NOTESINTRODUCTION
1. Aaron Gurevich, “Why I Am Not a Byzantinist,” DOP 46 (1992), 89–96, at 95–96.
2. Three major exhibitions have been held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art (1977); The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. 843–1261 (1997); and Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261–1557 (2004). They have been followed most recently by Byzantium 330–1453 at the Royal Academy in London (2008–9) and by the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition on Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century (2012). I return to the theme of Byzantine art and its interpretation in chapter 4.
3. I am very grateful to my friend Professor János Bak of the Central European University, Budapest, for alerting me to this theme and to Professor Sergey A. Ivanov for letting me see a copy of his paper “The Second Rome as Seen by the Third: Russian Debates on ‘The Byzantine Legacy,’” in Byzantium Receptions, ed. Dion Smythe and Przemyslaw Marciniak (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).
4. The trajectory of Byzantine studies in North America has been rather different, with many graduate students coming to the subject from a background in art history or general history.
5. The current enthusiasm shown among graduate students for learning Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic in places where such teaching is available is indeed remarkable, though it is usually connected with enthusiasm for late antiquity rather than Byzantium.
6. Fiona Haarer, “Writing Histories of Byzantium: The Historiography of Byzantine History,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 9–22, at 14.
7. It is invidious to single out individual examples, but one can point to many individual and edited works by Cécile Morrisson, J.-P. Sodini, J. Lefort, and others, as well as introductions to Byzantium including Le monde byzantin, edited by Morrisson, Jean-Claude Cheynet, and Angeliki Laiou, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004–11). The three-volume Economic History of Byzantium, edited by the late Angeliki E. Laiou and others (2002) was initiated and published at the Byzantine Research Center at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC (part of Harvard University), where Laiou was the director, and which owns important collections of Byzantine coins and seals of officials. See also the very useful introduction by Angeliki Laiou and Cécile Morrisson, The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. The term derives from Andrea Giardina’s well-known article, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi storici 40 (1999), 157–80, with English translation in Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam, ed. Averil Cameron (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 1–23.
9. Including Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006).
CHAPTER 1. ABSENCE
1. See chapter 5 for the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. The guidance is in the work known as the De administrando imperio (“On governing the empire”), one of a group of works composed and drawn up at the initiative of the emperor. They also include the Book of Ceremonies, a detailed codification of imperial ceremonial and protocol.
2. In all probability he was killed in the siege, but in the absence of a body, stories of his reappearance had a long life, and alleged descendants of Constantine XI were known as late as the twentieth century. The story is well told by Donald M. Nicol in The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
3. The events of the final day, recorded in a variety of western, Greek, and Turkish sources, are movingly told by Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
4. Take for instance Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), part six, titled “The Failed Restoration” (that is, after 1204), in a book designed to be the modern replacement for G. Ostrogorsky’s classic History of the Byzantine State, Eng. trans., 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1968); H. J. Haussig, Byzantine Civilization, trans. J. M. Hussey (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), part IV: “Byzantine Civilization in Decline.” “Decline” is inscribed in the conception of Donald M. Nicol’s The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and indeed in the title of S. Ćurčič and Doula Mouriki, eds., The Twilight of Byzantium: Aspects of Cultural and Religious History in the Late Byzantine Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), while according to Stephen W. Reinert, in The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. Cyril Mango (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 248–83, at 248, “the once magnificent Byzantine empire seemingly devolves into little more than a caricature, a disordered and dysfunctional polity.”
5. Cf. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. John B. Bury, 7 vols., 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1896–1900), V.
6. Examples of this well-documented phenomenon include Romilly Jenkins, Donald Nicol, and Cyril Mango, all holders of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London; Mango’s (brilliant) book, Byzantium: Empire of New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) gives the flavor of this approach.
7. Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007), explicitly and successfully eschews such negativity.
8. Byron’s reactions are described by Peter Mackridge, “R. M. Dawkins and Byzantium,” in Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes, ed. Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 185–95, at 195, as “mannered, opinionated and whimsically anti-Western.”
9. Lucy Butler, ed., Robert Byron: Letters Home (London, 1991).
10. Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and Friends (London, 1989), 73, 15.
11. For the American Thomas Whittemore and the Byzantine Institute, see chapter 4. The travels of Byron and his friends took place only very shortly after the fall of Ottoman rule, the rise of Ataturk (with whom Whittemore developed a close connection), and the events of 1922–23; when he wrote The Byzantine Achievement Byron had originally planned to write a history of the critical years 1919–23.
12. Fascinating details in Olivier Delouis, “Byzance sur la scène littéraire française,” in Byzance en Europe, ed. Marie-France Auzépy (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003), 101–51; also on Theodora, Silvia Ronchey, “La ‘femme fatale,’ source d’une byzantinologie austère,” ibid., 153–75.
13. The key elements about her in Procopius’s Wars and Secret History relate to Theodora’s early life and her performances in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, her imperiousness, her concern for repentant prostitutes, her support of eastern Monophysites, and the famous scene where Procopius claims that she prevented Justinian from running away during the Nika riot of 532 with the (borrowed) words “empire is a fine winding sheet.” The historical Theodora, and especially the Monophysite tradition, are discussed in Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14. Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951–54).
15. Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: The Call from the East (London: Bodley Head, 2012), allows much more agency to Alexius.
16. Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 553. For the Byzantine view see Angeliki E. Laiou, ed., Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and Its Consequences (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005); Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy P. Mottahadeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001); see also Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and some of the chapters in Jonathan Harris, Catherine Holmes, Eugenia Russell, eds., Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).
17. This applies even to some very distinguished editors of key Byzantine texts.
18. See for instance Tia M. Kolbaba, “On the Closing of the Churches and the Rebaptism of Latins: Greek Perfidy or Latin Slander?,” BMGS 29, no. 1 (2005), 39–51.
19. Compare A. Papadakis, Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus (1283–1289), rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), especially his introduction, 1–14, at 7–9, and “Reflections,” 200–208.
20. For instance Stefaan Neirynck, “Neilus Doxopatres’s Oeconomia Dei,” in Byzantine Theologians, ed. A. Rigo and P. Ermilov, Quaderni di Nea Rhome 3 (Rome: Università degli studi di Roma “Tor Vergata,” 2009), 51–69.
21. Andrew F. Stone, “Nerses IV ‘the Gracious,’ Manuel I Komnenos, the Patriarch Michael Anchialos and Negotiations for Church Union between Byzantium and the Armenian Church, 1165–1173,” JÖB 55 (2005), 191–208, at 101.
