Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Byzantine icon, tenth century
Book Details
Judith Herrin
UNRIVALLED INFLUENCE
Women and empire in Byzantium
328pp. £24.95 (US $35).
978 0 691 15321 6
MARGINS AND METROPOLIS
Authority across the Byzantine Empire
365pp. £27.95 (US $39.50).
978 0 691 15301 8
Averil Cameron
BYZANTINE MATTERS
164pp. £15.95 (US $22.95).
978 0 691 15763 4
All Princeton University Press.
Redefining the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East
CHRISTOPHER KELLY
To be clear right from the start: Byzantium never existed. It is a modern fiction. Byzantium is the imaginative coinage of the sixteenth-century German humanist, Hieronymus Wolf. In 1557, Wolf published under the title Corpus Historiae Byzantinae a set of Greek chronicles of the history of the "Byzantine" Empire from its inception, with the foundation of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in AD 324 by Constantine – the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity – to its demise, with the city's capture in 1453 by the Ottomans under the twenty-one-year-old Mehmed II.
Wolf's neologism revived the name of the town on the Bosphorus – Buzantion – which had earlier occupied the site selected by Constantine for his new imperial capital. Constantine judged Rome too distant from the wealthiest provinces of empire (Asia Minor and Egypt), too strategically vulnerable and perhaps too committed to the old gods. Constantinople was intended as a New Rome. Neither its rulers nor its citizens ever referred to themselves as "Byzantine". In their view, they remained indisputably and unequivocally Roman. Arabic and Turkish texts echoed this claim: Mehmed the Conqueror had subdued Rum and its Christian population, the Rumis.
These claims to continuity and conquest were strongly resisted by the invention of Byzantium. To label the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean "Byzantine" after the foundation of Constantinople is to suggest that the East is somehow much less Roman than the West. Or – conversely – that it is the West which should properly be considered to be the heir of Rome's greatness. The traditional timeline of European achievement quickly tidies away a fragmented (western) Roman Empire in the fifth century, carefully preserves antiquity's heritage in medieval Catholic courts and monasteries, and loudly celebrates its liberating rediscovery in the city-states of the Italian Renaissance.
No room here for a New Rome. No place in this grand narrative for the eastern half of the Mediterranean world once comfortably part of the Roman Empire. Byzantium – Greek-speaking and resolutely autocratic – is to be severed from its Roman past and denied Rome's political and intellectual legacy. After all, there was no Renaissance in Byzantium: rather a still-born culture of stifling imitation and stultifying repetition; an ossified society of empty pomp and pointless ceremony; a failed state that was unable to defend Christendom's holiest places. It is a register of the dispiriting success of this prejudicial project that "byzantine" has established its own unflattering common currency (according to the OED): "reminiscent of the manner, style, or spirit of Byzantine politics; intricate, complicated; inflexible, rigid, unyielding".
But there is a slow recovery in progress. Byzantium – a term now so fixed in modern historical scholarship that it will not be dislodged by a mere TLS review – has undergone a quiet revolution. In the past forty years, a small group of scholars, perhaps no more than half a dozen, has offered a strikingly different view of Byzantium as a sophisticated and dynamic society with its own impressive intellectual and theological tradition deep-rooted in the classical past. Judith Herrin (Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London from 1995 to 2008) is a key member of this revisionist gang. Her significant contribution to the redefinition of Byzantium has been honoured by two volumes from Princeton University Press which reprint (lightly edited with brief introductions and some updated bibliography) twenty-five of her essays and adds five previously unpublished.
Unrivalled Influence: Women and empire in Byzantium offers a thirty-year conspectus on a project that Herrin presents as inspired by the radical feminism of her Cambridge undergraduate days in the late 1960s. Her insistent aim is the recovery of women's priorities and experiences. Her chief tactic is as a "suspicious and wary" historian. Byzantine texts are not to be understood on their own terms, but deliberately unsympathetically "read against the grain and around the intention of the male authors who created them". That approach allows Herrin, in one of her most interesting pieces, to suggest that female devotion to icons should not be understood – as some (male) theologians asserted – as proof of women's inability to grasp complex religious ideas. Rather, in Byzantine houses, icon corners, their painted panels venerated with lights, incense and flowers, demarcated a private and defiantly non-institutional space in which "women could express their belief in an unmediated, direct engagement under their own control" without the need of (male) priests.
Herrin's careful attention to often recondite material uncovers a wide range of particularly female preoccupations: with family, education, the household and (for the very privileged few at court) high politics and imperial office. She offers a welcome corrective to long-standing cartoon-like images of Byzantine women as over-sexed in public and over-pious in private. The broad patterns of empowerment and subjugation which she exposes are also familiar from the medieval West and Islamic East. Byzantium does not stand alone. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the position of women was established, exercised and experienced within and against the confines of a conservative, and unapologetically patriarchal, society.
