BOOKS
Byzantium
By DAVID KNOWLES
My years ago it was no disgrace to know no more of the Eastern Roman Empire than hat it was settled by Constantine in the city hich then took his name, and that it expired hen that city was taken by the Ottoman Turk n 1453, thus releasing a flood of scholars and nuscripts to bring about the rediscovery of reek literature in Italy and the dawn of the Odern mind in, western Europe. The fact that any who shared this outlook had read parts of ibbon and had even taken sections of his ecline and Fall as a textbook at the university ad little effect on their opinions. Indeed, it is ossible even now to read a good deal of Gibbon ithout bringing his majestic story of wars and eresies into any relationship with the picture of Yzantine culture in its social, religious and rtistic manifestations such as is given by a host recent books, of which Mr. Sherrard's is the *test and one of the most attractive.* In some- 'ling of the same way, an addict of Sir Winston , Churchill's. History of England would fail to ri recognise a familiar landscape if faced with vowicke's volume in the Oxford History of this ountry. Even though Byzantine studies have S, ourished exceedingly during the last fifty years, u; Particularly in France and Germany, while in t.nt England there has been a spate of books dis- t laying the riches of Byzantine painting and P, architecture, the history of the whole millennium "f the Eastern Empire from Justinian's age it onwards is for many a terra incognita. o This neglect of Byzantine history is a prolonga- "on of that strange and tragic chasm of mutual distaste and ignorance that separated eastern and Western Christianity in the early middle ages and softhat hardened into hostility and schism in the ( eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is a chasm that evenprofessional historians often fail to cross." II Although the educated classes at Constantinople fill retained to the' end as a living tradition the • classics 'of Greek literature and the philosophy of 1, Mato, the Byzantine outlook on the world re- d litained to their contemporaries in the west, as it rennains for most students today, incomprehen- sble and in consequence neglected or despised. Classical and Christian antiquity, Celtic culture de and the achievement of the western middle ages 11 are more actual to us than is the life of id Constantinople. That great and wealthy city, more luxurious and sophisticated and better or- ganised than any in western Europe: remains a Pt strange and gorgeous enclave of mystery in mediaeval Christendom. Yet we owe to her people t i,ite very existence of Europe as we know it. ",esieged, it has been reckoned, seventeen times, 'he, far more than Venice, was the bulwark of the west. Twice within a century, in 674-77 and again in 717-18, the golden city on the narrow Passage between Asia and Europe felt and with- stcad the full force of victorious Islam. On the second occasion in particular she was beleaguered CONSTANTINOPLE : ICONOGRAPHY OF A SACRED '1T Y. By Philip Sherrard. (0.U.P., 63s.) ttu THE THE FALL 35s.) (C.U.P., OF CONSTANTINOPLE. By Sir Steven man 1 THE WORLD ON THE LAST DAY. By David 9 Stanton. (Faber, 35s.) by sea and land for a full year. Her citizens and her soldiers, had they known it, were supporting the whole fabric of Christendom, the 'sum of things' in the Roman phrase made familiar by Housman. 'They stood, and earth's foundations stay.' Five centuries later their descendants were rewarded by a twofold assault and a brutal sack at the hands of the Latin Crusaders, an outrage which has never been forgotten by the Orthodox Church and which still remains, as the spectre of Drogheda remains in Ireland, a bar to sympathy and union.
The 'Romans' won their city back again, and the two last centuries of Byzantine civilisation were in many ways—in art, in literature, in the spiritual life—the best of all. But their territory was narrow, their economy unsound, their popu- lation had dwindled from a million to a hundred thousand, the size of modern Oxford. Sir Steven 'Runciman shows, perhaps more clearly than any previous English writer, that the final catastrophe was inevitable.t Within the perimeter of the great walls of the city were parks, gardens, fields and orchards, and instead of a single great mass of habitation, a cluster of villages, 'with wild roses blooming in the hedgerows in spring and nightingales singing in the copses,' while the population crowded along the Golden Horn. Beyond the Horn the Genoese possessed Pera, and across the Bosphorus the Turks held what had been the rich commuters' belt of the city. The Turks, advancing gradually under Mehmet I and Murad (more familiar as Mahomet and Amurath), with ample resources of men and materials, could choose their moment for stoop- ing upon their prey. Nothing but a far-sighted, self-denying and prompt assertion of European solidarity and help could have saved the city, and as we read of the promises, the debates, the haverings and the final delays and refusals in the western countries, our old • wounds of the past sixty years feel the chill of winter.
