PART IV
THE WORLD OF BYZANTINE STUDIES

The people that we now call Byzantines considered themselves Romans, and called themselves “Romaioi.” The use of the term “Byzantine” in modern scholarship dates from the sixteenth century, when, as Diether Roderich Reinsch demonstrates, an interest in the history of what came to be called the Byzantine empire had emerged in Italy. This took place shortly after the fall of Constantinople, and was inspired by the arrival of émigré intellectuals, of which Manuel Chrysoloras was the first of many. Italians learnt Greek and sought classical literature. Only later did Italians embrace the later Roman history of the East as their common history, for example that contained in Prokopios’ Wars. As Reinsch explains, we can observe here the production of the first editions of Byzantine historical texts, or more importantly of Latin translations of those texts, including works by Prokopios, where a Latin version was produced as early as 1441, but the Greek original only in 1607. That is to say, mining the histories for details of regional and local history was far more compelling than producing editions, as the list Reinsch has compiled demonstrates.

Still, editions of medieval Greek texts were produced, and the emphasis was on producing a complete run of Byzantine historiography. Interest was spurred by the encroachments of the Ottoman Turks, now masters of Byzantium, who reached the walls of Vienna in 1529. Augsburg, a southern German city which dominated trade between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, became “the first centre of editorial activity in the field of secular Byzantine historiographical texts.” It was through the commercial family firm Fugger that “the father of German Byzantine studies” was forced into editing Zonaras, for Hieronymus Wolf was private secretary to the nephew of the proprietor of the business. The Augsburgian tradition continued into the seventeenth century, even as other centres emerged, notably Leiden, but subsequently Paris. The first corpus, the Byzantine du Louvre (or Corpus Parisiense), was edited under the auspices of Louis XIV from 1645 to 1688, and manuscripts flowed into the Royal Library. The complete corpus was reprinted in Venice (1729– 33), aimed at a broader readership, even before the last volume was added in 1819. A decade later began the publication of the Bonn corpus, the CSHB. Reinsch sketches its history, bringing us to the present day, and to the CFHB.

The editing of Byzantine texts was not the first choice of the most able philologists. For much of the time since its first use, by Hieronymus Wolf in 1557,¹ the term “Byzantine” has been essentially pejorative. For the educated in western Europe, blessed with a classical education, the term distinguished Rome from her corrupt and decadent successor, a culture that lingered in a state of perpetual decay for more than a thousand years. This was also the sense in Greece, where the leading intellectuals looked to Paris rather than Constantinople. Rigas Velestinlis, who features on the Greek ten euro cent coin, took the French Revolution as his inspiration. His publications included a projected constitution, modelled on the French constitutions of 1793 and 1795, for a new state called the “Hellenic Republic.” It was to be a unitary, not a federal, state which embraced the whole Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor. Sovereignty was to reside in the people, who were to comprise all the state’s inhabitants without distinction of language or religion. However, the official language was to be Greek, as it had been in Byzantium.² There were substantial problems with Rigas’ vision of a restored Byzantine empire, and to serve as a model Byzantium had to be redefined so that it might fit within, and not contradict, the national and nationalist framework of nineteenth-century Greece.³

As Despina Christodoulou shows, in Chapter 31, the Byzantine centuries were considered dark by the leading, if not all, Greek intellectuals of the Enlightenment. For them the classical past prevailed over the Byzantine period for those seeking a model past for the new Greece. Christodoulou focuses initially on Adamantios Korais, who championed the ideal of classical Greece and the example of revolutionary France, was present in Paris in 1789 and believed that modern Greeks, in order to emulate their ancient forebears, could do no better than imitate the French. However, he was not, as is frequently asserted (by those who overstate or misinterpret his use of Gibbon), unremittingly hostile to all things Byzantine, but rather to those that brought the “Graikoroman” empire low. Christodoulou traces a Greek tradition that informed Korais, even as he lived in Paris until his death in 1833.

