Download PDF | John W Barker - Manuel II Palaeologus (1391-1425). A study in late Byzantine statesmanship (Rutgers Byzantine series) (1969).
671 Pages
Foreword
On n May 11 in 330 A.D., Constantine the Great dedicated the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium on the Bosphorus as Con- stantinople, the splendid new capital of the recently Christianized Roman Empire. If that dedication may be taken to mark the beginning of what modern historians call the Byzantine Empire- distinguished from the earlier Roman Empire by the abandon- ment of Rome as the capital and by such cultural developments as the triumph of Christianity-then that Empire lasted for over eleven hundred years. In the course of this long existence, the Byzantine Empire faced and survived a number of crises.
That it achieved a longevity unique in European history was due to many factors, one of the most important being the emergence at critical moments of bril- liant and capable leadership. But if such men as Heraclius, Leo III, Alexius I Comnenus, and Michael VIII Palaeologus suc- ceeded in checking the forces which threatened to destroy the Byzantine Empire, they did so not only through sheer ability but also because the resources necessary for survival were there. The Empire finally succumbed on May 29, 1453, not for lack of capable leadership but as the result of a multiplicity of con- ditions which, by the end of the fourteenth century, could not be changed. The man was there, but the Empire no longer had the potential to save itself.
Manuel II Palaeologus, as readers of this study by John W. Barker will learn, was one of the most gifted statesmen Byzantium ever produced, but it was his fate to rule the State at a time when the forces which threatened its existence could not be checked. Intelligent, energetic, and a man of char- acter, he tried hard to turn back the tide, but failed in the end- failed because the tide was irreversible. Nevertheless, he emerges as a fascinating personage, a consummate statesman, and a bril- liant man of letters. His career, moreover, is inextricably inter- twined with developments of major significance in the history of Europe: the consolidation of the Ottoman position in the Balkan peninsula, and the consequent subjugation of its Christian peoples.
The author's task was by no means easy; sources of information on Manuel are sparse, widely scattered, and difficult to interpret and evaluate. Professor Barker, however, has been highly success- ful in surmounting these difficulties; he has produced a volume which, in addition to being scholarly, is also very readable.
His book is likely to remain the standard study on the subject for many years to come. Professor Barker's manuscript was completed and accepted for publication some time ago; in the interim, the author has added whatever new information has come to his attention, so that the book as it now appears may be considered abreast with the most recent published research. We are happy indeed that the book has finally seen the light, and happier still that we have been able to include it in the Rutgers Byzantine Series, Peter Charanis General Editor Rutgers Byzantine Series.
Preface
The purpose of this book is to trace the development of a fascinating Emperor as a statesman add, to a lesser extent, as a man of letters. The book is not intended to give a detailed account of Byzantine history during the seventy-five years of his life. Nor is it intended to be an all-embracing and "definitive" study of this man as an individual. It is designed rather to pro- vide a basis for fuller evaluation of Manuel II by synthesizing the already extensive scholarly work on details or aspects of his life, by sampling in translation his surviving literary work, and by pointing ahead to work yet to be done on these subjects.
Since the background, aims, and methods of this study are set forth more fully in the Introduction following, this space may be confined to a few vital acknowledgments. The major portions of this book, and its basic premises, ap- peared as a thesis submitted to Rutgers University in the spring of 1961 in partial fulfillment of doctoral degree requirements. The five original chapters of the dissertation were revised, and the two additional chapters (VI and VII) were written, during the following year. For the academic years 1959-1962 I was privi- leged to be a resident Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard Uni- versity's center for Byzantine studies.
While delays have post- poned publication, I have attempted to bring the scholarly apparatus up to date as thoroughly as possible. My first expres- sions of gratitude go therefore to the two institutions which enabled me to pursue this work: Rutgers University, which sus-tained me generously through my years of graduate study, andt he Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, without whose generosity and matchless facilities my subsequent research would have been, at the very least, far more difficult, and its results perhaps different. Within these two institutions there were many individuals who were bountiful in their help.
