City of Fortune

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas
© 2012 Roger Crowley
464 pages

In the north of the Adriatic grew a city built not on land, but upon the water -- whose fortune was earned in transit, by  running the ships that connected Europe with the Orient.  Already a powerful commercial entity at the time of the Fourth Crusade, Venice's actions there would catapult her to empire -- empire based on the broken back of eastern Rome, but empire nonetheless, and she would survive near-defeat and triumph again and again until finally she met her match in the Turks. City of Fortune is a history of the Stato da Màr, the empire of the sea that existed wherever waters run.  A highly narrative history  that focuses on Venice's peak and fighting decline,  City of Fortune is a treat for students of European history as it tells the story of this most singular state.

This book was a particularly rare treat for me because I had no idea how it would end. I knew Venice was built from a swamp and maintained itself through trade, and that it was extensively involved in the crusades as the provider of transportation. I had no idea how powerful it was at its peak, however, and knew nothing of the circumstances of its decline.   The story of Venice is one not of Europe, but of the Mediterranean: Venice, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Turks are its primary actors.   In the beginning Venice was technically a vassal of the eastern empire, commonly called the Byzantine, but  as it made its living by trade the city rarely behaved like a subordinate, frequently engaging in commerce with the constantly-attacked empire's enemies in the middle east. When the Church organized another crusade to redeem Jerusalem from the rising Turks, Venice would become the key agent in derailing the crusade, ultimately sending it to conquer Constantinople instead of Jerusalem, and solidifying Turkic rule in Judea instead of repelling it. Venice's entire economy and much of its citizenry were consumed by the contract with the west to transport their men and material to Jerusalem:  when the west balked at paying in full, Venice decided to use their armies to redeem its gold in other ways, by sacking some of its rival-neighbors.  When some ambiguity over the Byzantine succession presented an opportunity for regime change and rewards in gold, naturally Venice took advantage and carried the crusade toward  Constantinople. Things didn't go as planned, and....well, long story short the west conquered the city, fractured the eastern Roman empire, and left it easy pickings for the Turks as they continued to march west. 

For a time Venice would flourish in its ill-gotten gains:  from the ruins it turned its commercial holdings into a genuine empire, and the wealth of the ancients and the east would pour into Venice.  When like proud Athens it found itself in bitter wars with its neighbors, even being surrounded by a  Genoese fleet, it somehow rebounded. But  nations reap what they sow as well as individuals,  and Venice's empire of the sea was no match for the Turks' increasingly vast holdings in the middle east,  marching through Asia Minor and soon pushing around Venice for possession of islands and seaways.  Venice would attempt to organized a general European defense of the Med, but her own prideful pushiness made her a pariah -- and her attempts at lifting high the cross were laughed at, considering Venice's long history trading with Christendom's foes.   Venice would lose her military might to the Turks in battle after battle, but ultimately it was Portugal who would see the city fall from commercial dominance. Faced with the Turkic domination of the west, the closing of access to India and China, the Portuguese would find new ways east -- and  as the Age of Discovery dawned, Venice's brilliant star would dim. But that's a story for Crowley's other book, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire.


Curiously, for a century or so there existed a lovely hotel in downtown Selma modeled after the Places of the Doges in Venice.  The building was destroyed in the late sixties to  make room for city hall.  A pox on politicians!

The Orthodox Church

The Orthodox Church
© 1963, 1993 Kallistos (Timothy) Ware
368 pages

Who are the Orthodox? To the extent Americans have heard of them, it is through eastern European immigrant communities. Those who paid marginal attention in western civ might remember something called the Great Schism, in which the western and eastern halves of Christendom declared one another excommunicate. While the Catholic west and Orthodox east have continued to drift their separate ways throughout the centuries, they share the same core tradition. In The Orthodox Church, Kalistos Ware delivers a history of the eastern Orthodox, followed by an introduction to its liturgy and devotional practices. He ends by musing on the possibilities and obstacles to communion between the Orthodox and their closest brethren, the Catholics and Anglicans. Although the history is very much dated now, the book having been written shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed and the suppressed church started to reemerge, Ware’s account of the centuries prior is handled attractively and efficiently.

