Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Byzantium and the Islamic World

Byzantium and the caliphates fought for eight hundred years and exchanged scholars, texts, craftsmen, mosaics and ideas throughout. The frontier, the translation movement, and mutual influence.

The relationship between Byzantium and its Muslim neighbours lasted from the 630s to 1453, which makes it the longest continuous engagement between any two civilisations in the medieval world. It was conducted in the language of holy war on both sides and in practice consisted mostly of raiding, truces, prisoner exchanges, embassies, trade and a steady traffic in books, craftsmen, doctors and ideas.

Neither side thought of the other as alien. They were rival claimants to the same inheritance, occupying adjacent halves of the same Mediterranean, and each knew the other far better than either knew the Latin west.

The Conquest and the Frontier

The Arab conquests took Syria, Palestine, Egypt and eventually North Africa from the empire between 634 and the end of the century — the fastest transfer of territory in ancient or medieval history. The military account is in the Battle of Yarmouk and the religious background in the Christological controversies.

Two attempts on Constantinople followed, in the 670s and in 717–718. Both failed, and after the second the frontier stabilised in the Taurus mountains for two centuries.

What developed there was not a border but a zone: a depopulated march several days’ ride across, with fortified passes, raiding in both directions every summer, and a frontier society on each side that had more in common with its opposite number than with the capital behind it. The epic of Digenis Akritas — whose hero is the son of a Muslim emir and a Byzantine noblewoman — is the literary expression of that world, and the equivalent Arabic frontier romances are its mirror.

Regulated Hostility

The formal structures of the relationship are the most striking thing about it.

Truces were negotiated regularly, usually for fixed terms, and generally observed.

Prisoner exchanges took place at the river Lamos in Cilicia, several times a century, conducted with elaborate protocol: captives lined up on opposite banks, exchanged one for one, with the surplus ransomed for cash. These were diplomatic occasions as much as humanitarian ones.

Embassies travelled continuously between Constantinople and Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba, carrying gifts, letters, scholars and physicians. Byzantine diplomacy treated the caliphate as a peer in a way it never treated the Latin west.

Trade ran through the frontier despite prohibitions on strategic goods. Byzantine gold circulated in the Islamic world; Islamic glass, ceramics and textiles reached Byzantium.

Books

The most consequential exchange was textual, and it went both ways.

The great translation movement in ninth-century Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliphs and centred on the Bayt al-Hikma, rendered the Greek scientific and philosophical corpus into Arabic: Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Dioscorides, Hippocrates. The translators — Hunayn ibn Ishaq above all — were mostly Christians of Syria and Iraq working from Greek and Syriac manuscripts.

Byzantine manuscripts were part of the supply. Diplomatic exchanges included books; the caliph al-Ma’mun is recorded as requesting Greek manuscripts from the Byzantine emperor, and there is a tradition, embellished but not baseless, that a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest was part of a peace settlement.

The traffic returned. Byzantine astronomers of the fourteenth century used Persian and Arabic tables; Byzantine medicine absorbed Islamic pharmacology; Arabic numerals reached Byzantium through Maximos Planoudes in 1292.

And the material that reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century came overwhelmingly through Arabic, in Spain and Sicily, before the direct Greek route opened in the fifteenth century — the double transmission described in the transmission of classical learning.

Art and Craft

Influence in the visual arts is well documented and runs, early on, mostly from Byzantium outward.

The Dome of the Rock (691) and the Great Mosque of Damascus (706–715) are decorated with glass mosaics of a kind only Byzantine workshops were making, and Arabic sources say the caliph al-Walid requested craftsmen from the Byzantine emperor for the Damascus work. The mosaics are unquestionably by mosaicists trained in the Byzantine tradition, working to an Islamic programme that excluded figures — the result is a landscape of buildings, trees and rivers with no human beings in it, and it is one of the most beautiful things either tradition produced.

The same happened later at Córdoba, where the tenth-century Umayyad caliph received mosaicists and materials from Constantinople for the mihrab of the Great Mosque.

Traffic in the other direction is visible in Byzantine decorative art from the tenth century: pseudo-Kufic ornamental bands imitating Arabic script on churches and in manuscripts, textile designs, lustreware influences on Byzantine ceramics, and the muqarnas-like treatment of some later vaulting.

The most extraordinary case is the Bryas palace, built for the emperor Theophilos in the 830s on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, explicitly on the model of the Abbasid palaces at Baghdad, by an ambassador who had seen them. A Byzantine emperor built himself an Arab palace.

