CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PIONEERS OF POPULAR BYZANTINE HISTORY

Freeman, Gregorovius, Schlumberger

Paul Stephenson

INTRODUCTION

At the end of the eighteenth century a wide readership in western Europe was familiar with Byzantium. Montesquieu and Voltaire had created a vision of political corruption and imbecility, religious authoritarianism and obscurantism, the antithesis of France in the “Age of Reason.”¹ Grand narratives had sought to demonstrate at inordinate length the absurdity of the decaying empire, for example the twenty-two volumes by Charles Le Beau published between 1756 and 1779, later expanded by Ameilhon, with the twenty-ninth volume appearing in 1817.² And of course there was Edward Gibbon, whose work had appeared in English in six volumes (1776–88), and in a full French translation in 1813.³ Similar sentiments were to be found in Greece, where for a century up to 1821 the classical past prevailed over the Byzantine period for those seeking a model past for an emerging state.⁴ The Byzantine centuries were considered dark by the leading, if not all, Greek intellectuals of the Enlightenment. The most famous detractor was Adamantios Korais, for whom “Byzantium stood for obscurantism, monkishness, oppression, inertia.”⁵ No bridge between Ancient and Modern was sought. However, by the middle years of the nineteenth century a different mood prevailed both in Greece and in western Europe, where popular histories appeared extolling the medieval Christian empire of East Rome.

Three authors were paramount in reintroducing Byzantium, as medieval Greece, in a positive light to a popular audience: E. A. Freeman in English, Ferdinand Gregorovius in German and Gustave Schlumberger in French.⁶ None of our three was entirely an academic, and only one held a university post for some of his active career. Rather, each was a writer and traveller, antiquarian and collector, journalist and public intellectual, demagogue and historian. Each was passionately a philhellene, and each confronted an increasingly professional academy. All were concerned at times, although not all equally, with national and nationalist politics, and also international politics, including the “Eastern Question,” namely how to deal with and benefit from the disintegration of the Ottoman empire.

E. A. FREEMAN

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92) is best known for his monumental History of the Norman Conquest of England.⁷ However, his mature passion was “universal history” and his gaze was frequently turned on classical Greece, on Italy and the legacy of Rome; on the Germanic “Holy Roman Empire” and Byzantium, the Empire of the New Rome; and latterly on the presumptive heir of New Rome, Modern Greece, and its Slavic neighbours.⁸ Freeman, whose papers are preserved in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, was a pioneer of Byzantine history, and was among the leading British commentators on the “Eastern Question.”⁹

Throughout his life Freeman wrote for an educated public, meaning those educated like himself in the nation’s ancient universities. His pieces appeared most frequently in the Saturday Review from 1856 to 1876, and from 1865 in both the Fortnightly Review and the British Quarterly Review.¹⁰ He wrote outside the academic milieu, having lost his Oxford fellowship upon marrying in 1847, and from 1856 he began to travel abroad, returning to write up his experiences at Somerleaze, his home near Wells in Somerset from 1860. Freeman’s attention was drawn early to the Byzantine empire, largely as a response to the work of George Finlay, with whom he developed a correspondence and then a lasting friendship.¹¹ In a lengthy review of Finlay’s four published volumes of 1844, 1851 and 1854, Freeman condemns those who write with ignorance and prejudice about what they call the “Lower Empire,” and considers this “the more inexcusable … since the publication of this great work.”¹² Freeman relied heavily on Finlay for first-hand information on affairs in Greece and south-eastern Europe. For example, in a letter to Finlay dated September 1864 he observed: “I should much like to know something of what has really happened in ‘Moldovlachia’. I don’t believe a soul in England understands a word about anything of the kind, except Lord Strangford, who is first in England.”¹³

Freeman’s three abiding interests under the rubric of “universal history” were: medieval history, primarily that of England; contemporary racial theories; and current affairs, notably the “Eastern Question,” but also Irish “Home Rule.” Although the study of Byzantium would appear to fit most easily into the first of these categories, Freeman considered it essential to all three. The first category, the political history of the medieval Byzantine empire, is most easily dispensed with. Freeman proceeded to develop his ideas, already sketched in 1855 in the review of Finlay’s volumes, with a paper on the “Roman Empire in the East” in 1873, and a second paper published in 1876.¹⁴ These two pieces were pasted together and thoroughly revised for the composite essay entitled “The Byzantine Empire,” published in his 1879 collection of Historical Essays.¹⁵ A thorough understanding of the political and institutional history of the Byzantine empire was, Freeman held, essential to the understanding of European historical development. Freeman was ever in search of historical coherence and continuity through political institutions, and Byzantium was the political and institutional heir of Rome. In his Outlines of History, “The Roman Empire in the East,” gives way to chapters on the medieval and modern histories of the Great Powers: France, Russia, Germany and Italy. England, of course, he treated elsewhere at extraordinary length. Freeman’s lectures to the Royal Institution early in 1873 were devoted to Comparative Politics, or more particularly to demonstrating that “Greeks, Italians and Teutons,” among the last of which he numbered the English, “have a large common stock of institutions.”

Modern Greece was also an heir of the ancients, of course, although of a different order to the Teutons. In his Rede Lecture, The Unity of History, Freeman acknowledged the peculiarly Hellenic character of Christianity. However, he generally discounted religion as a means to understand historical societies, and saw this as the cardinal flaw in recent works by Foustel de Coulanges. Instead, he wished to highlight a difference between societies which were free to develop by assimilation, such as England and France, and those held in states of suspension, which might therefore be distinguished by adherence to particular religions and languages. In the language of the day he wrote not of societies, but of “races.” While it would be odd, he observed, to find various “races” living together in modern Britain or France, Thracians, Greeks and Illyrians have survived as Romanians, Greeks and Albanians, the latter two retaining their pre-Roman languages. Add to this the various Slavs, who had equally resisted assimilation by the Turks, “the Servian” being the purest, as the Bulgarians assimilated their “Finnish overlords,” and the Russians took the name of their Scandinavian lords, and one had a mosaic unseen in the West. The Ottoman Turks he held responsible for this unnatural condition of the peoples of south-eastern Europe.¹⁶

Freeman was throughout his life a pious Christian, and this certainly informed his distaste for Muslims, to whom he referred mockingly as infidels. His sensibilities were offended by Ottoman political calculation, which permitted acts of great cruelty in suppressing popular unrest, and by which he identified an absence of morality within Islam.¹⁷ But it is clear that Freeman’s motivating creed was not religious intolerance, but rather, as A. Momigliano showed quite devastatingly, racism. Freeman embraced contemporary racial theories, espousing a theory of universal history which placed at the fore the Aryan race.¹⁸ He loathed the Turks as inferior to the Aryan race which had led European society in its “three most illustrious branches of the common stock – the Greek, Roman and Teuton … who went before our own race in holding first place among the nations on the earth.”¹⁹ Of course, such sentiments were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Britain, and sat not at all uncomfortably with Freeman’s liberalism.

