Byzantine diplomacy (review)

240 Reviews specialist. Established textual and art history scholars will not find anything new in the critical or analytical apparatus within the covers. It is difficult to agree with the pubUsher's hype that the work is '... an indispensable guide for scholars . . . ' . It is, however, an admirable record of a cross-section of the manuscripts held in the Beinecke and will be valuable to bibliophiles and certainly a teaching tool at the undergraduate level. Whilst Latin or technical terms are generally explained in her text, the lack of a glossary does, nonetheless, limit the volume's function as a teaching aid in this area. Peter Rolfe Monks Townsvdle Shepard, Jonathon and Simon Franklin, eds., Byzantine diplomacy (Papers from the Twenty-fourth spring symposium of Byzantine studies, Cambridge, March, 1990), Aldershot, Variorum, 1992; pp. xi, 332; R.R.P.? This is an important book on several counts. First and not least it is the first volume in a new monograph series published by the Society for the promotion of Byzantine Studies. The SPBS, founded in 1983 as an umbrella organization for the sundry activities in Byzantine studies in the British Isles, has already taken under its wing the Bulletin of British Byzantine Studies (BBBS) whose annual, regular, and increasingly more complete lists of recent publications is now more than ever acting as a substitute for the authoritative but much delayed bibliographical listings of Byzantinische Zeitschrift. For nearer thirty than twenty years, at first in the University of Birmingham thanks to Antony Bryer's energy but more recendy in other centres too, Britain has also seen annual symposia on Byzantinetopics,always closely focussed (unlike the American and Australian affairs) and authoritative—but preserved in written form only occasionally. It is welcome news then that under the aegis of its cunent president Averil Cameron, the SPBS has found means which permit much more regular publication of these symposia. Then the subject matter of this book is significant. In the later Middle Ages Byzantine diplomatic machinations became a byword beyond the empire's borders for deviousness and subdety. However, there is no one modem study which examines the means by which this reputation came to be acquired, nor how the deviousness was put into practice. The symposium in 1990, and this coUection of papers derived from it provides the ground work for such a study. The topic is one that is not always easy to pin down. Foreign policy, the overall design, and diplomacy, the means by which the design is carried out are not always immediately separable. Although the symposium convenors and editors of this volume instructed the speakers to concentrate on the means rather Reviews 241 than the policy, some have been more successful than others in carrying this out. Thought has gone into the overall construction. There are general overviews of Byzantium's relations with outside powers by A. Kazhdan, E. Chrysos, J. Shepard, and N. Oikonomides. Between them they cover more than a thousand years of complex contacts, changing state structures, and differing external pressures. It is in these chapters, perhaps, that the distinctions between foreign policy and diplomatic means are most difficult to maintain, though a sense of the differing demands at different periods is well brought out. These papers are contrasted with more detailed analyses of Byzantium's relations with specific peoples: J. Herrin on the Franks, T. Noonan on the Khazars (especially useful because of the paucity of the evidence), H. Kennedy on the Arabs before the eleventh century, S. Franklin on detailed points of dispute with the Russian church in the twelfth century, and K. Hopwood on the sort of contract between Byzantine and Turkish communities in Asia minor that must have been very frequent but usually escapes attention. The question of our sources on Byzantine diplomacy is a tricky one, given the lack of primary archival documentation. By and large scraps have to be constructed from the rewritings of more or less literary historians, as was done in Dolger's Regesten der Kaiserurkunden. R. Scott (on Malalas of Antioch) and C. Schummer (on Liuprand of Cremona) discuss the remnants of diplomatic exchanges that can be seen in these authors while M . Mullett sets out the...