Download PDF | Warren Treadgold - A Concise History of Byzantium-Macmillan Education Limited_ Red Globe Press (2020).
311 Pages
Preface
This revised edition reflects some developments in Byzantine studies since the original edition of 2000 but still draws heavily on the research I did for my longer History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) and Byzantium and Its Army (1995). For this edition, I have also added ten more maps, a new chronological table, and new sections on sources that draw on my Early Byzantine Historians (2007), Middle Byzantine Historians (2013), and Later Byzantine Historians (in progress). Anyone who wants more detail or fuller references, including footnotes, should put this book down right away and turn to the others. While I try to make all my books accessible to general readers and students as well as to scholars, naturally this one is meant for readers with less time or a less specialized interest in Byzantium.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, each of the book’s chapters begins with a narrative account and ends with descriptive sections on society, culture, and sources. Given the fashions of modern academic writing, some scholars might have liked this book better if I had left out all the narrative and simply reprinted the third of my History of the Byzantine State and Society that covers social and cultural history. But the result, even with some added explanations, would have been hard for readers unfamiliar with Byzantium to follow and still could not have been a comprehensive treatment of Byzantine civilization, which would require a fully topical organization like that of Cyril Mango’s Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980). Of course, readers with no interest in narrative, like those interested only in narrative or interested only in one period, can read just the parts of either book that interest them.
On the other hand, such preferences can be more than a matter of taste, because the Byzantine state and Byzantine society constantly interacted. For example, the demographic, economic, and cultural crisis of the sixth century led to the political, military, and religious upheavals of the seventh and eighth centuries, which in turn led to the social, economic, and cultural revival of the ninth century. Some of the best work done in Byzantine history in the last fifty years has demonstrated such connections. Yet they are barely discernible in many earlier surveys, including George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State, first composed in 1938 and largely based on scholarship from before 1914, or the popularizations of John Julius Norwich, largely based on the eighteenthcentury work of Edward Gibbon. I shall be delighted if this book can persuade some narrative history buffs of the value of social and cultural history or a few social and cultural historians of the value of historical narrative.
Warren Treadgold
St. Louis, MO, USA
Introduction
THE PROBLEM OF DECLINE
In AD 285, the emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire into two parts. The eastern part, the subject of this book, became known as the Eastern Roman Empire or, after the last of the Western Empire disappeared in 480, simply as the Roman Empire. Only after the former Eastern Empire also fell in 1453 did some scholars feel a need for a name without “Roman” in it for an empire that had not included Rome. Although the capital of the East had usually been at Constantinople, the term “Constantinopolitan Empire” was ungainly. The renamers settled on “Byzantine Empire” or “Byzantium,” Byzantium having been the name of the small town refounded as Constantinople in 324. For better or worse, this name has stuck, though historians disagree about the right date to start using it. This book begins with 285, when the Eastern Roman Empire began its separate existence, but the town of Byzantium had no special importance as yet. I avoid calling the empire “Byzantine” until the fifth century, when Constantinople truly became its political and cultural capital and the Western Roman Empire fell away.
Under any name, the Eastern Roman Empire has a long-standing reputation for decadence. This is partly the doing of Edward Gibbon, who (without calling it Byzantium) made it the subject of his magnificent Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since a Calvinist minister hired by his father talked him out of his youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism, Gibbon was disillusioned with Christianity and looked down on Byzantium as a Christian society. He knew that the Western Roman Empire had fallen soon after becoming mostly Christian and that, even if the Eastern Empire had lasted a millennium more, it too had fallen in the end. Besides, to someone with a Classical education like Gibbon, Byzantium looked like a degenerate mongrel of Greece and Rome that had lost the city of Rome and spoke bad Greek. Moreover, the whole medieval period, when Byzantium existed, was in his opinion a dark and barbaric age.