Freeman’s preferred solution to the “Eastern Question” was the formation of a Balkan federation. He addressed numerous public meetings, including a gathering in St James’s Hall, London, on 9 December 1876, to demand British support for Russian campaigns. The final speaker to take the rostrum that evening was Gladstone. In writing shortly afterwards, on 24 December, to Edith Thompson, his regular correspondent and sometime research assistant, Freeman noted “I have sent you my Manchester speech; of the full report of the Conference they have sent me only one; so you may spend a shilling in buying what Gladstone and I really said. How the Jews, Turks and Tories do lie!”²⁰ Besides his public speeches, Freeman wrote copiously both privately and publicly on these matters. According to Stephens, “[Freeman’s] letters … show how deeply he was absorbed by the troubles of southeastern Europe, and how hard he worked in the cause which he believed to be that of humanity and justice … He wrote sometimes as many as seventeen or eighteen letters a day in addition to his other work.” Stephens also lists fourteen pertinent articles that Freeman published between December 1875 and May 1882, the greatest number in the Contemporary Review.²¹ His fullest, but far from final, disquisition was his book The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877), which at over 300 pages was a rather rapid expansion of his sixty-one-page pamphlet for the “Popular Library for the People,” entitled The Turks in Europe (1877). This is inscribed with his new title, Knight Commander of the Greek Order of the Saviour and of the Servian Order of Takova. The former honour had been bestowed with, apparently, no prior announcement or ceremony, in the early months of 1875. On 19 July 1875 he wrote to Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis, in Athens, to express his surprise, pleasure and gratitude, “that the highest honour I have ever received from any quarter should come from Greece.” At this time he had still never visited Greece, but warned Trikoupis that he would now do his very best to remedy that, which he did in 1877.²² According to Bryce, while travelling in Greece in 1877, although “French was the only [foreign] language he could speak with ease … [Freeman] made some vigorous speeches to the people in their own tongue.”²³ Subsequently, in 1878, he shared at length his “First impressions of Athens” with the readers of the International Review.²⁴

Freeman’s political and ideological support for those throwing off the “Ottoman yoke” was, therefore, only latterly informed by personal experience. His ability to travel was curtailed when Gladstone, who in April 1880 had become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, appointed him in 1884 to the Regius Chair in Modern History at Oxford. Freeman would later complain heartily of his return to Oxford, where dining at Oriel College and the need to lecture to ever diminishing crowds of students undermined his productivity. In this first year he delivered his six lectures on “The Chief Periods of European History,” drawing heavily on his earlier outlines and surveys, as well as recent public lectures.²⁵ His thought at the time was taken up with close studies of Gregory of Tours, Paul the Deacon and “the history of the teutonic nations in Gaul.”²⁶ Freeman never came, therefore, to offer a full outline history of Greece, ancient to modern, or indeed a single volume devoted to the Byzantine empire.²⁷ Perhaps he was satisfied, as he had been at the outset of his Byzantine studies, that Finlay had said it all as well as he might, but that seems unlikely. It is more likely that he saw his contributions outstripped by those of a new generation of scholars, foremost among whom was J. B. Bury, fellow and tutor of Trinity College, Dublin.

Bury’s first study of Byzantium appeared in 1889.²⁸ Its preface ended with the observation: “Speaking of Mr Freeman, I am impelled to add that his brilliant and stimulating essays first taught me in all its bearings the truth that the Roman Empire is the key to European history.” However, Bury’s work was of a quite different nature to Freeman’s, and beside his long narratives in political history, he was a philologist and editor of Greek texts.²⁹ Notably, Bury was a devoted practitioner of the new German methods: “Erudition has now been supplemented by scientific methods, and we owe the change to Germany. Among those who brought it about, the names of Niebuhr and Ranke are pre-eminent.”³⁰ He is clear that “history is not a branch of literature,” and for that reason, “the reputation of [Theodor] Mommsen as man of letters depends on his Roman History; but his greatness as a historian is to be sought … in the Corpus and the Staatsrecht and the Chronicles.” We shall turn to these shortly.

Bury, the scientist, remained studiously neutral on modern Balkan politics. He wrote not of the medieval Greek empire, nor often of the Byzantine, preferring the eastern Roman empire. He was critical of the “production of some crude uncritical histories, written with national prejudice and political purpose.”³¹ Bury was without doubt the foremost Byzantinist of his generation writing in English, and certainly was not the intellectual heir of Freeman, despite coming to Byzantium through Freeman’s writings, and despite praising Freeman in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge as the “great Oxford historian … [to whom] we owe it that the Unity of History is now a commonplace in Britain.”³² Bury, who died in 1927, earned the respect of the increasingly professional academicians on the continent. The first paper delivered at the third congress in Athens, in 1930, was a eulogy in Greek, by one Eug. Darkó, “Discours in Memoriam J. B. Bury.”³³

FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS

Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–91) wrote more extensively on medieval Greece than Freeman, his exact contemporary, and while his contribution was more enduring, it was surely less significant. Like Freeman, Gregorovius came to Athens via Rome, and he did so only in the last decade of his life. And just as Freeman drew inspiration from Finlay, so Gregorovius based his studies on the work of Hopf. However, whereas Hopf’s contributions “were buried in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopaedia,” Gregorovius, like Freeman, sought a general audience for this scholarship, resisting the firm shift in Prussian scholarship towards professional academic production, in Theodor Mommsen’s formulation Grosswissenschaft.³⁴

Born on 19 January 1821 at Neidenburg (now Nidzica, Poland) in East Prussia, Gregorovius was from the age of seventeen a student of theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). At the time of his graduation in 1841, realizing that theology was not his vocation, he took work as a private tutor in Neidenburg. This financed his earliest literary ventures, including his first work of fiction, the romance Werdomar and Wladislaw (1845), and of history, a biography of The Emperor Hadrian (completed in 1848, but published only in 1851, along with his drama The Death of Tiberius). Resident once again in Königsberg, he witnessed the revolution of 1848, and “entered with enthusiasm into the agitation of popular meetings and clubs.”³⁵ He demonstrated his sympathy with the Polish cause by the publication of his Die Idee des Polentums (1848), and argued throughout his life for the liberty and independence of Poland, Italy and Greece.

In 1852 Gregorovius journeyed to Italy, and he returned almost annually thereafter, keeping detailed journals between 1856 and 1877, posthumously published in two German editions and an English translation.³⁶ In addition, he completed an eight-volume History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages.³⁷ A plaque erected in 1991 at the Albergo Cesari, near the Temple of Hadrian, celebrates Gregorovius’ first lodging in the city in October 1852.³⁸ By then he had spent the better part of two months on Corsica, and a few days on Elba; naturally he wrote about it at length. His despatches to the (Augsburger) Allgemeine Zeitung,³⁹ which would form the basis of his book Corsica (1854), were read with interest by Friedrich Althaus, who tracked Gregorovius down to Rome in the spring of 1853. And with them on that first trip together was one Jacob Burckhardt. In the following year, 1854, Gregorovius determined to write the history of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages, and to that task he devoted himself for the next two decades. He conceived of this project as the fulfilment of Gibbon’s original intention, but with the additional goal of highlighting the connection between the Germans and Rome, as he stressed in the first pages of the first published volume.⁴⁰

