In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Byzantine Exceptionalism and Some Recent Books on Byzantium
  • Warren Treadgold (bio)
Jonathan Shepard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, c. 500-1492 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Elizabeth Jeffreys with John Haldon and Robin Cormack, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008).
John Haldon, ed., A Social History of Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton University Press, 2007).
Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

In 1066 the Normans invaded England and won a decisive victory. While they claimed that their actions were justified, they held the land essentially by right of conquest and displaced nearly everyone who had been ruling it. After a few years they secured the whole kingdom and profoundly reshaped the society and culture of the country, where their descendants still reign. Likewise, in 1203-4 the men of the Fourth Crusade invaded the Byzantine Empire and won a decisive victory. While they claimed that their actions were justified, they held the land essentially by right of conquest and displaced nearly everyone who had been ruling it. Yet they never secured most of the empire, lost practically all of it by 1261, and had scarcely any lasting impact on the society or culture of the Byzantine world.

Various reasons can be given for the success of the Norman Conquest, and historians can easily imagine how it might have failed. What is much harder to imagine is how the Crusaders' conquest of Byzantium could ultimately have succeeded, at least without far more accommodation of the Byzantines or massive Western European immigration. Though the Normans spoke a different language from the English, both groups were part of a Western European political, social, and cultural system that was also shared by the Crusaders of 1204. This system was, however, incompatible with the Byzantine political, social, and cultural system, which soon expelled the Crusaders as an alien body. Byzantium was not just another medieval European country, like England or France, but a world of its own.

The contrasts between Byzantium and the West are still a problem for authors of general books on Byzantium, including the recent batch of seven reviewed here. Most Byzantinists know how different Byzantium was, but many prefer not to emphasize the fact. Scholars like to be fashionable, and fashions are set by the majority who study the medieval and modern West, the source of concepts like feudalism and nationalism. While today we are all aware of non-Western cultures, we think of Byzantium as Western, certainly in comparison with China, pre-Columbian America, or sub-Saharan Africa. This is presumably why the American Historical Review lists books on Byzantium under "Europe: Ancient and Medieval," though most Byzantine territory was in Asia or Africa (and Constantinople straddled Europe and Asia). Byzantinists may reasonably fear that insisting their subject is not fully Western could leave it without a place in either Western or non-Western history.

The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire comes very close to treating Byzantium as just another medieval European country, even if such treatment results mainly from the opportunism of its publisher. Of the book's twenty-seven parts, only eight (plus the introduction) were actually written for it. Three more parts are adapted from the final volume of The Cambridge Ancient History (2000) and sixteen more from the seven-volume New Cambridge Medieval History (1995-2005), which has short chapters on Byzantium in each period. (The old Cambridge Medieval History had a separate volume on Byzantium.) The editor of the Cambridge History, Jonathan Shepard, explains that an editor at Cambridge University Press "encouraged me to take on remodelling materials already available" (xvii). While the press profits from selling libraries the same material twice, the benefits to scholarship are less clear.

In his introduction Shepard struggles to lend the book some coherence.1 He explains its beginning with the year 500 by citing the fall...

pdf

Share