Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?: Toward a Critical Historiography 9780271095905

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

ICMA BOOKS | VIEWPOINTS Copublished by the International Center of Medieval Art and Penn State University Press, the ICMA Books | Viewpoints series aims to engage with and instigate new conversations, debates, and perspectives not only about medieval art and visual-material culture but also in relation to the critical practices employed by medieval art historians. Books will typically be data-rich, issue-driven, and even polemical. The range of potential subjects is broad and varied, and each title will tackle a significant and timely problem in the field of medieval art and visual-material culture. The Viewpoints series is interdisciplinary and actively involved in providing a forum for current critical developments in art-historical methodology, the structure of scholarly writing, and/or the use of evidence.

Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Toward a Critical Historiography

Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Benjamin, editor. | Ivanova, Mirela (Historian), editor. Title: Is Byzantine studies a colonialist discipline? : toward a critical historiography / [edited by] Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Series: ICMA books. Viewpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A volume of essays by scholars of Byzantine art, history, and literature addressing the entanglements between the academic discipline of Byzantine studies and the practice and legacies of European colonialism”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005021 | ISBN 9780271095264 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism—Historiography. | Byzantine Empire—Study and teaching— Historiography. | Europe—Colonies— Historiography. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC DF505 .I83 2023 | DDC 945/.701—dc23/eng/20230213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005021 Copyright © 2023 International Center of Medieval Art All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations (vii) Preface: The Historical Conjuncture (ix) Introduction: For a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies (1) Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova Part 1: How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

1 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue: Early Byzantine Scholarship at the Intersection of Slavery, Colonialism, and the Crusades (39) Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff

2 Byzantine Archaeology: Teaching the Tenth and the Twentieth Centuries (52) Hugh G. Jeffery

3 Byzantium in Exile (58) Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun Part 2: How Is Byzantium (Re)produced?

4 Methodological Imperialism (75) Nicholas S. M. Matheou

5 The Price of Admission (83) Anthony Kaldellis

6 Byzantine Studies: A Field Ripe for Disruption (90) Averil Cameron

7 Subaltern Byzantinism (98) Maria Mavroudi

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Part 3: How Are Byzantine Texts (Re)produced?

8 Byzantine and Western Narratives: A Dialogue of Empires (111) Arietta Papaconstantinou

9 The Ethnic Process (121) Alexandra Vukovich

10 Publication and Citation Practices: Enclosure, Extractivism, and Gatekeeping in Byzantine Studies (133) Matthew Kinloch Part 4: How Is Byzantine Art (Re)produced?

11 The South Kensington Museum, Byzantine Egyptian Textiles, and Art-Historical Imperialism (145) Arielle Winnik

12 From Ethnographic Illustration to Aphrodisian Magistrate: Changing Perceptions of an Early Byzantine Portrait (153) Stephanie R. Caruso

13 Expanding and Decentering Byzantium: The Acquisition of an Ethiopian Double-Sided Gospel Leaf (162) Andrea Myers Achi

14 Equity, Accessibility, and New Narratives for Byzantine Art in the Museum (172) Elizabeth Dospěl Williams

A Collective Bibliography Toward a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies (179) List of Contributors (189) Index (193)

Illustrations

I.1. Solar diagram, Handy Tables of Ptolemy (18) I.2. The separation of light from darkness (Genesis 1:3–5) (19) I.3. Saint Michael defeating an attack on Constantinople (20) I.4. Saint Peter and Bishop Petros I (22) I.5. The meeting of Muhammad and Herakleios (23) I.6. “The idolatry of the Ishmaelites” (24) 1.1. The coat of arms of Johann Jakob Fugger (42) 3.1. Interior of Hagia Sophia (69) 7.1. Mark Doox, Saint John Coltrane Enthroned (100) 7.2. Photis Kontoglou, murals, City Hall, Athens (103) 7.3. Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, Lion of Judah (104) 11.1. Plate depicting Byzantine Egyptian textiles (150) 12.1. Portrait of a benefactor (Rhodopaios?), Aphrodisias (154) 12.2. Engraving depicting the dance of the Chohos (158) 13.1. Double-sided gospel leaf, Tigray, Ethiopia (164) 13.2. Double-sided gospel leaf, Tigray, Ethiopia (165) 14.1. Installation of the “Emperor Roundel,” Dumbarton Oaks (173) 14.2. Phalera or harness pendant, Persia (176)

Preface: The Historical Conjuncture

In the summer of 2020, two events, at first glance unrelated, rendered a series of questions about the study of the medieval Mediterranean unavoidable. What is the remit of the field called “Byzantine studies”? In which forums may Byzantinists speak with authority? What is the basis of that authority, and how should it be deployed? When are scholars compelled to engage in public debate? The first event occurred on 25 May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on camera. The footage spread via social and mass media, becoming a metonym for an entire system of racecraft, of structural inequality upheld by racialized violence and newly exacerbated by a global pandemic.1 Renewed resistance to this system crystallized under a phrase. “Black Lives Matter” denotes in practice a social movement, but it is grammatically a credo— one rejected, moreover, by many in power. The footage of Floyd’s murder demonstrated that, to the agents of contemporary colonialism, Black lives do not matter.2 The focus of the resistance thus expanded from the immediate context of US-American policing to a transnational reassessment of the enduring legacies of European colonialism and white supremacy. Contemporary private cultural institutions—most obviously museums and universities—are founded upon the fruits of structural inequities: surpluses unjustly accumulated and dedicated to a perpetual, secular, mass of remembrance. At the same time, cultural professionals abhor outward demonstrations of racism and regularly seek to distinguish their institutions’ present activities from the circumstances of their founding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, such institutions took center stage in this new transnational reassessment of colonialism. Many issued formal statements. Here is a characteristic document from the summer of 2020:

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At British Art Studies, we know from our work to date how thoroughly entangled histories of British art are with the legacies of colonial violence, oppression, slavery, and systemic racism. These histories manifest themselves variously in artworks, art-historical writing, museum displays, and other forms of heritage conservation. Acknowledging the ways that British histories and cultural production have been complicit in anti-Blackness, colonial violence, slavery, and white supremacy is only the first step. Recognising and dismantling the racism that affects and is perpetuated in our institutions today is the essential next step. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art, the co-publishers of BAS, have both shared statements of solidarity in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world.3 Somewhere between a mea culpa and a manifesto, this statement reveals how the murder of George Floyd caused those in positions of cultural authority to engage seriously with the relationship between their professional activities and the duties of global political citizenship. Could the study of British art contribute to a more just society? If so, then how? If not, why bother? The relevance of colonialism to the study of British art, the cultural production of a colonial empire, seems obvious. So too does that of colonialism to those disciplines, such as classics, that have historically contributed to the assertion of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. For these disciplines, 2020 was not the first reckoning. After the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, the Society of Classical Studies, American Historical Association, and many peer organizations denounced the appropriation of their scholarship by racists. At this point, however, Byzantinists saw no need to enter public debate, even as members of the misogynist, racist “alt-right” increasingly turned to Byzantium (or their concept thereof) as a model for a patriarchal, Christian state.4

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In the following years, Adam Goldwyn and other Byzantinists consistently pointed out the importance of engaging in public debate beyond the confines of the academy, including on online platforms such as Reddit and Twitter.5 Thus, by the summer of 2020 it was no longer possible for Byzantinists to ride out the next reckoning. On 7 June 2020, the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), of which one of us (Benjamin Anderson) was president at the time, published a statement via its listserv and website. It expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and announced a small fund for Byzantinists of color as well as an initiative to decolonize Byzantine studies, spearheaded by the question “Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline?”6 BSANA’s call led to a collaboration with the New Critical Approaches to Byzantine Studies Network, hosted at the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities, of which the other of us (Mirela Ivanova) was a founding member. Our first joint venture was a webinar, Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies, held on 13 August.7 The second is the volume before you. Oswald Spengler writes that “a philosophical question is merely a thinly veiled desire to receive a particular answer that is already implied in the question itself.”8 If this is true, then our question was not and is not philosophical. It is intended rather to initiate a conversation within and beyond Byzantine studies in the hopes that the answers would be unexpected. In our opinion, the present volume amply fulfills that hope. Initial responses to our question ranged from curiosity and enthusiasm to ridicule and scorn.9 Many sat in the middle: supportive of our broader aims, but skeptical of the relation between the practice of Byzantine studies and contemporary politics, in particular Black Lives Matter and the project of decolonization. And yet, at precisely the same moment, a second event, at first glance entirely distinct, triggered a public discourse in which Byzantinists felt compelled to engage, thereby demonstrating the thoroughly politicized nature of the existing discipline of Byzantine studies. These events are covered in detail in this volume by Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun; here we provide a brief outline. On 29 May 2020, the Turkish government celebrated the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) both outside

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and inside Hagia Sophia.10 Built as a church in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia became a mosque after the conquest; since 1935, it had operated as a museum. The Greek foreign minister swiftly objected, specifically to “the reading of passages of the Quran inside Hagia Sophia.”11 The protest elicited a response from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who stressed the sovereignty of Turkey’s borders: “Greece is not the one administering this land, so it should avoid making such remarks. If Greece does not know its place, Turkey knows how to answer.”12 Next, the Council of State (Danıştay), Turkey’s highest administrative court, agreed to hear a suit to reopen Hagia Sophia to Muslim worship. Various national organizations of Byzantinists issued proleptic condemnations of the anticipated result, including the Greek Committee of Byzantine Studies (8 June), the Italian Committee of Byzantine Studies (23 June), the French Committee for Byzantine Studies (26 June), and the National Committee of Byzantine Studies of the Russian Federation (29 June).13 The Danıştay, undeterred, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on 2 July; one week later, on 10 July, Erdoğan transferred jurisdiction over Hagia Sophia from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to the national Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Hagia Sophia was a mosque again.14 This precipitated another round of letters. John Haldon, as president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies (Association Internationale des Études Byzantines—AIEB), wrote (13 July) that the decision “damages Turkish scholarship and research in both the humanities as well as the natural sciences in a way that is likely to have direct consequences for Turkish participation in international scientific enquiry for some years to come.” A few days later (18 July), the AIEB announced that the International Congress of Byzantine Studies, planned for 2021 in Istanbul, would be postponed and moved, citing both the ongoing pandemic and “concerns associated with issues of heritage management.” The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque made evident that, despite earlier hesitations to connect our practice with political global citizenship in support of Black Lives Matter, Byzantine studies is, in fact, a political discipline. Our professional practice is inseparable from our geopolitical circumstances. When a historical monument of great significance to the discipline became a pawn of regional politics, Byzantine

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studies mobilized its national and international committees to intervene and to reprimand both the Turkish state and ultimately also our Turkish colleagues on the ground. A group of Turkish graduate students of Byzantine studies in Turkey wrote in response (20 July): “In an era of identity politics, it is all too easy to be stigmatized as ‘the enemy’ in our own field of study on account of presupposed affiliations. At a time when we need your support more than ever, we are left to feel ostracized.”15 The historical conjuncture of (1) the global reassessment of the legacies of colonialism and (2) the controversy around Hagia Sophia requires that we ask what Byzantine studies and Byzantinists have stood for in the past and stand for today. As various as their answers may be, the contributors to this volume are united by their recognition of the value of this project and their desire to pursue it in a fashion both critical and generous. We thank everyone who participated in the webinar (some forty colleagues in total) and those who responded to our question under separate cover. Sophie Moore and Alexandra Vukovich designed and implemented the three-part program of small-group discussions, a format that was inspired in turn by an earlier conference co-organized by Nicholas Matheou.16 Roland Betancourt, series editor for Viewpoints, and Eleanor Goodman, executive editor at Penn State University Press, welcomed our proposal for a collaborative volume that would continue the conversations begun in the webinar. In order to preserve the dynamic and multivocal character of that meeting, we solicited short contributions (“position pieces”) in response to one or both of the following questions: Is Byzantine studies a colonialist discipline? How can we write a more critical historiography of Byzantine studies? We furthermore asked authors to focus on one object, site, text, problem, subfield, or scholarly practice and to advance their arguments with minimal footnotes. Our introduction to the volume, by contrast, attempts a synthetic account of the critical historiography of Byzantine studies. Rooted in the discussions held during the webinar, it has continued to evolve in dialogue with the position pieces and the two anonymous reviewers, to

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whom we are deeply grateful for their detailed comments on the draft manuscript. We presented sections of our draft introduction during a roundtable discussion (“Theorizing Byzantium and Byzantine Studies”) at the Twenty-Fourth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Venice, on 23 August 2022 and shared a complete draft of the preface and introduction with the Research on Art & Visual Culture workshop at Cornell University on 6 October 2022. We thank all who joined and discussed. Taken as a whole, accordingly, this book offers a multitude of views on Byzantine studies during a fascinating moment of self-reflection. It reveals, in brief, a field in motion. We conclude with thanks to those who helped lend this volume its final form: to Sam Barber for assistance in preparing the final manuscript for submission, to managing editor Laura Reed-Morrisson for copyediting the manuscript, to Ayla Çevik for preparing the index (and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University for funding her work), and to editorial assistant Maddie Caso and production coordinator Brian H. Beer for shepherding the volume into print. Notes 1. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012). 2. For Black Americans as “a submerged nation in the heartland of U.S. imperialism, the main bulwark of the collapsing colonial system,” see Harry Haywood, For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (Chicago: Provisional Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, 1958), available online at Marxists Internet Archive, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​ www​.marxists​.org​/history​/erol​/1956​–1960​/haywood02​.htm. See further Harry Haywood and Milton Howard, Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (New York: International Pamphlets, 1932), available online, with an introduction (on “the national question”) by Erin Gray: Erin Gray, Harry Haywood, and Milton Howard, “Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (1932),” Viewpoint Magazine, 9 January 2017, https://​v iewpointmag​.com​/2017​/01​/09​/lynching​-a​-weapon​ -of​-national​-oppression​-1932/. 3. BAS Editorial Group, “Editorial,” British Art Studies 16, 30 June 2020, https://​ britishartstudies​.ac​.uk​/issues​/issue​-index​/issue​-16​/editorial​-574. 4. Adam J. Goldwyn, “Byzantium in the American Alt-Right Imagination: Paradigms of the Medieval Greek Past Among Men’s Rights Activists and White

