. Recent scholarship is also taken into account, as are a number of books and articles which were not available in Moscow libraries. In some cases I have introduced additional evidence, corrected errors, or excluded what I now consider to be superfluous. I have also tried to eliminate the repetitions which are to some extent inevitable in a collection of this kind.
Dr Simon Franklin not only translated the original articles, but also worked closely with me on their revision. He checked my Greek references and quotations; in certain places he has restructured my text; he criticized my arguments, and provided alterations and improvements. In short, this book has been produced jointly; it has evolved and emerged through fruitful collaboration.
Dumbarton Oaks, Spring 1982 ALEXANDER KAZHDAN
Acknowledgement
The preparation of this book was made possible by a grant from the Program for Translations of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C.
Approaches to the history of Byzantine civilization: from Krause to Beck and Mango
Earlier generations of scholars have sought to understand the Byzantine empire primarily by turning to its political history. But the modern world has grown lukewarm to the history of events. It is surprising to note that the standard work on Byzantine political history, George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State (‘the best handbook on Byzantine history’, as Cyril Mango rightly calls it) was first issued in 1940, albeit with adjustments in 1952 and 1963. Ostrogorsky’s book has survived for over forty years not because it is flawless: many aspects of his concept of Byzantium have since been challenged. The book’s longevity is due, first and foremost, to the fact that our generation does not relish the history of wars, upheavals and religious disputes. We no longer believe that the core of the past can be reached through even the finest analysis of political events. Instead, the fashion is for the history of civilization, the history of man in a broader perspective. It is no accident that the first part of Alain Ducellier’s Le drame de Byzance (Paris, 1976) is entitled ‘A la recherche de ’homme quotidien’.
The first book specifically devoted to Byzantine culture was produced more than a century ago, by J. H. Krause.' As one would expect, Krause’s sources are pitifully meagre by comparison with what is available today. For example, he writes about Byzantine trades without any knowledge of the Book of the Eparch; he discusses taxation unaided by the publications of Ashburner and Karayannopulos; in 1869 very few items of Byzantine art were known or studied; and Krause’s description of the administrative system piles error upon error.? But such deficiencies should not lead us to become smug or patronizing about Krause’s endeavour, nor should they blind us to the magnitude of his achievement. It is quite remarkable that a scholar in 1869 was able to produce such a comprehensive account of Byzantine life, while relying only on narrative sources and, wherever they left gaps, on his own common sense and intuition.? Krause was visionary not only in his use of the available (or unavailable) facts, but also in his whole attitude towards Byzantium and its culture. He tried to ‘rehabilitate’ Byzantium, to rescue it from the contempt with which it was treated by his contemporaries and predecessors. The notion of ‘decline and fall’ still dominated opinion: Byzantium as the tediously drawn-out afterlife of antiquity, as the mummified corpse of classical culture. Krause turned this assessment on its head, and set out to show that Byzantium was in many respects greatly preferable to the corrupt present. Some of his observations are distinctly idiosyncratic: the Byzantine proletariat knew its place, and in Byzantium Lassallian ‘workers’ associations’ would have been considered absurd (p. vim); the Byzantines and the Romans were not tainted by the lazy modern habit of hanging around in restaurants (pp. 84—5). In at least one respect, however, Krause anticipated the opinions of a significant proportion of Byzantinists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He, and many of his successors, idealized the Byzantine centralized state: the empire was a hive of economic activity; the capital was guaranteed an abundant supply of food; the emperor's powers were sensibly circumscribed; rulers made provision for the poor and the elderly; the armed forces were superb, and education was at a high level (pp. 73, 87, 93, I10, 134, 278, 284, 293, 305-6). At the same time, Krause was aware of Byzantine defects: successful careerism by mediocre bureaucrats, confiscation of private property, parasitic monasticism (pp. 75, 207-8, 281). But these, for Krause, are minor flaws which do not seriously mar the general impression of prosperity and stability.
However one might argue with Krause’s judgement and conclusions, his presentation is sober, ordered and coherent. His chief concern is with material life. After a description of Constantinople, its palaces and churches (pp. 15-47) comes a section on various crafts and arts: mosaics and their preparation, pots, cult objects, ivories, machines, clocks, musical instruments, military technology, fabrics, painting and coinage (48-72). Krause does not look at rural or agricultural implements. He moves on, logically, to the lives and habits of the urban (mainly Constantinopolitan) population: its social composition and mobility, its clothes, its entertainments, and the position of women (72-93). Only then does Krause embark on his long discussion of the emperors and court life (93-206). Then comes administration, the army, diplomacy and finance (206-86). And finally Krause turns to education (286-308), the church and the monasteries (308-79), and astrology and magic (380-405). Such a structure lends the book a certain unity, as the author leads us from the forms of material existence, through administration and government, to the forms of spiritual pursuit. One must stress that in Krause’s book these spiritual pursuits are only ‘forms’, for Krause does not attempt to penetrate the medieval consciousness. He does not hint at any specifically medieval way of thought. His Byzantines think and act according to the same logic as Romans, or indeed as Krause’s own contemporaries.
Since the publication of Krause’s Die Byzantiner, our knowledge of Byzantine life has been enriched with huge quantities of new and varied material. The fact-gathering perhaps reached its peak with Ph. Koukoules’ monumental ‘ethnographic’ collation of written sources.* However, the accumulation of data led initially to some loss of coherence. The raw material was not integrated either conceptually or in the structure and manner of its presentation.
