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Global Byzantium
Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old “Byzantium and its neighbours’ theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and towards the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium — as a concept — explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the empire’s strategic geographical location.
Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of ‘competitive sharing’, not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they ‘looked out’, and what others saw in Byzantium when they ‘looked in’ and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism.
Finally, we need to think about the empire’s strategic geographical position: between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally, they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa, and Asia — effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world.
Leslie Brubaker is Professor Emerita of Byzantine art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on Byzantine culture, with particular emphasis on manuscripts, iconoclasm, and gender. Her most recent projects have focussed on the cult of the Virgin in Byzantium, processions, and the Byzantine peasantry.
Rebecca Darley is Lecturer in Global History, 500-1500 CE, at the University of Leeds. Her research focusses on Byzantine cultural history, especially perceptions of the foreign and on political and economic changes in the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE, as well as all things numismatic.
Daniel Reynolds is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine History at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham and co-director the Crossroads of Empires Project in Montecorvino Rovella, Italy. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham and held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship from 2014 to 2017.
Contributors
Leslie Brubaker is Professor Emerita of Byzantine art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on Byzantine culture, with particular emphasis on manuscripts, iconoclasm, and gender. Her most recent projects have focussed on the cult of the Virgin in Byzantium, processions, and the Byzantine peasantry.
Rebecca Darley is Lecturer in Global History, 500-1500 CE, at the University of Leeds. Her research focusses on Byzantine cultural history, especially perceptions of the foreign and on political and economic changes in the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE, as well as all things numismatic.
Francesca Dell’ Acqua is Associate Professor in History of Medieval Art at the Universita di Salerno and the only expert in medieval art selected for the Italian REF (VQR) 2015-2019. She received her PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and held research fellowships at prestigious institutions, including the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, and the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham where she was Marie Sktodowska Curie Fellow of the European Commission (2015-2017).
Julia Galliker received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2015. Her doctoral thesis was titled Middle Byzantine Silk in Context: Integrating the Textual and Material Evidence.
Tim Greenwood is a Reader in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on the political, social, and cultural history of late Antique and medieval Armenia (c. 500-1100). His study and translation of the early eleventh-century Universal History of Step‘anos Tardnec‘i was published in 2017. He is currently working on a range of projects including a monograph on law and legal culture in medieval Armenia.
Catherine Holmes is a historian of the politics and the culture of the Mediterranean world, including Byzantium, between the tenth and early fifteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in frontiers, in relations between different religious and ethnic groups, in comparative political culture, and in the Global Middle Ages.
Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. She is interested in most aspects of Byzantine art and has recently-ish (2017) published a book on medieval mosaics.
Anna C. Kelley is a Research Fellow in Early Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, during which she held fellowships at the Institute for Historical Research in London and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Her research interests include early medieval exchange, production, and labour organisation in the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Africa and the Red Sea.
Angeliki Lymberopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the artistic production in Venetian Crete (1211-1669) within its socio-economic and cross-cultural environment. She is the editor (vol. 1) and co-author (vol. 2) of Hell in the Byzantine World: A History of Art and Religion in Venetian Crete and the Eastern Mediterranean 2 vols (Cambridge, 2020).
Henry Maguire is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at Harvard and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was sometime Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington.
Eduardo Manzano Moreno is Research Professor at the Instituto de Historia of CSIC and British Academy Global Professor at the University of St. Andrews. His work has dealt with the history of al-Andalus, on which he has published a number of papers and monographs. His last book is titled La Corte del Califa: Cuatro atios en la Cordoba de los omeyas, Barcelona, 2019.
Nicholas S. M. Matheou is a social, political, and economic historian of the medieval Middle East, specialising in Armenian, Georgian, and Greek material in the regions of Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia, and Caucasia. After completing his degrees at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, he was awarded a Past & Present research fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, was programme manager at the Armenian Institute, London and has recently been made Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Stephanie Novasio completed her PhD candidate in Byzantine studies at the Centre of Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern Greek studies at the University of Birmingham in 2022. Her research examines representations of ageing and the life course in the later Byzantine period, with an emphasis on constructions of gender and the family.
Robert Ousterhout is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Claudia Rapp is the Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna. She has research interests in the history of written and writing culture, hagiographies and the cult of saints, and, broadly, the social, cultural, and religious history of Byzantium.