Primacy in this category belongs to my master and sponsor, Peter Charanis, Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, who guided and supported me through crucial training with a degree of staunchness far exceed- ing the customary teacher-student relationship. Whatever merit may be found in my work may perhaps serve to justify his exer- tions on my behalf. To another of the faculty members then at Rutgers, Professor Clayton M. Hall of the Classics Department, I am indebted for much useful advice in the early stages of my work in the thorny arbors of Palaeologan literary texts. Among the faculty and staff members of Dumbarton Oaks, with whom I enjoyed enriching contacts both professional and personal, there are many to whom I owe particular gratitude. One of these is the late Dr. George Soulis, then librarian of Dumbarton Oaks, whose suggestions and encouragement were of constant significance.
His untimely death in the summer of 1967 has prevented his seeing in completed form this book he helped. so much, adding for me a further poignance to the personal grief I feel at the tragic loss of this brilliant scholar and fine man. To Professor Romilly J. H. Jenkins I owe the warmest thanks for invaluable advice on the demanding problems of translating the original texts which appear throughout this book.
In my present ignorance of Slavonic languages I was given generous and in- dispensable assistance with Russian by Dr. Cyril Mango, at that time director of the institution's publications, and with Russian and particularly Serbian by Mrs. Jelisaveta S. Allen of the library staff. Among other members of this staff, I must also single out Mr. Isham Perkins, the indefatigable interlibrary-loan expert, for his endless and devoted labor in securing hard-to-find titles. Though limitations of space hinder a full enumeration of the names, I must also note the valuable exchanges of information, assistance, and ideas that I enjoyed with those who were my contemporaries as Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks during the years of my residence there.
There were also several individuals beyond the confines of these two institutions who were of great help to me. Chief among these is the Reverend Father Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, O.P., of the Istituto Storico Domenicano in Rome. This learned and kind scholar has been unselfishly and endlessly generous in his wise advice, encouragement, and even contributions of material, during the course of a long and fruitful correspondence between us. His imprint upon my work may be seen throughout the book. I wish also to acknowledge my thanks to Dr. Enrica Follieri of the Istituto di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici in Rome, for her important contributions to this correspondence as well.
I am also greatly indebted to Father Loenertz' student, the Reverend George T. Dennis, S.J. Our nearly simultaneous work on the same Emperor, mutually discovered in midstream, has proved happily complementary rather than competitive. He very kindly sent me a copy of his published dissertation on Manuel in Thessalonica at precisely the right moment for me, and he also was generous enough to provide me with a transcription of the short chronicle texts published by M. Gedeon in the rare periodical 'Exxindiaoxi aja, which would otherwise have been unavailable to me.
I am also indebted to Professor Oliver Strunk, the eminent musicologist, formerly of Princeton University, for an illuminating exchange of ideas on the question of the liturgical acclamations in honor of Manuel II and his Empress. Finally, there were a number of individuals who were of great assistance to me in assembling the illustrative material for this book. For the sake of convenience and pertinence, I have ex- pressed my thanks to most of them at the conclusion of Appendix XXIV. Nevertheless, I will take this opportunity to offer my grati- tude to Professor Randall D. Sale, and especially Mr. David A. Woodward, of the Cartographic Laboratory of the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, for their generous contribution of the three maps to be found in this book.
Introduction
The Subject and Its Sources The scorn, neglect, and misunderstanding to which the re- stored Byzantine Empire (1261-1453) and its Palaeologan dynasty have long been subjected are fortunately becoming obsolete attitudes as time passes and more careful study is made. The reasons for such attitudes are too extensive to allow for dis- cussion here, although the chief of them might be a natural dis- taste for what seems, at first glance, but a period essentially of continuous decline and decay. But at least one reason may well have been the relative dearth of outstanding rulers which the period produced. Of a total of some eleven individuals who bore the consecrated title of Basileus, hardly three or four may really be ranked as rulers of genuinely unusual ability or stature.