The standard textbook became Steven Runciman’s Byzantine Civilization, first published in 1933, and since reproduced in various forms and languages. Runciman starts with an historical outline, and then he describes, in separate chapters, imperial power, administration, religion and the church, the army, commerce, town and country life, education, literature and art, and, in the final chapter, the relationship of the empire to the world around it. Approximately the same structure is to be found in Byzantium, ed. N. H. Baynes and H. St. L. B. Moss (Oxford, 1948), and in the Cambridge Medieval History, 1v, 2 (1967). Government and law, social life, church and monasticism, literature, science and art, and Byzantium’s place in the medieval world — these were the independent sections of a multi-storey construction, where no staircase led from one floor to another.
Louis Bréhier’s Le monde byzantin (3 vols., Paris, 1947-50) is differently labelled, but almost identically structured. Volume 1 (Vie et mort de Byzance) is a history of political events; volume lis on institutions, with chapters on imperial power, administration and the church; and the final volume is devoted to urban life, the countryside, trade, religion and superstition, literature, science and art. Only once does Bréhier stray from the traditional scheme, in his section entitled ‘la vie privée’, which includes the family and daily life. His book is traditional not only in its structure, but also in its approach: here too, as in Runciman, Baynes and Moss, and the Cambridge Medieval History, Byzantium is presented as a sum or list of separate items, rather than as a coherent, functioning model.
The first modern attempt to integrate, rather than merely to juxtapose, the various aspects of Byzantine culture, is Herbert Hunger’s Reich der neuen Mitte (Graz, Vienna, Cologne, 1965). But by contrast with Krause’s Die Byzantiner, Hunger pays no attention to the material conditions of Byzantine life. His theme is the Christianization of Byzantine society, politics and thought.
Then came André Guillou’s La civilisation byzantine (Paris, 1974). Guillou adopted a new approach to the writing of Byzantine cultural history. Between Runciman and Guillou several scholars had produced works expressly concerned with Byzantine culture.® All of them, like Runciman, accompany their discussion of culture with a fair amount of political and ecclesiastical narrative history.
One can take as an example the book by K. Wessel, which appeared in the influential series Handbuch der Kulturgeschichte. Wessel devotes seventy-five pages to the period from the mid ninth century to 1204, including twelve pages on church history and thirteen pages of political history — together precisely one-third of the total. And in the preceding section narrative history is yet more prominent, filling twenty-five pages out of a total of sixty-seven. Apart from politics and church history, Wessel discusses law (or rather, he lists judicial texts), military organization, crafts, trade, and daily life. Literature and learning are given fairly cursory treatment, and the visual arts are hardly dealt with at all.
Guillou’s book differs from its predecessors fundamentally. It contains no narrative political history whatsoever. Instead it opens with a survey of Byzantine historical geography (chapters 1-2), a subject which had normally been ignored in previous studies of Byzantine history or culture.* Admittedly, Guillou’s account rather resembles a verbal map, a list of regions and towns, instead of an analysis of the geographical conditions, the nature and the climate. Yet the point of his innovation is surely valid: Byzantine civilization cannot fully be understood without an understanding of the Byzantines’ natural environment. The drama of Byzantine history unfolded in a real and specific setting, not on a bare stage. Krause, too, had sensed this, but for him the setting was restricted to Constantinople, its topography and its cultural atmosphere (i.e. the sum of its noteworthy buildings). Guillou mainly discusses the provinces: from Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia) to Syria, Egypt and the Levant.
The geographical introduction is followed by four large chapters: on the state, society, the economy, and culture (spiritual and intellectual, rather than material). A glance at the chapter-headings of the Cambridge Medieval History is enough to show that Guillou’s work is structured according to utterly different principles. Guillou’s chapters are not self-contained entities, like articles in an encyclopedia. They deal with interdependent and interrelated aspects of a single phenomenon. Some might prefer Guillou to have arranged his chapters on the state, society and the economy in the reverse sequence,’ but the essential links between his ‘four elements’ are incomparably plainer and more coherent than the links between the adjacent chapters on, say, music, monasticism, literature and science in the Cambridge Medieval History.
Within each chapter also, Guillou’s presentation is logical and harmonious. The chapter on the state starts with the position of the emperor, and with the imperial cult (pp. 103-8). Then comes a survey of the administration, its general characteristics, its role in the capital and in the provinces (108-33). From organization Guillou passes to function, and the five major administrative departments: financial, judicial, diplomatic, military, and ecclesiastical (133-93). By treating the church as a department of state, Guillou again departs from convention: the church is plucked from its mystical haze and dumped into the thick of administrative life.
The next two chapters, on society and the economy, are arranged with equal clarity. Guillou examines social classes and professions, and social ties (203-22); landed property, agriculture, and the position of peasants (243-63); urban life in Constantinople and in the provinces (263-304); crafts and trades (304-16). One might have minor reservations about individual points: for example, state ownership of land (243-4) and the position of the paroikoi (261-2) might perhaps have been discussed under the heading of ‘society’ rather than ‘economy’. But overall these chapters convey a complex but fully coherent picture of the Byzantine social and economic structure, including aspects of it which were not treated at all by Krause and most of his successors.
