Download PDF | Nicolas Oikonomides, Elizabeth Zachariadou - Social and Economic Life in Byzantium (Variorum Collected Studies)-Routledge (2004).
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NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES
Born in Athens to a family with Constantinopolitan links on 14 February, 1934, Nicolas Oikonomides forged a scholarly career of international distinction, probity and humanity from the very diverse circumstances thrown out by a convulsive twentieth century. Although originally inclined to the modem history of a reborn Greece, his studies quickly coalesced around Byzantium, whose ancient capital was his father’s birthplace and favorite reading subject. As an 18-year old, Oikonomides made an auspicious beginning with a learned article on the cult of St. Phokas of Sinope. One can see immediately the scholarship that characterizes his nearly 300 publications, especially the clarity of exposition and broadly informed footnotes that cite, impeccably, all the relevant international literature in German, English, French, Latin and Greek. 1
Though Oikonomides’ work occasionally ranged forward into the Ottoman era (the speciality of his very distinguished wife, Elizabeth Zachariadou), and back to the fourth century, the institutional history of the middle Byzantine period formed the core of his scholarly activity. Successful studies under Dionysios A. Zakythinos at the University of Athens led to a first great departure in his life, when he traveled to Paris in 1958 and began work under Paul Lemerle, the leading Byzantinist of that time and place whose inspiration marked a whole generation of scholars from Paris to Moscow, and beyond. At the same time, to the great good fortune of Byzantine studies generally, Nikos Oikonomides came under the influence of the leading sigillographer, Father Vitalien Laurent.
From him, Oikonomides learned the secrets of deciphering and interpreting those miniature monuments to the workings and personnel of Byzantium’s incomparable bureaucracy, the lead seals. In their tens of thousands, they are all that survive of as many documents, records and official transactions issued between late antiquity and 1453. Surely his Parisian days accounted for Oikonomides’ deeply francophone and francophile attitudes, attitudes which would shape his work, his fondness for his New World home (and Voltaire’s wry words for it - “quelques arpents de neige”) and, of course, any well-turned phrase in his treasured second language.
From the beginning, Oikonomides’ work showed certain constants, which he also impressed deeply, if gently, on his students. First, historical study of Byzantium required thorough mastery of ancient and medieval Greek, devoid of any illusions that native speech of the modem tongue could substitute for rigorous philology. Second, history was an empirical discipline: it was written from documents, and those documents and the literature about them needed to be mustered exhaustively and critically. Third, Oikonomides judged the publication of source materials, previously unknown or poorly published, the imperious need of modem Byzantine studies. Familiarity with the manuscripts that conveyed the texts was a natural and pleasant corollary, especially if it required return to the great libraries of beloved Paris. Although his bibliography abounds in interpretive studies, Oikonomides carried that task out admirably in terms of both the high quality and the volume of his production, particularly with respect to the great monastic archives of Athos and lead seals.
Finally, the past was to be approached serenely. He was deeply proud of his native land and people. Yet Oikonomides never allowed into his seminar or his work the kind of petty chauvinism that disfigured so much of Balkan and other Byzantinology in those days. We were invited to read works on both sides of the vexed question of the Dobruja, and gently, humorously, and critically guided through the thickets of ethnicity and historical distortion. Fortune favored the prepared mind of Oikonomides with more than one insight and discovery. A splendid example came when he unearthed in an Escurial manuscript an unknown tenth-century taktikon, one of those invaluable internal guides to the structure and precedence of the Byzantine administration. It is revealing of the profound modesty of the man that he systematically eschewed referring to it with the name that Byzantinist tradition would have urged - the Oikonomides Taktikon.
The subject of his Parisian doctorate (3e cycle), this text would lead him toward one of his masterpieces, the edition, translation and commentary of all the imperial precedence lists (1972). 2 By sorting out, editing and explaining all known versions of these intricate texts of the ninth and tenth centuries, Oikonomides resolved or illuminated countless points of crucial detail in the history of Byzantium’s elaborate administrative structures. By laying them side by side, he firmly grounded the history of the expanding empire and its adapting government. It remains the most comprehensive, concise, and reliable guide to the offices and dignities of the Byzantine empire at its zenith. Notwithstanding its stout binding, this volume weathered faster than any contemporary on the shelves of Dumbarton Oaks, and one can think of no truer testimony to the frequency with which Byzantinists from around the world referred to it. From Paris, Oikonomides returned to Greece for what should have been a glorious ascent to the pinnacle of Hellenic scholarship. But the winds of turbulence and tyranny were not to have it so.
The rule of the colonels allied with Oikonomides’ political engagement and native honesty to drive him to a second great departure, toward a much different clime. Nikos and Elizabeth moved to the French-speaking world’s second largest city in July 1969. There he would bring true international distinction to the Department of History of the Université de Montréal, and serve it twice as chairman. Both his daughters were born there, and he much enjoyed the city’s cosmopolitan, francophone flair, and large Greek community. A lesser man might have complained at a harsh climate which so differed from his native land, or resented that his circumstances precluded a larger following of the most advanced graduate students. Oikonomides never let such feelings show, despite an internal assessment of the situation that was devastatingly accurate. True to his gentle and humorous way, he expressed his sentiments indirectly. Once, arriving from Montreal into a Toronto winter day of about -5° Celsius, he looked around and observed with barbed pleasure: “How nice it is to be back in the Canadian Riviera!” To be the man’s student was to be held, gently, to very high standards of philology and accuracy of interpretation. It was also to be treated with rare warmth and human kindness.