22. It is invidious to cite specific examples, but one cannot help but be struck to find in an important recent study of the iconoclast era (not, one notices, of “iconoclasm”) the categorical statement that “Theology is not why iconoclasm happened”: Leslie Brubaker and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, ca. 680–850: A History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 783. In contrast, according to Stone, “Nerses IV,” 191, “Few areas of scholarship invite more animated discussion than theology. This discipline … cannot be avoided in the study of the Byzantine empire.”
23. See Warren Treadgold, ed., Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 1–22.
24. There is intriguing information about the role of women patrons and collectors before and after 1453 in Donald M. Nicol, The Byzantine Lady: Ten Portraits, 1250–1500 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
25. E. Fryde, The Early Palaeologan Renaissance (1261–ca. 1360) (Leiden: Brill, 2000); I. Ševčenko, “The Palaeologan Renaissance,” in Renaissances before the Renaissance, ed. Treadgold, 144–71 (a revival, not a renaissance). Niels Gaul, Thomas Magistros und die spätbyzantinische Sophistik. Studien zum Humanismus urbaner Eliten in der frühen Palaiologenzeit (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2001), especially 197–203, argues that it is better to avoid the term. For attempts to find traces of the Italian commune in late Byzantine Thessalonike, see John W. Barker, “Late Byzantine Thessalonike: A Second City’s Challenges and Responses,” DOP 57 (2003), 5–33, appendix B, 32–33; with J. Harris, “Constantinople as a City-State, ca. 1360–1453,” in Byzantines, Latins, and Turks, ed. Harris, Holmes, and Russell, 119–40.
26. Ševčenko, “The Palaeologan Renaissance,” 165.
27. Writing of the learned authors of the Palaeologan period, Niels Gaul aptly calls this elaborate literary Greek “an atticizing sociolect.”
28. A well-known example is the inaugural lecture given by Cyril Mango in 1974 in the Bywater and Sotheby Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford: Cyril Mango, Byzantine Literature as a Distorting Mirror (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975). Attempts to find “originality” in Byzantium: A. Littlewood, ed., Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music (Oxford, UK: Oxbow, 1995); on the problem, S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos. Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 20.
29. The classic statement is by H. Hunger, “On the Imitation (Mimesis) of Antiquity in Byzantine Literature,” DOP 23/24 (1969/70), 17–38.
30. See I. Nilsson, “The Same Story, but Another: A Reappraisal of Literary Imitation in Byzantium,” in Imitatio, Aemulatio, Variatio, ed. A. Rhoby and E. Schiffer, Akten des int. wiss. Symposions zur byzantinische Sprache und Literatur (Vienna, 2010), 195–208; and M. Mullett, “Imitatio-aemulatio-variatio,” ibid., 279–82.
31. See Margaret Mullett, “No Drama, No Poetry, No Fiction, No Readership, No Literature,” in Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 227–38; despite p. 336, a substantial section titled “Reading Byzantine Texts” still ignores the theological writing that survives in such vast quantities. Mullett begins, “It used to be thought …,” but her rebuttal shows that these assumptions are by no means dead. Mary Whitby’s contribution in the same volume (“Rhetorical Questions,” 239–50) is an excellent short introduction to the overwhelming prominence of rhetorical elements in Byzantine literature, another feature that modern scholars find difficult.
32. Several recent publications deal with Byzantine humor, in literary texts (especially satire and parody) and more generally: for instance Shaun Tougher, “Having Fun in Byzantium,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. James., chapter 11.
33. Warren Treadgold, The Medieval Review, 11.03.03.
34. Some ways forward are indicated by the contributors to the important volume La face cachée de la littérature byzantine. Le texte en tant que message immédiat, ed. P. Odorico, Actes du colloque international, Paris, en mémoire de Constantin Leventis, Dossiers byzantins 11 (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, neo-helléniques et sud-ouest européennes, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2012).
35. See G. Fatouros and M. Grünbart, eds., Theatron: rhetorische Kultur in Spätantike und Mittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).
36. Publications on Byzantine poetry are currently leading the way, though much attention has also been given to historiography and the novel. Floris Bernard, Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025–1081 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) vividly portrays the explicitly competitive nature of literary production in this period; arguing for its “utilitarian quality,” see Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, “Why Produce Verse in Twelfth-Century Constantinople?,” in Doux remède: Poésie et poétique à Byzance, ed. P. Odorico, P. A. Agapitos, and M. Hinterberger, Acts of the Fourth International Philological Colloquium Hermeneia (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-ouest européennes, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2009), 219–28.
37. H. Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1978). A new history of Byzantine literature by P. A. Agapitos is currently awaited. Alexander P. Kazhdan’s two posthumous volumes, A History of Byzantine Literature (650–850), in collaboration with Lee Sherry and Christine Angelidi (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation Institute for Byzantine Research, 1999), and A History of Byzantine Literature (850–1000), ed. Christine Angelidi (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation Institute for Byzantine Research, 2006), do not extend beyond AD 1000, and take a firmly positivist view. See also P. Magdalino, “A History of Byzantine Literature for Historians,” in Pour une “nouvelle” histoire de la literature byzantine: problèmes, méthodes, approches, propositions, P. Odorico and P. A. Agapitos (Paris: Centre d’Études byzantines, 2002), 167–84.
CHAPTER 2. EMPIRE
1. Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), on which see chapter 3; the same author’s Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), chapter 3, lays stress on references in Byzantine literature to the concept of politeia (“polity”) in contrast to basileia (“empire”); and see Dimitris Krallis, “‘Democratic’ Action in Eleventh-Century Byzantium: Michael Attaleiates’s ‘Republicanism’ in Context,” Viator 40.2 (2009), 35–53.
2. Heraclius (610–41) was reported to entertain the idea of moving the capital to Carthage, and Constans II (641–68) briefly thought of Sicily, but even if credible, both ideas arose only in desperate moments.
3. Especially Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2005); and Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4. See the magisterial work by Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); with Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). McCormick returns to the theme in “Movements and Markets in the First Millennium: Information, Containers, and Shipwrecks,” in Trade and Markets in Byzantium, ed. C. Morrisson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012), 51–98.
5. A. Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi Storici 40 (1999), 157–80; Eng. trans. in Averil Cameron, Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), no. I. Discussion of the periodization of late antiquity continues unabated, as can be seen for instance from the inclusion of four articles on the topic in the first issue in 2008 of the Journal of Late Antiquity.
6. Brent D. Shaw, “After Rome: Transformations of the Early Mediterranean World,” New Left Review 51 (May/June 2008), 89–114, especially 112 (a review-discussion of Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages).
