by Cyril Mango
Gregoras was made aware of Arabic astronomy, but made no explicit use of it. Actually, exclusive adherence to Ptolemy proved a dead end. The real progress that had been achieved in the tables and treatises compiled by Arab and Persian astronomers reached the Greek world about 1300, at first through lowlier social channels, namely through translations made from Persian and Arabic by men moving between the capital and Trebizond in the east, like George-Gregory Chioniades, who had to go to Persian Tabriz to acquaint himself with oriental science, and, later on, by his follower George Chrysokokkes. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Ptolemaic data were criticized as inadequate by professionals, and either ‘Persian’ tables were substituted for Ptolemy, or both Ptolemaic and ‘Persian’ tables were used in different books of the same work. The latter was the case of the Three Books by Theodore Meliteniotes, published about 1352. Already by about 1309, however, a treatise on the use of the astrolabe was translated in Constantinople from a Latin version of the Arabic original. In the second quarter of the fifteenth century, another astronomical work, the Six Wings, dating from the fourteenth century, was translated into Greek, this time from the Hebrew. Here we may be dealing with western influences: the Six Wings’s Jewish author hailed from southern France, and the work itself may have reached Byzantium through Venice or one of its possessions. In spite of its non-Hellenic and non-Christian origin, the new astronomy was predominantly cultivated by Greek Orthodox ecclesiastics. Thus George Chioniades ended up as bishop of Tabriz and Theodore Meliteniotes was head of the Patriarchal School. Here practical needs were victorious over cultural pride and ideology.
Another area of enlargement concerned translations from the Latin (mostly by Planudes) which, however, reflected a typically medieval range of interests: Ovid, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio with Macrobius’ commentary on it, the Disticha Catonis, the Grammar of Donatus, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and St Augustine. More ambitious and influential in terms of contemporary religious concerns was the translation of parts of the Summa and other works of Thomas Aquinas by the brothers Demetrius and Prochoros Kydones in the second half of the fourteenth century.
Originality of thought can only be demonstrated in a few cases. Once again, Metochites comes to the fore. Keenly aware of the decadence of his times and the precariousness of his own literary fame (by which he set great store), he was the first to question one of the axiomatic doctrines of Byzantinism, namely that the empire played a central role in the cosmic drama and was destined to survive to the end of days. For Metochites the empire was just another political entity, and its impending collapse, another manifestation of the universal law of creation and decay. Unlike his predecessors, Metochites saw Byzantine civilization as neither unique nor superior to all others. A historical relativist, he even considered the infidel Tatars noble, more so in some respects, especially in moral behaviour, than his Byzantine fellow Christians.
The other Palaiologan maverick was the Neoplatonist George Gemistos, who renamed himself Plethon (c.1360–1452). He, too, composed an astronomical work in which he used ‘Persian’ and perhaps Hebrew tables, but his claim as original thinker lay elsewhere. Although his astronomical computations were useful for establishing the dates of Easter, and although he had defended the cause of Orthodoxy at the Council of Ferrara—Florence (14389), Plethon in his old age fell into neo-paganism, perhaps under the influence of Italian humanists. In a treatise called, like Plato’s, The Laws, he advocated a somewhat modified ‘Hellenic’ pantheon, headed by Zeus, who was assisted by Poseidon (married to Hera!) and four types of other gods of descending power. Plethon professed a belief in both the message of Zoroaster and that of the Seven Wise Men, and posited the immortality of the soul before its descent into the body. He also believed in fatalism, probably under the influence of Islam. No wonder that when, some time after his death, the master copy of the Laws was handed to the patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios Scholarios, the latter ordered it to be burnt. As a result, we know of Plethon’s religious system mainly from refutations by the same patriarch, from numerous fragments copied by Plethon’s adherents, and from a page or so in Plethon’s own handwriting. He may have exerted some influence on his Italian admirers, but had only a few followers among his fellow countrymen. Fittingly, his ashes repose in the Tempio Malatestiano of Rimini, the most pagan of Renaissance churches.