Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330 by Dimiter Angelov (review)

REVIEWS 175 Dimiter Angelov, Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007) xvii + 453 pp., maps. This book is a study of imperial ideology and political thought in Byzantium after the Latin conquest of the city of Constantinople, New Rome, in the year 1204. The author approaches the manner in which Byzantine political imagination responded to the trauma of the loss of Constantinople and to the post-1204 realities by looking at the dichotomy imperial ideology vs. political thought. He explores the correspondence, tensions, and rifts between official ideology of kingship, on the one hand, and ideas of imperial governance formulated at a semi-official or independent level, on the other, during this period of unparalleled political and financial crisis facing Byzantium, a period when the empire lost extensive territory, international prestige, and wealth. The book is about state ideology as well as the opinions and perspectives of individual Byzantine authors. The methodology employed by the author is both literary and historical. He uses exclusively written texts, and pictorial representations of the emperor only occasionally when they complement the written sources. The political ideas are also set in a historical context in order to allow the reader to form a comprehensive understanding. The empire’s political history in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century presented at the outset is intended to familiarize the reader with this concrete historical context. The three most important states formed in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in the imperial territories that eluded Latin conquest were Nicaea and Trebizond in Asia Minor and Epiros in the Balkans. Of these splinter states, the empire of Nicaea (1204–1261) was the most successful. The founder of the Nicaean empire was Theodore I Laskaris (1205–1221), who had married the daughter of Emperor Alexios III Angelos (1195–1203). His successor and sonin -law, the emperor John III Vatatzes (1221–1254) reconquered large territories in the Balkans, including the important city of Thessaloniki in 1246. Following the reign of his son and successor Theodore Laskaris II (1254–1258), Michael VIII Palaiologos (1259–1282), a general who usurped power from the Laskarid dynasty, recaptured Constantinople. Nonetheless, the empire of the Palaiologoi never managed to reunite fully the pieces of the fragmented Byzantine empire, and soon after 1300 almost the whole of Asia Minor was lost to the Turks. The reconstituted imperial office after 1204 was a historical and symbolic bridge to the empire of the twelfth century, and in the ideological response to the events of 1204 both signs of continuity and change are apparent. Angelov’s study has a more comprehensive scope that previous more limited studies of imperial ideology, as it focuses on official ideology and the richer field of political ideas on kingship, including both secular and ecclesiastical thought. Accordingly, he divides the discussion into three sections: part I, “Official ideology,” deals with the ideas of propagandists and panegyrists; part II, “The secular thinkers,” focuses on political theories of governance outside the official context; and part III, “The ecclesiastics,” examines the constitutional ideas of churchmen. The study focuses on some hitherto little known political authors, such as Theodore II Laskaris and Thomas Magistros, as well as some better known but not sufficiently explored ones. The time span (1204–1330) was chosen by the author because it makes possible to compare and contrast two REVIEWS 176 distinct periods after 1204, the Nicaean empire and the empire of the early Palaiologoi. The end of the period under study is meaningful, being marked by changes in the political and intellectual life of the empire, as the long reign of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos ended in 1328, and with it the First Civil War (1321–1328), and the city of Nicaea fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, in 1331. The investigation refers on occasion to developments after 1330 in the later Palaiologean period, especially with regard to ecclesiastical thought. In the Introduction, the author explains the complexity of the concept of “political thought” in Byzantium, as scholars have traditionally argued that the Byzantines lacked propensity for political theorizing and fell short of developing a discipline of political thought. Angelov’s...