Category: Byzantine Things

It’s Not Made by Great Men

Yet that’s how I wrote it.

Yesterday, I went to the Greenfield First Sunday Word open mike. I read my blog post A 500-Word History of a Lost Civilization That Stood for Over a Thousand Years. As I was going through the piece, I realized that what I was reading was a high school history report. Which is fine, I suppose. Paul and others joked that there would be an exam. Hah. The original post was a writing assignment I set myself to see if I could do it. The challenge was the title. All in all, I give myself a B for that post (to continue the joke.)

Readers of this blog will note that last week I posted about seeing Gang of Four up in Maine the previous weekend. Before I got up and read, I thought about referencing the band before I read the piece, but ultimately decided not to. I’m not one to avoid a mixed message generally, but in this case, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do to put what would ultimately be seen as a disclaimer in front of my own work. I try not to do that.

But here’s the disclaimer I didn’t perform at the open mike. I agree with the sentiment in that song. And the piece I read (as you will see if you go back and look) is all about a few of the Great Men of the Eastern Roman Empire. I’m currently working on a novel that is a fantasy set in some factually erroneous version of the world of the Romans. One of my rules for the book was that it would not be about the nobility or rulers of the Empire. I wanted it to be about individuals walking around on the ground, not the folk in Blachernae Palace. There’ve been so many “court intrigue” novels. I have no desire to write another.

Perhaps, at some point, I’ll write another history post and try to give the flavor of the life of an ordinary Roman, and maybe something about how that changed over time. What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a stable, long-established place in the Empire? Probably not so different from any other place in the main, but very different in certain details.

One detail I can share is about how a middle-class house in the Empire was set up. There was always a great central room where day-to-day living, entertaining, and even worship would typically happen. It wouldn’t include the kitchen, although dining would likely take place there. Kitchens were always off to one side and out of sight.

Stay tuned. This interests me. I’ll see what I can do.

A Byzantine Reflection

The medieval Roman Empire is all around us. The more that I study, the more I realize that this is so.

Today I learned about Erasmus, a Dutch scholar, who created the New Testament, compiling over 2,000 Byzantine manuscripts into a single document. The King James Bible’s New Testament is a straight up translation of his Novum Instrumentum the Latin translation of his original Greek manuscript, also by Erasmus. The Gutenberg Bible also printed his New Testament. Martin Luther based his faith on it.

There are many ways that the Byzantines are still with us, but there are few as profound and important as the New Testament.

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.