Despina Christodoulou
Byzantium has occupied an ambiguous position in the national history and collective memory of the Greeks. The roots of the current Greek understanding of the historical past can be traced to the mid-eighteenth century, when a distinctly modern Greek identity began to emerge. At the core of this identity, as it took shape over the following decades, was the glorious ancient past; Byzantium was either missing or was its antithesis. In the emerging historical narrative, Byzantium stood for oppression, corruption and decadence, foreign rule and the abuse of the people by the dominant class of emperors, church hierarchs and wealthy notables. This historical discourse was well suited to the dramatic social changes unfolding, which climaxed with the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and the foundation of the modern Greek state. The national name used by the Greeks also underwent transformation: “Romaioi,” with its evocation of Byzantium as the eastern Roman empire, was abandoned and supplanted by “Hellenes.” The ancient race was thus deemed to have been reborn after millennia of foreign rule and oppression, including that of the Byzantine “Romans.”
The most explicit demonstration of this classicizing tendency was the selection of Athens as the new state’s capital. The private Athens Archaeological Society, founded in 1837, and the state Archaeological Service took it upon themselves to uncover the ancient city, even if this meant destroying the strata above the classical layer and although early Christian, medieval and later structures were supposedly protected by law.1 Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, president of the Athens Archaeological Society and government Minister for Religious Affairs and Education, expressed the ideology dominant among the cultured elite in a vibrant speech he gave on the Acropolis at the Archaeological Society’s annual meeting in 1841. Neroulos eulogized the “revival” of the Hellenes after twenty centuries of slavery and lethargy. Byzantine history, however, he proclaimed to be “a long and almost continuous series of foolish practices and shameful violent acts,” and “a most dishonourable record of the lowest misery and the stultification of the Hellenes.”2
This was a narrowly proscribed view of the past, however, and one not sufficiently flexible to cover the evolving political, psychological and emotional needs of the Greek people. By the mid-nineteenth century it would be challenged in vociferous and unpleasant debate. A novel historical model would gradually take its place, a tripartite schema of history wherein ancient, medieval and modern were tightly linked chains unified through geographical space and time.3 The pioneer of this model was Athens university professor Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, for whom Byzantium was not simply an equal element: it was the core of Greek history that legitimated the new Greek state’s aspirations for its future. Along with amateur historians such as Skarlatos Vyzantios and Spyridon Zambelios, Paparrigopoulos set about to dismantle the system of historical thought that excluded Byzantium and replace it with a new system that projected the unity of the Hellenic nation through space and time.
Iakovos Rizos Neroulos’ hard-hitting disdain for the Byzantines, especially as a negative contrast to the ancients, is also found scattered liberally throughout the writings of Adamantios Korais. These two were certainly not admirers of each other’s work – Neroulos had published a play in 1813 entitled the Korakistika in which he lampooned Korais’ proposed language reforms – demonstrating that such anti-Byzantine sentiment was not merely the preserve of particular intellectual circles but was a widespread sentiment among the social and cultural elite at least. Korais, “the most celebrated of living Greeks, at least among the Franks,”4 was the preeminent protagonist of the so-called “Neohellenic Enlightenment.”5 Born into a merchant family in Smyrna in 1748, Korais spent the majority of his life outside Greece and the Ottoman empire, primarily in Paris, where he lived from 1784 until his death in 1833. In the city of light, Korais established himself as an internationally recognized classical scholar. More pertinently, he attempted to initiate a cultural “renaissance” among Greeks and organize his fellow countrymen against their Ottoman overlords through his prolific pamphleteering, voluminous correspondence and, from 1805, his seventeen-volume Hellenic Library intended to be used in the Greek schools of the Ottoman empire and Europe. This was a series of editions of ancient Greek authors prefaced by lengthy prolegomena in which Korais outlined an agenda for Greek national revival, with strategies for an education system and development of the Greek language, including recommendations as to which authors young Greeks should read and which they should most definitely avoid.6
For Korais, Byzantine history was marked by corruption, in both linguistic and moral terms. But he still saw it as an element of Greek history. In the prolegomenon to his collection of Aesop’s Myths he outlined an almost continuous Greek literary history, from antiquity through to the present. The ancient standards were wondrous, but a steady decline set in from the fourth century AD. The ninth century had some bright spots, namely “the exceedingly polymath Patriarch Photius … and his student Michael Psellos,” but it was also the century of the birth of the deacon and Magistros pseudo-Ignatius, also known as Gabrias, whose work was full of “[b]arbarisms, solecisms, misuse of words, and unclear in much and most dark.”7 The emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos was a “friend of education and protector of art lovers,” but even he was unable to dissolve the darkness of ignorance (amatheia) that had now clearly settled over Greek letters, and “the darkness thickens further.” The twelfth century was “perhaps the most inglorious” period for Greece: “Philosophy was no longer heard; Greek philology, without the lamp of philosophy, did not know in which direction it was going, and the koine language of the people … went from bad to worse.”8
Korais did, however, have an intriguing interest in the rather obscure poet Ptochoprodromos, and this because two of his works were written in the “koine spoken language of the Graikoi.” These poems may make us feel disgust, Korais comments, but they are of historical interest as they indicate the level of the corruption of both language and morals at that time.9 They provide us with a little consolation, he continues, as we can see that today our language and our morals are greatly improved.10 Volume one of Korais’ Atakta of 1828 is dedicated to Ptochoprodromos, with almost 500 pages of detailed notes and commentary accompanying only sixty pages containing two poems. In the prolegomenon – written several years after the outbreak of the War of Independence when an autonomous Greece had already been carved out and the first constitutions of the burgeoning Greek state drawn up – Korais no longer needs to advocate a Greek cultural revival as a “reborn” Greece is now a political entity. His ire is instead directed at the pope and the Jesuits for the Crusades and the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204. He fulminates against monarchy as the political form of the emerging independent Greek state, drawing upon a litany of disastrous Byzantine emperors to illustrate his point. Gibbon is a recurring source for this text, and it is Gibbon whom Korais cites to verify his polemic against the Byzantine emperors, Alexios Komnenos above all, for desiring to acquire the trappings of the Persian and Parthian courts and filling the Byzantine court with eunuchs.11 “According to the Englishman Gibbon …” is frequently found in footnotes and main text.
