The Other Empire

When the Spanish conquerors reached the colossal pyramids and plazas of Teotihuacan, fewer than 40 miles from the Mexican metropolis and only a few centuries abandoned, they found no one who could tell them anything about the awesome sight, which remains a mystery to this day. What could have been the foundation of Mexico’s classic culture--a source of inspiration and reassurance about the purpose of life and death down the ages--was utterly extinguished because no successor culture preserved the language and thoughts of Teotihuacan’s builders.

We too would only have the bare stones of classical Greece to look upon in ignorant admiration if its uniquely fertile culture had not been kept alive by the Roman Empire until the reading of Greek texts was joyfully resumed by Renaissance scholars. It is one of the ironies of history that it was the eastern empire, not the western branch of the Roman Empire headquartered in Italy, that assured this most precious continuity. Fatally weakened by the Huns, the western empire was increasingly fragmented by Germanic invaders and mercenaries until the last imperial figurehead, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476. But the Eastern Roman Empire headquartered in Constantinople outmaneuvered the Huns, expelled its own Germanic mercenaries and invented a strategy to successfully resist each and every new wave of invaders from the Eurasian steppe, Persia, the Arabian desert and the renascent west until 1204, then reviving once more from the depths of the Dark Ages until the final Turkish victory of 1453. It was only because the poetry, prose and philosophy of classical Greece continued to be read, edited, studied and recopied in the eastern empire for more than 1,000 years that the fragile sequence of manuscripts finally reached the safe harbor of the first printing presses (by 1503, Aldus Manutius of Venice was printing Greek classics in runs of 1,000 copies, more than had ever existed).

That this glorious epic of military and cultural survival at the core of Western history should be a rather new, rather exotic subject for the general reader takes some explaining. It was only in the 17th century that Catholic scholars introduced the unfortunate term “Byzantine” to describe the Eastern Roman Empire. That was an anti-Greek Orthodox gibe--Byzantion was the small city that Constantine turned into his imperial capital, the New Rome (imagine referring to the American Empire as “Georgetown and its surroundings”). A century after that, the Enlightenment’s great names, notably Gibbon and Voltaire, made an insult of the word, which lingers still in our dictionaries: See “byzantine” as in “maneuvers, machinations, intrigues. . . .” Loathing Christianity as they did, Gibbon & Co. denigrated the intensely Christian eastern empire as an extended degeneration from Roman glories and its history as a sequence of sordid plots, absurd superstition, bloody usurpations and shameful defeats.

Such was these critics’ influence that it was not until this century that Western scholars, with Russians in the lead, began to seriously study the history and culture of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was not until the 1960s that the reading public at large became interested in the subject. By now, the worldwide level of interest is so great that along with many books for nonspecialists, there are many Internet sites dedicated to the empire, including one originating in Singapore.

But the effects of centuries of neglect have yet to be overcome. In contrast to the abundance of good one-volume surveys of classical Greece, starting with H.D.F. Kitto’s short, utterly wonderful “The Greeks,” the Eastern Roman Empire has been poorly served. Bookshops everywhere display the three hefty volumes of John Julius Norwich, but their size is deceptive: What is valid in that pot-boiling compilation of obsolete accounts would hardly fill a slim paperback.

Warren Treadgold’s “A History of the Byzantine State and Society” is in a different class. While fluently written for the general reader--few will tire of its 850-odd pages of text--its coherent account reflects the most up-to-date scholarship, some of it Treadgold’s own. In spite of its title, it is definitely an imperial history, largely focused on the political and military vicissitudes of the successive emperors down to the last, Constantine XI Palaeologus (1449-1453), rather than on the evolution of society, religion, the economy, culture or the arts, though there is much about all of them. Scholars will not scorn this book because it provides a well-documented overview for their inevitably more specialized research, successfully updating if not replacing George Ostrogorsky’s “History of the Byzantine State,” the classic one-volume summary, once read by experts alone, now selling well in bookstores.

Many scholars, however, will object to the fluency and the coherence, not because of any ivory-tower affectations they might have but because of Treadgold’s solution of imposing a coherent story line on periods that have inadequate sources. Some periods of Byzantine history such as Justinian’s 6th century (the reconquest of Italy, his great general Belisarius, his scandalous wife Theodora) are brilliantly illuminated by contemporary writings, of Procopius above all, as well as by documents, archeology, coins, surviving architecture and art, including the superb and revealing mosaics of Ravenna. For the period on either side of the year 1000, the sources are almost as good, and for the last centuries they are even better.

For other periods, by contrast, such as the momentous 7th and 8th centuries, when the empire withstood the impact of the Arabs at the peak of their strength while undergoing important transformations, we only have scant, unreliable and often contradictory monkish chronicles, no archeology to speak of and assorted bits and pieces from the lives of the saints as well as Arabic, Armenian, Coptic and Syriac texts that only refer incidentally to what was happening in the empire.

Most scholars accept the resulting darkness and limit themselves to the few facts that seem well-documented. Not Treadgold. His declared method--the reader is duly warned, as befits a serious historian--is to boldly leap from one fragment of evidence to the next in order to produce a coherent account by guessing what he cannot know (he carefully inserts “probably” before each one of his leaps). The virtue of Treadgold’s reconstructions is that they sometimes make sense of isolated pieces of evidence that seemed irrelevant or meaningless to prior historians. Their defect is that they mingle good evidence with bad in the text (though usually separating them in his notes), so that readers are left with an account all too coherent, but not necessarily reliable.

But there is a sure remedy for that: Once their appetite is whetted by Treadgold, readers can turn to other books on specific subjects and periods and to the sources themselves, such as Procopius who, in addition to his excellent military histories and a fascinating survey of Justinian’s buildings (all available in good translations), also wrote anonymously “The Secret History,” which could not be translated in full until recently because of its X-rated version of Theodora’s life before she became the most devout of imperial wives.