INTRODUCTION
I first met
Byzantium in a pleasant little salt marsh on the north shore of
Long Island. I had paused there to read a book about what was
innocently called the "later Roman Empire", prepared to trace
the familiar descent of civilization into the chaos and savagery
of the Dark Ages. Instead, nestled under my favorite tree, I found myself confronted with a rich tapestry of lively emperors
and seething barbarian hordes, of men and women who claimed to
be emperors of Rome long after the Roman Empire was supposed to
be dead and buried. It was at once both familiar and exotic; a
Roman Empire that had somehow survived the Dark Ages, and kept
the light of the classical world alive. At times, its history
seemed to be ripped from the headlines. This Judeo-Christian
society with Greco-Roman roots snuggled with immigration, the
role of church and state, and the dangers of a militant Islam.
Its poor wanted the rich taxed more, its rich could afford to
find the loopholes, and a swollen bureaucracy tried hard to find
a balance that brought in enough money without crushing
everyone.
And yet
Byzantium was at the same time a place of startling strangeness,
alluring but quite alien to the modem world. Holy men perched
atop pillars, emperors ascended pulpits to deliver lashing
sermons and hairsplitting points of theology could touch off
riots in the streets. The concepts of democracy that infuse the
modern world would have horrified the Byzantines. Their society
had been founded in the instability and chaos of the third
century, a time of endemic revolts with emperors who were
desperately trying to elevate the dignity of the throne.
Democracy, with its implications that all wore equal, would have
struck at the very underpinnings of their hierarchical, ordered
world, raising nightmares of the unceasing civil wars that they
had labored so hard to escape. The Byzantines, however, were no
prisoners of an oppressive autocratic society. Lowly peasants
and orphaned women found their way onto the throne, and it was a
humble farmer from what is now Macedonia who rose to become
Byzantium's greatest ruler, extending its vast domains until
they embraced nearly the entire Mediterranean. His successors
oversaw a deeply religious society with a secular educational
system that saw itself as the guard tan of light and
civilization in a swiftly darkening world They were, as Robert
Byron so famously put it. a 'triple fusion": a Roman body, a
Greek mind, and a mystic soul.
It's a better
definition than most, in part because the term "Byzantine" is a
thoroughly modern invention, making the empire attached to it
notoriously difficult to define. What we call the Byzantine
Empire was in fact the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its
citizens referred to themselves as Roman from the founding of
Constantinople in to the fall of the city eleven centuries
later. For most of that time, their neighbors, allies, and
enemies alike saw them in this light; when Mehmed II conquered
Constantinople, he took the title Caesar of Rome, ruling, as he
saw it. as the successor of a line that went back to Augustus.
Only the scholars of the Enlightenment, preferring to find their
roots in ancient Greece and classical Rome, denied the Eastern
Empire the name "Roman," branding it instead after Byzantium the
ancient name of Constantinople. The "real" empire for them had
ended in 476 with the abdication of the last western emperor and
the history of the "impostors" in Constantinople was nothing
more than a thousand-year slide into barbarism, corruption, and
decay.
Western
civilization, however, owes an incalculable debt to the scorned
city on the Bosporus. For more than a millennium, its capital
stood, the great bastion of the East protecting a nascent,
chaotic Europe, as one after another would-be world conqueror
foundered
against its walls. Without Byzantium, the surging armies of
Islam would surely
have
swept into Europe in the seventh century, and as Gibbon mused,
the call to prayer would have echoed over Oxford's dreaming
spires. There was more titan just force of arms to the Byzantine
gift, however. While civilization flickered dimly in the remote
Irish monasteries of the West, it blazed in Constantinople,
sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, but always alive.
Byzantium's greatest emperor. Justinian, gave us Roman law the
basis of most European legal systems even today—its artisans
gave us the brilliant mosaics of Ravenna and the supreme triumph
of the Hagia Sophia, and its scholars gave us the dazzling Greek
and Latin classics that the Dark Ages nearly extinguished in the
West.
If we owe such
a debt to Byzantium, it begs the question of why exactly the
empire has been so ignored. The Roman Empire fractured—first
culturally and then religiously between East and West, and as
the two halves drifted apart, estrangement set in. Christianity
was a thin veneer holding them together, but by IO54, when the
church ruptured into Catholic and Orthodox halves, the East and
West found that they had little to unite them and much to keep
them apart. The Crusades drove the final wedge between them,
engendering lasting bitterness in the East, and derision in the
West. While what was left of Byzantium succumbed to Islamic
invasion, Europe washed its hands and turned away, confident in
its own growing power and burgeoning destiny. This mutual
contempt has left Byzantium consigned to a little-deserved
obscurity, forgotten for centuries by those who once took refuge
behind its walls.
Most history
curricula fail to mention the civilization that produced the
illumination of Cyril and Methodius, the brilliance of John I
Tsimiscis. or the conquests of Nicephorus II Phocas. The curtain
of the Roman Empire falls for most with the last western
emperor, and tales of heroism in Greece end with the Spartan
king Leonidas. But no less heroic was Constantinos Dragases,
standing on his ancient battlements in 1453 or Belisarius before
the walls of Rome. Surely we owe them as deep a debt of
gratitude.
This book is
my small attempt to redress that situation, to give voice to a
people who have remained voiceless far too long. It's intended
to whet the appetite, to expose the reader to the vast sweep of
Byzantine history, and to put flesh and sinew on their
understanding of the East and the West. Regrettably, it can make
no claims to being definitive or exhaustive. Asking a single
volume to contain over a thousand years of history is taxing
enough, and much must be sacrificed to brevity. In defense of
what's been left on the cutting-room floor. I can only argue
that part of the pleasure of Byzantium is in the discovery:
Throughout the
book I've used Latinized rather than Greek names Constantino
instead of Konstandinos on the grounds that they'll be more
familiar and accessible to the general reader. I've also used a
personality driven approach to telling the story since the
emperor was so central to Byzantine life, few societies have
been as autocratic as the Eastern Roman Empire The person on the
imperial throne stood halfway to heaven, the divinely appointed
sovereign whose every decision deeply affected even the meanest
citizen.
Hopefully,
this volume will awaken an interest in a subject that has long
been absent from the Western canon. We share a common cultural
history with the Byzantine Empire, and can find important
lessons echoing down the centuries. Byzantium, no less than the
West, created the world in which we live, and—if further
motivation is needed to study it -- the story also happens to
be captivating.