Korais’ greatest venom is, however, reserved for the Latin rite, the Church of Rome and the Jesuit order. In comparison with them, the Byzantine emperors and priests were positively progressive, although Korais can still not forgive the hedonism and debauchery of the latter for the collapse of Byzantium:
the monks and clergy of the eastern Church, compared with the then and later popes, high priests, clerics and monks of the West, should be considered saints, even if they did scandalize the laity with their dissolute behaviour, and hasten, with their increasing common superstition, the collapse of the Graikoroman empire.12
Korais’ problem, then, is not with the Byzantine, or “Graikoroman,” empire per se – indeed, its collapse is a source of regret for him – but with those who administered it, whose antics led to its destruction, and with the West. Moreover, he uses Gibbon here not as evidence for the debauchery of Byzantium but to demonstrate that the Byzantines were superior to the West: “Gibbon, the unrelenting critic of the easterners and the westerners, is however forced to admit that the bishops of the East, compared with the western bishops, can be judged as the genuine successors of the apostles.”13 This brings us to the oft-repeated claim, stated as such an obviously verifiable truth that it is never verified,14 that Korais’ anti-Byzantinism was due to the influence of western authors, most notoriously Gibbon. Yet, it is only in this late commentary on Ptochoprodromos that we find Korais’ first extant reference to Gibbon, despite his having spent almost the past forty years publishing attacks on Byzantium. Moreover, Korais cites Gibbon in a defence of Byzantium, to show its superiority to the West. Nor is he a mindless reader of Gibbon, simply reproducing and emulating him. Korais in fact edits Gibbon when quoting him, to delete the section most denigrating to the Greek cause: he omits Gibbon’s notion that the Church of Rome was “less degenerate perhaps than the Greeks in the worship of saints and images,”15 simply inserting the three dots of an ellipsis.
The absence of any previous reference to Gibbon in Korais’ published works and the date of the prolegomenon suggest that it was in fact not until the second edition of François Guizot’s French translation of Gibbon, published in 1828, that Korais actually read Gibbon and became significantly familiar with his work. In one of the few actual studies to explore Korais’ putative attachment to Gibbon, Stergios Fassoulakis acknowledges that there is little evidence to “justify” the “assertion” that “Koraes’ attitudes derive directly and exclusively from Gibbon.” Yet, Fassoulakis still insists that the “grounding of Koraes’ perception, then, is to be found not only in the conceptual framework of the eighteenth-century historians, chiefly Montesquieu, Voltaire and Lebeau, but also in that of the more recent Gibbon.”16
I would suggest that this is not the case. Rather, Korais’ hostility towards Byzantium had distinctly Greek roots. Indeed, there was another tradition of Greek writing hostile to Byzantium yet which could hardly be described as having been influenced by western attitudes – that of the Church. A range of works emerging from church circles around this time were not simply critical of Voltaire and his Greek followers, but also of Byzantium. The pamphlet Fatherly Teachings of 1798, for example, purports to have been written by the patriarch of Jerusalem. God, he writes, “raised out of nothing this powerful empire of the Ottomans, in the place of our Roman Empire which had begun, in a certain way, to cause to deviate from the beliefs of the Orthodox faith.”17
A similar position is taken by the monk and preacher Kosmas the Aitolian (1714–79), who in contemporary Greek collective memory is considered a forerunner of the Greek War of Independence. His history of the Romaioi reads thus:
When 300 years had passed since the crucifixion of our Christ, our most merciful Lord sent St Constantine and he set up a Christian kingdom and the Christians had the kingdom for 1,150 years. Then God removed the kingdom from the Christians and brought the Turk from Anatolia and gave it to him for our own good … God knew that the other kings would harm our faith and that the Turk does not harm us.18
The belief that Byzantium fell because the Byzantines had “sinned” was also shared by those who did not see the Ottomans as protectors. The Amsterdam-based merchant Ioannis Pringos wrote despairingly in his diary in 1768: “My Lord, have we had enough of your fury, be forbearing, have our sins not yet sufficed for you to liberate us, O Lord? We have angered your benevolence and for this you have made us subject to such a wild beast, the impious Hagarene.”19
The first real defence that we find of Byzantium is from a treatise by Dimitrios Katartzis (1730–1807), an official in the Wallachian court, counselling the youth on which “Frankish” and Turkish books they should read. Katartzis mocked those Greeks who “read the General History of Voltaire, and the Philosophy of History … before reading a book from the Byzantis, the history of their race.”20 He also attempted to construct a Greek national history, although one quite different from that of Korais:
When a Romios contemplates that he descends from Perikles, Themistokles and other such Hellenes, or from the relatives of Theodosius, Bellisarius, Narses, Boulgaroktonos, Tsimiskes, and other such great Romaioi, or that his family derives from some saint or a relative of his, how can he not love these great men and their descendants?21
It is possible to interpret Katartzis as here providing evidence of an “indigenous Greek” pre-independence, pro-Byzantine tradition. Yet, his historical knowledge of Byzantium came through a very western filter. Byzantis was the collective term used by Greeks for the series of Byzantine editions produced by the Louvre, the Corpus Byzantinorum between 1648 and 1729, including the abridged 1729 Venice edition in twenty-three volumes and perhaps even a six-volume modern Greek translation of the 1767 Venice edition by Ioannis Stanos.22 Rather than offering a simple translation, however, Stanos used the Corpus Byzantinorum for his own purposes. As his publisher, Demetrios Theodosius, explained in the foreword to volume one, the purpose of this translation is to:
make a clear selection of the most accurate and reliable of the historians who constitute the great and exhaustive corpus of Byzantis, and to order them … in such a way so that all can gain a clearer idea of things, when they are arranged as they followed each other, which order we do not find in the aforementioned collection of Byzantis.23
Rather than mindlessly adopting supposed western anti-Byzantine sentiments, Greek intellectuals of the late eighteenth century were clearly able to appropriate the formalized knowledge made available by western scholarship and to adapt it to a specifically Greek historical narrative. As such, the encounter with western discourse on Byzantium might more fairly be judged as having produced an interest, even a curiosity, in Byzantium and provided a framework in which it could be approached. Indeed, the anonymous 1795 translator of Montesquieu’s Researches into the Progress and Fall of the Romans – one of the works most often accused of having caused Greek antipathy towards Byzantium – was inspired by this work to ask questions and seek answers on the origins, development and fall of Byzantium, rather than to despise it.24
* * *