Guillou not only integrates the separate strands of his subject. He also tries to present them in a conceptual framework appropriate to their time and place. He neither modernizes the Byzantines, as if they thought in twentieth-century terms; nor does he project them back into classical antiquity. Contrast his approach with that of Krause. Krause begins his chapter on imperial power with the statement that ‘although one cannot speak of a constitution in the modern sense, nevertheless the power of the absolute autocrat was far more restricted and perilous than that of any monarch in our time’ (p. 93). In the Cambridge Medieval History W. Ensslin commences his chapter on the administration with what seems like an assertion of the opposite, and with a different point of comparison: ‘In the Byzantine Empire the conception of the supremacy of monarchical power was more deeply rooted and less contested than anywhere else in medieval Europe’ (p. 1). However, both Krause and Ensslin base their discussion on contemporary notions of the state. Guillou starts his chapter on the state not witha reference to monarchical supremacy, or to constitutions, but with a quotation from John of Damascus (p. 103). When he wants to examine social contrasts, he begins with Byzantine jurists’ own definitions of the relationship of slavery to freedom (197). He opens his chapter on the economy by describing the Byzantines’ own attitudes to land: the land, like the sun and the air, is the creation and the property of God, who entrusts it to His representative, the emperor (243). Unlike Krause, and unlike the compilers of the Cambridge Medieval History, Guillou aims to present Byzantium in Byzantine terms; to view Byzantine economic life, social conflict, moral and aesthetic problems, through Byzantine eyes.
Not that Guillou shuns all modern concepts. He uses the term ‘ruling class’ (203); he analyses ties of dependence (liens de dépendance), and concludes that social cohesion in Byzantium was based on the principle of individualism (212). These terms have no Byzantine equivalents, but Guillou injects them with Byzantine meaning. He explores the Byzantine idea of marriage and the family (213), and the particular Byzantine conditions which were responsible for the ‘weakness of monastic communities’ (220).
Since Guillou rejects anachronistic description of Byzantium, he also avoids anachronistic evaluation. His aim is neither to condemn the empire, nor to praise it, but to understand what it was, in its own time, on its own terms.
And since Guillou constructs his picture of Byzantium with Byzantine images, his presentation is vivid and tangible. Instead of general argument in the manner of Krause, he provides facts and illustration.
Guillou uses the full range of sources available to the modern historian. Besides the narrative sources (on which Krause had relied completely) he uses documents, letters, speeches and theology: all that is written is part of the culture, and must therefore be incorporated into the study of the culture. Guillou also cites the observations of foreigners who came into contact with Byzantium.
Then there are the objects: the archeological finds, the coins, the art, through which life and work in the empire are visibly and tangibly communicated to us. All these varied kinds of sources are extensively used by Guillou. Nor does he present them only in ‘predigested’ form, already assimilated into his argument: the book is filled with quotations, archeological plans, manuscript illustrations. Thus Guillou’s presentation complements his interpretation: Byzantium must be seen and understood from within.
There is, however, one important issue on which Guillou advances no further than Krause. The subtitle of Krause’s book states that it deals ‘mainly’ with the period from the end of the tenth century to the end of the fourteenth. ‘Mainly’ is a convenient imprecision, for whenever Krause’s sources from his ‘main’ period are inadequate for his purposes, he is quite happy to produce the necessary evidence from earlier centuries. In his introduction Krause divides Byzantine history into periods (pp. x1x—xx1), but in his narrative he ignores them. To some extent Krause’s practice is consistent and logical, for in his view historical changes in Byzantium were changes only of circumstance, not of substance: political life was fickle; success could become failure, and vice versa, but the Byzantines themselves remained essentially the same throughout, like the Romans, and like Krause’s own contemporaries. Krause is thus free to use, for example, asixth-century source to make a point about the eleventh century, not primarily because of the lack of adequate material available at the time when he wrote, but because he conceived Byzantium to be socially and culturally static.
The same conception remains dominant today. Wessel, for example, divides Byzantine history into several periods, but only in order to emphasize how little actually changed (pp. 314, 338, 366). Nowhere does he show how or whether his chronological periods have any coherence, any distinctive qualities in themselves. Arnold Toynbee has remarked that ‘if one were to ask any educated modern westerner what was the first idea that associated itself in his mind with the word “Byzantine’’, his answer would probably be ‘“‘conservatism”’’.8 Toynbee criticizes the traditional notion of Byzantine ‘conservatism’, but even he then discusses mainly the difference between Byzantium and classical antiquity, not internal change in Byzantium.?
Guillou does allow for certain changes in the character of Byzantine society, such as the gradual evolution of the bureaucracy, or the restructuring of the élite between the tenth and twelfth centuries (pp. 116, 204). But his ‘periodization’, like that of Krause, is based entirely on political geography: Byzantium as ruler of the Mediterranean, Byzantium confined to the northern Mediterranean, the empire in the Aegean, the empire of the Straits, and so on. Social and cultural change is assumed to be irrelevant, or non-existent.
