by Will Durant
Such Greek gifts were not altogether pleasing to the emperors. The wealth so gleaned from the flesh and sweat of millions of men gave the owners a power collectively dangerous to any sovereign. Out of self-interest as well as humanity, the emperors sought to halt this process of concentration. The severe winter of 927-8 ended in famine and plague; starving peasants sold their holdings to great landowners at desperately low prices, or merely in exchange for subsistence. In 934 the regent Romanus issued a “novel” that denounced the landlords as having “shown themselves more merciless than famine and plague”; it required the restoration of properties bought for less than half a “fair price”; and permitted any seller, within three years, to repurchase the land he had sold, and at the price he had received. The edict had only a negligible effect; concentration continued; moreover, many free farmers, complaining of high taxes, sold their lands and moved to the towns—if possible, to Constantinople and the dole. Basil II renewed the struggle of emperors against nobles. His decree of 996 permitted the seller at any time to redeem his land at the price of its sale; voided titles to lands acquired in contravention of the law of 934, and demanded the immediate return of such lands to their former owners, without cost. These laws were in large measure evaded, and a modified feudalism was sporadically established by the eleventh century in the Byzantine East. But the effort of the emperors was not lost; the surviving free peasantry, under the stimulus of ownership, covered the land with farms, orchards, vineyards, beehives, and ranches; the large proprietors developed scientific agriculture to its medieval zenith; and from the eighth to the eleventh century Byzantine agriculture kept pace with the prosperity of Byzantine industry.
The Eastern Empire in this period acquired an urban and semi-industrial character quite different from the ruralism of Latin Europe north of the Alps. Miners and metallurgists actively explored and developed the lead, iron, copper, and gold in the soil. Not only Constantinople but a hundred other Byzantine cities—Smyrna, Tarsus, Ephesus, Durazzo, Ragusa, Patras, Corinth, Thebes, Salonika, Hadrianople, Heraclea, Selymbria—throbbed and resounded with tanners, cobblers, saddlers, armorers, goldsmiths, jewelers, metalworkers, carpenters, wood carvers, wheelwrights, bakers, dyers, weavers, potters, mosaicists, painters…. As caldrons and caverns of manufacturing and exchange, Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cordova in the ninth century almost rivaled the bustle and bedlam of a modern metropolis. Despite Persian competition the Greek capital still led the white world in the production of fine tissues and silks; only second to it in this regard were Argos, Corinth, and Thebes. The textile industry was highly organized, and used much slave labor; most other workers were free artisans. The proletarian population of Constantinople and Salonika were class-conscious, and staged many unsuccessful revolts. Their employers formed a considerable middle class, acquisitive, charitable, industrious, intelligent, and fiercely conservative. The major industries, including their workers, artists, managers, merchants, lawyers, and financiers, were organized into systemata, or corporation guilds, lineally descended from the ancient collegia and artes, and akin to the large economic units of a modern “corporative” state. Each corporation had a monopoly in its line, but was strictly regulated by legislation in its purchases, prices, methods of manufacture, and conditions of sale; governmental examiners kept surveillance over operations and accounts; and at times maximum wages were fixed by law. Minor industries, however, were left to free workers and individual enterprise. The arrangement gave order, prosperity, and continuity to Byzantine industry, but it checked initiative and invention, and tended to an Oriental fixity of status and life.20
Commerce was encouraged by state maintenance or supervision of docks and ports, governmentally regulated insurance and loans on bottomry, a vigorous war on piracy, and the most stable currency in Europe. Over all commerce the Byzantine government exercised a pervasive control—prohibited certain exports, monopolized the trade in corn and silk, charged export and import duties, and taxed sales.21 It almost invited its early replacement as commercial mistress of the Aegean and Black Seas by allowing foreign merchants—Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Amalfians, Pisans, Venetians, Genoese, Jews, Russians, and Catalans—to carry most of its trade, and to set up semi-independent “factories” or agencies in or near the capital. Interest charges were permitted, but were limited by law to twelve, ten, eight per cent, or even less. Bankers were numerous; and perhaps it was the moneylenders of Constantinople, rather than those of Italy, who developed the bill of exchange,22 and organized the most extensive credit system in Christendom before the thirteenth century.