Neither Gibbon nor others ever developed such prejudices into a rigorous argument. While a small fraction of Byzantine history was a relatively dark age, Byzantine culture was always well in advance of that of contemporary Western Europe. Although the Greek language evolved over time, as it had done since Homer and as every language does, the best Byzantine scholars were excellent Hellenists who could read and write ancient Greek very well. Whatever we think of Christianity, it was no less intellectually respectable than the combination of the Olympian gods and mystical Neoplatonism that it replaced. The Eastern Empire, which had first been separated from Rome by an administrative decision rather than a military defeat, later conquered Rome and held the city for some two centuries. Finally, that Byzantium fell in the end seems less striking than that it lasted for well over a thousand years.
Recently, without really rehabilitating Byzantium, many ancient and medieval historians have abandoned the words “decline” and “dark age” as overly negative, preferring the words “transformation” or “discontinuity.” These scholars are reluctant to speak of decline even when plagues killed millions of people, enemy raids wrecked scores of cities, trade shrank, and literacy rates fell. Most of the same historians have, however, no hesitation in decrying disease, war, poverty, and illiteracy in their own times. Why these things should have been any less bad for the Byzantines seems inexplicable, unless the Byzantines were inferior people who deserved what happened to them. Distaste for the Byzantines also seems to lie behind objections to using the Greek word “barbarian” (barbaros) for German and other northern invaders, though the word simply meant “foreigner”. Yet the Germans were undeniably less literate and urbanized than the Byzantines, and no objector seems to care much about the feelings of modern Germans anyway.
The Byzantines did have some opinions that may seem benighted today. Their attitude toward sexuality, for example, was rather like that of contemporary Americans toward smoking or overeating: almost unrelieved disapproval in principle, combined with frequent indulgence in practice. Since the Byzantines thought that the only real good in sexual relations was procreation, they naturally condemned abortion and homosexual acts. They would have regarded the idea that people’s interests were determined by gender, ethnic group, or social class as perverse and absurd. The loyalties that the Byzantines considered worth fighting for were to religious doctrines, political leaders, and sometimes charioteers. Almost without exception, Byzantine rebels wanted not to divide or to overthrow the empire but only to impose their own opinions or leaders on all of it. Practically all Byzantines were loyal to their own ideas of their empire and the Christian religion. We need not share their views in order to study them, but we should resist the temptation to reinterpret them in modern terms.
In any case, whether we like Byzantines, Christians, or empires should have nothing to do with our judgment of whether, when, or how much they declined, except perhaps in a moral sense. Admittedly, decline, in Byzantium as elsewhere, is a complex and problematic concept. It can be of different sorts: advance for the Arabs could mean decline for the Byzantines; within Byzantium, political and military decline could coexist with economic and cultural advance; and one part of the empire could be declining while another was thriving. Of course, every society has its problems, but not all problems imply any decline at all.
Today, with enormous amounts of accurate data about our own society, not all of us agree about whether we ourselves are in decline or, if we are, what sort of decline we might be in. Even if we did agree, we might turn out to be wrong; contemporaries can easily overlook or misunderstand what is happening around them. Because our available evidence for Byzantine history is often scanty, we may often be unsure whether what was happening there should be called decline, growth, or stability. If anything, however, such practical and conceptual complexities are reasons for doubting that Byzantium was continuously declining during its whole long history.
In ancient and medieval times, probably the best index of social and economic development was urbanization. Scarcely anyone who lived in a city, but almost everyone who did not, farmed, herded, or fished for a living. Any society with few and small cities had a population overwhelmingly composed of subsistence farmers and little time or money to spare for government, trade, education, art, or literature. The larger the urban population, the more people were likely to be engaged in all of those typically urban pursuits, which constitute civilization in its root meaning — the activities that take place in a city.
The growth or shrinkage of cities therefore tends to indicate cultural advance or decline. Although minor fluctuations may not matter much as long as a certain level of urbanization is maintained, a shrinkage of cities to mere villages probably means a drastic decline in the quality and quantity of government, trade, education, and higher culture. Such a collapse occurred in Western Europe in the sixth through eighth centuries, and many have argued that something nearly comparable happened to Byzantium around the same time. While some have exaggerated the dark age in Byzantium and minimized that in the West, the archeological and literary evidence seems to show that both dark ages occurred, and that the Byzantine one was much less severe, as measured by both urban shrinkage and cultural decline. However, though the trends appear clear from such things as the contraction of urban sites and the scarcity of surviving manuscripts, we lack reliable statistics for city populations or indisputable indicators of cultural vitality.
