The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Bull of the union of the Roman and Greek churches (Florence 1439). Text in Latin and Greek, signed by Pope Eugenius IV and the emperor John VIII. The signatures of the Greek ecclesiastics are missing from this copy, one of 18 that are preserved.

  Although the fall of Thessalonica in 1430 was certainly considered a powerful portent of doom, the Rhomaioi and their leaders still nurtured hopes over the next decade and a half that their fortunes might again change for the better. Some still believed that the West might rally to a vigorous defence, especially if the Churches of Constantinople and Rome could be brought into a sincere union. There was also the parallel hope that the central European powers, especially the Hungarian kings, might finally sense a lethal danger across the Danube and mount serious expeditions against the Ottomans in Europe. Indeed, in the late 1430s and 1440s, there was a bustle of anti-Ottoman activity, although the results were again transitory.

  On the Byzantine side, John VIII renewed efforts to attain union with Rome in the late 1430s, negotiating for a resolution of dogmatic differences at a council to be held in Europe. It was agreed that the locale would be Italy, and that the emperor and his retinue would participate. This council was eventually held in two places, and hence is termed the Council of Ferrara—Florence (1438–9). John VII, the patriarch Joseph, and other high dignitaries duly arrived in Ferrara early in 1438, and after lengthy discussions a basis for agreement was found. The Orthodox substantially accepted the doctrine of papal primacy, and conceded that the filioque dispute was based on a semantic confusion. This solution failed to satisfy everyone in the imperial party, and indeed some objected and left. Nonetheless, a formal union was celebrated on 6 July 1439, in the recently built cathedral of Florence.

  As in the past, the benefits of union turned out to be negligible for Byzantium. Most importantly, it did not evoke much western sympathy for the plight of Constantinople. At the same time, it again alienated the imperial regime from the Orthodox community. At home and elsewhere in the ‘Orthodox Commonwealth’, John VIII’s behaviour was branded as betrayal, on a par with that of Michael VIII. In Constantinople, the division over union was particularly serious, since it now fractioned a populace facing the inevitability of a renewed Ottoman effort to conquer the city. Already, in the aftermath of Ferrara—Florence, there were those wondering if the ‘mufti’s turban’ would be preferable to the ‘papal tiara’.

  A Christian military revival in the 1440s initially showed some promise of success, but ultimately failed to reverse the situation. At that time several powerful antagonists to the Ottomans emerged in the western and northern Balkans. In Transylvania, the voivoda Janosh Corvinus Hunyadi mounted a series of successful campaigns against the Turks in Serbia and Wallachia. The same spirit was to be seen in the young Hungarian king, Vladislav III, and the Serbian despot George Brankovic. In Albania, a colourful resistance leader appeared in the person of Georgios Kastriotes or ‘Scanderbeg’ (a corruption of ‘Iskender Beg’). This spirit of regionalized resistance eventually crystallized into another international crusade. In the autumn of 1443, a combined force of some 25,000 warriors crossed the Danube under the leadership of Vladislav, Hunyadi, and Brankovič, defeating the Ottoman regional commander at Niš, temporarily occupying Sofia, and then wintering back in the northern Balkans. Overwhelmed with problems in Anatolia, Murad II negotiated an armistice (June 1444), which the Hungarians promptly broke the following autumn. Inspired by his recent successes, Vladislav believed the opportunity had come to drive the Ottomans from the Balkans, and hence in September he organized another expedition, though without Serbian participation. When this army clashed with Murad II at Varna (10 November 1444), it was annihilated, and the revived hopes of the 1430s and 1440s perished with it.

  Pen and ink portrait of the patriarch Joseph II, who attended the Council of Ferrara–Florence. Joseph, who was in his eighties, died in 1439 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence where his tomb still survives.

  Above: Detail of wall painting purporting to represent the siege of Constantinople by the Avars in 626, but clearly inspired by the Turkish siege of 1453. Here the sultan Mehmed II followed by a contingent of Janissaries. Romania, Monastery of Moldoviţa (1537).

