Putting Byzantium Back on the Map

—————————————————— VLADA STANKOVIĆ —————————————————— PUTTING BYZANTIUM BACK ON THE MAP ————————— OFFPRINT MODERN GREEK STUDIES YEARBOOK A PUBLICATION OF MEDITERRANEAN, SLAVIC AND EASTERN ORTHODOX STUDIES Minneapolis, Minnesota Volume 32/33, 2016/2017 PUTTING BYZANTIUM BACK ON THE MAP by Vlada Stanković University of Belgrade A SCHOLARLY field is defined by many factors, among them subject matter and its institutional and intellectual traditions; its status within the broader scholarship; and its relevance to contemporary political and social issues. In all these aspects, Byzantine studies have been something of a scholarly outsider, when compared to similar disciplines, particularly to classical and Western European medieval studies. Moreover, the very character of the Byzantine Empire is still being debated. With just over a century of institutionalized scholarly tradition, Byzantine studies are a relatively recent discipline, with a modest number of experts, indeed, given the complex and ever-changing nature of the polity that lasted over a thousand years and its diverse cultural production. The failure of Byzantine scholars to prove the relevance of studying an empire that ceased to exist over half a millennium ago led to doubts over the purpose of Byzantine studies in the modern world and its survival on the margins of other disciplines. One consequence of this is a seemingly elitist selfisolationism of students of the Eastern Roman Empire from innovative currents in other fields that are perceived and usually discarded as just temporarily fashionable intellectual exercises. The series Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy from Lexington Books was conceived as an attempt to check these negative trends. The desired result would be twofold: to present in innovative ways the history and civilization of the Byzantine Empire within its natural historical context of a broader European Middle Ages; and to make a case for the importance and relevance of studying all the various aspects of Byzantine history and civilization as obvious elements for understanding the premodern world—and many aspects of our contemporary world. The series is the fruit of almost two decades of reflection, of thinking about and working on different aspects of Byzantine history and culture, goaded by frustration with the state of affairs in the field but also inspired by the realization of the amazing potential the discipline holds. It is our hope that the Byzantium series, and the reasoning behind it presented below, will spark discussion among scholars of the Byzantine 399 400 Vlada Stanković Empire and the broader eastern Mediterranean and raise interest in new approaches and understanding of the various features of the Byzantine world. Two books that appeared forty-five years ago changed in many respects the scholarly method and approach in studying medieval Western and Eastern European civilization, challenging the views and general perception predominant since the time of the Enlightenment of the Middle Ages as the unchangeable, backward period dominated by simplistic and rigorous church dogmas that hindered the progress of Europe toward modernity. Each book had in its own way reshaped, in somewhat opposite directions, the chronological and geographical borders of the Middle Ages and offered new paths in studying and understanding the premodern world that run contrary to the strictly positivistic historiographical obsession with facts. But the difference in the scholarly response to these two books and, consequently, the effect each had on the development of medieval studies throw an insightful and thought-provoking light on the development of historical thinking over the last half century. This widened the gap between the scholarship on the European West and that on the European East, and their respective results, quality, innovativeness, quantity, and popularity. Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971) opened the flood gates through which the new approaches, sensibilities, and orientation toward cultural history overwhelmed historiographic narrative and established new topics and areas of research that were previously barely touched in the wake of Fernand Braudel’s longue durée (long duration) process-oriented views of the early modern Mediterranean. With his path-breaking shattering of the ossified artificial chronological barriers and by shifting from facts to broadly understood culture, Brown and his followers created the most vibrant and innovative field in the historiography of the premodern world. They accomplished this by focusing on processes and the cultural backdrop instead of strictly political events during the transitional period from the middle of the second to the middle of the eighth century. The innovation of Brown’s approach was underscored by renaming this period as “Late Antiquity,” thus escaping the inherited a priori negative reverberations of the term “Middle Ages,” even with an addition of the disclaimer “Early” in front of it. On the other