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Supremacists,” in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, ed. Michael Edward Stewart, David Alan Parnell, and Conor Whately (London: Routledge, 2022), 424–39; Roland Betancourt, “Why White Supremacists and QAnon Fans Are Obsessed with the Byzantine Empire,” Salon, 8 March 2021, https://​w ww​ .salon​.com​/2021​/03​/08​/why​-white​-supremacists​-and​-qanon​-fans​-are​-obsessed​ -with​-the​-byzantine​-empire​_ partner/. 5. See especially Adam Goldwyn, “The Byzantine Workings of the Manosphere,” Eidolon, 11 June 2018, https://​eidolon​.pub​/the​-byzantine​-workings​-of​ -the​-manosphere​-37db3be9e66. 6. “Statement by the Officers and Board of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America,” Byzantine Studies Conference 2020 website, 7 June 2020, https://​bsc2020​.net. 7. For a report on the webinar, see Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova, “Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies,” Byzantine Studies Conference 2020 website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​bsc2020​.net​/Towards​ -a​-Critical​-Historiography. 8. Quoted in Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 100. 9. For an example of the latter, see Anton Kulikov, “Why Is Decolonization of History So Popular Today?,” Pravda, 11 June 2020, https://e​ nglish.​ pravda.​ ru/​ world​ /144661​-decolonization​_history/. 10. For a first attempt at a history of these developments, see Brian Croke, Flashpoint Hagia Sophia (London: Routledge, 2022). 11. “Ministry of Foreign Affairs Announcement on Today’s Reading from the Quran in Hagia Sophia, on the Anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople,” Hellenic Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, 29 May 2020, https://​w ww​.mfa​.gr​ /en​/current​-affairs​/statements​-speeches​/ministry​-of​-foreign​-affairs​-announce ment​-on​-todays​-reading​-from​-the​-quran​-in​-hagia​-sophia​-on​-the​-anniversary​ -of​-the​-fall​-of​-constantinople​.html. 12. “Hagia Sophia Decision Does Not Concern Greece, Erdoğan Says,” Daily Sabah, 9 June 2020, https://​w ww​.dailysabah​.com​/politics​/diplomacy​/hagia​ -sophia​-decision​-does​-not​-concern​-greece​-erdogan​-says. For an analysis of the controversy from the standpoint of international law, see Lando Kirchmair, “Turning Hagia Sophia into a Mosque (Again): Has International Law Anything to Say About That?,” Völkerrechtsblog, 21 July 2020, https://​voelkerrechtsblog​.org​/de​ /turning​-hagia​-sophia​-into​-a​-mosque​-again/. Kirchmair concludes that “international law in the form of the World Heritage Convention does not forbid the announced change of status or holds only weak sanctions ready.” 13. For a letter signed by an international group of Byzantinists and Ottomanists, see Friends of Hagia Sophia, “An Open Letter About the Status of Hagia Sophia,” Medium, 30 June 2020, https://​medium​.com​/@hagiasophia​/an​-open​ -letter​-about​-the​-status​-of​-hagia​-sophia​-bea9afd1a62f. 14. For an analysis of the court’s decision, see “The Hagia Sophia Case,” Harvard Law Review, 11 January 2021, https://h ​ arvardlawreview​.org​/2021​/01​/the​-hagia​ -sophia​-case/. For the text of the decision, in Turkish and English, see Tenth

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Chamber of the Council of State of the Republic of Turkey, “Court Decision Annulling Cabinet Decision of 1934 Converting Hagia Sophia into a Mosque,” SHARIAsource, 2 July 2020, https://​beta​.shariasource​.com​/documents​/3778. For a translation of Erdoğan’s decree, see Croke, Flashpoint, 56. 15. See the text of the letter here: https://​docs​.google​.com​/forms​/d​/e​ /1FAIpQLSekKjs1​-Qpt2LgAPu9dQsBf0​-AH0PIHXwJMchZohcx4uO0​-sQ​/viewform. 16. Ilya Afanasyev, Nicholas Evans, and Nicholas Matheou, “Doing Conferences Differently,” Verso Books Blog, 14 September 2018, https://​w ww​.versobooks​.com​ /blogs​/4028​-doing​-conferences​-differently.

Introduction For a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies

Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova Byzantine studies applies a variety of humanistic disciplines (art history, archaeology, history, literature, philosophy, theology, and philology) to the study of cultural, political, and social phenomena within a circumscribed chronology (ca. 500–1500 CE) and geography (the eastern Mediterranean and adjoining landmasses). If conceptualized as a transnational and multigenerational project to describe and understand human activity in the past, it may serve as a model for coalition building and problem solving in the present and the common envisioning of a just future. If, by contrast, it is reckoned to be an arcane body of knowledge—difficult to access and limited in appeal—then it may serve as a redoubt for reaction, a refuge for the highly educated who seek personal comfort and security in the present and see little hope for the future. The question of colonialism is key to the current trajectory of Byzantine studies and to the future of the field. That said, we do not presume to answer our titular question with a simple “yes” or “no,” much less to save (or to damn) our discipline. Instead, we hope to highlight the distinctive character of our object of study (the Byzantine Empire)

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and of our discipline (Byzantine studies): namely, that both are simultaneously colonial and colonized. We are not the first to inquire into the relationships between Byzantine studies and European colonialism. Take, for example, two works published in 2019: one by Panagiotis Agapitos and the other by George Demacopoulos. Agapitos studies an extractive mission undertaken by the Byzantinist Franz Dölger to occupied Athos in 1941 and its relation to his influential “view of the Byzantine empire as a fully developed system of a national population under a constitutionally organized state.”1 Demacopoulos studies a much older group of texts about Byzantium—those produced by participants in another extractive colonialist enterprise, the Fourth Crusade—and employs postcolonial critique to understand the enduring concepts of Christian difference embedded therein.2 Similarly, we are far from the first to address the historiography of Byzantine studies. Among the many earlier contributions included in the bibliography at the end of this volume, we wish to highlight one of the most recent. Published in 2021 and edited by two contributors to the present volume, Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers an impressive “cross section” of the discipline’s founding figures, albeit without explicitly addressing their direct participation (or indirect implication) in colonial projects.3 Our concept of “critical historiography” is shaped by two studies of neighboring disciplines. In The Nation and Its Ruins (2007), Yannis Hamilakis demonstrates that modern Greek studies “can only be adequately addressed if it is positioned within the discourse of post-colonial studies, and only when the interplay between colonialism and nationalism is fully explored.”4 Similarly, in Beyond Balkanism (2019), Diana Mishkova highlights the origins of southeast European studies in the work of “scholar-officials” employing “the language of the then triumphant European colonialism.”5 As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, Byzantine studies is no less entangled with the practices and legacies of European colonialism than are modern Greek studies and southeast European studies, even as the contours of its entanglement—the specific knots and nodes that tie the production of knowledge to projects of colonial rule

Introduction

3

and extraction—are distinctive. It is the job of a systematic critical historiography of Byzantine studies both to map this topography and to envision the alternatives: how Byzantine studies might contribute to the formation of a more just and equitable society. Accordingly, we consider the chapters below and the thematic bibliography that follows as contributions to this much broader project. The bibliography is meant as a tool, not as a comprehensive record of all works mentioned in this volume. It was compiled collectively by participants in our original workshop and contributors to this volume. It reveals that the critical historiography of Byzantine studies is still a fragmented (more optimistically, a nascent) discourse. None of the texts cite or refer to any substantial portion of the others. This is not the intellectual production of a self-conscious field of critical historiography; rather, it is an undercurrent of locally occasioned critical reflections. We hope that in mapping it across disciplines and specialties, the book and bibliography may serve as a foundation for a more coherent intellectual project, both by gathering various approaches to the question of colonialism in Byzantine studies and by looking outward and situating Byzantine studies among the neighboring disciplines of classics and medieval studies.

Orientalism and Nationalism Unlike the study of ancient Greece and Rome and the study of the Western Middle Ages, the study of the Byzantine Empire was never essential to the formation of modern Europe and the pursuit of its colonial enterprises. Rather, Byzantium was constructed as the decadent, effeminate foil to a vigorous, manly Europe: in short, as an especially proximate branch of an imagined Orient.6 Beginning in the nineteenth century, this marginalization provoked a response on the part of scholars in orthodox Christian nations who sought to construct an equally imaginary, idealized image of Byzantium as a usable past in the service of modern political projects.7 The foregoing observations, whose truth we fully acknowledge, have led some of our interlocutors to pose two objections to our titular question. First: Byzantium is so marginalized and orientalized that Byzantine

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studies cannot possibly be a colonialist discipline. Second: nationalism, not colonialism, is at the root of the discipline’s discontents. It is hard to argue with the premise of the first objection. Of course, and as we discuss in greater detail below, Byzantium has been marginalized by traditional histories of Western civilization. In a material act with symbolic significance, Byzantine strata have been stripped off excavation sites to reveal the prized yet architecturally formulaic monuments of antiquity hidden below.8 Even while granting the premise, however, the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Marginalized fields of study can be conducted in a colonialist manner: one need look no further than the histories of the study of Sanskrit philosophy and Arabic literature.9 In short, while Byzantium may be marginal to Eurocentric discourse, Byzantine studies, if practiced in a colonialist mode, can contribute further to its marginalization. The second objection brings us to questions of definition. What is colonialism? What is nationalism? And have they been, as the objection suggests, clearly distinct and mutually exclusive factors in shaping the history of scholarship? Defining colonialism is not a straightforward task. In 1995, Jürgen Osterhammel devoted an entire book to this project, delineating six forms of colonialism, six epochs, and three basic types with a plethora of subdivisions. According to Osterhammel’s preferred definition, “colonialism is a relationship of rule between collectives, in which the fundamental decisions about the lives led by the colonized are made and carried out by a culturally foreign minority of colonial rulers, uninterested in acculturation, and primarily driven by external interests. In modern history, this is usually combined with missionizing justificatory doctrines, which rest upon the colonial rulers’ conviction of their own cultural supremacy.”10 Such theoretical work continues, with various authors arguing at different times that empire and colony are different, or that a colony is a part of an empire, or indeed that the two concepts are best collapsed.11 Nevertheless, the applicability of the concept of colonialism to the medieval world remains contested. Osterhammel’s first epoch is 1520–70, after the end of the Byzantine state and contemporary with the origin of Byzantine studies.12

Introduction

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In bringing the concept of colonialism to bear on the historiography of Byzantine studies, we do not intend to contribute to this technical-definitional debate. We have not chosen colonialism because we believe it to be a clear and bounded concept better suited to explaining East Rome than the commonsense “empire.” Concepts in the world are never siloed off from one another, nor are they composed of discrete sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Their use is often messy, “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing,” guided more by family resemblance than essence.13 Empire and colonial empire have more commonalities than differences. Both rely on the existence of a hierarchical extractive regime encompassing vast swaths of peoples, cultures, and linguistic traditions. But they are different in what they evoke and in the history of their study. Accordingly, we chose to bring colonialism to the discussion because we hoped that its history would help reframe some key questions relating both to the history of Byzantium and to the history of Byzantine studies. In particular, we believe that the field of postcolonial studies offers us the tools to think critically about both the Byzantine Empire and the field dedicated to its study. With respect to the history of Byzantium, the term “empire” is sufficiently ubiquitous in our field to have assumed a robust moral ambivalence. It means different things to different people and thus allows consensus without productive debate. Asking whether Byzantium was a colonial empire, even only as a rhetorical provocation, can help reintroduce specificity and genuinely productive disagreement. “Colonialism” conjures the realities of extraction and exploitation upon which empires are based more vividly than the celebrationist studies of the Byzantine Empire’s survival (on which see Nicholas Matheou’s chapter below). It provokes a different emphasis, different semantic and emotional associations, and, ultimately and most productively, different responses. Foremost of these is a concern with the subaltern, the colonized and oppressed whose lived experience the term brings to the forefront: “the experiences of those people who suffered as a result of state and institution formation.”14 In terms of the history of the discipline, scholars and scholarship are useful within colonialism as, in Osterhammel’s terms, one means by

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

which colonial rulers convince themselves of their own cultural supremacy. This dynamic has been well explicated in postcolonial studies, dating back to the foundational works of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Talal Asad. These and many other thinkers have elucidated the role of academies and scholars in the distribution of resources and power. As Robert J. C. Young wrote in 1990, and in dialogue with Spivak’s work, “the difficult political questions . . . emerge from the analysis of colonialism because it combines its critique of Western history with one of Western historicism, showing the enactment of the links between the two in the colonial past and the neocolonial present. The effect of this has been to produce a shift away from the problem of history as an idea towards an examination of Western history’s and historicism’s contemporary political ramifications. For that history lives on: its effects are operating now.”15 Who gets to speak, and who does not, is a question as relevant to our medieval sources as it is to our modern conference programs, and colonialism impacts both. By bringing the concept of colonialism to our field, we do not deny the impact of nationalism on Byzantine studies. As Partha Chatterjee demonstrated in his 1986 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the discourses of nationalism and colonialism have much in common, including their civilizing mission and their patriarchal sense of gender and sexuality. Indeed, although nationalist discourse “challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based.”16 Moreover, to construct the nation from the top down itself requires a form of colonization, which irons out the creases of regional and local difference.17 It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that nationalism as a discourse emerged from centers of imperial and colonial rule.18 Some of the regions whose medieval histories are studied under the remit of Byzantine studies—including Turkey and the Balkans—were never directly colonized by modern European powers.19 Other regions, such as the Caucasus, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, were. Nevertheless, the intellectual elites of both were often educated in colonial capitals: Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Moscow, Paris, Vienna.

Introduction

7

Accordingly, we do not seek to dismiss the role of nationalism in the construction of Byzantine studies, both historically and today. Rather, we hope that by placing nationalist scholarly production within a broader framework of colonial relations and intellectual hegemony, we might view the role of nationalism in our field differently. Let us begin by rejecting the pernicious distinction, effectively highlighted by Chatterjee, between the “good” nationalism of the West and the “evil” nationalism of the East.20 Nationalism is a condition that unavoidably shapes all scholarship in Byzantine studies, regardless of the national affiliations of the author. The question, then, is what we choose to do with it. Can this shared condition serve not as a cause for perennial lament, or mutual recrimination, but as a tool for comparing our own field to others and for building transnational resistance to the ongoing material and intellectual legacies of European colonialism?

