Mar 27, 2014 - men of the Fourth Crusade invaded the. Byzantine Empire and won a decisive vic- tory. While they claimed that their actions were justified, they ...
Byzantine Exceptionalism and Some Recent Books on Byzantium Warren Treadgold
Historically Speaking, Volume 11, Number 5, November 2010, pp. 16-19 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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BYZANTINE EXCEPTIONALISM AND SOME RECENT BOOKS ON BYZANTIUM Warren Treadgold
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n 1066 the Normans invaded England and won a decisive victory. While they claimed that their actions were justified, they held the land essentially by right of conquest and displaced nearly everyone who had been ruling it. After a few years they secured the whole kingdom and profoundly reshaped the society and culture of the country, where their descendants still reign. Likewise, in 1203-4 the men of the Fourth Crusade invaded the Byzantine Empire and won a decisive victory. While they claimed that their actions were justified, they held the land essentially by right of conquest and displaced nearly everyone who had been ruling it. Yet they never secured most of the empire, lost practically all of it by 1261, and had scarcely any lasting impact on the society or culture of the Byzantine world. Various reasons can be given for the success of the Norman Conquest, and historians can easily imagine how it might have failed. What is much harder to imagine is how the Crusaders’ conquest of Byzantium could ultimately have succeeded, at least without far more accommodation of the Byzantines or massive Western European immigration. Though the Normans spoke a different language from the English, both groups were part of a Western European political, social, and cultural system that was also shared by the Crusaders of 1204. This system was, however, incompatible with the Byzantine political, social, and cultural system, which soon expelled the Crusaders as an alien body. Byzantium was not just another medieval European country, like England or France, but a world of its own. The contrasts between Byzantium and the West are still a problem for authors of general books on Byzantium, including the recent batch of seven reviewed here. Most Byzantinists know how different Byzantium was, but many prefer not to emphasize the fact. Scholars like to be fashionable, and fashions are set by the majority who study the medieval and modern West, the source of concepts like feudalism and nationalism. While today we are all aware of non-Western cultures, we think of Byzantium as Western, certainly in comparison with China, preColumbian America, or sub-Saharan Africa. This is presumably why the American Historical Review lists books on Byzantium under “Europe: Ancient and Medieval,” though most Byzantine territory was in Asia or Africa (and Constantinople straddled Europe
and Asia). Byzantinists may reasonably fear that insisting their subject is not fully Western could leave it without a place in either Western or non-Western history.
Jonathan Shepard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, c. 500-1492 (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Elizabeth Jeffreys with John Haldon and Robin Cormack, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008). John Haldon, ed., A Social History of Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton University Press, 2007).
twice, the benefits to scholarship are less clear. In his introduction Shepard struggles to lend the book some coherence. He explains its beginning with the year 500 by citing the fall of the Western Roman Empire, without seriously claiming that this had much impact on Byzantium. His reason for concluding with 1492— thirty-nine years after Byzantium fell—is that “the world had been predicted to end” then, a pretext undermined by a contributor’s admission that practically no contemporaries believed that (856). Most individual chapters begin and end at these and other dates borrowed from The New Cambridge Medieval History that make little sense for Byzantium: 700, 900, 1300, and 1415 (though by chance 1024 and 1198 come close to events important for Byzantine history, the death of Basil II in 1025 and the Fourth Crusade in 1204). The contributors seldom mention how different Byzantium was from Western Europe. The editor tries to avoid the issue by suggesting that “there is something about Byzantium, whether as political structure or cultural atmosphere, that resists categorisation or orderly review in the manner of say, imperial Rome” (77). Actually Byzantium belonged to a category very like imperial Rome, which it directly continued: its bureaucracy, army, economy, and culture were by premodern standards highly developed. Among the rare factual errors in the book, three seem significant: that the many precise figures for Byzantine army units in the sources “are no more than rough estimates” (267), that soldiers “did not receive substantial regular cash wages” (502, refuted on 268-270), and that the whole wealth of Constantinople “only amounted to 300,000 marks” in 1204 (491), when the Crusaders estimated their plunder at 800,000 marks. All three mistakes make Byzantium look less developed (and more like Western Europe) than it really was. In one of the few new chapters in the book, on the middle Byzantine economy, Mark Whittow refreshingly criticizes Marxist historians of both Byzantium and the West who assume that peasants worked harder for a landlord or the state than they did for themselves. The argument is that under a “feudal” or a “tributary” “mode of production” peasants produced more in order to pay their rent or taxes; but the idea that peasants work best under compulsion should finally have been disproved by the agricultural boom that followed the dismantling 1