Daniel Reynolds is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine History at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham and co-director of the Crossroads of Empires Project in Montecorvino Rovella, Italy. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham and held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship from 2014 to 2017.
Linda Safran is an associate fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and has published extensively on medieval art in southern Italy and on Byzantine diagrams. Her co-authored textbook Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
Peter Sarris is the Professor of Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine Studies, and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has published extensively on the social, economic, and legal history of Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and Byzantium, and his current research is focussed on the development of Eurasian trading networks.
Flavia Vanni received her PhD at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom); her doctoral thesis Byzantine Stucco Decorations (ca 8501453): Cultural and Economic Implications across the Mediterranean is the first synthetic study on the use of plaster reliefs in the Middle and Late Byzantine period. Her publications include “Aspetti meno noti della scultura medio bizantina: la decorazione a stucco” (2019) and “Seeing the Unseen: Plaster Reliefs in Middle Byzantine Constantinople” (2021).
Lauren A. Wainwright achieved her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2018, completing a thesis entitled Portraits of Power: The Representations of Imperial Women in the Byzantine Empire. Her research interests lie in the perception and representation of women in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the first millennia AD.
Preface
Global Byzantium was the product of Rebecca Darley, Dan Reynolds, and I working together on a project on Mediterranean trade in the years before the Fourth Crusade (1204). We were not alone: Henry Chapman (Birmingham), Matt Harpster (Kog), Jonathan Jarrett (Leeds), Anna C. Kelley (St Andrews), and Joanita Vroom (Leiden) all contributed, and the eventual outcome of that collaboration will be/has been presented by a large percentage of that team at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Venice/Padua 2022.
But we also realised, as we worked through the trade material, that there was a larger project swirling around ours, and that it enveloped an area larger than the Mediterranean. Rebecca, in particular, drew in the Indian Ocean and Asia; Anna tracked the pre-Islamic cotton trade down the Nile into Nubia and the Sahara; Dan travelled from Sinai, across the Red Sea, and into Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, Matt’s shipwreck data, with Henry’s input, increasingly demonstrated that oceans are not simply something to get across, but need to be treated like landscapes — seascapes — in their own right. And just like on land, the people who exploited these seascapes did so in localised and regional ways that created overlapping spheres of contact, circles of intersecting communities.
The patterns that were emerging from our study of the Mediterranean had become quasi-global in scope — quasi because we stopped before the great Atlantic trade routes began, so we did not incorporate the American continent. We also had no expert on northern Europe on board, sadly, so we did not deal with the Vikings and their sea routes, which would also have led us to North America at least. But even without the Americas, we had moved from a Mediterranean focus to an almost global one, and the symposium that generated this volume grew from our realisation that we needed to think about the Byzantine Empire in a global, not just a Mediterranean, context. Forces well beyond the Mediterranean impacted on Byzantium, and Byzantium was a crucial and central player on a global stage for much of its history, as many of the chapters in this volume attest, not least Peter Sarris’s chapter on Eurasian trade and Linda Safran’s chapter on Byzantium and China.
There has been considerable interest in global history, and the global Middle Ages, across the past decade, and the bibliography is steadily growing: the state of the literature is summarised in Rebecca Darley’s introduction to this book. But the key elements that underpinned our interest in ‘going global’ were three: the historiographical narrative and its theoretical and methodological implications (and limitations); the importance of regional interconnections — social, cultural and economic — which, as they overlap, can expand to encompass vast networks across continents and bodies of water; and, finally, the power of comparative analysis.
The first of these elements, the grand narrative engrained in (especially, but not only) modern national histories, is particularly clear in Dan Reynolds’s conclusions to this volume. Here we see how Byzantine history (and material culture) was restructured to support the needs of modern states. But there are other sides to this rhetorical manipulation, as demonstrated when Armenian authors incorporated elements from Byzantine ‘universal histories’ into their own historical narrative to establish parity with the larger polities that surrounded them (on which see Tim Greenwood) or when Byzantines wrote narratives about to-them distant and exotic lands (such as India, as discussed in the volume by Rebecca Darley) to create stories favourable to themselves. Using ‘them’ to make sweeping statements about ‘us’ is clearly not new, and one of the strengths of the global turn is to expose literary twists such as these and observe how they work on the ground, as we see in Nik S. M. Matheou’s chapter. !