hand, Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971) offered a provocative, even if somewhat ad hoc, redefinition primarily of the Byzantine Orthodox religious heritage among the Slavic peoples, by creating an illusion of cultural if not political unity of the “Eastern European World” in Byzantine and post-Byzantine times. Obolensky’s idea, however, suffered from a lack of clarity in distinguishing broader culture from the purely religious aspect of Byzantine influence over the vast region of Eastern Europe, and from randomness of the analyzed examples from the thousand-year dynamic history of the wider Byzantine world (500–1453). Never quite receiving the response it deserved—which in itself was telling about anti-innovative tendencies in the field of Byzantine studies—Obolensky’s Commonwealth was mainly perceived as little more than a modern, post-World War search for the roots of the seem- Putting Byzantium Back on the Map 401 ingly unbridgeable differences between Europe’s West and East in both political and cultural aspects. And while these two books in many ways defy comparison, their different impacts on current scholarship is in itself a testimony to the state of affairs in the field of Byzantine studies, and related Slavic, East, and Southeast European studies. For four and a half decades now, Byzantine scholars have been struggling to accept or discard Obolensky’s model and ideas, rarely venturing to deconstruct and analyze its facets and premises adequately and thoroughly. Equally rare were proposals aimed at revising the stagnant and seriously outdated discipline of wider Byzantine studies, since Obolensky’s Commonwealth had, as seems to be the consensus, failed to do that. Even more perplexing, however, is the reaction, or lack thereof, of Byzantine scholarship on the few occasions when an innovative and scholarly unorthodox approach is proposed. The tendency to ignore and disregard unusual views as purely provocative, if not straightforward amateurish, goes well beyond unwillingness to engage in a conversation that could lead to broadening the scholarly horizon and produce innovative results. Anthony Kaldellis’s The Byzantine Republic (2015) is just the most recent example of such an attitude. Byzantine scholars seem to be particularly persistent in repudiating the reality by refusing to even consider the possibility that Byzantine studies are legging behind Western European medieval and, especially, Late Antiquity studies, consciously overemphasizing the growing number of scholars of Byzantium, regardless of the status of the field itself.1 By preferring quantity over quality, Byzantine scholars choose to turn a blind eye to the issues burdening both their discipline and that growing number of scholars who become additionally isolated by the lack of an institutionalized framework for integrative work with other medievalists. There have been a few more serious attempts to reframe the commonwealth model of Obolensky. Their focus on geographically and/or thematically marginal and peripheral topics, however, only underscored the prevalent lack of response to the waves of innovative approaches that the field of Late Antiquity studies had already brought to mainstream scholarship of premodern Western Europe, becoming “a distinctive period in history: one that is now enshrined as academic orthodoxy,” as Tom Holland recently characterized it.2 One example is particularly instructive, since it combines both Late Antiquity studies and Obolensky’s commonwealth idea, expanding geographically the latter and chronologically the former, without actually changing or updating the concept of commonwealth. In his 1993 Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Garth Fowden accepted the foggy notion of Byzantine Commonwealth by making a case for the first Byzantine commonwealth as the “politico-cultural entity” that encompassed the regions to the north, east, and south of the empire’s core territories. According to Fowden’s view, those peripheral Byzantine territories would in the course of the seventh century form the central part of, in his words, “Islam, a World Empire, then Commonwealth,” which did little to lessen the ambiguity in understanding both the political and cultural aspects of the concept. Similarly, the case was made by Christian Raffensperger for a more precise positioning of Rus’ within the Byzantine Commonwealth (Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ 402 Vlada Stanković in the Medieval World, 2012). But examples of the misunderstood principle of the community of different “nations” that abound in the “national” scholarships of the peripheral regions of Obolensky’s commonwealth tip the scale toward the downsides of Obolensky’s idea, often seen as an opportunity for a “national history” to be included in or connected with Byzantine culture and civilization. Hand in hand with national discourses, there is another scholarly tendency that also goes essentially in the opposite direction of the very idea of a commonwealth: while the local national history narratives can and have been hindering the development