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Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire comes very close to treating Byzantium as just another medieval European country, even if such treatment results mainly from the opportunism of its publisher. Of the book’s twenty-seven parts, only eight (plus the introduction) were actually written for it. Three more parts are adapted from the final volume of The Cambridge Ancient History (2000) and sixteen more from the seven-volume New Cambridge Medieval History (1995-2005), which has short chapters on Byzantium in each period. (The old Cambridge Medieval History had a separate volume on Byzantium.) The editor of the Cambridge History, Jonathan Shepard, explains that an editor at Cambridge University Press “encouraged me to take on remodelling materials already available” (xvii). While the press profits from selling libraries the same material
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of the centrally planned economies of 20th-century Russia and China. The Cambridge History has some other merits, including serviceable maps and illustrations, a capacious bibliography, and a long index. Yet it is far from being the authoritative history it could have been if intelligently planned from scratch. Although somewhat shorter than the Cambridge History, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies has even more contributors (seventy-four to twentyfour), parts (eighty-eight to twenty-seven), and editors (three to one). The editors, Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack, observe in their rather schizophrenic introduction that “Byzantine studies . . . is a convenient term that comprises a vast range of sub-fields which often have little direct contact one to another—indeed, the contents of this volume illustrate this very clearly” (9). That they do. The introduction fitfully castigates most Byzantinists for not “challenging the theoretical assumptions underlying and informing their research” and insufficient use of a “comparative” approach (9-10, 15-17). Since most of the authors praised for such an approach are Marxists and the only Byzantinist consistently praised is John Haldon, he is presumably writing here. The assumption is that Byzantium and other societies had many similarities that have been overlooked; but if so, most seem still to be overlooked in the Oxford Handbook. The parts of the Oxford Handbook, each of about eleven pages including bibliographies, make a very mixed bag. The four parts of the “Political-Historical Survey” are too elementary for anyone who could profit much from the rest of the book. Some parts overlap (e.g., “Clergy, Monks, and Laity” and “Monasticism and Monasteries,” “Art and Iconoclasm” and “Icons”). The three parts on “Documents” (“Imperial Chrysobulls,” “Athos,” and “Venetian Crete”) omit many documents (those from non-Athonite monasteries, taktika, cadasters). The part on “Sigillography” fails to list all the catalogues of Byzantine seals, and that on “The Economy” fails to mention the three-volume Economic History of Byzantium (2002). “Chronology and Dating” treats its material as a joke, while “Art and the Periphery” argues persuasively that its subject is misconceived. In “Revenues and Expenditures” Haldon and Wolfram Brandes note that state revenue fell by up to three-quarters during the 7th century, without explaining how the state could still field armies against the Arabs. They ignore the only plausible explanation: that instead of pay the soldiers received grants from state lands (enormous in the 6th century, later almost gone), apparently because Marxists cannot accept that “privatization” saved the empire. Some parts of the Oxford Handbook are well done, like “Lexicography and Electronic Textual Resources,” “Epigraphy,” “Communications: Roads and Bridges,” and “Population, Demography, and Disease.” Several others, like “Towns and Cities” and “Byzantine Theology,” do as well as could be expected with big subjects and inadequate space. The book would surely have been more useful if the editors had organized it more carefully and assigned parts of varying lengths. In fact, they would have done better to prepare an updated edition of the 3
three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991), a much more useful work. Unlike the Oxford Handbook, the Oxford Dictionary has an overall point of view, that of its editor Alexander Kazhdan, an ex-Marxist who emphasizes Byzantine uniqueness. One might expect A Social History of Byzantium to have a clear viewpoint, since its editor, Haldon
Consular diptych of Magnus, consul of Constantinople in 518. He sits between two figures representing Rome and Constantinople. From Charles Diehl, Justinien et la Civilisation Byzantine au VIe Siècle (Paris, 1901).
