Category: blogging my research

Thoughts after reading Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin

I appreciate Herrin’s activism on behalf of the Romans of Constantinople, and as often happens when I delve into history, I find that I appreciate Western Europe and the way it has acted in the history of the world less and less.

Think about what comes to mind when you hear the word “Byzantine” used as an adjective: a weak, decadent society that collapsed under the weight of its own corruption, with a huge and inefficient bureaucracy and too much of its energy spent on creating over-complicated and obscure art at the expense of running its own affairs. Before I became fascinated with it and began exploring, this is the impression my education had left me with.

Absolutely nothing I’ve read in the period of time it’s taken me to get through the three histories I’ve read — one of them contemporary (Anna Komnene’s The Alexiad), one written about 50 years ago (Vryonis Speros’ Byzantium and Europe), and this one, written in the last decade — confirms that set of stereotypes in any way. One of the things Herrin accomplishes with her fascinating popular history of that great, lost civilization is to delineate the history and meaning of that false negative view of the Eastern Roman Empire, and another is to overturn it completely. Even in its final throes, the empire was dynamic and progressive.

It seems certain that Europe as we know it would not exist had it not been for the efforts of the medieval Romans. When the first muslim jihad spread like wildfire across the world, overtaking the Persians, the cities of Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and flowing across northern Africa and into the Iberian peninsula, the Byzantines stood as a bulwark against their advances into Europe from the east. From the 7th century through to the mid-15th, they stood in the way of all incursions from that direction, allowing western Europe to find its footing in the wake of the collapse of the western Romans at the hands of the various Germanic tribes — Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and others.

All through the history of the eastern Empire, there was world-changing brilliance. At the very end, one of its great thinkers, the philosopher George Gemistes Plethon, helped bring to Western Europe the ideas and thoughtfulness of the classical Greeks, including Aristotle and Plato. The west might not even know about these crucial thinkers were it not for his efforts. Plethon died in Mistras in the year before the Ottoman Turks captured the capitol, Constantinople.

He had been active in the efforts to save the Empire  in its final years by aligning the see in Constantinople with the Latin Church. Even then, in the midst of negotiations which appeared at first to have been successful, western Europe’s prejudices and intentional misunderstandings were evident, and the agreement brought back from those meetings with the Latin church were not embraced by the Empire. As a result, the last vestiges of the Empire were consumed in just a few years’ time.

The Byzantines were a cosmopolitan, diverse, literate society. They were patriarchal, but women held power there. There were a few women, such as Zoe and Theodora, sisters who held power in the 11th century, A different Theodora in the 9th, Irene who held power in the 8th, and others as well, who sat on the Byzantine throne.

Constantinople was, in its prime, the greatest city in the world, an unrivaled center for commerce and culture. At the heart of Byzantium was their church, While the Catholics in Rome sought to dominate the world, they forgot that it was Byzantium that sustained them, that it was Constantine himself, beginning with the Ecumenical council he called in 325 CE that created the structure in which they exist. And today, there is still a see that is centered there. Bartholomew I, 270th Archbishop of Constantinople, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, still reigns in modern-day Istanbul, at the center of a very small Greek community still living there.

If we look, we can see many ways in which the Byzantines are still with us, and that is at the heart of my fascination with them.

 

Purslane

This is my first writing on the subject of the eastern Roman Empire.

“Americans don’t know about this,” the older woman whose family owns the liquor store near us, who I think is Turkish, told my wife. She pointed to a low, kind of scrubby looking plant that was coming up through a crack in the sidewalk in front of the store. “See that? That plant is delicious, but to an American, it’s just a weed.”

purslane 2

Indeed, we had the same plant in our own garden, and had been pulling it as a weed the whole time. Because our neighbor called our attention to it, we went looking online for information. The woman had called it purslane. We found recipes and botanical information. It is, indeed, a commonly-eaten plant in many parts of the world. Its habitat ranges throughout the middle east, and from India all through the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe. It also grows through much of North America, though it’s not a native plant.