The second of these elements is the crucial importance of small, and usually regional or local, connections, which — at least in the pre-modern world — underpinned all larger networks and gradually overlap to form loosely structured global networks. Strong small-scale ‘communities of use’ seem to us to be essential to the generation of any large-scale associations on all levels, and many of the chapters that follow attest to the impact of this premise: for example, Anna C. Kelley’s chapter on cotton production and trade brilliantly demonstrates how this worked. Though these communities of use were normally centred on a particular locality, this was not always the case. For example, elite and monastic communities can form strong communities of use, in these cases based on the shared social capital (access to surplus or shared vocation) rather than geographic proximity, on which see, for example, Francesca Dell’Acqua’s chapter on the monk Autpertus. On a different register, Stephanie Novasio demonstrates how the social markers of life course stages create other communities, defined by socially constructed “communities of experience’, which equally impact of the parameters of Global Byzantium.
The power of comparative analysis is perhaps the most sweeping theme of this volume and also perhaps the most familiar: Catherine Holmes’ chapter explains why it is such an important tool.” In addition to relatively straightforward comparisons (as, for example, in Robert Ousterhout’s chapter on master masons, Eduardo Manzano Moreno’s discussion of al-Andalus and Byzantium or Henry Maguire’s comparison of the use of magic signs in Byzantium and the caliphate), several chapters — particularly those by Lauren A. Wainwright on marriage alliances and Angeliki Lymberopoulou on the maniera greca — explore the ways in which cultural exchange resulted in the creation of new meaning. Comparative analysis is complicated by Julia Galliker and Flavia Vanni: Galliker notes that shared technologies make it impossible at times to determine whether a silk was produced by Christian weavers in Byzantium or Muslim weavers in the caliphate; while Vanni shows that parallels between Byzantine and South Italian stucco were not due to ‘borrowing’ but simple familiarity, thus undermining the simple binary opposition between ‘Byzantine’ and ‘non-Byzantine’. In southern Italy, the global was local, a point also made about northern Italy (and especially Ravenna) by Liz James.
These three sweeping themes — historiography, communities of use, comparative analysis — tie together the chapters of this volume, but one further leitmotif unites them all: the pivotal role of Byzantium in any understanding of the global Middle Ages. It was not always the central player (as Claudia Rapp’s chapter shows, it was sometimes a small bead on a longer necklace) but it almost always had a role. Positioned across the imaginary boundary of what is currently often called the Global North and the Global South, and across the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia, Byzantium was the lynchpin that held together a great many other networks that together made up a (partially) global world.
Leslie Brubaker Rome 11.21
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to thank Lauren Wainwright for her editorial work on this volume; without her, it would not exist. Thanks too to Joseph White, who compiled and collated the Index. My co-editors were models of what co-editors should be: Dan Reynolds ran front of house at the actual Symposium, and ensured that everything ran smoothly; Rebecca Darley was a brilliant text editor all the way through. My final thanks are to the contributors, who have all been extraordinarily patient as we battled through the pandemic; to the Press (always Michael Greenwood, but also Yassar Arafat Abdulnasser, Melissa Brown Levine and Louis Nicholson-Pallett); and, as always, to my husband, Chris Wickham.
Introduction
The Future of Global Byzantium
Rebecca Darley!
Part of the inspiration for the theme “Global Byzantium’ was the sense that, in many narratives concerning a global Middle Ages, in efforts to link and consider distant places, especially north-western Europe and West and Central Asia, Byzantium was an obvious yet overlooked point of connection and comparison. Many of the chapters in this volume help to fill that gap. It was also a theme chosen to reflect our belief in the particular utility of Byzantium in reaching for and addressing a wide range of global questions due to the empire’s longevity, geographical situation, and continued relevance to world geopolitics. Finally, it was an opportunity to contribute a uniquely Byzantine perspective, in terms of evidence and approach, to defining the study of a global Middle Ages. We hope that the chapters in this collection, marking 50 years of Spring Symposia under the aegis of the UK Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, offer as many questions as answers about what such a definition might be.