Ideas

Iconoclasm and its relationship to Islamic aniconism has been argued about for a century. The chronology is suggestive — the caliph Yazid II’s edict against images in 721 precedes Leo III’s measures by a few years — but the Byzantine controversy has its own internal theological logic, set out in Byzantine iconoclasm, and a simple derivation is not sustainable. What can be said is that both societies were arguing about images in the same decades, in adjacent territories, in contact.

Theological engagement was substantial and mostly polemical. John of Damascus, writing from inside the caliphate in the eighth century, produced the earliest substantial Christian account of Islam, treating it as a Christian heresy. A tradition of Greek anti-Islamic polemic and Arabic anti-Christian polemic ran for centuries, and a set of formal debates and correspondences — some genuine, some literary constructions — survives on both sides.

Institutions. The Islamic hospital, the bimaristan, developed from the Byzantine xenon by way of Syrian Christian physicians, and returned to Europe in that developed form.

The End of the Relationship

The rise of the Seljuks in the eleventh century changed the character of the frontier from a regulated zone to a moving one, and the loss of Anatolia after Manzikert removed the geographical basis of the old arrangement.

By the fourteenth century the Byzantine emperor was an Ottoman tributary, and by 1453 the relationship of six centuries ended with the conquest described in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

What is worth holding onto is that for most of those six centuries, the two states behaved less like implacable enemies than like neighbours who fought every summer, exchanged prisoners in the autumn, sent embassies in the winter, and read each other’s books throughout.

The Prisoner Exchanges

The most striking institution of the frontier deserves a full description, because nothing quite like it existed elsewhere in the medieval world.

Exchanges took place at the river Lamos in Cilicia, near the frontier, roughly every few years from the eighth century to the tenth — Arabic sources list a dozen or more.

The procedure: captives were assembled on both banks. They were exchanged one for one, walking across simultaneously so that neither side gained an advantage at any moment. When one side ran out, the surplus on the other was ransomed for cash, at rates that were negotiated in advance.

The occasions were substantial. Several thousand people might change hands. Both governments funded the ransoms; in Byzantium, imperial money and church charity were both used, and redeeming captives was a recognised act of piety that wills provided for.

They were also diplomatic events. Envoys accompanied the exchanges, gifts were presented, and negotiations on other matters took place alongside.

What the institution demonstrates is that a state of religious war coexisted with a functioning framework of mutual recognition. Two powers that described each other as infidels nonetheless maintained an agreed protocol for the humane resolution of a shared problem, over two centuries, and largely kept to it.

The Translation Movement in Detail

The transfer of Greek science into Arabic was the largest cross-cultural intellectual project of the Middle Ages, and the mechanics are well documented.

It ran principally in Baghdad from the late eighth to the tenth century, under Abbasid patronage — al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid and above all al-Ma’mun — with the Bayt al-Hikma as its institutional focus.

The translators were overwhelmingly Christians: Syriac-speaking Nestorians and Miaphysites who already had a tradition of translating Greek philosophy and medicine into Syriac. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), a Nestorian Christian from Hira, is the outstanding figure — a physician who translated Galen, Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle, developed a method of collating multiple manuscripts before translating, and left an account of his own work listing what he had translated and from which copies.

The texts came from wherever they could be found. Hunayn describes travelling in search of manuscripts. Diplomatic channels supplied others: caliphs requested Greek books from Byzantine emperors, and at least one peace negotiation is recorded as including manuscripts among the terms.

The result was that by around 1000 the entire Greek scientific and philosophical corpus, minus poetry and history, existed in Arabic — and that this Arabic corpus, translated into Latin in twelfth-century Spain and Sicily, is how western Europe recovered Aristotle. The double route is described in the transmission of classical learning.

What Byzantium Took Back

The exchange is usually described in one direction, and the reverse traffic is worth documenting.

Mathematics. Maximos Planoudes introduced the Indian numerals and the associated calculating methods to Byzantium in a treatise of 1292, working from Arabic sources.

Astronomy. George Chrysococces translated Persian astronomical tables into Greek in the 1340s; Gregory Chioniades had studied in Tabriz and brought Ilkhanid astronomical work back. Byzantine astronomers of the fourteenth century were using Islamic tables and instruments.

Medicine. Byzantine pharmacological texts of the later period incorporate Arabic materia medica, and works of Islamic medicine circulated in Greek translation.

Decorative art. Pseudo-Kufic ornament on Byzantine buildings and manuscripts from the tenth century; textile designs; ceramic techniques.

Architecture. The Bryas palace of the 830s, built for Theophilos on the model of the Abbasid palaces of Baghdad by an envoy who had seen them.

Court practice. Elements of ceremonial, and a taste for automata and mechanical display that both courts cultivated competitively.

The picture that emerges is of two states that spent six centuries watching each other closely, copying what they admired, and describing each other in public as the enemies of God.

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