On the level of the state, an obvious way of testing for decline or advance is to look for decreases or increases in the state’s territory. Major and sustained territorial losses are likely to be either a result or a cause of some sort of weakness, and major and sustained territorial gains are likely to reveal or to result in some sort of strength. There is also the great advantage that we can make a reliable calculation of the approximate size of the Byzantine Empire at various dates, whereas calculations of other possible indexes of the empire’s decline, such as its population or state revenues at different dates, are more difficult and less reliable, and something like the Byzantine gross domestic product is probably beyond useful calculation. In Figure 1.1, one can quibble about little more than my exclusion of the uninhabited Egyptian and Syrian deserts that most maps conventionally attribute to the empire.
The graph shows that Gibbon had a point: especially when we include the Western Roman Empire, as he did, the millennial trend was down. Yet there were important exceptions, some covering hundreds of years. As the West was declining and falling, Byzantium suffered comparatively minor and temporary losses. Then, between 450 and 550, it nearly doubled its territory. Although for the next two centuries something obviously went very wrong, from 750 to 1050 Byzantium more than doubled in size, and by the latter date it was actually larger than it had been 600 years earlier. After 1050, another disaster struck, but Byzantium quickly recovered, and by 1150 it was larger than it had been 400 years before. In 1204, an even worse disaster shattered the empire, but even so, by 1280 the Byzantine successor states held as much land as the empire of 200 years earlier. Only then did a final decline set in. As measured by territorial extent, the overall pattern is one of strong resistance to decline, which often became an advance.
Some other measures, though harder to plot on a graph, would show a broadly similar pattern and, if anything, a more positive one. For example, it now seems clear that Byzantine economic expansion continued from about 750 right up to 1204 and probably afterwards. Byzantine culture, as measured by its scholarly and artistic achievements, showed great vigor to the very end — and somewhat beyond, if we count Greek scholars and artists who went to Renaissance Italy. Even during the worst of the crises of the 600s and 700s, the efficiency of the Byzantine bureaucracy and army apparently began to improve, and in most ways Byzantine society became more cohesive. Such factors evidently helped the empire to recover from political, economic, and cultural decline.
My principal aim in this book is to describe these political, social, economic, and cultural changes and to try as far as possible to explain them. In looking for causes, I have no exclusive preference either for impersonal forces or for decisions made by identifiable people, both of which were important. Byzantium was a monarchy, ruled by a theoretically absolute emperor and other influential officials in the army, Church, and civil service. These rulers could and did make dramatic and lasting innovations. On the other hand, they also had to deal with developments well beyond their full control, such as the spread of Christianity, outbreaks of the plague, and invasions by Germans, Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, and Turks. What determined the course of Byzantine history was a combination of the forces faced by the Byzantines and the Byzantines’ reactions to them.
THE ROMAN BACKGROUND
Our story begins with the Roman Empire of the third century, which had problems that seemed to presage not merely decline but fall. Gibbon believed that the trouble had begun in 180 with the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, which ended a long period of peace, prosperity, and good government. Yet the real beginning seems to have come as early as 165, when a devastating epidemic arrived from the east, probably the first appearance of smallpox in the Mediterranean basin. Such diseases caused much higher mortality in the densely populated empire than among the sparser populations of Germans and other barbarians on the northern frontier, who launched a major invasion of the empire in 166. Marcus was still able to defeat the barbarians, but with difficulty. Marcus’ son Commodus, who showed distinct signs of mental derangement, was assassinated in 192. This set off a brief rash of military revolts, one of which brought the harsh but capable general Septimius Severus to the throne. Though Severus restored order, at his death in 211 he left the empire to an equally harsh but less capable son. The son executed his brother, hugely increased the army’s pay, and was murdered in his turn, beginning a long period of political instability and military rebellions. Successive emperors kept bidding for the army’s favor by raising its pay still more, covering the expense by debasing the silver coinage and causing inflation that lost the army’s favor again. Meanwhile, on the eastern frontier, the Parthian Empire was replaced by a new, stronger, and more aggressive Persian Empire under the Sassanid Dynasty. While the Persians raided from the east, the Germans raided from the north.
