Despite al-Ghazali’s assault, however, Muslim philosophy continued, and produced many more notable thinkers. Among the greatest of them, and drawing this brief survey of Greek-inspired Islamic thought to a close, is the fourteenth-century thinker Ibn Khaldun. A north African Arab from Tunis, Ibn Khaldun studied the works of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, among others, but determined to make his own mark as a historian. His universal history, the Kitab al-’Ibar, won wide acclaim. The first section (of seven) of this history, the Muqaddimah or Introduction, is often read as a book in its own right. In it Ibn Khaldun introduced ideas of social conflict and social cohesion that have had a significant impact in the discipline of sociology, and he was one of the first thinkers to emphasize the importance for a civilization of its political economy, which he described as being composed of value-adding processes carried out by the people. No less a historian than the great Arnold Toynbee, author of the influential multi-volume Study of History, praised Ibn Khaldun’s work for introducing a “philosophy of history” which is among the greatest of its kind.
In sum, the high culture spread all around the Mediterranean and near east in the Hellenistic era did not vanish in the parts of that world that were conquered by the Muslims. Ibn Khaldun had argued that when desert nomads or other less “civilized” outsiders conquer a great civilization, they inevitably become attracted to its refined literacy and arts, and assimilate and/or adapt aspects of that culture to become their own. In accordance with Ibn Khaldun’s principle, under the impact of Hellenistic philosophy and science the Islamic world enjoyed a “Golden Age” of high culture between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, with great cultural centers from Balkh in the east, to Baghdad in the center, to Cordoba in the far west. This era of Islamic culture still influences Muslims to the present day; and the Hellenistic-influenced high culture of the Islamic “Golden Age” in turn influenced the Christian west.
2. A BYZANTINE LIBRARY
Not all of the Hellenistic world was conquered by the Muslims. Despite repeated assaults in the eighth century and later, including several sieges of the city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire—comprising Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Balkan peninsula as its core lands—held firm for many centuries as an orthodox Christian realm using the Greek language and viewing itself as a continuation of the old Roman Empire: the people we call Byzantines referred to themselves as Rhomaioi or Romans. After an era of crisis in the seventh and eighth centuries, involving attacks from outside by the Muslims from the south and Slavic peoples (especially the Bulgars) from the north, and also internal dissensions in the form of the great “iconoclastic” dispute within orthodox Christianity, the Byzantine Empire entered a period of revitalized prosperity and success in the ninth and tenth centuries.
At some time, most likely in the early 850s, an important official in the imperial service in Constantinople named Photios was sent on an embassy to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Preparing himself for this task, Photios decided to undertake a literary work of great importance. We have his own words about it:
Photios, to his beloved brother Tarasios, in the name of the Lord, greeting. After our appointment as ambassador to Assyria (i.e. Baghdad) had been confirmed … and approved by the emperor, you asked to be supplied with summaries of those works which I had read and discussed during your absence. Your idea was to have something to console you for our painful separation, and at the same time to acquire some knowledge, even if vague and imperfect, of the works which you had not yet read in our company … Accordingly … we engaged a secretary and set down all the summaries we could recollect … If during your study of these volumes, any of the summaries should appear to be defective or inaccurate, you must not be surprised. It is no easy matter to undertake to read each individual work, to grasp the subject matter, and to remember and record it … Certainly such records will assist you to refresh the memory of what you have read by yourself, to find more readily what you want, and to acquire more easily the knowledge of what has not as yet been the subject of intelligent reading on your part.
These words introduce Photios’ famed work, the Bibliotheca (Library). In it he gives more or less concise summaries of some 280 works he had read, works which evidently constituted his personal library. Photios, that is to say, personally owned one of the great libraries of early medieval times, and emerges as one of the most learned men of his era. Photios, in fact, became a great and famous man. In the year 858 the Byzantine emperor Michael III and his uncle and chief minister Caesar Bardas fell out with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Ignatios, and decided to depose and replace him. Their choice fell on the chief secretary of the palace, Photios. In the space of four days, beginning on December 20th, Photios was tonsured as a cleric, successively ordained lector, sub-deacon, deacon, and priest, and then on Christmas Day of 858 he was enthroned as Patriarch of Constantinople, that is to say head of the eastern Orthodox church, in succession to Ignatios. This was no doubt the most meteoric ecclesiastical career in history, only paralleled by the fictional Pope Hadrian in Frederick Rolfe’s much overlooked novel Hadrian the Seventh. Photios served as Patriarch under Michael III until the emperor’s assassination in 867, when the new emperor Basil I the Macedonian deposed him and restored Ignatios. But Photios soon ingratiated himself with Basil, and when Ignatios died in 877 it was inevitably Photios who succeeded him, serving again as Patriarch until Basil’s death in 886. During his time as Patriarch and his final years in retirement at the monastery of Gordon, he became arguably the most important and influential theologian of the Orthodox tradition, played a key role in the schism between the eastern Orthodox and western Catholic churches, and established the reputation that sees him still today revered as one of the great saints of the Orthodox church.
