Byzantine Culture

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Byzantine Studies

Gibbon called it a thousand years of decline; Voltaire called it a disgrace to the human mind. How Byzantine studies began, why the field was despised, and how it was rehabilitated.

No other major civilisation has had a worse press than Byzantium, and the reasons have almost nothing to do with the Byzantines. The reputation was made in eighteenth-century France and England, for purposes internal to eighteenth-century France and England, and the field has spent two hundred years digging out from under it.

The Verdicts

Montesquieu (1734) described the empire’s history as “nothing but a tissue of revolts, seditions and perfidies.”

Voltaire called it “a disgrace to the human mind” and “a worthless repertory of declamations and miracles.”

Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) is the most influential history book in English, gave the eastern empire — a thousand years of it — a fraction of his space and characterised it as “a uniform tale of weakness and misery,” a passive story of decline with no compensating achievement.

W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 produced the sentence most often quoted against the field: that the Byzantine Empire constitutes “without a single exception the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed.”

These judgements rest on identifiable positions. Enlightenment writers were hostile to monasticism, to theological controversy, to autocracy and to a church closely bound to the state, and Byzantium supplied conspicuous examples of all four. Protestant historians disliked its ritual; classical scholars disliked its Greek; liberal historians disliked its politics; and nobody much had read it.

The Term

The word “Byzantine” itself is part of the problem. The people concerned called themselves Rhomaioi, Romans, and their state the empire of the Romans, without interruption, from Constantine to 1453.

“Byzantine” was coined by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf in 1557 and popularised by French scholarship in the seventeenth century, and its adoption served a purpose: it separated the medieval Greek empire from Rome, leaving the Roman inheritance available to the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in the west. The argument is set out in Why “Byzantine”?.

The adjective then acquired its modern English sense of devious and needlessly complicated, which continues to do quiet damage every time a newspaper uses it.

The Founders

Serious scholarship began before the abuse and continued through it.

The Byzantine du Louvre, a series of editions of Byzantine historians published in Paris from 1645 under royal patronage and directed by scholars including Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, established the textual basis of the field. Du Cange’s glossaries of medieval Greek and Latin, published in the 1670s and 1680s, are still consulted.

The nineteenth century brought the German and Russian traditions. Karl Krumbacher founded the Byzantinische Zeitschrift in 1892 and wrote the first history of Byzantine literature; the Russian school, with a direct confessional and cultural interest, produced Vasiliev and Ostrogorsky, whose History of the Byzantine State (1940) was the standard textbook for two generations.

Greek national historiography had its own stake. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’s History of the Greek Nation (1860–1874) made the decisive move of treating ancient Greece, Byzantium and modern Greece as a single continuous national story — against a western scholarship that treated Byzantium as an oriental interruption. The political dimension of this is described in the Megali Idea.

The Rehabilitation

The twentieth century transformed the field, through several distinct developments.

Art history led the way. The cleaning of the Hagia Sophia mosaics from 1931 and of the Chora from 1948, and the publication of the Sinai icons from the 1950s, put objects of unarguable quality in front of people who had assumed there were none.

Institutions. Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, endowed in 1940, became the field’s centre of gravity, with a research library, a journal and a publication programme. Comparable centres developed in Vienna, Munich, Paris, Athens, Thessalonica, Belgrade and Moscow.

Social and economic history. From the 1960s the field moved beyond emperors and councils to taxation, land, demography, and the lives of ordinary people, drawing on documentary and archaeological evidence rather than chronicles.

Archaeology. Survey work in Greece and Anatolia from the 1970s onward has transformed the picture of the Byzantine countryside and produced the evidence for the economic recovery of the ninth to twelfth centuries — which is the single most important revision to the traditional narrative of continuous decline.

Gender, and the study of the marginal. Work on women, eunuchs, children, the poor and the enslaved has opened areas the older field did not consider.