Gregorovius complained that he received no academic recognition for this grand project in Germany. His work ran against the stream that is best illustrated in the illustrious career of Theodor Mommsen. Gregorovius’ history of medieval Rome was widely contrasted with the three-volume history of republican Rome written by the youthful Mommsen. Erudite, replete with provocative new hypotheses and Niebuhrian source criticism, but above all politically engaged, Mommsen’s history was the achievement of a singular individual. Gregorovius remarked on it and its author, writing in his Roman journal for March 1862: “Theodor Mommsen is here. His appearance is a curious mixture of youthfulness and pedagogic conscientiousness. This in great part explains his work, which is distinguished by critical, destructive acumen, but which is rather a pamphlet than a history.”⁴¹ And yet in the decades after the publication of his “pamphlet,” Mommsen presided over the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a project of immense scope that might only be produced by a team of dedicated philologists and epigraphers, and later also edited those volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica devoted to the age of the Völkerwanderung. Mommsen supervised by example, editing much of the material himself, even as he continued to produce independent works of great erudition and little popular appeal, notably his multi-volume study of Roman law (Staatsrecht).⁴² In 1890 Mommsen would, in response to the great historian of the early Church, Adolf Harnack, bemoan the fact that never again would a single scholar master the sum of classical knowledge. Germany had, he reflected, entered the age of Grosswissenschaft, which like Grossindustrie required capital input. Young academicians now aspired to lead research teams, spending that capital on major undertakings, following the course of his own career.⁴³ State money was directed to support the enterprises of the academy, and even Bismarck could not derail Kaiser Wilhelm’s pet projects, notably the excavations at Olympia, on which the Kaiser opined: “Every one of us remembers having heard about the Olympic Games in his youth … should we not complete so great an undertaking [as the excavations] hardly half finished, because of money?! That would be unworthy of Prussia.”⁴⁴

It was Grosswissenschaft that Gregorovius resisted, although he had no private fortune on which to draw, so lived on the income from his writings.⁴⁵ From 1860 to 1862 he received from the Prussian government an annual subvention towards the History of 400 Thalers, and this appears to have been renewed on a few occasions.⁴⁶ In 1862–3 King Maximilian II of Bavaria sought to derive some benefit by inviting Gregorovius to spend some months each year in Munich. The invitation was declined, but the stipend and invitation together suggest the historian was held in some esteem in the German lands, if not by the German academy.⁴⁷ This was surely due to the broad popular appeal of his writings. In the words of a sympathetic reviewer, Sigmund Münz: “[Gregorovius’] work is less to be regarded as a consecutive whole than as a succession of historical paintings instinct with descriptive power, and a series of portraits of popes, heroes and women. They are drawn with vigour and enthusiasm by a writer who is at home in the historical relations between popes and emperors, but whose sympathies are specially enlisted in the scenic effects of history, and who cares little for the more ordinary aspects of life, its principles of administration and of domestic economy.”⁴⁸ For that reason, Gregorovius’ volumes appealed broadly and, as they appeared, each was sufficiently popular to allow him to continue to write full-time. His contributions to the Allgemeine Zeitung, frequent earlier in his career, were now curtailed until February 1867, when he despatched an essay on “The Empire, Rome and Germany,” inspired by Bryce’s The Holy Roman Empire.⁴⁹

On 28 March 1870, Gregorovius, a Protestant, was for the first time denied access to materials in the Vatican Library. Complaining of Catholic “fanaticism,” he removed himself to Munich in July, and it was from there that Gregorovius followed the events of the Franco-Prussian War, in which his brother Colonel Julius Gregorovius was engaged, notably in the siege of Metz (in which action he won the Iron Cross).⁵⁰ Gregorovius did not know, of course, and had little reason to care that Gustave Schlumberger, a Frenchman and native of Alsace, had as a response to the siege of Metz enrolled in the “eleventh international ambulance of the Red Cross,” which left on 4 September for the front at Sedan.⁵¹ Aged almost fifty, Gregorovius’ own response was to issue a series of articles, published in the Allgemeine Zeitung and elsewhere: “Europe and the Declaration of War,” “Nemesis,” “Italy and the German Nation,” “France’s Guilt and Punishment,” “Alsace and Lorraine Once More,” “Pavia and Sedan,” “Paris and Rome.”⁵² His reaction to the French capitulation at Sedan and the bombardment and siege of Strasbourg, which damaged the cathedral and also the city’s collections of manuscripts and antiquities, was to send a poem to the Allgemeine Zeitung.⁵³

Gregorovius was contemptuous of Napoleon III, whose adventures in Italy ostensibly to defend the papal state he had witnessed in 1859.⁵⁴ The defeat of Napoleon III at Sedan and the consequent collapse of the Second Empire exposed the papal state, without a protector, to the encroachment of the Italian army, and in October 1870 Rome and Latium were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Following two decades of good relations with Italian society, especially with those who administered both Church and municipal archives, Gregorovius confronted the problems associated with Italian unification and the designation of Rome as the new capital. It was a cause for which he had long been a passionate advocate, but its passage made him Rome’s secular historian, a favourite of the municipality which offered to fund an Italian version of his magnum opus. In March 1876 a still greater honour was bestowed upon him: honorary citizenship. But meanwhile Gregorovius’ standing with the Catholic Church had deteriorated. In 1874 his History of the City of Rome was placed on the Index, the list of works banned by the papacy. He recorded the incident grimly in his journals, considering it a barb aimed at Bismarck rather than himself, and expressing relief that the ban had not come after the publication of the first volume. Now, with the work complete, the pope had provided an excellent advertisement.⁵⁵ With the principal libraries of Rome now barred to him, Gregorovius returned to Germany to settle in Munich, being the city nearest Italy. In 1865, he had become a member of the Bavarian Academy. It was from there that in the last decade of his life he turned his attention to Greece.

“Athens and Rome,” he wrote, “are inseparably connected, they are joined to each other like spirit and will, like thoughts and action.”⁵⁶ Following an extended trip to Greece in 1880, he penned a series of shorter studies, published in 1881 in the journal Unsere Zeit and the Sitzungsberichte der Münchner Akademie.⁵⁷ In the following year he produced Athenaïs, Geschichte einer byzantinischen Kaiserin,⁵⁸ a companion volume of sorts to his earlier history of the life of Lucrezia Borgia. The empress Athenaïs, wife of Theodosius II, had lived in Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem, allowing Gregorovius to roam widely across the late Roman world. Following his second trip to Athens in 1882, he began work on the companion volume to this Roman history, a History of the City of Athens in the Middle Ages. This was not, however, composed in situ from close study in local archives, for the author spent more time in the libraries of Venice, Naples and Palermo than in Athens itself, and he now wrote mostly at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The journals he kept for these last years have not survived, perhaps culled in the autumn of 1889, when Gregorovius destroyed many of his papers, but revised his Roman diaries with a view to their publication.⁵⁹

Gregorovius’ conception of medieval Athens was clearly influenced by contemporary attempts to place that city at the heart of a medieval Hellenic empire. A Romantic philhellene, he began his work with a terse dismissal of Fallmerayer’s thesis, within an astute overview of contemporary scholarship.⁶⁰ While he followed Fallmerayer in asserting, quite incorrectly, that Athens had been vacated by its population, which retired to Salamis for a period, he dismissed his claim that “the national gods of the Greeks were exterminated by Alaric,” refuting the notion that the Goths had destroyed the temple at Eleusis and reassigning blame to Theodosius.⁶¹ Gregorovius ended his History of Athens with the poetic and starkly Romantic observation that Constantinople still threatens to darken the “newly risen star of Athens … [For] if after the expulsion of the Ottomans from the Bosphorus the Greek cross flies once again over Hagia Sophia, and a new Hellenic Kulturreich is established with Byzantium at its heart, then the Lebensgeister of Greece will be drawn to it with magnetic attraction.”⁶² But this was, of course, a good thing. The boundaries of the Kingdom of Greece were drawn too narrowly, he felt, reflecting the views of Greek national historians after Paparrigopoulos.