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the sources of patronage that had supplied Byzantine intellectuals with their bread and butter began to dwindle. It was a lucky coincidence that their expertise, namely their mastery of the Greek language, their knowledge of ancient texts and access to manuscripts, came to be increasingly valued in Italy. Emigration was a hard choice that often entailed conversion to Roman Catholicism, but some were ready to leave the sinking ship. At first, as in the case of Demetrios Kydones, they would go to Venice for a few years, then return home or stop half-way in Venetian-held Crete, but from the end of the century onwards they began emigrating permanently. The story of these scholars is a well-known part of that of Renaissance humanism, but two of the most important émigrés deserve a brief mention here. Between them, Manuel Chrysoloras, who died at Constance in 1415, and John Argyropoulos, who died in Rome in 1487, taught in Padua, Rome, Milan, Pavia, and, above all, Florence. They introduced Byzantine didactic practices, possibly the curricula and certainly the techniques of philology to Italy, translated Aristotle’s works and Plato’s Republic word by word into Latin, and taught or influenced such prominent humanists as Leonardo Bruni, Guarino of Verona, Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini, Filelfo, and John Reuchlin. They did well in their new homes, none better than Bessarion of Trebizond, who was made cardinal and titular patriarch of Constantinople, narrowly missing being made pope.
Facing: Theodore Metochites, who refounded the monastery of Chora at Constantinople, was both a politician and a scholar. He created an extensive library and distinguished himself as an astronomer. Dressed in turban and caftan, he is here offering his monastery to Christ. Mosaic of Kariye Museum, Istanbul.
It is tempting to imagine the aged Plethon, who died one year before the fall of Constantinople, sitting on the hill of Mistra within sight of ancient Sparta as he devised his ‘Hellenic theology’, complete with its rites and prescribed prayers to the gods. Perhaps he was getting senile, but it is just possible that he did come to understand what had been evident to Julian the Apostate eleven centuries earlier, namely that Christianity, much as it came to be indebted to Hellenism, in the end was incompatible with it.
Facing: John Argyropoulos teaching medicine at the hospital of the Kral (a foundation of the Serbian king Stephen Uros II Milutin, attached to the Petra Monastery at Constantinople) in c.1448. At the top of the page is a list of his students.
12
Towards a Franco-Greek Culture
ELIZABETH JEFFREYS AND CYRIL MANGO
The fall of Constantinople was followed in a few years by the conquest of the Despotate of the Morea (1460) and the bloodless absorption by the Turks of the kingdom of Trebizond (1461). When Mehmed the Conqueror died in 1481, the greater part of Greek-speaking lands were under Ottoman rule, excluding the islands which were gradually mopped up: Rhodes in 1522, Chios in 1566, Cyprus in 1570–1, the Cyclades in 1579, finally Crete between 1645 and 1669. Only the Ionian Islands were never subjected to Turkish occupation.
While the great majority of Greek populations that had once belonged to Byzantium experienced a longer or shorter period of Tourkokratia, their previous fate had varied greatly from region to region. We may set aside those, notably in Cappadocia, that had been conquered by the Seljuk Turks at the end of the eleventh century and to all intents and purposes disappeared from history. Among more visible areas, the Black Sea coast passed directly from Greek autonomy to Ottoman domination. Constantinople, the kingdom of Thessalonica, Epiros, and the Despotate of the Morea underwent a relatively short period of Latin occupation before reverting to Greek rule. The Aegean islands, on the o
ther hand, along with Cyprus and Crete remained in Latin hands for several centuries before submitting to the Turks. The diversity of political status led to different cultural results, which may still be felt today.