The global turn is still in its infancy.” It has proved its power as a vantage point from which to look more broadly at the world and a foundation for exploring big hypotheses concerning, for example, environmental change, maritime mobility, and technological dissemination.’ It is still evolving as a set of methods and a coherent theoretical framework but has already been fruitful in promoting new ways of looking at the past, from collaborative, increasingly trans-national projects to feminist re-imaginings to the breaking down of chronological and regional boundaries.* From material culture to textual sources and pedagogical theory, and from East Asia to East Africa, ‘Global Byzantium’ has inspired all of the scholars in this volume to explore these emerging possibilities. Within its pages are microcosms of the debates about what global history might be: broadscale and interested in transregional influences, explicitly concerned with the extra-European world, comparative between perceived culture blocs, in pursuit of shared human experiences and modes of expression, politically active in post-colonial debates concerning global inequalities of knowledge and prestige, constructing modern global dialogue through study of the past.
Rather than attempting to synthesise a single narrative or direction on behalf of these scholars, or for global (medieval) history as a whole, this introduction delves deeper into several key themes of ‘Global Byzantium’: the nature of the Byzantine Empire as a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and geographically extensive state; the connections of the Byzantine Empire to its contemporary cultures and polities; the significance of the Byzantine past in shaping subsequent global events and the ongoing confrontation of Byzantine studies with the legacies of its disciplinary past. Reflecting on the past and future of Byzantine studies entails recognising the significance not only of global but also post-colonial interpretations of our empire of study and underscores the vitality, visible throughout this volume, of Byzantine studies as a community from which to see old problems and conventions anew.
This introduction was written in the run-up to the 53rd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, the first to be hosted by Birmingham since ‘Global Byzantium’ and the first to be conducted in virtual format, enabling new levels of global participation but disabling some of the key mechanisms of embodied hospitality that foster a sense of the local and personal.> It thus highlights the perpetual challenge of a broad scope: how to retain closeness and detail. The 53rd symposium was on the topic of ‘Nature and the Environment’, speaking directly to the global-scale threats of climate change, associated environmental degradation, and their political and economic consequences for communities across the world.® This was also close to the first anniversary of the UK national lockdown in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The pandemic slowed the completion of this volume but also underlined how intertwined our lives are today on a worldwide scale.
These circumstances make more pressing the necessity of talking to each other globally and situating the Byzantine past as a resource with which to think about current challenges. Moving forward, while global history is not the only direction of travel in research, a global perspective seems likely to remain crucial for the foreseeable future. We believe firmly that Byzantinists, those of us drawn to this empire and its history from a wide range of disciplinary, national, linguistic, and methodological backgrounds, have an obvious place in shaping historical debates. Our worldwide organisation as a community of scholarship and the long and pivotal role that Byzantium played in the history of Afro-Eurasia are both significant, but even more so is the phenomenal richness of our historical material with which to offer insight and inspiration to a world looking for new questions and answers.
A theme that recurs throughout this volume — and will be dealt with in detail in the conclusion — is post-colonialism. Post-colonial studies encompass both the study of places and people dealing with the aftermath of explicit colonial power relations (and is explored explicitly in later chapters) and also the ways in which colonial power and frameworks for understanding the world have been retrojected into the study of the past, with particular focus on inequities built into the study of the extra-European past. Application to the study of Byzantium is evident. It was an empire that held colonised territories and instituted policies of integration highly recognisable in the wider history of empire. It has also been studied through lenses shaped by later, modern European colonial discourse, which has tended to marginalise Byzantium in favour of asserting a direct link between modern colonial powers and the earlier Roman Empire. This supposed status of ‘successors’ or ‘inheritors’ of ancient Rome in turn served to bolster the newer imperial dreams of these European powers.’ Nevertheless, the history of Byzantium does not fit easily into the simple dichotomies that post-colonial theory can appear to throw up: those between subaltern and conqueror, colonised and coloniser. Byzantium was, as a living state, and has been since as a historical memory, all of these things. As post-colonial theory is about the complex intersections and interdependencies of these forces, so Byzantine history provides a fertile source of inspiration.