Just months before his death on 1 May 1891, Gregorovius delivered his only address before the Bavarian Academy. His subject was “The Great Monarchies, or the Empires of the World in History,” which he addressed within the rubric of “universal history.” Embracing views espoused by Freeman, he extolled the virtues and liberties of the Saxon peoples, the Germans and English. Althaus would recall the paper as “a pamphlet, insignificant in compass, but in contents and style a great achievement, in which as historian and philosopher he erected a noble monument to himself.” Strikingly, Althaus chose to end his eulogy on Gregorovius with a quotation from Freeman, observing that:

As he remained free from the pedantry and exclusiveness of his craft, as in himself he united the character of the scholar and the man of the world, so his historical studies offered no obstruction to the keenest sympathy with the great movements of time. In this sense history was to him, as Freeman puts it, “the politics of the past, politics the history of the present.”⁶³

It may be that Althaus, who had lived in London since 1854, had in mind Freeman’s (anonymous) long, largely narrative and broadly positive review of The History of Athens in the Middle Ages, which appeared in the Quarterly Review of July 1891.⁶⁴ The work was also reviewed favourably by Karl Krumbacher. In 1892, the year after Gregorovius’ death, Krumbacher was appointed to the newly established chair in Byzantinistik at Munich. He promptly set up the Institute for Byzantine Studies,⁶⁵ and founded the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the first and still the premier journal of professional Byzantine studies. By his efforts, Byzantinistik in Germany took the path cleared by Mommsen, against which Gregorovius had railed.

Gregorovius’ works remained popular after his death. Lucrezia Borgia had, upon its appearance in March 1874, sold out its first German edition in two months, and was swiftly reprinted and translated into French and Italian.⁶⁶ It continued to be reprinted years after his death and can today be purchased still in countless editions in several languages. Translations into English of his work were longer in coming, as most were produced by the indefatigable Mrs G. W. (Annie) Hamilton.⁶⁷ An English translation of The Emperor Hadrian, by Mary E. Robinson (1898), offered Ronald Burrows the opportunity to reflect on Gregorovius’ oeuvre: “Gregorovius had not the strength or grip to write a great book. He never faced fair and square the comparative value of his sources, and his judgments lack weight; yet he is throughout honest and unprejudiced, and has the one cardinal merit of giving all his references.”⁶⁸ R. W. Seton-Watson disagreed, in his 1903 translation of Gregorovius’ Tombs of the Popes. By his estimation Gregorovius was “a romanticist and idealist among historians, he offers a striking contrast to the historian of ancient Rome, so terrible in his unsparing realism … His temperament was as much that of the poet and artist as the historian … [he was] the natural enemy of those stern pedants who frown upon an attractive style, and who, thanks to their foolish renunciation, have bequeathed so many musty volumes to the top shelves of posterity.”⁶⁹

GUSTAVE SCHLUMBERGER

Whereas both Freeman and Gregorovius died even as Bury and Krumbacher were reshaping Byzantine studies in Britain and Germany, Gustave Schlumberger lived through the period of transition in France. His publications, like theirs, were both academic and popular, but where Freeman is best remembered for his works on Norman history and Gregorovius for his study of medieval Rome, Schlumberger’s enduring reputation rests on his grand narratives devoted to the middle Byzantine empire. His interpretations had broad appeal, and were not sufficiently rigorous in the eyes of many. Still he retained the respect and friendship of many serious academicians in Paris, some of whom enjoyed his patronage. He was universally recognized for his excellence as an interpreter and publisher of coins and seals.

Schlumberger was born in 1844 at Guebwiller, Alsace, into a rich industrial family. He studied medicine in Paris, from 1863, and in 1870 served as a doctor in the Franco-Prussian War.⁷⁰ He earned a doctorate in medicine, in 1872 publishing his dissertation as Documents pour servir à l’étude de l’érysipèle du pharynx et des voies respiratoires.⁷¹ Thereafter, he turned to his great passion: numismatics. Described by Charles Diehl as a “collectionneur heureux et passionné,” Schlumberger’s first major work in the field was a study of German bracteates of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁷² He also collected and published coins and seals of the Crusader principalities, and the first fruits of his work were incorporated in 1877 into his Les principautés franques. In 1878, he published the two volumes of La numismatique de l’orient latin, with a supplement and alphabetical index following in 1882.

A member of the Société française de numismatique et d’archéologie (founded in 1865), in 1883 Schlumberger breathed life into its moribund publication, Revue numismatique, third series, along with Anatole de Barthélemy and Ernest Babelon, fellow members of the “Institut.” On 12 December 1884, Schlumberger was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, of which he served as president in 1896, noting how absorbing was the task of organizing and chairing so many prize committees.⁷³ He continued throughout his life to publish articles on coins, and also on seals which he collected as fervently. In 1916 an edition of the 690 French seals and signet rings owned by Schlumberger and his close friend Adrien Blanchet was published.⁷⁴ By then Schlumberger had abandoned his professed intention to produce a composite Sigillographie de l’orient latin. Instead, he had entrusted this task to Ferdinand Chalandon (d. 1921), and it was finally edited, annotated and published by Blanchet in 1943. Schlumberger was unable to devote further time to the project because, as Blanchet observed, he was by then absorbed with “la chère Byzance, trop couverte de sang et d’horreurs, mais si profondément imprégnée de gloire et de faste.”⁷⁵

Schlumberger became “intoxicated” by Byzantium during his first trip to Greece and Turkey in 1875.⁷⁶ He was perhaps introduced to the empire’s sigillographic remains by (the younger) A. D. Mordtmann (1837–1912) in 1875, and on that and a subsequent trip to Istanbul in 1879 he collected the vast majority of his Byzantine seals, purchased from merchants in the bazaars. It was in Mordtmann’s company that his passion for Byzantine seals was nurtured during a period of six months in 1879 that he spent in Istanbul.⁷⁷ Mordtmann, who had published the first Byzantine seals in 1872, and Schlumberger were together creators of the field of Byzantine sigillography, but it was the catalogue based on Schlumberger’s private collection Sigillographie de l’empire byzantin (1884) that is its first monument. The tome ran to more than 750 pages, containing 1,100 figures, and drew from the dozen articles he had devoted to Byzantine seals between 1877 and 1883 (together only onequarter of the almost fifty publications he produced in those seven years). He continued to publish additional seals as he purchased them or came across them in private collections, from 1889, as irregular bulletins entitled simply “Sceaux byzantins inédits,” of which there were six (1889, 1891, 1894, 1900, 1905, 1916). In 1911, he published a boulloterion, the pincer-like instrument that was used to strike the lead seal around strings attached to both ends of a document, which were threaded through the seal’s central channel.⁷⁸

Following the eloquent lead of Rambaud, whose study of the age of Constantine Porphyrogennetos won universal praise, Schlumberger devoted himself to the tenth century. Unlike Rambaud, who had mastered Greek, Latin and Russian, Schlumberger had studied medicine, not philology. By Grégoire’s estimation, this rendered him inadequate properly to translate Latin and Greek, beyond the inscriptions on seals and coins, and to decipher monograms.⁷⁹ Certainly, Schlumberger was not an editor of texts, and he relied for his information on Slavic literature on esteemed correspondents, including Uspenskii and Vasilevskii, and for Arabic on Sauvair and Schefer (to whom Un empereur was dedicated as “evidence of deep affection”). But it is hard to contemplate his producing such lengthy narratives based principally on sources that existed only in the Paris and Bonn corpora or PG – that is, as Greek editions with Latin translations – unless he was a competent translator from Greek and Latin. Rather, Grégoire’s complaint is symptomatic of the broader criticism, that Schlumberger resisted the move in Byzantine studies, as in classical studies, to source criticism and the publication of texts. Schlumberger felt that history was best delivered in energetic prose and with lavish illustrations, mainly with line drawings and etchings. He supplied lists of these “gravures,” although rarely with adequate attributions.⁸⁰

Schlumberger’s first monograph of Byzantine history, devoted to the emperor Nikephoros Phokas, appeared in 1890. It ran to 781 pages, and was followed by three equally large volumes published in 1895, 1900 and 1906 as a trilogy under the title L’épopée byzantine, “The Byzantine Epic.” However, we learn from Schlumberger’s mémoires that this title was imposed upon him by his publisher, Hachette, much to his regret, for it gave his readership the impression that his previous work on the emperor Nikephoros Phokas was not part of the series.⁸¹ His tetralogy embraces the reigns of Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes and Basil II, ending with the last of the Macedonian dynasty, the sisters Zoe and Theodora.