Korais’ contemporary, but far from a friend, Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, was more dismissive of Byzantium, and as late as 1841 condemned it as “the lowest misery and the stultification of the Hellenes.” By then, Byzantium had begun to play a significant role in Greek life and thought. Christodoulou glances at the work of many lesser thinkers, including Kosmas the Aitolian and Dimitrios Katartzis. However, the greatest provocation to fuller reflection on Byzantium and medieval Greece came from Germany. The thesis of J. P. Fallmerayer, first aired in 1830, posited that modern Greeks were not descended from the ancients, but had been eliminated by massive influxes of Slavs and Albanians, such that any notion of continuity was a fiction. Fallmerayer’s statements were extremely bold and provocative considering how meagre was his basis for making them. For example, and notoriously, he claimed that “not a single drop of real pure Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of modern Greece.” By “pure Hellenic blood” he meant that which had flowed in the veins of Perikles and Alcibiades.⁴ Responding to such provocation, Byzantium was embraced in Greece by scholars of philology, linguistics and folklore as the missing link which proved the continuity of Hellenism. Byzantine texts were compiled, edited and published, and Byzantine themes were a commonplace in contemporary literature. Much recent work has explored this Byzantine renascence.⁵ Most importantly for our purposes, the history of the Byzantine empire was embraced as a subject worthy of popular reflection and redefined as the history of medieval Greece, the link between the classical past and the national present.

The immediate political context for the emergence of Byzantine studies was a debate over the relative rights of Greeks living within (autochthons) and outside (heterocthons) the borders of the new Greek kingdom, and the so-called “Great Idea” (Megali Idea).⁶ Expounded first and famously in 1844 by Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis, the great idea was to make all Greeks autochthons by extending the borders of the kingdom by force of arms. Although Kolettis did not mention Byzantium, a link was established between the medieval empire and the Great Idea within the prevailing political culture of “Romantic Hellenism.”⁷

The greatest exponents of Greek historical continuity were Spyridon Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. Zambelios has been credited with devising the tripartite scheme for Hellenic history. He also distinguished between Byzantine history and the medieval history of the Hellenic people: the latter he wished to excavate and separate from the former, to liberate the people from “common slavery, the oft bloody throne, the eunuchs, the rule by women.” His original vision of Byzantium is not so very different from that of Korais, although as Christodoulou reveals, it was not constant. Paparrigopoulos, on the other hand, has become known as the national historian of Greece. Paparriogopoulos’ task, in his History of the Hellenic Nation, was to chart the passage of “the Greek nation” (to ellinikon ethnos) from origins to emancipation, through the Byzantine era which he rechristened the age of the Hellenic Empire of Constantinople. Initially a mere sketch intended for school-children, Paparrigopoulos’ vision expanded to five volumes for the second definitive edition (1885–7), of which three volumes were devoted to Byzantine history.⁸ Even before this, it had appeared in a French translation, in the preface to which Paparrigopoulos set out his reasons for writing for an international readership. Many readers would be familiar with works “on the Greek people … published all the time, of lesser or greater merit, in England, Germany and in France.”⁹

The unity of Hellenic civilization has sometimes been denied, sometimes strongly affirmed … But few are those who have admitted that the Greek race never ceased to make a mark on history … The purpose of this work is to re-establish the neglected unity of Hellenic civilization, to give to its principal phases their true meaning, to make heard the voice of Greece in the historical trial where she has been judged in absentia.

The works with which Paparrigopoulos’ took issue were those by Voltaire and Montesquieu, Le Beau and Gibbon, Fallmerayer and his followers. He would have been far more satisfied with popular historical works that had appeared and would appear subsequently “in England, Germany and in France,” with which Stephenson deals in his chapter. Popular scholarship continued apace, with scholars in Britain (E. A. Freeman), France (G. Schlumberger) and German-speaking lands (F. Gregorovius), offering narratives of Byzantine and Greek history. Stephenson suggests that none was without a political agenda, and it is impossible to understand these visions of Byzantium without placing their development against attempts to resolve the “Eastern Question.” However, he also argues that Byzantium offered a refuge of sorts for scholars who might, in an earlier age, have devoted themselves to classical studies. These men were driven by the new philology and the demands of Grosswissenschaft – in Munich, Heidelberg and, increasingly, Paris – to embrace a less well-known field, where the independent scholar or antiquarian might still dwell safely, at least for a short while.

