Sailing from Byzantium (6 page)

The mercilessly acquisitive Venetians specialized in removal. The most famous examples of their booty are the four bronze horses that adorn the Basilica di San Marco, but countless other art treasures were carried off to grace the churches, palazzos, and piazzas of the Serenissima. The less sophisticated French went in more for wholesale drunken demolition, though gold, silver, and jewels were easy enough to spot and grab. In the great church of Hagia Sophia, Nicetas Choniates tells us, looters stripped the silken wall hangings, smashed the icons, tore apart the gold and silver furnishings, and then brought mules inside to load with booty. Some of the mules slipped and fell, unable to regain their footing on the blood-slicked marble floor. Their guts were slashed with knives so that shit oozing from their wounds mixed with the blood on the marble. A drunken whore sat on the patriarch's throne and sang obscene songs before kicking up her heels in a burlesque dance.

Even the Muslim infidels, Choniates continues, treated Christian captives better. The Westerners’ atrocities against both humanity and God revealed their depraved and demonic natures for all to see. As for Constantinople itself, Choniates laments, the city's majesty has been forever despoiled: “O City, formerly enthroned on high, striding far and wide, magnificent in comeliness and more becoming in stature; now thy luxurious garments and elegant royal veils are rent and torn; thy flashing eye has grown dark.”

The Crusaders didn't make it to Egypt. Instead, they set up a “Latin Empire of Constantinople” complete with a Western “emperor.” But they had overextended themselves. The Byzantines proved resilient enough to regroup, first into
several rival governments in exile, then into a single Byzantine rump state. Led by the emperor Michael VIII Paleologos, who styled himself the “New Constantine,” they recaptured Constantinople in 1261.

The emotional chasm between East and West was now fixed in place, deep and wide. Byzantium never forgave or forgot the outrage of Fourth Crusade, nursing a hatred of the West that it would take to the grave. And though the empire lasted a further two centuries, it never recovered its former strength and political influence.

Yet, it was during this final stage that Byzantine civilization shone most brilliantly. Nicetas Choniates could never have known it, but far from growing dark, Byzantium's flashing eye would light the world as never before.

hat has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked the second-century Christian writer Tertullian. Hostile to the secular wisdom of the ancients, Tertullian meant to evoke the answer “Nothing at all,” but others asked the question with sincere curiosity. Boethius asked it, essentially, in his quest to join faith and reason. After him, the West forgot to ask it with any seriousness.

In Byzantium, things were different. Tertullian's question didn't ever go away entirely, and it serves as a prism through which we may glimpse the outlines of Byzantine civilization. Somehow, through all the centuries, Byzantium kept a tight grip on the literature of ancient Greece, yet held it firmly at arm's length. Their ancient pagan literature was at once too barbed with secular reason and other dangers for the Christian Byzantines to embrace too closely, yet too imposing, too downright gorgeous to dismiss altogether. Athens sparkled at one pole of the Byzantine consciousness, Jerusalem glowed softly at the other.

Ever adept at compartmentalizing, the Byzantines drew a clear and crucially revealing line between ancient Greek literature, which they called the Outside Wisdom, and Christian literature, which they called the Inside Wisdom. The distinction was codified in the fourth century by an Eastern Church Father, St. Basil of Caesaria, in his famous essay
To Young Men, On How They Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature,
which remained one of the most widely read works in Byzantium. This short book would do much to keep the peace between Athens and Jerusalem in the coming millennium.

When Basil was writing, controversy raged throughout the Greco-Roman world over Tertullian's question. Attempting to still the waters, Basil affirmed for Christians the moral utility of “the wisdom drawn from the outside,” at least insofar as its precepts could be shown to be in agreement with Christianity's. Ancient poets, historians, and especially philosophers all praised virtue, he wrote, so their works properly deserve a place in the education of Christians. True, they also depict patricide, fratricide, incest, lust, cruelty, gluttony, and other sinful goings-on, not to mention the bickering and multiple gods of the pagan pantheon. Readers must therefore exercise due diligence in weeding out the bad passages from the good, storing up the moral lessons as they go, just as bees make honey through judicious visits to fragrant and colorful—but otherwise useless—flowers.

Over time, Basil's approach was adopted as the mainstream attitude in the Byzantine East. As such, it remained in force for more than a millennium: a thousand years later Theodore Metochites would explicitly echo it in his letter to the monks of the Chora. Even in Basil's day, however, there were those who took a harder line toward Greece's secular,
rationalistic pagan heritage, including his friend, the only slightly less esteemed theologian St. Gregory of Nazianzus. The hostility and suspicion of these Christian hard-liners— almost always they were monks—toward the classics would never go away. At times it would simmer quietly, while at other times it would boil over into open controversy.