7. The network and publication series Impact of Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2001–) defines itself as ending in AD 476, the traditional date for the fall of the western empire. Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds., The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), contains chapters by Garth Fowden on the long periodization of late antiquity and John Haldon on the eastern empire in the seventh and eighth centuries.
8. A provocative set of lectures on late antiquity refers to Justinian as crossing “a Rubicon of Byzantine culture” (Polymnia Athanassiadi, Vers la pensée unique. La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive [Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010], at 113).
9. The subject of a long series of books by Jack Goody and others, with the object of breaking down prevailing westernizing assumptions in historical scholarship. Most recently see Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010); with J. M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. For a Eurasian perspective relating to a later period see J. P. Arnason and B. Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances, Medieval Encounters 10, no. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
10. Aziz al-Azmeh discusses the implications of Goody’s argument for Islam in “Jack Goody and the Location of Islam,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, nos. 7–8 (2009), 71–84; many of the points he makes can also be applied to the case of Byzantium.
11. Yet another strategy that has been tried is to assign Byzantium to an essentialist “Orthodox civilization” or “Orthodox sphere,” neither fully eastern nor, certainly, western; see later and chapter 5.
12. David Abulafia and Nora Berend, eds., Medieval Frontiers. Concepts and Practices (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).
13. See Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, with Carla M. Sinopli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); for Rome and China see in particular Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: From Assyria to Byzantium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), unusually includes a chapter on Byzantium, by John Haldon: “The Byzantine Empire,” 205–52, but there is no equivalent chapter in Peter Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly, eds., Tributary Empires in Global History, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For the “American empire” see Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2005); with Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007). Both these current historiographical trends are discussed in detail by Phiroze Vasunia, “The Comparative Study of Empires,” JRS 101 (2011), 222–37.
14. “The Byzantine Empire,” 206–8.
15. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), which appeared in the same year as a collection of essays, also containing a section on Byzantium, with the title The Virtual American Empire: War, Faith and Power (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Books, 2009). For Rome see Luttwak’s earlier book, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). A Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, also by Luttwak, appeared in 1983 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
16. See further Averil Cameron, “Thinking with Byzantium,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), 39–57.
17. See Dimiter Angelov, Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18. See Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, “Ancient States, Empires and Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives,” in Dynamics of Ancient Empires, ed. Morris and Scheidel, 3–29; John F. Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London: Verso, 1993). Thomas J. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Empires, ed. Alcock et al., 10–41, at 28–39.
19. John F. Haldon, “Comparative State Formation: The Later Roman Empire in the Wider World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1111–47, at 1124.
20. See the essays in Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly, Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
21. John Haldon is one of the relatively few Byzantine historians who have been concerned with the question of elites and social macrostructures; see on the early period “The Fate of the Late Roman Senatorial Elite: Extinction or Transformation?” in Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, ed. John Haldon and Lawrence I. Conrad, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East VI (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004), 179–234; and for later periods, John F. Haldon, Byzantium: A History (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2000), 117–30.
22. See on this N. Oikonomides, “The Role of the State in the Economy,” in The Economic History of Byzantium 3, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 973–1058, at 990–1019.
23. For the landowning power-base see J.-C. Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963–1210) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1990). On the question of whether Byzantium had an aristocracy see Paul Magdalino, “Court Society and Aristocracy,” in A Social History of Byzantium, ed. John F. Haldon (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 212–32, especially 218–30; and Paul Stephenson, “The Rise of the Middle Byzantine Aristocracy and the Decline of the Imperial State,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 22–33 (for the period 950–1204).
24. Peter Sarris, “Economics, Trade and ‘Feudalism,’” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 25–42; with id., Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
25. Names can be extremely misleading, but major advances have been made as a result of detailed prosopographical work by British and German research teams.
26. Haldon, “The Byzantine Empire,” 205; having stated that the case of Byzantium is anomalous, he concentrates in his chapter on its modes of exploitation and state structures.
27. Ibid., 251–52, citing the work of Gary Runciman.
28. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires,” 29–33.
29. Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); cf. Garth Fowden’s Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and for the post-Byzantine period, Paschalis Kitromilides, An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007).
30. Empire to Commonwealth, 165–68, 169. Islam is also part of Fowden’s conception: G. Fowden, “The Umayyad Horizon,” JRA 25 (2012), 974–82; and id., Before and After Muhammad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
31. C. Raffensperger, “Revisiting the Idea of the Byzantine Commonwealth,” Byzantinische Forschungen 28 (2004), 159–74; Evelyne Patlagean, Un Moyen Âge grec. Byzance IXe–XIVe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), 387; J. P. Arnason, “Byzantium and Historical Sociology,” in The Byzantine World, ed. P. Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 491–504, at 503–504.
32. For which see J. H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 211–12.
33. See Jonathan Shepard, “Byzantium’s Overlapping Circles,” in Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, London, 21–26 August 2006, I, Plenary Papers, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 15–55; id., “The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1000–1550,” in Cambridge History of Christianity V, ed. M. Angold (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3–52.
34. Arnason, “Byzantium and Historical Sociology.”
35. “Emperors and Expansionism: From Rome to Middle Byzantium,” in Medieval Frontiers, ed. Abulafia and Berend, 55–82.
36. G. Ostrogorski, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates (Munich: Beck, 1940); Eng. trans. by Joan Hussey, History of the Byzantine State (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1956). Consultation of the catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxford brings up eight copies of the various German and English editions.
37. Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); Patlagean, Un Moyen Âge grec: Byzance; cf. Patlagean, “Byzance dans le millénaire médiéval,” Annales HSS LX, no. 4 (2005), 721–29. On Ostrogorsky see Patlagean, Un Moyen Âge grec, 49–51; and Arnason, “Byzantium and Historical Sociology,” 495–98.
38. Among key Byzantine sites is Amorium in Anatolia, where excavation began in 1987 and reached its twenty-fifth year in 2012, while current work at Sagalassos and Euchaita focuses on the relation of urban sites and their hinterlands; survey archaeology not specifically aimed at the Byzantine period increasingly takes a wide diachronic approach with important results for questions of settlement and economic levels. Peter Thonemann, The Meander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), is an outstanding example of a longitudinal study.
39. Marlia Mundell Mango, Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); C. Morrisson, ed., Trade and Markets in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012). The work of David Abulafia, Michel Balard, and others puts Byzantium into the context of Mediterranean and other trade, especially from the twelfth century onward (see also D. Abulafia, “Venetian Commercial Expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, 8th–11th Centuries,” in Byzantine Trade, ed. Mango, 371–91).