of the field, the superficially understood idea of cultural unity under the cover of the idea of commonwealth could do even more damage by subtly bringing the late nineteenth-early twentieth century concepts of intellectual colonialism back to the scholarly fore. Such examples are particularly noteworthy, not least because of the prestige of their authors and the possible impact of their work on shaping the field of Byzantine studies in the decades to come. This is doubly dangerous, since the emphasis is laid on the cultural aspect of the commonwealth idea, which is equated with the Orthodox faith and in that sense a priori distinguished from the Western medieval, overwhelmingly Catholic European world, an implicit but clear distinction with the potential to sidetrack any eventual progress in an interdisciplinary approach to studying the Byzantine world. While The Expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia, edited by Jonathan Shepard (2007), is little more than a random collection of older articles on various topics, the series The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300–1500 (general editors R. Hoyland and A. Papaconstantinou), presents serious challenges of the kind mentioned above. The entire Eastern Christianity series is, unfortunately, completely wrongly envisioned and conceptualized. In their preface, the editors state that geographical expansion and diversity of Christianity “makes a mockery of any simple division into Western and Eastern Christianity,” but then proceed with a contradictory judgment: “Yet lines must be drawn if one is ever to achieve anything more than a superficial survey.” It may be necessary for practical reasons to draw lines somewhere, but, in the case of this high-profile series, they are drawn in a highly politicized and ideological manner that includes Byzantium, but not the Slavic world, in Eastern Christianity. As if Byzantine studies needed another paradoxical and nonsensical repositioning of Byzantium, this example confirms yet again the incapability and unwillingness of scholars to communicate and learn something about the regions and cultures they are unfamiliar with; they are essentially still in the nineteenth-century European colonial discourse. By positioning Byzantium strongly and unequivocally in the East, leading scholars confirmed the tendency to overemphasize the influence of religion on Byzantine history and ideology and, even more problematically, on Byzantine society and the functioning of the vast and complex state apparatus of the empire, while sidelining the Slavic world that otherwise formed an essential part of the idea of Byzantine Orthodoxy and of Obolensky’s commonwealth. Thus, the response of the field of Byzantine studies to an avalanche of titles laden with new approaches and innovative syntheses on, especially, Late Antiquity and the first Christian millennium in the West and the Mediterranean remains weak and uninspiring. A few well-known examples, such as Putting Byzantium Back on the Map 403 Averil Cameron’s The Byzantines (2006) and Byzantine Matters (2014), and Judith Herrin’s Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2007), underscore the evident problem and another paradox of contemporary Byzantine studies: these “revisionist” attempts come from scholars who are primarily Late Antiquity historians, under the aegis of Peter Brown and his work. It seems, therefore, that Byzantine studies are heading to further selfisolation from broader medieval studies, as Byzantine historians fail to attract Western medievalists’ and other non-Byzantine scholars’ interest and engage them in a constructive dialogue. The exchange between the two fields is limited to a very narrow circle of scholars, and even when it does exist, it is far from a desirable level of active collaboration. This can easily be inferred from the passages devoted to Byzantine history in recent works of scholars of Late Antiquity and the Western Middle Ages. For example, both in Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and The Inheritance of Rome (2009), Chris Wickham presents developments in the eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium (the perennial problem of the name of “Byzantine Empire” points symbolically to many essential problems pervading this field), and relevant chapters offer solid overviews of the political situation and economic, cultural, and religious developments in those parts of Europe. But to a specialist in Byzantine history, they remain superficial and often outdated, especially when compared with the author’s emphatic insistence on innovative approach and views in those passages of the books that are areas of his expertise. It is my strong belief that a more pronounced inclusion of Byzantine history into the field of Medieval studies, and studies of the premodern world in general, is needed in order to change the ongoing process of marginalization of Byzantine studies. The achievement of this goal is the main rationale behind the new series, Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy, recently launched