A second volume of collected essays, Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire, is aimed at defeating the characterization of Byzantium as too byzantine: monolithic, unresponsive, inflexible, rigid, unyielding. Sixteen studies survey the organization and workings of Empire and Church from the provincial periphery to the urban splendours of Constantinople. Again, Herrin delights with her unpicking of unfamiliar texts and her eye for detail. Particularly pleasing is an essay constructed around a pipe organ (which provided the sonorous soundtrack for Byzantine court ceremonial) presented in 757 by the Emperor Constantine V to Pippin III, King of the Franks. A second piece takes as its starting point the Byzantine fascination with mathematical riddles. These were often packaged in an amusing narrative. For many educated Byzantines, the stark number grids of modern Sudoku would have lacked finesse: too obviously an invitation to arithmetical hard-grind. It was much more fun to puzzle over apple scrumping on Mount Helicon. How many apples did Love pick before each of the nine Muses claimed a share?
Aphrodite spoke to downhearted Love as follows: "Why, my child, do you look upset?" And he answered:
"The Muses snatched the apples I was bringing from Mount Helicon, each one taking a different share. Clio took a fifth of them, Euterpe a twelfth, while divine Thalia took an eighth. Melpomene made off with a twentieth part, Terpsichore a fourth and Erato followed with a seventh. Polymnia robbed me of thirty apples, Urania of 120 and Calliope carried away a load of three hundred. So I come to you light-handed, bringing only these fifty apples that the Muses left me.
This puzzle is just one item in a meticulous essay which traces the role of Byzantine mathematicians in copying and studying the greatest works of Greek antiquity – Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius and Diophantus – and in the transmission of that knowledge to the West. That is the start of a long trail. In the 1630s, it was in response to one of Diophantus's propositions on number theory, now in Latin translation, that Pierre de Fermat claimed, "I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain".
Mathematics, as Herrin emphasizes, is just one example of a millennium-long intellectual engagement with ancient Greek learning. The classical past did not have to be re-discovered by Byzantine scholars. If there was no Renaissance in Byzantium, there was also no Dark Ages. Importantly, too, the transmission of mathematical knowledge (like King Pippin's pipe organ) was part of a web of diplomatic, economic and scholarly contacts that stretched across the entire Mediterranean. These connections with a wider medieval world are important. One of Herrin's most significant achievements in these essays is to lay the foundations for a history of Byzantium that is much less isolated, much less exotic and – at least in premodern terms – much more normal. At last, Constantinople can be moved closer to Rome.
Yet it is also clear that Byzantium still remains under-recognized in recent work on the medieval Mediterranean or (currently more modish) Eurasia. There has been no boom in Byzantine studies to match the recent explosion of interest in late antiquity: the Mediterranean and Middle East from the Roman Emperor Constantine to the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. This regrettable and frustrating state of affairs is the driving concern of Averil Cameron's Byzantine Matters. This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation (who, before moving to Oxford, preceded Herrin in the chair of Late Antiquity and Byzantine Studies in London). At the core of Cameron's concern is the methodological tardiness of Byzantine studies, "for Byzantium is an undertheorized field as well as an understudied one". Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry that have proved fruitful in classics, medieval history and late antiquity.
And it must be said that, for all its scholarly excellence, Herrin's approach to Byzantium cannot fairly claim to be theoretically informed. Indeed, she puts "high-flown theory" firmly to one side: "I am intolerant of theoretical jargon that fails to deliver understanding of the human experience". On the whole, Herrin's work is innocent of any productive engagement with (for example) postmodernism, literary theory, ideas on pre-modern economies and state formation, identity or gender studies. Her feminism (of which she is rightly proud) is straightforward: "an analysis of the unacceptable state of affairs that arises in deeply unfair, unequal patriarchal societies in which men exploit women".
Does that matter? Of course, it would be risible to suggest that any historian's achievement should be measured principally by her attentiveness to theoretical concerns. The problem – and this is Cameron's key point – is that the deep-seated reluctance of the great majority of Byzantinists to exploit more theoretical lines of inquiry contributes to the continuing marginalization of the discipline. It sharply separates them from the common practice of historians in other periods. After all, it might be argued, only in an area as methodologically backward as Byzantine studies would it be regarded as cutting-edge to propose to read texts "against the grain".
Byzantine Matters – it must be emphasized – is not a bid to propel Byzantinists from an intellectual backwater to the forefront of postmodernism. Rather it is an impassioned and sympathetic plea to fellow scholars to be much more ambitious in exploiting ideas developed for the understanding of other premodern societies and in making Byzantium both fully part of the history of the Mediterranean and a key period in any comparative study of empire. For these projects, Byzantium matters. Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow. And it should also be read by medieval and late- antique historians. That might perhaps mitigate another of Cameron's concerns, namely that, if it is pressured to take account of wider trends, "Byzantine scholarship might turn in on itself in response".
But, in the end, Byzantium is too important to be left to balkanized Byzantinists. As Averil Cameron urges, what is most pressingly needed is a major new history and one that moves beyond the recent rush of handbooks and companions to offer an innovative and coherent approach to the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East. Perhaps (on a smaller scale) the most profitable next step – and here Judith Herrin's solid work securely points the way – is to set the carefully recovered detail of Byzantium in a broader, comparative context. It was, after all, the tracing of a wide pattern of significance (which reached right across the Mediterranean world) which gave Byzantine brain-teasers their historical interest and importance. Otherwise, who really cares – to end the frustration of any still puzzling – that if Love had not encountered the Muses he would have left Mount Helicon with 3,360 apples?
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