New Rome

Byzantium: The Early Centuries.
by John Julius Norwich.
Knopf. 408 pp. $29.95.

In one of those eminently quotable and hopelessly prejudiced assessments of which he was such a master, Edward Gibbon in Chapter 53 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire described “the reproach and shame” of the Byzantine empire, “a degenerate people”:

They held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony; they read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action. In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity, and a succession of patient disciples became in their turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation.

That caricature has dominated historiography, especially in the English-speaking world, as for example in the judgment of W.E.H. Lecky with which Lord Norwich begins his introduction to this book: “Of that Byzantine empire the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed . . . a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.”

During the 20th century, thanks to the work of scholars across the map from Kiev to Dumbarton Oaks, the caricature has been giving way to a much more balanced picture: a good index of the change is to compare the first edition of Volume 4 of The Cambridge Medieval History (1936), “The Eastern Roman Empire,” with the second edition (1966), which had to appear as a double volume. It is the results of the more recent study by such scholars as these that John Julius Norwich, a professional officer of the British Foreign Service whose earlier books include A History of Venice, seeks to present here in the first of a projected three-volume series on Byzantium. As he explains somewhat diffidently (and perhaps a bit disingenuously), “This book makes no claim to academic scholarship.” What it does claim is to set forth a connected narrative of the transition from the Roman empire when its seat was in Rome to the Roman empire whose seat was in Constantinople, “New Rome”; and he concludes his narrative, appropriately enough, with the emergence of an even newer Roman empire, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Old Rome on Christmas Day in 800 CE.

Of the eighteen chapters in the book, the four dealing with what he calls the “extraordinary career” of the Emperor Justinian I are in many ways the most effective. As described by Norwich, Justinian emerges as a noble and gifted, but flawed and ultimately tragic figure. His dream of reuniting East and West in a revived Roman empire was not only a failure in its outcome, but probably an illusion in its very conception. His empress, Theodora, was the subject of character assassination by the Byzantine historian Procopius (whom Norwich rightly calls a “sanctimonious old hypocrite”), which was pruriently repeated by Gibbon, but in fact she and Justinian were “the sole and supreme rulers of the Byzantine empire”—and, Norwich comments, “the plural is important.”

Because of the author’s interest in art and architecture, the role of Justinian as the great builder of Constantinople engages his attention at some length. It is, understandably, the building of Hagia Sophia that receives the most space. On the other hand, Justinian’s project of “a complete recodification of the Roman law,” which was to influence the subsequent history of civil and canon law for many centuries, is accorded only a scant paragraph.

None of this is very novel and there is indeed very little in the book as a whole that is. The chapters of The Cambridge Medieval History mentioned earlier contain vastly greater amounts of information, and the older history of A.A. Vasiliev (1928 and 1952) is more balanced. The bibliography contains relatively few recent works, even in English, and in a field where European scholars have made such major contributions it is shocking to find not a single title in German, not even to mention works in Russian or Serbian.

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I am not merely making a point of personal privilege as a historian of the development of Christian doctrine when I express my disappointment that neither in the chapters on Justinian nor in the earlier ones on Constantine—nor, to tell the truth, anywhere else—does Norwich enable his readers to understand the centrality of doctrinal issues in the entire life of Byzantium. He admires Byzantine religious art, and he obviously rejoices that the iconoclasts were defeated at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787; but he does not expound with any credibility the fascinating if convoluted argumentation of the defenders of the icons, whose fundamental thesis was that by the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in the man Jesus Christ, God Himself had decisively reinterpreted the meaning of the second commandment, because now there was a living image of whom it was possible and legitimate to make an icon or image in turn.

Norwich examines the cultural, linguistic, geographical, and political factors in the eventual separation of East and West, symbolized by the coronation of Charlemagne; but when he comes to the religious and intellectual issues over which they disputed, the best he can do is to observe, rather wanly. “That a plebeian mob should be inflamed to fury not by political slogans but by such questions as the relation of the Father to the Son or the Procession of the Holy Ghost puts a greater strain on our understanding, but it is true nonetheless.” Whether this puts such a strain on our understanding or not, it is, it seems to me, the task of the historian, and specifically of the historian of Byzantium, to make use of close textual analysis combined with imagination to suggest just why it might have been that “such questions” seemed so important.

The account in this volume unfortunately closes just before the decades in which Byzantium was to make its most important geopolitical mark on the history of Europe and of the world, with the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity by the “apostles” Saints Cyril and Methodius, who were sent to the Slavic lands by the Byzantine emperor Michael III in 862. The conversion of Rus’ (which refers in the first instance to the Ukraine, not to Muscovite Russia) in 988 was part of the eventual outcome of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission, and the division of the Slavs between Old Rome and New Rome had consequences that can be seen in the dispatches emanating from Warsaw and Lvov even as we speak. Yet Lord Norwich’s neglect of the doctrinal issues in Eastern Orthodoxy is matched by his inattention to the details of the Byzantine liturgy—which was, after all, the raison d’être for all those churches, and for the icons. As a result, the reader who turns to this book in an effort to understand what made Russia so different from the West long before Lenin will not find much help.

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