Paul Stephenson
As I write this brief afterword, in February 2009, an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London is drawing the popular gaze to Byzantium 330– 1453. Of the various treasures gathered from across, principally, Europe, among the most precious are those dating before ad 700, the imprecise but broadly observed starting date for contributions to this volume. My eye was drawn to two fourth-century pieces: a cameo with a warrior horseman, perhaps Constantine, now kept in Belgrade, and the “Projecta Casket,” in embossed and partially gilt silver, from the British Museum; to ivory diptych leaves lent by Liverpool, London and Florence, celebrating consuls of the fifth and sixth centuries; and to the magnificent silver plates depicting scenes from the life of David, discovered in Cyprus and kept in Nicosia.1 Are these late Roman, late antique or early Byzantine? one might reasonably ask. An equally reasonable answer would be that they are all of these, and that while they are distinct from it, they are also the foundation for the art of the Byzantine World, c. 700–1453. Thus one can delight in but also locate in a developing tradition – without denying “external” influences or ignoring the fierce academic argument surrounding them – the stunning ivory triptychs from the Louvre and Vatican Museums; the ivory of Constantine VII crowned by Christ, lent by Moscow’s Pushkin Museum; the glorious twelfth-century icon of the Archangel Michael, in silver gilt on wood with cloisonné and enamel, plundered from Constantinople to be stashed in the treasury of San Marco, Venice; and the series of magnificent ivory caskets, carved between the later ninth and eleventh centuries, including the “David Casket,” the “Veroli Casket” and the “Troyes Casket.”2
While Byzantinists are delighted that their arcane specialism has received such attention, and are grateful for the opportunity to see such treasures gathered in one place, many have been struck by broad popular confusion: what is this exhibition all about? This is in striking contrast to the two most recent exhibitions held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, mentioned in the Introduction.3 Another recent exhibition is instructive. Hadrian, a Roman emperor who reigned for twenty-one years, drew many thousands into the British Museum through the summer of 2008.4 Hadrian had the sense to build a wall in northern England, which was begun during his visit to the province in 122. Only one Byzantine emperor ever visited England, in 1400–1, leaving no lasting impression. The British public cannot easily connect with Byzantium, and the exhibition at the RA does not invite them to try. Upon my first visit, early on a Friday evening, I was struck by the number of Greeks and Slavs among those attending, who feel an affinity for this culture, for the reasons set out in the preceding chapters.
The exhibition and its catalogue are not, of course, devoted to the legacy of Byzantium in today’s Europe.5 However, the catalogue’s two forewords, by the serving Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and of Greece, wish to make that connection. Gordon Brown considers the exhibition “a timely reminder of our links with the peoples and the nations of the past” and an opportunity to explore “the extraordinary influences of Byzantium.” He does not specify where or how. Kostas Karamanlis is more didactic, stating that the “unfair omission” of Byzantium in the “story of Europe” is only now being addressed:
After centuries of division and conflict, Eastern and Western Europe can look forward to a common, promising future within the framework of the European Union and celebrate their shared cultural roots. As Europeans seek to define what our continent stands for, the study of Byzantium is becoming of paramount importance. Its heritage, shared not only by Europeans, but also by citizens of nations in the three continents over which it once extended, can help us foster the common values that bring us together and understand the causes and natures of our differences.6
Politicians will always dwell on the political, and those in office today are concerned with tomorrow not yesterday. It was not the remit of the curators, whose achievement was to secure the loans of so many and such treasures, to contribute to a political discussion. Yet if Karamanlis is right, this is a missed opportunity. When the treasures now displayed at the RA have been returned to their museums, to be displayed according to national taste, they will form elements of a common past in Nicosia and Athens, in Belgrade, Moscow and St Petersburg, but will remain alien and exotic in Paris, Berlin and London. The frontiers of the past are firmly drawn, and for those in the West the many heirs of Byzantium remain beyond the border.