Empire and Discipline, Colonizer and Colonized Features of colonialism and coloniality can be found at different times in both the East Roman Empire in the medieval Mediterranean and in the modern discipline of Byzantine studies. This ambiguity makes Byzantium an especially fascinating object of analysis and should allow Byzantine studies to contribute productively to postcolonial studies. Byzantine history is conventionally related in terms of the shifting fortunes of the East Roman state and its post-1204 successors, especially of their elites. Periods traditionally viewed as “golden ages”— the era of Justinian, for example—are unmistakably marked by colonial empire. In raw material terms, Corisande Fenwick has shown that the Justinianic conquest of North Africa did not represent the return of the beloved king, but rather an aggressive and unwelcome exploitative regime run out of small fortifications amid the sprawling, yet no longer defensible, urban landscapes.21 Similarly, Anthony Kaldellis has argued that Byzantine rule in eleventh-century Bulgaria “looks more like an occupation”: Bulgaria was governed “through primarily military and fiscal institutions, without giving its people much opportunity to rise in the Roman system.”22

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

To these instances of direct colonial rule, we may add less direct mechanisms of Byzantine colonialism: in particular, production of ethnographic and geographic knowledge and conversion to Orthodoxy. East Roman bureaucrats recorded information about the histories of nonliterate peoples in the Balkans and central Asia for the purposes of diplomatic domination. The most famous example is the De administrando imperio by Emperor Constantine VII (913–59), the functions of which have been aptly characterized by Paul Magdalino: “Constantine applies to each geographic area on the imperial horizon the degree of historical narrative and topographic description that is appropriate to his imperial and . . . dynastic interests. The depth and angle of coverage varies not only according to the quantity and quality of his sources and the degree of processing, but also, and I would argue primarily, according to the potential for imperial intervention and domination, both inside and outside the empire.”23 For all its distortions, this record is often all we have for imagining what those subalterns would say if they could speak. As Alexandra Vukovich notes in this volume, who gets to name a people is not a neutral question. The relation of Orthodox missions to Byzantine colonialism is more complex. Sergey Ivanov has charted the central contradiction of missionary work in Byzantium, which pitted a universalist, Christian discourse against an exceptionalist, civilizing one: “What happened when these two discourses collided with each other? Almost always the cultural snobbery inherited from the Roman Empire prevailed. Only Imperial Christianity, in which the Imperial predominated over the Christian, was recognized as genuine. A barbarian was located outside the dichotomy of ‘Christianity’ versus ‘paganism.’”24 In other words, Byzantine missions closely resemble Osterhammel’s “missionizing justificatory doctrines, which rest upon the colonial rulers’ conviction of their own cultural supremacy.” It is telling that Dimitri Obolensky, the twentieth-century Russian-British historian, employed the term “commonwealth” to describe the influence that Byzantium exerted on its neighbors by means of its perceived religious authority.25 Perhaps he sought merely to render the Byzantines sympathetic by analogy to the British Empire’s postwar rebranding as a soft-power “commonwealth.” In doing so, however, he opened up the possibility that Byzantium

Introduction

9

could itself be colonial. Outside our field, the colonial nature of Byzantine missions has not gone unnoticed. For example, Alan Strathern has compared Byzantine conversion of the Slavs with more recent colonial Portuguese missions in Sri Lanka and Oceania.26 So, Byzantium could be colonial—and yet it could also be colonized. In periods for which the principal narrative frame has been the decline of state power, claimants to the inheritance of East Rome found themselves vassals or clients to emergent foreign powers. In the seventh century, elite authors bemoaned the collapse of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean.27 After 1204, Constantinople and large portions of the southern Balkans were added to the colonial conquests of the crusaders. Loss of territory continued, and East Roman elites lamented their reduced state in elaborate prose. Many simultaneously integrated into the new elite cultures—be they Latin or Islamicate—that shaped the early modern eastern Mediterranean.28 So far, all these questions have concerned the shifting fortunes of Byzantine elites on a global stage. By contrast, the exploitation of masses of non-elites from the empire’s various ethnic communities was a constant through the Byzantine millennium. These people served the state as its laborers and soldiers in its various deadly wars. In the late medieval period, they were exploited by the colonial ventures of the Venetians and Genoese, who took control of key territories in the Aegean and Black Sea.29 There is, of course, no need to assume that exploitation along ethnic or linguistic lines is any less extortionate than that done by “foreign” elites. In brief, throughout Byzantine history, we find the key features of colonialism both exerted by the East Roman state upon others (including its own subaltern) and exerted by others upon East Roman elites or their claimant successors. The Byzantine Empire—at different times and places, and in regard to different social classes—was both colonist and colonized. Multiple contributors to this volume, including Arietta Papaconstantinou, Alexandra Vukovich, and Nicholas Matheou, draw attention to the realities of this violence, both physical and semantic. They thus participate in a growing resistance within medieval studies to the abstraction of medieval violence. As Geraldine Heng has written,

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

since it is “fictionalized as a politically unintelligible time, because it lacks the signifying apparatus expressive of, and witnessing, modernity, medieval time is . . . absolved of the errors and atrocities of the modern, while its own errors and atrocities are shunted aside as essentially nonsignificative, without modern meaning, because occurring outside the conditions structuring intelligible discourse on, and participation in, modernity and its cultures.”30 By naming colonial violence when we see it in our sources—whether enacted by, against, within, or despite Byzantium—we render Byzantine history intelligible as human history and thus combat the fictionalization of Byzantium as an extrahistorical entity. Like Byzantium, the discipline of Byzantine studies, embedded as it is within national academic regimes, has found itself on both sides of the colonial/colonized coin. In the longue durée of Western historiography, the study of the East Roman Empire has always been the preserve of a hyperliterate elite, versed in dead languages and provisioned with the necessary corpora and instrumenta. Similarly, its entanglement with European colonialism has remained a constant over time, even as its institutional configurations have shifted. As Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff show in this volume, the earliest humanist scholars of Byzantium, such as Hieronymus Wolf, relied for their patronage on the system and profits of early modern European colonialism, while the knowledge they produced was instrumentalized in power politics (as, for example, a tool against the Ottomans).31 The efflorescence of Byzantine studies at the court of Louis XIV (1643–1715) coincided with the establishment of the French colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean. Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the architect of France’s notorious Code Noir, which legitimated and regulated slavery in the colonies; a patron of the Byzantine du Louvre, a new corpus of Byzantine historical works; and a collector of medieval Greek manuscripts, nearly nine hundred in total, all now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.32 Whereas absolutist France deemed Byzantine splendor worthy of emulation, the balance shifted in the following century, even as the relation to contemporary empire remained. For Edward Gibbon, the long history of the Roman Empire exposed the flaws of universal

Introduction

11

monarchy; Britain’s maritime empire (he believed) was immune to any analogous decline into despotism.33 These colonial entanglements continued into the age of universities. As Ihor Ševčenko observed, the “old Byzantinists” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “lived in an elitist world that was deemed conceptually and intellectually stable. . . . It was commonly understood that few people would land at the top and that those who did would wield considerable power.”34 Some wielded that power directly in the service of colonial empire. For example, as a Byzantinist, Arnold J. Toynbee wrote an authoritative monograph on Emperor Constantine VII; as a colonialist, he served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.35 The nature of his advocacy is intimated in his Nationality and the War, in which he explicitly calls for the colonial partition of Afghanistan between Russia and British India.36 Not all Byzantinists were so directly involved, but Byzantine studies legitimized itself as a discipline in part through the promise of producing useful knowledge for the colonial powers that funded it. Thus, for example, Karl Krumbacher, justifying the independence of his discipline in the first issue (1892) of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift—the first journal dedicated to Byzantine studies and, to this day, one of the most prestigious—remarked that “neither the Turkish nor the present-day Greek nor indeed the Slavic law can be understood without the history of Byzantine law.”37 Krumbacher’s claim is characteristic not only in its instrumentality but also in its perception of Byzantium as a superior, civilizing force within the complex linguistic and religious landscape of the eastern Mediterranean—in his words, “a unique, half-cultured, half-wild ethnic complex that lies between civilized Europe and barbaric Asia.”38 As Papaconstantinou shows in this volume, the so-called Oriental Churches, too, were perceived as secondary emanations from Byzantine Christianity, to be studied by Byzantinists who believed the achievements of Latin and Greek far superior to those of Coptic or Syriac. Even now, the study of medieval Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, or Slavonic is often offered as a supplement to Byzantine studies proper; in the Metropolitan Museum’s influential exhibition and catalogue of 1997,

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

the material remains of such cultures are displayed as testaments to the “glory of Byzantium.” This intellectual environment shaped the discovery and use of Byzantine material culture. In this volume, Arielle Winnik shows how the acquisition of Byzantine-period materials was directly entangled with colonial rule. Art from the Byzantine period was taken from Egypt during the so-called British Protectorate, then displayed and interpreted in step with the broader colonial project of nineteenth-century Britain. At other times the relations were far more complex than colonizer-colonized, as discussed in this volume by Hugh Jeffery, with reference to the archaeological work done by the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (1885–1914), and by Stephanie Caruso, with reference to such local agents as Osman Hamdi Bey, the French-educated director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum in Istanbul. By drawing attention to connections between European colonialism and the emergence of Byzantine studies, we do not discredit the genuine intellectual curiosity that has motivated many individuals to undertake arduous scholarly labors, often with little remuneration or recognition. We seek, instead, to elucidate the underlying conditions that have enabled such work and to which each scholar has of necessity responded, whether explicitly, through support or opposition, or (as far more frequently) implicitly, through silence. We must engage frankly with the fact that Byzantinists could, at one time or another, be the profiteers of colonial wealth, the intellectual architects of colonial rule, or simply passive but complicit participants in these wider political processes. This view of Byzantine studies may seem fully at odds with some of the other essays in this volume. More generally, it may appear jarring to some Byzantinists today, whose experience has often been defined by a sense of marginality. The East Roman Empire has never held the same central position in narratives of Western civilization as its classical ancestor. As Averil Cameron notes in her contribution to this volume, even some prominent chairs of Byzantine studies held a disparaging attitude toward Byzantine culture and civilization. Consider, for example, a judgment by Romilly Jenkins, then Lecturer in Modern and Medieval Greek at the University of Cambridge and later named to the Koraes

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Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College, London: “The Byzantine Empire remains almost the unique example of a highly civilized state, lasting for more than a millennium, which produced hardly any educated writing which can be read with pleasure for its literary merit alone.”39 Or consider how Cyril Mango, briefly Jenkins’s successor in the Koraes Chair and later Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine Greek at the University of Oxford, concluded his account (still widely praised) of the Byzantine reception of classical statuary: “Here ends our sad story—sad, because the Byzantines derived so little benefit from the statues that they took care to preserve. Byzantium fulfilled its historic role by transmitting to the more receptive West the Greek heritage in parchment and paper; it was unable to transmit in the same fashion and at the right time the heritage in bronze and marble.”40 As Kaldellis notes in this volume, the derogation of Byzantium by Byzantinists represents the internalization of the Eurocentrism of the (Western) academy: a Eurocentrism that left the medieval Roman empire in the cold while laying claim to ancient Greek and Roman culture as the foundations of Western liberal democracy. In this account, Byzantium is no more than the hapless but necessary conduit of the surviving scraps of classical culture (“the Greek heritage in parchment and paper”). Frequently, editions of classical sources extract excerpts and publish them with no reference to their medieval collectors. Figures as complex as Constantine VII and Eustathios of Thessaloniki—not to mention the anonymous but equally complex authors of the Souda lexicon and similar compilations—are seen as no more than passive vessels for this great inheritance.41 It is tempting to characterize this as a problem of representation: Byzantium lacks a national successor, and thus Byzantine studies lacks an advocate in the world of national academies.42 The young Greek state, as Hamilakis has shown, was eager to cash in on Western fascination with classical Athens and accordingly remained ambivalent toward its Byzantine past. In the historiography of other Balkan nations, Byzantium has become an uncomfortable reminder of Eastern isolation, its textual output no more than an awkward imperial record from which to rescue national histories.43 Nor is Eurocentrism the only foe of a flourishing Byzantine studies. As Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

Zeynep Olgun discuss in this volume, other hegemonic frameworks can marginalize Byzantine history, such as (in Turkey) a mythologizing glorification of the Seljuks and Ottomans. One might argue in response that the Byzantines were in fact truly European, or truly Anatolian, but this is an intellectual dead end. The politics of representation will not save Byzantine studies. Efforts to integrate Byzantium into Europe, as Kaldellis notes, harm both others (for example, those east of Byzantium who are pushed out) and the discipline itself. The cost of admission is too high. It solidifies existing parochialisms, when the ambiguous status of Byzantium might help rather to destabilize and dissolve them.

Race Before Modernity How might this destabilization work in practice? By way of an example, we turn to one of the most contested questions in premodern scholarship today: the origins of race and racism.44 A steady stream of publications over the course of the last two decades have argued that race and racism existed in the classical world and in the Middle Ages. In 2004, Benjamin Isaac published his case, entitled The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity.45 In 2018, unperturbed by this, Geraldine Heng published her The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.46 Other contenders for the birth of prejudice, and particularly anti-Black prejudice, can be found in the histories and rhetoric of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, or in ancient philosophy.47 By contrast, and as Jules Gleeson has recently observed, “Byzantine studies still awaits a treatment of racism and ethnic-prejudice equivalent to Geraldine Heng’s book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.”48 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to argue that modern racism or white supremacy were invented in Byzantium—precisely because Byzantium rarely, if ever, served as a positive exemplum for the architects of European colonialism. Nevertheless, and as we discuss in detail below, anti-Black prejudice is amply attested in Byzantine art and literature. Accordingly, a view from Byzantine studies can help shift the discussion of premodern race from a debate about origins to an analysis of cultural practice.

Introduction

15

In its broadest outlines, the debate about origins pits gradualism against catastrophism. The former position identifies elements of ancient and medieval thought that later evolved into modern racism. For example, Cord Whitaker identifies a medieval transition from a “desire for unity” to the “desire for strife,” predominantly in the context of religious thought. When the desire for strife was bonded to a metaphorical conception of sin as black and salvation as white, contemporary hierarchies of race began to fossilize.49 Among scholars of premodern race, Heng is one of the most uncompromising in her assertion that the logic and functions of racism can be found in the medieval world. For Heng, race “is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences.” It thus names “a repeating tendency . . . to demarcate human beings through differences amongst humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”50 Her benchmark example is thirteenth-century England, where the state used a series of racializing policies and technologies to demonize Jews, legalize violence against them, and eventually expel them en masse. For Heng, not calling this racism is a historiographical failure. The objections raised against this literature are plentiful, and some have been motivated by ill will. But a more potent and intellectually robust critique holds that our modern racial order is different in kind, not degree, from those of the classical and medieval world. The catastrophes of colonialism and transatlantic slavery and the subsequent globalization of white supremacy render modern racism fundamentally distinct from the production and policing of racial, ethnic, or religious difference in the premodern world. Vanita Seth and Charles Mills are among the most recent and forceful advocates of this position. For Seth, looking for race in the Middle Ages is a failure of intellectual historical practice, as it rests on “the implicit presumption that racism is an empty vessel residing outside the history it is said to contain.”51 She suggests instead “that it is possible to speak of conversations across time without presuming a continuity of meaning over time. . . . One can recognize, for example, the long history of Christian vilification of Jews or Muslims without thereby presuming

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that medieval renderings of heathens and infidels share the same conceptual meaning as contemporary anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.”52 Similarly, Mills emphasizes the radically unique conditions that produce and sustain modern white supremacy and, with it, the possibility of an oppositional Black philosophy. For him, a number of necessary conditions must be fulfilled for racial subordination to be identified, including “the existence of race as a social category, the existence of Blackness as one of the extant racial categories, and the subordination of Africans and Afro-descendant populations under that designation.”53 The premodern world cannot fulfill this third condition in particular, because “even if race as ideology, discourse and iconography is older than the conventional post-war narrative claimed, race as a planetary system is unambiguously modern. . . . Race is ontologized in a way that it is not in premodernity because inherited discourses of racial stigmatization, whether secular or Christian, now have coercive power behind them in the form of the racial state.”54 While Mills grants that medieval states could be racial, pointing to Heng’s example of thirteenth-century England, the modern, post-Enlightenment racial state is rendered unique by the contradiction between the “declared universal equality” of liberalism and the new inequalities that it consolidated.55

Byzantine Anti-Blackness We turn now to the question of race in Byzantium, in the hopes that it might help dissolve the strong dichotomy between the gradualist and the catastrophist positions on premodern race. Since Byzantium was neither the origin of nor the chosen exemplum for modern Europe, Byzantine ideas about race cannot have evolved directly into modern racism and white supremacy. We are therefore free to consider not whether Byzantium was (or Byzantines were) racist, but how certain ideas about skin color could be deployed to different ends under different circumstances. Skin color was not and is not the only basis for racialization, but a study of the full complexity of race in Byzantium lies outside the scope of this introduction. Accordingly, and because of the origin of our volume in Black Lives Matter, we focus here on Byzantine anti-Blackness.