Despite this, Byzantine studies has perhaps not been as active in its turn to post-colonial analysis as other fields of ancient and medieval history (just as the inherent globality of the empire has hitherto elicited more implicit than explicit engagement with global historical approaches).* This is perhaps because it is easy, and somewhat conventional in Byzantine studies, to see the history of the empire as a whole as marginalised and thereby either exempt from having to engage with post-colonial responsibilities or obliged only to do so as a means of underscoring the empire’s status as a historiographical victim.’ The long shadow of Edward Gibbon can still be felt in popular representations of Byzantium and (courtesy of its now widespread digital availability) in incautious undergraduate writing.!° As Anthony Kaldellis’s work has argued, even much more scholarly analysis that disavows Gibbon’s characterisation of Byzantium as an icon of ‘decline and fall’ is not necessarily willing to relinquish fully the claims of north-western Europe to be Rome’s true successor, and grant to Byzantium an unqualified Romanness.!! All Byzantinists recognise the importance and, often, the difficulty of raising the profile of our discipline and confronting pejorative assumptions about its nature and relevance. As an empire that is not, straightforwardly, claimed as the exclusive originator of any national unit today, it often feels, whether we are writing in Britain, Greece, or China that some special case needs to be made for why people should be interested.
Nevertheless, in seeing Byzantium as a victim of history’s occlusion, other aspects of the empire are themselves marginalised or distorted. Global approaches, decentring both Constantinople and the European gaze, and post-colonial analysis, homing in on the contradictions and compromises of power relations, offer tools with which to take a different look at core elements of our field and challenge existing narratives that privilege particular actors and interpretations. Terminology used in Byzantine studies, for example, often obscures violence and coercion and casts whole communities and regions, such as those of Arabia-Palestina in our concluding case study, as contingent characters, defined by their relationship to the metropole — peripheral, reconquered, lost, won, or in rebellion — rather than as full participants on a wider stage of empire.
The idea of the so-called Byzantine Commonwealth, as another example, addresses important themes of diplomatic relations, religious community building, and soft power, but it seems no coincidence that the term was applied in the context of post-World War Two decolonisation, when the idea of ‘the free association of independent states’ was filling the ideological space left by the collapse of colonial systems.!? The term, therefore, strongly implies that Byzantium, unlike modern empires, managed to establish such friendly and equal relations without needing to inflict the inequities of colonialism to reach that point. Yet, for many members of the commonwealth, conversion to Christianity and diplomatic participation in rites of subordination were likely considered a necessary response to the threat of Byzantium on their borders."?
Nor was Byzantium any stranger to direct imperial violence. It is true that Byzantium did not do a great deal of conquering of territory that had never been Roman, but over the course of its history, it did quite a lot of conquering of places that had been out of Byzantine control for generations, sometimes centuries. These were territories that faced the process of being re-incorporated into imperial structures, and local populations often chafed against the demands of a resurgent centre. The term ‘re-conquest’ can conceal or serve to legitimise the sometimes resented, at times traumatic, processes by which Byzantium asserted its will by means of culture, religion, and military force.!4
On the other side of the balance, the language used by Byzantium when the empire was itself subject to attack entails its own difficulties. Both the Latin emperors of 1204 to 1261 and the Ottoman emperors from 1453 laid claim to the title of emperor of Rome/Rum or emperor of the Romans; they sat on the throne in Constantinople and asserted their right to take tax and control religious and social practice in formerly Byzantine territory, yet both are seen as moments of interruption or cessation. By contrast, the reigns of other emperors considered heretical in the context of the empire’s own self-perception (Marcian, Constantine V, or John VIII, to name a few) or who seized the throne by violence (such as any number of military usurpers, including, one after the other, both Phokas and Herakleios, and subsequently Tiberios III, Leontios and then the returning Justinian II), are perceived to be part of the internal history of empire. This raises questions about what the underpinning characteristics of ‘Byzantineness’ are considered to be today: Christian? Orthodox? Greek-speaking? Constantinopolitan (and what then of the emperors of Nicaea, so often contrasted in scholarship with the contemporaneous Latin emperors as the ‘insiders’)?!> Who, among the empire’s many subjects, do each of these definitions tacitly exclude or relegate to an ambivalent membership and how do such definitions affect participation in the field today?