The War of Independence which broke out in 1821 led over a decade later to the establishment of a monarchy in Greece.25 The foreign monarch selected by the protecting Great Powers of Britain, France and Russia was young Otto of Wittelsbach, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Since Otto was only seventeen years old, a regency comprised of three Bavarians ruled the country until he came of age in 1835. Otto’s father, Ludwig, was a lover of Greek antiquity, and had apparently hoped to see ancient Greece reborn in Munich and subsequently in Athens even before the outbreak of the war and his own family’s direct relationship with Greece.26
Otto’s desire was to see Munich as the “Athens on the Isar,”27 and to this end he had a number of neo-classical buildings constructed when still crown prince. Their principal architect was Leo von Klenze, who designed the Walhalla temple, the Glyptothek and the Pinakothek. Ludwig was also very much behind the choice of Athens as the capital of a “reborn” Greece, and he sent von Klenze to Athens to draw up a town plan for the city, although this was never implemented.28 The “neoclassical” architectural style dominated the new Athens, as seen in many of the public buildings constructed from the 1830s to the 1850s, such as the University, Library, Academy, the Royal Palace and the Archaeological Museum. Even the Metropolitan cathedral was built, at Otto’s request, not according to the traditional Byzantine church architectural style but according to a neo-classicizing “Hellenobyzantinon” order.29
Yet, Byzantium was a useful resource for Otto, and one that both he and Ludwig warmly adopted. In his memoirs Nikolaos Dragoumis recounts that one of the terms Ludwig had set for Otto’s crowning was that it “adhered in an unchanged manner to all the customs of the eastern Church, just as had happened under the emperors.” More intriguingly, an order was given in Munich to make a grand crown, sword and sceptre, while in Greece “they researched the practice in Byzantium before the fall.”30 Clearly, Otto was excited at the thought that not only did he embody the rebirth of classical Greece but that he was the successor to the Byzantine throne. Such Byzantine imperial imagery and regalia were not merely a matter of personal taste but were calculated to legitimate Otto as a foreigner and a monarch – a prospect for Greece that Korais had fulminated against – in the eyes of the Greek people and to mobilize them around him in the campaign to expand the borders of his kingdom.
It also appears that it was Munich which had pushed for the choice of Athens as capital of the new Greece. The capital under the governor Ioannis Capodistrias, during the final years of the War of Independence and the early 1830s, had been the Peloponnesian town of Nafplion. For various reasons, however, it was now considered not suitable as a permanent capital. During a privy council discussion in 1833, the majority of government ministers believed that a town along the Isthmus, such as Corinth or Megara, was the best choice for a new capital of Greece, and only one opted for Athens. Alexandros Mavrokordatos, Minister of Finance, for example, argued in favour of the Corinth Isthmus as an excellent location, although he was aware that “educated Greeks agree with the choice of Athens.”31 Ioannis Kolletis, Minister for Shipping, argued that no permanent capital be built, only a temporary one selected:
The capital of the Kingdom of Greece must be Constantinople. It is the city where the foundations of the throne of our old emperors are located and the seat of our religion, the city upon which we should all turn our eyes … we should not desire any capital other than Constantinople.
The present condition of the Ottoman empire and the latest events in Asia and European Turkey are sufficient for us to understand that this choice is the wish of Divine Providence. The throne of Muhammad is crumbling.32
Kolettis’ conviction that Divine Providence would soon make Constantinople available to the Greeks was clearly mistaken, but one of his arguments against making Athens the capital was prescient: “why should we choose the city of Athens, and bury the grand and artistically perfect ancient monuments for the second time under new buildings?” Kolettis believed that if Athens were to be made the capital, then the hope would be lost “for both us and the foreigners” of showcasing the ancient monuments as a model for future generations and which would “strengthen the glory of the national spirit.”33
Kolettis’ own choice for temporary capital was the Peloponnesian town of Megara, and some claimed the reason behind his preference was because Byzantium had been an ancient colony of Megara.34 Even so, Kolettis’ fondness for Constantinople as the throne of the old emperors did not preclude his appreciation of classical Athens and the ways in which the city’s ancient monuments could be used to promote Greece abroad. Yet, despite Kolettis’ views regarding Constantinople and what it represented historically and culturally to the Greeks, Byzantium was still suppressed from any coherent kind of national history. And this at a time not only a new capital was being constructed but also when debates around national history were becoming more urgent now that Greece had its own schools and university, all of which needed an official, national educational programme.35
On 3 May 1837, the day of the foundation of the university of Athens, Konstantinos Schinas, the university’s first dean and professor of history, in a direct address to King Otto recounted the travails of the Hellenic nation over the millennia. In the “heroic years” Greece had been fragmented into a number of autonomous cities, which then lost their autonomy to the Macedonians. They were subsequently conquered by the Romans under Mommius, who bequeathed them to the “successors” of Rome, the Byzantine emperors. Four hundred years ago, Greece had been unbearably enslaved. “Hellas, your Highness,” Schinas continued:
was never an autonomous and indivisible state, but was first small in size and fought with adjoining states, and then a small province of three successive large monarchies, of which only with that of Byzantium did it have so much as language and faith in common.36
Vaggelis Karamanolakis, in his otherwise commendable study of the development of historical studies at the university of Athens, explains this perspective of Greek history as “expressing a common view of the era as it had been formulated by Edward Gibbon and which had much influence in western thought.”37 But, any reading of Gibbon shows that Schinas’ history is quite removed from that of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Moreover, Schinas’ vision of a historically fragmented Hellas would soon be abandoned. From the mid-nineteenth century a quite different historiographical model began to be developed, which posited three successive eras, ancient, medieval Byzantine and modern, with the Byzantine era as a crux in the development of a unified Greek nation. The two figures most identified with this effort were Spyridon Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos: Zambelios, so the story goes, introduced this tripartite conceptualization, while Paparrigopoulos refined and fought for it, the climactic result being his five-volume History of the Hellenic Nation, published between 1860 and 1874. Yet, although there was much interaction between the two authors and their work, their views on Byzantium and its position in a Greek national history differed markedly, at least at first. More pertinently, in the evolution of their own work, dramatic transformations can be seen in their personal attitudes towards Byzantium.
Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos was born in Constantinople in 1815, dying in Athens in 1891 after having enjoyed a long, successful and polemical career as an academic and very vocal public figure. Konstantinos Schinas had been his patron, helping a young Paparrigopoulos to secure his first job in the Ministry of Justice in 1834. This job he was forced to abandon a decade later when the constitutional reform banning heterocthons, Greeks from outside Greece, from serving in the civil service was passed. Between 1846 and 1850 Paparrigopoulos taught at the Athens Gymnasion school. Schinas again supported Paparrigopoulos in his, initially unsuccessful, application for a history lectureship at the university in 1850.38
In one of his first forays into historical research, Paparrigopoulos stuck faithfully to the historical model outlined by Schinas. This was an article published in 1844 and entitled The Last Year of Greek Freedom in which he attempted to demonstrate that Corinth had fallen to the Roman general Mummius in the year 145 bc, not 146 bc as generally believed. When he republished this article in 1858, in volume one of his Historical Treatises, a number of discreet but drastic changes had been made. The new title was now Fall of Corinth to Mummius. Whereas the 1844 opening line spoke of a “Hellas, already free …” continuing with “[I]f we look closely into the study of our slavery …”39 the 1858 opening line read “Hellas, having reacquired part of her freedom …” continuing “[I]f we look closely into the study of this period …”40 It was not only Paparrigopoulos’ concept of dating and historical periods that had changed in the intervening years. There had also been a shift in his political thinking, not simply in terms of when Greece was either free or enslaved in the past, but in how only part of Greece was now free today.
We can trace this paradigmatic shift elsewhere in Paparrigopoulos’ work. In the earlier part of his career he had dedicated himself to the publication of school history textbooks. His 1845 translation/adaptation Elements of General History according to the System of the Frenchman Lévi resulted in a clash between him and the Athens Gymnasion schoolteacher Grigorios Pappadopoulos. The Ministry of Education had issued a circular to the effect that Paparrigopoulos’ book should be used within schools. Pappadopoulos refused to do so and was transferred elsewhere, with Paparrigopoulos eventually filling his vacated teaching position. There ensued a pamphlet war between the two. Pappadopoulos’ grievance was that the General History did not contain enough of the “history of the eastern Orthodox empire … as for middle history, the Byzantine is worthy.” We, he continued, must be taught the history of our ancestral throne, as it is connected to our later history.41 Paparrigopoulos defended his book thus:
It is true that the history of the eastern Orthodox empire is presented synoptically; it is not, however, true that it constitutes our middle ancestral history … Middle Hellenic history constitutes middle Hellenic history … This middle Hellenic history should be taught by us and not the Byzantine.42
The evolution of Paparrigopoulos’ views became even more apparent in his following work, the Textbook of General History. Volume two – three were intended, only two produced – was published in 1852 on the medieval period. It contains an intriguing note by the publisher, Andreas Koromilas, addressed to the reader, the “studying youth,” that its contents relate to the “strange and difficult to interpret history of the Middle Age.”43 In the prologue, Paparrigopoulos cites some of his sources, all foreign historians, such as Schlosser and Thirlwell (this was a general history, not a specifically Greek one). And, most pertinently given the extent to which Paparrigopoulos was already at this period becoming ill-disposed to him, “for the Byzantine epoch, Fallmerayer.”44
This was a productive time in terms of schoolbooks for Paparrigopoulos, with the original slim volume of the History of the Hellenic Nation being published the next year. The “history of the Hellenic nation” is herein divided into five periods: (1) antiquity, “the most famous part of the history of the Hellenic nation;” (2) 145 bc to ad 476, when Hellas was under the foreign rule of the Romans; (3) ad 476 to 1453, when “the Hellenic nation was again free and acquired its own kings, whose capital was Constantinople;” (4) 1453–1821, when the Hellenic nation was again subject to foreign rule, that of the Ottoman Turks; and (5), the longest section, from 1821 until today, when the Hellenic nation once again gained its freedom.45 Theodoros Manousis, the other professor of history at the university, found this historical schema most peculiar. In his report to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education, Manousis commented that Paparrigopoulos had not “remained within the currently established boundaries of Hellenic history until the loss of Hellenic autonomy … but has dragged into this cycle other elements, which are not usually considered parts of it, for example, the Byzantine state.”46 The report was countersigned by Stephanos Koumanoudes, poet, lexicographer, professor of Latin, secretary of the Athens Archaeological Society and much more.
