Howard Burton - Byzantium: Beyond the Cliché: A Conversation with Maria Mavroudi

When you hear the word empire, what springs immediately to mind?

For many, the first thought would be ancient Rome, while for some it would be the British Empire, or other examples of European colonialism. Others, meanwhile, might revert unthinkingly to the fictional, calling forth images of Darth Vader and the Empire that is determined to strike back. Given mans consistently well-demonstrated proclivity to impose his will upon his surroundings, there is no shortage of examples of empires, real and imagined, throughout the broad scope of human history.

But one empire that most of us consistently overlook is that of the Byzantines, despite its enduring from Constantines official founding of the New Rome of Constantinople in 330 CE until finally being extinguished by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

When it comes to Byzantium, the common view, even amongst many scholars, is that its primary historical importance occurs through its simple existence as a bridge to the classical Greek past, particularly through its role in preserving the great literary works of antiquity during a time of turbulence and decline in the West.

A little bit of reflection is enough to convince most of us that this is a pretty ridiculous way of looking at things. Reducing a civilization that prospered for well over a millennium to the status of a fossilized library is simplistic at best, and quite likely mostly nonsense.

Indeed, how on earth, you might wonder, could such a naive picture have arisen in the first place?

Maria Mavroudi, an eloquent and thoughtful Byzantinist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that a key aspect of our historical understanding is a natural consequences of what she calls the high-school narrative that we often unthinkingly impose on the past as a way of reinforcing our own sense of importance.

Most of what people know about history comes from what I call, for facility, the high-school narrative. This narrative needs to be clear and relatively simple; and our notion of simplicity is that the history that counts is that of the so-called Western World or developed world. Therefore, it is perceived teleologically as the endpoint toward which all earlier developments lead.

What this means is that you have a central civilization which is Westernand you choose how you define that and its elementsand all civilizations that are deemed extraneous enter the stage to the degree that they have offered a gift to Western civilization.

For example, the Chinese gave the West paper. Meanwhile, the fact that there was a Chinese printing press already in the 10th century is completely ignored because the West wasnt able to receive that as a gift.

Byzantiums presumed gift to the Western world is Greek manuscripts, which arrived during the course of the 15th century as the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and the Byzantine intellectuals had to flee. Our idea is that Byzantium maintained Greek texts, not anything else, from Greek antiquity, and was able to offer those to the West at a time when the West was ready to receive them. This is the only role that a traditional narrative assigns to Byzantium.

You might think that an elite Byzantine scholar would have nothing but disdain for such one-sided accounts of civilizational gift-giving that deeply trivialize a full appreciation of the past, but she evinces a surprising degree of tolerance for the utility of such crude, sweeping accounts of human history.

For the sake of simplicity, this high-school narrative makes perfect sense. It certainly loses nuance. But Im also a pedagogue, so I have to keep thinking about when the appropriate moment is to deepen ones understanding. I say this because of my experience in the classroom.

But recognizing the occasional utility of frameworks for the beginning student of history is one thing, putting matters into their proper perspective for ones professional colleagues is quite another. And for Maria, a fuller understanding of the need to right a historical wrong and redress the value of Byzantine civilization amongst her peers was triggered by a walk with the great Soviet-American scholar Alexander Kazhdan.

I learned a great lesson from him when I was a graduate student at Dumbarton Oaks, walking the woods with him. I will never forget that discussion.

Some of what he said should be pretty obvious and subject to common sense, but that was not the stage Byzantine studies were at before his arrival in the United States. He was, at the time, engaged in writing a history of Byzantine literature, which is perhaps the most maligned aspect of Byzantine civilization. Its visual arts have been somewhat appreciated, but Byzantine literature, not at all. Part of it is that not many people read Greek, and especially not the kind of difficult Greek that most of it is written in.

He said to me, You know, Byzantine civilization was one of the great civilizations of its time; therefore, it must have produced great literature. If we do not perceive it as such, it is not Byzantiums fault; it is our fault. So my task in writing a history of Byzantine literature is to highlight why this was a great literature.

In other words, it was the opposite of what one would normally say: Byzantine civilization is great because it produced great literature. No. It was great; therefore it must have produced great literature.

This gave me a template for a thought process. Similarly, one can reverse the assumption and think, Well, Byzantium was a great medieval civilization; therefore, it ought to have also had great science. Then, you see, your quest is very different than simply looking at Byzantium as an intermediary. There is a tendency to think that all the great science of the Middle Ages was produced by the Islamic world and then it migrated to Europe, resulting in the view that all Byzantium did is simply transmit Muslim ideas.

I think this is completely wrong. I have not been able to figure it out exactly, yet, in my research, but I believe Im starting to see glimpses of that. Some of it Ive started writing about in my publications already. I have a few very concrete examples to show, but hopefully, before I die, Ill have more. And maybe Ill have enough students who will be able to show even more, and correct me where Im wrong, and all of that.