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In this investigation, we take our cue from Stuart Hall’s concept of “the elements of a cultural practice,” which “do not in themselves have any necessary political connotations. It is not the individual elements of a discourse that have political or ideological connotations; it is the way those elements are organized together into a new discursive formation.”56 In the following, we are concerned with a specific element of Byzantine cultural practice, namely, the figure of the Ethiopian demon. Our question is not “Is this figure racist?” but rather “How has this figure been recombined and deployed to political ends?” All students of Byzantine art and literature confront the frequent representation of demons as Black, African, and ugly.57 In a characteristic example from the tenth-century Life of Saint Basil the Younger, the saint’s late servant, Theodora, relates that on her death she “saw clearly multitudes of Ethiopians standing around my bed, creating a disturbance and commotion . . . contorting in mockery their black and gloomy and dark faces, the mere sight of which alone seemed to me most terrifying and more bitter than even the Gehenna of fire.”58 The medieval figure of the Ethiopian demon shares with modern anti-Black stereotypes an association between black skin and African origin, on the one hand, and moral and aesthetic depravity, on the other.59 In Theodora’s account, moreover, as in other contemporary saints’ lives, the demons are counterpoised to beautiful, virtuous, White angels: “As I turned my eyes here and there away from the loathsome and accursed sights and directed the spiritual gaze of my soul elsewhere (for I could in no way stand to see or hear the chatterings of those polluted creatures), I suddenly saw two exceedingly beautiful young men just then coming toward me, their heads resplendent with golden hair, their skin white as snow, exceedingly sweet in appearance, clad in dazzling garments.”60 The figure of the Ethiopian demon finds precedents in earlier eras. In pre-Christian Greek and Latin literature, “demonic beings” and “the unquiet dead” were characterized by black skin, sometimes associated with African origin.61 For example, Suetonius describes a masque “in which scenes from the lower world were represented by Egyptians and Ethiopians.”62 However, some ancient authors considered the fear of Black people to be childish, a principle enunciated by the geographer and historian Agatharchides (second century BCE): “But the Ethiopians

Fig. I.1 Solar diagram from the Handy Tables of Ptolemy, ca. 800. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticanus graecus 1291, fol. 9r. © 2023 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

will terrify the Greeks. How? By their blackness and the strangeness of their appearance? Among us such fear does not persist beyond childhood. In wars and important disputes, however, the matters at issue are decided not by appearance and color but by daring and intelligence.”63 The demonic combatants of early Christian literature both hardened preexisting associations between black skin and moral and aesthetic depravity and weakened the accompanying skepticism.64 Among the earliest examples is the Acts of Peter, in which Marcellus beholds in a vision the apostle beheading a demon, “a most hideous woman, in appearance entirely Ethiopian, not Egyptian, but completely black.”65 As David Brakke has argued, such stories served above all to illustrate their heroes’ divinely granted clarity of vision, which enables them to perceive the demons’ blackness.66 The contrast between demonic blackness and saintly clarity of vision was further developed in middle Byzantine hagiography. In the

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tenth-century Life of Saint Andrew the Fool, the hero explains that only blackness separates demons from angels: “the angels of God are spotless and pure . . . whereas the demons are useless, black, dark, sinful, and accursed.”67 The faces of the righteous shine with white light.68 By contrast, the devil’s eyes emit smoke, as when a monk recognizes the devil “in the shape of a black Ethiopian, smoke coming forth from his eyes.”69 In the closely related Life of Niphon, the hero’s friend tells him, “your face looks black, like an Ethiopian,” upon which Niphon “realized that his vision had been darkened from the multitude of his sins.”70 The association between black skin and visual impairment may underlie the Byzantine convention of representing night as a Black woman. The goddess Nyx appears rarely in ancient Greek and Roman art and is not distinguished by skin color.71 By contrast, in the Vatican Ptolemy, produced around the year 800 in Constantinople, a ring of twelve “black- and white-skinned women represent the night and the day, respectively” (fig. I.1).72 In the Octateuchs, manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that contain the first eight books of the Bible, personifications of Night and Day accompany Genesis 1:3–5, the separation of light from darkness. Once more, Night is a dark-skinned woman at left, Day a light-skinned boy at right, and the hand of God illumines the latter (as in fig. I.2).73 One final aspect of the Ethiopian demon is worthy of note in the present context: its conflation with the figure of the Muslim “Saracen.”

Fig. I.2 The separation of light from darkness (Genesis 1:3–5), twelfth century. Smyrna, Evangelical School A.1 (lost), fol. 4v. D. C. Hesseling, Miniatures de l’Octateuque grec de Smyrne (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1909), fig. 3.

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Fig. I.3 Saint Michael defeating an attack on Constantinople, 1347–49, from the church of the Archangel Michael, Lesnovo, North Macedonia. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

For example, in the eleventh-century Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, the devil places “terrible snares” in the hero’s path, among them “a crowd of Saracens—black Ethiopians with wild eyes, evil faces, all appearing like demons—reclining beneath a grove of trees.”74 As Kalina Yamboliev observes, “the vitriolic language the hagiographers employed in reference to the Muslims, in sharp contrast to the terms of angelic purity they assigned to the demeanor of the saints, was essential to the affective framing that promoted Italo-Greek oppositional identity to the Muslim Saracen.”75 For an analogous figure of the Black Saracen in visual art, consider a fourteenth-century painting in the Monastery of the Archangel Michael in Lesnovo, which depicts the first Arab siege of Constantiople (674– 78). The attacking sailors, identified by the inscription as “Saracens,” are vanquished by the archangel (fig. I.3). As Paul H. D. Kaplan remarks, “the nine attackers all have tightly curled hair and dark skin. Although their ethnicity surely denotes Islamic religious identity, the presence of the winged archangel Michael also suggests that the dark men have a demonic dimension.”76 Thus, both saint’s life and painting take an additional step: the racialization of Muslims as Black.

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In most of the representations discussed thus far, the figure of the Black Ethiopian serves as a foil to a figure of divine Whiteness. The Ethiopian demons at Theodora’s bedside in the Life of Saint Basil the Younger are contrasted to White angels; the personification of Night serves as a foil to divine illumination; and the figures of Black Muslims reinforce the divine protection accorded to Christians. In this sense, the Ethiopian demon falls short of Mills’s final necessary condition for the existence of racism. The intent was not to subordinate Africans. Byzantine anti-Blackness did not spur wars of conquest against African states. Nor is it clear that it correlated to, or encouraged, prejudicial treatment of black people in Byzantium.77 Nevertheless, and as Yamboliev writes, medieval hagiography and European anti-immigrant discourse share a common structure and purpose: “The resonant utilization of an affective rhetoric of violence, danger, and invasion, whether directed at Muslim ‘Saracens’ or modern migrants is, at its root and across the centuries, a language of self-preservation employed by those who seek to protect traditional hierarchies of power and privilege.”78 Just as contemporary anti-immigrant discourse results in actual violence against the individuals whom it casts as foreign, so too did the metaphorical conception of Blackness in premodernity directly affect the lives of Africans—for example, the actors in Suetonius’s masque, and the Ethiopian man who was kidnapped by Venetians and forced to mock imperial ceremonial in the reign of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80).79

Cultural Practice, Then and Now Returning now to Hall’s account of the elements of cultural practice, it remains for us to investigate how Byzantine concepts of Blackness could be deployed in new discursive formations with distinct political connotations. We have sought in vain the textual record of Black Byzantines. We know no analogues in medieval Greek literature to the Black poets who used Arabic poetic forms to comment upon their racialization.80 For a reflection on Byzantine racialization, we might rather turn to the Nubian painters at the cathedral of Pachoras, who carefully distinguished the

22

Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Fig. I.4 Saint Peter and Bishop Petros I (974– 97) from the cathedral of Pachoras, Faras. National Museum in Warsaw, 234031 MNW.

dark brown complexion and black mustache of Bishop Petros I (974–97) from the white complexion and white beard of Saint Peter (fig. I.4).81 As Andrea Myers Achi and Seeta Chaganti write, Nubian art is “of neither Byzantium nor Africa” but “of both worlds.”82 It therefore provides a space within which black artists could represent and reconceive the poles of Byzantine anti-Blackness, simultaneously preserving difference and rejecting any associated moral or aesthetic hierarchy. However, Byzantine concepts of Blackness have also been deployed in a manner closer to their original purposes, namely, to produce an ideal concept of Whiteness. Consider, as an example, the illuminated manuscript Biblioteca Marciana Gr. VII, 22 (=1466), executed in 1592 in Venetian-ruled Crete by the artist Georgios Klontzas.83 Over the course

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of some 217 paper folios containing extensive texts in Greek and over 400 drawings in pen and ink, the Klontzas Codex presents a universal history from a Christian viewpoint. Of these, 22 folios and 25 drawings relate the life of the Prophet Muhammad from an explicitly anti-Muslim perspective. Muhammad’s skin is consistently marked by crosshatching, in contrast to those around him; the manuscript, accordingly, depicts him as Black.84 In one drawing, for example, the blackness of Muhammad, at right, establishes by contrast the whiteness of the Byzantine emperor Herakleios, at left (fig. I.5). Another drawing, entitled “the idolatry of the Ishmaelites,” accompanies an excerpt from the anti-Muslim treatise of John of Damascus, according to which the Arabs “worshipped the morning star and Aphrodite” (fig. I.6).85 The artist uses the same technique, crosshatching, to depict both the skin of the worshippers and

Fig. I.5 The meeting of Muhammad and Herakleios, 1592. Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Marc. gr. VII, 22 (=1466), fol. 48r. Photo courtesy of the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo.

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the atmosphere that envelops them: their Blackness, and the obscurity of their vision, the ultimate source of their heresy. The Klontzas Codex gathers many of the elements of Byzantine anti-Blackness. Black skin is associated with moral depravity, obscurity of vision, and Muslim faith. It thereby establishes the Whiteness (and corresponding righteousness) of the Byzantines. To what end? Klontzas was an affluent, Greek Orthodox resident of Chandax, the center of Venetian rule. His Black Muhammad serves, at least in part, to establish the Whiteness (and righteousness) of the subaltern community to which he belonged.86 Klontzas was not a Byzantinist, but he was a contemporary of the first full-time scholars of Byzantium. As Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff observe in this volume, the work of one such scholar, Hieronymus Wolf, was funded in part by the labor of enslaved Africans and Native Americans and was intended in part to aid European powers in the

Fig. I.6 “The idolatry of the Ishmaelites,” 1592. Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Marc. gr. VII, 22 (=1466), fol. 43r. Photo courtesy of the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo.

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fight against the Ottomans. Wolf’s investment in Byzantium was very different from Klontzas’s—Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff note that he “reserved special loathing for the people he sometimes called Byzantini”—but both were produced at the nexus of race and colony, and they entailed a careful and deliberate organization of the preexisting elements of Byzantine cultural practice. The primary challenge posed by this comparison, then, is to understand Byzantine studies, the academic discipline, as part of a much broader field of cultural production, within which the elements of Byzantine cultural practice have been deployed to a dizzying variety of ends by a wide cast of characters: scholars, yes, but also artists, authors, politicians, and amateurs. Many have followed Klontzas and Wolf in placing elements of Byzantine culture at the service of anti-Muslim polemic. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI quoted at length from the work of “the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos” (1391–1425) in an address held at the University of Regensburg. Benedict used the Byzantine author to position Christian Europe as the heir to Greek reason, in contrast to Muslims, who posit an “absolutely transcendent divinity,” whose “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”87 In 2016, Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić opened the Twenty-Third International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Belgrade by calling upon attendees to assist him against the majority-Muslim state of Kosovo. He then compared himself to Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos (1449– 53), who had likewise “turned to Europe to ask for help against the infidels [неверника].”88 Benedict is a scholar—albeit not a Byzantinist—and Nikolić is not, but both share a conception of Byzantium as an “antemurale state,” or “Christendom’s rampart against the barbarians.”89 This conception appears in Krumbacher’s founding statement, too: “This multiform confusion of peoples [i.e., Byzantium] formed in the past Europe’s defensive wall against Asiatic barbarism.”90 As Byzantium had witnessed the rise of Islam, Byzantine polemics against Islam (such as those by John of Damascus, Niketas Byzantios, and Manuel II Palaiologos) are accorded a particular authority.91 Similarly, as Byzantium fell to a Muslim power,

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its fate becomes a cautionary tale—either of its own doctrinal intransigence or of the Western powers’ failure to intervene.92 In extreme versions of the latter trope, Byzantium becomes the original “lost cause”: a strong Christian state betrayed by European powers.93 This conception permeates right-wing American discourse on Byzantium.94 It finds its grisliest manifestation in the manifesto penned by the white supremacist who murdered fifty-one people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019, which proclaimed that “until the Hagia Sophia is free of the minarets, the men of Europe are men in name only.”95 There is another way. Other artists and authors have followed the lead of the Nubian painters at Pachoras and reconfigured the elements of Byzantine cultural practice to anti-racist ends. Take, for example, the artist Mark Doox, whose work Maria Mavroudi discusses in her contribution to this volume. Doox’s self-described “iconoclastic icons” expose the “weakness in our sacred images, which have been steeped in American divisions of race and power.”96 Many more examples of such progressive appropriations, ranging from the playful to the studied, appeared in a recent exhibit at the Pera Museum on Byzantium in popular culture:97 for example, the artist Fikos, who painted Greek-Nigerian basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo in Byzantine style;98 the Greek Communist comic artists of the mid-twentieth century, who related Byzantine history through the lens of “an implicit pacifism, internationalism, and universalism”;99 and the authors of science fiction, who take Byzantium as a starting point for “pondering about notions of empire.”100 So too can Byzantine studies, as a scholarly pursuit, be practiced in a decolonial mode. Geraldine Heng and Sierra Lomuto have called for a global medieval history that is not simply a diversity exercise but one that actively dethrones European hegemony through the introduction of multiple centers and temporalities.101 Byzantinists have much to offer this project, but not by demanding greater representation in traditional forums for business-as-usual work—more Byzantine art in undergraduate surveys, more Byzantine articles in flagship journals, more chairs of Byzantine studies. Instead, we must begin by actively questioning our own orthodoxies: first and foremost, those about the strength and beneficence of the Byzantine state, the pliancy of its