***
As Michael Herzfeld has noted of Spyridon Zambelios, the little we do know of his life “shows a cosmopolitan Heptanesian intellectual of distinctly hot temper.”47 Of a similarly fiery disposition was Stephanos Koumanoudes, who took such offence to the emerging historical approach to Byzantium that he perceived Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos to be promoting that he coined the term “Zambeliopaparrigopouleios,” defining it as a “historical school” in an attempt, presumably, to portray such theories as belonging to a lunatic fringe.48 Koumanoudes was correct to assume a close connection between Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos, despite their distinct differences. Born in Lefkada in around 1813, Zambelios produced the historical works by which he first became known in the United States of the Ionian Islands, then not a part of Greece but under British protection. He was of a prominent family and even served in the Ionian Island parliament, while his father Ioannis was a distinguished playwright and great admirer and personal acquaintance of Adamantios Korais.49
Primarily through his two lengthy works Folk Songs of Greece (1852) and Byzantine Studies (1857) Spyridon Zambelios is regarded as having laid the foundations of contemporary Greek national historiography, battling dynamically for the inclusion of the Hellenism of the Middle Ages within a tripartite schema. These are, however, complex works, difficult to read and with convoluted arguments. Moreover, there are significant differences, almost a tension, between the two works. In the Folk Songs of Greece Zambelios expressed his opinion of Byzantium thus:
In Byzantine history we rarely find traces of the people … The monarchy of Constantinople, from the beginning until the fourteenth century, with a few exceptions, is so alienated from the national inclinations of the subjects, that it does not protect Hellenism, only towards its end … A barrier, then, between the demos and the basileus, a chasm between Church and court. As a consequence of this division, two different political histories are presented to us, one which refers directly to the Roman empire, relating entirely its fortunes, as such, it remains completely foreign or at least external to the nation; and the other, indirectly or obliquely, refers exclusively to Hellenism, noting the terms of its existence and the levels of its development.50
Zambelios’ distinction between Byzantine history and the medieval history of the Hellenic people is emphatic: these are two different histories. What he was seeking was the cultural history of the people, not of the kings who tyrannized them. In the sense that he considered Byzantium as represented by the emperors, Zambelios was very much continuing the anti-Byzantine tradition exemplified by Korais. There is not a great difference between Spyridon Zambelios’ notions of Byzantium in Folk Songs and those of his playwright father Ioannis, who felt “repulsion when reading the history of the Middle Ages or the eastern empire … the common slavery, the oft bloody throne, the eunuchs, the rule by women.”51 What was truly novel in Folk Songs is that Zambelios did not view the medieval period as a chasm or as one of decline, moral and cultural, but attempted to engage with this era and to uncover the medieval Hellenism that he believed had been obscured by the monstrosity of Byzantium. The full title of the work was Folk Songs of Greece Published with a Historical Study of Medieval Hellenism: Zambelios believed that the study of this “dark and unexplored historical epoch” and of “medieval life” was of necessity for gaining an “aesthetic flavour” of contemporary Greek folk songs.52 The problem for Zambelios was not so much with the notion of a medieval period, but with what was seen as its corrupt, oppressive and seemingly foreign leadership. Hellenes may still have existed in this period, but they were enslaved and thus stigmatized and regarded as not worthy of attention. Zambelios’ innovation was actively to seek out the oppressed Hellenes of the Byzantine period. In this sense, he is highly critical of the Byzantis, believing that these chronicles told the story only of the court and not of the people.53
In his review of Folk Songs for the periodical Pandora, Paparrigopoulos praised Zambelios for challenging the notion that the Hellenic ethnos had been extinguished in the Middle Ages, but takes issue with him for considering “the monarchy in Byzantium to be a foreign element, and the only national elements to be the people and the Church.”54 When Zambelios’ second major work, the tellingly titled Byzantine Studies, was published five years later in 1857, his view on the Byzantine monarchy had undergone what can be described as a “rearrangement.” The emperors were now no longer a foreign element but part of an organic whole. Zambelios proposes to conduct an autopsy on the body of the “Hellenic middle age” and to examine its vital organs: religion was the head, language the lungs, and the throne and legislation of old Rome the legs.55 This is a distinct development from the views he held only five years earlier: the barrier between the people and the emperors has fallen, the chasm filled. As the title of the work itself indicates, all this was now Byzantium.
Spyridon Zambelios had settled briefly in Athens in 1856. He continued to publish in Pandora, a leading literary and cultural periodical co-edited by Paparrigopoulos, and in the French-language periodical Le Spectateur de l’Orient, with which Paparrigopoulos was also involved.56 It is tempting to speculate, then, that Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos were personal acquaintances who would meet to discuss Byzantium. Paparrigopoulos may thus have played a direct role in the shift in Zambelios’ attitudes towards the Byzantine emperors, both through his critical review of Folk Songs and his personal contact with Zambelios.
Spyridon Zambelios was not the first of Paparrigopoulos’ broader circle to have attempted to revise attitudes towards Byzantium. In 1851, a year before the publication of Folk Songs of Greece, volume one of Skarlatos Vyzantios’ mammoth Konstantinoupolis was published. Two further volumes followed in 1862 and 1869. The first volume was dedicated to the area within and around the walls of Constantinople, a truly complex and meandering work of over 600 pages. In the prologue Vyzantios recounts the overwhelming effort he made just to get even the smallest of details right, as “through the knowledge of each of these the history of the Byzantine epoch is made clearer, which comprises an integral and most essential part of the whole of our national history.”57 Even so, he still adheres to the position that there was something “wrong” with Byzantium, suggesting that Greeks limit discussion of whatever is reprehensible, even suppressing the nasty aspects of the Byzantines. On the other hand, they should highlight those things that are praiseworthy, which outnumber the negatives, as one can learn about in an unprejudiced manner from the Byzantis.58
Stephanos Koumanoudes reviewed Konstantinoupolis and took issue with its author over the argument that Greeks should avert their eyes from the reprehensible aspects of their Byzantine “fathers.”59 This evolved into a vitriolic “pamphlet war” between the two men, particularly on the part of Koumanoudes, who was clearly attempting to humiliate Vyzantios, with pedantic, over-detailed analyses of the latter’s imputed errors.60 In one important aspect, however, Koumanoudes was right: a historian should never cover up aspects of history simply because they are deemed unpleasant. His attitude towards the study of Byzantium – as opposed to Byzantium itself, which he unambiguously considered a horror – was complex, even contradictory. He wishes, for example, that “we could acquire a complete corpus of the cultural writings of the Byzantines. From this would come a true knowledge of our history.”61 For Koumanoudes, Byzantium was still “our history,” it should be studied, even in a brutally honest fashion. But, it was riddled with bad things and, as such, should have no real part in a Greek national history, which concerned antiquity and its modern projections.