again, berates others for lacking one. Yet he admits in his preface: “In the end, I have to confess that I have not succeeded in doing all the things I originally hoped,” and “I believe that we are not yet in a position to write a single-authored social history of the Byzantine world—and whether anyone can ever hope to achieve such an aim satisfactorily may be doubted” (ix-x). This remarkable statement implies that a satisfactory Byzantine social history may be theoretically impossible, no matter how much the subject is studied. Others will suspect the real problem is that Haldon cannot make the sources fit his theories. In a chapter entitled “Towards a Social History of Byzantium” he declares that, when “tributary rulers [i.e., the state] and elites [i.e., landlords] compete directly for control over the means of production,” all that changes “is the identity of those with the power to coerce. It is the political structures and
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relationships through which surplus wealth is redistributed which change” (26). These italics (in the original) seem intended to shout down the abundant evidence that independent peasants produced the economic expansion of middle Byzantine times. The ten contributors to the Social History often show (and sometimes admit) a failure to match evidence with theory. Liz James insists, “Gender is so implicit, so ever-present, in the discussion of how Byzantine society is organized—as implicit as class—that it should appear as a matter of course in all other contributions to this book” (46). Yet no other chapter pays much attention to gender, and James’s argument is undermined by the utter indifference of her heroine Irene (empress from 780 to 802) to any woman but herself. Haldon practically concedes that the Byzantine “ruling class” was so open to outsiders as not to be a class at all: “Different, competing factional groups, which changed their composition as their perceived interests and identities shifted, dominated the imperial court, and thus while a power élite in a generic sense maintained a monopoly on influence at court and over imperial policy, yet its composition was constantly changing” (172). Peter Sarris rightly protests: “If the social history of Byzantium is to be written at all, it must be written on the basis of the primacy of practical reason and a pragmatic approach to the evidence” rather than “a methodological Cloud-cuckoo-land” (94). This seems to mean abandoning the theoretical and “comparative” approaches sporadically used in the Social History. A coherent overall view of Byzantium should be easier to attain in single-authored books than in collaborative volumes, and the title of Judith Herrin’s Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire suggests a study of the uniqueness of Byzantine civilization. The book is in fact a popularization, professedly written “to engage the interest of construction workers” and others who know hardly anything about Byzantium (xiii). Herrin follows current fashions for popular history by combining overinterpreted anecdotes, breathless generalizations, a mixture of chronological and topical order, and major errors. For example, she writes that “Stilicho” controlled Italy after the fall of the Western Empire in 476 (13; Stilicho died in 408), the Lombards were named for Lombardy (68; Lombardy was named for them), and the Byzantines accepted Islam as divine “revelation” (324; they rejected it as diabolical and heretical). Her main thesis—that “[t]he systematic calumnies against Byzantium as an empire which continue to this day originated in the crusaders’ attempt to justify their greed and pillage” in 1204 (332)—is also false. Byzantium was still widely admired in the West after 1204, and Renaissance Europeans lionized Byzantine emperors and scholars. Since Herrin must know this, her real target may be contemporary medievalists who neglect Byzantium. Edward Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire continues his Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976), taking the idiosyncratic but defensible position that Byzantium began in 395 and ended in 1204. Luttwak’s two main assumptions are certainly right: the Byzantine army continued the Roman 4
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army, and Byzantine strategy was overwhelmingly defensive. Yet otherwise he seems to assume that Byzantium resembled the West much more than it really did. He attributes the Byzantines’ defensiveness largely to their defeats by the Huns in the early 5th century (48); this overlooks the deep disapproval of warfare already expressed in the 4th century by St. Basil of Caesarea, who advised soldiers who killed an enemy in battle to abstain from communion for three years, a startling contrast to the Western approval of “just wars” codified by St. Augustine. Though Luttwak realizes that the Byzantine army was as well organized as the Roman army and better organized than Western medieval armies, he wrongly assumes that it was far smaller than the Roman army and similar in size to Western medieval armies. Claiming that “[a]n acute shortage of combat-ready troops was indeed the perpetual condition of Byzantine warfare” (285), Luttwak disregards evidence that the Byzantine army was large and effective until the 11th century, when the emperors found it too large and expensive and debased the coins used to pay it. Although Luttwak assumes that the Byzantines’ “ruinous defeat” by the Bulgarians in 811 put Constantinople at risk (182), the Bulgarians never seriously threatened the city, and the