for Lexington Books. For Byzantine studies to develop and attract more scholarly and public attention and understanding, a change in approach is much needed, starting with scholars’ readiness to open the discipline for true and serious, not just stated and superficial cooperation with other, methodologically more advanced fields, in order to become an essential part of antiquity, wider medieval, and early modern historiographical production.3 The next step would be a creation of broad, problem-oriented international and cross-disciplinary projects that would provide new approaches to the most disputed topics, from basics like terminology and identity, questions of periodization and social structure, the borders of the Byzantine Empire and the outreach of its civilization, culture, and religion, to the phenomenon of “Byzantium after Byzantium,” and beyond. The necessity for the new Byzantium series rests on this argument, with three essential tiers that comprise both temporal and spatial aspects: ∗ ∗ The redefinition of Byzantium: characterization of the empire, what it comprised and represented phenomenologically. The European context: approaching Byzantium as another European empire, bearing in mind its fundamentally Roman character, preserved 404 Vlada Stanković ∗ until the Ottoman conquest and nurtured in the memories, language, and ideology of the “Romans” long after the empire’s collapse in the mid-fifteenth century. The intellectual thrust toward “europeanization” of the Byzantine Empire, which in recent decades has been institutionally frequently placed within the Near Eastern world, following the strongly ideological judgment of its relevance for European culture in general, is a necessary first step toward modernization of contemporary Byzantine Studies. The legacy of Byzantium: an essential part of identifying Byzantine influence during the Middle Ages and after the fall of the empire, the legacy is thus understood diachronically, combining the horizontal/ spatial element, comprising different regions beyond core Byzantine territories, and the vertical/temporal, allowing for bridging the artificial divides among the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman worlds. The first volume that appeared in the Byzantium series and edited by the author, The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453 (2016), lays emphasis squarely on the importance of broadening the temporal and spatial boundaries of Byzantine studies. By disregarding modern national borders when analyzing premodern, supranational complex societies within the politically highly developed mechanisms of imperial bureaucracy and diplomacy, and focusing instead on the more precise research of the development, functioning, and interactions of different Byzantine and regions under the empire’s influence, new questions can be posed and more adequate concepts fashioned for comprehending the complex phenomenon that is the Byzantine world. NOTES Vlada Stanković is editor of the series, Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy. The official description of the series reads: This series explores the rich and complex history, culture and legacy of the longest lasting European state, its place in the Middle Ages, and in European civilization. Through positioning Byzantine history in a wider medieval context, the series will include new perspectives on the place of the eastern Mediterranean; Central, Eastern and South Europe; and the Near East in the medieval period. The intention is not simply to place the Byzantine Empire in the Western sphere, but rather to call for a reorientation away from the traditional East-West divide and to bring Byzantium out of its isolation from the rest of the medieval world. Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy seeks both monographs and edited collections that bring Byzantine studies into conversation with scholarship on the Western medieval world, as well as other works on the place of the Byzantine Empire in the global Middle Ages. 1. See, for example, the editor’s preface in Cyril Mango, ed., The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2002). Putting Byzantium Back on the Map 405 2. Tom Holland, review of The World of Late Antiquity, by Peter Brown, History Today 65, no. 5 (May 2015). 3. An additional indication of this necessity is an announcement of another book series devoted to reshaping Byzantine studies, New Directions in Byzantine Studies, with Dionysios Stathakopoulos from King’s College, London as its editor. The Modern Greek Studies Yearbook is published by the Modern Greek Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. The price for this offprint is $5.00. The price for volume 32/33 is $60.00. Checks should be made payable to Modern Greek Studies and sent to: Modern Greek Studies 325 Social Sciences Building University of Minnesota 267–19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 Telephone: (612) 624-4526 FAX: (612) 626-2242 E-mail: mgsp@umn.edu Copyright © 2017, Modern Greek Studies, University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.