Koumanoudes had the opportunity to articulate publicly his own views on the history of the Hellenes when he was selected by the Athens University senate to give the university’s annual anniversary speech in 1853. His chosen theme was the unity of the Hellenic nation, which he explored historically. Unlike many, he did not comprehensively condemn Roman rule, believing that although there were moments when it was strict, there were also moments when it was relaxed.62 Indeed, Koumanoudes believes that Hellenic unity crystallized in the Roman period, when the regional communities (koines) were established. The word “Panhellenic” was heard often under the Romans, dying out in Byzantine times, he argued. Art and letters declined when the capital of Rome was moved to Constantinople, being finally killed off by barbarian raids and despotic Byzantine rule. Koumanoudes fires a few shots at those attempting to rehabilitate Byzantium,63 believing that those who delve into the darkness of “our national life” during the medieval period may be worthy, but only those who use clear and indisputable facts producing safe and irrefutable conclusions that can be used to found a social system are worthy of national praise. Anything else could potentially harm the future of the Hellenic phyles (tribes, races) and their freedom.64 Koumanoudes believes that “certainly there was a Hellenic nation throughout the medieval era; we are the proof.” But, “either there was an absence of a sense of a political existence among the people, or they were in a deep sleep.”65 For Koumanoudes, the fall of Byzantium to the Turks was the greatest disaster, but it also provided the springboard for the rebirth of the Greeks: “Hellenic letters were reborn in the West” (his italics). Hellenism in the West was thriving and spreading salvation throughout Europe, and it was the teachers and merchants operating there who decided on the anastasi (resurrection) of the race, which had been sleeping for over one thousand years.66
Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’ five-volume History of the Hellenic Nation, the first edition of which came out between 1860 and 1874, is often described as “monumental,”67 but in many ways its success lay in its simplicity. The first two volumes covered antiquity until the Roman period, volumes three and four were exclusively dedicated to the Middle Ages until the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204, while the final volume covered the 600-year period since then until the War of Independence, including the Palaiologan dynasty and the Ottoman conquest. Paparrigopoulos’ aim, as displayed on the title page, was to produce a history “for the many.” The title page also included an epigram from the French historian, prime minister and translator of Gibbon, François Guizot: “The people that studies and knows its history almost always judges its present affairs securely and correctly, as well as the terms of its progress and its future fate.” Paparrigopoulos clearly had what we might call an agenda to pursue in this lengthy work: he aspired to establish the framework of a Greek national history and to make it easily accessible to the Greek people, for the purposes not only of historical interest or intellectual pleasure, but as a way of securing Greece’s political aims.
Written in a clear, crisp and pleasant manner, this is a narrative of events and personalities, with little place for historical philosophizing. Byzantium is often referred to as “our medieval kingdom.”68 In his effort to create a popular work Paparrigopoulos provided no footnotes and few references to the sources used, and for this he was exposed to the criticism of Byzantine historians of a younger generation, such as Konstantinos Sathas, Spyridon Lambros and his successor at the university of Athens Pavlos Karolides, who was also to update the History of the Hellenic Nation in the 1920s.69 Although the History of the Hellenic Nation is today regarded as the work which established the continuous tripartite schema of ancient, medieval and modern as the narrative for Greek national history, the fact that its publication took place over a period of fourteen years makes it hard to pin down its influence on changing historical perceptions. It certainly had a huge symbolic effect and was supported by the Greek state: the government recommended that municipalities and prefectures around the country acquire copies of the History and that richer municipalities should award it to their best pupils; the university solidly supported the History with large purchases; Paparrigopoulos received a pay rise twice in the 1860s; and parliament voted to fund its translation into French and to send its author to Paris.70
Paschalis Kitromilides characterizes the History as “the most important intellectual achievement of nineteenth-century Greece.”71 Another view is that of Elli Skopetea, for whom “[A]ll roads, from one perspective, lead to Paparrigopoulos, and it would not be an exaggeration to assume that if he had not appeared, someone else would have undertaken his position as the theoretician of Greek national unity.”72 These views are not mutually exclusive, although Skopetea’s assessment is perceptive: there may well have been something “inevitable” about Paparrigopoulos’ legitimating national historical narrative. Such histories had already been popularized in western Europe in the work of Guizot – upon whose work, as we have seen, Paparrigopoulos consciously drew as a model – Macaulay and others.73 Paparrigopoulos’ individual achievement was that he responded to the needs of his day, perceiving them before they were even fully understood by the broader society, and providing the political arguments for Greek irredentism with a historical and intellectual legitimacy. He was also combative and polemical, fiercely fighting his ground against the detractors of Byzantium within Greece as well as without. His experience producing schoolbooks helped him to hone his style, enabling him to produce a type of history that was clearly explained, pleasant to read and easy for a broad audience to understand.
A key to the development of Paparrigopoulos’ thought lies in his review of Zambelios’ Folk Songs of Greece published in the periodical Pandora. He opens by outlining the historical dogma, as he calls it, according to which the ancient Hellenes had been wiped out by Slavic invaders and that today’s Greeks were therefore not the genuine descendants of the ancient inhabitants. Paparrigopoulos is, of course, here alluding to Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who had propounded this “dogma” in his Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters of 1830. Fallmerayer argued that the Greek populations of the Peloponnese had been wiped out by Slavs from the sixth century and the “Greeks” of today were really only the descendants of those invaders.74 Paparrigopoulos argued that those who dispute the uninterrupted existence and unity of the Hellenic nation from antiquity until the modern day denied a main reason for its current independence. Indeed, if the view were to prevail “that the genuine Hellenic nation disappeared from the face of the earth and that those who are called Hellenes are nothing other than Slavs, Albanians, Bulgarians and Vlachs, stuttering the Hellenic tongue in semi-barbarian fashion,” then the Hellenic nation would come lower in the order of the peoples of the East than the Serbs and Montenegrins. The Greeks will thus not be able to claim greater rights than the other races that live among or alongside them, and the East will be divided into numerous small states, of which the Hellenic will only be one. As such, “the true and national history of Hellenism in the Middle Ages is not indifferent to its fate in this century.”75
Paparrigopoulos signals here that his primary interest in the Middle Ages is to demonstrate that there was a vibrant and thriving Hellenism throughout this period, so that the modern Greek state would have more legitimate claims to territory than the neighbouring Balkan nations. In 1852 when Paparrigopoulos wrote this review, the Eastern Question on the fate of the crumbling Ottoman empire was still rumbling on in the background and the Crimean War threatening to break out. This was a time when Greeks could hope to make some territorial gains. There were, however, competing claims to Ottoman territory. In response to Fallmerayer, Paparrigopoulos argued as early as a speech of 1850 that the issue is “not to prove that the modern Hellenic nation descends in a direct line from Perikles and Philopoimen.” On the contrary, this is not possible. Rather, just as the Albanians in Greece today are being Hellenized, which in itself strengthens the Hellenic nation, the Slavic tribes who settled in Greece in the past had also been Hellenized by the Byzantines.76
Paparrigopoulos had already challenged Fallmerayer in one of his earliest works, a little book published in 1843, On the Settlement of Slav Races in the Peloponnese. In this, he challenged Fallmerayer’s claim that destructive Slav invasions had wiped out the Hellenic population. On the contrary, the Slavs living in the north of Greece had been invited by the Byzantine emperors to settle in the Peloponnese as parts of it had been laid barren by plague. The twenty-nine-year-old Paparrigopoulos noted that he planned to write a much longer work on the relations between these Slavs and the indigenous population and Byzantine government.77 Such a work never materialized, but this unfulfilled promise provides an indication of the trajectory of Paparrigopoulos’ historical thinking. Moreover, although his 1844 work on the “last year of Greek freedom” displayed very traditional notions of the periodization of Greek history, in this work on the Slav settlements Paparrigopoulos takes a more neutral stance towards the Byzantines, making little distinction between the “indigenous” Greek population and the Byzantine emperors. We also have the seed of the belief that the Byzantine emperors protected and furthered the interests of the Hellenes in the Middle Ages.
