Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Byzantine studies is neither the oldest nor the largest of the historical disciplines, but it is among the oddest. Its peculiarities, however, are rarely discussed by its practitioners, nor have they been much noted by intellectual historians. The appearance in recent years of multiple book-length studies of the discipline and its histories is therefore welcome. The quality of the three works here reviewed is such that each simultaneously complements and complicates the image presented by the others. The resulting view, if still far from complete, is nevertheless much greater than the sum of the parts. Three peculiarities stand out especially, each closely related to the others. The first is the discipline’s distinctive multinational constellation. The International Association of Byzantine Studies is composed of some thirty-nine national committees,1 including twenty-four current NATO members, five former Soviet republics and four Soviet-aligned satellite states. The oldest centres for Byzantine research in the Western world are located at the heart of historic institutions of educational privilege: in Washington DC (Dumbarton Oaks, administered by Harvard University); the universities of Munich, Oxford and Princeton; and the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Istanbul has emerged as a new hub in the last thirty years with research centres and faculty posts at Boğaziçi and Koç Universities.2 These have come to complement long-standing traditions of Byzantine studies, with chairs and endowed centres, in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Russia and Ukraine. The last handful of quinquennial International Byzantine Congresses took place in London, Sofia, Belgrade and Venice; and the next will be in Vienna. The discipline and its practice therefore bridge traditional divides between west and east, the first and the second worlds. But the stakes of Byzantine studies and the material conditions of those teaching them vary widely across these states. In the main centres of the Western and North Atlantic world, Byzantine studies is a luxury, a space for curiosity for the obscure afforded by immense institutional wealth. In much of the Balkans, Russia and Ukraine, it is the bread-and-butter medieval module for any degree in history, ethnography, philology or theology, and is often delivered by scholars who teach at more than one institution to make ends meet. This geographic breadth, which extends far beyond the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire in any period of its history, is partly explained by the second peculiarity, namely, the absence of an obvious successor state. Although Greece may appear as a natural successor due to linguistic continuity and the political prominence of the Orthodox Church, the contest over Byzantium’s legacy began immediately after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, long before the foundation of the Hellenic Kingdom in 1820. Some among the conquering Ottomans, not least Sultan Mehmed II, considered themselves Byzantium’s heirs, while others in the same court rejected the imperial legacy.3 And the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the eastern Mediterranean was fiercely contested by foreign powers, including at various times the popes, the Habsburgs, the Bourbons, the Romanovs and, ultimately, the Kingdom of Greece.4 Contested succession points to the third peculiarity of Byzantine studies: its status as a historical discipline whose object of study is not a region or an era but a state. Roman studies exist, but are usually folded into Classics; and while there are journals of (e.g.) Mamluk and Mongol studies, they are not accompanied by the institutional apparatus (such as dedicated research institutes and endowed chairs) of Byzantine studies.5 A discipline focused on a state whose legacy is contested must, by definition, be highly politicised. Indeed, practitioners of Byzantine studies have historically participated not only in ‘small-p politics’ (in the sense that all history or scholarship is political), but also in ‘large-P Politics’, taking roles in government and helping to articulate their states’ claims to sovereignty. In Diana Mishkova’s Rival Byzantiums, we encounter three Byzantinists who served their countries as Prime Minister in the first half of the twentieth century: Spyridon Lambros in Greece (1916–17), Nicolae Iorga in Romania (1931–2), and Bogdan Filov in Bulgaria (1940–43). Even those Byzantinists who did not directly engage in politics were subject to intensive political scrutiny. For example, and as we discuss further below, the same decades witnessed the arrest of Soviet Byzantinists and eventually the execution of Vladimir Beneshevich, the head of the Soviet Academy’s Byzantine Commission. Analyses of the politics of Byzantine studies remain scarce. They constitute (as we have written elsewhere) ‘not the intellectual production of a self-conscious field of critical historiography’, but ‘an undercurrent of locally occasioned critical reflections’.6 The contrast to neighbouring disciplines is striking. Archaeologists, for example, have long recognised the intrinsically political stakes of their field. Already in 1984, Bruce Trigger proposed that archaeology could be divided into ‘three basic types …: Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist’, taking it as a given that all archaeological practice is informed by and contributes to contemporary politics.7 Subsequent scholarship has both built on and expanded Trigger’s typology.8 For example, beginning around the year 2000, scholars established Indigenous archaeology as an autonomous and dynamic