For almost half his short book Sir Steven moves slowly through the last century of Byzan- tine history. Then, for some sixty pages, his narrative breaks into flame. There is no over- writing, no purple patch, but the reader is held. A siege is always a gift for a good historian. From Syracuse and Jerusalem to Londonderry and Vicksburg, sieges small and great, Platea and Basing House, Gibraltar and, in our own day, Malta and Stalingrad, are all alike in their moments of agony, hope, despair and heroism. The last siege of Constantinople was relatively short, from April 5 to May 29, but it seems on the printed page, as it must have seemed to the beleaguered, an eternity. Fortunes changed and spirits rose and fell. There was the porten- tous eclipse of the moon, a remarkably frequent accompaniment of Mediterranean sieges and battles, the mine and the countermine, the coun- cil in which the final die was cast, the contrast between the din and terror and cruelty of war- fare and the spring flowers and skies—'it was the time of roses,' and the hedges and churches were full of blossoms—the last liturgy in the church of Holy Wisdom, with a congregation now at last united, by the final irony of history, with the Romans of the west; the sombre night- piece of the emperor, like Brunswick's 'fated chieftain, standing silent on a tower gazing into the darkness where the forces of the storming- party • were massing, himself to die on the morrow; the surge of victory and pillage and the silence of emptiness and ruin.
On a lower level of emotion the siege has many points of interest. Whatever the basic, ulti- mate cause of Turkish victory may have been, it seems clear that the immediate agency was artillery and, in particular, the great cannon of the Hungarian Urban. Yet almost two centuries had yet to run before it was clear that stone walls alone were no defence against gunpowder. Then, many readers will be surprised to learn of• the youth of the conquering sultan, Mehmet II. He was just twenty-one years of age when the siege began, yet he dominated and decided the whole campaign and its preparations, and showed himself a master of rapid decision and drastic action. Finally, there is the recurrent theme of bestial cruelty and barbarous inhumanity. Byzan- tine history at court level always had a bad record of violence and savagery—it is one more facet of the Byzantine enigma—but in the siege it is the Turk who appears untouched by any consideration of ethics, good faith or justice. The chapters on the aftermath of the taking of the city, though undramatic, make painful read- ing with their intriguesi their disloyalties and the gradual elimination of the Greek civilisation in the Aegean and the Morea.
By a curious coincidence, another account of the siege by Dr. David Stactont has been pub- lished almost simultaneously with Sir Steven's narrative. It is a less polished story, without the trappings of scholarship and the background of detailed research, but based on a careful reading of many of the sources. It is very readable, though with occasional idiosyncrasies of grammar and syntax. A reader of both books will be interested, and even perhaps amused, to note the frequent coincidence of the narrative even in small details. Were there no sources behind the story, a critic might argue learnedly as to which narrator was following the other; as it is, he can spend his ingenuity in identifying the story *hich both are repeating. There is no disgrace in this; many 'pages of Grote's and Bury's histories of Greece were written for them by Thucydides. Mr. Stacton has done his homework, and those who admire his other writings may find his account easier to read than Runciman's.
Mr. Philip Sherrard's study has as its sub- title 'Iconography of a Sacred City.' Iconography is an ambiguous word, doubly so when used of a culture in which icons were mass-produced, to be adored or broken according to taste. In fact, the book is an attempt, by no means the first of its kind, to present what might in the context be called the 'icon' of Byzantium. As in other volumes of this successful series, this is achieved partly by well-chosen illustrations, partly by extracts from contemporary documents, and partly by comment. Many of the plates are both unfamiliar and either extremely beautiful or historically significant—as, for example, the nine-page sixteenth-century panorama of Con- stantinople as restored to prosperity by the Turks —but the final effect is to leave us once more bemused in a hieratic, unfamiliar world in which the rationalist and the realist within us are con- tinually asking questions which neither need nor find an answer in Byzantium. What is that elusive spirit that transforms the life and mind of New Rome from the sixth century onwards? Is it the spirit of the east, of Persia and of the lands that
lay beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire? Basil, John Chrysostom, even Justinian, speak a language we can understand, but after that we are adrift in a world from which no familiar voice arises.
Perhaps we can never hope to comprehend its mystery, but must be content to analyse its economy, unravel its administration, admire its liturgy and deplore its fate, while renouncing all hope of seeing it with the sympathy that comes only from full understanding.
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