Although Rome initially persecuted the Christian church, by the third century A.D.it had attracted the attention of the emperor Constantine, who declared it legal.Constantine courted the church himself, though (famously) he would not submit to baptism until he lay on his deathbed. Christianity soon became the state religion of the Roman empire, circling the Med, but as Rome aged and withered, division ensued. Barbarian activity in the Balkans and the eruption of Islam made communication increasingly difficult, and soon a purely administrative division between the empire’s western and eastern halves became a cultural one. The western empire and its church became more enmeshed with the fate of the Franks, crowning their king as Emperor,  Frankish influence would extend to theology, as an addition to the Nicene Creed intended as a rebuttal to a local heresy found favor in the west, eventually being adopted by the pope.

That proved to be a problem, as did the pope's authority in general, for his claimed jurisdiction over not merely the Roman see, but the whole of Christendom.  The Nicene Creed was adopted by an ecumenical council at Nicea, representing the entire church; it was pounded out in collaborative labor.  One bishop by himself couldn't alter it simply at will. Ware is remarkably fair-minded about the popes, attributing their beliefs not to villainy or ambition, but to the mere fact that Rome had no western peer.  The pope was the closest thing the west had to a unitive authority, as Charlemagne left behind a mess of warring states.  Secondly, the See of Rome was the only western church with Apostolic credentials, the only one believed to be founded by one of the original followers of Christ. In the east, there were three -- Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – and none were able to claim precedence over the other. The great schism  was thus made possible by the actual divide between the western and eastern parts of the Empire, begun in earnest by the  arguments over how far papal authority extended, and completed when the western Franks sacked Constantinople on the way to yet another crusade.  No forgiveness for this fratricide would follow.

Subsequent chapters cover the conquest of Eastern Rome by the Arabs and later the Turks. The Orthodox church muddled through, largely – it wasn’t until the rise of ISIS that Christians were wholly driven out of places like Iraq and Syria. The most grievous persecutions had a nationalist rather than religious focus – the Armenian genocide, for instance, followed Turkey’s defeat in the Great War.  Following the withering and defeat of Constantinople, Orthodoxy developed new life in eastern Europe, especially in Russia, which wanted to claim itself as the Third Rome. The Russian church would endure its own repression during the Communist years, aside from a brief detente during World War 2.   Turkish  and Russian brutality both drove Orthodox emigrants out of Europe and into the United States, where today it flourishes.

The second half of the book covers Orthodox theology and praxis, both of which more difficult to summarize than politics.   It bears comment on, though, and the Nicene creed is again an example. While the Orthodox objected to the pope single-handedly changing a creed that was created by a congress of the church,  Ware argues that the change itself  also subtly shifted and confused theology.  The change in question was to declare that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son,  which dilutes the role of the Father and makes things more vague. In the essential approach to worship (communal prayer, reading of scriptures, and the Eucharist) the Orthodox and Catholics are very similar,  but there are notable differences. The Orthodox, for instance, worship standing, and most do not employ musical instruments. Icons play a much larger role, being seen as literal windows into heaven ,and used to focus the mind. Mysticism has played a larger role in Orthodox development, as well, though Ware doesn't comment on the tension between it and western scholasticism.

Covering as it does two thousand years  of history and most of Eurasia, The Orthodox Church is impressively ambitious, yet fairly concise. The church's fate under Turkish and Soviet domination are dispatched in single chapters, as is the church's role in the developing civilization of Russia.  It is most helpful in the area of general religious literacy, with a lot of content wrapped up in these 300-odd pages.

In God's Path

In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
© 2015 Robert Hoyland
303 pages

A Roman author referred to the Roman and Persian empires as the two eyes of the world -- but they didn't see the Arabs coming. In the span of a hundred years, a people from the desert wastes between Egypt and Mesopotamia had traveled from Spain to the Indus, bringing together a diversity of nations under one banner and laying waste to empires. History texts usually present a map of expansion as the sudden creation and explosive growth of Islam, but Hoyland argues that's premature.  Instead, he examines the Arab conquests as...the Arab conquests, in which Islam is first the means of an alliance between Arab tribes that allows them to sack two ailing realms, and then is the means of forging their own empire that transcended tribal bounds.  Instead of merely attributing the Arab spring into empire as one motivated by religious zeal, Hoyland examines the Arabs as actors on the historic stage, and dwells on their political skill.