In 251, a new epidemic broke out, this time perhaps a strain of influenza, which was far more deadly than it later became because the population had no immunity to it. Now both Germans and Persians began not merely to raid but to invade and sometimes to conquer Roman territory. Scarcely any part of the empire escaped foreign invasion or civil war, and most of the East suffered from both. From 211 to 285, besides having a large crop of unsuccessful usurpers and rebels, Rome had about twentysix emperors who were generally recognized as such, more than in its whole previous history. Of these, one died of the epidemic, another died fighting the Germans, a third was captured by the Persians and died in captivity, and twenty-three died violently at the hands of Romans. So matters stood in 285, when the general Diocles defeated and killed the last of his predecessors and became sole emperor under the name Diocletian.
Among several grave problems Diocletian faced when he took over the empire, probably his greatest worry was remaining emperor. Most of his predecessors had lasted less than two years before being killed. While staying alive was doubtless a high priority for Diocletian personally, political stability was also a prerequisite for any lasting solution to the empire’s other problems. No long-term initiative at home or abroad could be taken without some continuity in government, and constant fear of imminent death had long led emperors to take short-sighted measures, like their ruinous increases in military pay. Civil wars were themselves damaging to the empire’s security and costly for its economy, and as long as the empire’s neighbors saw it being wracked by chronic anarchy, they would be tempted to raid and invade again.
Even apart from its civil disturbances, the empire faced serious military threats. Most of the lost Roman territory had been recovered, except for Dacia in the region of today’s Romania, which had been evacuated under barbarian pressure. But the Persians remained powerful and bellicose on the eastern frontier, and an uninterrupted chain of barbarian tribal confederacies remained just across the northern frontier. Both borders had weak natural defenses, consisting of rivers and mostly low mountains, which the empire’s enemies had learned how to cross easily. No further withdrawal, except perhaps for a drastic abandonment of several provinces, could have made the frontiers significantly more defensible. Roman troops could hardly retreat into the empty center of the empire, the Mediterranean Sea. The only means of keeping the enemy out was to station large armies all along the vulnerable frontiers. To resist the enemy effectively, these armies had to be so strong that they could raise an effective revolt against the emperor himself as well.
The empire also had major economic and fiscal difficulties. The two epidemics, which had recurred after their initial outbreaks, had caused very substantial loss of life, which the civil wars and foreign invasions had compounded. Although few precise figures are available, we can scarcely doubt that the Roman population decreased appreciably between 165 and 285. The more Romans died, the more difficult it became to maintain tax revenues and recruitment for the army. The inflation caused by debasing and overminting the coinage had damaged trade, reduced the value of government tax receipts, and left the soldiers not only discontented but poorly supplied and equipped. The coinage was so debased that the standard silver coins finally became almost all bronze, so that they could hardly be adulterated any further.
Besides such concrete and tangible problems, the Romans were suffering from a crisis of religious confidence that no emperor could ignore. Most people at the time believed that political and military reverses and natural disasters were signs of divine anger. Several emperors had persecuted the rapidly growing Christian Church on the theory that it angered the pagan gods. Yet these persecutions had brought no apparent improvement, and in any case many pagans had become dissatisfied with paganism itself. Although the disasters of the time had encouraged a general return to religion, the old Olympian gods, the subjects of many unedifying and contradictory stories, no longer commanded much faith or respect, offering neither a moral example nor hope of a satisfactory afterlife. The mystical philosophy that we call Neoplatonism was too abstract to have very wide appeal. Although the emperors’ ability to do anything about religion was limited, they ranked as high priests and were blamed for religious disunity.