An early reviewer observed of Schlumberger’s first historical volume that it was “with the exception of Rambaud’s Constantin Porphyrogénète, the most substantial monograph devoted to a Greek emperor published to date,” written not in a dry fashion, as are so many such works, but with a passion that impassions the reader. The reviewer, S. Reinach, professed himself “almost astonished” that one might have found so many attractive details in a mere ten years of history.⁸² The book was, in fact, one-third longer than Rambaud’s study of the tenth century,⁸³ thanks to the 240 line drawings, four colour lithographs and three maps. It was not, however, in Reinach’s estimation, a work to satisfy scholars, as it lacked adequate critical apparatus, and perhaps evidence of scholarly competence. There were no footnotes or specific references to editions of texts, but rather a list of texts was appended to the work. Schlumberger’s handling of sources showed no evidence of Quellenkritik, for example where he frequently preferred Leo the Deacon to other sources, providing no explanation nor comparanda. Damningly, Reinach observed, if one cites “Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Paris, 1857–66,” then why not also “Bibliothèque nationale, passim”?⁸⁴ Most egregiously, where Schlumberger found gaps in his source base, he might intervene “in the manner of Walter Scott or Dumas.” Reinach condemns this attempt to embellish history as unacceptable, striving not to show “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” but rather using plausible inference to suggest what might have happened. Even as Reinach concludes that “despite its faults, which are not venial, [the book is] agreeable to read,” he recommends that those who might wish to follow Schlumberger’s example do not write the biography of an emperor, but rather turn to the study of sources and institutions.

In short, the antiquarian collector and writer, who wished to share his passion for the lost cultures of the eastern Mediterranean with the broadest audience, had run into the rigour of late nineteenth-century philology and scientific history. Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) was a formidable classical philologist, author of the Manuel de philologie classique (1880, 1883) and Grammaire latine (1886).⁸⁵ Hence, one might understand this fierce criticism of Schlumberger’s perceived shortcomings. However, there was certainly some personal animosity involved, although on that count Schlumberger is far from forthcoming. He reveals in his memoir that he first met Reinach in 1885, when the latter had returned from a long sojourn at the French School at Athens. Schlumberger was “seduced by [Reinach’s] natural charm and immense erudition,” and it was at Reinach’s advice that he published the very book Reinach reviewed. Reinach’s character later “changed greatly, he became sour. It seemed to me also that wanting to speak about everything, on any matter, he sometimes made serious errors.”⁸⁶ Here Schlumberger appears to allude to the Dreyfus Affair, which heralded a recrudescence of anti-Semitism in France, although casual anti-Semitism was far from unusual in Schlumberger’s social milieu before 1894.⁸⁷ Reinach was a leading figure and intellectual of the Franco-Jewish establishment, founder in 1880 of the Société des études juives, and vice president of the most important Jewish organization of the time, the Alliance israélite universelle. Schlumberger and Reinach would take opposite sides in the Dreyfus Affair, the latter being a founding member with his brothers of the Comité de défense contre l’antisémitisme.

Reinach was, in 1890, employed at the National Museum of Antiquities at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.⁸⁸ Schlumberger considered Alexandre Bertrand (d. 1902), the founder and director from 1867 of that institution, to be “un savant sans charme, d’un charactère peu agréable.”⁸⁹ Perhaps this, then, was the first stage in their estrangement, before 1894. In any event, Schlumberger was not deterred by Reinach’s stinging criticism. Instead, when compiling his Souvenirs, published posthumously, he considered Un empereur to be his most important book, and the following years to be the apogee of his career.⁹⁰ In contrast to Reinach’s judgement, Schlumberger’s contribution to Byzantine studies in the later nineteenth century is generously summarized by Charles Diehl. In 1899, Diehl became the first holder of the new chair in Byzantine history established at the Sorbonne. Casting his eye over the previous century of Byzantine studies in France, he highlighted the shift that took place in 1870 with the publication of Rambaud’s Constantin Porphyrogénète, and regretted that Rambaud had turned his attention elsewhere, so that “none devoted himself with perseverance to the serious and thorough study of Byzantium,” until the Latin Orient once again gave France a Byzantinist.⁹¹ Diehl treats Schlumberger’s introduction of Byzantine sigillography as his most profound achievement, but does not disparage the scholarship in his four “beaux livres” of grand narrative (1890, 1896, 1900, 1905). “Perhaps one might find that four large volumes each of nearly 800 pages is enough for a century (959–1057),” but it is to the merit of these “savants livres” that although only an erudite could compose them, they are accessible to laymen.⁹² At that time, Schlumberger was sponsoring a grand project being undertaken by Diehl and G. Millet: a series of illustrated monographs entitled Les monuments de l’art byzantin.

Following his Byzantine tetralogy, commenced in 1884 and completed in 1905, Schlumberger allowed his attention briefly to stray to other fields. He never lost interest in the Crusader states, dashing off a 300-page monograph on Amaury, king of Jerusalem, in 1906. But he also turned to nineteenth-century history, with two volumes in 1908 under the title Soldats de Napoléon (one an edition of letters, the other a journal), and in 1910 an edition of Mémoires du Commandant Persat, 1806 à 1844. From 1910 Schlumberger also devoted more time to his role as public intellectual, becoming a regular contributor to newspapers, publishing around sixty articles over thirteen years. He contributed forty-three articles to the Journal des débats, between November 1910 and August 1923, and from January 1911 to July 1920 another sixteen articles to Le Gaulois.⁹³ Many of these were collected into his two edited volumes Récits de Byzance et des Croisades, in 1916 and 1922. Although not on the scale of Freeman, his contributions were timely and occasionally political. Schlumberger followed Balkan politics closely, and was vehemently pro-Greek, as his letters exchanged with the children’s writer Penelope Delta reveal.⁹⁴

One of Schlumberger’s pieces for Le Gaulois, published as “L’empereur Basile et le roi Constantine à Athènes” in column one on page one, on 4 October 1913, draws a direct comparison between Basil II’s “terrible war of forty-three years against these same Bulgars today so recently vanquished by the Greeks.” He began the piece thus:

When, several weeks ago, the victorious king of Greece Constantine, arriving from Salonika, disembarked at Phaleros with great pomp and amidst indescribable popular enthusiasm, the correspondents of French newspapers noticed, among the frenetic acclamations and greetings, the strange epithet “Voulgarokotonos,” that is to say “Slayer of the Bulgars.” “Long live the liberator king! The victor king! The Bulgar-slayer!,” cried the thousands of spectators at every opportunity, as the king passed among them visibly moved. They had rushed from Athens and all the cities of the Peloponnese and Attika to be present at this second modern resurrection of the Hellenic nation.⁹⁵