In the later nineteenth century and through the twentieth, the various visions of medieval Greece, produced by Hellenists both within and without the kingdom, competed with national narratives composed in Bulgaria and the lands of the Southern Slavs, where scholars employed excerpts from Byzantine texts to demonstrate ethnic continuity from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Notable names that deserve to be studied in detail include N. Iorga (Romania) and V. Zlatarski (Bulgaria) – and it is to be regretted that those who were to offer perspectives on Romania and Bulgaria in this volume were unable to do so. One might also consider the impact of Illyrianism in Albania and both Illyrianism and Pan-Slavism in former Yugoslavia. Of the latter, Sran Pirivatri, takes Serbia as a case study, in chapter 33, observing how Byzantine studies emerged as an academic discipline under external influence even as it remained central to the formation of national identity for the Serbs. Adopting a prosopographical approach, Pirivatri begins with those who combed Byzantine sources for information on the Serbian nations and people. It is not until late in the nineteenth century that one finds the first stirrings of interest in the new scientific approach to history, pioneered in German-speaking lands to the north-west. The Romantics fell rapidly under fire from the critical school, whose victory “was strongly felt in the selection of members of the newly established Serbian Royal Academy of Science in 1886.” Yet the two most influential figures in the emergence of critical Byzantine studies in Serbia were a Czech and a German: Konstantin Jireek and Karl Krumbacher. The latter trained a generation of Serbian Byzantinists and medievalists, whose careers Pirivatri sketches, including Stanoje Stanojevi, Vladimir orovi, Jovan Radoni, Nikola Radoji, Dragutin Anastasijevi, Boidar Proki and Filaret Grani. The most important Byzantine voice to echo forth from Belgrade, however, belonged to a Russian-born scholar, who fled to Finland, and was trained in Heidelberg and Paris: George Ostrogorsky.

Resident in Belgrade from 1933, and from 1940 head of the Seminar, “Ostrogorsky was the initiator of and driving force behind all [Serbian] initiatives in Byzantine studies during the three post-war decades.” His influence within and beyond the world of Byzantine studies is measured also by Johann Arnason, in chapter 34, who sees Ostrogorsky’s scholarship as replete with comparative sociological perspectives that are never spelt out. Ostrogorsky, whose major thesis Arnason sketches, was the major influence upon Saul Eisenstadt, who first realized the value of the Byzantine empire for comparative study of imperial political systems. As Arnason notes, in an elegant précis of Eisenstadt’s analysis, “Byzantium … seems to exemplify, more instructively than most other cases, two aspects of imperial regimes: the ability to build institutions and mobilize resources on a superior scale, characteristic of their ascendant phases, and the regressive dynamics that tend to prevail in the longer run.” Historical sociologists have been slow to follow Eisenstadt, but Arnason has begun to expand upon his elucidations and to locate Byzantium in the broadest of contexts, embracing the competing general histories and distillations produced in recent years, comparing the decline or transformation of the late Roman world to traces of continuity, and relating all to parallel developments in China, Japan and elsewhere. In this chapter, his critical gaze falls on the discredited notion of “caesaropapism,” to which Gilbert Dagron has recently devoted attention, and in his exploration of the geopolitical centre and the relationship between patriarch and emperor, Arnason returns us to themes with which the volume began, in Michael Angold’s chapter.

Arnason’s central message is that historical sociologists must follow Eisenstadt’s lead, and we might add now his own, to integrate (the latest studies of) the Byzantine World into their analyses. A similar message informs Stephenson’s afterword (chapter 35), which is devoted to the absence of Byzantium in most discussions of Europe’s past by those within and without the academy, notably political scientists and politicians, but also many medievalists. It would appear that Walter Ullmann’s call to establish Constantinople, alongside Rome, as the second pillar of medieval Europe has not yet been heard. But there are hopeful signs, as eloquent and important voices – Averil Cameron, Jonathan Shepard, Evelyn Patlagean – express the need for a wider and fuller appreciation of the other Middle Ages, how it was constructed, and how it has been presented to us. Several post-Byzantine nations – for now, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria – are heirs to the Byzantine World within the European Union. Others will follow, and they cannot remain beyond the pale. The geographical frontiers of Europe’s past have shifted definitively to the East, and the conceptual frontiers must now catch up.

NOTES

1 Evans 2004: 5.

2 López Villalba 2003.

3 Kitromilides 1989.

4 Fallmerayer 1830–6: I, iii–xiv. See authoritatively Leeb 1996, and also Veloudis 1970. Bel 1993 places necessary emphasis on Fallmerayer, and Curta 2005 contextualizes his commentary.

5 See e.g. Ricks and Magdalino 1998.

6 Kitromilides 1989: 165; Clogg 1988.

7 Kitromilides 1998: 28.

8 Paparrigopoulos 1860–74.

9 Paparrigopoulo[s] 1878a: vii–ix.