Eastern Approaches to Byzantium (review)

190 Reviews improbable instance of the 0.005% of error. W h e n it enables text searches ofthe entire corpus of printed books in the period, E E B O will become an extremely powerful research tool, separating it decisively from its microfilm predecessor and very likely creating a yet further revolution in Early M o d e m scholarship. Anthony Miller Department ofEnglish University ofSydney Eastmond, Antony, ed., Eastern Approaches to Byzantium (Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications 9), Aldershot, Ashgate Variorum, 2001; cloth; pp. xxi, 297; R R P £45.00; ISBN 0754603229. If the Byzantine Empire is on the fringe of the awareness of most western medievalists, a book of studies on its relations with its eastern neighbours from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries may seem doubly remote. The contributors to this volume, the fruits of a conference held in 1999, make few concessions to the unlearned, employing as they do Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Syriac and Turkish 'in addition to the normal Greek and other western and Slavonic languages.' They discuss such exotic people as the katepan Bagrat Vxkac'i, the catholicos Yovhannes V Drasxanakertc'i, the historical corpus known as K'art'lis c'xovreba and the kingdom of Ap'xazet'i. And yet this collection of studies has an interest which far transcends the antiquarian, for there are very important things to take away from it. Western scholars, doubtless unconsciously thinking back to the Roman Empire, have tended to think of Byzantium as part of a Mediterranean world, for which relations with western Christian powers were of great importance. But the Byzantines did not think of themselves as part of a world stretching away to the west; for them, the caliph tended to bulk larger than any figure in Christendom. For their part, the eastern neighbours ofthe Empire did not always treat i t with the deference demanded by its own ideology. Georgian perceptions ofByzantium show nothing ofthe resentment ofa marginal people. Astonishingly, the Georgians felt able to term the Byzantines barbarians, and, in a move paralleled elsewhere by the ideology of the Serbs, they came to see themselves asrivalsand heirs ofthe Empire. The neighbours ofthe Empire lived in a spacious world. A detailed study of the decorative program in the Armenian palace and palace church built at Aghamar, an island in Lake Van, early in the tenth century Reviews 191 shows an iconography appropriated from the world ofIslam being used to express themes of power; a roughly contemporary example of one aspect occurs as far away as Umayyad Spain. The book is an important reminder of the need to reconfigure our understanding ofh o w the parts ofthe medieval worldfittogether. The volume also deconstructs the notion offrontier.One intriguing paper considers the kind of control the Byzantines held over territories conquered from the Muslims in the tenth century. They were wealthy and heterodox; the imperial authorities were content to leave pre-existing administrative structures intact, and at least initially indigenous local personnel were given considerable authority on the ground. Another contribution considers thefluidityof self-identity along the Perso-Byzantinefrontier,and thefinelycalibrated balancing acts performed by a number of peoples are evaluated. What are w e to make of the Turkomans from outside the Empire w h o spent the winters in imperial territory? Or what was the precise situation of Cilicia, an Armenian kingdom which was a vassal of Byzantium on the border of the crusader world? The lines m o d e m scholars draw across maps to mark different states, even when they accurately reflect political realities, suggest a firmness of division that the realities almost always belied. One'sfinalreaction to such a learned and thought provoking volume is to wonder about the possibility of synthesis. To what extent would it be possible to take the histories of such disparate peoples together? Answering this question would involve considering the c o m m o n situations they shared, the complexity ofwhich is suggested by the practice of the mlers among the Turkomans to use the Greek, Arabic and Persian languages to express their identity, so performing an exercise in 'cultural polyglossia' in which various models of self...