Tag: Byzantium

Anna Komnene

It’s been pointed out that I haven’t posted much about my research into the Eastern Roman Empire of late. There’s a reason for this: I’ve gotten hung up reading The Alexiad, written by the Roman princess Anna Komnene in the Twelfth Century CE: a history of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, and his reign.

The problem is the relationship I’m having as reader to Anna Komnene as an author. She’s a huge personality, clearly brilliant, and every bit a member of an old-world, long-standing ruling class family. I’ve found the time I’ve spent with her words compelling, difficult, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding. I still haven’t finished it, so I won’t go far into the content of the book here. I’ll write about that once I’ve made it to the end. But I can talk to you about my experience of reading the book so far.

I’m intrigued with the contemporary perspective. She talks in the introduction about her uncle, who died of exhaustion: he was so tired he developed a tumor. As a result of such misunderstandings, I was willing to accept her as an at-least-somewhat unreliable narrator due to her medieval worldview. But there are other problems, including chronological errors throughout the book, which I wouldn’t have been aware of if I hadn’t been checking the end notes as I read.

I understand she was working within limitations: she was banished to a convent, and while primary source materials were available to her, it appears that she may not have been able to reconstruct timelines dependably. So much for the chronological inconsistencies.

It also seems to me that she considers the official narrative and contemporary affairs of state as she writes, which I can’t fault her for. It still made me trust her less as an authoritative voice. Causing your reader to be skeptical is a huge challenge to overcome in a work of nonfiction, and I was definitely skeptical about certain things I read.

But the main problem I’ve had is that I’m not sure what to make of Anna Komnene as a person. She was clearly, as I’ve said, brilliant, perceptive, and an engaging writer as well, but she was caught up in the politics of her time, about as high-born a person as there could have been. I admit that I am leery of such people. I have socialist leanings both politically and in how I view class generally. I was prepared to set those prejudices aside, but I was daunted by the way she speaks about her father: how gifted he was, how resourceful, how strong, what a great soldier, how handsome, how pious. It all began to seem like too much. After one such hagiographic passage, I set the book down for a couple of weeks.

To be fair, she doesn’t avoid talking about Alexios’ failures, and she avoids mitigating or excusing them. On reflection, I think she did her best to meet the challenges of writing about her father within the limitations of her circumstances. I still suspect she doesn’t tell the whole truth, and it’s taken me a fair amount of processing to make peace with that.

I also let myself in for a little bit of disappointment by imagining that this book would contain story elements I didn’t end up finding. That’s my shortcoming. I wanted more description, more relationships, a stronger story arc. I think I was looking for a style of writing that didn’t exist in her day. Modern narrative writing is richer in the sorts of details that for the most part Anna either only barely touches on or skips entirely.

The book is mainly accounts of wars and battles Alexios fought, with a paragraph here and there of surprising granular detail. There’s a brief conversation between Anna and her mother. Elsewhere there’s a description of the workings of a particular weapon. It’s for those moments that the book has held my attention most. They’re sparsely strewn throughout the narrative, and when I come upon them, the world of the story becomes much more vivid.

I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there for most of the events The Alexiad covers: not yet born at the beginning, a child in the Imperial creche for much of the time she writes about. She clearly held her father in the highest esteem, and probably heard stories of the events she writes about from him or those around him. It’s unfair of me to judge her for that.

Having understood these things, I am having a much easier time with her book. When I finish, I’ll say more.

The End of an Empire

In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.

It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.

I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.

When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.

In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.

Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.

That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.

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.

Season Two: Byzantion

Welcome to Season Two! I hope you like the updated look of the blog.

As I said in Tuesday’s post, I am narrowing the focus of this blog for this season. Over the last couple of months, I have become fascinated by the Byzantine Empire, and as a result I have decided to blog about my research into that period of history.

I will blog about other things, but as often as I can, I’ll discuss what I’m learning about the Byzantines: the eastern Roman Empire, which stood for 1,123 years from the time that the Emperor Constantine move the capitol of the Roman Empire there in 330 AD until the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks on June 4th, 14531.

I offer this disclaimer: I’m new to the field of historical research. I’ll try to be as disciplined as I can, but I will likely make some rookie mistakes. If you, dear reader, are a historian yourself, I’ll appreciate any feedback you can offer on my efforts.

My intention is to both maintain a conversational tone (it’s a blog, after all) and subject any historical writing I do to the best level of academic rigor I can manage within this context. I don’t see much evidence that citing in blogs is done to this standard, but The Chicago Manual seems to me to offer the best solution to these two seemingly conflicting ambitions. I’ll start by using a summary of the 15th ed., as that is what I currently have access to, but will move to the 17th ed. as soon as I can acquire a copy.

Also under the heading of disclaimers, I do realize that there are many people who’ve devoted a lifetime to delving into the incredibly rich history of the Empire. I may or may not have much of interest to show someone like that, especially at first. My enthusiasm comes from the several fascinating things about the period that I’ve learned, beginning with the fact that no one from that period of history thought of themselves as a “Byzantine2“, and my hope to make the case that those eleven hundred years are much more important to the shape of the world as it is today than most people realize.

I’m also nerdy enough to believe that some people think it’s fun to learn new stuff. If you’re willing to follow along, I will try to share my journey to Byzantium in as entertaining a way as I can. My hope is that you’ll find the place as fascinating as I do.

Still, this blog will not be solely focused on doings a thousand years and more ago: I have other interests, and I will write about them here. Think of these posts as letters from your geeky friend Diane. To wit: Your geeky friend Diane has stumbled, via one of her random-ish fits of curiosity, into a topic that is richer and more crucial than she expected. Now she wants to tell you what she’s learning, because she’s excited about it, but doesn’t want to become a bore with only one topic in her head.

Notes

1. Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1970), 189-92

2. Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, rev. Peter Frankopan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 5