One of the central questions of Byzantine history is that of whether or not the empire suffered serious economic decline in the seventh century. Over the last two or three decades support has grown for the hypothesis, based initially on archeological and numismatic evidence, that from the late seventh to the mid ninth centuries cities in the Byzantine empire were economically depressed, and that urban prosperity revived during the eleventh and twelfth centuries." If one is to understand the development of Byzantine culture, and in particular the great flowering of literature and art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then surely one must take into account the vicissitudes of economic history, and not just the changing boundaries of empire. Yet Guillou, in his survey of towns, hardly mentions the problem, despite his auspicious opening statement to the effect that there was a ‘close parallelism between the evolution of large land-holdings and the expansion of the urban economy’ (p. 263). Guillou gives the impression that, with the exception of Gerasa, which disappeared in the mid eighth century (pp. 297-8), all Late Roman towns made the transition to the Middle Ages unscathed and unchanged; that the Byzantine urban environment remained classical. Guillou treats cities synchronically: he describes their forms, but he does not follow their development over time.
And he does the same with literature and art: no sense of change, merely a description of genres. He does not look at the development of artistic methods and devices, nor at changing attitudes towards the qualities and depiction of people (people both as the creators and as the main subjects of literature and art). His section on ‘literary production’ (the derogatory quotation marks are Guillou’s) contains a list of forms, with no chronological connection: exegesis, ascetic instruction, novels, historiography, rhetoric, poetry, and so on (pp. 334-60). A catalogue of this sort does not help us to understand the Byzantines’ perception of themselves and the world.
Guillou’s lapse is all the more surprising because it seems to contradict his own general approach. Krause had ignored material and cultural change in accordance with his overall view of man in history. But Guillou’s book is notable precisely because its author does, for the most part, insist that Byzantine life and culture must be understood in terms proper for their time. In other words, most of Guillou’s argument is built on the assumption that cultures, values and concepts change with time and circumstances. Why, then, should he retain an entirely static view of Byzantium itself? Byzantium is indeed a particular cultural phenomenon, a particular civilization, which can as a whole be distinguished from other civilizations. But it was not in itself unchanging and homogeneous. It went through several stages, each of which has its own distinct characteristics. The empire of the Straits was not simply smaller than the empire of the Mediterranean: it faced different cultural problems, and it produced its own solutions to them.
Guillou’s La civilisation byzantine was followed two years later by Ducellier’s Le drame de Byzance. Ducellier’s book has a rather more complex structure. Its first section deals with man in everyday life, and discusses attitudes towards the oecumene, society, morality, and aesthetic values. The second section is concerned with Byzantine self-consciousness: the imperial ideal as propounded by citizens and rulers of the empire; and Byzantine attitudes towards barbarians. The final section looks at the supernatural world: God, the devil, and the bounds of human reason.
Thus over the last couple of decades scholars have begun to present Byzantium in a fundamentally new way. In the first place, Byzantine life and culture is increasingly perceived as a coherent entity, rather than as an agglomeration of heterogeneous elements. Secondly, homo byzantinus is now discussed as an historical figure in his own right, with a character and style of his own, rather than as a vessel containing a peculiar concoction of classical and oriental traditions. Yet Ducellier, like Guillou, does not take the next step. Like Guillou, Ducellier looks at the individuality of Byzantine civilization as a whole, but not at development within it. Krause lacked both the information and the inclination to write of socio-cultural change in Byzantium. But now vast amounts of material are available, and the twin questions of individuality and development can and should be raised with regard to all aspects of Byzantine life. With Guillou and Ducellier the monolithic facade remains firmly in place.
Next came Hans Georg Beck’s Das byzantinische Jahrtausend (Munich, 1978), and Cyril Mango’s Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome (London, 1980). Both Mango and Beck are thoroughly modern in their approach, yet it would be hard to imagine two more contrasting books. Beck writes a kind of philosophy of Byzantine civilization. He enjoys sophisticated formulations, paradoxical statements, and he is more critical than constructive. He does not attempt to provide a complete picture: he confesses as much in his preface (p. 7), and this is not just a piece of conventional modesty. Beck simply does not wish to offer more than Bemerkungen to such a momentous phenomenon as Byzantine society: “as regards Byzantine society, we are still a long way from anything which might properly be called a history’ (p. 232). The same could be said of Byzantine literature, but Beck nevertheless devotes a comprehensive chapter to the subject, rather than mere Bemerkungen. No history of Byzantine society would yet satisfy the requirements of contemporary sociology, but within the limits imposed by the sources we can, and must, tackle the nature of Byzantine society, for otherwise we shall impoverish our image of Byzantine theology, literature, monasticism, imperial power, all of which existed not in a vacuum, but within society. This is no criticism of Beck. Within the limits which he sets himself, and of which he is fully conscious, his approach is wholly consistent. There are numerous reference books which attempt to be comprehensive, but so few attempts to think comprehensively of Byzantium.
Beck’s book has no chapter on art. Mango, as one might expect, includes a section on art, and he comments on Byzantine art and architecture in several of his other chapters too. For Mango’s whole approach is graphic and visual. He seeks to present not a philosophy, but a vista, a series of images in logical order. His path is from image to conclusion. When he reads the tenth-century Vita of Basil the Younger, he sees that all the action takes place indoors (p. 82), while the sixth-century Vita of Symeon the Fool contains many scenes of life in the streets (64-5). Mango’s conclusion is important: fundamental changes have taken place in patterns of urban life; by the tenth century the public activity of earlier times has been replaced by a closed-in privacy.