Purslane plants grow to be about a foot or so in diameter as they lay close to the ground, with juicy, red-tinged vines and succulent green leaves smaller than a dime and teardrop-shaped. It blooms in the morning – little quarter-inch yellow flowers pop up in the elbows of the vines – and then the blooms close by the afternoon.

Morning is also the best time to pick it; you take the whole plant right out of the ground, root and all. Purslane produces oxalic and malic acids overnight, with its pores closed to keep in moisture, then converts those acids to sugar and metabolizes that sugar through the day. Pick it first thing in the morning, and the acid gives the plants a lemony tang. Cut them up, stems and all, and either toss them into a salad raw or cook them for stews and other uses. On the streets of Istanbul, it’s sold wrapped in puff pastry as a street food.

Purslane is first known to have been in North America in the thirteenth century in Canada, which suggests that it may have been brought here by the Vikings, perhaps when Erik the Red first came to the shores of Labrador, perhaps brought either intentionally as a dependable food source – the plants are hardy and low-maintenance — or accidentally as seeds stuck in somebody’s boots or clothes or baggage.

But if the Vikings brought it to North America, how did they come to have it? It’s a desert-adapted plant growing in the opposite corner of Europe from them.

I found that the Byzantine Empire had employed Norsemen as elite mercenaries, some even working their way into the hierarchy of the Empire. I imagine Viking soldiers spending years campaigning in the southern Balkans, then going home carrying the seeds of purslane in their belongings, in the seams of their clothing, boots, or bedding. Perhaps those same warriors then made their way across the Atlantic to Labrador, where the tiny black seeds, barely discernable from grains of dark sand, finally came to rest and began sprouting on the low hillsides of eastern Canada.

Now purslane grows through cracks in the sidewalks, in gardens and fields all over this continent. In it I see a connection to lost Byzantium, which disappeared from the Earth in the first week of June in 1453, destroyed after standing for 1123 years by the Ottoman Turks. I’ve walked past clumps of purslane, or pulled it as a weed from my garden, oblivious to its history, every warm, bright day of my life.

It’s a consequence of having a name for a thing. That naming seems almost to change the physical shape of the thing, as well as what surrounds it. What was a “weed” as I tossed it into a lawn and leaf bag now connects to a world of knowledge I’d never considered. Learning about Byzantium itself has been the same sort of revelatory experience. The hook for that story also comes from learning a better name for the thing.

The people who lived within its borders didn’t call themselves “Byzantines.” That was applied to them only centuries after the Empire’s demise by historians trying to make a distinction the people themselves never made. If you had asked those people to identify themselves, they would have told you that they were Romans, right up until the day the Ottoman Emperor Muhammad II broke into the Sanctuary of Hagia Sophia on June the 4th, 1453 and destroyed the altar, the symbolic act ending the Empire.

In trying to better understand the nature of that society, those who study it have made it unrecognizable to the people who lived in it. By learning that one fact, I have become fascinated with the Byzantines and how their civilization has shaped the world we live in, from the seemingly insignificant things like purslane, through the answers to some long-standing questions I’ve had.

For instance, how is it that the Muslims seemed unstoppable and carried their holy war throughout the middle east and northern Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, where they ruled for centuries, yet they didn’t storm across Europe from east to west at the same time? The answer is plain to those who know the history of Byzantium. The Empire was the bulwark that saved western Europe so that it could become the cradle of modern western society.

It sparked the Renaissance as a center of learning throughout medieval times, and when it finally collapsed, scholars and artisans fled to Italy and fostered some of the great thinkers of succeeding generations. We owe much to these people, whom most of us never knew to be Romans, whose civilization fell a mere forty years, well within the living memory of the last of them, before Columbus (who some believe may have been a Byzantine himself) crossed the Atlantic to find a land that had already been touched indirectly by those latter-day Romans, it would seem, in the form of viny, succulent, tangy, little-known purslane.