40. For instance the authors of the important chapter on the sixth century are respectively a numismatist and an archaeologist: Cécile Morrisson and Jean-Pierre Sodini, “The Sixth-Century Economy, Background,” in Economic History of Byzantium 1, ed. Angeliki E Laiou (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 171–220.
41. J.-C. Cheynet, La société byzantine: l’apport des sceaux, Bilans de recherché 3 (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2008), 2 vols., and the series Studies in Byzantine Sigillography are basic guides.
42. For which see J.-M. Carrié, “Were Late Roman and Byzantine Economies Market Economies? A Comparative Look at Historiography,” in Trade and Markets in Byzantium, ed. Morrisson, 13–26. M. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, ca. 300–1450 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985) exemplifies the primitivist approach.
43. Gilbert Dagron, L’hippodrome de Constantinople. Jeux, people et politique (Paris: Éditions de Gallimard, 2011), 340, a brilliant exposition.
44. The idea that Byzantine emperors controlled the church (“caesaropapism”) is effectively addressed by Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Eng. trans. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), even if he may overstate the sense in which they themselves were seen as priestly; see also Arnason, “Byzantium and Historical Sociology,” 498–500.
45. Though to see it as particularly tolerant goes too far: see chapter 5.
CHAPTER 3. HELLENISM
1. Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980).
2. See on this Despina Christodoulou, “Byzantium in Nineteenth-Century Greek Historiography,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 445–61.
3. Though one can see road signs in northern Greece pointing to “Constantinople.” The dream of recovering Hagia Sophia in Istanbul survives even now, against Turkish calls to reopen it for Muslim prayer.
4. Peter Mackridge, “The Heritages of the Modern Greeks,” The British Academy Review 19 (2012), 33–41, a lecture given in 2011 for the 125th anniversary of the British School at Athens.
5. These issues can be conveniently followed in several chapters in Stephenson, ed., The Byzantine World: see Paul Stephenson, “The World of Byzantine Studies,” 429–33; Diether Roderich Reinsch, “The History of Editing Byzantine Historiographical Texts,” 435–44; Srdan Pirivatric, “A Case Study in the Emergence of Byzantine Studies: Serbia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” 481–90; Paul Stephenson, “Pioneers of Popular Byzantine History: Freeman, Gregorovius, Schlumberger,” 462–80.
6. Ironically, the Koraes Chair itself was founded in 1918 with the strong support of Venizelos and in the most optimistic phase of the “great idea.” It is remarkable that the scandal caused by the anti-Greek war reporting of its first incumbent, Arnold Toynbee, did not completely undermine the support of the College authorities for the chair (which still exists).
7. R. H. Jenkins, “The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Literature,” DOP 17 (1963), 39–52, at 29. A similar view is found in Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), by Cyril Mango, himself a past holder of the Koraes Chair.
8. Mackridge, “The Heritages of the Modern Greeks,” 34. For the modern Greek reception of Byzantium see M. Lassiothiotakis, “Une Grèce chrétienne. Les lettrés grecs et la réhabilitation de Byzance sans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle,” in Présence de Byzance. Textes réunis par Jean-Michel Spieser (Lausanne: Infolio, 2007), 91–112, 174–82.
9. On Greek and eastern European scholarship on Byzantium in this regard see the contributions of D. Kyrtatas and S. Ćurčič in Nea Hestia, July–Aug. 2008, 138–47, and Sept. 2008, 492–500; with G. Grivaud, ed., Les mishellénismes, Actes du séminaire organisé à l’Ecole française d’Athènes, 16–18 mars 1998 (Athens: Ecole française d’Athènes, 2001).
10. The important role of Thessalonike in Byzantine cultural and intellectual life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is also very clear, though so also is the frequency with which its intellectuals and churchmen gravitated to the imperial center at Constantinople.
11. Florin Curta, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, ca. 500–1050: The Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), deals with these issues.
12. See for instance G. Prinzing and Maciej Salamon, with Paul Stephenson, eds., Byzantium and East Central Europe, Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 3 (Cracow: “Historia Jagellonica,” Jagiellonian University, 2010).
13. See Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed., Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek, The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300–1500, eds. Robert G. Hoyland and Arietta Papaconstantinou (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).
14. See G.W.Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); id., Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); id.,”Reconsidering Hellenism in the Roman Near East,” in The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power, ed. Yaron Z. Elias, Elise A. Friedland, and Sharon Herbert (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 21–23.
15. “Unholy and loathsome” according to the sixth-century Codex Justinianus: see N. Siniossoglou, Plato and Theodoret: The Christian Appropriation of Platonic Philosophy and the Hellenic Intellectual Resistance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47, on which see later in this chapter.
16. The shift is discussed for instance by Dimiter Angelov, “Byzantine Ideological Reactions to the Latin Conquest of Constantinople,” in Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and Its Consequences, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005), 293–310, at 300–302; whether this is an indicator of “protonationalism” is a moot point, on which see R. Beaton, “Antique Nation? Hellenes on the Eve of Greek Independence and in Twelfth-Century Byzantium,” BMGS 11, no. 1 (2007), 76–95.
17. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London: John Murray, 1966), 106–7.
18. See further Averil Cameron, “The Absence of Byzantium,” Nea Hestia, Jan. 2008, 4–59; and cf. Christoph Markschies, “Does It Make Sense to Speak about a ‘Hellenization of Christianity’ in Antiquity?,” Church History and Religious Culture 92.1 (2012), 5–34.
19. Rowan Williams, Sobornost 2, no. 1 (1980), 72; see Aaron P. Johnson, “Hellenism and Its Discontents,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford, UK/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 437–66; “toolbox,” ibid., 439; id., “Philosophy, Hellenicity, Law: Porphyry on Origen, Again,” JHS 132 (2012), 55–69; A. Perrot, ed., Les chrétiens et l’hellénisme: identités religieuses et culture grecque dans l’Antiquité tardive (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 2012).
20. Several works by Judith Lieu are indicative and important: for instance Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T. and T. Clark, 2002); Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).
21. P. Athanassiadi, Julian and Hellenism: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1981); the term “Hellenism” was dropped in the title of the revised edition of 1992.
22. See Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1992); with Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Siniossoglou, Plato and Theodoret, 56–61.
23. Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Greek Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kaldellis offers a pugnacious but unconvincing defense of his views in “From Rome to New Rome, from Empire to Nation State: Reopening the Question of Byzantium’s Roman Identity,” in Two Romes. Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, ed. Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 387–404.