Despite Karamanlis’ hopes and expectations, Byzantium is notable now, as always, for its absence from discussion of Europe’s future, although its legacy is central to the pasts of so many member states of the European Union. Averil Cameron has drawn attention to this recently in her contribution to the Blackwell series “The Peoples of Europe,” The Byzantines, and at greater length in a provocative paper entitled “The Absence of Byzantium,” published in both English and Greek, which has provoked a sustained discussion in the journal Nea Hestia.7 In an ethnic sense, as Cameron notes, the Byzantines were not a people, for Byzantine is not an ethnic designation. That is equally true of European, which does not embrace simply those who live in its north-western portions.
The popular perception of Byzantium in western Europe consists largely of received truths: Constantine’s conversion to Christianity condemned the grandeur of Rome to a millennium of decline, of empty Orthodox ritual, monkish obscurantism and imperial decadence. With the dead hand of the Church and the limp wrists at court guiding affairs, the empire simply waited, sybaritically, to succumb to the vigour of the western Crusaders and the backlash of the Muslim Turks. And thence its only worthwhile component, its learning, was transferred to the West, and the post-Roman histories of the peoples of Europe extracted from its writings.8
The decadence of Byzantium was a western concern for centuries. Its most eloquent and complete articulation is still to be found in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published 1776–88 in both England and France. Scholars have returned often to Gibbon’s ideas and preoccupations, to examine and question his thesis of “decline.” This is particularly pertinent in the light of contemporary thought on the “World of Late Antiquity,” a beguiling age of saints and martyrs, which stands astride the sack of Rome in ad 476, illuminating the so-called “Dark Ages.” Just a few decades ago late antiquity did not exist, until Averil Cameron and Peter Brown cut it free from the “Later Roman Empire.” But even without the appearance of late antiquity, Rome’s decline would have fallen out of vogue. In the post-colonial academy of the 1970s to 1990s, revision of the notion of decline was imperative, predicated on the premise that no society is better than another, merely different. Where no hierarchy exists it is impossible to posit notions of decline; one speaks instead of “transformation.” Transformation suited the political climate in western Europe in the 1970s to 1990s, where a union was being forged of nation-states with long histories of mutual hostility. More recently, since the turn of the millennium, attention has returned to decline, notably in popular historical works by Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather. These are notable not just for the attention they have received, but also for their lack of attention to Byzantium.9 Political and economic circumstances appear suddenly to have caught up with the scholarship. We are now, once again, in an age of decline, and this may benefit Byzantium, which was ignored by those who would transform the European past in an age of prosperity.
If one accepts – and it is a big “if” – that it should be an imperative of the European Union to recover a common heritage for a unified Europe, what might this be? Where are the frontiers drawn? When is the frontier? The Roman empire, which stretched across Germania and Gaul, incorporating the barbaric extremities of Thule (Britannia), cannot satisfactorily perform this function (although not for the reasons posited by the current Mayor of London).10 First, since the Enlightenment, Rome has served as a model for numerous oppressive regimes. Second, Rome was aggressively militaristic and politically conservative: hardly the ethos for an incipient twenty-first-century superpower (in the eyes of many Europeans, if not all American neoconservatives). Third, Rome’s was not a north-western empire, but a Mediterranean empire, geographically marginal to the core of the EU. Fourth, the Roman empire contained numerous difficult peripheral regions that many in the new Europe feel the union could do better without. Beyond Istanbul, the magnificent ruins at Ephesus in Turkey bear witness to that country’s Romanitas. But Turkish entry into the EU is highly problematic, despite the best efforts of some who consider it central to western/NATO policy in the Middle East. With the extensive remains of Carthage long under excavation, we do not need St Augustine of Hippo to remind us that Rome reached to North Africa. Indeed, many in Germany and France do not want to be further reminded of Europe’s links with those regions, as they experience widely publicized social problems associated with post-colonial mass immigration. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s election pledge to forge a Mediterranean union has been quietly shelved.