  Facing: Prophetic literature, notably the Oracles of Leo the Wise, concerning the liberation of Constantinople from the Turks, enjoyed wide diffusion until the seventeenth century. In this richly illustrated copy of 1577 made in Crete by Francesco Barozzi we see the Turks being driven out of Constantinople by a coalition of Christian princes.

  With the end of the 1440s and early 1450s came the last change of rulership, on both the Palaiologan and Ottoman sides, before the fall of Byzantium. In Constantinople, John VIII died childless in 1448, to be succeeded by his brother Constantine, despot of the Morea, and since 1447 likewise tributary to the Porte. In 1451, Murad II died and was succeeded by one of the most fascinating figures of the entire fifteenth century—Ftih Mehmed, or ‘Mehmed the Conqueror’, in whose hands the fate of Constantinople now rested.

  If the 19-year-old Mehmed ascended the Ottoman throne with vague plans of taking the city, Constantine XI quickly supplied him with a pretext to act when, in autumn 1451, he threatened to foment a rebellion against the new sultan unless certain subsidies were provided. Within six months Mehmed signalled the tenor of his reply, when he began building an enormous fortification up the Bosporos (the ‘Boghaz-Kesen’ or ‘Channel Cutter’), intended to control traffic plying those waters, and as a preliminary to his assault on Constantinople. Constantine, in turn, was firmly convinced that the survival of the city rested securely on close relations with the West. When the papal legate, Cardinal Isidore, arrived he was greeted with the utmost courtesy, and a celebration of the union was held in Hagia Sophia (12 December 1452), something which John VIII had at least deferred. In point of fact, the Union proved worthless in defending Constantinople from Mehmed’s soldiers, who commenced their attack on 6 April 1453, and penetrated the walls on 29 May. The fate of Thessalonica in 1430 was repeated, and again the conquering sultan would quickly turn his attention to the more difficult task of rebuilding, repopulating, and revitalizing the city.

  With Constantine XI’s death in battle that mournful day, and Ftih Mehmed’s triumphal journey to Hagia Sophia—henceforth the premier mosque in Constantinople—the core of the Byzantine state was extinguished forever. The subsequent acquisitions of Mistra (1460) and Trebizond (1461) were but aftershocks. Yet by this victory Mehmed had not destroyed a culture, a faith, or a people. The essential rhythms of Byzantine life would endure within the framework of the Ottoman order, and beyond.

  Left: Miniature of the same manuscript of Leo’s Oracles showing the resurrection of the saviour emperor, who lay buried in the western part of Constantinople. In the background the column of Arcadius whose reliefs were believed to foretell these events.

  Right: Grant of religious and commercial liberties to the Genoese of Galata, who had surrended to the Turks. Text in Greek, headed by the tughra (monogram) of Mehmed II and signed by the third vizier Zaganos Pasha, 1 June 1453.

  11

  Palaiologan Learning

  IHOR ŠEVENKO

  Despite its small extent, political weakness, and growing impoverishment, the late Byzantine state, along with its Greek satellite principalities, produced a remarkable cultural efflorescence. To call it a renaissance, as many scholars have done, tends to blur its fundamental difference from the one, true Renaissance which occurred in western Europe in the fifteenth century. It is also confusing to speak of Byzantine humanism for this or any other period. The cultural revival of the Palaiologan age (1261–1453) should rather be seen in the perspective of previous Byzantine revivals, notably those of the ninth-tenth centuries (see Chapter 8) and of the eleventh-twelfth, although it went some distance further than its predecessors. Indeed, conditions had changed. For one thing, the diminished Byzantine world was no longer the vast polyethnic entity it had been earlier: it was now almost
exclusively Greek, a fact that redefined to some extent its attitude towards Greek antiquity. For another, close, if not always friendly, contact with the West meant that Latin literary and philosophical culture (whether of Latin, Arabic, or even Hebrew origins) could no longer be ignored to the extent to which it had been by a Photios in the ninth century or a Psellos in the eleventh.