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subjects, its dazzling image in the eyes of its neighbors, and even its coherence as a stable object of analysis. Byzantium’s peculiar position, as a medieval state that lacks an obvious modern successor, can in this sense count to its advantage. Byzantium’s national homelessness draws to its study many of those whom former British prime minister Theresa May derogatorily called “citizens of nowhere.”102 Early-career Byzantinists today often lead itinerant lives on short-term (one-year or even one-semester) contracts across continents and countries. The neoliberalization of the academic market has meant that, across East and West and across national boundaries, the experiences of early-career scholars have much in common. Global precarity has opened possibilities for global solidarities. This kind of solidarity can result in critical reflection, and it is not surprising that many contributors to this volume have received their intellectual formation not in single, siloed, national academies but through engagement with multiple national, and indeed multi- and transnational, scholarly institutions and discourses. In short, Byzantine studies is increasingly practiced beyond national boundaries, and its object of study defies traditional national histories. It should accordingly play a leading role in the production of a new, radical, global history. This potential can only be realized on the basis of a constant and critical examination of our own history and our own cultural practice. In our introduction, we have attempted to review the former. But it is not enough to simply be conscious of the contradiction that we inhabit and share with our fellow scholars in other disciplines: our material reliance upon the spoils of hierarchical systems of oppression (be they colonial, imperial, or national) that we outwardly abhor. We must also make use of the distinctive nature of our field of study—our own intellectual capital—to change the conditions that our own students and successors will inherit. A number of contributors to this volume suggest concrete steps that we can take toward this goal. For example, Matheou calls for us to write histories that do not simply avoid identifying with a particular modern nation but rather disavow identification with states (both empires and nations) altogether. Matthew Kinloch asks us to think explicitly about whom we cite and why: these are political choices, even if they seem

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natural and commonsensical. Finally, Andrea Myers Achi and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams ask how we can transform the institutions whose custodians we may become. Taken as a whole, the following chapters illuminate the mechanisms by which Byzantine studies and the very idea of Byzantium, as a distinctive culture with its own art and literature, are produced and reproduced. Colonized and colonizer, cultural hegemon and exotic other, Byzantium and its scholarly reception remain ripe fields for critical inquiry. Their potential to generate new radical histories lies precisely in their ambiguity. If the proposals found in this volume oscillate between the simple and practical and the utopian, we consider that a virtue—we must not let the pessimism of the intellect suffocate the optimism of the will.

Notes

1. Panagiotis A. Agapitos, “Franz Dölger and the Hieratic Model of Byzantine Literature,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 112, no. 3 (2019): 707–80. 2. George Demacopoulos, Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 3. Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, eds., The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021). 4. Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), x. 5. Diana Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 15. 6. On the relation between Byzantine studies and Orientalism, see Averil Cameron, The Use and Abuse of Byzantium: An Essay on Reception (London: The School of Humanities, King’s College, 1992); Robert S. Nelson, “Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art,” Gesta 35, no. 1 (1996): 3–11; Dimiter G. Angelov, “Byzantinism: The Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium in Southeastern Europe,” in New Approaches to Balkan Studies, ed. Dimitris Keridis, Ellen Elias-Bursać, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2003), 3–23; Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Premysław Marciniak, “Oriental Like Byzantium: Some Remarks on Similarities Between Byzantinism and Orientalism,” in Imagining Byzantium: Perceptions, Patterns, Problems, ed. Alena Alshanskaya, Andreas Gietzen, and Christina Hadjiafxenti (Mainz: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2018), 47–54; Leonora Neville, Byzantine Gender (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 5–21; and Yannis Stouraitis, “Is Byzantium an Orientalism? Reflections on Byzantium’s

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Constructed Identities and Debated Ideologies,” in Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World, ed. Yannis Stouraitis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 19–47. 7. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “On the Intellectual Content of Greek Nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium, and the Great Idea,” in Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, ed. David Ricks and Paul Magdalino (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 25–33; Diana Mishkova, “The Afterlife of a Commonwealth: Narratives of Byzantium in the National Historiographies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 3, Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies, ed. Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 118–273; Bratislav Pantelić, “The Last Byzantines: Perceptions of Identity, Culture, and Heritage in Serbia,” Nationalities Papers 44, no. 3 (2016): 430–55; Diana Mishkova, Rival Byzantiums: Empire and Identity in Southeastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 8. Kostis Kourelis, “Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s–1930s,” Hesperia 76, no. 2 (2007): 391–442. 9. On the former, see fundamentally Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. On the latter, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 10. Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (Munich: Beck, 1995), 21. Cf. the English translation by Shelley L. Fritsch, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997). 11. See especially Robert J. C. Young, Empire, Colony, Postcolony (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015); Krishan Kumar, Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021); and Krishan Kumar, “Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 2 (2021): 280–309. 12. Osterhammel, Kolonialismus, 34–35. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §65–71, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 27–29. Kumar applies Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” to the definition of empire and colony in Empires, 1–5. 14. Ian Forrest, “Medieval History and Anarchist Studies,” Anarchist Studies 28 (2020): 47. 15. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 218. 16. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), passim, the quote at 30; Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 622–33. 17. See, for example, Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); John Stone, “Introduction: Internal Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 3 (1979): 255–59, with the other contributions to this special issue; Krishan Kumar, “Nation-States as Empires, Empires as

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Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice?,” Theory and Society 39, no. 2 (2010): 119–43; Charles Pinderhughes, “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism,” Socialism and Democracy 25, no. 1 (2011): 235–56; and Joe Turner, “Internal Colonisation: The Intimate Circulations of Empire, Race, and Liberal Government,” European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 4 (2018): 765–90. 18. Consider Adamantios Korais in Paris: Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 175–96. 19. Nevertheless, two caveats are in order. First, Greece, alongside Thailand, has served as a paradigmatic example of “crypto-colonialism”: Michael Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 899–926. Second, historians are increasingly willing to acknowledge Ottoman complicity with and emulation of European colonialism, in particular during the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa”: Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 20. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 3. 21. Corisande Fenwick, “Imperial Anxieties and Colonial Confrontations: Towards an Archaeology of Byzantine Imperialism,” paper given at the Imperialism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism in the Byzantine World workshop, University of Oxford, 17 May 2019. 22. Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019), 239. 23. Paul Magdalino, “Constantine VII and the Historical Geography of Empire,” in Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, ed. Sahar Bazzaz, Yota Batsaki, and Dimiter Angelov (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 24–42, at 36. 24. Sergey A. Ivanov, “Pearls Before Swine”: Missionary Work in Byzantium (Paris: ACHCByz, 2015), 219. 25. Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). Ivanov writes that “the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ was not so much an actual construction as a self-delusion”; see “Pearls Before Swine,” 221. 26. Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 236 and 275. 27. Locus classicus is Doctrina Jacobi Nuper Baptizati 3.10. For an English translation, see “Teaching of Jacob Newly Baptized,” trans. Andrew Jacobs, accessed 22 July 2022, http://​andrewjacobs​.org​/translations​/doctrina​.html. 28. Locus classicus is Manuel II Palaeologus, letter 16: see George T. Dennis, ed. and trans., The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1977), 42–51. See also Theodore Metochites, On the Human Condition and the Decline of Rome: Semeioseis gnomikai, 27–60, ed. and trans. Karin Hult (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2016), esp. 28, 37. 29. See especially Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

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30. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 21. 31. Further on the ties between Türkenfurcht and the study of Byzantium: Agostino Pertusi, Storiografia umanistica e mondo bizantino (Palermo: Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 1967), and Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 94–134. 32. Vernon Valentine Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir,” Louisiana Law Review 56, no. 2 (1996): 363–407; Teresa Shawcross, “Editing, Lexicography, and History Under Louis XIV: Charles du Cange and La byzantine du Louvre,” in Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff, Invention of Byzantium, 143–80; Donald F. Jackson, “A Delivery of Greek Manuscripts in 1686,” Scripta 3 (2010): 73–75. 33. John Robertson, “Gibbon’s Roman Empire as a Universal Monarchy: The Decline and Fall and the Imperial Ideal in Early Modern Europe,” in Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247–70. 34. Ihor Ševčenko, “Old Byzantinists and the Place of Byzantine Studies Today,” Byzantinoslavica 67, nos. 1–2 (2009): 50–54, at 50. 35. Arnold J. Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 36. Arnold J. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1915), 467–70. 37. Karl Krumbacher, “Vorwort,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 1 (1892): 1–12, at 9. On Krumbacher’s foreword, see further Anthony Kaldellis, “From ‘Empire of the Greeks’ to ‘Byzantium’: The Politics of a Modern Paradigm Shift,” in Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff, Invention of Byzantium, 349–67, at 364–65. 38. Krumbacher, “Vorwort,” 2. 39. Romilly Jenkins, Dionysius Solomós (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). For an alternative view, see Stratis Papaioannou, “Readers and Their Pleasures,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, ed. Stratis Papaioannou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 525–56. 40. Cyril Mango, “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 53–75, at 75. 41. For a vital reassessment of their works, see Panagiotis Manafis, (Re)writing History in Byzantium: A Critical Study of Collections of Historical Excerpts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 42. Thus Kaldellis, Romanland, 14–15. 43. Mishkova, Rival Byzantiums. 44. For a partial yet substantial bibliography of studies of race in the premodern world, see Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orelmanski, “Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography,” Postmedieval 8 (2017): 500–531. 45. Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 46. Heng, Invention.

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47. For instance, see David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Aaron P. Johnson, “Blackness of Ethiopians: Classical Ethnography and Eusebius’s Commentary on the Psalms,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 2 (2006): 165–86; Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, eds., Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 48. Jules Gleeson, review of Byzantine Intersectionality by Roland Betancourt, Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 2 (2021): 335–39, at 339. 49. Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 151. 50. Heng, Invention, 3. 51. Vanita Seth, “The Origins of Racism: A Critique of the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020): 343–68, at 359. 52. Ibid., 363–64. 53. Charles W. Mills, “The Illumination of Blackness,” in Antiblackness, ed. MoonKie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 17–36, at 20. 54. Ibid., 27. 55. Ibid., 28. 56. Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 144–45. 57. Scholarly treatments include Philip Mayerson, “Anti-Black Sentiment in the Vitae Patrum,” Harvard Theological Review 71, nos. 3–4 (1978): 304–11; Frank M. Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 100–108; David Brakke, “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, nos. 3–4 (2001): 501–35; David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 157–81; Thomas Pratsch, Der hagiographische Topos: Griechische Heiligenviten in mittelbyzantinischer Zeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 167; and Dimitris Letsios, “Diabolus in figura Aethiopis tetri: Ethiopians as Demons in Hagiographic Sources; Literary Stereotypes Versus Social Reality and Historic Events,” in East and West: Essays on Byzantine and Arab Worlds in the Middle Ages, ed. Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Vassilios Christides, and Theodoros Papadopoulos (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 185–200. For Western comparanda, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 61–93. 58. The Life of Saint Basil the Younger, ed. and trans. Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, and Stamatina McGrath (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 201. 59. Compare Max Papadantonakis, “Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 49, no. 3 (2020): 291–317. 60. Life of Saint Basil, 201.

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61. Jack Winkler, “Lollianos and the Desperadoes,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 155–81, at 161. 62. Suetonius, Caligula 57, in Suetonius, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1:503. 63. Agatharchides of Cnidus, On the Erythraean Sea, trans. Stanley M. Burstein (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1989), 51 (fragment 16). On this passage, see Albrecht Dihle, “Zur hellenistischen Ethnographie,” in Grecs et barbares, ed. Hans Schwabl et al. (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1962), 207–39, at 214–15; Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970), 177–80; and Winkler, “Lollianos,” 162. 64. Franz Joseph Dölger, Die Sonne der Gerechtigkeit und der Schwarze: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Studie zum Taufgelöbnis, 2nd ed. (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1970), 49–75 and 159–63. 65. Ricardus Adalbertus Lipsius, ed., Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha: Acta Petri (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891), 1.70. 66. Brakke, Demons, 159–62. 67. The Life of St. Andrew the Fool, ed. and trans. Lennart Rydén (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis, 1995), 2.225. 68. Ibid., 2.119 (Andrew’s snow-white and dazzling face) and 2.201–3 (statement of principle). 69. Ibid., 2.151. 70. A. V. Rystenko, ed., Materijaly z istoriï vizantijs’ko-slov’jans’koï literatury ta movy (Odessa: Tsentral’na-naukova biblioteka m. Odesy, 1928), 11. 71. Ioannis Mylonopoulos, “Brutal Are the Children of the Night! Nocturnal Violence in Greek Art,” in La nuit: Imaginaire et réalités nocturnes dans le monde gréco-romaine, ed. Angelos Chaniotis (Vandoeuvres: Fondation Hardt, 2018), 173–207, at 175–80; Helena Papastavrou, “Nyx,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. 6, pt. 1 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1992), 939–41. 72. Benjamin Anderson, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 115. 73. Kurt Weitzmann and Massimo Bernabò, The Byzantine Octateuchs (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, 1999), 17–18. 74. The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, ed. and trans. Raymond L. Capra, Ines A. Murzaku, and Douglas J. Milewski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 17. 75. Kalina Yamboliev, “Italian Narratives of Oppositional Identity: Hagiography and Affect in Distancing the Late Antique and Medieval Saracen, and the Modern Migrant,” Studies in Late Antiquity 3, no. 1 (2019): 77–113, at 94. 76. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 2, pt. 1, From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”; From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 1–30, at 9. 77. See in general Apostolos Karpozilos, “Η θέση των μαύρων στη βυζαντινή κοινωνία,” in Οι περιθωριακοί στο Βυζάντιο, ed. Chrysa A. Maltezou (Athens: Goulandre-Chorn, 1993), 67–81. For evidence of color prejudice in Byzantium, see Myrto Hatzaki, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz

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James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 93–107, at 95 and 97; Apostolos Karpozilos, “ Ἰωάννου Νομικόπουλου Ἔκφρασις Αἰθίοπος καὶ ἵππου πάνυ ταλαιπωρημένου,” Dodone 9 (1980): 285–97; and Ilias Taxidis, The Ekphraseis in the Byzantine Literature of the 12th Century (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2021), 157–58. 78. Yamboliev, “Italian Narratives,” 111–12. 79. O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. Harry J. Magoulias (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 50–51; discussed by Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 175. 80. Touria Khannous, Black-Arab Encounters in Literature and Film (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), especially chapters 1 and 2; Rachel Schine, “Race and Blackness in Premodern Arabic Literature,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 29 October 2021, https://​oxfordre​.com​/literature​/view​/10​.1093​/acrefore​ /9780190201098.​ 001​.0001​/acrefore​-9780190201098​-e-​ 1298; Bernard Lewis, “The Crows of the Arabs,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 88–97. 81. Stefan Jakobielski, Pachoras, Faras: The Wall Paintings from the Cathedrals of Aetios, Paulos and Petros (Warsaw: Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, 2017), 338–41. This volume collects several similar pairings. Note especially the anonymous woman and Saint Aaron (198–200); Queen Mother Martha and the Virgin and Child (248–53); Bishop Marianos and the Virgin and Child (308–13); the queen protected by the Virgin and Child (395–98); and the dignitary protected by Christ (403–6). 82. Andrea Myers Achi and Seeta Chaganti, “‘Semper Novi Quid ex Africa’: Redrawing the Borders of Medieval African Art and Considering Its Implications for Medieval Studies,” in Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, ed. Catherine E. Karkov, Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei (Earth: Punctum Books, 2020), 73–106, at 83. 83. Athanasios D. Paliouras, Ὁ ζωγράφος Γεώργιος Κλόντζας καὶ αἱ μικρογραφίαι τοῦ κώδικος αὐτοῦ (Athens: Ekdoseis Grēgorē, 1977). 84. See Charles Barber, “Reading an Icon of the Black Mohammed: Georgios Klontzas on Islam,” in After the Text: Byzantine Enquiries in Honour of Margaret Mullett, ed. Liz James, Oliver Nichols, and Roger Scott (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 273–88. 85. John of Damascus, De haeresibus, 100, in Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, vol. 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 60. 86. Barber perceives rather “a strategy to argue for the inferior status of Mohammed” (“Reading an Icon,” 274). For him, the manuscript exhibits “a racism built upon binary expectations that specifically adds colour, a more contemporary concern, to the themes found in the early medieval theological and historical texts that had provided Klontzas’ point of departure” (286). 87. Benedict XVI, “Lecture of the Holy Father, Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg, Tuesday, 12 September 2006,” accessed 20 July 2022, https://​w ww​ .vatican​.va​/content​/benedict​-xvi​/en​/speeches​/2006​/september​/documents​/hf ​_ben​-xvi​_ spe​_20060912​_university​-regensburg​.html. On Manuel’s Dialogue with a Persian, see Siren Çelik, Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425): A Byzantine Emperor in a Time of Tumult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 138–57.