Most Romans did share some ideas about moral behavior, however little their religion helped to reinforce it. No one seriously argued that the pederasty of Zeus, the thievery of Hermes, or the drunkenness of Dionysus was admirable. Most Romans had always disapproved of divorce, sexual promiscuity, and homosexual acts, except for some of the Roman elite, who without professing a different moral code behaved as if no morality applied to them. Roman law punished adultery and rewarded childbearing, though it allowed divorce by mutual consent. A few aberrant practices in the provinces, such as brother-sister marriage in Egypt, had gradually succumbed to Roman condemnation. The overall trend seemed to be toward more strictness in sexual matters, and Neoplatonists went so far as to regard virginity as superior to marriage. Christian morality had anticipated this trend and remained more rigorous than ordinary pagan morality. Nevertheless, some pagans, assuming that Christian rejection of the majority’s gods implied rejection of the majority’s morals, believed and spread rumors of cannibalism and incest among Christians.
Religion had a special importance for the Romans because the pagan gods, for all their defects, were almost the only cultural element that the whole empire had in common. Unlike the western part of the empire, where the Romans had introduced cities, literacy, and the Latin language among largely uncivilized peoples, the lands that the Romans conquered in the East had already had their own civilizations and languages, except in the North along the Danube River, which was the only part of the East that became Latin-speaking. Nor did the eastern Empire form a cohesive cultural unit even within itself. Since the time of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had made some efforts to Hellenize it, but outside the Greek peninsula they had truly succeeded only in western Anatolia. The majority languages remained Coptic in Egypt, Syriac in Syria, a medley of native languages in eastern Anatolia, and Thracian and Illyrian to the north of Greece. The peoples of these regions had their own cultural traditions to go with their languages, and most of them lived in relative isolation from outsiders.
On the other hand, the Roman Empire of 285 had some undeniable strengths. Despite all the trials of the preceding century, it had held or recovered most of its land and was still stronger than any of its enemies, including the Persians. Throughout the third-century crisis, the empire also seems to have maintained its army at about the same strength and at a fairly high level of military effectiveness. Its system of roads was excellent by premodern standards and could transport people up to 120 miles a day by coach with changes of horses and send messages up to 180 miles a day by relays of mounted couriers. Roman cities were still relatively large; Roman trade seems not to have decreased greatly; and the central and provincial governments had not broken down. By now, nearly every Roman wanted political stability to return, and the army had begun to see the futility of nominal pay increases. The empire had at least learned how to live with many of its weaknesses, even if its emperors had not yet learned how to survive them.
The eastern part of the empire weathered the third century in better condition than the western part, despite serious incursions by the Persians and many revolts, including an interval of virtually independent rule in Syria and Egypt by the Roman client state of Palmyra. Much of the reason for the better condition of the Eastern Empire was that the eastern Mediterranean lands had always been more prosperous, urbanized, and cultured than the regions to the west, and so had greater resources to marshal in times of trouble. Unlike the Germanic barbarians, the Persians and Palmyrenes had mainly sought to conquer, not just to plunder, with the result that they had inflicted considerably less destruction on Roman cities and territory than if they had been interested only in movable property.
At least partly because of the more developed condition of the eastern half of the empire, during the second and third centuries the Greek culture of the East showed much more vitality than the Latin culture of the West. Though in the first century before Christ Latin literature had advanced while Greek literature declined, in the second century AD Greek literature had revived while Latin literature seemed to be succumbing to the general crisis. Both trends continued into the third century, when for the first time most of the major authors in the Roman Empire were writing in Greek rather than in Latin. Apart from the biographies of Plutarch and Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloé, most of the secular Greek literature of the second and third centuries is too artificial and rhetorical to have much appeal today, but it nonetheless reveals a sizable community of well-educated authors and readers or auditors. Moreover, the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus and the Christian theologian Origen, both of whom lived in the third century, showed a subtlety and sophistication on which Greek culture could build in the centuries to come.
The best reason for thinking that in the third century the eastern part of the Roman Empire had a vigorous society, culture, and economy is that it developed into the remarkably resilient Byzantine Empire. By contrast, the western part of the Roman Empire, after a short-lived recovery, resumed its decline and soon fell. Although the respective fates of the East and the West could hardly have been foreseen in detail in the late third century, especially before the two parts of the empire received separate administrations and emperors, the East had at least the potential to become a strong state. Diocletian, who proved to be a ruler with ideas and talents well suited to tackling many of the problems that confronted him, surely deserves some of the credit for the temporary recovery of the whole empire and for the future durability of the East.
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