Roger Minshull - Relations Between East and West in the Middle Ages

First published 1973 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Copyright 1973 by Taylor & Francis.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009044713

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages / [edited by]
Derek Baker.
p. cm.
Consists primarily of papers presented at a colloquium in medieval history organized by the Dept. of History, University of Edinburgh, in association with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, 1969. Originally published: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c1973.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-202-36332-5 (acid-free paper)
1. Byzantine Empire--Relations--Europe--Congresses. 2. Europe--Relations--Byzantine Empire--Congresses. I. Baker, Derek, 1931-II. University of Edinburgh. Dept. of History. III. University of Edinburgh. Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
DF552.R4 2010
303.482495040902--dc22

2009044713

ISBN: 9781351493925 (ebk)

Donald M. Nicol

W.H.C.Frend

Karl Leyser

R.H.C.Davis

Anthony Bryer

Joseph Gill S.J.

Jonathan Riley-Smith

R.W.Southern

Donald M. Nicol

The essays here gathered together were the intellectual wines poured out at a symposium held at Edinburgh in 1969. Its theme was EastWest contacts in the Middle Ages. The title was taken to apply to relations between eastern and western Europe, or between the eastern and western parts of the old GraecoRoman world, and not to contacts between, for instance, France and Far Cathay.

To the founder of the Roman Empire and his successors relations between East and West meant relations between the eastern and western parts of a whole, the pars orientalis and the pars occidentalis of the unified structure of the empire. Roman poets liked to boggle the minds of their listeners by talking of a dominion that extended from the barbarous Britons at one end to the perfidious Parthians at the other. But the dominion was one. Jupiter, if Vergil is to be believed, granted to Romulus and his Romans an imperium without limits and without end. Augustus nevertheless wisely decided that his empire should have manageable territorial boundaries. But within the limits that he set Roman, Greek, Jew, Christian and Gentile could live under the same law. Romans of the old school sometimes complained about the corrupting influence on their city of Greeks and orientals, of the Orontes flowing into the Tiber. But they employed Greek tutors to educate their sons. People did not think of the eastern and western parts of the empire as being separate entities whose relations with each other must be the object of careful study.

Even at the moment of the empires birth, however, there was already a clear idea of where the Latin West ended and the Greek East began. The Roman historian Appian tells us that when, in 44 bc, Octavian and Mark Antony divided the world between them, they drew a line down their map from north to south. The line passed through the Dalmatian town of Scodra on the Adriatic Sea. Everything to the east of that line, as far as the Euphrates,was to belong to Antony; everything to the west of it, as far as the Atlantic Ocean, was to belong to Octavian. It was a remarkably realistic division. When the structure of the Roman Empire cracked in later centuries, the crack appeared more or less down that seam; and in the Middle Ages it was across that line that Byzantines and westerners maintained their tenuous contacts. Most of what lay to the west of Scodra was lost to the Roman world in the fifth century. Yet the emperors reigning in Constantinople regarded the loss as being only temporary. Barbarians had unhappily usurped authority in the West. But the empire had not fallen apart; and in Gods good time the barbarians would either come to learn or to be forcibly taught their rightful place in the imperial scheme of things. Justinian, as a true successor of Augustus, Trajan and Constantine, made it his lawful business to restore order to the world byreestablishing Roman rule over the western provinces. Given the means and the opportunities to do so he had no option. He would have been failing in his imperial duty if he had not seized those opportunities; and, as Professor Frend points out in the first of the essays in this volume, most of Justinians subjects probably shared the common pride in the enterprise of reconquest. But the cost of that enterprise, in terms of human suffering as well as of hard cash, was more than the empire could sustain; and even by Justinians time reintegration of the empire had already been rendered almost impossible by reason of the differences among its members in matters of theology and ecclesiology. Christianity proved to be an even more potent factor than language, culture, or barbarian conquest in the division of the structure.