A new and in many ways significantly revised version of Byzantine history is obviously in the making.
—Johann P. Arnason1
After discussing the ways in which the subject has moved on from the immensely influential synthesis of Ostrogorsky, the author of the preceding words also writes: “No similarly authoritative overall interpretation has emerged from recent debates.”2 Instead, in addition to many excellent contributions on specific subjects, we have the plethora of guides, companions, handbooks, and edited volumes already noted. Arnason lists the prejudices about Byzantium that he believes have been overcome: belief in “caesaropapism,” imperial control of the church; Byzantine continuity from the Roman empire, but in inferior form; lack of dynamism and originality; and the failure to see Byzantium in its wider contexts or its “active role in the networks and processes that linked it to western Christendom and Islam.”3
Nevertheless, this book has been concerned with the difficulties of interpretation that still seem to stand in the way of understanding Byzantium. Many elements important to Byzantine history are not considered here—they include not only warfare and military matters, law, administration, and economy but also the huge field of hagiography and other aspects relating to social history. Byzantium certainly needs a fresh look in relation to both the west and Islam. My main preoccupation here has been with the historiography of the subject, and the ways in which it has been (and still is) seen, both in the secondary literature and more widely. I am very aware that these essays focus on articulate elite culture in Byzantium rather than on its wider social history (and that even so there is little discussion of the imperial center). Yet it remains true that at its higher levels Byzantium was a learned culture, the nature of which is still not fully understood or appreciated. It was also a highly competitive, and in premodern terms open, society, in which in most periods learning and especially rhetorical skill provided a pathway to advancement.
However much one wishes to avoid the dangers of seeming to argue for continuity, it is impossible to avoid the question of periodization in relation to Byzantium. As I have noted, several recent writers prefer to see “Byzantium” proper as beginning from ca. 600 or later, and there are good reasons why. Constantinople was formally inaugurated in AD 330, but there was not yet such an entity as “Byzantium,” distinct from the eastern Roman empire, and it remains the case that the Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans (chapter 3). The shock and loss of territory consequent on the Arab invasions of the seventh century also necessitated a painful adjustment. Nevertheless, adopting a later periodization risks obscuring the fact that what we call Byzantium had a long earlier history; it was not a new state formed only in the medieval period.
In the last generation “late antiquity” has taken over from “the later Roman empire” in much of the secondary literature, even if the continuing number of publications discussing its scope and nature suggests that these questions are not yet settled. The “explosion” of late antiquity and now the turn to the east—that is, toward the eastern Mediterranean, the rise of Islam, and the early Islamic world—that is such a feature of current scholarship are both tendencies that threaten to squeeze out Byzantium. The danger, I fear, is that Byzantine scholarship may turn in on itself in response. In contrast, one of the arguments running through these essays has been that Byzantinists need to engage more directly with the relationship of Byzantine ideology, social practice, and artistic and intellectual features with what is now referred to as “late antiquity,” especially given the huge amount of scholarship on the subject. One of the most difficult fields to incorporate into a wider understanding of Byzantium is the realm of theology and especially theological writing—just as it is also for late antique historians. Within the field of Byzantine Greek literary culture similar issues arise in relation to the role of rhetoric (where the far better understanding now reached by classicists and ancient historians of the many different aspects of the Second Sophistic needs also to be fully applied to Byzantium), and the relation of Byzantine literature to classical, over and beyond the traditional model of imitation.
Byzantium belongs to all of us, and it belongs to mainstream history.
This is why the field of Byzantine studies must be rescued from its continuing association with the competing claims of negativity and exoticism. Byzantine exceptionalism is an idea that holds us back. It is intimately connected with the idea of Byzantium as victim or subaltern. Recent publications have set an encouraging pattern. But now the subject needs to be opened up further, and Byzantium seen against more “normal” and wider perspectives.