Sailing from Byzantium (31 page)

As for Maxim, his situation continued to improve. With Vasily's death soon afterward, the three-year-old Ivan IV became grand prince. Eventually the hostile metropolitan Daniel was deposed, but Ivan—who began asserting himself as ruler while still in his teens—fell under the influence of the new metropolitan, the elderly Makary, whose attitude toward Maxim was hardly more sympathetic. Maxim pleaded over and over to be allowed to return home to Mt. Athos, but his pleas were refused. Although he was finally released from imprisonment when he was around eighty, he never left Russia.

Instead, he found refuge of a sort in the famed monastery of the Holy Trinity near Moscow, which had been founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh. There Hesychast and Non-Possessor ideas still quietly percolated, and there Maxim continued to read and write, though his eyesight was failing and his hands were arthritic. He also taught the monks enough Greek to make copies of the Psalms.

In 1553 Maxim was reportedly visited by Ivan the Terrible, who was making a pilgrimage with his wife and infant son to a monastery in the far north to give thanks for his delivery from a near-fatal illness. The conversation between the young ruler and the old monk was later recounted by a disenchanted retainer of Ivan's, Prince Kurbsky. Kurbsky was one of many Russians who retained Non-Possessor sympathies and greatly admired Maxim for his modest fortitude in the face of so many torments.
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According to Kurbsky, Ivan had fallen under the influence of evil Possessor monks, who promised him absolution in exchange for granting them land and making useless pilgrimages. Maxim instead advised Ivan to look after the widows and orphans of soldiers killed in a recent military campaign against the Tatars. If Ivan persisted in the pilgrimage, Maxim prophesied, his young son, Vasily, would perish. “Flattered and urged to do this by those monks who love the world and love possessions,” Kurbsky writes, the arrogant Ivan insisted on ignoring the advice, and the boy indeed fell ill and died. A few years after this (possibly fictional) meeting took place, Maxim himself died quietly at the Trinity monastery, on January 21,1556, by the old Orthodox calendar.

Maxim and the Hesychast tradition he stood for had become symbols of resistance to the autocratic power that was now claimed by Moscow's expansionist rulers. A few years before his meeting with Maxim, Ivan the Terrible was the first Russian ruler to be crowned as tsar, although his father and grandfather had used the title on occasion. This was part of a deliberate campaign to appropriate the Byzantine legacy and use it to enhance Moscow's imperial power; as part of that campaign, the old idea of the Third Rome was now picked up and burnished for public consumption. In effect, the new Russia turned its back on Byzantium's spiritual legacy and instead embraced a propaganda version of its political legacy. Despite such claims, the imperial tsars were a Russian creation, not a Byzantine one.

Echoes of the Hesychast tradition would continue to resound in Russian culture. The mystical Tolstoy would have had much to talk about with Maxim Grek. And in the West, the ancient Greek heritage that at first had so entranced Michael Trivolis would also find new life and new meaning.

But Byzantium itself had ended a century earlier. It was
now a fading memory, not a point of embarkation for travelers bearing the fruits of civilization. No one would follow in the footsteps of Michael Trivolis, the man who became Maxim, and whose fate so strangely recapitulates Byzantium's own: a passage into long captivity at the end of the road from Athens to Jerusalem.

originally met Byzantium in the eighth grade, when my Russian teacher and good friend, James Morris, suggested Cyril and Methodius as a topic for my first long research paper. Years later, as an undergraduate at UCLA, I was lucky enough to take several Byzantine history courses with Speros Vryonis, Jr., whose teaching brought a long-forgotten subject back to life for me. I'm grateful to every teacher I've ever had, but I'd especially like to thank Jim Morris and Speros Vryonis for enriching my life by introducing me to Byzantium with such warmth, enthusiasm, and skill.

This book originated in a comment that Professor Vryonis made one day in class: One of the most fascinating things about Byzantium, he said, was the way it influenced the younger civilizations that grew up around it. Despite a busy schedule, Speros Vryonis continued to offer his warm support as I undertook the research and writing of
Sailing from Byzantium,
generously reading some early versions of the outline and manuscript. I am very grateful to him for his efforts. If the book has strengths, they likely originate with him; its mistakes, I hasten to add, I have made entirely on my own.

With the same stipulation very much in mind, I thank Michael J. B. Allen, Dimitri Gutas, Henrietta Leyser, and Ingrid D. Rowland for help and advice at various stages of researching and writing this book; I owe a special additional debt to Henrietta Leyser for her ongoing encouragement and support. For inspiration, I thank Peter Brown, Averil Cameron, Fred Halliday, Dimitri Obolensky, Diana Wells, and Mark Whittow. Bob Loomis gave me a fair hearing long before I was ready, and I thank him for that. My father, Charles Wells, and my mother, Liz Jones, offered helpful comments on early drafts, as did Gordon Davis, George Davis, Charlie Davis, Dan Henderson, and Simone Stephens. They were wonderful exemplars of my intended audience, the curious general reader. I'm indebted also to the staffs of the following institutions: the University Research Library at UCLA; Firestone Library at Princeton University; the New York Public Library; Starr Library at Middlebury College; Feinberg Library at SUNY Plattsburgh; the Archiginnasio (Biblioteca Comunale) in Bologna, Italy; and the Westport Library Association and the Wadhams Free Library of Westport, NY.