In style, Beck’s particular skill lies in his precise and fine definitions, while Mango’s is in his creation of palpable images. These predilections determine both Beck’s special interest in rhetoric (pp. 152-62), and Mango’s continual use of the most ‘visual’ of Byzantine literary genres, hagiography. But the distinction between the two books is more than purely stylistic. Beck emphasizes the unity of Byzantium, while Mango brings out social and cultural changes within the general framework of Byzantine history. In his introduction, Mango announces that ‘one can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century’ (p. 4), and he goes on to speak of the ‘collapse of the Early Byzantine State’ and of ‘profound social readjustment’ (p. 45). He also posits ‘fundamental shifts in mental attitudes’ (p. 255). The concepts of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘collapse’ are totally alien to Beck’s work. Instead, he likes such words as Symbiose, Permanenz, Kontinuitat, Continuum (pp. 14, 27, 212, 298, 310). He speaks of phenomena present in Byzantium ‘from beginning to end’ (p. 242). Though he does not regard Byzantium as a ‘monolith’ (p. 290), Beck aggressively, and with more than a hint of polemical irony, refuses to speak of a ‘rise and fall’ (p. 311). According to Beck, changes, if they occurred, must not be allowed to obscure the essential unity of Byzantine culture. Thus Mango’s book presents a history of Byzantine development, while Beck’s is devoted first and foremost to the functioning of his ‘Byzantine model’.
Mango’s concept of Byzantine development is, at its core, a negation of the idea which still dominates Byzantine studies, and which was expounded with brilliant consistency in Ostrogorsky’s History. According to Ostrogorsky, the major causes of change in Byzantium must be sought in the countryside. The creation of alarge class of free and free-moving peasants, as well as the organization of the theme system (that is, settlement of soldiers granted inalienable holdings of land), provided the foundations for the revival of the empire in the seventh century, while from the eleventh century onwards the process of feudalization inevitably led to decline and fall. For Ostrogorsky, as for his distinguished Russian predecessors, the life of the peasantry and of the village community was the corner-stone of historical development. In an article on the city in the Byzantine empire!! Ostrogorsky argued strongly against any attempt to discover substantial changes in urban life during the seventh century. Significant development would have to have been generated in the fields and vineyards.
Mango rejects this ‘agrarian approach’. For him the city is not simply a fact, but a factor in historical development. Without naming Ostrogorsky, Mango writes of ‘historians’ who ‘have been looking in the wrong direction’: they assumed (as, we might add, did Guillou) ‘a continuity of urban life in the Dark Ages’, and ‘sought to discover an agrarian revolution’, whereas ‘in fact it was urban life that collapsed’ and that was practically extinguished in the calamities of the seventh and eighth centuries (pp. 48, 69-73). Rural society underwent no structural change. Moreover, both ‘the establishment of quasi-feudal relations’ and the revival of city life (p. 54) were typical features of Byzantine life and development after the eleventh century. Mango announces an ‘economic and social upsurge of the eleventh century’ (p. 58), which was accompanied by ‘the growth of a petty bourgeoisie’ (p. 82). He suggests that the collapse of the educational system after Justinian was ‘undoubtedly due to the disappearance of the cities’ (p. 136) and also that the revival of intellectual creativity in the age of Psellus may be explained (albeit with a cautious “perhaps’) by ‘the rise of an urban bourgeoisie’ (p. 246).
Taken as a whole, Mango’s conception of Byzantium looks consistent and convincing, but aspects of it are, naturally, open to dispute. Let us consider two such issues. The first arises from his treatment of Byzantine society after the eleventh century. Despite his criticism of Ostrogorsky’s thesis, Mango assumes, with Ostrogorsky, that the ‘feudalization’ of the eleventh century coincides with the start of the collapse. “The economic and social upsurge... was cut short before it had achieved any durable results’; Alexius I is a ““‘saviour’’’, in ironic quotation marks (p. 58); it is ‘perhaps a wonder’ that the Comnenian state managed to survive for a century (p. 59); policies of the Comneni are the same as those of the Palaeologi (pp. 53, 59).
Mango’s periodization of Byzantine history is almost the same as that offered by Beck (Mango, pp. 1-5; Beck, pp. 29-32). Both scholars make a tripartite division into Early, Middle and Late phases. Both take political and territorial changes as the dividing criteria, and both date the Middle period from the Arab expansion in the first half of the seventh century. They are at variance only in the way in which they date the transition from the Middle period to the Late. Beck confidently places the end of the Middle period in 1204, which he claims to be ‘an appropriate and generally acknowledged date’ (p. 32). Mango, by contrast, states that scholars have chosen 1204 ‘with less justification’ (p. 1) than the 1070s, when the Turks occupied Asia Minor.
