Paul Stephenson
Why concern ourselves with the Byzantine World? In November 1972 the late Walter Ullmann, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge, delivered his inaugural lecture. “The Future of Medieval History” laid out his vision for his discipline, and one of its central tenets was the fuller integration of Byzantium into studies of the Middle Ages. “Papal Rome and Imperial Constantinople,” he stated, are “the two cornerstones upon which the development of medieval history” rests, and “the excision of Byzantine history from medieval European studies does indeed seem to me an unforgivable offence against the very spirit of history.”1 Nearly four decades later, the Byzantine World is still peripheral to the interests of most students of the Medieval World.2 However, fascination with the early Christian Late Antique World,3 and with the World of the Crusades,4 has thrown Byzantium into sharper relief. All now know that Byzantium stood as the bulwark against Islam for half a millennium between those eras, and persisted through the latter to outlast the Crusader states. Moreover, the intrigues of the imperial court at Constantinople in the sixth and eleventh centuries have long fascinated readers of the Penguin translations of Prokopios’ Anekdota (Secret History) and Psellos’ Chronographia (Fourteen Byzantine Rulers). Many popular accounts in the modern era have exploited these precious texts for considerable commercial success, most recently those by John Julius Norwich, whose efforts mirror those of French writers of grand narrative of a century earlier.
There have also been many more academic attempts to present the Byzantine World to a broader audience. The most successful political history, which Ullmann had surely read as he wrote his inaugural lecture, was by George Ostrogorsky. Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State had appeared in a third revised German edition in 1963, and an authoritative English translation, by Joan Hussey, in 1968.5 As a single-authored vision of the entirety of Byzantine history it has not been surpassed, although there are now many supplementary or alternative views of discrete periods and some compelling collections.
In 1971, Dimitri Obolensky offered a compelling vision of the The Byzantine Commonwealth. This was a multi-ethnic, linguistically diverse medieval world drawn together by a common culture that emanated from Constantinople, the greatest city in the western hemisphere, and centre for the empire’s cultural production, where flourished art and architecture, literature and learning, bureaucracy and ceremonial. Obolensky restricted his vision to the empire’s core, and to its influence on the Slavic periphery, those lands of Eastern Europe and Russia that embraced Orthodox Christianity. But his idea of “Commonwealth,” deeply influenced by the developments he witnessed as a resident of Britain in the years after the Second World War, was both too narrow and too broad for many. His thesis has been, in turn, criticized, embraced, ignored, dismissed and rehabilitated.6
The Caucasian lands, like those of southern Italy, were largely ignored by Obolensky; their role in his Commonwealth was peripheral. More recently their significance to the survival and reorientation of the middle Byzantine empire has been fully established. Armenians and Georgians, not Slavs nor Greeks, formed the core of an aristocracy that transformed the empire between 800 and 1100. Their integration into the Greek core saw the reconfiguration of the kingdoms and churches of Armenia and Georgia, but also prefigured the rise of autonomous “shadow empires” in Bulgaria and Serbia. These parallels over centuries demand closer investigation. Byzantium and the Caucasian lands were, moreover, in constant contact with Muslim neighbours, from the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century,7 to the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth. In this period Islamic empires rose and fell: the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids and others interacted with Byzantines, and through them with the rest of Europe. These contacts took many forms, but both trade and war were most often to the fore. Diplomatic exchanges were frequent, and gifts were commonly exchanged. These transmitted ideas as surely as did the debates between Christian and Muslim scholars and theologians, rulers and clerics, that are recorded throughout the Byzantine millennium.8
These areas and many more are addressed most recently in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, which offers a new political history, and far more, of the Byzantine World. It expands upon the more approachable Oxford History of Byzantium, which featured chapters by many of the same scholars.9 Similarly, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies complements the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, offering far longer, but still compact “entries” on key themes and concepts.10 These are now the key tools for scholars. However, the wonders of Byzantine art and architecture continue to fire the popular imagination. Major collections in the museums in various European capitals have long attracted the discerning eye to Byzantine art and architecture, but it is the grand occasional exhibitions that have drawn the largest crowds. Only the most respected and well-connected curators have successfully gathered the empire’s treasures in one place, most recently introducing priceless icons preserved in the monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai to the more familiar ivory and parchment, silver and gold masterpieces. The most popular have been the three blockbusters staged at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Age of Spirituality (in 1977–8), The Glory of Byzantium (in 1997) and Byzantium: Faith and Power (in 2004).11 Together, these have guided the persistent visitor of a certain vintage through the three phases of Byzantium, which one might more prosaically call early, middle and late. There are no exact beginning and ends. The catalogues to these exhibitions are enduring testaments and works of profound scholarship, but now the preserve of research libraries rather than coffee tables.