24. Hellenism in Byzantium, 118, cf. for example, 63, 83.
25. Anthony Kaldellis, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); “The Historical and Religious Views of Agathias: A Reinterpretation,” Byzantion 69 (1999), 206–52; “The Religion of Ioannes Lydos,” Phoenix 57 (2003), 300–316; “Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth-Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos,” Florilegium 21 (2004), 1–17. Psellus’s Hellenism is discussed in literary terms by S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 5.
26. N. Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
27. For the idea that Hellenism “failed” in late antiquity see Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, 166–71.
28. Termed by Elizabeth A. Clark “the new intellectual history”: ead., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 106–29, 159.
29. For a somewhat provocative discussion of “late antiquity” as seen by the Byzantines themselves see Stratis Papaioannou, “The Byzantine Late Antiquity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 17–28, arguing for a specifically late antique aesthetic passed on to Byzantium. The idea is intriguing but begs the question of what is Byzantine and what late antique; space has not allowed the more detailed discussion of late antiquity the author’s argument would need in order to be persuasive.
30. To confuse the issue further, it is also still sometimes described as the late Roman empire.
31. Johnson, “Hellenism and Its Discontents,” 440–42; for Sophronius see also Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 52 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Maximus Confessor, among the greatest of Orthodox theologians and author of many theological writings in Greek, also came from the milieu of Palestinian monasticism and traveled to Carthage, Constantinople, and Rome.
32. Some examples: Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Greg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011); many recent articles by Fergus Millar and Robert Hoyland deal with these issues in relation to Greek, Syriac, Arabs, and Arabic, and see also Philip Wood, ed., History and Identity in the Late Antique East (500–1000) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and see Angelos Chaniotis, “European Identity: Learning from the Past?,” in Applied Classics: Comparisons, Constructs, Controversies, ed. Angelos Chaniotis, Annika Kuhn, and Christina Kuhn, Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien 46 (Munich: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 27–56. Gill Page, Being Byzantine: Greek Identity before the Ottomans (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), takes up some of these themes in relation to late Byzantium.
33. One must except some works on the Latin empire, and studies of art in the Crusader kingdoms, for instance Lucy-Anne Hunt, Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam: Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean, 2 vols. (London: Pindar Press, 1998, 2000). I also very much regret that this book does not cover Byzantine-Islamic interactions, though that is a huge subject in itself; but see Helen C. Evans with Brandie Ratliff, eds., Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), the catalogue of an important recent exhibition.
34. See the controversial book by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998), with, for example, Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, eds., Art’s Agency and Art History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007).
36. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, 137.
37. Ibid.
38. For earlier scholarship see C. M. Woodhouse, Gemistos Plethon: Last of the Hellenes (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986), with translations of some of Plethon’s works.
39. Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism, 39.
40. “The question of Hellenic continuity and identity in late antiquity is essentially a philosophical problem…. This crucial link between Hellenic identity and philosophy that Theodoret exploited is reaffirmed and verified in the fifteenth century by Plethon” Plato and Theodoret, 238–39.
41. Ibid., 237.
42. Radical Platonism, epilogue, 418–26, with 415; and cf. L. Bargeliotis, “The Enlightenment of the Hellenic ‘genos’ from Plethon to Vulgaris,” Skepsis 20 (2009), 44–61.
43. See G. Karamanolis, “Plethon and Scholarios on Aristotle,” in Byzantine Philosophy and Its Ancient Sources, ed. K. Ierodiakonou (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2002), 253–82.
44. Eng. trans. in Woodhouse, Gemistos Plethon, 192–214.
45. Siniossoglou attempts to deal with this (though with difficulty) in Radical Platonism, 125–34.
46. Woodhouse, Gemistos Plethon, 136, 167; for recent attempts to play down Plethon’s paganism see Radical Platonism, 148–50.
47. A. D. Angelou, “Who Am I? Scholarios’s Answer and Hellenic Identity,” in Philhellen: Studies in Honour of Robert Browning, ed. C. N. Constantinides, N. M. Panagiotakis, and E. Jeffreys (Venice: Istituto ellenico di studi bizantini e postbizantini di Venezia, 1996), 1–19. C. Livanos, “The Conflict between Scholarios and Plethon: Religion and Communal Identity in Early Modern Greece,” in Modern Greek Literature. Critical Essays, ed. G. Nagy and A. Stavrakopoulou, with J. Reilly (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 24–41, defends Scholarios.
48. J. Monfasani “Pletho’s Date of Death and the Burning of His Laws,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 98, no. 2 (2005), 459–63.
49. For doubts about Siniossoglou’s essentialism see also K. Ierodiakonou, “Byzantine Philosophy Revisited (a Decade After),” in The Many Faces of Byzantine Philosophy, ed. K. Ierodiakonou (Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 2012), 1–22, at 6–7.
50. G. Dagron, “Byzance et la Grèce antique: un impossible retour aux sources,” in La Grèce antique sous le regard du Moyen Âge occidental, Cahiers de la Villa “Kerylos” 16, ed. J. Leclant and M. Zink (Paris: Boccard, 2005), 195–206, at 195.
51. Dagron, ibid., 203–4.
52. Hélène Ahrweiler, L’idéologie politique de l’empire byzantine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975).; cf. ead., “The Hellenic Europe: Problems of Greek Continuity,” in The Making of Europe: Lectures and Studies (Athens: Nea Synora Livanis Publishing Organization, 2000).
53. Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 164–65, 167–68, also on the concept of nationalism or proto-nationalism.
54. See Millar, A Greek Roman Empire; Latin remained in use for some purposes even after the sixth century, but few Byzantines knew or read it until a much later period.
55. From the large literature see especially Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001); id., The Second Sophistic (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996).
56. Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome, 26, cited in The Byzantines, 15, in a discussion of Byzantine identity, ibid., 15–19.
CHAPTER 4. THE REALMS OF GOLD
1. B. V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon. Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 127 and 7.
2. On which see Amalia G. Kakissis, “The Byzantine Research Fund Archive: Encounters of Arts and Crafts Architects in Byzantium,” in Scholars, Travels, Archives. Greek History and Culture through the British School at Athens, ed. Michael Llewellyn Smith, Paschalis M. Kitromilides, and Eleni Calligas, British School at Athens Studies 17 (London: British School at Athens, 2009), 125–44.
3. A milestone was reached in 1852 by the publication of an album of lithographs by G. Fossati, Aya Sofia, Constantinople (London), with W. Salzenberg, Alt-christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1854).
4. Annabel Wharton, “Westminster Cathedral: Medieval Architectures and Religious Difference,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 3 (1996), 523–57.
5. O. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1911); see Christopher Entwhistle, “O. M. Dalton: ‘Ploughing the Byzantine Furrow,’” in Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes, ed. Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, UK: Variorum 2000), 177–83.