But was the Byzantine twelfth century really a period of decline? Robert Browning is more cautious in his judgement, calling the Comnenian age ‘one full of paradoxes’.”2 The twelfth century — the century which produced most of the writers treated in the present book — does seem to pose particular problems for historians of Byzantium. Beck incorporates it into his Middle phase; Mango pushes it into the Late phase; and Browning defines it as a separate stage in itself. Yet urban life, which is so important to most of Mango’s argument, still flourished. The famines which appear with devastating regularity in the tenth and eleventh centuries are hardly mentioned in twelfth-century sources. Not only did westerners still perceive Byzantium as an orchard in bloom; the empire did in fact still supply Italy and other neighbouring countries with grain. An upsurge in the realm of literature and art is recognized by Mango himself; and it would be hard to deny that Manuel I was a worthy rival to Frederick Barbarossa. Moreover, recent books by Michael Hendy and Michael Angold make the ‘generally acknowledged date’ of 1204 also disputable:"> they show that the economic and monetary system survived the capture of Constantinople, and that the Territorialstaat of Nicaea was a robust body, fully able to hold its own among its neighbours. It is quite possible that the real disaster for Byzantium was the reappearance of the will-o-the-wisp idea of universal monarchy, which Michael VIII Palaeologus pursued with completely inadequate resources. '*
The second major difficulty arises from the structure of Mango’s book, rather than from its content. Mango affirms that the seventh century marked ‘the beginning of a very different and distinctly medieval world’, and that therefore ‘the catastrophe of the seventh century is the central event of Byzantine history’ (p. 4). Thus one might expect that Mango’s picture of the ‘conceptual world of Byzantium’ would be constructed from post-seventh-century evidence. But in chapter 9 (‘The Inhabitants of the Earth’) Mango uses later material only in five instances (John of Damascus, the Vita of Stephen the Sabaite, Photius, Cecaumenus, and Manuel II), while authors from the fourth century to the seventh are quoted at least twenty-six times. There is an even greater imbalance in chapter 12 (‘The Ideal Life’): five quotations from later sources (Theodore the Studite, the Epanagoge, the Book of the Eparch, a novel of Leo VI, and the De Cerimoniis of Constantine Porphyrogenitus), while earlier authors are cited forty times, including fourteen references to John Chrysostom, and ten to the Sacra Parallela (patristic texts assembled by John of Damascus). Does this mean that the ‘central event of Byzantine history’ had little or no effect on the ‘conceptual world of Byzantium’, and that proto-Byzantine ideas on the oecumene and on morality remained unchanged throughout both the collapse and the revival of urban life? Does this mean that the imagines mundi, as created by the inhabitants of the Late Roman polis (from Libanius to Agathias), by the provincial monks of the Dark Ages, by the antiquarians of the ninth and tenth centuries, by the intellectuals of the Byzantine ‘Pre-Renaissance’, and by the ‘knight’ or ‘burgess’ on the eve of the Turkish conquest, were all identical?
Mango does provide some justification for his choice of illustrative quotation. He sets out to describe not ‘high’ culture, but ‘the conceptual level of the average Byzantine’ (pp. 8~9); and he shows from the evidence of Byzantine libraries that even in the eleventh century, on this level, ‘disregard of contemporary, or near-contemporary literature was typical of the Byzantine world’ (p. 240). In a sense, therefore, Mango’s quotations are fairly representative of what his ‘average Byzantine’ might have read. This does not, however, solve the problem. Even if we are to disregard the issue of provenance, surely we cannot ignore the effects of a changing context. Does Mango wish to imply that the meaning, the connotations and associations, of early Byzantine literature remained stable for readers in later centuries? Or were early works read and understood differently as historical circumstances changed?
Despite his own declarations to the contrary, Mango is in danger of perpetuating, implicitly, Beck’s notion of Permanenz, Kontinuitat and Continuum in Byzantine culture.
Beck’s book, like that of Mango, is inherently polemical; and like Mango, Beck prefers not to name the targets of his critical darts. In modern historiography there are two theses which are broadly accepted, and which are thought to epitomize Byzantium. The Cambridge Medieval History expresses them thus: (1) “The autocratic absolutism of the Byzantine Emperors was the essential feature and the chief support of that state’ (J. Ensslin, rv, 2, p. 1); and (2) ‘Monks are the sinews and foundations of the Church’ (J. Hussey, quoting Theodore the Studite, p. 184). Beck firmly opposes these opinions. He states categorically that ‘the Byzantine ruler was by no means an absolute monarch’ (p. 40). And he supports his claim by demonstrating that the res publica was understood in Byzantium as an institution older than the imperial power, and was set above the emperor (p. 43). He shows how the Byzantine monarchy was restricted by institutions of private law, Verbande, including the colonate, patrocinium, and pronoia (pp. 46-50), and also by local self-government as exercised in urban autonomies, or through the authority of local bishops (pp. 50-1). Beck discusses the functions of three bodies which effectively circumscribed imperial power: the senate, the ‘people’, and the army (pp. 52-9). He sees the Byzantine empire as a Wahlmonarchie (p. 67). He is aware of the need to ask what milieu and what external pressures gave rise to Byzantine imperial theory (p. 43). And he indicates that the bureaucracy could adopt various views of its own relations to the emperor: it could see itself as a tool in the hands ofits ruler; it could identify itself with the ‘state’, in some kind of opposition to the monarch; or it could represent a specific social group- or caste-mentality (p. 70). In other words, Beck presents an image of a highly complex and sophisticated state apparatus, in which differing and frequently antagonistic social tendencies were elaborately enmeshed.
The chapter on monastic life starts with plain polemic. Beck ridicules (unnamed) Byzantinists who claim that by the sixth century the church administration was already controlled by monks, or who calculate numbers of monks in the empire so vast that they led to a crisis of population: ‘where a hand was seen to write, a scriptorium would be found; where two codices could be found, there must have been a library’ (p. 207; cf. also 210-11, 228). Byzantium had no monastic orders as such. Most Byzantine monks took the habit only at the threshold of death, and the influence and activity of Byzantine monks cannot be compared to that of their western counterparts (p. 212). Koinobia were hard to find in Byzantium (p. 214), and the main social function of monks was thought to be the creation of an ideal of behaviour (p. 217).