The imposition of Ottoman rule meant the preservation of Byzantinism. The subject Orthodox population, both Greek and Slav, remained for the most part segregated from its Muslim neighbours and was constituted into a single ‘nation’ (millet), placed under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople. In effect, the patriarch and the metropolitan bishops under him gained enormously by this arrangement. They received a further priceless boon when the Ottomans absorbed Syria, Palestine, and Egypt (1516–17), so bringing the patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch, and the dependent pilgrimage sites of the Holy Land and Sinai into the Greek network. If the Greek hierarchs did not prosper more than they did, that was because of their continual squabbles and the ever-increasing bribes they paid to their Muslim overlords. The one proviso, which the patriarchs had no trouble in observing, was that the Church should remain loyal to the sultan, now commonly referred to as ‘Basileus’. Being loyal meant, above all, being anti-western, and that, too, came naturally. While the pope remained the chief enemy, Constantinople also learnt by bitter experience to keep its distance from the new Protestant powers which were up to no good. To preserve Orthodoxy uncontaminated, education had to be restricted to its medieval curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, theology, and a modicum of Aristotelian philosophy. At the same time the Church and its monasteries provided a means of employment and often opportunities of rapid advancement in the hierarchy to Greek men of letters. They have left a literary heritage in the Byzantine tradition, a heritage now covered by a thick layer of dust.
Conditions were very different in the lands that came under Latin domination. It cannot, of course, be claimed that the colonists were welcomed by the natives, even if, in the case of Cyprus, it is admitted (by a rabidly anti-western author) that Richard Lionheart was received with open arms (1191). For the peasant population it made little difference who was on top, although they certainly resented the restrictions and humiliations imposed on the Orthodox clergy by their new masters. In Crete several rebellions erupted against the Venetians. As time went on, however, there was a steady rapprochement between ‘Franks’ and the better-off Greeks. Western fashions in dress, ideals of chivalry, entertainments spread to the natives, while third-and fourth-generation Franks spoke more Greek than Italian or French and came to venerate local saints.
Here we must cast a glance backwards. Cultural contacts between Byzantium and the West had never, of course, been entirely interrupted, but remained weak until the age of the Crusades. The one exception was Italy, where Byzantium maintained a presence until the fall of Bari in 1071. Italian merchants, at first mainly from Pisa and Amalfi, started trading at Constantinople in the tenth century. Venice, nominally a vassal of the empire, built and decorated its cathedral of St Mark’s in the Byzantine style. The basilica of Monte Cassino, reconstructed in 1066–71, owed its decoration (but not its architecture) to Byzantine artists. But while Byzantine influences flowed to Italy, they seldom extended north of the Alps, and very little flowed in the opposite direction. In the domain of letters practically no Latin writings, except a few works of hagiography, were translated into Greek since Late Antiquity until c.1300. The thinning of the cultural divide between the eastern and western areas of the Mediterranean is particularly clear in literary developments that took place from the thirteenth century onwards. From this period, for example, come the romances which are the works of Byzantine literature with the most immediate appeal to readers today, and which are the forerunners of the literature of modern Greece.
A western family that has gone native. Dedicatory panel of a village chapel at Galata, Cyprus, AD 1514. The donors are identified as ‘miser’ Stefano Zacharia, his son Paolo and their respective wives Louise and Madelena. The Zacharia family was originally Venetian.
Most of the literature produced in Byzantium was written in a manner that is not easy for someone from outside that culture to appreciate: much of it was theological and much was written following linguistic rules which required years of study and were increasingly remote from the spoken language. In the period after the Fourth Crusade, however, the linguistic conventions of previous generations were increasingly ignored, especially in the areas on the fringes of the empire, and new topics attracted writers’ attention.