The result is a history that overturns elementary assumptions.  For instance, conquest and conversion were two completely different processes: even a province absolutely integral to the nascent Islamic civilization, Persia, was not majority-Muslim until the 14th century.  (Islamic provincial governors were by no means eager to force conversion:  non-Muslims were taxed by the government.) By preserving the structure of the societies they were conquering -- relying on Christian and Persian scribes, civil officers, etc to retain their roles --  and offering completely secular benefits for joining the Arabs on their globetrotting campaigns, what began as a local city-state quickened into a global phenomenon.  Eventually, the religion of the Arabs, who had become the ruling class, would become the religion of a multitude, evolving along the way. Towards the end Hoyland dips into religious history,  reflecting on how the century of war, mixed defeats and triumphs, and the assimilation of various cultures shaped it. For instance,  he views the bar against images as a way for the Arabs to distinguish themselves against the decadent empires they had supplanted, but especially against the Romans, whose Constantinople twice defeats sieges here.   While there were some brief spots in the strictly historical narrative that rivaled Numbers for being a list of names and places without story to them, Hoyland's insightful commentary more than makes for it, This is a history that illustrates not only the beginning of the Islamic world, but shows some of the shared machinery of empires in general. For a book on conquests, there's comparatively little about the actual execution of battles; for that, a source like Crawford's War of the Three Gods might prove a complement.



Related:

• War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford
• Destiny, Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary

Lost to the West

Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization
© 2009 Lars Brownsworth
329 pages

The Roman empire not not fade quietly into history in 474, when a Gothic warlord decided to run the city of Rome directly instead through a faux-imperial proxy. It went out in a blaze of glory, in an epic battle in which an Emperor himself stood in the line and bid a massing enemy to do its worst.  For Rome continued long after the Empire faded from Italy, and it not only prevailed but flourished against a host of enemies until finally falling a millennium later.  Lost to the West is highly storied introduction to the eastern Roman empire, one that reduces eleven hundred years of war, politics, and religion to three hundred pages. I learned of this book through the author's podcast, "Twelve Byzantine Rulers", and Lost to the West improves on it. Instead of having twelve distinct episodes, Brownsworth moves smoothly through an entire epoch, lingering on leaders and events which were especially impactful. It's essentially a shorter Short History of Byzantium,  even more storied.

For those completely in the dark, the 'eastern' Roman story begins in the third century A.D., when the Emperor Diocletian decided that an empire that wrapped around the entire Mediterranean was more trouble than it was worth, and divided it into administrative halves. His intentions were good, but the move didn't save Rome from the curse of dynastic wars, and when Constantine the Great seized total command, he transformed the entire Empire. Not only did he established a new capital in the east (Constantinople), the better to focus on the realm's Persian foes, but he began the process that turned classical Rome into Christian Rome. His unity didn't hold for long;  distracted by the constant problems of the Balkans and Persia, the Emperor was unable to come to the rescue of the badly-led western realm. Weakened by its own civil wars, the west fell easy prey to rampaging barbarians.  Constantinople would reclaim bits of Italy later on, only to lose them again as the centuries passed, but the heart of the Empire, the heart of western civilization, was fixed in the east.  In comparison, old Italy was a dump, and Europe little more than a wilderness with a few wooden forts occupied by belching brutes.

Religious unity took longer to destroy.  The Bishop of Rome held an esteemed place in Christendom, being one of the five great metropolitans of the Empire with Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople. After the first three fell to the Arabs, however,  Rome and Constantinople were a rivalry of two. While their respective Latin and Greek cultures were different, eventually it was politics that sundered Christendom. The iconoclastic epidemic, for instance, saw the eastern emperor attempting to order Christians throughout the empire to destroy their religious art, either by breaking it or whitewashing murals.  This originated in the emperor's belief that the Empire had become idolatrous, and was being punished by God. To regain divine favor,   Christians should purge themselves of representational art in the manner of the triumphant Muslims and in the ancestral way of the Jews.   The eastern church was coerced into going along with the emperor, but the Roman bishop was incensed that a secular figure would dictate doctrine to the church -- and order the destruction of soul-edifying art, to boot!  So began a merry round of excommunication and growing hostility between east and west, politically and religiously, that was made permanent when a western army sacked Constantinople on its way to redeem Jerusalem yet again.  That tragedy, the Fourth Crusade, came after the 'official' schism, but the eastern Romans suffered so at the hands of the west that they would never submit to the Roman papacy. "Better the Turk's turban," they snarled, "than Rome's miter."