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88. Tomislav Nikolić, “Угрожена српско-византијска баштина на КиМ” (Endangered Serbian-Byzantine heritage in Kosovo and Metohija), 22 August 2016, https://​w ww​.predsednik​.rs​/pres​-centar​/saopstenja​/ugrozena​-srpsko​-vizanti jska​-bastina​-na​-kim. 89. For both the term and the definition, see Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 40. See further Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher, eds., Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). 90. Krumbacher, “Vorwort,” 2. For a more recent formulation, see Mark C. Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society, 1204–1453 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 1: “Byzantium became the bulwark of Christendom against the Arabs, the Christianizer of the Slavs, the preserver of ancient Greek culture, and up through the eleventh century the only European state worthy of the name.” 91. Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 30–56. 92. Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially at 29–34. For contemporary versions of the same tropes, see Adam J. Goldwyn, “Byzantium in the American Alt-Right Imagination: Paradigms of the Medieval Greek Past Among Men’s Rights Activists and White Supremacists,” in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, ed. Michael Edward Stewart, David Alan Parnell, and Conor Whately (London: Routledge, 2022), 424–39. 93. In American historiography, the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” refers to a set of myths about the Civil War. In the words of Adam H. Domby, “first, the Confederacy’s cause was noble and just, and the war was fundamentally about states’ rights, not slavery. Second, slavery was benevolent and slaves content in their station. . . . Third, Confederates were among the greatest soldiers in history, and they were only defeated due to the Union’s superior manpower and resources. . . .This memory of the past offered a useful tool for politicians wanting to justify and defend white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.” Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 4. 94. Goldwyn, “Byzantium,” 425. 95. Quoted in Perin Gürel, “Turkey, White Supremacy, and the Clash of Civilizations,” Contending Modernities, 10 July 2019, https://​contendingmodernities​.nd​ .edu​/global​-currents​/turkeyclashofcivs​/. 96. Mark Doox, “The N-Word of God: Envisioning the Image of Christ,” Religion News Service, 24 June 2020, https://r​ eligionnews.​ com/​ 2020/​ 06/​ 24/​ the-​ n-​ word-​ of​ -god​-envisioning​-the​-image​-of​-christ​/. 97. Emir Alışık, ed., “İstanbul’da Bu Ne Bizantinizm!”: Popüler Kültürde Bizans / “What Byzantium Is This in Istanbul!”: Byzantium in Popular Culture (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2021). 98. Brigitte Pitarakis, “Çağdaşlaştırılan Bizans Sanatı: Yunan Tarihyazımı Anlatısının Prizmasında Yunan Devrimi’nden Atina Sokak Sanatına / Byzantine

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Art Made Contemporary: From Greek Revolution to Athenian Street Art through the Prism of the Greek Historiographical Narrative,” in “İstanbul’da Bu Ne Bizantinizm,” 86–121, at 115–17. 99. Haris Theodorelis-Rigas, “Didaktik Popülerleştirmeden Karşıt Kültüre: Bizans Çizgi Roman Dünyasıyla Buluşuyor / From Didactic Popularization to Counterculture: Byzantium Meets the World of Comics,” in “İstanbul’da Bu Ne Bizantinizm,” 264–89, at 279. 100. Emir Alışık, “Olağandışı Bir Bizans’a Doğru: Spekülatif Kurguda Bizantinizmin Toposlarını Saptamak / Towards an Unearthly Byzantium: Mapping Out Topoi of Byzantinisms in Speculative Fiction,” in “İstanbul’da Bu Ne Bizantinizm,” 290–317, at 317. 101. Geraldine Heng, “The Global Middle Ages: An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities, or Imagining the World, 500–1500 C.E.,” English Language Notes 47, no. 1 (2009): 205–16; Sierra Lomuto, “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages,” postmedieval 11 (2020): 503–12. 102. “Full Text: Theresa May’s Conference Speech,” The Spectator, 5 October 2016, https://​w ww​.spectator​.co​.uk​/article​/full​-text​-theresa​-may​-s​-conference​ -speech.

Part 1

How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

Chapter 1

Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue Early Byzantine Scholarship at the Intersection of Slavery, Colonialism, and the Crusades

Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff Scholars of the Byzantine world, like those in many other disciplines, have only recently begun to interrogate the role of colonialism in shaping the field’s past development and present practice. While the Byzantine Empire’s destruction in 1453 meant that it neither participated in nor suffered from the colonial predations that followed Columbus’s voyages, an incipient study of Byzantine history nevertheless emerged in the sixteenth century—an age that witnessed the European conquest of the Americas, the rise of global maritime empires, and the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. Hence one way to answer the question posed by the present volume—“Is Byzantine studies a colonialist discipline?”—is to assess the connections between European colonial projects and early Byzantine scholarship, an investigation all the more urgent for being underemphasized in other treatments of

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the discipline’s formation. This essay proposes to consider such connections, briefly and provisionally, by revisiting a moment commonly cited as the “birth” of Byzantine studies in early modern Europe: the publication, between 1557 and 1562, of Hieronymus Wolf’s Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. The figure of Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580) bestrides the origins of Byzantine studies like an ill-tempered colossus. Misanthropic by any measure—“I hardly visit anyone unless I am summoned or forced to do so,” Wolf grumbles in his autobiography—the Augsburg humanist reserved special loathing for the people he sometimes called Byzantini.1 “I marvel more than lament,” he writes of Constantinople’s fall in 1453, “that that dregs and bilgewater of an execrable people remained so long unsubdued, and were not conquered earlier.”2 Yet despite his disdain, Wolf devoted several years to the study of Byzantine texts, and his successive editions and Latin translations of the Byzantine historians John Zonaras, Niketas Choniates, and Nikephoros Gregoras—to which his printer added Conrad Clauser’s loose translation of Laonikos Chalkokondyles—constituted “a complete corpus of Byzantine history.” Extending “from Constantine the Great to Constantine the Last,” Wolf’s corpus made a coherent account of the Byzantine Empire available to a western European readership for the first time.3 For this reason, Wolf numbers among the handful of early modern scholars whose names remain known to most Byzantinists today, if not to a wider public. Historical surveys of Byzantine scholarship often begin their story with Wolf and his corpus. He has been lauded as the “father” of Byzantine studies and has even been credited—somewhat dubiously—with coining the terms “Byzantium” and “Byzantine” to describe the Eastern Roman Empire and its inhabitants. The reality, of course, is more complicated. Wolf never saw himself as siring a new scholarly discipline, and paternity of Byzantine studies might with equal justification be awarded to a half-dozen other claimants. The term “Byzantine” in reference to the Eastern Empire, moreover, has a long and complex semantic history, one that neither begins nor ends in the sixteenth century. Still, as with any foundation myth, the tale of Wolf and his Byzantine corpus reveals much about how present-day Byzantinists choose to remember the origins of their field—and

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what they choose to forget. Scholars have traced the provenance of Wolf’s manuscripts, pried into his philological methods, weighed the “success” or “failure” of his emendations, lauded the merits of his Latin translations, regretted his classicist’s disdain for Byzantine Greek, and assessed his intellectual pursuits within the context of the German Reformation and late humanism. By contrast, the contemporary rise of European colonial empires and their role in the creation of Wolf’s Byzantine corpus have been mostly absent from such accounts, relegated to separate compartments of early modern European history. To be sure, no study of Wolf is complete without a nod to the fabulous riches of his employers, the Fugger banking dynasty of Augsburg. A passing mention of Fugger mining interests or a dark reference to “colonial enterprises” may appear in a subordinate clause; at most, studies will note Fugger preoccupation with the Ottoman Empire. But scholars often treat the connection between patron and product as incidental to the “real” stuff of Wolf’s Byzantine scholarship. The Fuggers paid and Wolf produced; does it matter where the money came from? The following pages move Fugger wealth, which provided both material support and ideological impetus for this first Byzantine corpus, from the margins to the center of our discipline’s paradigmatic “origin story.” Doing so underscores the vital but overlooked relationship between the European colonization of the Americas, on the one hand, and Wolf’s Byzantine scholarship on the other. For if we are to evaluate Byzantine studies as a colonialist discipline, we must not only excavate the colonialist discourses that inform current mentalities and methodologies nor focus solely on the by-products and tools of colonialism—such as racism, nationalism, and imperialism—that continue to visibly pervade the present. We must also ask new questions about the field’s genesis in western Europe, questions that challenge notions of the history of scholarship as a succession of solitary figures laboring over their books and that compel us to consider how the development of Byzantine studies was imbricated in the global history of European conquest and colonization. All three of Wolf’s editiones principes of Byzantine historians—two (Zonaras and Choniates) published in 1557, and the third (Gregoras) in

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1562—are dedicated ad magnificvm et generosvm virum, d. antonivm fvggervm. The “magnificent and generous man” in question, Anton Fugger, was the head of sixteenth-century Europe’s richest family, the Fuggers of Augsburg.4 From their beginnings as minor textile merchants, the Fuggers built a commercial empire through a combination of good luck, shrewd marriages, and a simple business strategy. Extending loans to leading princes in Europe, most notably the Habsburg rulers of Austria, Fugger lenders demanded security in the form of material resources. When the indebted princes defaulted on their loans as expected, the Fuggers seized ownership of the collateral—increasing the firm’s capital and allowing them to extend still greater loans in exchange for more extensive securities. Fugger financiers favored collateral in the form of mining privileges, and as the firm grew, its commercial interests shifted

Fig. 1.1 The coat of arms of Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1575) from Das Ehrenbuch der Fugger (Augsburg, 1548). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 9460, fol. 12, urn‌:nbn‌:de‌:bvb‌:12‌ -bsb00042105‌–6.

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from textiles to the copper and silver trade. In this manner, the Fuggers acquired control over mines in the Tyrol, Bohemia, Carinthia, and Upper Hungary until, by the close of the fifteenth century, they had come to virtually monopolize copper mining in central Europe. Up to this point the Fugger firm remained rooted in Europe, despite several attempts to invest in Portuguese trade with India at the turn of the sixteenth century. But two successive incidents in 1519 set the stage for the Fuggers to stretch their commercial sinews across the Atlantic. First, in June, the Habsburg king Charles I of Spain was elected Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, thanks to a staggering Fugger loan of 543,585 florins that allowed the Spanish monarch to offer more lavish bribes to the imperial electors than his rival candidate, the French king Francis I. A month later and an ocean away, the Spaniard Hérnan Cortés landed on the coast of what is today Mexico, claimed the land in the name of young King Charles, and founded the city of Veracruz. By 1521, Cortés and his Indigenous allies had defeated the Mexica (Aztec) Triple Alliance, sacked their capital of Tenochtitlán, and established the kingdom of New Spain. The “empire on which the sun never sets”— only the first of several to be praised in this fashion—was born. Emperor Charles V owed his crown to the Fuggers, and he looked to his new colonial possessions to pay off his largest creditor. In 1530, Charles granted the Fuggers the right to conquer and colonize the Pacific coast from the city of Chincha down to the Straits of Magellan—a territory comprising much of modern-day Peru and all of Chile. Fugger dreams of an Andean demesne would prove ephemeral; more permanent and profitable access to America’s riches came indirectly, through Fugger control over the mercury mines in Almadén, Spain. In 1554, the discovery of the so-called patio process, a technique for extracting silver from ore through mercury amalgamation, sustained an upsurge in colonial silver production. At its center stood New Spanish mines such as those in the area of Pachuca and Guanajuato and, eventually, the Andean boomtown of Potosí, which produced over 60 percent of the world’s silver during its heyday in the second half of the sixteenth century. Converting Pachuca and Potosí silver from ore into bullion for the Spanish royal fisc, however, depended on a steady

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mercury supply, and the Fuggers, with their possession of Almadén, commanded the Iberian peninsula’s principal source of the element. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Charles V’s endless wars kept the emperor in perennial debt to Fugger financiers. Fugger loans constituted nearly 20 percent of all those taken out by Charles V over the course of his long reign—more than any other single lender. American silver was the principal means by which the emperor paid down these huge debts. Thus, in a perpetual cycle of profit, Fugger middlemen sold mercury to the Spanish crown, which it then used to extract silver from New Spanish and Peruvian mines in order to pay off Fugger loans. By the 1550s, the Fuggers maintained representatives in Veracruz and Lima who regularly reported back to Augsburg on the state of silver production, while Fugger agents thronged the wharves of Seville, waiting to claim a cut of the precious metals from the Spanish treasure fleets as soon as they arrived. By trapping the House of Habsburg in a web of debt and dependency, the Fugger firm had gone global. The long arm of Fugger commerce embraced Africa as well as America. The firm’s direct involvement in transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic remained minimal, at least when compared to the Welsers, who were fellow Augsburg bankers. But the Fuggers’ wealth, no less than that of the Welsers, was wrung from the bondage of African and Indigenous American bodies. Unable to produce mercury fast enough to the meet the Spanish crown’s new demands, the Fuggers introduced convict laborers ( forzados) and enslaved Africans to the mines of Almadén to bolster its traditional paid workforce. They soon discovered in slave labor a highly profitable innovation—the average price for an African slave in mid-sixteenth-century Spain was sixty ducats, roughly equal to a miner’s wages for a year—and the Fuggers began to employ enslaved Africans in more of their mining operations. Between 1559 and 1560, for instance, the firm’s agents purchased one hundred enslaved Africans from Portuguese merchants in Cape Verde for use in the Fugger silver mines of Guadalcanal, near Seville; by 1575, only five survived. Fugger mining interests in the Americas relied even more heavily on slave labor and proved even deadlier. It has been estimated that up to eight million enslaved Indigenous and African workers perished in the silver mines of Potosí.