While the purpose of this work was the demolition of Fallmerayer’s claims, of that other supposed denigrator of Byzantium, Edward Gibbon, Paparrigopoulos had this to say: “Not knowing English, I am forced to resort to [French] translations of this book, stunning because of the great learning of its author.”78 Over thirty years later, however, in an 1878 speech, Paparrigopoulos pointed to Gibbon as the originator of the negative attitudes towards Byzantium expressed “from the past century by our wisest who … charmed by the cleverness of Gibbon’s narrations, despise and mock our medieval monarchy … forgetting that to this monarchy they owe their language … and their name of Hellene; as that kingdom saved us from the Slavs, Bulgars, Arabs, Franks.”79 For Paparrigopoulos, Gibbon has now become not only the enemy, but is presented as the reason why Greek intellectuals prior to the War of Independence held Byzantium in contempt.
But Gibbon cannot be blamed entirely, as we have now seen. The aggressively anti-Byzantine prejudices expressed by a broad range of commentators in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not, I suggest, the result of an assumed uncritical reading of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Adamantios Korais, who then allegedly proceeded to diffuse such prejudice through his authority and influence. Rather, such notions were remnants of the past, responses to the collapse of Byzantium with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the ensuing existence of the Greeks within the Ottoman empire. For those attempting to rehabilitate Byzantium within the new Greek nation-state, it was easier to blame Gibbon than to attempt to explain why Greeks held such attitudes. The discourses around the place of Byzantium in Greek historiography in the nineteenth century divulge tension and confusion, but also the development of new forms of historical thought in response to the debates, and the needs and politics of the new Greece. That there were conflicting answers to various questions – Who were the Byzantines? How did the medieval period relate to Hellenism? Must one distinguish between popular culture and imperial tyranny? Is continuity between the ancient world and Byzantium comprehensible? Is it a reflection of nineteenth-century Greece, not of Byzantium and its history?
Paparrigopoulos’ unified tripartite schema of national history was overwhelmingly successful on one level: it is how Greeks understand their past today. In another sense, however, it contributed to catastrophe not success: Constantinople was never regained, the Byzantine empire was never reborn and the Byzantine lands were emptied of their last remaining Greeks. With the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922, during an attempt to implement a national vision – a vision that owed so much to Paparrigopoulos – a dream of restoring a lost empire was itself lost forever.
1 See Petrakos 1989: 36.
2 Neroulos 1841: 312.
3 On Paparrigopoulos, and others, on the structure of national time see Liakos 1994 and Liakos 2002.
4 Byron 1970: 884, in his 1812 notes to Childe Harold.
5 On the so-called “Neohellenic Enlightenment,” a term invented by Konstantinos Dimaras in the mid-twentieth century, see Dimaras 1993, and Kitromilides 1978 and 1994. For an overview of historical writing in this period, see Tabaki 2007.
6 The most comprehensive bibliography of Korais’ works remains Mamoukas 1888, 1999: 22–48. See also Chaconas 1942: 172–3, 176–8. On Greek readers, schools and intellectuals prior to the foundation of the Greek state, see Roudometof 1998: 21–3.
7 Korais 1810, 1988: 43–4.
8 Korais 1810, 1988: 51.
9 See now Ptochoprodromos 1991.
10 Korais 1814, 1988: 205–9.
11 Korais 1828: θ–ια.
12 Korais 1828: ιη.
13 Korais, 1828: μστ.
14 For just one example among many, see Argyropoulos 2001: 24–9, where Gibbon’s supposed insidious influence is discussed over several pages along with that other culprit Montesquieu, although no actual direct connection is made between their output and the anti-Byzantinism of Greek intellectuals.
15 Gibbon 1788, 2005: 434.
16 Fassoulakis 1993: 173.
17 Translation at Clogg 1969: 104. On church condemnation and occasional excommunication of revolutionary figures such as Rigas Velestenlis in 1798 and the outbreak of the War of Independence, see Kitromilides 1989: 179–80.
18 Menounos 1979: 269–70.
19 Cited at Clogg 1976: 42. On Pringos and the sins of the Romaioi, which apparently led to their loss of Byzantium, see also Politis 1998: 6.
20 Katartzis 1974: 52. Katartzis wrote in the 1780s but never published his work.
21 Katartzis 1974: 46.
22 On the history of editing and publishing Byzantine texts and the various corpuses see Reinsch in this volume.
23 Stanos 1767: foreword. This order in which things “followed each other” was the standard Byzantine biblical one, starting with the ktisis, the genesis or building, of the world, followed by accounts of the successive Roman emperors, running straight on into the Byzantine emperors.
24 See Politis 1998: 9.
25 The monarchy followed a four-year Governorship by Ioannis Kapodistrias.
26 Wünsche 2000: 280.
27 Wünsche 2007: 186.
28 Bastéa 2000: 85–8. For an interesting discussion of von Klenze’s trip to Athens, see Hamilakis 2007: 58–64.
29 Bastéa 2000: 163. Bastéa believes that Otto’s desire to incorporate Byzantine architectural elements into religious and other buildings indicates his adherence to the Greek irredentism of the “Great Idea,” with its emphasis on Byzantium. On the contrary, more remarkable was the incorporation of neo-classical elements into Orthodox church buildings when there was an existing and prevailing order of Byzantine church architecture, underscoring the extent to which the (neo-)classical was pushing the Byzantine tradition out of even its established and sacred spaces.
