Writing about the Byzantine empire in 1869, the Irish historian William Lecky dismissed it as “a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude”. Edward Gibbon had already passed his judgment on the empire, ending The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and claiming that Byzantium was of little interest apart from keeping alive the West’s tenuous connection with the Greco-Roman classical world. While recent revisionist histories have rescued early empires such as the Ottoman and the Mongol from the censure of the grand old men of European historiography, the Byzantine empire remains, as Judith Herrin points out in her absorbing new study, stuck with the Enlightenment stereotype of it as a moribund state, whose name has become synonymous with opaque duplicity and labyrinthine bureaucracy.

Herrin, a professor of late antique and Byzantine studies at King’s College London, was inspired to write the book when two workmen knocked on her office door in 2002 and asked: “What is Byzantine history?” Composing an answer to such a question has daunted specialists in the field for centuries. Most, as Herrin points out, trot out a tortuous 1,000-year chronology of the 90 emperors, 125 patriarchs and innumerable empresses, holy men and eunuchs who stretch from the inauguration of Constantinople under Constantine the Great in 330, to the fall of the city in 1453.

Instead, Herrin has taken the brave decision to approach her subject thematically, choosing particular events, monuments and individuals through which to tell her story. Four broad sections move from the foundations of Byzantium, through its transition from ancient to medieval world, to the creation of a medieval state, and finally its decline from the Latin occupation in 1207 to the siege and fall of 1453. Such an approach might not make much sense to her builders as she leads them through the finer detail of Justinian’s codification of civil law, but for anyone with a vague grasp of the empire’s history from visiting today’s Istanbul, it makes for a rich and convincing, if not necessarily surprising, life of Byzantium.

Byzantium’s unity lay in its origins of diversity. From its foundation it looked west to Rome, as that empire collapsed under barbarian invasion, and east to Persia. Both shaped early Byzantine imperial and religious styles, before the defeat of Persia in 630 and the rise of Byzantium’s nemesis, Islam, in the shape of the Ottoman empire. By 1071, the Byzantines were fighting, and losing, to both Muslims in the east and Normans in the west. Relations with the Latin West reached an all-time low in 1207, when western Crusaders ended up sacking Constantinople rather than recovering the Holy Land, a traumatic moment in relations between the eastern and western churches that led to a papal apology in 2007, and that Herrin regards as still central to western European attitudes towards Byzantium.

Herrin’s defence of the empire and its continued importance is impassioned and impressive. She argues that the empire acted as a bulwark against the expansion of Islam from the 7th century, and that “without Byzantium, Europe as we know it is inconceivable”. It survived as a “lively, inventive society, passionately believing in itself”, which thrived on the creative tensions inherent in its particular variant of Orthodox Christianity, Roman imperialism and Greek tradition. The empire generated a cosmopolitan artistic and intellectual culture that profoundly influenced the Italian Renaissance, embraced migration and hospitality towards strangers, maintained a stable currency that held together the medieval Mediterranean economy, and established the enduring, if controversial, practice of venerating religious icons. The book is at its best when explaining the more obscure aspects of the empire’s rise to preeminence, including the collapse of Rome and the rebranding of Constantinople as the “New Rome”. It is also good on law and the Byzantine economy, which focused on land to the exclusion of the sea, to Venice’s ultimate advantage, and the rise of iconoclasm in the 8th century as a response to Islam’s official prescription against religious images.

Herrin shies away from the lurid stories of courtly intrigue, strangulation, blinding and castration that have characterised accounts of Byzantium, and this is all to the good, but her celebration of the longue dureé, or long-term history, tends to lose sight of the sights, tastes, smells and voices that made up the empire. I longed to hear more surviving personal testimony of the ordinary men and women of Byzantium. The builders at King’s who inspired Herrin’s book might have liked to have recognised more of themselves in this fascinating account.

Buy BYZANTIUM: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin
Allen Lane £20 pp392

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