Those who, like this writer, took his graduate seminar when Oikonomides was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1972, will never forget his invitation for a drink in honor of his newly born daughter Catherine. Hungry, hirsute, and clad mostly in the tattered ritual blue jeans of the age, we were ushered into a truly fancy pub and ordered to pick the finest drinks proffered by a rather alarmed waiter. The occasion was a grand one, our teacher quietly offered, and we students deserved the best. About the same time, his sigillographic competence met the challenge of a lifetime, when Oikonomides was introduced to the massive holdings of Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard University’s Fogg Museum of Art. Their magnificent collection of 17,000 lead seals is the greatest single treasure trove of its kind. If correctly read and dated, and subjected to rigorous but complex analysis, these seals promised to yield incomparable new data and insights into the personnel and structure of the middle Byzantine government and church. And so began the long series of summers in the coin room at Dumbarton Oaks, deciphering, transcribing, dating, interpreting these diminutive records of imperial power, its art, ideology and operations, a process which established Oikonomides at the apex of the sigillographic art.
Yet as that work approached completion, the very scale of the achievement seemed to condemn it to virtual oblivion. Oikonomides had determined in his own mind how it needed to be published in order to serve the scholarly world with rigor and flexibility. But the cost of such a publication - hundreds of plates and countless specially made typographic characters! - was judged too steep, even for the deep pockets of Dumbarton Oaks. In the meantime, Oikonomides shared, generously, of his results, with those who needed them. The advent of the personal computer finally allowed Oikonomides to cut this Gordian knot. Working with computer specialists from Harvard University, Oikonomides and his collaborators devised a new software, a font specially suited to conveying the ambiguities and graphic signals of the lead seals’ miniature inscriptions and monograms. The result has been a new standard reference work in Byzantine sigillography, which catalogues the offices and personnel of the Byzantine empire, province by province, person by person, seal by seal - and photo by photo - in a series of modestly priced volumes, of which four have appeared in ten short years.
Dumbarton Oaks became a seedbed for propagating the methods and insights Oikonomides had developed from his teacher Laurent and his own exploration of the Harvard holdings. The results of the summer seminars for scholars and graduate students and colloquia have appeared in an impressive collection of edited volumes, the Studies in Byzantine Sigillography. 3 Even before his monumental sigillographic addition to the source basis for medieval Byzantium, Oikonomides’ talent for diplomatic and palaeography was at work on his other crucial contribution to renewing the evidentiary base of Byzantine history, the archival records preserved by the monasteries of Mount Athos. Single-handedly he edited, analyzed and interpreted the medieval archives of Dionysiou (1968), Kastamonitou (1978), and Docheiariou (1984) in five volumes of texts and plates, publishing over 120 documents. As part of a distinguished team, he also contributed to the eight volumes of rich records from Iviron (1985-1995). 4 Any scholar would be proud to sign one of these. To have produced so many such works seems almost incredible, especially when one reckons that the overwhelming majority of the documents posed the daunting challenges of records that had never before been published.
At the same time, Oikonomides played an important role in the another pioneering effort headquartered at Dumbarton Oaks and aimed at assuring the foundations of Byzantine studies, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. The editors, Alexander Kazhdan and Alice-Mary Talbot, benefited from his role on the Advisory Committee, and all users are grateful for his 38 entries on diverse subjects of Byzantine diplomatic and administration. And any who has used them admires the interpretive flair of his many articles. That flair is unmistakable, for instance, in the acute and imaginative detective work (1976) that uncovered unexpectedly in the omissions of the Fourth Crusade’s Partitio Romaniae the dismemberment of the Byzantine empire on the eve of the conquest of Constantinople.
A distinguished and immensely productive career culminated in its third and final move in 1989, when Oikonomides returned to Greece and assumed the chair of Byzantine history at the University of Athens. The national and transnational authority of his scholarship combined with his humane disposition to make this an era of great promise in Greece’s own contribution to international Byzantine scholarship. The founding of an interdisciplinary seminar in Byzantine studies - which continues today, and is fittingly and officially known as ‘The Oikonomides Post-Graduate Seminar’ -, the promotion of links among Athenian and Hellenic institutions, as well as with foreign centers of Byzantine studies, the training of a new generation of Greek Byzantinists to the highest of international standards, all got under way in short order. He equally took some pleasure in prestigious appointments beyond the scholarly world, for instance, to the governing board of the Greek broadcasting service and as President of the Hellenic Cultural Foundation. But this happy period of work on his home soil was not to be the lengthiest of his life.
On 31 May 2000, at the peak of his powers, he was felled by a swift and insidious infection which perhaps profited from the iron discipline with which he pursued a heavy work load. Those who had the privilege of knowing Nikos cherish their memories of his blithe optimism and natural generosity and kindness, qualities which tempered the very firm opinions he sometimes held. Those who know him only from his work will admire the rigor, clarity and intellectual probity which inform his immense production. Twenty five of the twenty nine publications collected in this volume stem from that fertile but sadly abbreviated period of his life.
This is in itself a measure of how productive it was. One, the Runciman Lecture, delivered at King’s College, University of London, in 2000, (VII) is published here for the first time. The volume represents the characteristic interests and methods of Oikonomides’ interpretive work in the final half of his productive life. Focusing on institutions, these studies explore monastic history, taxation, the imperial bureaucracy and administration, the regulation of trade in the capital and provinces, the army, relations with the Slavs, and epigraphy, including one sigillographic study.
MICHAEL McCORMICK
Department of History Harvard University
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