Mango, too, discusses the status of monarchs and monks. His image of the emperor is more traditional: after the statement that ‘in theory the emperor’s authority knew no limits save those imposed by divine laws’ (p. 32), he hints at practical restrictions, but does not go into them in any detail; instead he emphasizes the specific role of the emperor as a holy person (p. 219). Contrary to Beck, Mango suggests that the principle of heredity was generally respected, though he finds it strange that the Byzantines never evolved a theory of imperial succession (p. 32). In his treatment of monasticism Mango is more innovative: he insists that monasticism was a lay movement, that the monk was a Christian layman, and that monastic education beyond the most basic level did not exist (pp. 105, 108, 148, 224).
Who, then, can be regarded as the key figure in Byzantine society, if not the absolute autocrat or the contemplative monk? Three interconnected chapters stand at the heart of Beck’s book: on political orthodoxy, literature and theology. Here Beck implies that the most significant representative of the Byzantine world is the intellectual. Notably, Beck uses the idea of ‘political orthodoxy’ to include the impact of religious doctrine and ritual on the political structure. This is a reversal of the traditional view, in which influence spreads in the opposite direction, from imperial ideology to lay society and the church. Time and again Beck removes the throne from the focus of social life, and replaces it with living and acting human thought.
Runciman complained that Byzantine literature ‘lacked a certain creative spontaneity’ (Runciman, p. 240). Franz Délger echoed his lament: although some writers could produce works of considerable merit, Byzantine literature is more an exercise in formal and technical skill than the result of direct inspiration or significant experience (in the Cambridge Medieval History, 1v, 2, pp. 209-10). Guillou’s assessment is similar. Beck abandons this well-trodden path and attempts to survey Byzantine literature as a live organism: old genres die out (pp. 112-13), and writers were quite able to feel ‘the pulse of time’ (p. 125); they could offer apt criticism, not just general eulogy (pp. 139-40). Although most Byzantine literati came from the upper strata of society (pp. 123, 241, 294), they sometimes tried to escape the restrictions of official morality and political orthodoxy. Beck looks in detail at two products of this moral dissidence: erotic romance, and the disparagement of monks (pp. 142-7).
In his chapter on literature Mango makes much the same point. He, too, tries to ‘gain some understanding of Byzantine literature in its historical setting’ (p. 234), and he connects the development of literature to the disappearance and reappearance of a reading public (p. 237), that is, to the fate of Byzantine cities. In re-assessing the general character of Byzantine literature, both Beck and Mango have made important and positive contributions to the subject: Byzantine literature ceases to be a vain game of artificial imitation, and it begins to assume its proper place in its historical context.
Thus, and by extension, Mango and Beck also bring a new approach to the old and vexatious question of Byzantium’s classical heritage. Beck points out that Byzantium had no Vorgeschichte or Friihgeschichte, no period of myth and oral tradition, that it is simply a late stage in the history of the Greeks and their neighbours (p. 11). Yet he stresses that Byzantine culture was not purely or merely imitative. A Byzantine author might follow a classical model, but he does not thereby produce merely a replica (see p. 111). Mango puts the case even more strongly: Byzantine art and literature may be ‘undeniably very conservative’ (p. 256), but at the same time the Byzantine scheme of life was ‘the antithesis of the Hellenic ideal’ (p. 229). The perception of the classical heritage was an active process: Psellus did indeed have classical models, but the same models had been available to his predecessors, who chose to ignore them (p. 246). In other words the Byzantines at a certain period began to call on classical models to give answers to contemporary problems.
The thesis of continuity has recently been brilliantly defended in an article by Ginter Weiss,'> but it is not a thesis which Beck or Mango accept. Byzantine culture and society were new phenomena, not variations on a Roman theme. In its literature, theology and art, and above all in its ‘conceptual world’, Byzantium was consistently medieval.
Having shown that Byzantium differs from antiquity, neither Beck nor Mango tries to compare Byzantium with other medieval civilizations, such as those of the Arabs or of the Latin West: what features are common to all, and what is specific to one? These are avenues still to be explored.