Lost to the West is a story of long, gradual decline, occasionally arrested by great leaders like Justinian, and occasionally hasted by abysmal ones and the plague.  The sporadic maps tell the story; from an empire that appeared to be united Rome at its height, the east declined under constant outside attack and civil war to controlling the  city of Constantinople, a bit of Greece, and bits and pieces of Asia Minor's shoreline. Constantinople would beat foes again and again, but so long lived was it that it would have to face them as they revived, zombie-like.  Eventually woe came from the east: despite surviving the Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and Seljuk Turks,  the Ottoman Turks were able to wear down the great walls of the city with cannon and seize a prize lusted after for centuries by the Islamic world.  New Rome went down fighting, however, achieving an end far more glorious than both  western Rome and the Ottoman Empire which succeeded it.

This is a fast run through a millennium, and for me it was mostly review. I enjoyed Brownsworth's voice, though his title is curiously chosen. He hints at the topic from time to time; in both the defense of Europe against eastern armies and  Constantinople's preservation and increase of knowledge lost to the west during its brooding Gothic phase, but never devotes a lot of attention to a thesis that Byzantium 'saved' the east.  Influence is  covered a little more in books like Sailing from Byzantium, though.


Related:

• Constantinople: the Forgotten Empire, Isaac Asimov; Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells; A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich; The War of the Three Gods: Rome, Persia, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford.
• The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins

This week: the usual suspects

Well, dear readers, it's another month! I have a serious itch for science and science fiction at the moment, so I have no less than five potential science reads stacked up now, and three potential SF books. Among the numbers...Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, and Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chromosomes.   What about science fiction? Well, there's some of H.G. Wells' less well known novels, and  perhaps something newer.

I recently finished The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam.   It is a brief but highly detailed history of the last Romano-Persian war, one in which the great powers of the classical world mauled each other.  Rome nearly perished here, because while the Persians were sweeping into Syria and Judea, tribes in the Balkans began raiding against Constantinople. Eventually the Persians would be stopped, and even subjected to raids in their heartland, and the statuo quo ante bellum stored.  No sooner had the armies retired, however, than came armies from Arabia...and by the time the ancients realized these weren't just the usual Bedouin raids, all of Persia was falling and the Romans were again stripped of most of their territory outside of Anatolia. The second half of the book is dedicated to Islam's early military victories, with abundant maps that showcase the solid maneuvering of commanders like Khalid.  The book is chiefly about combat, with some politics mixed in as the Persians weakened themselves through civil war.  I intend on reading a fair few more books about the 'middle world' later on.

Since I am in the area, I may as well mention a book I read a few weeks ago, Facing East by Frederica Mathewes-Green. recounts a year in the life of a small Orthodox mission, one created by six families that include the author's newly-minted priest of a husband. The M-Gs, as the author refers to her family later on, are both converts to the faith, and throughout this piece she reflects on the way her experience has changed in the last three years, as she and her husband begin to soak in the liturgy and live the Orthodox life more deeply. While this is not a formal introduction to Orthodoxy, or even a conversion testimonial, Mrs. M-G often provides exposition about the what and why of service. Like the faith itself, however, this tale is more experiential than epistemological. We encounter the sacraments -- Baptism, for instance -- not through lectures but through the lives of the congregants, communicated in the intimate and awe-filled style of the author. Short though it may be, Facing East provides a hint of how deep a well the Orthodox tradition is. The mission of Holy Cross may be small and relegated to renting a space that has to be evacuated every Sunday afternoon to make room for the weekday tenants, but in their religious life they are as firmly established as any of the grandest metropolitan seats or parishes across the world.    I'll probably have couple of more books about Eastern Orthodoxy as the year goes on.  For the moment, however...SCIENCE!

The Lost History of Christianity

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- And How It Died
© 2008 Philip Jenkins
315 pages

For the first millennium of the church's history, Europe was less Christendom than a dismissed backwater. The heart of the faith was its fount in the middle east, where it saturated the landscape and spread through two empires across the vast expanse of Eurasia. Within five hundred years of Christianity's millennial birthday, however, its reach had vanished, lost in political upheaval and newly arrived competition. Though advertising itself as a history of the global church,   Lost History is principally about religious transformation  in the middle east, with Christianity as its case model. 