Schlumberger proceeded to explain the strange epithet, and why it should be employed by the Greeks of their new king, Constantine, victorious at the end of the Second Balkan War. He did not observe that this was no spontaneous outburst of Byzantine feeling, but an orchestrated acclamation, thus in true Byzantine style, of the king who claimed to be the successor to the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI. After the assassination of his father, posters were distributed of the new king wearing the uniform he had sported as crown prince and commander-in-chief of the Greek army, above the caption: “The greatest of the Constantines, the Bulgar-slayer, [Constantine] XII.”⁹⁶

Many of Schlumberger’s contributions to newspapers were not, however, so much political as topical. For example, he begins and ends an article dated 1 April 1918 with references to the use of flaming liquids and gases in the “terrible war of today,” in order to offer an exposition on “Greek fire.”⁹⁷ The same newspaper reported communiqués relating to the “New [1918] Battle of the Somme” (Operation Michael). Similarly, he began his essay of 17 January 1920 with the observation that while all details relating to military organization are interesting at a time of world war, the particulars with which he will now deal have a “saisissante actualité,” alluding to the Greek invasion of Asia Minor, but passed no further judgement.⁹⁸

His last contribution to Le Gaulois du dimanche of 31 July 1920, which appeared in the literary supplement, is an account of Nikephoros Phokas’ triumphal entry into Constantinople in 961.⁹⁹ This article and its predecessors were contributions to, and advanced publicity for, his planned second edition of L’épopée byzantine. A second edition of the first volume, Un empereur byzantin au dixième siècle, did appear in 1923,¹⁰⁰ but progress on the larger project was slowed and then halted by progressive blindness.¹⁰¹

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday on 17 October 1924, Schlumberger was honoured with a two-volume festschrift, listing 173 published works by the honorand and containing fifty-seven papers by scholars from France (many, including Bréhier, Diehl, Ebersolt, Rénauld and Millet), Belgium (Cumont, Delehaye and Grégoire), the USA (Porter), Italy (Orsi and Jerphanion), Romania (Iorga), Russia (Kondakov) and England (Bury and W. Buckler).¹⁰² The subject matter was as broad as Schlumberger’s tastes, embracing history and archaeology, numismatics and sigillography of Byzantium and the Latin East, but also of France (plus a section on philology, to suit the interests of some contributors more than the recipient). In the same year, 1924, the first international congress of Byzantine studies was held in Bucharest: Byzantinistik had emerged as a serious international academic enterprise.¹⁰³

Now almost entirely blind, the aged Schlumberger did not attend the Bucharest congress, nor the second congress in Belgrade held in 1927, where in the opening address the president of the organizing committee, J. Radonic, praised the giants of French Byzantinology, Rambaud, Diehl and Millet, alongside Bury and Krumbacher, Vasilievskii and Uspenskii.¹⁰⁴ There was no praise for Schlumberger, nor for Freeman nor Gregorovius. By the time of the third congress, in Athens just three years later, Schlumberger had died. Upon Schlumberger’s death in 1929, his papers and his extensive library were bequeathed to the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France. These are available only to members of the five académies or qualified readers on their recommendation.¹⁰⁵ It is perhaps ironic, not only for the fact that it increased the list of prize committees for the president to chair, that the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres established the prix Gustave Schlumberger for Byzantine history, not numismatics or sigillography. This prize is still awarded, but to those who might better be considered the heirs of Diehl, Krumbacher and Bury than of Freeman, Gregorovius and Schlumberger.

CONCLUSION

Freeman, Gregorovius and Schlumberger were all politically engaged, although to different degrees, and keen observers of the political upheavals of the nineteenth century, driven by “the spirit of resurgent nationality.”¹⁰⁶ They were all also, to different degrees, victims of a contemporaneous phenomenon, namely the transformation of history into a scientific positivism. Bury, in 1903, observed that the transformation was not yet complete, but it was no longer possible for one to ignore source criticism, nor to fill gaps in the historical record creatively. The transformation that began with philologists rendered the classical world hostile territory to those who wished to paint on a broad canvas or to render the past poetically. It was equally problematic for those concerned with universal history or in relating the past to modern politics. Byzantium, therefore was a refuge. It was sufficiently obscure to allow each historian to pursue his own agenda.

Although only Schlumberger can be said to have devoted himself to Byzantine history such that he is remembered principally as a historian of the empire, Gregorovius considered it a suitable extension of his passion for medieval Rome, and Freeman as a missing link without which one could not comprehend the modern world nor approach universal history. None was willing or able to engage with the Byzantine World in the terms set out by a new cadre of scholars armed with critical methods, the practitioners of, in Mommsen’s apt phrase, Grosswissenschaft. Hence, the pioneers of popular Byzantine studies were also resisters. For them Byzantium was, in the words of Lionel Gossman, a refuge for “the private scholar, whose work is deeply and personally motivated, a vocation rather than a profession.” They rejected, in their own ways but consistently, modern critical approaches to texts and to the accumulation of facts, viewing “bookishness and pedantic erudition as barriers to the living reality of the past.”¹⁰⁷ Their tradition lived on for much of the twentieth century in the work of Steven Runciman, who was, ironically, the first and only student of Bury.

NOTES

1 Diehl 1905: 22; Angelov 2003, offers a fascinating introduction to “Byzantinism.”

2 An abridged version for schoolchildren by Caillot appeared in 1819, before the final volumes of the continuation. Le Beau, his work and its reception have received far less attention than one would hope. However, see Zaimova 2002.

3 There is now copious literature devoted to Gibbon and his views of Byzantium. One might usefully start with McKitterick and Quinault 1997. More generally on “decadence” see Vance 2005.

4 Politis 1998.

5 Mango 1965: 37. One must not regard Korais as representative. See Christodoulou in this volume.

6 Space dictates that these sketches are overly brief, and I intend to say more elsewhere. For now, on Freeman at greater length, see Stephenson 2007.

7 On Freeman’s life see at greatest length and eulogistically Stephens 1895. The most expansive obituary of Freeman is a “warts and all” piece by James [Viscount] Bryce 1892.

8 It is striking that Freeman features not at all in an excellent recent collection devoted to British contributors to Byzantine studies, Cormack and Jeffreys 2000. The best modern analysis of the full range of Freeman’s historical writings is contained in Burrow 1981. Also useful are the published papers of a seminar convened in Pisa by Momigliano 1981. Lacking in empathy is the brief account Kenyon 1993: 159–64.

9 See McNiven 1990: 32–3, 62, for writings on the “Eastern Question” and related matters.

10 Several revised articles from the Saturday Review are collected in Freeman 1879, 1892. The Fortnightly Review (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865–1931; Horace Marshall 1931–54) was first published in May 1865.

11 See Hussey 1995: I, xv. Only one letter from Freeman to Finlay has been preserved among Finlay’s papers at the British School at Athens. There are also copies or drafts of four letters from Finlay to Freeman, and several references to Freeman and his works elsewhere. All are edited in an appendix to Stephenson 2007.

12 Freeman 1855: 344, being a review of: Finlay 1844, 1851, 1854.

13 Finlay Papers, B6 (120), p. 6; Hussey 1995: II, 820. Percival Smythe, the eighth Viscount Strangford (d. 1869) was a noted linguist and sometime attaché to Constantinople.

