Byzantium the Great

By DAVID KNOWLES

ATHOUGH we all pay lip-service to Gibbon's Decline and Fall as the greatest of English historical writings, the history of Byzantium after the reign of Justinian is virtually unknown to Englishmen, even if they are graduates of a school of history. Edward Gibbon, indeed, was in some ways the subject's worst enemy. His im- mense shadow for long kept historians off his field, and he had misled readers by his inter- pretation of his theme. To him, as the title of his great work implied, Byzantium was a pro- longation of the ancient civilisation passing slowly from sunshine to shade, from virility to decrepitude. For the statesmanship, the adminis- trative genius, the religious experience, the eco- nomic problems and the pictorial art of Byzantium he had little sympathy.

The phases of Byzantine life passed as a pageant in his majestic narrative, but he had no ear for the undertones and overtones of the living organism. It was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that a family of 'Byzantinists,' trained in critical methods and for long regarded as a species of orientalist, began to publish their findings in learned international journals. In the British Isles, J. B. Bury was the earliest scholar of the first rank to take a hand in shaping the modern approach to the subject. His immense learning and acute judgment were seen in his brilliant edition of Gibbon as well as in his own general works. Since Bury's day, Byzantine studies have continued apace, particularly in France and eastern Europe, and the volume he edited in 1923 for the Cambridge Medieval History soon became antiquated. The decision to replace it was taken by the Syndics of the Press a dozen years ago, and the present work* was in type- script in 1961. Announced as forthcoming till hearts grew sick with waiting, the birth-pangs, to judge from a single cry of agony from the editor, must have been long and bitter.

It would have been altogether fitting if Norman Baynes, who led the cohort of English Byzantinists so long and so ably, could have contributed to the writing and editing. The years defeated him, and the heavy task has been accomplished, with exemplary care, by his suc- cessor in the leadership and in the London chair, Professor Joan Hussey. Even so, the volume under review, long as it is, gives only half of what was at first promised. The social and cul- tural life of Byzantium is reserved for later treatment.

The first lesson to be learnt from any modern history of eastern Rome is to abandon Gibbon's title. The survival and repeated renewal and expansion of the empire, its steadfast protection of the West as well as of its own people, its diffusion of Christianity and the arts over the Balkans and Russia: these are the achievements and the glory of its millennium, these and its own tale of saints and artists. Within a little more than forty years of the death of Justinian, whose empire at its greatest stretch had reached from the Euphrates to Cadiz, Slays and Persians were battering at the walls of Constantinople.

*THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY: IV. THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, PART I: BYZANTIUM AND ITS NEIGHBOURS. Edited by J. M. Hussey. (C.U.P., £7.)

The emperor Heraclius and the patriarch Sergius, the army and the fleet, flung the invaders back; the Persian king was pursued and defeated and his kingdom fell to ruin. Yet ten years later all victories turned to dust when the explosion of Islam sent the Arab armies flooding over the old eastern civilisation, and Egypt, Syria and Palestine were lost to the Empire and to the Church. It was the gravest blow that Christen- dom has ever sustained.

Once again the invaders reached the walls of Constantinople, and for a year (717-18) the Muslims besieged the city by land and sea. The victory of the Greeks was complete, and marked an epoch more clearly than the almost contem- porary victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers. Islam was halted, and for 700 years Constanti- nople was to remain the bulwark of Europe. The victory was largely due to the newly crowned soldier-adventurer Leo, with whose reign, so pregnant in both hope and disaster, the period of this volume opens. Two centuries after the Muslim assault the Russians (907) and the Bulgarians (923) besieged the city in vain, and the Russians returned again in 941 and 1043-46. Muslims and pagans had failed; the triumph of assaulting and sacking the jewel of the world, the city of the Mother of God, was reserved for Christians and crusaders in 1204-05.