V. THE BYZANTINE RENAISSANCE
From the labor and skill of the people and the superfluities of the rich there came in the ninth and tenth centuries a remarkable revival of letters and arts. Although the Empire to its dying day called itself Roman, nearly all Latin elements had disappeared from it except Roman law. Since Heraclius, Greek had been the language of government, literature, and liturgy, as well as of daily speech, in the Byzantine East. Education was now completely Greek. Nearly every free male, many women, even many slaves, received some education. The University of Constantinople, which, like letters in general, had been allowed to decay in the crises of the Heracleian age, was restored by Caesar Bardas (863), and attained high repute for its courses in philology, philosophy, theology, astronomy, mathematics, biology, music, and literature; even the pagan Libanius and the godless Lucian were read. Tuition was largely free to qualified students, and the teachers were paid by the state. Libraries, public and private, were numerous, and still preserved those classic masterpieces which had been forgotten in the disordered West.
This ample transmission of the Greek heritage was at once stimulating and restrictive. It sharpened and widened thought, and lured it from its old round of homiletical eloquence and theological debate. But its very wealth discouraged originality; it is easier for the ignorant than for the learned to be original. Byzantine literature was intended chiefly for cultured and leisurely ladies and gentlemen; polished and polite, artistic and artificial, Hellenistic but not Hellenic, it played on the surface, and spared the heart, of human life. Though the churchmen of the period were remarkably tolerant, thought of its own accord, through habits formed in youth, stayed within the circle of orthodoxy, and the iconoclasts were more pious than the priests.
It was another Alexandrian age of scholarship. Pundits analyzed language and prosody, wrote epitomes, “outlines,” and universal histories, compiled dictionaries, encyclopedias, anthologies. Now (917) Constantine Cephalas collected The Greek Anthology; now (976) Suidas accumulated his encyclopedic lexicon. Theophanes (c. 814) and Leo the Deacon (b. 950) wrote valuable histories of their own or recent times. Paul of Ægina (615—90) composed an encyclopedia of medicine that combined Moslem theory and practice with the legacy of Galen and Oribasius; it discussed in almost modern terms operations for cancer of the breast, hemorrhoids, catheterization of the bladder, lithotomy, castration; eunuchs were manufactured, says Paul, by crushing the testicles of children in a hot bath.23
The outstanding Byzantine scientist of these centuries was an obscure and impoverished teacher, Leo of Salonika (c. 850), of whose existence Constantinople took no notice until a caliph invited him to Baghdad. One of his pupils, captured in war, became the slave of a Moslem dignitary, who soon marveled at the youth’s knowledge of geometry. Al-Mamun, learning of it, induced him to join in a discussion of geometrical problems at the royal palace, was impressed by his performance, heard with eager curiosity his account of his teacher, and at once sent Leo an invitation to Baghdad and affluence. Leo consulted a Byzantine official, who consulted the Emperor Theophilus, who hastened to secure Leo with a state professorship. Leo was a polymath, and taught and wrote on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, and philosophy. Al-Mamun submitted to him several problems in geometry and astronomy, and was so pleased with the replies that he offered Theophilus eternal peace and 2000 pounds of gold if the Emperor would lend him Leo for
a while. Theophilus refused, and made Leo Archbishop of Salonika to keep him out of al-Mamun’s reach.24
Leo, Photius, and Psellus were the stellar luminaries of this age. Photius (820?—91), the most learned man of his time, was in six days graduated from layman to patriarch, and belongs to religious history. Michael Psellus (1018?-80) was a man of the world and the court, an adviser of kings and queens, a genial and orthodox Voltaire who could be brilliant on every subject, but landed on terra firma after every theological argument or palace revolution. He did not let his love of books dull his love of life. He taught philosophy at the University of Constantinople, and received the title of Prince of Philosophers. He entered a monastery, found the monastic career too peaceful, returned to the world, served as prime minister from 1071 to 1078, and had time to write on politics, science, medicine, grammar, theology, jurisprudence, music, and history. His Chronographia recorded the intrigues and scandals of a century (976-1078) with candor, verve, and vanity (he describes Constantine IX as “hanging on Psellus’ tongue”25). Here, as a sample, is a paragraph from his description of the revolt that restored Theodora to the throne in 1055:
Each [soldier in the crowd] was armed: one grasped a hatchet, another a battle-ax, one a bow, another a lance; some of the populace carried heavy stones; and all ran in great disorder … to the apartments of Theodora…. But she, taking refuge in a chapel, remained deaf to all their cries. Abandoning persuasion, the crowd used force upon her; some, drawing their daggers, threw themselves upon Theodora as if to kill her. Boldly they snatched her from the sanctuary, clothed her in sumptuous robes, seated her on a horse, and, circling about her, led her to the church of St. Sophia. Now all the population, highborn as well as low, joined in paying her homage, and all proclaimed her queen.26
The personal letters of Psellus were almost as charming and revealing as Cicero’s; his speeches, verses, and pamphlets were the talk of the day; his malicious humor and lethal wit were an exciting stimulus amid the ponderous erudition of his contemporaries. Compared with him and Photius and Theophanes, the Alcuins, Rabani, and Gerberts of the contemporary West were timid emigrants from barbarism into the Country of the Mind.