It is no surprise, then, to find that the library of this man consisted, for rather more than half of its total works, of Christian literature; theological and controversial treatises, homilies, church histories, letters, and other Christian writings of all sorts featured very prominently. But for present purposes, it is the non-Christian segment of Photios’ library that is of interest. More than sixty of the works Photios held were non-Christian books. A few of them may nevertheless have been kept for essentially Christian reasons: Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and some of the writings of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, had long been of interest to Christian scholars as background to the rise of Christianity. But at the core of Photios’ non-Christian books was a set of texts that might have formed the personal book collection of any well-to-do and well-educated Hellenistic gentleman of the second or first century BCE: the works of classic historians such as Herodotus, Ctesias, and Theopompus of Chios, and the speeches of the great Attic orators—Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isaeus, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Deinarchus, Lycurgus; supplemented by a few specifically Hellenistic works such as Agatharchides’ Periplous of the Red Sea and the histories of Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The rest of the non-Christian library contains a veritable who’s who of the literary culture of the Hellenistic east during the high Roman Empire: Plutarch, Lucian, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Iamblichus, and Philostratus, along with historians such as Arrian, Appian, Herodian, Memnon of Heraclea, Zosimus, and Dio Cassius, and even some less highbrow literature such as the novels of Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Lucius of Patrae. Finally the collection was replete with technical treatises on language and style, including various lexica explaining the obscure words of the Attic orators and philosophers. None of these are works we would be surprised to find being read by any educated man of an eastern Mediterranean city during the second or third centuries CE, as the study of papyri found at the regional metropolis of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt has shown. Leaving aside the specifically Christian works, that is to say, the rest of Photios’ library was essentially a collection of works representing the literature and reading habits of the late Hellenistic civilization of the middle Roman Imperial period.
This should be surprising, since Photios did not live during that era, but half a millennium later. Photios’ library tells us that the literary culture of the high Byzantine Empire was still very much Hellenistic literary culture, though with a heavy Christian overlay. That is not something that should be taken for granted: half a millennium is plenty of time for an old culture to be forgotten and a new culture to arise. What we find instead is a Byzantine Empire, a Christian Greek state governing the north eastern end of the Mediterranean region for a thousand years between about 450 and 1453, that was not just Christian by religion and Greek in language: it also continued to be Hellenistic in literary culture.
Just one hundred years after Photios’ first enthronement as Patriarch of Constantinople, in the year 959, one of the more remarkable men in Byzantine history died at the age of fifty-four. Despite his relatively young age, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus had nominally ruled the Byzantine Empire for fifty years, having been elevated to co-emperor by his uncle, the emperor Alexander, when he (Constantine) was only three years old in 908. Alexander died in 913, leaving Constantine as his successor, but having appointed a regency council to govern on his behalf. The dominant figure on this regency council, the Patriarch Nicolaus Mysticus, governed for several years until he was supplanted by Constantine’s mother Zoe, who ran the empire on her son’s behalf until 919. Due to her failure to deal effectively with the Bulgar threat, however, she was then deposed and replaced by the great admiral and military leader Romanus Lecapenus. He was not content just to rule as regent: in 920 he had himself declared co-emperor with Constantine, regularizing this position by having Constantine marry his daughter Helena Lecapene. And so, until 944, Constantine was emperor in name but the empire was actually ruled by his father-in-law and co-emperor Romanus, who was assisted by his sons Christophorus and Stephanus. It was only in 945 that Constantine, after Romanus had been forced into retirement by his sons in 944, and he and his wife Helena had then succeeded in deposing his ambitious brothers-in-law, was able finally to rule the empire independently, though in truth Helena seems to have played a significant role.
What made Constantine remarkable was what he did during all those years, two decades in fact, when he was grown up and nominally emperor, but in fact was not permitted to rule. Rulers are often flattered by their entourages as men of learning and culture, though few really deserve the flattery. Constantine was one who did. From an early age he showed a passionate interest in reading and books. He encouraged and patronized writers, scholars, and artists of all sorts, and he was himself a writer and scholar of no mean talent. During his reign, the literary revival that had begun under Photios flourished as never before, and Constantine contributed strongly to it. He wrote works on court ceremonial and how to rule that provide us with unique insights into the governing system of the Byzantine Empire; he wrote a biography of his grandfather, the great emperor Basil I; and he was a passionate collector of books and manuscripts of all sorts. Few men did more than Constantine to foster the preservation of Classical and Hellenistic literature and learning at Constantinople and in the Byzantine Empire. Constantine felt, in particular, that the study of history was being neglected in his time, and that the great histories of the Greeks and Romans had much to teach his contemporaries. He decided that the problem was the great length of the works of history written during Classical and Hellenistic times, so he commissioned a series of excerpts that would bring together, under a set of thematic headings (fifty-three altogether, though only six survive), the essential lessons of the great historians of the past. Incidentally, these excerpts reveal how much that is now lost was still available to readers in tenth-century Constantinople. Sadly, Constantine’s own project hastened the loss of some notable historical works, as the availability of the excerpts caused the original works to be neglected. But the literary and scholarly activity of Constantine and his contemporaries reveals again how much the Byzantine Empire was still Hellenistic in literary culture, the libraries of Constantinople and other major cities stocked with old Greek texts of which too many no longer survive. But most of what does survive of Classical and Hellenistic literature survives because of the Byzantine interest in and preservation of it.
