The hardest course to deliver at a university is a first-year survey-course: no previous knowledge on the part of the students can be assumed, and the lecturer must decide upon the most important themes, choose their most salient and interesting aspects and refrain from confusing students with alternative theories. In comparison how easy appears a graduate course! The writers of Very Short Introductions are faced with much the same difficulties, which are exaggerated by a limit of roughly 150 pages. This latest volume contains seven chapters supplemented by ten black-and-white illustrations, five simple maps, three pages of references, a brief bibliography and an index. Misprints are few and should never trouble a reader except perhaps for the momentarily mystifying ‘Truce Cross’ of the index.
S. must be congratulated in presenting his readers with a very clear and up-to-date survey of his subject. They must, nonetheless, be warned of one thing, which S. himself bluntly states: ‘Much of the emphasis within this book is on warfare and its impact on Byzantine politics and culture … not because I regard [other] topics as unimportant, but rather because I address them in so much detail in my other writings’ (pp. xv–xvi). The writer of an introduction for readers who for the most part know very little or nothing of Byzantium should give a more balanced emphasis to the varied topics and not minimise attention to certain topics simply because he may be tired of writing about them. Monasticism, so important an institution for the Byzantines, is barely touched upon; Byzantium outside the Greek-speaking world is almost completely ignored. Very scanty help is given to readers in finding sources of information on such topics, and on so important a subject as economics, for instance, A. Laiou's three-volume The Economic History of Byzantium (2002) is never mentioned.
In his first chapter S. decries the traditional opinion of Byzantium as ‘a prison of the intellect and soul’ and ‘politically corrupt and pietistic’ (p. 3: this view, still widely held by the general public in the West, was never, however, that of Eastern Europe); and emphasises that the Byzantines considered and called themselves Romans. He briefly traces the change in the nature of the Roman Empire to the end of the fourth century, largely through Diocletian and Constantine, and then tackles the vexed question of the latter's conversion from solar henotheism to Christianity. He rightly puts the date of Christianity becoming the official religion of the Empire as the late fourth century rather than during the reign of Constantine, but still seems to accept the story of the emperor's conversion by the miracle the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge (which could well be a later fabrication).
Earlier Roman patriotism had been largely to inhabitants’ native cities, but increasingly from the time of Constantine the empire became Constantinople-centric, and S.’s account of the development of this city (pp. 19–40) is very good, although one is left wondering about life in other cities like Thessalonica and Antioch, never mind the countryside. Chapter 3 is a masterly survey of the fundamental changes in Byzantium, political, administrative, social, military and religious, up into the later seventh century, which modern scholars often characterise as ‘the End of Antiquity’. Particularly welcome is his emphasis upon innovation and creativity in all these areas, although he could have mentioned that the development of Christian theology to attempt to explain the problems largely not even recognised in the New Testament is mainly a Byzantine rather than a Western European achievement. He also necessarily surveys the mostly external causes for all these changes before devoting his next chapter to just one – Islam, Byzantine attitudes towards that religion, iconoclasm, the Empire's life-and-death struggle with the Muslims’ territorial advances and, eventually, with the fragmentation of the Islamic world by the late ninth century, the Empire's slow and modest assertion of its own power.
Chapters 5 and 7 tell the story of the remaining centuries of the Empire, but this is prefaced by a few very important pages on the history of Byzantine diplomacy, how the Empire was able ‘to punch above its weight’ through a constant analysis of its enemies’ strengths and weaknesses. S. does not point out, however, that the contempt for this in Western Europe, still evident today in the signification of the opprobrious word ‘byzantine’, was largely engendered by crusaders from the West, for whom fighting was often the only profession (apart from the Church) open to them and for many of whom personal glory was their main goal, in contrast to the Byzantines, who tried to ensure national survival with minimum loss of life and rarely glorified individual prowess. S. does rightly admit, however, that two of the measures taken were to prove disastrous: first, as a counter to the loss of Anatolia to the Turks, Byzantium's instigation of the first crusade led eventually to the sack of the city by the West in the infamous fourth crusade; and, later, the concession of trading rights to Italian city-states in return for military aid severely weakened its own economic resources and culminated in the capture of the capital by the Turks in 1453.
The most intriguing chapter is ‘Text, Image, Space, and Spirit’ (Chapter 6), in which S. shows, especially in literature, that, despite the Byzantines’ admiration for the Classical past and their professed conservatism, they were, in fact, very innovative within their accepted contours (but so, of course, were the ancient Greeks, at least before the Hellenistic Age, with their emphasis upon refining their traditions rather than breaking away from them). He discusses the wealth of linguistic registers and emphasises that of the ‘high style’ imitating the no-longer spoken Classical Greek, but he perhaps underestimates the number of people with the knowledge and intelligence to appreciate it: how, otherwise, for instance, can one understand why from the period from 1280 to 1453 there survive more than one manuscript per year of the linguistically highly difficult odes of the ancient poet Pindar? Mention is made of innovative types of history, but not of the outstanding example here, Michael Psellos’ Chronographia, which ascribes causation to individual character, or Anna Komnene's encomiastic Alexiad, which contains many vivid and emotional scenes and descriptions of individual personalities. A few examples could also have been given of the frequent subtlety of works in this register; and, while S. is right in discussing the breakdown in literary genres (to which the Byzantines still paid lip-service), it would have been instructive to mention that writers were not averse from indulging in a huge literary range including even theological jokes and bawdy humour. The visual arts are very summarily treated, and although mention is made of Theophanes the Greek, his art is not only ‘intense spiritualization’ (p. 118) but also, through its treatment of light, an impressionism distinct from the Roman popular and the French scientific forms. ‘[L]ate Byzantine art … equalled and paralleled that of contemporary Italy’ (ibid). Yes, but what of its probable influence on it? And, later, what of El Greco, schooled in the Byzantine and Cretan school of icon-painting? What of the quite unclassical love for variety in architectural column-capitals, so marvellously demonstrated in Anicia Juliana's St Polyeuktos? These and other opportunities of stimulating modern interest in Byzantium in many other areas (e.g. musical innovation, hospitals, charity, the position of women) have been missed.
The first Very Short Introduction was M. Beard's and J. Henderson's Classics, published in 2000: Byzantium is the 437th, but surely, despite this reviewer's reservations, S.’s little book will help to ensure that the gap in the public's respective interest in these subjects that one may infer from those ordinal numbers will be substantially reduced in the future.