6. Byron was also a friend of the Mitford sisters, especially Nancy, and Diana Mitford married his friend Bryan Guinness.
7. Robert Byron, The Byzantine Achievement: An Historical Perspective, AD 330–1453 (London: G. Routledge and Sons Ltd, 1929), author’s note.
8. Robert Byron, The Station (London: Phoenix, 1928), 136.
9. For gold in Byzantine art see Rico Franses, “When All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter: On the Strange History of Looking at Byzantine Art,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 13–23.
10. Procopius, Buildings I.1.1–78, on which see Paolo Cesaretti and Maria Luigia Fobelli, Procopius di Cesarea, Santa Sofia di Costantinopoli. Un tempio di luce (Milan: Jaca Book, 2011); marble: Liz James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 116, on Paul the Silentiary and Constantine the Rhodian.
11. Henry Maguire and Eunice Dautermann Maguire are two scholars who have done much to bring out the secular side of Byzantine art: see Henry Maguire, “The Profane Aesthetic in Byzantine Art and Literature,” DOP 53 (1999), 189–205; and especially Henry Maguire, “Unofficial Art and the Resistance to Orthodoxy,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 320–33; Eunice Dautermann Maguire and Henry Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Henry Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
12. The early-seventh-century suite of silver dishes found in Cyprus and known as the David plates has often been attributed to the emperor Heraclius (610–41), but for a wealthy individual as the patron see Ruth Leader, “The David Plates Revisited: Transforming the Secular in Early Byzantium,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (2000), 407–27; the treasure is now divided between Cyprus and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Early Byzantine silver: Marlia Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1986); ivory (including late antique official diptychs and Middle Byzantine ivory caskets): Anthony Cutler, The Craft of Ivory: Sources, Techniques and Uses in the Mediterranean World, AD 200–1450 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985); id., The Hand of the Master. Craftsmanship, Ivory and Society in Byzantium, 9th–11th Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). To these categories one should add that of textiles, especially silks, imported by the west and much favored as royal gifts.
13. Gilbert Dagron, Décrire et peindre. Essai sur le portrait iconique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 7.
14. Anthony Eastmond discusses the difficulties of deciding what counts as “Byzantine” art, given the changing shape of the Byzantine state, and the coverage of some recent exhibitions, in “The Limits of Byzantine Art,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 313–22.
15. See James, Light and Colour, 118–23 and chapter 7; Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
16. Glenn Peers, “Object Relations: Theorizing the Late Antique Viewer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 970–93, at 973–74 (I am not sure I agree with the overall argument of the chapter).
17. A development of the early Byzantine period according to E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art, 3rd–7th Century (London: Faber, 1977).
18. As well as for a type of icon associated with the feast, like the early fifteenth-century example in the British Museum (see figure 9).
19. Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
20. Brought out by Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
21. Even if not to the extent envisaged in the many publications on the subject by the late Paul Speck.
22. Kathleen Corrigan, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
23. See especially Leslie Brubaker and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, ca. 680–850: A History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
24. Matthew Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012); with Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth, eds., An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2011). The issue is also raised by Dirk Krausmüller, “God or Angels as Impersonators of Saints: A Belief in Its Context in the Refutation of Eustratius of Constantinople and in the Writings of Anastasius of Sinai,” Golden Horn 2 (1998/99), available at http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/goudenhoorn/62dirk.html, accessed 05.09.2013; and especially by Gilbert Dagron, “‘L’ombre d’un doute’: l’hagiographie en question, VIe–XIe siècle,” DOP 46 (1992), 59–68. The question did not go away: see Dirk Krausmüller, “Being, Seeming and Becoming: Patriarch Methodius on Divine Impersonation of Angels and Souls and the Origenist Alternative,” BZ 79 (2009), 168–207, and “Denying Mary’s Real Presence in Apparitions and Icons: Divine Impersonation in the Tenth-Century Life of Constantine the Ex-Jew,” Byzantion 78 (2008), 281–303.
25. Question 89 (19), PG 89. 717C; cf. Krausmüller, “God or Angels.”
26. For the latter, Henry Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies. Saints and Their Images in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 12–13.
27. Anna Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 40–63; Averil Cameron, “The Language of Images,” in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 28 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 1–42.
28. See Gilbert Dagron, “Holy Images and Likeness,” DOP 45 (1991), 23–33.
29. See Corrigan, Visual Polemics. Hostility to images in the eighth century has been seen in modern scholarship as a response to the purist stance of Islam, but it is Jews who were the target in portrayals in Byzantine visual art.
30. As I argued in “Blaming the Jews: The Seventh-Century Invasions of Palestine in Context,” TM 14 (Mélanges Gilbert Dagron) (2002), 57–78.
31. Corrigan, Visual Polemics, 32.
32. L. Brubaker, “Critical Approaches to Art History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, with J. Haldon and R. Cormack (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59–66, at 63.
33. Liz James, “Art and Text in Byzantium,” in Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. L. James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–12, at 1.
34. Ibid., 3, 7; see also Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and id., “Metaphors of Religion in Byzantine Literature and Art,” in Imitatio, Aemulatio, Variatio, ed. A. Rhoby and E. Schiffer, Akten des int. wiss. Symposions zur byzantinische Sprache und Literatur (Vienna, 2010), 189–94.
35. The writing and function of epigrams in Middle Byzantium (many on visual art) currently constitute a growing field, and ekphrasis has also attracted a large literature: see Ruth Webb, “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,” Word and Image 15 (1999), 7–18; Jaś Elsner, “Introduction: The Genres of Ekphrasis,” Ramus 31 (2002), 1–18. Both are concerned with a diachronic reading of ekphrasis between classical and later periods; see also Simon Goldhill, “The Naïve and Knowing Eye: Ecphrasis and the Culture of Viewing in the Hellenistic World,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 197–223. Classical Philology 102, no. 1 (2007) is a special issue devoted to ekphrasis edited by Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner (not confined to art history). For ekphrasis in Byzantium see Dagron, Décrire et peindre, 83–109.
36. As described by Ruth Webb, “Accomplishing the Picture: Ekphrasis, Mimesis and Martyrdom in Asterios of Amaseia,” in Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. James, 13–33, at 14; for ekphrasis as rivaling visual art rather than describing it, see ibid., 16. A notable Byzantine example is the tenth-century account of the monuments of Constantinople and the church of the Holy Apostles by Constantine the Rhodian: Liz James, with Ioannis Vassis, ed., Constantine of Rhodes, Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Apostles (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
37. This is brought out by Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); cf. also id., Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); id., ed., Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
38. This is less often connected with the use of patristic citations in theological writing; these are usually (and rightly) seen in terms of the appeal to authorities, but it would be interesting to explore their stylistic value as well.
