Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire by Judith Herrin (review)

This volume brings together fourteen of Professor Herrin’s most important publications on Byzantium that are not on women (the latter are brought together in a companion volume, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium), plus two previously unpublished papers. Unlike the Variorum series, these papers are not photoduplicated but reformatted with a unitary, elegant appearance. Each is prefaced by an autobiographical note helpfully explaining the intellectual context of its production, and some of the notes, which appear at the end of each chapter, contain bibliographical updates (though these are very selective). The autobiographical prefaces do not always give full (or any) citations to the original venues of publication, nor are the latter listed together on a separate page. They range from the 1960s to the 2000s, with most coming from the earlier decades.

Herrin’s scholarship has withstood the test of time well: without looking at the notes, it would be difficult for the most up-to-speed Byzantinist to date these papers. This is a function of both methodology and style. The exposition is unfailingly clear, based on primary sources, explains the nature of the problem at hand, defines and tests the limitations of the evidence, and never tries to hide uncertainty or problems in the argument with evasions and jargon. There is a singular lack of polemic, only a desire to grapple with the issues (though unease is expressed in the autobiographical notes with recent positions that downsize the historical impact of Iconoclasm). The lack of confrontation has a drawback, of course: it is not always apparent what is an original, even revisionist argument, and what reflects the state of the field at that time.

The first part (“Margins”), with six chapters, focuses on the Byzantine history of Greece, specifically on the processes that led to the absorption and assimilation of the Slavs who settled in Greece; on Athens and Greece in the late twelfth century, as revealed especially through the works of Michael Choniates; and on the island of Kythera. Chapter 1 is still a pretty good survey of the history of Byzantine Greece, and chapters 3 and 5 are still among the best analyses of the circumstances of Greece in the twelfth century. They can serve in classes as both general introductions and to stimulate scholarly debate, a rare combination. In her clear prose, Herrin takes on notoriously fragmentary data and methodically works toward conclusions about “how well Byzantine administration worked on the ground” (59). Conversely, she can also wade into evidence that is dense and confusing, to sort out helpfully the functions and interrelations of ecclesiastical, imperial, and local offices in twelfth-century Greece (chapter 3). Her paper on the Hellenization of the Slavs (ch. 2) tries to explain a process that we know certainly happened, although we have almost no idea how. She emphasizes the role of locals over that of imperial officials (37–38, 42) and devotes considerable attention to itinerant holy men, stating for a fact that they played a major role (46). It must be noted, however, that we have no direct proof of that. Our two most emphatic sources, the Chronicle of Monemvasia and the Taktika of Leo VI, present the process as managed from the imperial center. Herrin does not discuss Leo’s testimony about his father, Basil I.

The hero of part I is clearly the Orthodox church. Holy men (not the state) brought the Slavs into the imperial fold and, while Herrin acknowledges that the church was generally subordinated to the state as an instrument of control (59), her papers on the twelfth century insist that when the secular administration failed to do its job, the church continued to work hard to protect the interests of regular people and even picked up the slack in governance left by absentee and corrupt Constantinopolitan administrators (60). However, this was precisely the picture that our main source, Michael Choniates, a bishop, wanted to project, and...