Of itself this is not a bad percentage, but amid their mediocre or even feeble company and amid their unhappy circumstances their reputations have perhaps suffered unjustly. Yet these rulers deserve detailed study, not only for their own merits, such as they were, but also as indispensable keys to un- derstanding their era. And surely in the entire Palacologan house no Emperor is more significant, both for his own accomplishments and for his personification of the best and most interesting as- pects of his time, than the man to whom this study is devoted. Statesman, soldier, diplomat, administrator, scholar, man of let-ters, theologian-a person of many talents and interests, excelling in all, Manuel Palaeologus would have been a man of extraordi- nary interest whenever he might have lived. Living when he did, he is all the more fascinating and all the more in need of thorough study.
It was more than a century ago that there appeared the first- and still the only-full-length modern work on the entire span of Manuel's life and activities. This work was Jules Berger de Xivrey's Mémoire sur la vie et les ouvrages de l'empereur Manuel Paléologue. Its very title indicates its scope: the man and the Emperor; his activities, personal, political, and literary. A com- parison of its length, a scant 181 pages of actual text, with that of the present study will provide a rough if not fully complete indication of the vaster resources of material available to us today which Berger de Xivrey did not have at his disposal. Indeed, his work was written under what might now seem the greatest of handicaps. His general source material was limited to the standard Greek historians and to some scant Western materials.
Few of Manuel's own works had yet been published, and for these vital sources Berger de Xivrey was obliged to use the chief manuscript itself of most of the Emperor's writings, the Parisinus 3041. Little serious study of Manuel had been made previously, and although the image of this Emperor had been seen to flit through the pages of classic general histories, such as those of Edward Cibbon, Charles Lebeau, and, soon after, George Finlay, there was, relatively speaking, virtually no sec- ondary literature on the subject. Inevitably, these handicaps led the author into statements, misinterpretations, errors, or over- sights that now seem grotesque.
Yet, even granting such failures, Berger de Xivrey handled the material he had with care and imagination. Many of his observations are penetrating and per- ceptive and have pioneered in elucidating his difficult subject. If his study may by now be smugly retired as largely obsolete, it must still be admired for what it was as an achievement in its time and noted for what it may yet offer. Unjustly or otherwise, part of the stature of Berger de Xivrey's work has been based on the fact that no one has yet attempted to supersede it. There have been, however, several important studies of aspects of Manuel's life or activity which are worthy of particular notice. Three subjects have inspired large-scale at- tention. The first is the Emperor's diplomatic relations, and this subject has evoked two short works. Unfortunately, neither is a major advance.
The brief fifty-one-page study in modern Greek by Antonios Mompherratos, Diplomatic Activities of Manuel II Palaiologos in Europe and Asia, does gather together a certain range of information, but it is generally superficial. The second work, a short monograph by the Spanish scholar Sebastian Cirac Estopañan, La unión, Manuel II Paleólogo y sus recuerdos en España, in spite of its promising title, is essentially a study only of the documents of Manuel's dealings with various Spanish courts and with the Avignonese Anti-Pope. It is useful as far as it goes, but, as a whole, the work has little real scope or inter- pretative insight.
The second subject is Manuel's celebrated journey to the West. The most extensive study, and still the basic one, on this episode is the long article by the great Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, "The Journey of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus to Western Europe (1399-1403)." Less detailed and more su- perficial, but still quite useful, is the briefer study on the same subject by the French scholar Gustave Schlumberger. The third aspect of Manuel's life which has attracted important attention has recently called forth the newest and most significant major work on this Emperor since Berger de Xivrey's study. This is The Reign of Manuel II Palaeologus in Thessalonica, 1882-1887, by Loenertz' disciple, Father George T. Dennis, S.J. By contrast with the first two of these three subjects, this last has been un- justly neglected. Father Dennis' admirable work has the distinc- tion of focusing attention at long last on this important episode.
In addition, in the process of providing the background for his topic, he has actually assembled a good account of Manuel's life from his earliest years through 1387, though with inevitable emphases. If the aforementioned studies represent the sole works of major scope on Manuel, there is nonetheless a rich literature now of articles and other contributions, bearing directly or indirectly on him, by an imposing number of modern writers. Perhaps the foremost among this group is Father Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, O.P., who knows the history and sources of the Palaeologan period, especially of Manuel's time, as do few other living men.