The new topics include the romances just mentioned. Although there had been a brief interest in love stories, written in a highly erudite language, in the middle years of the twelfth century, fiction of this sort had never been as prominent in Byzantine literary culture as it had become in the Latin East. Now there appears a significant series of narratives that deal with the fortunes of star-crossed lovers, who have names like Velthandros and Chrysantza or Livistros and Rodamni. They frequently retreat to castles; they also encounter ogres and witches, hazards drawn from folk tales, as well as the pirates and furious parents that come from the classical Greek tradition. The indebtedness of these texts to a culturally mixed environment can be deduced from several characteristics. Some, most notably the War of Troy and Phlorios and Platzia-Phlora are close translations, the one of a French and the other of an Italian original. Others, like the Achilleis, refer casually to features of Frankish culture such as hairstyles or fashions in clothing. Less tangibly there is in all of them an assumption of a court culture that owes more to the feudal customs of the West than to Byzantine hierarchies, and there is a vocabulary to cover these items with many words taken over from French, Italian, and Latin. Furthermore the relationship between the lovers is depicted in a manner which arguably owes much to the conventions of the western amour courtois.
Perhaps connected to the focus on personal relations implicit in the romances, there is also apparent a renewed interest in an individual’s own feelings and his (never her) reactions to his surroundings. And so we find Stephanos Sachlikis in hot pursuit of the ladies of the night of Rethymnon, Leonardo Dellaportas musing from prison on the inadvertent wrong turnings his life had taken, Marino Falieri reporting his dreams. All these writers come from the Venetian—Greek cities of Crete in the early years of the fifteenth century. Here the imported Venetian aristocracy had combined sufficiently with the native Greek archontes to develop a culture with its own characteristic blend of Italian and Greek elements. From this came the dramas, such as those of Chortatsis, that were performed in the literary ‘academies’ (the Stravaganti, the Sterili, and the Vivi) of Rethymno and Chania in the last years of the sixteenth century.
Carved slab from Athens showing a soldier in Frankish accoutrement, a snake twined round a palm tree, and a crowned siren holding a flower (thirteenth century). The meaning of the composition remains unexplained.
Though certainly not a new topic, since the writing of history is one of the salient features of the Byzantine literary tradition, we now find narratives focusing on regional history, rather than the Constantinopolitan-based deeds of emperors. These narratives record the history of areas where communities of Franks were established. Thus from the late fourteenth century there is the Chronicle of the Morea, which recounts how William of Champlitte and Geoffrey Villehardouin took over the Peloponnese in 1205 with a handful of knights, and carries the story—in the surviving versions—through the next hundred years. The multiple versions in which this account survives (Italian, Catalan, and Aragonese as well as French and Greek) also testifies to the multicultural nature of the society that was then developing, as does the continuing debate over whether the first form of the Chronicle was written in French or in Greek. Much clearer is the case of the Chronicle of Tocco, which despite dealing with the fortunes of the Italo-Greek dynasty ruling in Kephallonia, was never written in anything other than Greek. As was the lively account of the Lusignan rulers written by Leontios Makhairas (c.1380–1432), though it is strongly marked with Cypriot orthography and vocabulary. Its vignet
tes of court life carry a vivid impression of the tensions endemic in a hybrid community.
All the works mentioned so far share one striking characteristic. They are all written in a register of Greek which is very far from the formal atticizing language that was normally expected when pen was put to paper, and which was described in the grammatical exercises of, say, Manuel Moschopoulos (1265–1316) or Thomas Magister (1270–1347/8). The texts from the areas of the Byzantine world settled by Franks use a form of the spoken Greek of the period; in the case of Makhairas this is particularly clear since he uses the Cypriot dialect. In the others there are no signs of regional dialect but there are syntactical and morphological constructions which foreshadow features of Modern Greek. The most reasonable explanation for this phenomenon is that these works were produced in a multilingual environment where Byzantine linguistic conventions were blurred. The audience was one whose oral comprehension of Greek would have been good but who would have been oblivious to, or had no means of discovering, the complexities of formal Greek. The censorship and education which in Constantinople would have removed neologisms from written forms of Greek were not in place in these areas. Undoubtedly, too, the mingling of cultures would have brought an awareness of literary fashions in other areas of Europe, as the translated texts demonstrate. It should be remembered that one of the most obvious features of the literatures of Frankish Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the dominant role taken by the vernaculars, with French and the regional dialects of Italy being especially innovative.