39. For Riegl see W. Liebeschuez, “The Birth of Late Antiquity,” Ant. tard. 12 (2004), 253–61; see also Jaś Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Form,” PBSR 68 (2000), 149–84; and from a literary point of view M. Formisano, “Towards an Aesthetic Paradigm of Late Antiquity,” Ant. tard. 15 (2007), 277–84.
40. The Russian scholar Alexei Lidov identifies this conception of sacred space as “hierotopy”; and see Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon, with ead., “What Is a Byzantine Icon? Constantinople versus Sinai,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Stephenson, 265–83; Robert S. Nelson, “Image and Inscription: Pleas for Salvation in Spaces of Devotion,” in Art and Text, ed. James, 100–119.
41. Nelson, “Image and Inscription,” 109, who also says that icons “transform the spaces of their performance.”
42. For a model of such exegesis, applied to vita-icons of the early thirteenth century associated with Sinai and representing a possible “mode of transmission” between cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean, using “the one truly international language … namely the language of art,” see Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “The ‘Vita-icon’ and the Painter as Hagiographer,” DOP 53 (1999), 149–65.
43. See the essays in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudrey, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010); Hicks discusses the “material-culture turn,” in chapter 2, 26–98. An online bibliography on Byzantine material culture can be found at www.univie.ac.at/byzantine (Michael Grünbart), accessed 05.09.2013; and see M. Grünbart,”Bibliography on Byzantine Material Culture and Daily Life,” Byzantinoslavica 67 (2009), 13–16; with M. Grünbart and D. Stathakopoulos, “Sticks and Stones: Byzantine Material Culture,” BMGS 26 (2002), 298–327 (with some methodological remarks at 304 f.).
44. See A. M. Jones and N. Boivin, in Hicks and Beaudrey, earlier, 340–42.
CHAPTER 5. THE VERY MODEL OF ORTHODOXY?
1. See F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Fukuyama explains and defends himself in “Reflections on The End of History, Five Years Later,” History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 27–43. “Orthodox civilization” is defined negatively by Samuel Huntington and others, by its supposed lack of the features allegedly constitutive of western Europe, including a Renaissance and an Enlightenment; there is an inescapable resonance here with western attitudes toward the east, and toward Islam in particular (chapter 2).
2. This translates into politics, obviously in Russia, but also in relation to Greece and its relation with Serbia.
3. A general introduction is provided in the thoughtful contribution of Mary Cunningham, “Byzantine Views of God and the Universe,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 149–60, especially her conclusions, with a conspectus of the basic bibliography.
4. Well described by Warren T. Woodfin, “Celestial Hierarchies and Earthly Hierarchies in the Art of the Byzantine Church,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 303–19. The fifth- or sixth-century writings of Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite on celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies provided an underpinning, but the idea went back even earlier.
5. The patriarch of Constantinople was not the only one: the doctrine of a “pentarchy” (that is, the patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem) expressed a continuity of understanding, despite political realities. A “standing synod” had also existed in the capital from an early date and could be summoned when required. But the patriarch of Constantinople occupied a special place in view of his relation to the emperor and the capital.
6. A fuller statement of this position, based on the early period, can be found in Averil Cameron, “The Cost of Orthodoxy,” Church History and Religious Culture 93.3 (2013), 339–61.
7. Paul Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity,” in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Byzantium: The Definition and the Notion of Orthodoxy and Some Other Studies on the Heresies and the Non-Christian Religions, ed. A. Rigo and P. Ermilov, Quaderni di Nea Rhome 4 (Rome, 2010), 21–46, responding to my “Byzantium and the Limits of Orthodoxy,” Raleigh Lecture in History, Proceedings of the British Academy 154 (2008), 139–52.
8. For this lengthy document, drawn up to be read out annually during the liturgy, see J. Gouillard, “Le Synodikon d’Orthodoxie. Édition et commentaire,” TM 2 (1967), 1–316. Charles Barber, Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chapter 1, brilliantly draws on the surviving Synaxarion of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis in Constantinople (which prescribes the monastery’s liturgical readings) in order to re-create the effects of the annual reading of the Synodikon.
9. See Patricia Karlin-Hayter, “Methodios and His Synod,” in Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 55–74, demonstrates the many ambiguities surrounding the supposed watershed of AD 843.
10. For doubts about this idea, and for references, see Matthew Dal Santo and Phil Booth, “Conclusion,” in An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, ed. Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 205–14, at 205–7.
11. See Katerina Ierodiakonou, ed., Byzantine Philosophy and Its Ancient Sources (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2002); and Börje Bydén and Katerina Ierodiakonou, eds., The Many Faces of Byzantine Philosophy (Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 2012), especially the introductory essays by Ierodiakonou in each volume. As Ierodiakonou points out (2012), the reception of the first book makes clear the persistence of existing assumptions, and the controversial nature of such challenges. While it may be argued that it would be premature as yet, a new history of Byzantine philosophy is much needed.
12. See Sarris, Dal Santo, and Booth, eds., An Age of Saints?; and see A. Kaldellis, “Byzantine Philosophy Inside and Out: Orthodoxy and Dissidence in Counterpoint,” in The Many Faces of Byzantine Philosophy, ed. Bydén and Ierodiakonou, 129–53.
13. Paul Magdalino uses the memorable term “The Guardians of Orthodoxy” as the chapter heading for his wide-ranging discussion in The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 316–412. Orthodoxy certainly needed guardians even if they did not necessarily agree about what they were guarding; I am less convinced by Magdalino’s choice of heading (within a chapter on “Government”: “Church and State,” 267–309).
14. This is still true in the case of Louth and Casiday, eds., Byzantine Orthodoxies, which ends with a paper by S. Averintsev with the title “Some Constant Characteristics of Byzantine Orthodoxy.” Contrast for example the review of two recent collective volumes on early Christianity by J. Rüpke, “Early Christianity out of, and in, Context,” JRS 99 (2009), 182–83; and the papers in A.-C. Jacobsen, J. Ulrich, and D. Brakke, eds., Invention, Rewriting, Usurpations: Discursive Fights over Religious Traditions in Antiquity (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011).
15. The central study of these tensions is G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Eng. trans. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
16. S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos. Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52.
17. G. Dagron, “La règle et l’exception. Analyse de la notion de l’économie,” in Religiöse Devianz. Untersuchungen zu sozialen, rechtlichen und theologischen Reaktionen auf religiöse Abweichung im westlichen und östlichen Mittelalter, ed. D. Simon (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), 1–19.