Few aspects of Manuel's life and activity have been left un- touched and unclarified by his illuminating scholarship. Great debts are also owed to the pioneering efforts of such distin- guished scholars as Peter Charanis and Franz Dölger, as well as Paul Lemerle and Vitalien Laurent. The full roster is inevitably too extensive to be covered in the short survey proper here. But the footnotes and the bibliography will indicate in detail the ex- tent of the vast array of secondary writing, directly or peripherally involving Manuel, which is presently available. Before the present book could go to press, the final fasicule of Franz Dölger's monumental Regesten der Kaiserurkunden des ostromishcen Reiches had appeared. The completion of this land- mark in Byzantine studies is itself a cause for rejoicing.
As it covers the period of Manuel II's lifetime, moreover, it is a basic reference tool far too important to be ignored, and so appropriate citations of it have been included in the footnotes. In addition to specialized secondary literature, one should also bear in mind a number of general works by modern writers that provide helpful background. The two prototypes, Edward Gib- hon's immortal History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and George Finlay's zealous A History of Greece from Its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 142 to A.D. 1864, are of course in varying degrees rather obsolete for schol- arly purposes, but they are at least always on hand for literary interest.
At the end, as it were, of the same great English tradi- tion of literary (and literate) scholarship is Edwin Pears' The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks." This book is unfortunately filled with many mistakes and shortcomings, at least for the period of Manuel's life, but it is still useful and is certainly good reading. Remarkable in their way but now rather out of date are Karl Hopf's Geschichte Griechenlands vom Beginn des Mittelalters bis auf unsere Zeit (1821) 10 and the really obsolete Essai de chrono- graphie byzantine, 1057-1453 of Edouard von Muralt." For the general history of Byzantium there is always Vasiliev's History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453," even though its categorized coverage of material is disconcertingly unwieldy. More important for purely political history is, of course, the revised and up-to-date English version of George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State.
One might note also the popu- larized and rather unscholarly, but often lively, La Ruine de Byzance, 1204-1453 by Gérard Walter." Useful, if not always accurate or fully up to date is Averkios Th. Papadopulos' im- pressive Versuch einer Genealogie der Palaiologen, 1259-1453. Introduction For Turkish history, the old classic by Joseph von Hammer- Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches," is badly out of date and has been superseded to a great extent by Nicholae Iorga's work of the same title." More recent is the somewhat controversial but trail-blazing The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire," by Herbert A. Gibbons, in spite of its unreasonably arbitrary and abrupt ending at the death of Bayazid. Early Osmanli history, however, is still very much in need of an ex- tended and up-to-date scholarly study.
If the secondary literature bearing on Manuel has expanded enormously in the past century, the primary literature has un- dergone no less significant amplification. Regrettably, there is still no single, fully adequate Byzantine source for the late four- teenth and early fifteenth centuries. The span of Manuel's life coincides exactly with the gap between the ends of the works by Cantacuzenus and Gregoras and the really detailed coverage by three of the four historians of the fall of Constantinople. Tragic as were the events of this crucial period, it is the more sad that they did not produce a major historian. What might a Thucydides have done with the decline of Byzantium! Thus, we are still obliged, to draw what we can from the scattered, often contradictory, or at least confusing, allusions and scraps of in- formation in the introductory sections of the three later historians. But even dealing with these basic sources is not the same as it was for Berger de Xivrey; for one of them can no longer be accepted as trustworthy.
It had long been assumed that the so-called Chronicon Maius by the courtier-historian Georgios Phrantzes, or Sphrantzes-as we have now come to recognize the correct spelling of his name "-was a more extensive and polished counterpart of the same author's briefer Chronicon Minus. As a result, the Maius had long been used by scholars while the Minus, even when available, was largely ignored. In recent years, how- ever, intense scrutiny and re-evaluation have made clear that the Maius is not an authentic work of Sphrantzes, but is, rather, a fraudulent compilation of the sixteenth century, probably by the known forger Makarios Melissenos."