Despite the monks’ hostility, this most Christian of societies always retained a secular educational system based on the Outside Wisdom, which it had inherited from its pre-Christian past. This sharply distinguishes the Byzantine East from the Latin West. As Christianity triumphed throughout the empire over the fourth to sixth centuries, various forces—doctrinal disputes, barbarian invasions, and in the seventh century the rise of Islam—shattered the old unity of the Greco-Roman world. Both East and West entered Dark Ages in which the classics came as close to vanishing as they ever would. In the Latin West, the future Catholic world, the break with the past was severe. In the Byzantine East, the future Orthodox world, continuity prevailed—after a fashion. Rome and the West fell to incoming barbarians, but Constantinople and the East endured, though not without suffering their own travails.

By the seventh century, when those travails were at their worst, Greek had replaced Latin as the language of government, reflecting the new capital's Greek milieu. By that time, too, the long struggle between Christianity and paganism was drawing to a close. A landmark came in 529, when the emperor Justinian closed the last major stronghold of pagan philosophy, the venerable Platonic Academy in Athens. There
Neoplatonist writers and teachers had struggled to stem the Christian tide by developing and codifying Platonic doctrine.
^∗

A century after Justinian closed the Platonic Academy, the Dark Age of Byzantium began. For the next 150 years, Byzantium suffered a break in its secular traditions of cultivated literacy and higher education in the pagan classics. The remaining academies closed, and no longer did Byzantine historians, for example, schooled in the craft of Herodotus and Thucydides, practice their reasoned inquiries into human activities. Pressed in the east by the Arab conquests that followed the rise of Islam and in the north by the incursions of Slavs into the Balkans as far as southern Greece itself, the Byzantines lacked the resources, the leisure, and above all the will to indulge in such pursuits.

Still, there is dark, and there is dark. While classical learning died off in the West, in Byzantium it merely lay ill, ignored and unloved by a society in desperate need of the unity and simple comfort that Christianity offered. Even during Byzantium's Dark Age, which began later and ended earlier than the West's, a strong central state survived, which cannot be said of the West. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and the other ancient authors continued to be read in school. They may also have been taught privately on a higher level by a handful of learned individuals, though no names of any such teachers survive. Meanwhile, like Italian, spoken Greek had long been evolving into simpler forms: reading and especially writing
ancient Greek required hard study even for Byzantines who were native Greek-speakers. Byzantine humanists were always a tiny minority. Even at the best of times, the leisure to pursue the Outside Wisdom was reserved for wealthy elites. In the Dark Age, if the humanists were there at all, their numbers were so small as to have left no impression.
^∗

Despite the breakdown in higher education, Homer was always “the poet” to Byzantine schoolchildren—and his works, the beginnings of Western literature, survive today because they stayed on the Byzantine educational curriculum. The same holds true for other ancient Greek authors. Like the bones of dinosaurs, ancient Greek literature survived by becoming fossilized.

The end of the Dark Age and the revival of interest in ancient Greek learning came during a period of expansion and renewed prosperity that for convenience (and in homage to Sir Steven) we'll call the First Byzantine Renaissance.
^†
Byzantinists know it as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the imperial dynasty that presided over it.

This was the age in which visitors such as Liudprand of Cremona beheld with awe the throne of Byzantine emperors. Byzantine prestige provided the model of imperial Christian
rule for the West, even if Western kings like Otto the Great chafed to outdo it. Byzantium was also an art school, a repository of techniques old and new, lost or never known, that the West now began discovering. From Hungary and Austria to Spain and Portugal, from Sicily and Naples to Britain and France, Byzantine artists (and art objects) traveled to European courts. With them came precious knowledge of mosaic, painting, carving, book illumination, and other techniques. Cloisonné enamel came to Limoges from Byzantium.

Within a newly confident, outward-looking Byzantine society, secular learning and Christian piety now embarked upon the period of their closest and most fruitful partnership. An aristocratic mastery of classical Greek literary style reasserted itself as the criterion for service in the imperial bureaucracy (Byzantium's overeducated civil servants are often compared to the Confucian mandarins of imperial China). Byzantium's historians again took up the pen, doing their utmost to imitate the dense, rationalistic Thu-cydidean style. The scribes and scholars of this era preserved everything we have of ancient Greek literature, for the oldest surviving manuscripts were copied in these years. The collaboration also resulted in Orthodoxy's farthest-reaching victory, the conversion of the eastern and southern Slavs.