  An indicator of changing perspectives is provided by the word ‘Hellene’, which, before the thirteenth century, had predominantly meant ‘pagan’—a pejorative term whose origin goes back to the books, apocryphal and genuine, of the Old and the New Testaments. There ‘Hellene’ simply denotes a non-Jew, i.e. a gentile. The negative meaning of ‘Hellene’ was absorbed by ecclesiastical and secular elites in Byzantium’s early centuries, almost completely eliminating its neutral use. By the thirteenth century, however, intellectuals started proudly affirming that they were members of the ‘Hellenic nation’. Under the new conditions of relative ethnic homogeneity and even some xenophobia, their search for roots led them back to the glorious Hellenic past. So with many intellectuals, but not all: when Demetrius Kydones translated into Greek the Summa contra gentiles of Thomas Aquinas (in 1354), he still called it Book against the Hellenes.

  The literary product of the Palaiologan period is abundant and falls for the most part within established Byzantine categories, setting aside writings in the vernacular, such as the romances of chivalry, which are relatively few. It is represented by three lengthy historical works, which treat contemporary events, but draw on ancient models, especially Thucydides; a vast body of epistolography, usually very complicated and obscure in its style; rhetorical addresses of remarkable verbosity; a great deal of iambic poetry and rather less in hexameter; a relatively large body of hagiography in high style; two encyclopaedic works, one on medicine, the other ranging from rhetoric to the disciplines of the quadrivium; and a vast array of theological polemic against the Latins, the Orthodox of the adverse camp (Palamite or anti-Palamite as the case may be), and Islam. The two last categories continued to attract the greatest degree of passionate commitment.

  Manuscript of Hesiod’s Works and Days in the hand of the scholar Demetrius Triklinios, dated 20 August 1316.

  Thanks to this extensive body of writing—and little of what was penned at the time is lost—it is possible to gain a pretty full picture of the intellectual milieu that produced it. For the two centuries between 1261 and 1453 we can identify about 150 literati, both laymen and ecclesiastics, who were active mostly at Constantinople, but also at Nicaea, Arta, Thessalonica, Trebizond, and Mistra. The correspondence of these authors reveals so much criss-crossing of names that it seems every-body knew and wrote to everybody else. In this restricted society sub-groups gravitated round the centres of power that were able to provide them with substantial patronage. In descending order of importance, that patronage came from the imperial court, especially before the civil wars of the 1320s; from peripheral courts; from individual aristocrats and rich bureaucrats who kept their own ‘salons’; from the patriarchate, and, finally, from metropolitan archbishops. To take one example, the scholarly career of the polymath Nikephoros Gregoras (c. 1290 c. 1360) was largely predicated on patronage. As a young man he was supported by his uncle, the metropolitan of his native town Heraclea Pontica (now Karadeniz Erelisi). When he arrived at Constantinople, he received encouragement from the patriarch John XIII Glykys and the emperor Andronikos II, but especially crucial was the continuous protection afforded to him by the prime minister Theodore Metochites, who declared Gregoras his spiritual heir and granted him a sinecure in his restored monastery of Chora.

  Facing: The mighty castle of Boaz Kesen (‘Throat-cutter’) or Rumeli Hisari on the European side of the Bosphorus was built by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1452 in a move to isolate Constantinople from the Black Sea. It served no further purpose after the Turkish conquest of the city.