30 Dragoumis 1879, 1973: 22. These plans were abandoned so as not to expose Otto to criticism from the Russians for having an Orthodox religious crowning when not an Orthodox Christian.
31 Papadopoulou-Symeonidou 1996: 45. These opinion statements, in French, are held in the Geheimes Hausarchiv in Munich, now attached to the Bavarian State Archive. The English translations here are based on Parysati Papadopoulou-Symeonidou’s Greek translations from the French. There is a longer section of Kolettis’ opinion statement translated into English (from Papadopoulou-Symeonidou’s Greek) at Hamilakis 2007: 106–7. It is not impossible that the original language of these documents was Greek.
32 Papadopoulou-Symeonidou 1996: 50–1. Kolettis was, of course, the popularizer of the phrase “Megali Idea,” the Great Idea by which the Greek state would expand territorially to cover all the lands in which Greeks lived – three-quarters of which at this stage lay outside the Greek state, mostly within the Ottoman empire – and which in the later part of the nineteenth century came to be specifically identified with the territory of the Byzantine empire. See Kitromilides 1998: 26–8.
33 Papadopoulou-Symeonidou 1996: 51–2.
34 So claimed Georgios Psyllas, a fighter in the War of Independence, in his memoirs, quoted in Dimitrakopoulos 1996: 149. In his opinion statement, Kolettis cites the clean air, available land, natural fortifications and shipping and commercial opportunities afforded by coastal Megara. See Papadopoulou-Symeonidou 1996: 50–6.
35 On the establishment of a network of schools and the university and their role in homogenizing Greek culture within the Greek state see Kitromilides 1989: 163–4 and 166–7. Kitromilides also discusses other means by which a Greek nation-state identity was disseminated, such as the army and the new autocephalous church of Greece, as well as the impact of the new Greek state on the Greek communities outside its borders.
36 Schinas 1837: 1–2.
37 Karamanolakis 2006: 53.
38 Dimaras 1986: 210; Karamanolakis 2006: 94.
39 Paparrigopoulos 1844: 4.
40 Paparrigopoulos 1858: 145–7.
41 Dimaras 1986: 123–4.
42 Quoted in Dimaras 1986: 124–5.
43 In Paparrigopoulos 1852a, Note.
44 Paparrigopoulos 1852a: α. He does not use the Byzantis as a source as the book is intended for schoolchildren, and the Byzantis is too voluminous and “not classical.”
45 Paparrigopoulos 1852a: 1.
46 Manousis 1853: 164.
47 Herzfeld 1982: 40. On Zambelios see Huxley 1998; Koubourlis 2005.
48 In his lexicon of new words posthumously published in 1900, where he gives the date of his neologism as 1851 and himself as its inventor; see Koumanoudes 1900, 1980: 432. However, as Dimaras has pointed out, Zambelios had not yet published his first major work (Folk Songs of Greece) at this date, and so this “historical school” had not yet appeared in 1851. Dimaras 1986: xxvii.
49 As Ioannis Zambelios reminisced in the notes to his biography apparently written around 1844. See Zambelios 1902: 228–9.
50 Zambelios 1852: 21.
51 Zambelios 1902: 233–4.
52 Zambelios 1852: 5. Pertinently, the folk songs he collected were songs about the War of Independence and the uprising against the Ottomans.
53 Zambelios 1852: 25. His criticism of Montesquieu, Le Beau, Voltaire and others is for a similar reason: with the Byzantine chronicles as their sources, they saw only the “king of the Romans” and his “Roman entourage” as the protagonists of the “Hellenic middle age” and not the Hellenic people.
54 Paparrigopoulos 1852b; Koubourlis 2005: 284–92, with translations of long select passages into French.
55 Zambelios 1857: 95.
56 Soldatos 2003: 46–7.
57 Vyzantios 1851: α.
58 Vyzantios 1851: β.
59 This review, published in the periodical Mnemosyne, is reproduced in full at Dimitrakopoulos 1996: 117–24.
60 The various instalments are detailed in Dimitrakopoulos 1996: 116.
61 From his personal notes, August 1850, in Matthaiou 1999: 216.
62 Koumanoudes 1853: 22.
63 It would not be too wild a speculation to presume he is referring to Paparrigopoulos, Zambelios and Vyzantios.
64 Koumanoudes 1853: 22–3.
65 Koumanoudes 1853: 24.
66 Koumanoudes 1853: 24–5.
67 For example, Kitromilides 1998: 27.
68 See Kitromilides 1998: 29.
69 Dimaras 1986: 274–6, 294–7, 355–7, 365–7; Karamanolakis 2006: 251–5. One of the main criticisms of the History of the Hellenic Nation was that it lacked scholarly apparatus such as footnotes and references. Paparrigopoulos attempted to respond to this with a new scholarly edition equipped with footnotes and bibliographies, but gave up after only a part of the first volume was published in 1881. A second edition of the whole work with some substantial changes was published in 1885–7. See Dimaras 1986: 365–9. On criticism of popular Byzantine history, and its lack of critical apparatus, see Stephenson in this volume ch. 32.
70 Dimaras 1986: 228–30. Most of these measures were taken in 1861–2 when only the first volume on antiquity had been published, and thus cannot be completely interpreted as the state supporting the History’s claims to Byzantium.
71 Kitromilides 1998: 28.
72 Skopetea 1988: 15.
73 On the type of history being written in western Europe in the early to mid-nineteenth century, see Stuchtey 1999; Crossley 1999; Bahners 1999.
74 On Fallmerayer and his reception in Greece, including his bewilderment that Greek children would run after him on the streets of Athens in 1847 shouting “Slav, Slav!” see Veloudis 1982: 26–47.
75 Paparrigopoulos 1852b: 398.
76 Paparrigopoulos 1850: 201. For similar responses to Fallmerayer, see Matalas 2003: 147–9.
77 Paparrigopoulos 1843: 112.
78 Paparrigopoulos 1843: 8 n. 8.
79 Paparrigopoulos 1878b: 831.