Judith Herrin, ‘Byzantium. The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire’.

Medieval historian Herrin provides an accessible and understandable introduction to a complex entity which persisted for 1123 years – Byzantium.  Covering such a vast distance of time, within 400 or so pages, is impossible if one delves into all the details and intricacies of a regime which lasted almost as long as the Roman Western empire if we accept the oral traditions of Rome’s founding (~773 BC to 476 AD).  Because Rome is situated in the so-called ‘West’ (named as such, because it was the western rump that survived the Musulman Jihad stretching from 632 AD to the end of the Ottoman empire), it is given deferential, reverential, almost divine worship far above and beyond its reality or actual contributions.  Byzantium is painted as ‘eastern’, mystical, foreign, strange, distorted and given the attributes of being mendacious, regressive, ‘dark’, corrupted, and far beneath the splendours of the slave-based tracts and military despotism of Rome.  Oddly in the ‘Western’ world, this undying veneration of all things ‘Roman’, is never permitted for the ‘Roman’ Catholic Church. 

There are broadly three views of Byzantium within ‘academia’.  One can see them as ‘phases’ of current cultural thought on the topic, starting in the 16^th century until today.  The first and most prevalent is the Western and especially the ‘Enlightenment’ tradition based on Anglo-Saxon Byzantophobia.  This viewpoint, which is premised on Christophobia, portrays the complexity of a long-lived state in mostly crude and not very erudite terms, depicting the long history of Byzantium as one of war, intrigue, guile, superstition, abstraction, corruption, inferiority, and inevitable failure. 

A second view exemplified by that of Runciman, Norwich and others in the 20^th century revisionist mould, could be classified as excessively ‘Byzantophile’ or Philhellene.  This camp elevates Byzantium far above Western Europe, portraying the Franks and especially the Crusaders in the dimmest possible way as savages, barbarians, cannibals, illiterates, unwashed and unholy.  This viewpoint broadly extols the Byzantines at the expense of their Western co-religionists.  Such themes echoed in ahistorical and popular literary such as Walter Scott’s, The Talisman, which concludes that the Byzantines are far more civilised than the ‘Franks’, but inferior to the Musulmans who are the superiors of the Western Christians, with Scott ennobling the anti-Christian imperialist Saladin, who murdered tens of thousands of Musulmans and Christians in his never-ending Jihad as some sort of chivalric hero.  A more ignorant view of reality is hard to find.

A third viewpoint is of course those who sit in the middle between these two endpoints.  Herrin is one such historian.  This group looks at the good and bad of Byzantium and on balance, surveys its very complicated and rich history, and leaves much impressed with its culture, refinement, technology, artistry, military and political prowess and its longevity, whilst noting its demerits.  Unlike those who venerate all things ‘Roman’, or who whimper and collapse to their knees at all things ‘ancient Greek’, this group is probably best placed to give an accurate assessment of the most Christian empire in history, only equalled in the West by the reasonably short reign of Charlemagne. 

Herrin quotes Braudel and cites the long duration of history.  Any historian who understands Braudel’s magisterial work is well worth a read.  Some facts that I learnt whilst reading this book.

The modern ‘Western’ world would not exist without the shield of Byzantium.  It would have been overrun by either the Arab or Turkish Mahometans.

Byzantium was a creative culture that fused the Roman, the Greek and the Christian into an energetic, forward looking, but deeply religious and self-reflecting empire of action and belief.  It was a unique blend, never equalled in history.  This muscular blend of the pagan and ancient, with the Christian and modern, is why the empire lasted in various shapes and sizes for 1100 years.

Eastern Europe and Russia were Christianised by Byzantium, and this is maybe its most important legacy and cultural achievement.

Fundamental aspects of modern government can find their ancestry in Byzantine governance, including a sophisticated diplomatic service, permanent civilian bureaucracy, detailed record keeping and complex administrative systems and processes.

The grandeur of ceremony, Christian worship, the edifices and Churches, the processions, all informed Western European tradition.

The West inherited its legal system from Byzantium, ideas of a permanent court and legal apparatus; and many artifacts of culture including the fork, advanced educational systems, state investment in the arts and sciences, and modern ideas around trade and its taxation and control (there never was, nor is, ‘free trade’).

Byzantine engineering outclassed the Romans and Greeks and astonished Western visitors.  Aqueducts, fortifications, roads, new cities, bridges and massive buildings such as the domed Hagia Sophia, all of which were present by 800 AD, far outclassed anything that Western Europe could boast of by the 9^th century.

In the time of the Norman, the bastard William ‘the Conqueror’ and 1066, London had maybe 12.000 inhabitants, Paris perhaps 50.000, Rome some 100.000 whilst Constantinople boasted over 500.000, making it the second largest city in world outside of China, after Baghdad.

Byzantium was the crucial bridge between pagan Greece and Rome, and the medieval Christian era.  Libraries of Greek and Roman authors, philosophers, ‘scientists’, naturalists, pagan theologians, existed in Byzantium and were the basis of Musulman and later Western scholarship and debate.  Without this corpus and documentation much knowledge would have been lost.

This book is a very good anodyne for the largely anti-Christian, anti-Byzantine approach found in the West.  Serious scholarship and assessment reach a different set of conclusions when viewing the Byzantine empire.  Herrin does an excellent job at explaining the main themes of Byzantium without getting lost in the maze of details.  A book well worth reading.