The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene, Byzantine Emperor and Monk, c.1295-1383 (review)

190 Reviews After drama, cartography and travel writing provide Marchitello with related cultural practices that exemplify the construction of 'master-narratives' in the context of evidence that purports to be value-free and professionally neutral, claiming simply to represent the world 'the way it is'. The argument here is that maps in fact 'are documents meant to establish and maintain certain social, economic, and political circumstances' (p. 82). After the work of Greenblatt (Marvellous Possessions), Gillies (Shakespeare and the Geography ofDifference) a N e w World discourses analysed in postcolonial studies, the various 'narratives of possession' advanced have nowadays a ring of familiarity—except that there is a politely sharp reminder that 'to claim otherness as one's own, is still to claim possession' (p. 123), and is just another master-narrative. Sir Thomas Browne's skull (if indeed it was his) was exhumed in 1840, and for a century afterwards virtually became the property of phrenologists. To the dismay of some, it revealed a forehead that receded backwards (just as the only authentic portrait figured) instead of being the nobly rising dome that was associated with European intellectuals. The image of a 'flat-headed Indian' was invoked by one disappointed, phrenological viewer. But the story charted by Marchitello is not one of unredeemed racist assumptions, since an extraordinarily detailed piece of research by Miriam Tildesley in 1923 concluded 'that the correlation of superficial head and brain characters with mentality is so low as to provide no basis for any prognosis of value' (p. 160). Even this apparently progressive statement, however, holds the subtext that Browne is intelligent and the Indian is not, but that phrenology is not an accurate guide to distinguishing them—a neat example of a kind of selfrighting device that enables narratives to be made to support any one view in spite of what one might naively call the 'evidence'. Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England gives us a sprightly and clever set of essays with an important subject. That several of the chapters had already been published as articles might confirm the sense of slightly random choices linked only lightly into book form, but such a suggestion may not trouble an author w h o is clearly sceptical of the beguiling unity that informs less self-conscious storytelling. R. S. White Department of English University of Western Australia Nicol, Donald M., The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene, Byzantine Emperor and Monk, c.1295-1383, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xiii, 203; 9 b / w plates, 1 map; R.R.P. AUS$64.95. It was only to be expected that Donald M. Nicol should provide a definitive and readable account of yet another emperor of the period of Byzantium's decline, in this case the 'reluctant emperor' John VI Cantacuzene Reviews 191 (Kantakouzenos). Cantacuzene reigned from 1347-54, his rule forming a brief interlude within the Palaiologan dynasty, the rights of whose young heir, John V Palaiologos, Cantacuzene was attempting, despite his usurpation of the imperial title, to uphold. This biography updates Nicol's previous prosopographical work on the Cantacuzene family (The Byzantine Family of Kantakouzenos (Cantacuzenus) ca. 1100-1460. A Genealogical and Prosopographica Study, Washington D C , 1968) and expands his account of the historical events of Cantacuzene's reign in such works as The Last Centuries ofByzantium, 1993. Though in some ways less immediately accessible to the average reader than Nicol's biography of the last emperor of the Romans, Constantine XI Palaiologos (The Immortal Emperor, 1992)), this scholarly account gives a sympathetic insight into the dilemmas facing an immensely wealthy and aristocratic courtier who, despite his integrity and loyalty towards the imperial family, was inveigled by his enemies at court into proclaiming himself emperor. After a seven-year reign bedevilled by the political intrigues of the Italian maritime states, dissensions within his o w n family, and the repercussions of the Turkish presence in Europe which was at least partly a result of Cantacuzene's o w n rapprochement with the Turks (whom he certainly found more tolerable than western Europeans), Cantacuzenefinallyabdicated, to spend some thirty years in retirement as the Emperor-monk Joasaph, having protected the...