Byzantium
The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire
by Judith Herrin
Princeton, 440 pp., $29.95 Two workmen knocked on Judith Herrin’s door in 2002. They were repairing buildings at King’s College, London, and were intrigued by the sign that read “Professor of Byzantine History.” Upon encountering Professor Herrin, they asked, “What is Byzantine history?” Herrin was momentarily flummoxed by the question, but eventually managed (as she puts it) to “sum up a lifetime of study in a 10-minute visit.” That visit resulted in Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, an introduction to the topic for nonspecialists.
The Byzantine Empire represents history’s greatest survival story. As the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire, Byzantium enjoyed an extraordinary combination of cultural inheritances–Greek, Roman, and Christian. It thus had deep roots, and was able to withstand shocks that would have killed a lesser state. During the meteoric rise of Islam in the seventh century, the Arabs took Syria and Egypt from Byzantium and swept away the Persian Empire in the east. But the newly truncated Byzantine Empire–confined to Anatolia, part of the Balkans, and Sicily–managed to rally, beating back Arab attempts to seize the great capital city of Constantinople.
Were it not for Byzantine resistance, Islam might well have overrun much of Europe. This fact alone makes Byzantine history enormously significant–as Herrin states, “the modern western world, which developed from Europe, could not have existed had it not been shielded and inspired by what happened further to the east in Byzantium.”
Yet Byzantium’s relationship with medieval Western Europe was uneasy. A long period of isolation led the eastern and western branches of Christianity to drift apart. The resulting differences in custom and (to some extent) in doctrine led to mutual suspicions and escalating hostilities, culminating in the disastrous Fourth Crusade of 1204, when westerners sacked and occupied Constantinople. Although the Byzantines were able to retake Constantinople in 1261, the empire had been badly undermined. It entered a long decline, finally succumbing (though not without a fight) to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Byzantium has a thematic structure. Each chapter focuses on a particular broad topic, such as the imperial court, icons, and the survival of Roman law. Herrin is clearly a master of her subject, as shown by her excellent description of Byzantine literary culture. The Byzantines spoke Greek. While the vernacular speech was on its way to becoming modern Greek, Byzantine scholars maintained the ability to read classical Greek texts. Thus the Byzantines deserve the credit for preserving the remnant of ancient Greek literature that survives today, since it was their scholars who copied and commented on the texts.
For their part, the Byzantines, following in the tradition of the great historians of classical antiquity, wrote many distinguished works of history. Herrin devotes a chapter to Anna Komnene (or “Comnena” in the more familiar transliteration), the daughter of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who reigned between 1081 and 1118. In the late 11th century, Byzantium was nearing collapse, torn by internal conflict while under heavy attack from external foes. Anna’s work, the Alexiad, recounts the thrilling back-from-the-brink story of the imperial revival orchestrated by her father.
Herrin (correctly, in my view) defends Anna from a recent preposterous claim that she never wrote the Alexiad, but merely cobbled together notes left by her husband after he died. Herrin notes that Anna had the opportunity to gather information on the battles and other dramatic events she describes: She accompanied her father on forays outside of Constantinople and evidently listened in on conversations he held with his military commanders.
Herrin emphasizes the point that, contrary to stereotype, the Byzantine empire was not a static, hidebound entity. Paradoxically, a state like Byzantium, with a deeply rooted cultural tradition, can be more flexible and innovative than one without. An example involves the Slavonic liturgy, the means by which the Byzantines propagated Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans and (in a development with enormous consequences for the future) in Russia. During the early medieval period, Slavs overran most of the Balkans. In the ninth century, two brothers in Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodios, learned the Slavonic tongue. Constantine–who later took the monastic name Cyril–devised a Slavonic alphabet (though the alphabet we now know as “Cyrillic” is a later development).
Cyril and Methodios oversaw the translation of the Bible and the Orthodox liturgy into Slavonic. While their mission to Moravia (in the modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) ultimately failed, their disciples became influential in newly converted Bulgaria. From the 10th century onward, the translations of Cyril and Methodios became instrumental in the Christianization of Russia. Herrin sees the Byzantines’ promotion of Slavonic (instead of insisting on Greek) as an “example of Byzantine innovation and creativity,” contrasting it with the western Church’s emphasis on Latin.
A few points in Byzantium trigger the impulse of a specialist to quibble. For example, Herrin discusses the 11th-century devaluation of Byzantine gold coinage, presenting it as the result of budgetary pressures. However, she doesn’t mention another possibility raised by modern scholars: Perhaps the devaluation was a response to economic growth, which increased the demand for circulating coinage–a demand met by minting a larger number of debased coins. Such nitpicking aside, the information here is both solid and detailed–so much so that even a specialist will frequently encounter previously unknown facts.
Byzantium does have a couple of shortcomings. Some chapters seem to meander, almost in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, from one topic to another. While this enables Herrin to display an impressive range of knowledge, it can make political and military developments, where a grasp of the chronology is critical, hard to understand. Thus in Herrin’s account of the initial Islamic conquests, the second Arab assault on Constantinople (in 717 A.D.) is discussed before the first (674-678).
A more serious problem arises in the last chapter, where Herrin addresses Pope Benedict’s 2006 lecture at Regensburg, in which the pontiff quoted the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (reigned 1391-1425) regarding the aggressive nature of Islam. At this point, current bien-pensant attitudes make their intrusive appearance. Herrin accuses Benedict of displaying an “ignorance of Byzantium,” and then launches into a defense of Islam that seems out of place. She probably would have done better to avoid the Benedict incident altogether.
Possibly as a result of similar attitudes, Herrin’s account of the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 falls flat. When describing the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 she quite rightly denounces “the desecration of ancient Christian places” and “the murder, rape and mistreatment of fellow believers.” By contrast, her description of the Ottoman sack of 1453 is exceedingly restrained, emphasizing offences against property. Yet the sack of 1453 was every bit as brutal as that of 1204, and plundering was the least of it. Fortunately, the distorting mirror of contemporary allegiances is largely confined to the final portion of the book. But in general, Byzantium offers a solid introduction to Byzantine history and culture, and the sheer depth of information it contains could repay multiple readings.
Richard Tada is a writer in Seattle.