It was now the turn of the Greeks to see the outside of the walls. They failed to recapture the city in 1235, but succeeded, almost by accident, in 1261. The rape of 1204 was an unmerited misfortune, and it could never be wholly made good. The two last centuries of Byzantine exis- tence, though marked by a flowering of art and literature, theology and spirituality, were the last phase of a city, not of an empire. The Turks were before the outer defences within a century, and their final success was only a matter of time. The eastern empire, reduced to the perimeter of a single great city and its suburbs, fell at last and for ever in 1453.

A city that was a world's wonder, and an emperor who claimed to rule the world by divine right, gave to Byzantium a character that no other European state has had. Once the rise of Islam had broken the Christian common- wealth of nations in the east, and had put an end to the traffic of men and ideas from Egypt and Syria to the Bosphorus and back again, the city became a capital more magnetic and more dominant than even Rome in the ancient world and Paris in modern times, and the strangest phenomenon in its story is the permanence and power of a divinely established, all-powerful emperor that endured through a procession of brief dynasties begun and ended by violence and treachery, and maintained by cruelty and intrigue.

It has often been said that the world of Byzantium was static. The writers in this volume deny this, and with justice. No advanced society can be static, and the history of Byzan- tium is in all conscience full of incident and change. Nevertheless, there is at the deepest level a changeless quality in the Byzantine out- look upon the world that has no parallel in European history. Until the fifth century, perhaps. even until the dass of Justinian, the eastern half of the empire was originating and putting into currency throughout the Mediterranean lands institutions and conceptions that were at once original and yet a natural development of the Hellenistic-Christian climate of ideas. In almost every department of church life the main stream of Christian thought and spirituality flossed from the East westwards.

After the days of Justinian, this was not so. It is often, and justly, regretted that the west lost the riches of Greek literature and thought and patristic theology for a millennium. It is also true that Byzantium, by losing the Latin language, lost also the vehicle that might have carried her forward along with the western world to new achievement, and the literature that would have helped her to bridge the chasm between the old world and the new. Intellectually, she proved unequal to the task of developing the classical heritage.

In Italy or France a codex of Justinian's Digest, a commentary of Boethius, a text of Aristotle, could cause an atomic explosion; a school of masons could revolutionise the archi- tecture of a continent; a monarch and a pope at odds could inspire a war of principles and pamphlets that left its mark on centuries of political thought. Byzantium had no dark age —and no Renaissance. Is it for this reason that its thought and literature are so seldom inspired by an original or a creative idea, and that the Byzantines looked neither backwards nor for- wards to a golden age? Is this why we find their outlook so hard to understand and to love?

It is interesting to compare with Byzantine civilisation another racial culture, the Celtic, which for centuries went its own way in art and in religion, and then by a two-way flow gave so much to the Latin west and received so much in return. Why did Byzantium give so little? Centuries earlier Greece had taken captive its barbarian captor; in the first four Christian cen- turies, Palestine, Cappadocia and Egypt had given untold mental and spiritual riches to the west. What fatal destiny decreed the severance of Byzantium from Italy in things of the mind?

The contributors to this volume ask no such useless questions. True to the traditions of the Cambridge Histories, they confine themselves to a narrative of facts, names and dates. Many well- known names appear among the contributors. and it may seem invidious for a rapid reader to select a few chapters—that of Dr Nicol, who sets the events of 1204-05 in a clearer light; that of Dr Dvornik, who summarises his own work which revolutionised the affaire Photius; that of Professor Obolensky, who emphasises once more the politico-missionary zeal of Byzantium. Only a specialist could praise the chapters on the nations surrounding the Greeks. The translations read well, and the writing is generally clear, but the editor, in reprinting Bury's introduction of 1923. has provided the volume with some pages which both in language and in clarity of thought are not surpassed by any that follow. The book is enormous, but the reader takes courage when he sees that his task finishes at p. 776, whereas the editor's continued to- p. 1168. Several reviewers of the New Cam- bridge Modern History have taken the absence of bibliographies very ill. Gilbcrt's Mikada might well have sentenced them to read in proof the 240 pages of bibliography here provided—a

compositor's dream of all the languages of Europe, with Greek characters and translitera-

tions of Russian, Arabic and Persian to boot. It is only fair to add that the actual proof- readers have worked a miracle.