I mean, come on... 1453 ! It's not unfair to say that the Roman Empire lasted most of the way through the medieval period, and yet all too often it's reduced to the date of its final fall. All of that millennium of history, of art, politics... all of it is so often completely overlooked. It's weird.
My previous dedicated reads on Byzantium* have been Judith Herrin's Byzantium : The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, and Lars Brownworth's Lost To the West. The former was so plodding and pointlessly nonlinear that I gave up less than halfway through, with the claim that the Byzantine court was a place of intrigue and plots being so unbearably unsurprising that boredom nearly did me in. The latter was much better. A genuinely gripping page-turner with powerful rhetoric, it suffered only from being far too short and with some questionable claims here and there.
* Sooner or later someone's going to point out the Byzantines themselves never used the name, but this isn't very interesting, so I won't.
Step forward John Julius Norwich. His Short History is, he says, about one-third the length of his full three-volume epic, and at nearly 400 pages this is already enough to be something of substance.
Norwich attempts to condense the entire history, emperor by emperor, into something readable and accessible. This is quite clearly an introduction, but it's a darn compelling one. Norwich's scope is immediately apparent : this is a thoroughly traditional political history concentrating almost exclusively on the upper echelons of society. It's a story about the powerful, the great, the good, the bad, and the exceedingly ugly, told with flair and clarity. He's unashamedly judgemental, so brazenly so that (unlike Brownworth) I instantly forgave him. He's biased towards his subject, but to my way of thinking he so openly declares his preference that he's honest about it. This is far better than any disingenuous pretence to objectivity.
Byzantine politics is proverbially complex, and it's to Norwich's great credit that he makes this almost perfectly straightforward. Here is someone who knows exactly which strands to pull on and which to leave well alone. The price, of course, is that limited scope. Of what daily life was like we hear next to nothing. Of art we get a smattering here and there, of science and engineering not a word. Theology and philosophy get a little more of an examination, but only when they influence politics. Deeper sociological factors are not covered : the Empire is reduced to the politics of individuals, not the currents of history.
All of this is an entirely sensible choice. Trying to cram in any more than there is would literally fill the book to bursting : Norwich gives remarkable completeness (not a single emperor is skipped) with plenty of insight into how politics worked at the highest levels. It's a good focus and a great read precisely because of its limitations.
That said, while I would hope for considerably more in the full work, there are still a few things I felt could have been improved here. One is the overall status of the Empire, which waxed and waned considerably before it was eventually extinguished. Brownworth did this better, explicitly describing the overall state of affairs : from total dominance to near extinction, astonishing resurrection to full Empire "("one of the greatest comebacks in military history"), retreat, re-expansion and consolidation into a powerful nation-state, and finally a long, agonising and piecemeal decline to ultimate irrelevance and destruction.
With Norwich the reader has to draw this out themselves. Here the maps could have been a lot better. Norwich puts them all at the start : what would have helped a lot would be to have a single map of the overall extent of the Empire at the start of each chapter. Norwich instead relies on verbal descriptions of quite precise regions that were controlled or lost. When this is done at the city-level this becomes rather unnecessarily tedious.
Still, these are somewhat minor complaints. It's still a good read, and the only part I found at all hard to follow were the too-brief sections on the Latin occupation. Here the list of politicians became simply too great, but the strength of the text is that you can easily get swept along and pick it up when things start to make sense again. I'm gonna give this one a very solid 8/10.
I don't want to do a detailed breakdown of this one, but there a few themes I want to mention briefly :
Not all theology was useless : Some debates in Byzantine philosophy do feel like proverbial, uselessly complex and esoteric debates of concern solely to those who were devout believers. Others seem to have much broader philosophical ramifications, chief of which was the Chalcedonian formula. This, it seemed, was what finally allowed everyone to shut up and get on with worshipping Jesus. Instead of worrying about whether he was fully human or fully divine or some weird mixture of both, they decided he was... "fully divine and fully human, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation".
The similarities here to property dualism are striking. The mental and the physical are separate but belong the same underlying subject. Neither, as ChatGPT put it in a discussion, reduces to or competes with the other. Whether you think this is actually a sensible interpretation of the mind-body problem isn't as important here as realising that these debates were intelligent, sophisticated, and productive for modern philosophy. They were not purely arcane points of useless trivia.
Not entirely the fault of the patriarchy : If the Eastern Empire literally came up with the very concept of a Patriarch, then it's interesting to see that more than a few women held supreme political power. None, it's true, in the Church, but many in politics, either as regents, wives, or even Empresses in their own right. Strangest of all was a brief period when political power was held by two elderly ladies. It didn't end well, partly due to the sheer proverbial political complexity of the situation, and partly because neither of them was actually any good. Even so, the idea that this could happen at all could scarcely have been imagined in the days of Augustus or even Marcus Aurelius. By no means was this a feminist society, but it could, on occasion, at least be a good deal more tolerant than its predecessor.
It is possible to make no mistakes but still lose : I don't mean the final conquest here. By that point Byzantium was so beyond saving that even Norwich is actively hastening its demise to put it out of its misery; it had made plenty of catastrophic and contemptible mistakes by the end. No, what comes through in an earlier phase is that competent rulers could be hated. Even when what they did was absolutely necessary for the Empire's well-being (and at times its very survival), there were limits its citizens were not prepared to tolerate. Material increases in prosperity made little difference. A ruler who couldn't persuade their citizens, or was simply too different from them, would never win their acclaim, and some of the most unfortunate were actively and unfairly despised almost because of their efforts rather than in spite of them. There's a lesson here for contemporary British politics, to be sure.
Afterlife of an Empire : The Empire under Justinian was a recognisable evolutionary descendant of that under Augustus. By the time of its zenith under Basil II it was not. It was now very much its own thing, still an Empire of sorts – not on the same scale as in its heydey, to be sure, but powerful, prosperous, and apparently stable. Unlike many periods of the original Roman Empire, this one feels like a state which could have been maintained indefinitely if only they had had but a few more competent rulers and a little more luck; it could even have (re)expanded considerably further than it actually did.
But what exactly it is about it that makes the Empire feel different is hard to say. It reminds me a lot of Marc Morris' book on the Anglo-Saxons : without ever describing how or why, the period at the end of the ninth century is clearly culturally different from that of the sixth. So it is with Byzantium.
And perhaps this is why it's so frequently overlooked. Stories, as a rule, like endings. When an Empire falls it should stay fallen, but the slow and continuous re-invention of the Byzantine state does not fit this mould at all. To have the original civilisation fall – actually and properly disintegrate – but an extended half of it survive and go on to become its own, highly successful thing is somehow... uncomfortable. It shouldn't do that.
Maybe it's the ambiguity : if it had maintained its Romanness in some fashion, or made a clean break with the past, it might be easier to accept. Byzantium did neither. This was no mere ghost of an Empire but a living, breathing, successful polity that endured and adapted even while remaining a vestige of antiquity. We ignore Byzantium because it just doesn't fit our expectations, being neither quite a Greek Empire nor a Roman Empire Mark II, but both and more and neither all at the same time. Surely, we should see this as a reason for fascination, not forgetfulness.
The Byzantines were human like the rest of us, victims of the same weaknesses and subject to the same temptations, deserving of praise and of blame much as we are ourselves. What they do not deserve is the obscurity to which for centuries we have condemned them. Their follies were many, as were their sins; but much should surely be forgiven for the beauty they left behind them and the heroism with which they and their last brave Emperor met their end, in one of those glorious epics of world history that has passed into legend and is remembered with equal pride by victors and vanquished alike.
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