14 Freeman 1873.

15 Freeman 1879, 1892: 235–82.

16 For Freeman’s thoughts, see Freeman 1879, 1892: 176–234, revising ideas presented in the Contemporary Review (February 1877) and Fortnightly Review (January 1877).

17 Stephens 1895: II, 121: “Freeman brought every question to the touchstone of morals.”

18 Momigliano 1986: 240: “I chose Freeman as the case to oppose to Max Weber because he is a good example of the situation in which universal historians found themselves when they accepted power struggles as the most important feature of history and, furthermore, treated them as being brought about by the coexistence of incompatible racial groups.”

19 Freeman quoted by Momigliano 1986: 238. See also Bryce 1892: 502: “By far the strongest political interest – indeed it rose to a passion – in his later years was his hatred of the Turk.” See also Burrow 1981, and Momigliano 1981: 318–21, on Freeman’s search for the unity not of man, but of the Aryan race of man.

20 Stephens 1895: II, 144. The papers of Edith Thompson (d. 1929), including 186 letters and three postcards from Freeman, were deposited in Hull University archives in 1934. They are catalogued as DX/9, and have been examined by Capern 1997.

21 Stephens 1895: II, 124–5, lists the articles.

22 Stephens 1895: II, 92.

23 Bryce 1892: 498.

24 Freeman 1879, 1892: 278–302.

25 Freeman 1886a. On the repetition of certain ideas, here referring to a recent lecture delivered in Edinburgh, Freeman explained (pp. v–vi) “I can only say that a thought which is worth suggesting once is worth suggesting twice.”

26 See the opening paragraph of Freeman 1886b. These were subsequently published as Freeman 1888.

27 There are among Freeman’s papers at the John Ryland’s two unfinished, unpublished manuscripts entitled History of Greece (3/2/2) and Little Greek History (3/2/3), neither of which stretches beyond the Peloponnesian War. See McNiven 1990: 45.

28 Bury 1889. In 1893, Bury saw to the posthumous publication as essays of some parts of the draft of Freeman’s second volume on the History of Federal Government. See also Oman 1892, in the popular series The Story of Nations. Oman was then a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. On the next generation of British scholars of Byzantium see Cameron 2000.

29 Cameron 2000: 165–6. See also Bryer 1988, and for the USA, Barker 2002.

30 Bury 1930: 5 (pp. 3–22 being a reprint of his 1903 inaugural). See also Goldstein 1977.

31 Bury 1930: 7.

32 Bury 1930: 12.

33 Orlandos 1932: 57–61.

34 Marchand 1996; Gooch 1959: 122–50, 455–6.

35 Gregorovius 1907: xiv.

36 Gregorovius 1892, 1893; Gregorovius 1907.

37 The fullest biography is Hönig 1921, 1944, which reproduces a good number of Gregorovius’ letters verbatim. This is a rather uncritical and uneven narrative, which reaches the start of the History of Rome only on p. 287 of 423. For further perspectives, see the preface to the German edition of his journals, by Friedrich Althaus 1893: iii–xvi; translated by Hamilton 1911; Esch and Petersen (eds) 1993. The article by Chambers 2000 is especially interesting and useful.

38 Gregorovius 1907: 2, which today marks the Hotel Albergo Cesari. This is not the same as a plaque, raised in Rome in 1992, at 13 via Gregoriana, which marks Gregorovius’ residence in the city after 1860. On this address and second plaque see Gregorovius 1907: 105–6; Chambers 2000: 415.

39 The Allgemeine Zeitung (1798–1929) was established as a liberal newspaper by Cotta, the famous Stuttgart publishing house which produced Greogorovius’ longer works. At first published in Tübingen (1798–1803) and then Stuttgart (1803–7), it was published in Augsburg from 1807 to 1882, and then in Munich (1882–1929). See Petersen 1993; Breil 1996.

40 Gregorovius 1859–72: I, 4. Gregorovius 1907: 16; Chambers 2000: 413–14, and Noble 1996, in his review of Esch and Petersen (eds) 1993.

41 Gregorovius 1907: 154.

42 Gooch 1959: 459–69. See also Gossman 1983: 21–41, recounting the attitude of the Swiss philologist J. J. Bachofen to Mommsen and the Prussian School, with which sentiments Gregorovius heartily concurred. Bachofen objected, in 1862, to Mommsen as the archetype of “the modern way of thinking” on classical antiquity, and far more cuttingly of his “reduction of Rome to the clichés of the most insipid Prussian salon liberalism.”

43 Mommsen 1905: 208–10; Marchand 1996: 75–6.

44 Marchand 1996: 77–91.

45 Hönig 1921, 1944: 408–11. On the second and last occasion Gregorovius mentions Mommsen in his Roman journals, he records on 30 March 1873: “Mommsen came to Rome and still remains here. Only met him accidentally at dinner. Like Richard Wagner he is evidently a sufferer from megalomania. The occupants of professors’ chairs refuse to recognise me, because I work independently, accept no official post, and even horribile dictu, possess a modicum of poetic talent.” Gregorovius 1907: 439.

46 According to Seton-Watson in 1903 trans. of Gregorovius 1857: 34.

47 For example, Gregorovius 1907: 439; Chambers 2000: 419.

48 Münz 1892: 699. Sigmund Münz was a correspondent of the writer who would later edit Gregorovius’ letters to the Countess Caetani-Lovatelli: Münz 1896.

49 Gregorovius 1907: 271–2. The first edition of Bryce’s book, often revised and republished, was in 1864. That Gregorovius took so long to read it is a reflection of his lack of comfort in English, on which see Seton-Watson in 1903 trans. of Gregorovius 1857: xvii–xli.

50 Gregorovius 1907: 376–8, opined on the events of August and September 1870 that “[t]he diplomatists are active. They come with their conjuror’s tricks to rob the German people of the fruits of their victory.” In the same month, August 1870, he met Lord Acton, who shortly afterwards wrote a rather dismissive review of “the Borgias and their latest historian.” Acton omitted Gregorovius entirely from his survey of “German schools of history” in the first volume of The English Historical Review. See Chambers 2000: 428–9.

51 Schlumberger 1934: I, 86.

52 Seton-Watson in 1903 trans. of Gregorovius 1857: xxx; Petersen 1993.

53 Gregorovius 1907: 377–9.

54 Gregorovius 1907: 54–64, esp. 62: “I regard the independence of Italy as a sacred national right … Only I cannot stand the thought that a man like Napoleon should make capital out of the fact of having liberated a nation. Germany will renew her youth, Prussia is her Piedmont … a religious war of principles lies before us.”

55 Gregorovius 1907: 449–50; Chambers 2000: 425. Four more of his works were placed on the Index by 1882.

56 Gregorovius 1892: 112. He also planned a further companion study, of the city of Jerusalem, which never came to pass.

57 Gregorovius 1927: 595–640 (“Athen in den dunkeln Jahrhunderten. Eine Studie”), 641–66 (“Mirabilien der Stadt Athen”), 667–92 (“Aus der Landschaft Athens”).

58 Gregorovius 1927: 709–850.

59 According to Althaus in his edition of the journals. See Gregorovius 1907: vii. Althaus and Gregorovius did not meet for twenty-five years, between the Italian trip of 1853 and a trip they took to the Bavarian Alps in 1878. Another eight years passed after that until they met again, but Althaus was to become Gregorovius’ literary executor.

60 Gregorovius 1889: I, xviii; Gregorovius 1927: 8–9. On Fallmerayer, see the Introduction to this Part, and Christodoulou.

