Download PDF | Warren Treadgold - A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Stanford University Press (1997).
897 Pages
Preface
Today, in the age of the monograph, the time for a general survey seems always to be the indefinite future. Yet the reader of monographs on Byzantium often senses that they presuppose a common body of knowledge, which one would expect to find in a general book. Though that book used to be George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State, even someone who has read it thoroughly will find that historians are now assuming information and points of view that are not in it. We have newer short histories of Byzantium, topical surveys of Byzantine civilization, and now a comprehensive reference dictionary on Byzantine subjects, but thus far no updated, detailed, and complete history a This is what I have tried to supply here, within the limits of a single volume. My intended audience includes both the scholar and the general educated reader, and the student who aspires to become one, the other, or both.
b This book is a history of Byzantium rather than a history of modern scholarship on Byzantium, and so it is not quite the book that the monographs seem to be assuming. Modem Byzantine scholarship, besides leaving many gaps and agreeing on some dubious propositions, has often come to conclusions that are inconsistent with each other, usually because those working on different parts of the field have reached results that turn out to be incompatible. A general book could be compiled by summarizing the modem studies and overlooking their incongruities; but the result would be a distorted picture of both the modem scholarship and Byzantium itself. A book could also be written that discussed all the contradictions and omissions in modem scholarship; but if limited to one volume it would leave little space for Byzantium, and would be of scant interest to anyone but students of modem historiography. What I have done instead is to consult the modem literature as far as it helped, to read as many of the Byzantine sources as I could, and then to write the history as I see it, following all, most, some, or none of the modem and Byzantine authorities as the case may be.
The purpose of my bibliographical survey and notes is not to satisfy bibliographers but to guide the reader to the principal works that I have used and think useful. I have described the basic sources and secondary literature in the final bibliographical survey, not in the notes, which are limited to references that cannot easily be found by consulting the survey.
Thus many fundamental works never appear in the notes, which tend to be most abundant when the secondary literature is least satisfactory. Much that has been written on Byzantine history —as on other topics—is mistaken, repetitious, or insignificant, and the process of listing and responding to it has become a distraction from the sources and the subject. Of course, since this book itself is secondary literature, readers should use it with due caution, realizing, for example, that about a quarter of the statements that I qualify by “probably” are probably wrong. The book differs from standard approaches in several ways, about most of which I have written other books or articles.
It puts less emphasis on the catastrophe of the seventh century. d It takes a more optimistic view of the eighth and ninth centuries. e It pays more attention to the army, emphasizing its survival through the seventh century and its failure to survive the eleventh century. f I give less prominence to Iconoclasm, the last and least of the empire’s major theological controversies. g I make more use of statistics and numerical estimates, since despite their varying reliability and precision they are less misleading than the standard generalizations about economic decline and disappearing cities. h The reader will also find none of the usual judgments that grave internal defects doomed the empire long before it actually fell. Though today we can say that the fall was inevitable in the sense that nothing can be done about it any more, only from about 1360 was Byzantium so weak as to be at imminent risk of extinction. In some other ways I differ with many Byzantinists, but probably not with most.
I attach no great importance to holy men, court oratory, or official ceremonies, since none of these seems to have mattered much to most contemporaries. i I find modem ideologies like Marxism, Post-structuralism, or nationalism of various sorts to be unhelpful for studying Byzantium, where social classes and political and religious groups were loose, shifting, and not ideological in the modem sense. I also think that events and emperors did matter, even for the lowliest Byzantine. What the emperor did, or did not do, could rapidly confront ordinary Byzantines with economic ruin, new religious doctrines, or conquest by a foreign power. Byzantine society, originally defined by the state, was constantly changed by it. None of these comments means that modem scholarship on Byzantium is worse than that on most other subjects.
Perhaps simply because it remains underworked territory, Byzantium has inspired more than its share of studies that are both original and valid. It has had its great names, like Edward Gibbon, Charles Diehl, J. B. Bury, Ernest Stein, and A. H. M. Jones; one of them, Sir Steven Runciman, is still active. It has its outstanding contemporary historians, like Cyril Mango, Alexander Kazhdan, Alan Cameron, Michael Hendy, and Ralph-Johannes Lilie. It has teams of scholars working on important research projects in Britain, France, Austria, and Australia. If the field is now endangered in America, the main reason is the decline of its leading institution, Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, which despite a huge endowment has let the number of its research professors drop to zero, its fieldwork end, and its leadership lapse. For fellowships that supported my work on this book, I am happy to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, the Wilbur Foundation, the Florida International University Foundation, and All Souls College, Oxford. My thanks for reading all or part of my text and making important suggestions and corrections go to Robert Browning, Noel Duval, John Fine, Michael Hendy, Leslie MacCoull, George Majeska, Victor Spinei, my father, Donald Treadgold, and my wife, Irina Andreescu-Treadgold. My special thanks go to Alexander Kazhdan for making hundreds of valuable comments, even though he and I hold very different views on some aspects of Byzantine history.
Naturally neither he nor any of my other readers could or should subscribe to everything I say here. I also renew my thanks to my original teacher, Ihor Ševčenko, whose respect for the sources and impatience with scholarly mediocrity are needed now more than ever. For help during my travels in the Mediterranean and in assembling the illustrations I am grateful to Chrysanthi Baltoyanni, Charalambos Bouras, Fr. Leonard Boyle, David Buckton, Helmut Buschhausen, Slobodan Ćurčić, Gianfranco Fiaccadori, Jacques Lefort, Jerko Marasović, Thomas Mathews, Denys Pringle, Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, Serena Romano, Bruno Tarantola, Natalia Teteriatnikov, Mehmet Tunay, Paul Williamson, and especially my wife. My thanks also go to my patient cartographer, Helen Sherman, and to my extraordinarily faithful and careful editor, Paul Psoinos, who has greatly improved the book and often acted as the research assistant I never had. Finally, my parents and again my wife have given me unstinting support during the most difficult project I have ever attempted.
This book assumes readers who want to learn about the Byzantine Empire in some detail. But why, I am sometimes asked, should anyone who is not Greek care about Byzantium? First, Byzantium shaped and passed on Christian, Roman, and Greek traditions, including Christian theology, Roman law, and the Greek classics, that still influence modern life everywhere. Byzantine traditions have had their most powerful effect on Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe, a part of the world that all of us have much more to hear from, for better or worse. Another reason for studying the Byzantines is that despite a similar background they produced a civilization often strikingly unlike that of modem Western Europe and America.
As a conservative, religious, and not very materialistic society, Byzantium had weaknesses corresponding to Western strengths, and strengths corresponding to Western weaknesses. Though in its politics Byzantium often resembled a Middle Eastern dictatorship, neither the West nor anyone else has matched it in maintaining a single state and society for so long, over a wide area inhabited by heterogeneous peoples. So Byzantine history helps explain why we are as we are, and how we might be different. Some of us also find it fascinating.
Coral Gables, Florida November 1993
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