The most conspicuous side of this Byzantine renaissance was its art. From 726 to 842 the Iconoclastic movement prohibited the sculptural or (with less strictness) pictorial representation of sacred beings; but in compensation it freed the artist from a monotonous confinement within ecclesiastical themes, and turned him to the observation, portrayal, and decoration of secular life. The gods were replaced as subjects by the imperial family, aristocratic patrons, historical events, the animals of the forest, the plants and fruits of the field, the fond trivia of domestic life. Basil I built in his palace the Nea, or New Church, “all adorned,” says a contemporary, “with fine pearls, gold, shining silver, mosaics, silks, and marble in a thousand varieties.”27 Much of the decoration recently uncovered in St. Sophia was the work of the ninth century. The central dome was rebuilt in 975 after an earthquake, and then received its great mosaic of Christ seated on a rainbow; additional mosaics were set up in 1028; the massive cathedral, like a living organism, achieved continued life by the death and renewal of its parts. The bronze doors installed in 838 were so renowned for excellence that similar doors were ordered from Constantinople for the monastery of Monte Cassino, the cathedral of Amalfi, and the basilica of San Paolo outside the walls of Rome; the last pair, made in Constantinople in 1070, still survives as a testimony to Byzantine art.
The royal or “Sacred Palace,” of which the Nea formed the chapel, was a growing congeries of chambers, reception halls, churches, baths, pavilions, gardens, peristyles, and courts; almost every emperor added something to it. Theophilus gave the group a new Oriental touch with a throne room known as Triconchos, from the shell-like apses that formed three of its sides—a plan imported from Syria. North of this he built the Hall of the Pearl; south of it several heliaka or sunrooms, and the Kamilas, an apartment with roof of gold, columns of green marble, and an exceptionally fine mosaic representing on a gold ground men and women gathering fruit. Even this mosaic was surpassed in an adjoining structure, on whose walls green mosaic trees stood out against a golden mosaic sky; and by the floor of the Hall of Harmony, whose marble tesserae gave the effect of a meadow in full flower. Theophilus carried his taste for bizarre splendor à outrance in his palace of Magnaura: in its audience chamber a golden plane tree overhung the throne; golden birds sat on the branches and the throne; golden griffins lay on either side of the royal seat, and golden lions at its foot; when a foreign ambassador was presented, the mechanical griffins rose, the mechanical lions stood up, swished their tails and roared, and the birds broke into mechanical song.28 All this was a frank copy of like absurdities in the palace of Harun al-Rashid at Baghdad.
Constantinople was beautified with the taxes of commerce and the “themes,” but enough remained to add some lesser splendors to the provincial capitals. The monasteries, rich again, rose in stately mass: in the tenth century the Lavra and Iviron at Athos; in the eleventh, St. Luke’s in Phocis, the Nea Moni in Chios, the convent of Daphni near Eleusis—whose almost classic mosaics are the finest examples of the mid-Byzantine style. Georgia, Armenia, and Asia Minor shared in the movement, and became outposts of Byzantine art. The public buildings of Antioch drew Moslem eulogies. In Jerusalem the church of the Holy Sepulcher was rebuilt soon after Heraclius’ victories. In Egypt, before and after the Arab conquest, the Coptic Christians raised domed churches modest in size, but adorned with such artistry in metal, ivory, wood and textiles that all the skills of Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Mohammedan Egypt seemed to have reached them as an unimpaired legacy. The Iconoclastic persecutions drove thousands of monks from Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople to southern Italy, where they were protected by the popes; through these refugees, and through Oriental merchants, Byzantine styles of architecture and decoration flourished in Bari, Otranto, Benevento, Naples, even Rome. Ravenna continued to be Greek in art, and produced in the seventh century the magnificent mosaics of St. Apollinaris in Classe. Salonika remained Byzantine, and adorned its own St. Sophia with somber mosaic apostles as gaunt as El Greco’s saints.