The Minus is apparently the only authentic writing of Sphrantzes, and the additional ma- terial of the Maius must be used, if at all, with the utmost cau- tion. Fortunately, most of its really fundamental information on 21 Manuel, derived from Sphrantzes' personal contact with the Im- perial family, is also in the historian's own authentic text. Still valid, when relevant, are of course the respective works of Ducas" and Laonikos Chalkokandyles, or Chalcocondyles." To these has been added an interesting Greek history of the Turkish Sultans, the text of which has recently been published." Unfortunately, however, it has since been demonstrated that this late sixteenth-century text is but a Greek translation and adaptation of the 1573 edition of Francesco Sansovino's Italian Annali Turcheschi, which was itself based heavily on Chalco-condyles. As such, it has little more basic value than much of the interpolated material in the Pseudo-Phrantzes-much of which is also derived from Chalcocondyles.
Nevertheless, it oc- casionally contains some additional or differing information, and, even if this may be suspect, it is cited below where pertinent for what it is worth. The most important addition, however, to our Greek source material for this period since Berger de Xivrey's time is un- doubtedly the corpus of various short chronicles which have been gathered and published over the years. While these motley texts of varying length and substance are hardly of any literary significance, they are of the most vitally fundamental importance for chronological information and details often unavailable else- where. With them alone we are able to correct and go far beyond many of the mistakes or oversights into which Berger de Xivrey fell without them. A growing amount of documentary material has also become available in quantity, including such things as Imperial chryso- bulls and diplomatic correspondence. Such riches are by no means limited to Greek material, for a good deal has now been made available from Western archives.
Noteworthy are Genoese documents, but of particular significance are the records of Venetian Senate deliberations. These latter are of enormous value, for they are numerous, orderly, extensively preserved, and invariably well-informed reflections of events of the age, including Byzantine affairs. We are still woefully in need of a thorough publication of the texts of these documents, for the collections or individual publications of texts that have appeared thus far are only a bare beginning.
One means of bridging this gap in our source material, by means of extended surveys of the texts in summaries, is at best a poor substitute, of value only in the absence of an immediate alternative. Such a sequence of surveys was provided on a limited scale by Iorga in the first volume of his Notes et extraits pour servir à l'histoire des croisades au XVe siècle," which also includes important Genoese texts. A more ambitious and laudable treatment of strictly Venetian material was recently attempted by F. Thiriet in his Régestes des delibérations du Sénat de Venise concernant la Romanie." But as striking as Thiriet's work seems at first encounter, its usefulness is seriously impaired by frequent omissions of important deliberations and, even worse, by grave and often inexcusable mistakes, distortions, or over- sights in the individual summaries.
Further, Thiriet ignores the availability of many deliberation texts, not only in individual publications here and there, but also in such an important col- lection as that of S. Ljubić in the Monumenta spectantia his- toriam Slavorum meridionalium. It is regrettable that the job was not more thoroughly done, but, even with its flaws, Thiriet's work is still exceedingly useful and important. In addition to historical writings and documentary materials, a third major category of sources is particularly significant for the Palaeologan era in comparison with other periods of Byzan- tine history. This is the realm of essentially literary works. In- deed, a rich bulk of such material survives, which will require extensive study and publication for some time to come before the fullest knowledge of the Palaeologan period will be possible. Many of these works, on religious or abstractly speculative sub- jects, are, of course, of little or no historical value. But panegyrics, orations, and various discourses on a wide range of themes can often be of great importance By far the most significant part of this category, however, is correspondence.
There are, regrettably, handicaps in the use of such material. Written within a small coterie of the intellectual elite of their day, these letters were cast as exercises in ultra-refined rhetorical elegance. Their style is usually a supreme dis- tillation of all the obscurity and distortion of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in which the late Byzantine writers reveled. As such, these letters were intended more to provide intellectual stimulation and to serve as a needed escape from the ghastly realities of the day than to convey information. Indeed, the rules of the game often call for concealing information, allusions, names, and facts as far as possible within the stylistic maze. Thus, even after the modern reader has fought his way through such essays, he is more likely than not to emerge at the end with a disappointingly small amount of content or information. Never- theless, these texts should not be ignored, for here and there among them one can in fact find some which yield really valuable tidbits of information.