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Recovering the ways that the Fuggers profited from traffic in African slaves sheds new light on a striking detail in their coat of arms, seen here in a deluxe genealogical manuscript commissioned by the family and completed in 1548 (fig. 1.1). The top-right quadrant of the Fugger escutcheon displays a dark-skinned woman with flowing hair, crowned and holding a miter. This cryptic figure, representing the family’s hereditary county of Kirchberg, emerged as the Kirchberg sigil centuries before the Fuggers acquired its lordship in 1507. In her pre-Fugger versions, however, the black woman bears flowing blond hair; under the Fuggers, not only does she acquire black hair and a golden hoop earring but other features also change. Above the crest, a so-called enhanced figure depicts the same dark-skinned woman with characteristics different from her escutcheon counterpart: a tightly-woven braid, noticeably rounder nose, and larger lips, all of which follow European caricatures of sub-Saharan Africans. In other words, the Fugger family arms in this manuscript seem to have “Africanized” the ambiguously dark-skinned woman of earlier heraldic imagery, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of Fugger association with transatlantic slavery. Whether intentional or incidental, the woman’s prominence on the Fugger coat of arms stands as a permanent, if often overlooked, reminder of the centrality of enslaved labor in creating and maintaining the riches that underwrote the family’s celebrated cultural patronage. The head of the Fugger firm during the boom years of the 1550s was Wolf’s “magnificent and generous” patron, Anton Fugger (1493–1560), who used his family’s unparalleled wealth to subsidize artists and litterateurs, acquire a vast library, and fund a variety of scholarly enterprises. Fugger agents from Persia to Peru collected not only business information for their employers but also manuscripts, coins, antiquities, and other exotica for Fugger Wunderkammern and libraries. Such enterprises required deputies who combined some education with experience in the affairs of commerce and diplomacy. In Hans Dernschwam (1494–1568/69), the Fuggers found a model agent. Dernschwam received his education in Vienna, Leipzig, and Rome before finding employment with a series of prelates, civil servants, and regional magnates in central Europe. After 1525, he became a Fugger factotum—a kind of business manager, diplomat, mining expert,

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and fixer—and helped administer their delicate relationships with the Habsburgs and Hungarian monarchs for over two decades. He retired in 1549, as the Fuggers confronted a series of commercial setbacks, yet in 1553 he joined a legation of Ferdinand I, then king of the Romans and of Bohemia, to Constantinople, and he left behind a journal (Tagebuch) assiduously documenting his travels. Why Dernschwam emerged from a comfortable retirement to undertake—at his own expense—this perilous and physically arduous journey remains unclear. But while intellectual curiosity was likely not his primary incentive, he did make two critical contributions to scholarship. First, he accompanied the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in a visit to Ankara, among whose Roman ruins they discovered the oldest extant version of Augustus’s Res gestae. Second, he purchased three Byzantine manuscripts, containing the histories of Zonaras and Choniates, which he brought back to Germany and “presented” (that is, probably sold) to the Fuggers in Augsburg upon his return. Dernschwam himself apparently convinced Anton Fugger to underwrite the expense of editing and translating these two writers. It was only natural that the arduous task be allotted to the Fuggers’ resident librarian: the accomplished Hellenist Hieronymus Wolf. Wolf was one of the new “house scholars” employed by Anton Fugger with the revival of the family’s fortunes in the 1550s. A native of Oettingen in Bavaria, Wolf had lived the peripatetic life of a scholar and teacher—in Basel, Paris, Nuremberg, and Tübingen—until his celebrated translation of Demosthenes (1549) brought him to the attention of the Fuggers. In 1551, he found stable employment in Augsburg managing the correspondence and, most importantly, the library of Anton’s nephew and successor Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1575). Johann Jakob, who inherited all of his uncle’s love of learning and none of his business acumen, was involved throughout the 1550s in building an impressive (and costly) private collection of Greek manuscripts. Perhaps Dernschwam, knowing his former employer’s passion for Greek books, purchased the Byzantine manuscripts in Constantinople as a kind of bibliographic speculation. In any event, he must also have recognized something of their value, since he encouraged Anton to support their publication.

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Wolf leaves no doubt that he undertook the arduous task dutifully, if not enthusiastically. He nonetheless found great value in these works and in Byzantine history more broadly. First, Wolf—like one of his predecessors in exploring Byzantine history, Johannes Cuspinianus (d. 1529), who also relied heavily on Zonaras in his De caesaribus (Basel, 1540)—saw a thorough account of Byzantine history as an essential ethnographic weapon in ongoing warfare against the Ottomans. It was an ingredient in the recipe for a successful anti-Ottoman crusade. According to Wolf, the importance of Byzantine history lay in reminding Germans of their immanent crusading spirit—his preface to Choniates calls upon his countrymen to imitate the example of Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1155– 90)—and warning them of dire consequences should they instead emulate the Byzantines and either ignore the Ottoman threat or pursue internal vendettas rather than uniting against their common external enemy. For as he remarked in the preface to his edition of Gregoras, one should study Byzantine history not for the same reasons one studied the ancients (as models of eloquence or exemplars of virtue), but rather as a warning to avoid the Byzantines’ mistakes. After all, “the same enemy who crushed, ravaged, and destroyed the formerly happy territories of Asia and Greece now threatens our necks as well.”5 Such a didactic frame for historical inquiry, while conventional for humanists, also reflects distinctly central European concerns. Since the first transalpine attempt to write a history of the Byzantine Empire— begun by Cuspinianus in the 1510s and also catalyzed, coincidentally, by the discovery of a Zonaras manuscript—scholars regarded the empire in Constantinople as an archive of instructive exempla for martial encounters with the Ottomans. Anti-Ottoman warfare was a goal shared by all those who found themselves neighbors of the Great Turk. Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1508–19) had yearned, and failed, to lead a crusade, patronizing literary and scholarly celebrations of the endeavor instead. His grandson and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, also dreamed of a crusade to “reconquer” the eastern Mediterranean. The Fuggers were less ardent advocates of holy war than their Habsburg patrons were, but they too sought to repulse the Ottomans; after all, the frontier lay not far east of Vienna, and the Ottomans’ rise had indirectly deprived the Fuggers of their holdings in Hungary and jeopardized

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the family’s interests further afield. Hence Anton Fugger proved all too willing to expend the firm’s riches—secured in part by enslaved African labor on both sides of the Atlantic—on the collection of Byzantine manuscripts and the translation, publication, and circulation of Byzantine histories. Scholarship on the Byzantine past was an investment in the firm’s future, promising as it did to illuminate the persistence of the Ottoman threat, reveal the secrets of the Sublime Porte, and unite the Germans in crusading zeal. Far from a detached intellectual pursuit or an antiquarian curiosity, Wolf’s Byzantine corpus emerges in this light as an unrecognized artifact of colonialism, produced within interlocking systems of domination and ideologies of cultural superiority that extracted wealth from the New World to realize the crusader ambitions of the Old. Wolf’s editions were repeatedly pirated and reprinted across Europe, often in cities and contexts that had less to fear from the Ottomans, vitiating the impulses that had informed their creation. But while Wolf’s “corpus of Byzantine history” failed to unify Germany or turn the Ottoman tide, it succeeded in ways that neither he nor Dernschwam nor the Fuggers anticipated. For the first time, lettered men across Europe enjoyed easy access to the rudiments of Byzantine history and consequently discovered in the empire’s annals a storehouse of materials useful for their own concerns—furnishing the French monarchy with an imperial genealogy, contesting papal supremacy, or even debating historical chronology and national origins. Wolf’s idea of a “complete corpus of Byzantine history from Constantine the Great to Constantine the Last” took root as subsequent scholars found profit in the study of Byzantine history and renewed the project of his Corpus Historiae Byzantinae on successively grander scales, from the Parisian Byzantine du Louvre (1648–1711), to Bonn’s Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (1828–97), and finally to the ongoing Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae (1966–). Each of these series emerged under distinct historical conditions—from heady Bourbon imperialism to postwar international collaboration—but all are heirs, in their own ways, of Wolf’s first “corpus.” By way of conclusion, we would like to highlight three provisional insights to emerge from this brief case study that illustrate some of

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the ways in which colonialism provided both material and ideological support for scholarship in early modern Europe. The first insight speaks to the challenges of presentism. Discussions of colonialism and decolonization, much like histories of Byzantine studies as a discipline, tend to focus—justifiably, in some regards—on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, all histories are histories of the present insofar as they are inextricably linked with the present concerns and mentalities that inform their expression; universities, academic disciplines, and museums were shaped, each in their own ways, by the colonialism of the modern world. But there are earlier intersections between colonization and scholarship that have hardly begun to be explored, and we risk impoverishing our understanding of colonialism as a historical phenomenon if we ignore all but its most recent predations. Tracing the material impacts of colonialism on Byzantine scholarship directs our attention to a second, more incisive point. Scholars, critics, and activists have offered a number of ways to understand colonialism and decolonization variously as political, material, and intellectual endeavors. Some of these approaches are difficult to apply to our discipline: Byzantium was not a historical participant in the “age of colonialism,” whose inception is often dated to 1492. Moreover, as an influential article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang has argued, decolonization is a material project, not simply a metaphorical one: a demand for the restitution of Indigenous land and life.6 In one sense, then, this imperative makes decolonization a problematic paradigm for Byzantium and Byzantine studies, since the empire has no surviving Indigenous inhabitants to which its land and assets might be repatriated. In another sense, however, Tuck and Yang’s attempt to direct our attention from the metaphorical to the material can still inform the questions at the heart of this volume. As we have tried to show here, the material benefits of colonialism—slave labor, Indigenous subjugation, and resource expropriation—fueled a critical intervention in Byzantine scholarship in the form of the Fuggers’ patronage of Wolf’s labors. Even if one were to dispute Wolf’s paternity of Byzantine studies, a kind of intellectual colonialism remained at play in the development of the discipline: after 1453, the production and interpretation of Byzantine texts, the establishment of Byzantine narratives, the collection of Byzantine objects,

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and the appropriation of Byzantine symbols were tasks arrogated by Westerners, many of whom evinced hostility to the empire on religious, political, or cultural grounds. Even Byzantium’s sympathizers—of whom there were far more than modern scholars tend to credit—were outsiders, imposing foreign logics on their reconstructions and interpretations of the Byzantine world, from political culture to ecclesiology. As a result, there is no easy cure for the colonialism embedded in Byzantine studies, no primordial disciplinary purity to recover, and certainly no return to a Byzantine scholarship untainted by either colonialism’s material fruits or its mentalities. There was never a Byzantine studies—or even Byzantine scholarship—before colonialism. Finally, we hope this case study can help dispel the myth of Byzantium’s marginality in early modern Europe. We have elsewhere attempted to illustrate the vitality of Byzantine scholarship in the history of European erudition and its utility for scholars, artists, and intellectuals grappling with issues from religious authenticity to tyranny and historical periodization.7 But as we acclaim the enduring relevance of Byzantium to early modern Europe’s signal cultural and political dilemmas, we must also acknowledge the debt Byzantine scholarship owes to Europe’s more baleful legacy. Understanding how Byzantine studies, even in its nascent forms, advanced through the colonialist projects of European statesmen, power brokers, and financiers such as the Fuggers is an essential step in acknowledging, if not rectifying, that legacy. We must recognize and confront the discipline’s colonial pasts before we can discuss its future directions, let alone imagine what a “decolonial” or “anticolonial” practice of Byzantine studies might look like.

Notes

We are grateful to Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova for organizing the webinar from which this piece emerged, to our various interlocutors during the event, and to David Ungvary for insightful recommendations. We would especially like to thank Nathalie Miraval, who discussed the ideas presented here with the authors and made many helpful corrections and suggestions to the piece. 1. Hieronymus Wolf, Commentariolus, coeptus quidem scribi anno 1564 sed aliquot annis post demum absolutus, de vitae suae ratione, ac potius fortuna, ed. and trans. Helmut Zäh (Heidelberg: Camena, 2013), 37: “neque conuenio fere quenquam, nisi aut vocatus aut coactus.”

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2. Hieronymus Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, Romanae, hoc est Byzantinae historiae Libri XI (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1562), Praefatio, sig. a2v: “& fecem ac sentinam illam nefariorum hominum tam diu fuisse incolumem, nec citius oppressam esse, mirarer potius quam miserarer.” 3. Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, title page: “integrum Byzantinae historiae corpus a Constantino magno ad Constantium postremum.” 4. On the rise of the Fuggers, see in general Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 9–67. 5. Wolf, Nicephori Gregorae, preface, sig. a2v: “Idem enim hostis, qui beatas olim Asiae & Graeciae provincias oppressit, vastavit, evertit, nostris etiam cervicibus imminet.” 6. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 7. See Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, eds., The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021).