61 Gregorovius 1927: 693–705: “Did Attila kill the national gods of Greece?”

62 Gregorovius 1889: II, 437; Gregorovius 1927: 584.

63 Gregorovius 1907: xxii–xxiii.

64 [Freeman] 1891: 180–210, where on p. 182 one notes the stern reprimand: “We do not wish to underrate the importance for Germany of the war of 1870 … [But] we would suggest to them that it is quite possible, without being traitors to their country, to forbear alluding to Metz and Sedan in a book concerning a different epoch of history … We … assure the countrymen of Gregorovius that we are quite ready to believe that ‘Corinthus was a son of Zeus,’ or that ‘the Germans thrashed the French,’ … provided they will only spare us unreasonable iterations.” In this respect, Gregorovius would appear to have indulged in the very act for which he condemned Mommsen in the 1860s, of dressing Romans as Prussians.

65 See Pirivatri in this volume.

66 Evidently this was Gregorovius’ most popular short work, although according to Münz 1892: 699, “It is an artist’s account of the times of Pope Alexander VI; the interest centres in the person of the beautiful Lucrezia, the daughter of Alexander and of his mistress Vannozza Catanei; but it is replete with conjectures, and the suppositions occupy almost more space in the volume than the actual facts.”

67 Only a few of Gregorovius’ works reached an English-speaking audience during his lifetime, notably his youthful work on Corsica, which was translated three times into English, in England, Scotland and the USA. Lucrezia Borgia appeared in an English version thirty years after those in German, French and Italian. All of his works that mention Greece were translated into Greek. See Chambers 2000: 423, 428–33.

68 Burrows 1899: 455. This judgement was not shared by R. W. Seton-Watson, who in 1903 published a translation of Gregorovius’ The Tombs of the Popes (1857) with a “Memoir of Gregorovius.” This concludes (1903: xxxix) with the observation that Gregorovius was “well worthy to stand by the side of Ranke and Mommsen,” although one suspects that is the last place he would have wished to spend eternity. An English translation of The Tombs of the Popes, of which Seton-Watson had no knowledge (1903: ix), had already been produced by Mrs L. W. Terry, published in Rome “for the benefit of the Victoria Home.” Seton-Watson attributed Gregorovius’ Romanticism to the fact that his father had taken his family to live in a restored castle of the Teutonic Knights.

69 Seton-Watson in 1903 trans. of Gregorovius 1857: xxxix.

70 Schlumberger 1934: I, 43–73 (“Mes années étudiantes à Paris”), 75–140 (“La guerre”).

71 “Erysipelas of the pharynx and the respiratory tract,” being a study of how a skin infection spreads to the mucous membranes and respiratory tract.

72 Schlumberger 1873.

73 Schlumberger 1934: I, 176; II, 73.

74 Schlumberger 1934: II, 339–40, a record from early in 1922 spells out Schlumberger’s great affection for Blanchet, and his designation as executor.

75 Schlumberger et al. 1943: viii.

76 Schlumberger 1934: I, 172–7, where Schlumberger tells the now familiar story of how a fire destroyed the Byzantine imperial archives shortly after the Turkish conquest, and that the remnants were pushed into the Bosporus, whence lead seals had ever since washed up.

77 Schlumberger 1934: I, 211–17. He had first met Mordtmann four years earlier, on his first trip. Schlumberger regarded the six months in Istanbul as among the most pleasant and fruitful of his life, and three publications emerged from it: Le trésor de San’a (monnaies himyaritiques) (1880), on some silver pieces he identified in the bazaar as worthy of purchase; Les iles de princes … (1884), which he had visited; and La siège, la pris et la sac de Constantinople … (1914), drawing on his walks along the walls with two eminent Russians, Loubanoff and Basily, and “le vieil historien grec de Constantinople, le Dr Paspati.”

78 Schlumberger 1911. For an image see Figure 21.3, described by Pentcheva in this volume.

79 Grégoire 1927–8: 783–7.

80 Sirapie der Nersessian, then a diplomée des études supérieures at the Sorbonne, supplied a full annotated list, arranged by category and medium, to Schlumberger 1924: II, 529–58.

81 Schlumberger 1934: I, 264.

82 Reinach 1890.

83 Rambaud 1870. See also the succinct commentary at Gooch 1959: 456.

84 Reinach 1890: 508.

85 Rodrigue 2004.

86 Schlumberger 1934: I, 177.

87 White 1999: 12, has Schlumberger announcing of Charles Haas, he is “the most likeable and glittering socialite, the best of friends, [who] had nothing Jewish about him but his origins and was not afflicted, as far as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes him an exception virtually unique.” Schlumberger writes cynically, and his anti-Semitism is casual, for it is clear that Haas was one of Schlumberger’s many Jewish friends and acquaintances. See, for example, also Schlumberger 1934: II, 162 (an amusing anecdote about attending a circumcision), 167, 170 (dining with a Rothschild “avant l’Affaire,” and an amusing misunderstanding involving a bookbinder also called Rothschild); II, 176 (dining chez Sarah Bernhardt).

88 Rodrigue 2004: 5, notes that Reinach would, in 1893, become assistant keeper, and in 1902 would replace Bertrand as keeper of the museum and editor of Revue archéologique. He contributed Alexandre Bertrand’s obituary to that journal.

89 Schlumberger 1934: I, 250. His brother, Jean Bertrand (d. 1900), he had disliked still more.

90 Schlumberger 1934: I, 177; II, 73–111.

91 Diehl 1905: 29.

92 Diehl 1905: 30. Diehl was also the voice abroad of French Byzantine studies, tracing its origins and development for a US audience in 1911, although the only record of that lecture appears to be a two-line notice in the Annual of the American Historical Association for 1911, in the record of the annual meeting at Buffalo and Ithaca, published in 1913, at pp. 27–8. This is noted by Charanis 1983: 95.

93 He had earlier published only three articles in Journal des débats on 27 April 1893, 1 October 1895 and 5 November 1895. A full list is supplied at Schlumberger 1924: xxix–xxxi. The Journal des débats politiques et littéraires was a daily newspaper (1814–1944), a continuation of the publication established in 1789 to provide an exact record of debates of the National Assembly. Le Gaulois was a French daily newspaper published first in 1868, and then continuously from 5 July 1868 to 30 March 1929.

94 See e.g. his letter to Delta dated 7 April 1913: Lefcoparidis 1962: 53–5.

95 Reprinted with “King Constantine” removed from the title in Schlumberger 1916–22: I, 50–8 at 50. The original can now be read online through the Bibliothèque nationale’s Gallica site http://gallica.bnf.fr/, in this case at http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5384039/f3.chemindefer.

96 Stephenson 2003: 114.

97 Schlumberger 1916–22: II, 37–48, originally published in the Journal des débats, which can be accessed via Gallica http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k488574d.

98 Schlumberger 1916–22: II, 23–36, originally published in the Journal des débats, which can be accessed via Gallica http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5384039/f3.chemindefer.

99 Schlumberger 1916–22: II, 11–21; the original can be accessed via Gallica http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5384039.

100 Schlumberger 1890, 1923.

101 Schlumberger 1934: I, i; II, 397.

102 Schlumberger 1924.

103 See now Jeffreys et al. 2008: 3–20.

104 Anastasievic and Granic 1929: xxv.

105 Acomb 1961.

106 Bury 1930: 7.

107 Gossman 1983: 40–1.