Introduction
Byzantium is the name given to both
the state and the culture of the Eastern Roman Empire in the middle ages. Both the state
and the inhabitants always called themselves Roman, as did most of their neighbors.
Western Europeans, who had their own Roman Empire called them Orientals or Greeks,
and later following the example of the great French scholar DuCange, Byzantines after the former name of the Empire's capital city, Constantinople.
These names give witness to the composite nature of Byzantium.
It was, without any doubt, the continuation of the Roman state, and until the seventh
century, preserved the basic structures of Late Roman Mediterranean civic culture: - a
large multi-ethnic Christian state, based on a network of urban centers, and defended by a
mobile specialized army. After the Arab/Muslim conquest of Egypt and Syria, the nature of
the state and culture was transformed. Byzantium became much more a Greek state [perhaps
best seen in the emperor Heraklios' adoption of the Greek title Basileus],
all the cities except Constantinople faded away to small fortified centers, and the
military organization of the empire came to be based on a series of local armies. There is
then a persistent ambiguity about the beginning of Byzantine history - between the
building of Constantinople by Constantine I and the mid-7th century collapse of late
antique urban culture.
The seventh to ninth centuries are generally accounted a low
point of Byzantine history. Little literature - even saints' lives - survives, and even
less art. The period is studied above all for the history of the struggle over icons. This Iconoclastic Controversy bears witness to a continued intellectual vitality,
and the emergence of one of history's most sophisticated analyses of the nature and
function of art. Under the Macedonian Dynasty [867-1056], Byzantium's political
power reached its apogee as former territories were incorporated in the Empire, and an
element of multi-ethnicity was restored. This period is also significant as the time in
which Byzantine culture was spread among the Slavs and other Balkan peoples. Following
massive Turkish attacks in the late eleventh century, the Empire was able to maintain a
lesser but still significant political and military power under the Komnenian Dynasty:
the cost was a social transformation which exalted a powerful military aristocracy, and
gradually enserfed the previously free peasantry. In 1204, internal Byzantine politics and
the resurgent West, effectively ended the imperial pretensions of the Byzantine state. The
Fourth Crusade [1204] succeeded in conquering Constantinople and making it a Latin
principality for half a century. The Greek political leadership, under the Palaiologan
Dynasty regained Constantinople in 1261, but the "empire" was just one state
among many in the area for the final 200 years of its existence. Strangely, this period
was among the most culturally productive, in art, in theology, and in literature.
It would be wrong then to present the later history of
Byzantium as a "thousand year history of decline", leading inevitably to its
conquest by the Ottoman Turks on Tuesday 29th May 1453. This perception, promoted
disastrously by the English historian Edward Gibbon, reflects the origins in the classical
studies of Byzantine studies. The classic periods of ancient cultures [the fifth and
fourth centuries BCE in Greece and the late republican/early imperial period in Rome] have
long appealed to modern Western sensibilities because - as times of rapid change and
innovation in art and literature - echoes and origins of the present have been seen there.
In comparison, Byzantine political culture changed slowly, and continuity was valued over
change. Furthermore, classical secularism, so attractive to Renaissance and Enlightenment
scholars, had no place in Byzantine thought worlds. As a result Byzantine culture was
subjected to centuries of abuse as a time of barbarism and superstition.
The counterpart to the dismissal of Byzantine culture was its
exaltation by 19th-century Romanticism, and by a substrate of Christian, especially
Anglican, intellectuals. [Even now Anglican seminaries are good places to locate books on
Byzantine studies.] Byzantium was also "claimed" by some Orthodox Christian
intellectuals. The result was that, after having been demeaned by the Enlightenment,
Byzantium acquired defenders, but defenders who concentrated equally on the culture's
religious aspects. Far from calm scholarship, Byzantine studies has ever been a locus of
contestation, of defamers and champions.
A third important strand of Byzantine studies has been the
Marxist contribution. Marxist historians are often derided, especially in the United
States, for fitting facts to theory [as if they alone were guilty of this!] In Byzantium,
especially in the agricultural laws of the tenth century, which were presented at the time
as addressing a struggle of the "poor" and the "powerful". Marxists
saw a prime example of the beginning of "feudalism". While perhaps pushing some
interpretations too hard, the Marxist tradition remains valuable in affirming a secular
aspect of Byzantine culture.
Currently, Byzantine studies, reflecting its classical
heritage, is still much more dominated by philological and art historical concerns than
Western medieval history. Still, there are interesting transformations evident. The French Annales School, represented by such scholars as Helene Ahrweiler and Evelyne
Patlagean has applied the specific social, cliometric and "long duree"
methodologies to Byzantine studies with some gusto. Purely social history, without a
Marxist slant, is now well established, with Angeliki Laiou among the most productive
writers. The Russian Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan was responsible for a whole variety of
initiatives, including a willingness to study religious phenomena in secular perspective.
Finally, and much later than in other areas of historical study, the history of women is
now coming to the fore.
Byzantine civilization constitutes a major world culture.
Because of its unique position as the medieval continuation of the Roman State, it has
tended to be dismissed by classicists and ignored by Western medievalists. Its internal
elite culture was archaicizing and perhaps pessimistic. But we should not be deceived. As
the centrally located culture, and by far the most stable state, of the Medieval period,
Byzantium is of major interest both in itself, and because the development and late
history of Western European, Slavic and Islamic cultures are not comprehensible without
taking it into consideration. While few would claim elevated status for much Byzantine
literature [although its historiographical
tradition is matched only by China's], in its art and architecture, Byzantine culture
was genuinely, and despite itself, innovative and capable of producing works of great
beauty. As an area of study, as I have tried to indicate here, Byzantine studies is
complex, full of conflict, and still open to new questions and methods.