The attempts by art historians in the last years of the twentieth century to bring the whole Byzantine World together owe much to the particular trajectory of their discipline. Historians of Byzantine art and architecture were from the outset moved to consider its contribution to the Renaissance in Italy, and more broadly its relationship to European art and architecture. Ruskin, in the mid-nineteenth century, promoted the Byzantine architectural achievement, at least as mediated by Venice. And even if, until well into the twentieth century, it was broadly held that Byzantine art, generally meaning the art of Constantinople, developed differently from art in the West, still comparison demanded a broader vision.12 In contrast, through the later nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century the study of Byzantine history, before Ostrogorsky and Obolensky, was fissiparous, its history written and read through competing national and cultural prisms. Those concerned with words, not images, mined the same texts, largely in Greek, to produce composite source collections, tearing works apart to shreds for a higher purpose and offering vernacular translations of pertinent “gobbets.” They followed a well-trodden path, for the first Byzantine histories to be translated in the West were held, to a greater or lesser extent, to illuminate the pasts of Italians and Germans, and Latin translations were published without reference to the Greek originals.13
In those countries without a Byzantine past, it was mostly classical philologists, with the necessary background in Greek and Latin languages and literatures, who studied the Byzantine World. All were aware that the preservation of their ancient texts was the work of the Byzantines, and a few moved into the later period to examine continuity and change. Of those, many found it wanting, condemning the debased language, and derivative, “scissors and paste,” literature. J. B. Bury was a noteworthy exception in the Anglo-American academy: at the beginning of the twentieth century he held, in turn, chairs in Greek at Trinity College Dublin and in Modern History at Cambridge. Bury published extensively in both disciplines, and, fortunately for modern Byzantine studies, devoted much of his time to the history and literature of what he always called the Eastern Roman Empire. Few scholars afterwards enjoyed Bury’s range of expertise, and consequently the history of the Byzantine World has tended to fall between two stools: that one on which classicists sit, and that of historians, medieval and modern. The former tend to lack interest in historical questions, the latter the linguistic skills to answer the questions they wish to pose. Moreover, Bury took little interest in theology and none at all in the history of art and architecture, without which, we now would argue, it is impossible to approach the Byzantine World.
Bury had but one postgraduate student during his years in Cambridge: Sir Steven Runciman. It might be said, therefore, that one is enough, and few scholars in established posts are able to attract, still less to fund, large coteries. To do so, moreover, is somewhat irresponsible, since few of those who secure a doctorate in an area of Byzantine studies have a chance of securing a permanent position to teach and research in their chosen field. For the past half-century in Britain and the USA, where Byzantium has been taught it has been most often by dedicated scholars as an addition to their regular duties. But Byzantium is not an easy subject to teach: a proper exploration of the Byzantine World requires the same skills that Bury possessed, but today one must be willing to embrace still more. One must be a skilled practitioner in classical languages and historical methods, possess a considerable appreciation of theology and art history, and an increasing grasp of archaeology. At research level, one must have at least a passing acquaintance with a range of auxiliary disciplines: epigraphy, numismatics and sigillography – the study of inscriptions, coins and seals – and of palaeography, codicology and diplomatics – the critical study of handwriting, books and archival documents. Regional specialisms require further expertise in modern Greek and Slavic languages and literatures, for the west and north; and for eastern affairs a facility in one or several of Armenian, Georgian, Syriac and Arabic or Turkic languages. This list does not end there, but I think it is clear that Byzantium is challenging to research and to teach.
Increasingly, younger scholars have been willing to take up this challenge, and the recent work of a good number are included in this volume. Thanks to the efforts of a few devoted scholars of longer vintage, who are also contributors, courses in all areas of Byzantine studies have been developed at a number of institutions. And the nature of the modern academy and its research methods has proven an asset in this expansion. Whereas in Bury’s day the scholar worked alone, perhaps on occasion seeking the advice of a colleague, increasingly it is recognized that the most effective progress requires co-operation across the boundaries of cognate disciplines. More than this, a multidisciplinary approach is essential for the survival and development of many smaller humanities subjects. Byzantine studies have benefited doubly, ensuring survival by sharing resources, intellectual and material, and by exploring new methods. Of course, similar developments have affected western medievalists and classicists, and that is rather my point: there is now a very real chance that a proper study of the Byzantine World will be considered a core element in courses dedicated to the long period between Rome and the Renaissance. If Byzantium is still peripheral to the interests of most classicists and historians, art historians and theologians, increasingly we all are interested in the peripheral. It is to that end that The Byzantine World has been produced.
The essays presented here are intended in the first instance for medievalists who wish to fulfil Ullmann’s demand, to learn about and teach the Byzantine World, but whose libraries cannot support such an enterprise. They present aspects of the latest research by scholars who have recently published monographs or undertaken extensive research projects. In some cases, the principal findings are summarized, in others new avenues explored. In each case the author was asked also to present a brief overview of the “state of research.” There has been no editorial effort to ensure consistency between essays in the relative weight given to new or synthetic research, although each has elements of both, and an extensive bibliography draws attention to where further insights might be sought. Ultimately, it is hoped those who know little of Byzantine history, culture and civilization between c. ad 700 and 1453 will find useful distillations, while those who know much already will be afforded countless new vistas.
1 Ullmann 1973: 24–5.
2 Linehan and Nelson 2001. But see now the important overview of the discipline offered by Jeffreys et al. 2008: 3–20.
3 Esler 2000.
4 Jotischky 2008.
5 Ostrogorsky 1963, 1968.
6 Obolensky 1971; Shepard 2006b.
7 Kaegi 1992.
8 El Cheikh 2004.
9 Shepard 2008; Mango 2002.
10 Jeffreys et al. 2008; ODB.
11 Weitzmann 1979; Evans and Wixom 1997; Evans 2004.
12 Jeffreys et al. 2008: 10–11.
13 See Reinsch in this volume.