My agents, Edward Knappman and Elizabeth Frost-Knappman of New England Publishing Associates, have given me the best professional representation anyone could hope for, along with sage counsel and warm support. The talents of John J. Flicker, my editor at Bantam Dell, contributed significantly to this book's final shape and tone; anyone who says that old-school editing is a thing of the past hasn't worked with John. David Lindroth turned a tangle of notes into a series of crisp, attractive, and informative maps; Marietta Anastassatos’ beautiful dust jacket and Glen Edelstein's elegant interior design handsomely complement the content. Thank you all. Finally, the late Clyde Taylor believed in the book also, and I remain grateful for his efforts on my behalf.

his is a work of popular synthesis with no pretensions to original scholarship. Byzantium's interactions with its three neighboring civilizations constitute separate areas within the larger field of Byzantine studies, and to each of these areas some first-rate scholars have devoted all or part of their careers. In addition, Byzantium per se has also been blessed by the attention of some superb scholars; likewise the separate areas of Italian Renaissance history, Islamic and Arabic history, and Slavic studies, not to mention related fields such as the transmission of classical literature. Without the work of scholars in all of these fields this book would not have been possible.

While many of the points made in passing are my own, many have also come from the work of these scholars. Most often they have been picked up by other scholars and entered the common reservoir, so to speak, but doubtless sometimes they have not. Regardless, I have given notes not for individual ideas and insights, as one would ideally try to in a scholarly work, but only for quotations. To anyone familiar with
the field in question, my debts should be readily apparent, but I would like to sketch them below on a chapter-by-chapter basis, not only for the sake of giving credit where credit is due, but also for the sake of helping the general reader who would like to learn more.

My greatest general debt is to the late John Meyendorff, whose learned and stimulating writings have done so much to illuminate the role of Hesychasm in the dissemination of Byzantine civilization to the Slavic world. Most importantly, I have adopted his conception of Byzantine civilization as a long dialogue between humanists and monks, between faith and reason, between Athens and Jerusalem, and of the Hesychast controversy as the final stage of that dialogue. Meyendorff also stresses the dismay and discomfort of the humanists with the controversy's outcome, and so my own thesis of the Hesychast controversy as an engine of Byzantine cultural influence in the West as well as in the Orthodox world owes much to his insightful scholarship. I have extended Meyendorff's picture of the Hesychast controversy and its implications to include Byzantium's influence on the West, and then used the tension between faith and reason on which the controversy turned to frame my discussion of Byzantine cultural diffusion to the Islamic world. Much of this, I think, is implicit in Meyendorff's analysis, but it needed to be worked out. Focusing on Byzantium's Orthodox legacy, Meyendorff had no interest in either of these latter two fields.

An Orthodox priest as well as a historian, Meyendorff was remarkably objective in many of his judgments, but he resisted mightily the imputation of obscurantism to the Hesychast monks that has commonly been made by sometimes hostile modern historians of a secular humanist bent. On one hand, though I share these historians’ secular outlook,
my view of the monks is less dismissive than they tend to be; on the other hand, I cannot follow Meyendorff in rescuing the monks from the charge of obscurantism. In the end I have been less interested in passing judgment than in telling the story—a story to which both sides made valuable contributions as well as perhaps more discreditable ones.

Prologue:
My greatest debts are to the work of John Meyendorff, and especially to his article on the Chora in Paul A. Underwood,
The Kariye Djami;
and to the article by Ihor Ševšenko in the same volume.

Part I

Chapter One:
See the work of Averil Cameron, Judith Herrin, Peter Brown, Margaret Gibson, and James J. O’Donnell as cited in the Bibliography.
Chapter Two:
John Meyendorff, as cited in the Bibliography.
Chapter Three:
Kenneth Setton, “The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance;” Donald Nicol,
The Last Centuries of Byzantium;
and the articles of Frances Kianka as cited in the Bibliography.
Chapter Four:
Michael Baxandall,
Giotto and the Orators;
George Holmes,
The Florentine Enlightenment;
Roberto Weiss, “Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia;” and N. G. Wilson,
From Byzantium to Italy.
Chapter Five:
Eugenio Garin,
Portraits from the Quattrocento;
the works of Deno John Geanakoplos as cited in the Bibliography; Joseph Gill,
Council of Florence;
George Holmes,
Florentine Enlightenment;
and N. G. Wilson,
From Byzantium to Italy.

Part II

Chapter Six:
See Averil Cameron as cited in the Bibliography; Patricia Crone,
Meccan Trade;
Garth Fowden,
From Empire to Commonwealth;
H. A. R. Gibb, “Arab Byzantine Relations Under the Umayyad Caliphate;” Walter Kaegi,
Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests;
and Speros Vryonis, Jr., “Byzantium and Islam, Seven-Seventeenth Century.”
Chapter Seven:
The works of Sebastian Brock as cited in the Bibliography; Garth Fowden,
Empire to Commonwealth;
Dimitri Gutas,
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture;
Marshall Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam;
and Hugh Kennedy,
The Early Abbasid Caliphate.
Chapter Eight:
The works of Dimitri Gutas as cited in the Bibliography; the works of Fred Halliday as cited in the Bibliography; Majid Fakhry,
A History of Islamic Philosophy;
and Marshall Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam,
vols. I and II.

Part III

Chapters Nine through Twelve:
See the works of John Fine, Dimitri Obolensky, Ihor Sevcenko, and Mark Whittow as cited in the Bibliography.
Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen:
Obolensky and Whittow as cited in the Bibliography, and Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard,
The Emergence of Rus.
Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen:
Dimitri Obolensky,
The Byzantine Commonwealth
and
Six Byzantine Portraits;
John Meyendorff,
Byzantium and the Rise of Russia;
Daniel Pipes,
Russia Under the Old Regime;
and Janet Martin,
Medieval Russia, 980-1584.

Epilogue:
See Dimitri Obolensky,
Six Byzantine Portraits,
and Jack V. Haney,
From Italy to Muscovy.