There is immediate intrigue in Jenkins' history merely for the fact that his primary subjects are unrecognizable to most as Christian.  Around the Mediterranean,  Rome -- in the person of the emperor -- maintained a faith common to all.  Achieving and enforcing orthodoxy was the reason Constantine urged on the Council of Nicaea. Outside the empire, however,  Christianity grew wild, running bramble-like clear to Asia.  Aside from stray missionaries from the Latin and Greek church,  most of the Christians covered here belonged to the Nestorian church,  which retained an orthodox-like hierarchy outside the authority of  the Greco-Roman sphere, with hundreds of metropolitans and bishops. How much of "Christianity" really survives the trek to Asia is a question Jenkins does not pursue, though the mention of a "second Jesus" buried in India allows a lot of room for doubt.   The Nestrian branch found a particularly cozy home in the Persian realm, safe from Orthodux rebuke, but the African church would vanish almost overnight, save for the impressively resilient Copts. 

The rise of Islam set the stage for the middle-eastern church's downfall, but it was not strictly a matter of religious competition.  Jenkins records Islam and Christianity meshing at first; considering the  power of Arian-like sects which effectively denied the divinity of Jesus,  they shared much more common ground than not. (So much so that medieval personalities denounced Muhammad not as a false prophet, but as a schismatic!) The golden age of  Islam was built on such ground,  flourishing through  the communities of Christian Syrian scribes and researchers.As Islam grew in self-confidence, however, and especially after it began brawling with outside powers, the  Christians within its midst were viewed as suspect. When the Black Death reared its head for the first time, a wave of persecution followed --  Christians playing the part of scapegoat that was assigned to Jews in Europe. When new powers arrived on the scene, like the Mongols and Turks, they frequently inaugurated a new era of religious oppression; the Crusades were a response  to Turkish abuses, not the nigh half-century old occupation of Jerusalem by Islamic forces.  (Interestingly, the Mongols who destroyed the high water mark of golden-age Islam, Baghdad, first persecuted  Islam and then became its champions, persecuting Christians.) Political stress turned into religious persecution again and again, a theme that runs  clear to the 20th century, when an on-the-ropes Turkey decided to rid itself of minorities with suspect loyalties. The Armenian genocide was the result.  Early Christian activity in China and Japan perished after upsurges in nationalism, as well.

This history of religious transformation in the middle east is then used by Jenkins to examine the life of religions in general, their 'struggle to survive'.  Though Christianity and Islam were rivals, they wore off on one another:  the Eastern Orthodox church's iconclastic period (that ghastly preview of Puritanism) marks Islamic influence, and mosques modeled themselves on the architecture of churches. Such architectural borrowing went the other way in Spain, where rebuilding churches incorporated elements of Islamic design  into their structure.  Even after Christianity vanished from an area, it left its mark: in rural Turkey, for instance, parents continued to have their children baptized to ensure the blessing of God.  Jenkins  speculates on various reasons regions thrive or perish amid competition; he notes that the church in Egypt became part of the culture, while in other parts of Africa it merely existed as outposts, like Roman military encampments that disappeared when the Romans left. Those churches were sustained from without, rather than from within. Faiths can also hedge their bets by expanding;  when Christianity virtually perished in the middle east, it continued to flourish in Europe; even as it fades in Europe, it grows again in Africa.

All this fairly interesting, though the book has certain frustrations. Belief, for Jenkins, is a moot point;  Nestorian doctrine or what Jacobites practiced, none of this matters. All the reader is really given is politics and labels; there were people here, they called themselves Christians, and then they were killed.  Jenkins has a peculiar understanding of Christianity, announcing to the reader that understanding the early church is impossible because Christianity was driven from its home region.  Since when is Christianity like Temple Judaism or Islam, fixated on a certain patch of earth?  What is revealed is how unimaginative humans are at creating ways to persecute one another:  Just as Christians were made to wear patches identifying them as an underclass and forced to dismount at the approach of a Muslim, so in the 20th century German Jews were made to wear patches and blacks had to vacate the sidewalk at the approach of a white.  One wonders how ubiquitous these shaming behaviors are -- did the Japanese practice them in China, for instance? The Lost History of Christianity is certainly relevant, given the ongoing slaughter of innocents at the hands of ISIS. It is a fascinating history of the middle east's religious evolution,  though of limited use for truly learning about the ancient church outside of Rome and Constantinople.