Finally, as the site of Auja Hafir, explored in Reynold’s chapter of this volume, shows, assuming Byzantium to be before the modern colonial moment, and therefore exempt from direct engagement with the interplay of global and post-colonial history, ignores the ways in which Byzantium has been used in subsequent colonial endeavours. As a symbol of degeneration or past glory, Byzantium has played its part in some people’s imperial dreams and other peoples’ struggles against it. To say that these are not relevant to the study of the more distant past is to disregard the multiple ways in which differences in quantities of evidence, the direction of scholarship, the nature of debates, and the resources available to create evidence — for example, via archaeological excavation and survey — have shaped what it is possible to know about the past in the present.
The act of looking backwards at the many ways in which the global history of Byzantium as an empire has been explored and narrated is important not just in order to detect the biases and omissions within our practice and our source base. It is also significant if we want Byzantine studies to look to the future. Everyone who contributed to this volume has done so because we believe that the history of the Byzantine Empire has things to say to the world. Various chapters address the ways in which Byzantine history can connect different parts of the medieval world, from Europe to Africa to Asia. Others examine the ways in which a focus on Byzantium might help to create global dialogue today or provide comparisons that expand and deepen analyses developed in other contexts. Still others think about the ways in which Byzantium might help us to critique the present and challenge assumptions about our journey to it.
The history of the Byzantine Empire is particularly effective as a means to connect the ancient (in this context, Greek and Roman) and modern worlds. As a Christian power, and one foundational in the development of many parts of the modern world still negatively impacted by colonial policies, especially in southern Europe, West Asia, and North Africa, the Byzantine Empire helps to understand how the legacies of Rome worked out in ways that were different from the triumphalist narrative of manifest destiny still visible in the nineteenth-century neo-classical civic architecture of Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere. In so doing, Byzantium also helps to reframe the Middle Ages in a way that does not serve modernist, progress-oriented constructions of a precipitous fall from urbanism and complex, hierarchical polities, followed by a long climb back to rationalism and prosperity.'® As such, Byzantium provides a radically different platform from which to evaluate claims of both continuity and change that attend upon the modern imperial adventures of nation states and the differently progressivist narratives that have developed since the 1960s in the context of political decolonisation. It compels those who think with it to be sceptical of commonly asserted relationships between pairs such as antiquity and modernity, secularism and sophistication, identity and ethnicity, or history and nation. As such it speaks directly to some of the most heated and vital debates about the present and imminent shape of global politics and social relations. Who are we all to each other and what do we collectively owe one another? By finding new ways to consider the options implicit within those questions, we may hope to find new answers.
Looking forward from ‘Global Byzantium’, our chosen empire of study provides a fascinating alternative to many of the unproductive binaries of current conflict. Its history spans the bifurcation of the Mediterranean as a cultural sphere and, thereby, the invention of a supposedly axiomatic antagonism between Islam and Christianity. It also provides critical context for understanding the distinctions between Catholic and Orthodox Christianities today, and for parsing the divergent histories of conquest and colonisation, wealth and economic marginalisation that have transformed large parts of northern and southern Europe and which sit at the heart of major political antagonisms.
To realise the full potential of Byzantine studies to confront, nuance, and critique the assumptions of the present, the only way is global. That is not to say that every study must be global in scope. There remains plenty of material for focussed, detailed, and in-depth analysis, excavation, and editing of sources, including, for example, those discussed in this volume from the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai. Byzantine studies certainly retains the excitement of the treasure trove and the intellectual freshness necessitated by new discoveries! However, it is only when these detailed studies are brought together and considered across the regional boundaries that exist today, and those that existed in the Byzantine past, that we are able to see past what may be normal in the context of our own particular area of specialism.
Being Byzantine was clearly a different experience for somebody in Constantinople and for somebody in Nessana, the Aegean islands, or on the Euphrates frontier, but for all of them, Byzantium no doubt seemed normal. Likewise for us as scholars, our own peculiar part of the empire can become Byzantium. Thus, within an empire spanning continents and centuries, even its internal contours take on global significance. Similarly, at any given historical moment, the experience of being a subject of the Byzantine Empire was undoubtedly different than being a subject of the Chinese imperial state, the Carolingian or Seljuk Empire, or living in a non-state region of the world. As scholars, being intuitively sure of this does not help us to articulate and interrogate those differences unless we also look up and try to find ways to enter dialogue with scholars of these other places. How else but by thinking globally can we know what was really Byzantine?
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