18. See Papaioannou, Michael Psellos, chapter 1.
19. The deep ambivalence felt in Byzantium toward applying Aristotelian logic to theological argument despite the fact that Aristotle’s logic was taught throughout the period is brought out by Katerina Ierodiakonou, “The Antilogical Movement in the Fourteenth Century,” in ead., ed., Byzantine Philosophy and Its Ancient Sources, 219–35.
20. Alexiad, V.2, trans. E.R.A. Sewter, rev. Peter Frankopan (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 130–32.
21. Eustratius, Dialogue on the Veneration of Icons, ed. A. Demetrakopoulos, Ekklesiastike Bibliotheke, I (Leipzig, 1866), 127–51; according to Nicetas Choniates, Eustratius often took part in imperial debates with Latins on azymes (the use by the Latins of unleavened bread in the Eucharist) and the filioque, and debated with the Armenians when he accompanied Alexius when the latter was on campaign at Philippopolis (Thes., XXIII, PG 140.136–37). Anna Comnena, the patron of his Aristotelian commentaries, described him as “more confident in dialectic than those who frequent the Stoa and the Academy” (Alexiad, XIV.8).
22. Greek text and Latin translation, PG 127.972–984D. The episode is discussed from the viewpoint of art history by Charles Barber, Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chapters 4 and 5.
23. They included 48 members of the senate, 24 metropolitans and archbishops, 8 ecclesiastical “archontes,” and 15 heads of monasteries: see P. Gautier, “Le synode de Blachernes (fin 1094). Étude prosopographique,” REB 29 (1971), 213–84.
24. Anathemas proclaimed on those considered heretical went back at least as far as the early fourth century: see Rosemary Morris, “Curses and Clauses: The Language of Repression in Byzantium,” in Toleration and Repression in the Middle Ages: In Memory of Lenos Mavromattis. ed. K. Nikolaou (Athens, 2002), 313–26.
25. Cited by Jaś Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012), 368–94, at 380.
26. Ed Demetrakopoulos, Ekkl. Bibl. I, 151–60. I am indebted to Foteini Spingou for her invaluable work in the context of my current project on Byzantine prose dialogues.
27. See P. Ioannou, “Eustrate de Nicée. Trois pieces inédits de son procès,” REB 10 (1952), 24–34; the three items in question consist of the judgment of the patriarch, John IX Agapetos; the record of how each member of the synod voted; and the syllabus of errors, a list of twenty-four propositions constituting the grounds of which Eustratius was condemned.
28. The part of the Synodikon that concerns Eustratius is at lines 388 to 423, discussed by Gouillard at pp. 206–10.
29. Alexius’s reign saw the condemnation of Eustratius’s teacher, the Italian philosopher John Italus, and other show trials; the public burning of Basil, a Bogomil leader; legislation introducing major ecclesiastical reforms; and the commissioning of a major heresiological compendium, the Dogmatic Panoply by Euthymius Zigabenus.
30. See C. Simelidis, “The Byzantine Understanding of the Qur’anic Term al-Samad and the Greek Translation of the Qur’an,” Speculum 86 (2011), 887–913, at 905–6.
31. Thomas Graumann, “The Conduct of Theology and the ‘Fathers’ of the Church,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 539–55.
32. The last chapter is his famous discussion of Islam, which is presented as a Christian heresy. For a discussion of the Fount of Knowledge in its monastic context see Andrew Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters 3–6, in a section headed “Faith and Logic.”
33. Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 367.
34. Ibid., 367–68.
35. For the process see the comprehensive work of H. Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana. Les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l’Antiquité chrétienne, 30–630 après J.C. (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2001). Heresiology developed early into a literary genre in its own right, as argued in my “How to Read Heresiology,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 193–212.
36. Magdalino, Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 366 f.
37. Though legal expertise was prized and highly developed, and can be seen in action at certain periods: see for instance Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
38. According to Peter Brown, “A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclast Controversy,” EHR 88, no. 346 (1973), 1–34, Byzantine iconoclasm was a reaction to the centrifugal force represented by monks and holy men.
39. This is compounded by the level of parti pris in existing scholarship (chapter 1), noted also in relation to the controversy between Barlaam and Palamas in the fourteenth century by Ierodiakonou, “The Anti-logical Movement,” 233.
40. See P. Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity”; id., “Orthodoxy and Heresy in Tenth-Century Byzantine ‘Encyclopaedism,’” in Encyclopaedic Trends in Byzantium, ed. P. Van Deun and C. Macé, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 212 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 143–59, arguing for an orthodox agenda behind Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’s compilations (cf. p. 151, “an orthodox culture is by nature normative and prescriptive”; p. 154, “the encyclopaedism of the tenth century was an imperial appropriation … of a religious ideology of law and order that had been developed by the monastic reformation of the eighth and ninth centuries in connection with the Triumph of Orthodoxy”).
41. Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity,” 25–26.
42. See Averil Cameron and Robert Hoyland, eds., Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300–1500 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), introduction; and cf. the papers in S. Elm, É. Rebillard, and A. Romano, eds., Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire (Rome: École française de Rome, 2000); contrast Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity,” 34, referring to “the seventh and eighth centuries, when Orthodox doctrine was being defined.”
43. The term “culture” also features in the title of Denis Sullivan, Elizabeth Fisher, and Stratis Papaioannou, eds., Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of Alice-Mary Talbot (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
44. Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity,” 32; cf. M. Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 650–1025 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 139–64.
45. Magdalino, “Orthodoxy and Byzantine Cultural Identity,” 35. Magdalino connects the intellectual endeavors and patronage of Leo VI and Constantine VII with this urge to restore orthodoxy (and refers to Byzantium as a “theocracy” in id., “Knowledge in Authority and Authorized History: The Imperial Intellectual Programme of Leo VI and Constantine VII,” in Authority in Byzantium, ed. Pamela Armstrong (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 187–209, at 194.
46. See for example Alexander P. Kazhdan and Giles Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982).
47. These included for instance the Horos (statement) agreed by the iconophile council of 787, read out in October each year.
48. See Jill Harries, “Superfluous Verbiage? Rhetoric and Law in the Age of Constantine and Julian,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 19, no. 3 (2011), 345–74, and other works cited there.
1. Johann P. Arnason, “Byzantium and Historical Sociology,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 491–504, at 497 (from a thoughtful essay, many of whose arguments I would endorse).
2. Ibid., 496.
3. Ibid., 497–98.