3. EXILES IN ITALY
In the summer of 1471 the plague was raging in the city of Florence in northern Italy. In his study at the Florentinum Studium, the university at which many of the great Italian humanists got their education, a man was packing up his books and belongings, preparing to go and seek safety at Rome. He was in his mid-fifties, and this was not the first time he had been forced to pack up his belongings and flee. His name was Ioannis Argyropoulos, and he had been born in Constantinople in 1415, in the declining years of the once great Byzantine Empire. There, in his youth, he had studied theology and philosophy, and eventually became a teacher himself, counting among his pupils the notable scholar Constantinos Laskaris. In 1439 he had been selected to participate in an embassy to Italy, to attend the ecumenical Council of Florence as part of an attempt to heal the great schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He even received a doctorate in theology from the University of Padua in 1444. Argyropoulos seemed set for a brilliant career in scholarship and public service. But in 1453 everything changed: the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror captured the city of Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire was no more. Argyropoulos fled the captured city, taking refuge at first in the Morea (Peloponnese in southern Greece), and then in 1456 moving to Italy. In Italy his career revived. After teaching for a time at Padua, he became head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium, where his fame grew. Argyropoulos did not just teach Greek: he played a major role in the revival of Greek literary learning in western Europe, in particular the study of Greek philosophy in the original language, rather than from Latin translations that were themselves often derived from Arabic translations. He was a noted Aristotelian, and was part of a wave of Byzantine scholars who fled to western Europe, especially Italy, at this time, bringing with them Greek texts that had long been unavailable in the Latin west. At the Florentinum Studium, Argyropoulos’ lectures were attended by such future luminaries as Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo il Magnifico as he was to become) and Poliziano; indeed it has even been suggested that the great Leonardo da Vinci listened to Argyropoulos.
Safely at Rome, Argyropoulos continued his career as a teacher of Greek language and philosophy for years. He finally died in 1487, back in Florence, reputedly from the effects of eating too much watermelon. Lovers of watermelon will agree, I am sure, that there are worse ways to die. Argyropoulos’ position as head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium did not remain vacant, of course. Within a few years another Byzantine Greek held the position: Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Born in Athens in 1423 to a family of the Athenian nobility, he and his family soon migrated to the Peloponnese, and then in 1447—not waiting for the inevitable end of Byzantine Constantinople—to Italy. At Rome in 1449 the Greek cardinal Bessarion, himself a refugee from the Byzantine Empire (born in the 1390s in Trapezous [Trebizond] on the Black Sea), took Chalkokondyles under his wing. He was able to study with the noted Byzantine humanist Theodore Gaza, established a friendship with Marsilio Ficino, and eventually attained a position teaching at the University of Perugia, where one of his pupils supposedly likened him to Plato to see and hear. From Perugia Chalkonondyles, following in Argyropoulos’ footsteps, moved to Padua in 1463, and then to Florence where he was, by 1479, the head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium, enjoying the patronage of the great Lorenzo il Magnifico. Besides teaching the likes of Lorenzo’s son, the future pope Leo X, Castiglione, and Giraldi, Chalkokondyles during his time at Florence helped to pioneer a project that changed the future of western education and secured the role of Greek literature as a crucial part of it.
One of the great inventions of the fifteenth century, which in its way had as great an impact on western civilization as the modern invention of the personal compute
r and the internet, was the printing press. Before the advent of printing, books had to be laboriously copied out by hand, over and over through the generations. One of the major reasons why texts became lost is that no one had a great enough interest to copy them out again, or pay for them to be copied. Without that process, aged manuscripts would simply deteriorate until they crumbled away. Fortunately, many of the more significant works of Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture had continued to be copied until the fifteenth century, but as long as they were dependent on the process of copying by hand, texts were vulnerable to becoming lost; and in addition books were rare and expensive so long as they were handwritten. The printing press changed all of that. The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their strong interest in Greek civilization stimulated by the influx of Byzantine refugee scholars with their manuscripts, realized that preserving and spreading the Greek texts they admired would be greatly enhanced by use of printing. Chalkokondyles was one of these humanists, and he helped to set the tone by preparing for printing the first editions of Homer (1488), Isocrates (1493), and the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (1499). These were among the first in a wave of printed editions of ancient Greek texts, securing the preservation of Greek literature once and for all, and establishing its place as a crucial component of western literary culture ever since. In 1492 Chalkokondyles was invited by Ludovico Sforza to move to Milan, where he continued his teaching and editing career until his death in 1511.
Before and After Alexander Page 35