After he has placed Byzantine literature in its historical context, Beck turns to theology. Can he do the same here? The task is infinitely more complex, but no less necessary. In principle Beck acknowledges that theology ought to be studied in connection with ‘the world of learning in its entirety’ (p. 167). However, what Beck discusses in the wake of this crucial statement is the lack of ecclesiastical magisterium and of Theological schools (schools both of thought and of pupils) (p. 171), the lack of works comparable with the ‘great western Summae’ (p. 175). He describes dogmatics in chronological sequence, stressing especially that Byzantine doctrinal theology did not die out after the Monothelite dispute of the seventh century (p. 183). He surveys Byzantine mysticism, also chronologically. Inquiring into the origins and spread of mysticism in Byzantium, he seeks the answer not, as he himself had prescribed, in ‘the entire complex of cultural and everyday life’, but in the much more restricted field of spiritual life: in the Byzantines’ general interest in the vita contemplativa, and in the disadvantages of ‘formalized dogmatics’ (p. 205). And so the social questions of theology remain unanswered. For example, is the mysticism of Symeon the Theologian, his ‘individualistic’ approach to God, his search for a personal way of salvation — is this to be connected with his rejection of social ties, particularly those of friendship? Is it linked to the Byzantine disregard for monastic koinobia (which Beck himself demonstrates)? Is it connected with the strength of family ties, so typical of the Byzantine social structure?!*
Two examples may serve to illustrate the difference between Beck’s approach to literature and his treatment of theology. When he speaks of trends in literature, he emphasizes underlying trends in social conditions: ‘social circumstances changed’, ‘social relations had altered’ (pp. 110, 125). But he perceives the relationship of society to doctrinal theology as the reverse: society does not influence theology; rather it is the function of dogmatics to influence society. Beck’s aim is thus to investigate dogmatics not in isolation, but as a significant phenomenon in Byzantine life, for which dogmatics have themselves created the norms (p. 178). Beck likes figures, although he is well aware of their limited availability for Byzantium. He uses statistics in his chapters on literature and on theology. In the first case he examines the social configuration of Byzantine literati (p. 123), concluding that they coincide approximately with the uppermost layer of society (p. 137). The statistical approach in the chapter on theology serves quite a different purpose. He analyses the Greek manuscript collection of the Escorial, and calculates the percentage of theological manuscripts within it, and then the percentage of dogmatic texts within the corpus of theological manuscripts (pp. 172-3). His figures are thought-provoking, but they are irrelevant to any social observation. Unlike literature, theology is still seen as an independent ‘superstructure’, not part of the basic framework of social relations and concepts: theology may have affected society, but Beck is apparently not prepared to accept that Byzantine society could have influenced doctrinal teaching.
Beck changes his attitude when he moves from lofty theology to the beliefs of ordinary people. He speaks here mostly of heresies, and he acknowledges that a rebel or nonconformist could express his political ideas in the form of dogma (p. 259), and that Byzantine dualists did in fact criticize social and ecclesiastical conditions (p. 273). In other words, sublime theology was a product of pure spiritual development, while heresies could be tainted by a social context. But was Der Glaube der Byzantiner, the beliefs of ordinary people, really restricted to heresies, or to demonology and astrology (pp. 267-9), that is, to a circle of ideas and images found mainly outside the official church and its political orthodoxy?
The Byzantine world outlook has long been identified with a doctrinal concept. Runciman distinguishes this doctrinal concept from ‘superstition’ which, according to him (p. 132), included the love of images, the cult of relics, and thaumaturgy. In the Cambridge Medieval History popular beliefs are treated with disdain as superstition and obscurantism (R. Jenkins, Iv, 2, p. 83), with their roots among ‘illiterate and brutish rustics’ (p. 101); or as superstition and pseudo-science (K. Vogel, p. 296). Popular beliefs are supposedly connected either with miraculous healing, rainmaking and fortune-telling (p. 101), or with entertainments and festivals (pp. 92-3, 96). Not until Guillou were Byzantine popular beliefs presented as a system, as ‘modes of thought’. Guillou’s system is broad, including such categories as time (pp. 227-8), labour and profit (231-2), entertainment (232-3), order (237). Such a system of popular beliefs, opinions and images is the central concern of Ducellier’s book. Mango follows the same path. His ‘conceptual world of Byzantium’ encompasses the invisible cosmos, the physical universe, the inhabitants of the earth, time both as historical past and as eschatological future, and eventually political, social and ethical ideals. None of these topics, save that of the historical past, is touched upon by Beck.
Furthermore, Mango suggests that the cosmos, including the heavens, was imagined by the Byzantines in terms of real life. The Awesome and Edifying Vision of the monk Cosmas (dating from the first half of the tenth century) endows the imperial palace of heaven with all the typical features of earthly palaces (p. 153). Another tenth-century text, the Vita of Basil the Younger, depicts the way to heaven as a road through twenty-one teloneia — ‘toll-gates’ — where the presiding demons check detailed ledgers in which every transgression is entered. Mango comments: ‘the burden of imperial bureaucracy and the fear of the tax-collector could not have been represented more graphically’ (p. 164).
Two basic principles of the Byzantine social ideal are especially noteworthy: order (taxis) (p. 218), and family ties: ‘the family was the basic cell of human existence’ (p. 227). Byzantinists are now giving close attention to both.
The ‘conceptual world’ in Mango’s book is far from complete. We do not find there the idea of labour and profit, of wealth and poverty, or the language of gesture and expression. Mango mentions only in passing the Byzantine condemnation of laughter (p. 225). Wealso miss Byzantine ritualism, which includes not only liturgical services and imperial ceremonial, but also the less well-studied rituals of birth, marriage and death. What did the Byzantines eat? How did they treat their children? One could extend the list of questions almost at will. Nevertheless, this section of Mango’s book is a particularly important contribution to modern Byzantine studies. Taking the lead from western medievalists, Byzantinists have only recently begun to investigate the Byzantine conceptual world. Continued inquiry will doubtless reveal to us many hidden aspects of Byzantine life.
The present survey has emphasized the differences, the contrasts between the recent books by Mango and Beck. These contrasts are highly significant. They show that the old framework for the description of Byzantine civilization, which had been almost mandatory after Runciman, is now collapsed and abandoned. Yet it has not been replaced by a commonly accepted new scheme. Byzantine Kulturgeschichte is in a state of flux, of search and of discovery, when different approaches are inevitable, necessary and profitable.
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