What Is Argued About Now

Several live debates shape current work:

  • The seventh-century transformation: whether the end of antiquity in the east was a catastrophe or a transformation, and how far the cities actually collapsed
  • The scale of the plague of Justinian and of climate events
  • Whether “decline” is a usable category at all, or an artefact of reading the empire backwards from 1453
  • Byzantium’s place in “Europe”: whether the field’s marginality in European history curricula reflects a defensible judgement or an inherited prejudice
  • The relationship to Ottoman history, and whether the two should be studied together

The Position Today

Byzantine studies is a small, healthy, international field with good journals, strong archaeology, excellent editions and a steady flow of translations into English that has made the primary sources accessible to general readers for the first time.

It remains under-represented in general education. A student in Britain or America can complete a degree in medieval history having read nothing about a state that lasted a thousand years, occupied the strategic centre of the medieval world, preserved the whole of Greek literature and shaped the religion of eastern Europe. That gap is Gibbon’s most durable achievement, and it is finally closing.

The Key Books

A short annotated list is more useful than a survey, and these are the works that shaped the field or would now be recommended to a reader entering it.

Foundational

  • Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) — wrong about Byzantium and indispensable, because everything since argues with it
  • George Finlay, A History of Greece (1877) — an early and unusually sympathetic English treatment
  • J. B. Bury, A History of the Later Roman Empire (1889, rev. 1923) — the first major English work to take the subject seriously on its own terms

The standard twentieth-century histories

  • George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (1940; English 1956) — the textbook for two generations, organised around the theme system
  • A. A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire (1928)

Modern general accounts

  • Cyril Mango, ed., The Oxford History of Byzantium (2002)
  • Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2007) — the best entry point for a general reader
  • Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) — comprehensive, narrative, opinionated
  • Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire (2023) — argues the Roman case throughout, and is the most substantial recent single-volume history

Reference

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991), three volumes — the field’s indispensable tool
  • The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008)
  • The Economic History of Byzantium (2002), three volumes, Dumbarton Oaks

The Argument About Roman Identity

The liveliest current debate concerns something that sounds like a terminological quibble and is not.

The traditional framing treats the Byzantines as medieval Greeks with a Roman political inheritance, or as an eastern Christian civilisation distinct from Rome. The word “Byzantine” encodes that framing, as Why “Byzantine”? explains.

The revisionist position, argued most forcefully by Anthony Kaldellis, is that this is simply a mistake: the inhabitants called themselves Romans, understood themselves as Romans, maintained Roman law and institutions continuously, and constituted a Roman nation-state with a Roman ethnic identity. On this reading, “Byzantium” is a modern invention that has prevented historians from seeing what was in front of them.

The counter-arguments are that Roman identity in the empire was more layered and more contested than this allows; that the Greek and Orthodox components of that identity were not incidental; and that nation-state language imports modern categories.

The debate has been sharp, occasionally personal, and productive. It has forced the field to examine an assumption that had gone unexamined for four centuries, and it has changed how new general histories are written — several recent titles now foreground the Roman name.

What Byzantine Studies Looks Like Now

A brief sketch of the field’s current shape, for anyone considering going further.

Where it is done. Dumbarton Oaks in Washington; the Austrian Academy in Vienna; the Collège de France and the Sorbonne in Paris; Oxford, Birmingham and King’s College London in Britain; Athens and Thessalonica; Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest and Moscow; and, increasingly, Istanbul, where Turkish Byzantine studies has grown substantially.

Journals. Byzantinische Zeitschrift (founded 1892), Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, Revue des études byzantines.

What is growing. Archaeology and material culture; environmental and climate history; network analysis of the documentary sources; digital editions and manuscript imaging; the study of Byzantium alongside the Islamic world and the Ottomans rather than in isolation.

What is still thin. Byzantium in general education, where the gap noted above remains, and in most English-language medieval survey courses.

The International Congress of Byzantine Studies meets every five years and is the field’s central gathering; the 2022 congress was held in Istanbul, which would have been unimaginable a century ago and says something about how the subject has changed.

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