In the eleventh century, internal and external difficulties again beset the empire. Weakened by social divisions that the strong emperors of the Macedonian era had held in check, Byzantium suddenly faced incursions by fierce enemies on all its borders. Petchenegs raided from the north; Normans (still just Frangoi to the Byzantines) invaded from southern Italy; and the populous Seljuk Turks, in the process
of displacing the Arabs as leaders of the Islamic world, began pouring into Asia Minor from the east.
^∗

Desperate measures ensued, and under the inspired leadership of a brilliant emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, who founded a new imperial dynasty in the late eleventh century, the empire managed to survive. Much was owed to Alexius’ fortitude and determination, as his talented daughter and chronicler, the historian Anna Comnena, makes clear in her paean to him, the
Alexiad.
On the run and cobbling together one rabble army after another from scratch, Alexius endured a series of blistering thrashings at the hands of the Normans. Much was owed also to his skillful negotiations with the Venetians, former Byzantine subjects from whom Alexius secured military aid in exchange for valuable trade privileges in Constantinople. It must have seemed like a winning proposition then, and no doubt it was, although at a time not too far distant the Venetians would extract their pound of flesh, and more, from the empire's flagging body.

Survival would exact another price, as the partnership between secular learning and Christian piety, between reason and faith, began to crumble under the burden of social and military disintegration. Taking advantage of the prevailing uncertainty, and of the monks’ traditional suspicion of the humanist intellectuals, Alexius browbeat a reluctant church administration into condemning a critic of his, the philosopher John Italus, for heretical Neoplatonic beliefs. Other such trials would follow. Historians have associated them with an upsurge of mysticism in the Byzantine monastic community. The example of John Italus weighed heavily on Byzantine humanists of succeeding generations, and for
centuries his fate essentially closed the door on the independent pursuit of Greek philosophical ideas within Byzantine society.

The stand taken against such inquiry by Byzantium's powerful monks was soon reinforced by a succession of historical circumstances that further stressed the empire's already tattered social fabric. The worst of these was the Fourth Crusade, when the Latins occupied Constantinople for over half a century. Under the house of Paleologos the Byzantines recovered some of their morale with their capital in 1261, and for a few short decades Athens and Jersusalem found harmony again.

Then, as Seljuk power waned around the turn of the fourteenth century, an aggressive new Turkish power arose along the Byzantine border in western Asia Minor. Named for its founder, Osman, the growing Osmanli or Ottoman state soon pushed the Byzantines onto the defensive for the last time.

Several times in the fourteenth century, crippling civil wars wracked the dwindling Byzantine empire. Often there were multiple claimants to the throne, with the Venetians and Genoese each sponsoring their own competing members of the Paleologan dynasty, and the Turks acting as kingmakers. In strategic terms, the last part of Byzantine history makes a dreary tale, as Genoese, Venetians, Turks, and others contentiously scavenged what they could from the remains of the empire.

Paradoxically, Byzantium's culture seemed to flower more insistently each time its military power was pruned
back. This defiant cultural florescence was the Paleologan or Last Byzantine Renaissance, in which Theodore Metochites played such an important part. We have now described a circle, back to the springboard from which Byzantium's humanists launched the ancient Greek classics on their westward trajectory.

In the century or so before the fall of Constantinople, Theodore Metochites and his successors made a partial comeback within Byzantium. Yet, this time there would be no fruitful partnership with the monks. In the mid-fourteenth century, even as the humanists gathered momentum, the monks enjoyed their own renewal. It deliberately excluded the literary humanism of Metochites’ intellectual heirs. Championed by the monks, a spiritual resurgence ultimately invigorated the whole Byzantine church, whose authority and power seemed to grow as those of the imperial government diminished. This great awakening is known as Hesychasm, and it, too, was a vital part of the Last Byzantine Renaissance.

The name comes from the Greek noun
hesychia,
originally simply “quiet,” later “holy quiet,” “peace,” and “solitude” rolled into one; the Hesychast monks believed that meditation with controlled breathing and repetitious prayer could lead to
theosis,
“divinification,” mystical union with the Godhead, bathing its practitioners in the same divine light that had bathed Christ at Mt. Tabor in the transfiguration. The Hesychasts would eventually win dominance of the Orthodox church, and religious scholars today view their movement as the last major phase in the development of Orthodox theology.