The Egyptians

The Egyptians
© 1997 Barbara Watterson
368 pages

"We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus, and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us. " (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage) 

The Egyptians surveys the entire course of Egyptian history, from ancient settlements to the 1990s, in a mere 300 pages. Were this not ambitious enough, Watterson does not limit herself to mere politics, but includes separate sections on religion, architecture, law, and economy.  The approach is reminiscent of Will Durant's symphonic history. Pyramid-like, The Egyptians is bottom-heavy:   two-thirds of the book is devoted to the ancients, with the Roman, Christian, Islamic, and modern periods sharing the last third together. The scale is immense, as it has been Egypt's fortune or misfortune to be an combatant or an object of interest to nearly every great power around the Mediterranean. Egypt's longevity is such that she has been conquered by two wholly different Persias, an epoch apart.  In the beginning Egypt was star of her own story, an insular union of two kingdoms fixed on the Nile; after outside invasion by the Hyksos, Egypt overcame her conquerors and became an empire in her own right. The land of the Nile would go the way of all empires, however, falling to Persia, then the Macedonians and their successors -- Rome, Constantinople, the caliphate, and Turkey. Through history Egypt has also been the plaything of other empires, like the French and British. Even Hitler attempted conquest, while trying to rescue Italian pretensions of a resurrected Rome.  Aside from a brief interlude during the Islamic civil wars, Egypt had to wait until the 20th century to be ruled by her own people again. Despite the generations of new reigning powers and the trauma they inflicted --  Ptolemies are utterly horrifying in their abuse, what with one king marrying his sister, then his niece, then murdering his own child and sending the body to his sister--wife to taunt her --  Egypt endures. Given the chaos of Egypt in recent years, such resilience is a hopeful sign.  

Sailing from Byzantium

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
© 2005 Colin Wells
368 pages           

       Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium  examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance,  Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization.  Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing  does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent's demise.  The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus.  Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East's richest provinces, and  Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack.  The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid;   having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and  as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium's. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow.  The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers,  connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It's quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in. 

A Short History of Byzantium

A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich
© 1997 John Julius Norwich
431 pages

            Rome fell in a.d. 474? Tell that to the Byzantines, who for centuries persisted in being an afterimage of the classical world, evolving through the medieval before their collapse a century after the west had fallen to barbarism. A Short History of Byzantium takes in over a thousand years of history, from Diocletian’s administrative division of the Roman Empire into two halves to the fall of the great city Constantinople to the Turks.  There is great difficulty in a hurried survey like this,  subjecting the reader to a tide of dates and names, but John Julius Norwich is a storyteller; under his pen, some  events, and some people,  are so outstanding that they serve as landmarks for the rest.

            A Short History of Byzantium begins with a story more familiar, for the first chapters are a history of the Roman Empire as the west remembers it: Roman. Constantine the Great moved the center of the Roman Empire to  the  east, founding a new Rome on the site of an old trading-city, Byzantium,  a city that would later assume his name: Constantinople.  The move created a fresh start, but allowed the Emperor to focus on the nation’s rising threats:  powers to the east, especially the Parthians. Rome vs. Persia; it’s a battle between titans of the classical era.  The book’s scope is such, though, that the classical gives way to a world at its conclusion which is more like ours; we see here the birth of the Holy Roman Empire,  the rise of Islam, the explosive expansion of the Ottoman Turks.  Throughout all this tumultuous change was the Empire,  warring against and making common cause with these changing powers through the ages.  Byzantium was also witness and party to Christianity’s evolution.  The effective founder of the Byzantine heritage, Constantine, was the man who legitimized Christianity within the Empire as a whole, and put it on the path to becoming the binding religion of the west as a whole. But that binding could not quite stand the stressors of the ages, the gulf of cultural differences between Rome proper and the east, and Christianity once unified eventually severed into two halves, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. But the cut was never a clean one; instead, there were tiny fractures that opened and closed through the centuries, forever dynamic but trending in the end toward rupture.  