empire fought another major battle against them in 813 and defeated them in 816. Luttwak thinks that the empire had “no organized frontier defenses” in the East; but its eastern defenses were well organized and strong before it demobilized 50,000 frontier soldiers around 1053 by replacing their service with a tax. Only after the emperors had ruined their army in the late 11th century by debasing its pay and dismissing its best men—a development entirely missed by Luttwak—did the Byzantines lack the troops to defend Anatolia against the Turks. Such misconceptions are particularly surprising in an author with a background in Roman military history, which explains so much about its Byzantine heirs. The best of these books for a novice who wants a basic introduction to Byzantine history is Timothy Gregory’s A History of Byzantium. Competent if not exciting, it is obviously intended as an undergraduate textbook; it includes the boxes and timelines that students expect and avoids scholarly discussion that might confuse them. The text is clearly written, approximately in chronological order from 306 to 1453, with some treatment of what preceded and followed those dates. The second edition corrects most (but not all) of the mistakes in the first. Gregory also reaches a sound conclusion: “Byzantium is the alternative West, showing how things might have turned out differently for Western Europe had circumstances been different, and providing valuable lessons of ways in which the European tradition itself can be seen and turned in different directions” (419). Finally we come to Anthony Kaldellis’s Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, which discusses 5
Hellenism as a component of Byzantine identity along with Christianity and the Roman Empire. These elements were originally somewhat discordant, because educated Greeks thought themselves culturally superior to Romans and Christians, Christians disdained Greek and Roman paganism, and Romans conquered Greeks and persecuted Christians. Kaldellis asks a good question. Why can “Greeks” mean an ancient or modern people but scarcely ever the medieval people we call Byzantines? The Byzantines preferred to call themselves “Romans” or “Christians” and to use “Greeks” to mean pagans or people from the Greek peninsula (generally a backwater in Byzantine times). Kaldellis attacks important modern misconceptions, including na-
ple of those recently written on Byzantine history— so unsuccessful, when most of their hundred-odd authors are good scholars and several have done outstanding work elsewhere? The reasons extend well beyond the Byzantine field. Most popularizations have become less serious and accurate as their authors strive to keep their readers interested, and most scholarly works have become less accessible and wide-ranging as their authors assume that only specialists read serious books. Although we can blame publishers to some extent, the average reader probably does have a shorter attention span and a poorer general education than at any time in the recent past. This problem is worse for writers on less familiar topics like Byzantium than for writers on current affairs, Nazi Germany, or the American Civil War. Another general problem is publishers’ growing enthusiasm for compilations by many authors, who can be paid little or nothing for reference books that libraries will buy at extortionary prices. Yet if fifty heads were better than one, the hellhound Cerberus would have been the perfect dog. Scholars seldom do their best work when given ten or even thirty pages to summarize earlier research on a topic chosen by someone else; and a book written by many authors in independent sections is unlikely to have a coherent point of view or to break new ground. Read from cover to cover only by an occasional reviewer, these books often sit in libraries unused. The relatively small cohort of Byzantinists is especially liable to be distracted from original work by writing and editing such collections, of which two more have just been published at still higher prices. Contributors have been slow to see how little such collaboration benefits them or anyone else, since until recently it was less common, better done, and more prestigious. At last a few have begun to question the value of being one of dozens of authors, or even the editor, of an unoriginal mishmash that almost no one will read. Another problem extending beyond Byzantine studies is a reluctance either to accept or to dispute Marxist interpretations. Admittedly, the temptation is strong to disregard those who disregard others and who never take their own advice to “challenge the theoretical assumptions underlying and informing their research.” At least in the Byzantine field most scholars do ignore Marxist theories, as the introduction to the Oxford Handbook complains; but that introduction is also right that most Byzantinists avoid drawing any general conclusions about society or economics. Certainly a satisfactory social history of Byzantium could be written if it abandoned Marxist ideas of class and “modes of production”; but no one seems interested in writing it. The late Michael Hendy made an excellent start on an economic and administrative history of Byzantium in a long book showing, among other things, that the Marxist interpretation of the 7th-century crisis was financially impossible. Yet Hendy’s book has been respectfully ignored both by Haldon and by the thirty-four con-
Few Western medievalists welcome comparisons that, except for basic and obvious similarities, show how much Byzantium differed from the medieval West.