We are thus very much indebted to the common custom at that time of copying and preserving large quantities of these letters, as more than merely ephemeral com- munications. In this department of correspondence, one of the most im- portant single contributors, at least for our purposes, was De- metrius Cydones. Scholar, man of letters, man of affairs, coun- selor and intimate of two Emperors (John VI Cantacuzenus and John V Palaeologus), he was also the teacher and friend of a third, Manuel Palaeologus himself. Among his surviving literary works are some four hundred and fifty letters of varying length and content, to various friends and acquaintances, and of di- vergent value.
Many of them, however, contain information and allusions of the greatest significance for the student of this period. For a long time these letters were not available in print. Even up until very recently only a very few of them had been published. Within the last few years, however, we have been given a critical edition of these texts, thanks to the patient toil of Father Loenertz." Their availability at long last is an event opportunities for confusion that their tripartite division entails, and also of the large number of other citations necessary to Loenertz' works, it has been deemed advisable to cite these three articles, not by title, but only by periodical, number, date, and page. All references, therefore, to Loenertz in this form are to these three articles. His other contributions are cited by title.
of immeasurable importance for the study of Byzantium in the fourteenth century. Specifically, these letters are fundamental sources for at least the early sections of the present work." Of all the source material used for the study of Manuel II Palaeologus, of course, the most fundamental is inevitably the writings of the Emperor himself. A large number of them have survived. For the most part, they are in a style at least as obscure as that of the usual literary products of their age, and generally more so. As a result, they are difficult to read and to use. Ad- mittedly, many of them are of limited or no historical value and concern primarily the student of Byzantine literature and culture as such. But a number of them, as will be seen below, are of great importance as historical sources.
There are several dis- courses that have specific associations with certain events. One such, the Emperor's Funeral Oration for His Brother Theodore, rich in historical information. But the most important sources among Manuel's works, by and large, are his letters. While those of Cydones are funda- mental for the late fourteenth century in general, Manuel's letters are fundamental for the Emperor and his career in particular. Though many of them are nothing more than empty displays of rhetoric, noteworthy mainly for their exasperatingly stilted and studied obscurity, there are yet a surprisingly large number of them which cast fascinating and illuminating light on Manuel's ac- tivities. Some of these letters have been used by scholars since they were made available. But, even bearing in mind the for-midable factor of their style, it is astonishing that so many of them contain really valuable material which has gone virtually unnoticed all these years.
In the field of editions, we are at a somewhat greater ad- vantage than Berger de Xivrey, who worked only from manu- script and, at that, from one not containing all the Emperor's surviving works. Now there are at least adequate editions of many of these literary works, including most of the really im- portant ones." But unfortunately there is still much to be done. Many works remain unpublished, and a good critical edition of Manuel's complete works is vitally needed. Indeed, the very absence of a really satisfactory publication of this important corpus of texts prevents, at this time, the writing of a truly complete study of all aspects of Manuel Palaeologus with the same scope that Berger de Xivrey attempted. The pres- ent book is therefore by no means a biography in the conven- tional sense of the word. Yet, the large accumulation of new secondary literature and the availability of fuller source material during the last century have made the time ripe to some ex- tent for a re-evaluation of at least some facets of this remarkable Emperor's life and reign.
The principal emphasis of the present study is therefore the political aspect. It is not intended to be a history of Byzantium during the seventy-five years of Manuel's life, but rather an examination of Manuel's involvement in political events and his contributions to them; of the problems which he faced and his reactions to them. The basic concern is thus both Manuel in Byzantine politics and Byzantine politics through Manuel; for in him we may observe not only the history of his time, but also the operation of first-class Byzantine statesmanship in action in the days even of the Empire's final decay.
The pursuit of these goals involves two approaches. The first, the synthesis of all current secondary literature hardly requires any defense or explanation. Since this literature has become so extensive and diverse, the need by this time to pull together the multitude of short articles and studies and to place their con- tributions in proper context was one of the incentives for writing this book. Of course, in instances where a topic has already been examined thoroughly, most notably in the respective major studies of Dennis and Vasiliev, there is no point in repeating their labors at length; their findings are thus gratefully absorbed with all due credit.