In all these lands and cities, as in the capital, the Byzantine renaissance poured forth masterpieces of mosaic, miniature, pottery, enamel, glass, wood, ivory, bronze, iron, gems, and textiles woven, dyed, and decorated with a skill that all the world honored. Byzantine artists made cups of blue glass decorated under the surface with golden foliage, birds, and human figures; glass vessels with a necking of enameled arabesques and flowers; and other forms of glass so exquisite that they were the favorite gifts of Byzantine emperors to foreign potentates. Even more valued as presents were the costly robes, shawls, copes, and dalmatics that displayed Byzantine textile art; such were “Charlemagne’s cloak” in the cathedral of Metz, and the delicate silks found at Aachen in the coffin of that king. Half the majesty that hedged in the Greek emperor, much of the awe that exalted the patriarch, some of the splendor that clothed the Redeemer, the Virgin, and the martyrs in the ritual of the Church, came from gorgeous vestments that embodied the lives of a dozen artisans, the technique of centuries, and the richest dyes of land and sea. The Byzantine goldsmiths and gem cutters were at the top of their line until the thirteenth century; the treasury of St. Mark’s at Venice is rich with the spoils of their craft. To this age belong the astonishingly realistic mosaic of St. Luke, now in the Collège des Hautes Études at Paris; the glowing head of Christ in the “Deesis” mosaic in St. Sophia’s; and the immense mosaic, covering forty square yards, unearthed in Istanbul in 1935 from the ruins of the palace of the Macedonian emperors.29 When Iconoclasm subsided, or where it did not reach, the churches fed piety with icons painted in tempera upon wood, and sometimes cased in enameled or jeweled frames. No miniatures in all the history of illumination surpass the “Vision of Ezekiel” in the ninth-century volume of Gregory Nazianzen’s sermons in the Bibliothèque
Nationale at Paris;30 or the 400 illustrations of the “Menologus” manuscript in the Vatican (c. 1000); or the pictures of David in the Paris Psalter (c. 900). We shall find in them no perspective, no modeling of forms through light and shade; but, as ample recompense, a rich and sensuous coloring, a lively play of imagination, a new knowledge of human and animal anatomy, a happy riot of beasts and birds, of plants and flowers, among saints and deities, fountains, arcades, and porticoes-birds pecking at fruit, bears dancing, stags and bulls locking their horns in battle, and a leopard lifting an impious leg to make a flowing initial for a pious phrase.31
Byzantine potters had long known the art of enameling—i.e., applying to a terra-cotta or metal base a metallic oxide which, when fired, fused with the base and gave it both protection and brilliance. The art had come from the Orient to ancient Greece, had disappeared in the third century B.C., and had reappeared in the third century A.D. This mid-Byzantine period was rich in enamels—portrait medallions, icons, crosses, reliquaries, cups, chalices, book covers, and ornaments for harness and other equipage. As early as the sixth century Byzantium received from Sasanian Persia the art of cloisonné enamel: the colored paste was poured into surface areas confined by thin wires or metal strips; these cloisons, soldered to a metal base, constituted the decorative design. A famous example of Byzantine cloisonné is a reliquary made (c. 948) for Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and now in Limburg; it is characteristically Byzantine in its minute and conscientious execution, its ornate and luxurious ornament.
No other art has been so overwhelmingly religious as the Byzantine. A church council of 787 laid down the law: “It is for painters to execute; it is for the clergy to ordain the subjects and govern the procedure.”32 Hence the somber seriousness of this art, its narrow scope of theme, its monotony of method and style, the rarity of its ventures into realism, humor, and common life; ornate and brilliant beyond rival, it never reached the lusty variety and scandalous secularity of mature Gothic art. So much the more must we marvel at its victories and influence. All Christendom from Kiev to Cadiz acknowledged its leadership and flattered it with imitation; even China bowed to it now and then. In its Syrian forms it shared with Persia in molding the architecture, mosaics, and decorative motives of Islamic art. Venice modeled itself on Constantinople, and St. Mark’s on the Church of the Apostles there; Byzantine architecture appeared in France, and mounted as far north as Aachen. Illuminated manuscripts everywhere in the West confessed Byzantine influence. The Bulgars took over Byzantine faith and ornament; and the conversion of Vladimir to Greek Christianity opened a dozen avenues by which Byzantine art entered into Russian life.