perspective on disciplinary history—albeit one that Trigger had previously excluded from his purview.9 The three books under review allow us to propose an analogous typology for Byzantine studies, starting from the assumption that every practice of Byzantine studies has a politics inherent in it, just as every practice of history has a philosophy inherent in it, even if it is not explicitly stated. In the volumes at hand we can identify versions of all three of Trigger’s founding types: a nationalist, a colonialist and an imperialist Byzantine studies. Our aim thereby is not to draw firm divisions between modes of scholarship. As Dimitris Stamatopoulos demonstrates in Byzantium after the Nation, late nineteenth-century intellectuals occupied multiple and sometimes contradictory political positions over the course of their public careers, their allegiances alternating between old empires and new nations. The case is hardly different today, as resurgent nationalisms everywhere erode the foundations of the (always tenuous) post-1989 internationalist–liberal consensus. Both the material conditions under which scholars work and the political expectations placed upon the Byzantine heritage vary widely from country to country. Scholars working within the empire’s erstwhile territories face different challenges from those working outside; not everyone receives the same resources to support their curiosity, nor the same freedom to be critical of received narratives. Nevertheless, a heuristic typology of disciplinary politics helps to break down a strict between and of Byzantine studies. namely, to a by all to Byzantine as a of multinational or it as an and a to the of national are more in Byzantine studies than the which are into the and of the International Association of Byzantine Diana Mishkova’s study beyond to a critical of the roles that Byzantine history has in the founding of nations. The of on the discipline is which of an of Byzantium in the works of late Ottoman intellectuals in the on Byzantine studies by and in The of by from and it that of disciplinary including its emerged before the Trigger’s three of imperialist and also for the politics of Byzantine studies. and also as in their can obscure the of modes of scholarship. we by that in the books under the of Byzantine modes of scholarship after the of the Byzantine and the of scholarship in some the or not these for they are for in far as they the of the we have a on all the that Byzantine studies has we can to the more of we it to In far as Byzantinists have the politics of it is a that Byzantine studies from its of which is the assumption that is an This we will The second is that has rarely been with the and of Diana demonstrates that Byzantine studies has been at the heart of and while is there are different in which Byzantium could the In Mishkova’s Byzantium’s in was to have the of the medieval them to on their could be both and Mishkova’s study the nineteenth-century of five national that had to out to with the and the Byzantine Empire from the perspective of a successor to its and much of its each of the traditions to the of its from the imperial of medieval The to Byzantine to its before the of and Even and were established in the they the and of the Byzantine Byzantine were the out its its even its The stakes of Byzantine studies were from the for all its historical Byzantium the or the A or the of and These were as for and as they were for and The and over the course of the twentieth As their as the historical discipline as political as each of the by between Byzantium and its Byzantium began as the to more Ottoman Byzantium for and it to the In between as of first the first of his of the in the In the was also the head of the Academy of that Bulgaria in of Byzantine and the took more of Byzantium emerged after the of the twentieth The Kingdom of Greece, from the of the of had on its in the of the intellectual a in the for the for and from the an Ottoman subject from who to Romania in that if Byzantium had not the they have on the of the of the The of as the in and the Byzantine legacy more to states. Nicolae Iorga that it was the not the who had an of Byzantine succession Byzantium that an who his could that the also from the and not just the Even such as to a of the Byzantium had was to Byzantine heritage and to the and between these but in Mishkova’s the foundation upon which all history was or Byzantium served the state. in Romania, for example, the with medieval at the of in in to Soviet But by the the of the twentieth the of Iorga and to the Roman legacy the of the Balkans, the of the as a in The same was in the NATO of and Greece, the of and was in support of the state a Byzantium to a of the from Byzantium for the same a of in the which we discuss below, the twentieth as the of the and at the often Byzantium while Rival is a and in it demonstrates both in the of The of Mishkova’s and the of on the of a study of Western and of Byzantine studies. be Western have the by nationalisms in the of medieval This usually in the late and with to the of The of in the (e.g.) and of Byzantine studies by for example, the to The of which rarely the of and at various Western Nevertheless, these scholars all to have the same as national in to Byzantium or to it, it as a or it as a foreign a in the that they As and in their and the of their on in Byzantine among This as the to the by are and The for a will but can be by of the late medieval of the received the of in the politics of Byzantine studies is both and is but not to at the of the with Byzantine the of a Byzantine studies is the of imperialist and colonialist on Byzantine studies are us with a heuristic between these the one