            The empire itself is the subject of considerable interest, somehow holding on through the centuries despite the staggering variety of challenges it faced. It defended itself from one invasion after another, from Bulgars, Goths, Vikings, and later on Arabs and Turks, and relied on the oddest allies. In resisting the Norman attack on southern Italy, for instance, it employed disgruntled Anglo-Saxons who had left England in disgusted after  the Normans conquered it. A nation surviving a thousand years of history must have some institutional stability, but it is hard to see after this survey;  only 88 people held the throne in that span,  but they seem to go with great haste,  and often bloodily. At times even western Rome appears sane by comparison, though that’s excepting monsters like Caligula and Nero. Not that Byzantium is without its characters, listing as emperor men like “Michael the Sot”.  There are utter boors and monks, noble heroes and complete, degenerate cowards.   There are women, too, some who reign through their husbands, and some who reign in their own right.  They make for a colorful cast, and though I knew the general trend of the story (an image of the Turks besieging Constantinople has haunted my mind since seeing it in grade school), the turns it took were surprising indeed. The empire rose and fell through the centuries, contending against all manner of adversaries, but the fatal dagger came at the hands of those who ought to have been its defenders; the Crusaders, who in the Fourth Crusade, sacked the city. Even the fluke victory the Turks inflicted on it years prior did not break the empire so badly as that sacking. 

    This was in short quite a treat, exposing me to a world of information previously hidden away, but of utter interest. From the word go, Byzantine history was wrapped up in the west; how its memory became lost is a puzzle, considering how important western powers viewed it almost until the last, straining to wed into its line to unite the  German 'Roman' empire and the empire of Old.  Entertaining in many respects, it also delivers a history of Europe from another aspect, and is quite commendable.

Related:

• Twelve Byzantine Rulers, Lars Brownsworth. Based heavily on the book, as it turns out.

A Ghostly Watch and Wait: A Reading

"The most hideous scenes of all, however, were enacted in St. Sophia. Matins were already in progress when the beserk conquerors were heard approaching. Immediately the great bronze doors were closed, but the Turks soon smashed their way in. The poorer and less attractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot; the remainder were led off to the Turkish camps to await their fate. The priests continued with the Mass until they were skilled at the altar, but there are among the faithful those who still believe that one or two of them gathered up the patens and chalices and mysteriously disappeared into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they will remain until Constantinople becomes once again a Christian city, when they will resume the service at the point at which it was interrupted." 

 p. 380, "A Short History of Byzantium". John Julius Norwich

 Throughout October I listened to Twelve Byzantine Rulers, a podcast series giving a history of the Eastern Roman Empire through leaders whose reign punctuated its waxing and waning. The last episode on Constantine XI is worth listening to itself,  if only for the descriptions the last Emperor, going down fighting, and of the legend of priests 'melting into the walls' of the church, waiting for the city's redemption so that their shades could resume the Great Thanksgiving.  It's the kind of legend that makes for the very best of ghost stories and reminds one of the legends of Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa, both of whom are said to be resting in some ethereal realm until the moment they are needed. 

The Belt of Gold

The Belt of Gold
© 1984 Cecelia Holland
305 pages

     Two Frankish brothers returning home from a pilgrim to Jerusalem become unwittingly involved in a palace coup when they rescue a damsel in distress on the road to Constantinople.  When one is murdered in an inn, the other -- Hagen the White. whose lord is Charlemagne -- vows vengeance.  Alone in a Roman empire that never fell, derided as a barbarian, Hagen's efforts to find his brother's assailants take him into the Imperial Palace itself, into the service of the Empress Irene.  There, navigating the machinations of political conspiracy as well as the vast city of Constantinople,  he struggles to sort out the truth while becoming increasingly undone by love for one of the Empress's servants.

