Download PDF | The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261-1453, By Donald M. Nicol, Cambridge University Press 1993.
497 Pages
Preface
The historian of the Byzantine Empire is in the rare position of being able to study an institution which endured for more than a millennium and which, whenever it may be thought to have begun, came to a certain end on a well-defined date in the year 1453. It forms a compact unit of history, much ofit well documented by its own records and by its own sophisticated historians. It can therefore be analysed, dissected, criticized or admired in a dispassionate manner; and it might, as Byzantine historians themselves often hoped, provide guiding principles, warnings and exemplary lessons for future generations of humanity.
The English-speaking public have been understandably slow to awaken from the spell of Edward Gibbon, who saw in Byzantium little to admire and much to criticize, who narrated its history as a prolonged decline from a golden age, and who could only conclude that he had borne witness to 'the triumph of barbarism and religion'. In recent years Byzantine history, whether or not it affords warnings or lessons for the present, has become an object of deeper and more reflective study. General histories of the Byzantine Empire have been produced, notably by G. Ostrogorsky and A. A. Vasiliev, which present a picture less dramatic but more objective and sympathetic than that of Gibbon. Several more or less scholarly books written in or translated into English already exist to guide the student or the general reader through the early and the middle periods ofthe Empire's long history. The last period of Byzantium, however, is in a special case. For long it was less closely studied than the earlier centuries, and it still contains many secrets in the way of unpublished documents and manuscripts.
It is now attracting more and more attention from scholars writing in specialist publications and periodicals in a babel of languages. But to discover the course of events in the years between 126 I and 1453 one has at present to turn to ·the rather sparse accounts given in the final chapters of the general histories of the Empire; for hardly anyone has yet attempted a more extended work of synthesis in any language. In the existing state of research and of the evidence it is doubtless rash and premature to make the attempt. But it is my hope that even an interim report may be useful, before the specialized studies of experts proliferate to such an extent that their subject sinks beneath the weight of their contributions, and their readers fall back exhausted and dispirited from the effort oftrying to distinguish the wood from the trees. The need for having such a book to hand has constantly been brought home to me when teaching Byzantine history to students.
It was partly to fill this need that I embarked on writing this book. This is a dry and perhaps mundane motive, however. I must also confess that I find in the last two hundred years of Byzantium a special fascination. They were not the halcyon days of a young society, nor were they the golden age of a mature civilization. But they were the years in which the Byzantines, whose forefathers had so often had to live in a state of nervous apprehension and impending catastrophe, were put to the final test. If I have described this experience in terms of the failing strength and mortal illness of an invalid, it is with reference to the institution rather than to its people.
The structure ofthe Empire was old and perhaps past saving by the fourteenth century. It only needed a vigorous and determined enemy such as the Ottomans to deliver the coup de grace. But its people, bred in a state of emergency, seemed to thrive on the excitement of their insecurity. There were more new developments of old ideas in politics, in religion and in philosophy in the last two centuries of Byzantium than there had been in the previous two hundred years. In this book I have tried to present a narrative of what took place in those centuries, so that those who have little Latin and less Greek may gain some clearer idea of the stages by which the institution of the Byzantine Empire came to its lingering end.
The footnotes provide primary and secondary material for closer study of particular periods or topics. Where recent monographs on the reigns of individual emperors already exist I have as often as not referred the reader to them for the original source material. Where no such works are currently available I have been more generous with references to the primary sources. I am aWare that I have said little about the social, intellectual and artistic life of the period. A comprehepsive treatment of these matters would require another volume; and my book on Church and Society in the Last Centuries of BYzantium(Cambridge, 1978) may now be found to cover some aspects of them. This book, as first published in 1972, aimed to provide simply a historical framework of the period from 1261 to 1453, written in narrative form, taking the reigns of Emperors"in chronological sequence.
This was the kind of historiography favoured by the Byzantine historians ofthe last centuries oftheir society; and it is to them that lowe my greatest debt. I have added some passages to the text and rewritten others; and I have tried to bring the footnotes and the bibliography up to date (or at least to 1991). It is here that the reader will detect my indebtedness to the many scholars who have added to our knowledge of this period in more recent times. Where I have misread or misinterpreted my authorities, medieval or modern, the fault is my own.
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