So the Roman empire cannot be the historical antecedent of the EU. Instead, a more acceptable, geographically and ethnically suitable successor has been identified, by philosophers and theorists such as Rémi Brague, but also by historians and archaeologists, art historians and theologians. The ideal precursor to twenty-first-century Europe is, it has been determined, Latin Christendom, forged from the “barbarian” successor states of Rome, and emerging into the High Middle Ages as a northern European entity centred on France and Germany. The single figure most greatly revered was Charlemagne, a ruler of both Germans and Franks, crowned emperor in Rome. A recent and massive European Science Foundation research project (1993–8), “The Transformation of the Roman World,” supported exhibitions across the EU, many attracting crowds far larger than those currently to be seen in the Royal Academy.
The Christianity of Latin Christendom is that of Rome, not of Constantinople or Antioch, and this was made plain in the failed – or perhaps merely stalled – campaign to have a reference to Christian values and traditions in the preamble to an EU constitution.
Where, then, does this leave Byzantium, which endured even as the “barbarians” carved out successor states from the western rump of the empire? Which eastern Roman emperor, or empress, might be placed beside Charlemagne? Should Byzantium not also serve as a model for Europe, notably in its interactions with the Middle East? “The Absence of Byzantium” in European discourse is all the more shocking when one considers the substantial realignments of the past five years, with four heirs to Byzantium – Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria – now full members of the EU, and many more – Albania, Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia and Turkey – who will in future apply for membership.11 The greatest bar to fuller integration of these nations, and their national pasts, is the worrisome fact that between Byzantium and the EU, they were all for periods under some form of Ottoman Turkish control. Byzantium’s heirs were subjects of Islam, their Christian traditions and values were “oriental” and therefore not European.
Until the admission of Cyprus in May 2004, the only Byzantine heir within the EU was Greece. Cyprus has always been the crossroads between Europe and the Middle East, but history is taught in schools using textbooks imported from Greece. Therefore, its children embrace the Greek vision of nationhood, which from the mid-nineteenth century has vigorously promoted the classical and Byzantine heritage and disavowed the period of Ottoman rule, the Tourkokratia. Similar national traditions founded in the medieval period have been forged in Bulgaria and Romania, both admitted to the EU in January 2007. The geographical frontiers of Europe’s past have shifted definitively to the East but the conceptual frontiers have not kept pace. It is imperative that the diversities and commonalities of Europe’s post-Byzantine states are more fully explored and integrated within a broader European framework, to place alongside the diversities and commonalities of Latin Christendom. The frontiers of the past in Europe must be realigned to include Byzantium, and the Ottoman period cannot remain concealed. To add extra emphasis to Karamanlis’ words, a broad popular appreciation of the Byzantine World is an essential prerequisite for “planning our Mediterranean and European future.”
* I thank Averil Cameron for her many important comments on this short chapter.
1 Cormack and Vassilaki 2008: 72–3, 74, 80, 86–7. The David Plates now kept at New York’s Metropolitan Museum did not travel to London.
2 Cormack and Vassilaki 2008: 112, 117, 124–5, 126, 132–4.
3 See above, pp. xxii–xxiii. This will perhaps have frustrated the curators, one of whom offered his reflections on the staging of the 1997 exhibition shortly afterwards: Cormack 1998 focused on the discourse of “centre and periphery.” See also Brown, P. (1997).
4 Opper 2008.
5 Cyril Mango offers a pellucid but brief historical introduction in Cormack and Vassilaki 2008: 25–33. The “lack of context” was one of the criticisms levelled at the London exhibition, and a symposium organized by Cormack, “Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art,” held in March 2009, promised to address this.
6 Cormack and Vassilaki 2008: 11.
7 Cameron 2006: viii–xii, 3–5; Cameron 2008.
8 See Reinsch in this volume.
9 Ward-Perkins 2005; Heather 2005; Cameron 2007.
10 Johnson 2006; Cameron 2008: 4.
11 See now, and exceptionally, the important papers gathered in Detrez and Segaert 2008. And for a compelling alternative history by a medievalist see Patlagean 2007.