The Belt of Gold is a tale of Byzantine power-plays, interwoven with romance and lots of chariot-racing.  The sporting scenes are used to good effect, not just included to show off research but providing a source of intrigue and later, the scene of the novel's climax.  Hagen is a suitable hero, primally powerful, ruggedly simple, and operating from a straightforward moral code. Keep faith with your lord and friends, do good by them, and kill those who try to kill you.  He's the relief in a cast of schemers, who make plans even in bed with one another (and there are a few pillow scenes), though not dumb. He has wiles of his own, but they don't involve manipulating others.  The Belt of Gold is instantly interesting for its setting of the Byzantine empire, whose subjects are a wonder to Hagen and ourselves. They live in Hagen's world, but they also seem otherworldly; their heads are filled with stories long forgotten by the west, and carry on a tradition since faded away.  Hagen's quest to avenge his brother and the intrigue stirred up by a man planning to seize the throne provide an easy opportunity to escape into this exotic place for a few days.  Holland's research seems to have emphasized the geography of Constantinople and the horseraces, but the main characters in the palace plot did exist,  and did attempt a coup. The Empress Irene was a fascinating political character,  more vicious in real life than depicted here (for the most part).   For the reader looking for a change of scenery -- or one deliberately seeking the Byzantines, as was I -- this may be just the touch.

Related:

• Twelve Byzantine Rulers, a history podcast by Lars Brownworth. I just completed listening to the series, and Irene has her own episode. This is what whetted my appetite, of course, and if I'm still hungry for it after I complete my TBR books, Brownsworth's Lost to the West, a history of the Byzantines, may make an appearance..
• Constantinople: the Forgotten Empire, Isaac Asimov. Before Brownsworth, the sum of my Byzantine knowledge. 
• Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa series. Obviously, set in western Rome, but you can't get away from palace intrigues in a series that climaxes with Caesar. 

Constantinople: the Forgotten Empire

Constantinople: the Forgotten Empire

© Isaac Asimov 1970

289 pages

The history of the eastern Roman empire, ruled from Constantinople, has long been a weak point in my own historical literacy. When I spotted a book on its history by Isaac Asimov in my library's catalog, I was delighted at the prospect of introducing myself to both Byzantine history and Isaac Asimov's history work. Unfortunately I won't be able to read more of it -- these books, like most of his work, are out of print and the only copies on Amazon are held by opportunists who offer them only at obscene prices.

The old city of Byzantium's history as told in section one's six chapters became the history of the Roman empire when the Emperor Constantine decided to rebuild it in his own image, creating a "New Rome" out of a city on the straits between southeastern Europe and Asia minor. It gained more importance under the reign of Diocletian, when he divided the old Roman empire into four administrative areas headed by two emperors -- one in the west, and one in the east at "New Rome which is called Constantine's City", or Constantinople.

Although the western empire eventually transformed into the European feudal world and officially died in 474, the empire in the east continued long after -- for nearly a thousand years, before finally being done in by the rising Ottoman Turks. In my own experience, histories of the Roman empire have referred to the eastern empire in a very passive way, as if it were only the echo of the west's once-ringing bell. Although Asimov is only able to give the empire a summative treatment, its history still emerges as fascinating and unique, deserving of more attention. There are many interesting characters and stories here -- like the emperor who saw his empire nearly destroyed by the Parthians, who triumphed over them and restored his dominion only to see it eviscerated again by Islam's armies before his death -- and Asimov makes me think of issues I've never before pondered. I never for once have given any thought to how the crowning of Charlemagne as "Holy Roman Emperor" by the western pope might be received by emperor in the west, who arguably has a better claim to being holy, Roman, and imperial. It also raises more questions, as answers often do: while I found out how Christianity spread to Russia (and why it is more East Orthodox than Roman Catholic), I then wondered what it replaced in Russia.

For all the story's interest, it is not a story with a happy ending. Although the Byzantine empire at its height resembles the Roman empire at its height (with much less influence in Europe), over the course of a thousand years it is weakened by constant political intrigue from within (monks seemed to have held a great deal of political power and ambition for more) and the constant attack of enemies from without. "Barbarians" in the Balkans seem to be an ever present problem, the western polities view the old Empire with scorn and hatred (demonstrated by their vicious sack of the city in 1204), and Asia provides a merry list of rivals starting with the Parthians and culminating with the Turks -- who destroy the withered remains of the state in a move that is more redundant than dramatic. Asimov's epilogue comments that while the western empire left an imposter "ghost" of sorts in the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines left their own imposter-ghost in the form of the Russian empire, who married one of the last Byzantine princesses and assumed the title tsar, from caesar.

This was a very readable introduction to Byzantine history. I recommend it, but good luck finding it.

So take me back to Constantinople

No, you can't go back to Constantinople

Been a long time gone, Constantinople

Why did Constantinople get the works?

That's nobody's business but the Turks