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tionalistic ideas of Greek continuity, romantic ideas of Byzantine claims to a “universal empire” (109), and “comparative” ideas of Byzantine similarities to Islam and Western Europe (111). His explanation for the failure of the “Latin Empire” established by the Fourth Crusade is to the point: “There was no uniformity in administration, taxation, economy, law, social differentiation, or religious worship. In some cases, feudal, Venetian, and Byzantine elements were stitched together in the hope that the golem might live” (347). While Kaldellis is surely right that Byzantine emperors were no more “Greek” than American presidents are “English” (113), he is reluctant to compare Byzantium to the United States on the grounds that though Byzantium “was not ethnic in conception,” the idea that “belonging does not depend on ethnicity” in America is “largely a fiction” (99-100; I agree about Byzantium, not about America). He demonstrates that educated Byzantines began to claim a Greek identity in the 11th and 12th centuries out of admiration for the Greek classics, but also that this “was in many ways a fantasy” (232). He shows that some 13th-century Byzantines claimed to be Greeks in reaction to the Fourth Crusade (since the Crusaders were obviously not Greeks, though they could claim to be Christians and “Romans”), but that most Byzantines found a Greek identity “carried with it too much baggage from a Christian point of view” (386). His summation of the limited but real importance of the Byzantines’ Greek identity is felicitous: “Hellenism was not a fixed point, a star, so much as it was like an artfully arranged constellation: one could get bearings from it” (396). As an authoritative study of the Byzantines’ Greek identity, the book significantly advances understanding of Byzantine exceptionalism. Why are five of these seven books—a fair sam-
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tributors to the aforementioned Economic History of Byzantium, another massive, inconclusive collaboration that similarly ignores Haldon’s work. Since refusing to discuss any significant interpretation creates an obstacle to scholarship, responding to Marxist scholars should be a normal part of scholarly debate. One last problem, which Byzantine studies share with other endangered specialties, is desperation to win outside acceptance. Most American Byzantinists have given up trying to be accepted as classicists by classicists, who are fighting just to maintain their own field. While a few Byzantinists are accepted as Marxists by other Marxists, and a few more try to attract attention by writing popularizations, many more hope a “comparative approach” will win them the favor of Western medievalists. Yet few Western medievalists welcome comparisons that, except for basic and obvious similarities, show how much Byzantium differed from the medieval West—especially when they show that Byzantium was more sophisticated than the medieval West. Byzantine exceptionalism ought to make Byzantium seem more interesting and important, not least for understanding how today’s Russians and other Eastern Europeans differ from Americans and Western Europeans. Byzantinists, however, seem not to have made that point effectively. 10
Warren Treadgold is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies at Saint Louis University. His most recent book is The Early Byzantine Historians (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
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He (defensibly) tolerates his collaborators’ disagreements on such matters as whether the fall of the Western Empire was important to contemporaries (99, 198), whether Justinian considered his reconquests part of a grand design (107, 201-2), or whether late Byzantine Thessalonica was a major center for Italian trade (846, 857). Shepard also notes my criticism that The New Cambridge Medieval History pays “undue attention to ‘Byzantium’s foreign relations with little regard for its internal history’” which he acknowledges is “pertinent” to this volume (10 and n23).
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One (Paul Magdalino) does say “there is clearly some sense in the standard view that [the Fourth Crusade] confirmed beyond doubt how incompatible the two cultures had always been” (627).
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Liz James, ed., A Companion to Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), listed at $199.95, and Paul Stephenson, ed., The Byzantine World (Routledge, 2010), listed at $250.00, appear to overlap significantly with the Cambridge History and the Oxford Handbook.
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See Josiah Ober, “Letter from the President: Too Much Companionship?” American Philological Association Newsletter 32 (2009): 1-3, announcing, “I no longer accept invitations to contribute to classical Companions,” meaning “multiple-author reference works.”
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9 Michael Hendy, Studies on the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 3001450 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially 553-667.
See John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Angeliki Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium, 3 vols. (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 2002); and my reviews of both in American Historical Review 97 (1992): 829-830 and American Historical Review 109 (2004): 236-37.
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On this question, see the books and reviews cited in notes 9 and 10 below.
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Cf. Wolfram Brandes’s review of my History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford University Press, 1997) and Concise History of Byzantium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 95 (2002): 716-725 and my reply in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 96 (2003): 802-4.
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See Kaldellis’s mournful aside: “One day, when the classical bias in hiring abates, it will be possible for Hellenists to write fewer unread dissertations on Homer and more on buried gems like [Theodore] Prodromos” (Hellenism, 271 n127).
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Note that the lists of errors in my review in International History Review 31 (2009): 99-101 and that of Florin Curta in American Historical Review 114 (2009): 813-14, though prepared independently, never overlap. 4
See my discussion in The Medieval Review (June 2010; https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3631).
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6 See my review of the first edition in International History Review 28 (2006): 374-75.