  Books and libraries were the main prerequisites of intellectual activity. It is a moot question how much of the earlier bibliographic accumulation had been destroyed as a result of the Latin conquest, but it is certainly true that the Palaiologan age was marked by an intense quest for ancient texts, their copying and annotation. Present-day classicists are vastly indebted to the efforts of their Palaiologan predecessors, such as Demetrius Triklinios, Manuel Moschopoulos, Thomas Magister, and Maximos Planudes. These men wrote dictionaries of Attic words. They made new editions of poets such as Hesiod and Pindar, whose metric system they reconstructed with competence, and of the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides. They wrote scholia to Pindar, the tragedians, and Aristophanes; and a number of their readings, e.g. of Sophocles and Theocritus, are still accepted as felicitous conjectures. They rediscovered authors about whom tradition had been silent for hundreds of years, as Maximos Planudes rediscovered Ptolemy’s Geography and the Dionysiaca by Nonnus of Panopolis. Their complete editions of various authors remain the basis of our own knowledge: Planudes, again, edited (and partly rediscovered) Plutarch and the Greek Anthology of epigrams, the latter in a version that we call ‘Planudean’. ‘Indecent’ antique epigrams, especially those of homosexual content, were expurgated from this version; in return, Planudes gave us almost 400 epigrams not found elsewhere. Scholars and aristocratic bluestockings searched for ancient texts, borrowed manuscripts from each other and, when they could afford to, created libraries of both secular and religious works. The collection that Theodore Metochites assembled in the monastery of Chora in the first quarter of the fourteenth century remained the largest library in Constantinople until 1453. Some of Chora’s volumes or parts thereof survive today in the libraries of Istanbul, Oxford, the Vatican, Vienna, and Paris.

  Manuscript of the Greek Anthology in the hand of the scholar Maximos Planudes, dated 1301. The Planudean Anthology was printed in 1494 and remained the Greek Anthology until the earlier Palatine version became known in the early nineteenth century.

  Philological activity was not new in Byzantium, even if we grant that in the Palaiologan period it attained a particularly high level of intensity and excellence; neither was the cultivation of a recherché atticizing style at the expense of clarity and simplicity. The question we have to ask is whether the Palaiologan revival broke new ground in its relation to the classical heritage, in enlarging the field of its interests and, finally, in breaking out of the traditional Byzantine mould. On all three counts we can give a somewhat qualified affirmative answer.

  It has been repeatedly stressed in the course of this book that Byzantine literary culture was largely based on that of Late Antiquity and what we call the Second Sophistic. The most widely imitated authors were not those that are studied in departments of classics today, but rhetoricians like Lucian, Aelius Aristides, Libanius, Synesius, and their Christian analogues, the Cappadocian Fathers, such as Gregory of Nazianzus and St Basil. Preoccupation with style rather than with ideologically suspect content meant that these authors were removed from their historical habitat and, as it were, lined up on a pedestal as timeless exemplars of literary excellence. This influence of the rhetoricians did not diminish in the Palaiologan period, but now for the first time antiquity came to be viewed in three rather than two dimensions. Metochites, in his critical essay on Demosthenes and Aelius Aristides, attributed the difference between their kinds of oratory to the different periods in which they had lived. Demosthenes orated in the heyday of democracy, when one had to speak to the point and answer questions on the spot, whereas Aristides lived under a monarchy, a condition that favoured panegyric and encouraged verbosity. That may strike us as a truism, but it does imply a degree of historical understanding.

  Facing: Initial B (Beatus vir) from the Psalter, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, cod. 323. It has been argued that this splendid Psalter was commissioned by the emperor Frederick II and produced at Jerusalem in c.1235. It shows a creative blending of a western tradition with Byzantine figure style and iconography.

  First page of Theodore Metochites’ Introduction to As
tronomy with a notation in the hand of his disciple Nikephoros Gregoras.

  With regard to our second criterion, we may note an increased interest in the sciences, like mathematics (where, again, the versatile Planudes was at work) and medicine, but especially in astronomy. The relevant ancient texts (notably Ptolemy and the Handy Tables by Theon) had been recopied in the ninth century, but no original work on them appears to have been done at the time. It fell to Metochites to produce without recourse to direct observation a new Introduction to Astronomy based on Ptolemy’s Almagest and recalculate the old parameters for a starting point in 1283 (the first regnal year of Andronikos II). He was followed, amongst others, by Nikephoros Gregoras, who annotated our most luxurious surviving manuscript of Ptolemy and who is praised for proposing a revision of the calendar that anticipated the Gregorian reform.