imperial of Byzantium to a between the the Ottoman Empire as the successor to the the Byzantine studies served including not those of the and This Ottoman and a to former Byzantine is the of Dimitris Byzantium after the to have a nineteenth-century of from national A of a study first in some years work and a of of the works of late imperial intellectuals and in a of including and In place of these Byzantium in the of imperial and of and for those of national of their and and in contrast to the of in Rival and The of imperial the legitimacy of the as to the of continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman was both by in in the of the and by in for journals in Both to the between and Ottoman imperial Stamatopoulos the between these Ottoman and the intellectual and to and For both or in by of of the imperial and of the of the be it or This at first the Ottoman imperial Stamatopoulos a further between the work of scholars and Ottoman The here is whose of an medieval a analogous to that by Byzantium for and as a for imperial in the study is in its of the of late imperial intellectuals whose have been by the of national is also in its to draw an between and in the late and twentieth As Stamatopoulos at the some of the including Greece and Bulgaria, in their in the that we propose just as the and empires to their versions of in to in the new And intellectuals between imperial and positions over the course of their of is the who in his in Ottoman as an imperial in and under the as a nationalist, for is an before is a or a the of study is to the of a or even Byzantine studies, in which the Byzantine state neither as the nor as the of the but as an to national The imperial that Stamatopoulos on the of Ottoman long as the a to Byzantine The of Ottoman by to a different to Byzantine history, which can be as and The of Byzantium to the whose on and the Byzantine the of the of Byzantine studies after the fall of for in Byzantine the of the and and the of Ottoman Byzantine history, it is sometimes with the Ottoman but in practice it is not that it much of in his to The of Byzantium that the scholars that Byzantine could the Ottoman The of Byzantine studies was to Ottoman In the of Byzantine studies was not into the but to The is a Byzantine studies are the subject of by on Byzantium in a of Ottoman legitimacy and an of to the of Constantinople which had as of that the of the Byzantine Empire one upon which and had (in that to the of Constantinople upon by and of the to Ottoman the of the claims to the Mediterranean were by on the as in and between and a to Ottoman sovereignty. the Empire its claims to a that is across the three volumes under but has been in by the course of the the of Ukraine, the and was by new the of the This into the at the of the with a both in and in the history of Orthodox The nineteenth-century of Byzantine studies at was to the new of in a of in of the Its among was their even further the of a in intellectuals and their of In the to Orthodox in the Balkans, that of the imperial and freedom to the The to the Ottoman was for on multiple that Russia the and also in the with the in the and on the in Bulgaria and the in In after in the Balkans, and the by the Ottomans, the They only at or a from the Byzantine a was In the same the Kingdom of Greece its which at to the territories of the Byzantine thereby Orthodox under This the of the late Ottoman including the still Constantinople and In of Greece its in the and in the west the same it was the who on of their three into in and and on the they were at around from the of In the late and twentieth the of Istanbul was and the various claims were by of the Byzantine Stamatopoulos of and that of these have to be in to a that of imperial a in But on Istanbul was far from the of the the to the to Russia they intellectuals to not they it not been for the have come As it Constantinople did fall in the and the the by and the of the Prime Minister proposed the to the Constantinople to the But there were far claims to the imperial in the In the after five years of by the Istanbul to the in The period of nevertheless as political of the of Ottoman rule over the imperial of Byzantine studies did often those of the late and twentieth that as in Mishkova’s to a of national from the of Byzantine But they could also those late imperial and intellectuals by who 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not all Byzantinists working within the of as by their the of scholarship and the on material a to Byzantine and medieval within the volumes under but both to the of Byzantine studies with Byzantine studies. all of the Byzantinists who are in the volumes under review were of of in and is an and of the Ottoman Empire not appear as historians. on the history of the for that have in the of to one of Orthodox and Mishkova’s of Ottoman of Byzantium on works written in Ottoman and of Stamatopoulos a handful of scholars who of their in of eventually to the new national In had their of Byzantine studies, one in that have been to the for example, the scholars and to each who both to Istanbul in the decades of the on the of and and a widely and much world work in The of not as a work of Byzantine history, but as a of late by Western to be and the Byzantium by and from that of their For a of Byzantine studies in an the of who in Constantinople before to the Kingdom of Greece, eventually the of to 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Source: The English Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ceae159
Authors: Mirela Ivanova, Benjamin Anderson
Institutions: University of Sheffield, Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,115
OpenAlex ID: W4401895296