The second approach is the more difficult, and, as it is also more unusual, it merits brief discussion. Plainly, it is desirable to make use as far as possible of all the material in Manuel's own writings bearing on his political activity and on whatever else is relevant. Study of this material soon suggests that discus- sion of the deeds of an Emperor who was so adept at self- expression, by the standards of his age, can be no better supported or illuminated than by his own words. Such use of Manuel's own words, in translation, has therefore become one of the basic features of the present work. There is no denying, of course, that this is a dangerous pro- cedure at best. It imposes a great handicap, since Manuel's style is usually so rhetorical and intricate that, even when it has been understood, it is very difficult to transmute it intelligibly into a modern rendering.
It is easy to rush to either of two extremes. One is to translate as literally as possible, producing near gib- berish, which may reproduce faithfully the author's stylistic traits in his own tongue, but which is virtually unintelligible even with a battery of ponderous explanatory footnotes. The other extreme is to give free paraphrases of the original, smoothing out the author's tortuous twists and turns and reducing his ideas and statements to easy clarity. But the latter course also has great disadvantages, for it is both an injustice to the author and a dangerous oversimplification for the reader, destroying the flavor and spirit, as well as the letter, of the original.
Moreover, since the chief interest in translating these works is not to present them for any purely literary value, real or inter- polated, but rather to use them to give insights into Manuel the Emperor and the man, it is desirable to retain as much as pos-sible of his own stylistic qualities. The inevitable compromise at- tempts its course between Scylla and Charybdis. The translations are as faithful as possible to the original, within, it is hoped, the limits of sensible English. Moderate paraphrase has been em- ployed only where it seemed desirable or unavoidable in the interests of intelligibility. Whatever the success of the attempt, it was one well worth making." These, then, are the perils of the second approach. It has not been followed at all in the first chapter.
There are a good many of Manuel's surviving writings which concern his life before his accession as sole Emperor. But to examine them in detail would expand beyond proper bounds the already distended size of what is, after all, but a preliminary to the real subject, Manuel's career as Emperor in his own right. The first forty-three years of his life are therefore essentially a background to the main body of the subject, albeit a background essential for understanding what fol- lowed. This background also happens to cover a period filled with many points of confusion and obscurity, a period that has, in ad- dition, elicited a large and diffuse array of small-scale articles and studies.
The necessary concentration in the first chapter is there- fore one of synthesis of available material to form as concise and well-grounded a survey as is feasible. In the following narrative chapters, the employment of Manuel's own writings and of other contemporary documents, when appropriate, is brought into play. The nature of the subject matter has shaped the chapter divisions, and if these divisions are not frequent enough to allow for more compact chapters, length is preferable to Procrustean distortions. The subject mat- ter of the first three chapters has allowed an essentially chrono- logical narrative; indeed, any other approach would be unwise and almost meaningless. In much of the fourth and fifth chapters, however, overlapping sequences of events and simultaneous planes of activity require disjunct and categorized treatment. If this latter procedure causes some confusion, it is perhaps prefer- able to even greater confusion. Every attempt has been made to give adequate cross references to enable the reader to keep track of separate or divided discussions of the same material.
Throughout this study, admittedly, the process of expounding the source material thoroughly makes for unfortunately bulky footnotes. But it at least avoids the failing, common in much of the literature on this period, of leaving the reader uninformed of the numerous contradictions and necessary reconciliations in which divergent sources for this period are so often involved. Where the inclusion of long discussions of extended problems or supplementary material have been deemed worth while, they have been added in appendices at the end of the work. And, al- though the practice may add to bulk and distraction, special ef- fort has been made to relate all the important secondary litera- ture to the author's own findings through the fullest citation at every opportunity.
The sixth chapter is a brief recapitulation. Its purpose is simply to reconsider the broad outlines of Manuel's policies and states- manship; no new material is introduced. Finally, the supple- mentary seventh chapter has been added to give the reader some broad idea of Manuel's personal characteristics and, more im- portant, his wide and significant literary activity, insofar as the availability of material and the scope of this book permit. Such, then, are the aims and methods of the present study. To the degree that it is successful, it is offered as a contribution to the ultimate understanding of a fascinating and complex period and of the remarkable man who was Manuel Palaeologus.
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