Chapter 2

Byzantine Archaeology Teaching the Tenth and the Twentieth Centuries

Hugh G. Jeffery As an undergraduate, not so long ago, I studied for a degree in classical archaeology. Syllabi were varied, engaging, and often innovative. Written assignments addressed diverse subjects, from Minoan palaces to Ambrosian Milan. However, I was very rarely required to demonstrate any understanding of the historical development of the discipline of classical archaeology or of the political history of the modern Mediterranean. Even at the time, this struck me as odd. My contemporaries studying for degrees in history were attending classes explicitly dedicated to parsing the myriad ways in which people have conceived of the practice of writing about the past. There were no comparable classes for fledgling archaeologists. I don’t intend this as a critique of any particular institution. It is, I think, a problem more endemic to the teaching of archaeology than to that of textual history, primarily because the material objects of our study appear more immediately accessible, less patently mediated by the interventions of our predecessors. But there is no good reason why archaeological pedagogy should be any less reflexive. The

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archaeological record, as much as the historical, is a product of identifiable political-intellectual projects. Moreover, given the inevitable implication of archaeology in modern statecraft, it is imperative that students be equipped with a critical perspective on the discipline as well as a firm grasp of its subject matter. For this we require a reflexive disciplinary history: one that demystifies the historical contingency and instability of the discipline itself.1 This contribution offers a suggestion for archaeological pedagogy. My argument is that undergraduate syllabi, especially those syllabi addressing the archaeology of regions with which students may not be familiar, ought, as a matter of course, to have a component of modern history. The necessity of such an approach for the teaching of Byzantine archaeology is particularly acute. The development of Christian and Byzantine archaeology was both consequence and catalyst of the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The discipline has changed a great deal since its genesis, but past legacies continue to define its parameters; recent events only serve to confirm that Byzantine archaeology remains a contested field of cultural production. I do not claim that this is a particularly revolutionary or unprecedented proposition. Many readers of this volume will likely share this conviction. Moreover, I am also aware that many readers will be teaching in situations very different from my own. These are the observations of a British archaeologist teaching Mediterranean archaeology at institutions within the United Kingdom. Specifically, my courses have addressed the material cultures of late antique and Byzantine Asia Minor. In my experience, students educated in the United Kingdom, through no fault of their own, come to higher education with a very limited grasp of modern Mediterranean history. They arrive, for example, with an understanding of the First World War largely predicated on Flanders Fields, ignorant of conflicts in the Balkans and Aegean that preceded, precipitated, and persisted beyond the war of 1914–18. Colleagues employed at Greek and Turkish institutions will reasonably expect a greater awareness of modern Aegean history from their students. Let’s return to the original comparison between the teaching of textual history and that of historical archaeology. The range of texts

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to which scholars of ancient Greek literature have access constitutes only a minute fraction of the gross literary product of the ancient world. The fraction is not a random or representative sample, but a selection curated by agents with political commitments and aesthetic sensibilities far removed from those of twenty-first-century classicists. Without an understanding of that process of curation, a student of ancient literature would be liable to fundamental confusion regarding the object of their study. As Anthony Kaldellis has recently put it, a student of ancient literature ignorant of its medieval mediation would be “working in an archive without knowing why that archive was created, or by whom, or when, or why some documents were included in it and some not.”2 So, for example, an undergraduate student of ancient philosophy should be equipped to answer the question of why there are so many more extant works in the Platonic tradition than in the Epicurean. I would hope that the above points would be accepted as uncontroversial by those teaching ancient literature. But what about archaeology? Can archaeologists really be said to be working in an archive comparable to that of literary scholars? Absolutely. The active and selective creation of the archaeological record is in many ways comparable to the active and selective curation of the textual record, and this archaeological record is far from a representative sample of the full suite of material culture once existing. The term “archaeological record” can be vague and confusing.3 Sometimes it is taken to denote pristine traces of past human activity prior to their encounter with the archaeologist. The record is supposedly finite, but dividing lines between artifact and environment, or past and present, tend to dissolve on close inspection.4 If an archaeological record exists prior to the discipline of archaeology, it is essentially just another (obfuscating and mystifying) way of saying the world/cosmos/ everything. This eternal record is epistemologically problematic and politically self-serving.5 The history of archaeology is a history primarily of creation, not reception. It is both more honest and more useful to consider the archaeological record as something constructed by archaeologists, discursively and materially. The archaeological record was created by specific agents, at particular times, with definite objectives. The agents responsible for its creation, as individuals and institutions,

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had identifiable political commitments and aesthetic sensibilities. A student of archaeology ignorant of the history of the discipline cannot describe or critically analyze the uneven patterning of this archaeological record and its relationship to past material culture. There are likewise many ways in which one might define the “history of the discipline.” For the sake of convenience, two complementary approaches may be outlined. The first would be a largely internal history, considering advances in archaeological method and theory. This, speaking anecdotally, is the most common form of disciplinary history in current archaeological pedagogy. It is generally accepted that undergraduate students should read twentieth-century archaeological publications and should be able to parse these publications in terms of the methodologies then employed. An example: my students should know that techniques of field survey were pioneered by the British School at Rome in the 1950s with the South Etruria Survey.6 They should also know that these techniques were only applied more recently in Turkey.7 This knowledge would inform their reading of archaeological literature from the 1990s addressing ancient cities in Asia Minor, since they would understand that little comparison between the historical development of town and territory was possible at that time. The second definition would be more capacious, considering the discipline of archaeology as integral to broader historical developments. This would be a reflexive history of a particular field of archaeological inquiry: its institutions, discourses, and inevitable political implications. Perhaps even more so than textual history, the development of the academic discipline of archaeology has been inextricably implicated in the imperialist and nationalist projects that have shaped the modern world. Archaeological fieldwork actively reconfigures modern landscapes, valorizing particular epochs and legitimizing particular narratives. On 26 February 1885, an Orthodox Christian ceremony was held to mark the inauguration of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (RAIK). The overseas archaeological institutes of western European states directed their attention toward the remains of the classical past. The research agenda of the RAIK addressed primarily Christian archaeology.8 Though the institute was officially closed in

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1914, many of its members conducted archaeological research in Trebizond and those areas of Ottoman Caucasia and northeastern Anatolia occupied by the Russian military prior to the revolution of 1917.9 On the eastern Aegean seaboard, it was likewise in 1914 that the uncomfortably Romaic toponym Ayasoluk was replaced by the acceptably Turkic Selçuk. The first excavations of the Justinianic basilica of Saint John at Ayasoluk/Selçuk were conducted by Georgios Soteriou in 1921 as part of the irredentist archaeological program of the Zone of Smyrna.10 It is impossible for students to comprehend the historical development of Byzantine archaeology independent of its implication in the violent and immediately political upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Teaching the history of those centuries is therefore not merely an act of disciplinary self-flagellation. It is not a question of being appropriately embarrassed by the history of archaeology. It is prerequisite for students to be able to reflect critically on the archaeological archive at their disposal. The solution to this problem is simple. Teaching archaeology should entail teaching some modern history. Teachers should think carefully about the general historical knowledge that might reasonably be expected of their undergraduate students in order to ensure that their syllabi account for any gaps. It is no bad thing if a student who signs up for a course addressing Byzantine archaeology should spend some time reading about the Tanzimat or the Treaty of Lausanne. A reflexive history of archaeology often provides a highly penetrating angle through which to explore the history of the world, instilling in our students a critical attitude toward the production of knowledge both within and outside the academy.

Notes

1. Yannis Hamilakis, “Archaeology and the Politics of Pedagogy,” World Archaeology 36, no. 2 (2004): 287–309. 2. Anthony Kaldellis, Byzantium Unbound (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 55. 3. The first rigorous attempt to parse the possible meanings of the term may be found in Linda Patrik, “Is There an Archaeological Record?,” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (1985): 27–62. See now the admirable precision deployed in Assaf Nativ, “No Compensation Needed: On Archaeology and

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the Archaeological,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 24, no. 3 (2017): 659–75, at 665. 4. Rodney Harrison, “Surface Assemblages: Towards an Archaeology in and of the Present,” Archaeological Dialogues 18, no. 2 (2011): 141–61. 5. Yannis Hamilakis, “Iraq, Stewardship and ‘the Record’: An Ethical Crisis for Archaeology,” Public Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2003): 104–11, at 107. 6. Among many other publications, see John Ward-Perkins, Anne Kahane, and Leslie M. Threipland, “The Ager Veientanus North and East of Veii,” Papers of the British School at Rome 36 (1968): 1–218. 7. Owen Doonan, “Surveying Landscapes: Some Thoughts on the State of Survey Archaeology in Anatolia,” Blackdirt: Annual Review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2013, 118–23. 8. Pinar Üre, Reclaiming Byzantium: Russia, Turkey and the Archaeological Claim to the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 9. Pinar Üre, “Byzantine Past, Russian Present: Russian Archaeological Institute’s Trabzon Expedition during the First World War,” in Byzantium’s Other Empire: Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, ed. Antony Eastmond et al. (Istanbul: ANAMED, 2016), 215–36. 10. Georgios Soteriou, “Die Altchristlichen Basiliken Griechenlands,” Atti Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae 4 (1940): 355–80; Victoria Solomonidis, “Greece in Asia Minor: The Greek Administration of the Vilayet of Aydin, 1919–1922” (PhD diss., King’s College, University of London, 1984), 182; William H. C. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 224–45; Jack Davis, “A Foreign School of Archaeology and the Politics of Archaeological Practice: Anatolia, 1922,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 16 (2003): 145–72; Fikret Yegül, “From the Lofty Halls of Academia to the Dusty Hills of Anatolia: Howard Crosby Butler and the First Sardis Expedition through Peace and War, 1909–1926,” in Perceptions of the Past in the Turkish Republic: Classical and Byzantine Periods, ed. Nina Ergin and Scott Redford (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 57–100; Christina Luke, A Pearl in Peril: Heritage and Diplomacy in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 41–77.

Chapter 3

Byzantium in Exile

Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun The very concept of Byzantium and, alongside it, the study of its civilization are in double exile in Turkey. On the one hand, the marginalization of the Byzantine past, which began even before the foundation of the Turkish republic, has resulted in the neglect of Byzantine cultural heritage and has shaped the way Byzantine studies has developed in Turkey. Moreover, in an era of increasingly nationalist politics, Byzantine studies has been further alienated from Turkish academia. On the other hand, scholars and students in Turkey who strive to contribute to the discipline in this politically challenging environment remain isolated, struggling to be recognized as an integral part of the international scholarly community. It is not surprising, therefore, that the International Congress of Byzantine Studies to be held in Istanbul has now been twice overshadowed by political events. In this chapter, we aim to provide a brief overview of the past and present of Byzantine studies in Turkey in the light of events that took place in the summer of 2020: the change of Hagia Sophia’s status from a museum to a mosque and the change of the venue for the Twenty-Fourth International Congress of Byzantine Studies (henceforth ICBS) from Istanbul to Venice.

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Facts: The ICBS and Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline in Turkey The ICBS was first organized with thirty participants in Bucharest in 1924. By the twentieth century, it constituted the third pillar of Byzantine studies, which had become well known through the institutes and journals established in Europe and North America. The ICBS has convened twenty-two times in different venues since 1924. The congresses have served as umbrella organizations for scholars of Byzantine studies on four continents and, especially in the past half century, have contributed to the structuring of the discipline’s multicultural, intellectual, and institutional base irrespective of nationalistic agendas. The running of the congress is the responsibility of the General Assembly of the AIEB (Association Internationale des Études Byzantines / International Association of Byzantine Studies), which was first configured in Sofia in 1934 and officially established in 1948. Every five years, the General Assembly votes on the venue for the next gathering of Byzantinists and assigns responsibility for the congress’s organization to the relevant national committee. A committee for Turkey did not exist when Istanbul hosted the ICBS for the first time in 1955, as the Turkish national committee was only established in 2000 and accepted as a member of the AIEB in 2001. Nevertheless, Turkish scholars and scholars of other nationalities representing institutions in Turkey had been attending the congress since 1934. Their participation continued in the following years but remained low, with the exception of the tenth congress, which was held in Istanbul.1 While participation from Turkey has increased steadily over the last two decades, the country continues to be one of those with the fewest representatives. At first glance, this could be interpreted as Turkish scholars intentionally abstaining from Byzantine studies. The paucity of papers on Byzantine history presented at the Turkish Congress of History, which has been organized regularly since 1932, would seem to lend further support to this initial reading. At the most recent congress, held in 2018, only eight of the nearly six hundred contributions were related to Byzantium, with four of those considering Turkish history using

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Byzantine sources. This phenomenon also reflects how Byzantine studies developed in Turkey, however. Whereas the discipline’s late nineteenth-century origins in Europe and North America were institutional, in Turkey, Byzantine studies emerged as late as the mid-twentieth century through the personal efforts of a few scholars. Although the early years of the Turkish republic witnessed an increased interest in the humanities, and particularly in history and archaeology, this interest was initially tied to the ideological needs of the nation-state as expressed in the Turkish History Thesis2—and thus focused exclusively on ancient Anatolian civilizations. Aside from the neglect of the Byzantine—as well as Ottoman—past, efforts to situate Byzantium within the narratives of Turkish history, combined with a lack of the necessary expertise and skills for studying it, impeded the development of Byzantine studies as an independent academic discipline. The first phase of the development of Byzantine studies in Turkey should be evaluated as part of the Westernization and modernization projects carried out in the early years of the republic. The influx of Jewish and socialist scholars to Turkey before the Second World War triggered the higher education reforms of 1933. Scholars in exile played a pivotal role in the development of Byzantine studies in Turkey (as well as many other disciplines) during the 1940s and 1950s. A metaphorical connection was even established between their contribution and the topos of the Byzantines who fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople and sparked Renaissance humanism. Courses in Byzantine history and art were taught by foreign scholars at Istanbul University.3 At Ankara University’s Faculty of Languages and History-Geography, founded in 1935, Byzantine history was taught by scholars who had completed their graduate studies abroad. Thus, Byzantine studies in Turkey was initially grounded in Western scholarship and received limited support from the state before the congress held in Istanbul in 1955.4 The establishment of the chair of Byzantine art history at Istanbul University in 1963 was a turning point in the institutionalization of Byzantine studies in Turkey. It is worth emphasizing that the pioneering Turkish scholars of this period had a personal interest in Byzantium and started studying it on their own, only to experience difficulties finding a place for Byzantine studies at their universities later in their

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careers. Ideological obstacles—namely, the lack of necessary institutional support for Byzantine studies to become a mainstream discipline—overshadowed the scholarship carried out at Istanbul University and Ankara University. The construct of Greece as the historical “other” by Turkish nationalism from the 1950s onward, along with its image as the “official” inheritor of the Byzantine legacy, must have played a role in the marginalization of Byzantine studies, as the skepticism shown toward scholars working in this field attests. Turkey’s seclusion and introversion in the following decades as a result of the military coups of 1960 and 1980, as well as the 1974 Cyprus conflict, further impeded the discipline’s development. In addition, the Higher Education Council, which was established after the coup of 1980, forced the closure of the chairs of Byzantine, Turkish, and Islamic art history, among others, and compelled their merger into the Department of Archaeology and Art History. This change further interrupted the institutionalization of Byzantine studies at Turkish universities. Only in the 1990s did Byzantine studies finally start to gain traction in Turkish universities. While only five doctoral dissertations were completed in Byzantine studies in the 1980s, this number tripled over the following decade. This increase can be attributed to two main developments. First, several scholars who returned to Turkey after completing their graduate studies abroad started to work at Istanbul Technical University, Hacettepe University, and Boğaziçi University and created new focal points for Byzantine studies. Second, young scholars, especially those trained at Hacettepe University, attained teaching positions in various universities throughout Anatolia. Despite the significant increase in the number of Byzantinists at Turkish universities, holding another international conference dedicated to Byzantine studies would only become possible in 1999. Nearly four decades after the congress of 1955, there was an attempt to organize an international conference on Byzantine Constantinople in 1994. Planned to be held at Turkey’s first private museum—the Sadberk Hanım Museum, which had been established by the Vehbi Koç Foundation—a strong reaction against it caused it to be canceled at the last minute.5 Resentment at the cancellation notwithstanding, the international workshop Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and

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Everyday Life, which convened at Boğaziçi University five years later, heralded that Byzantine studies in Turkey would enter a new era in the twenty-first century. Byzantine studies continued to spread and flourish at Turkish universities in the new millennium. More than forty doctoral dissertations were completed in the 2000s, rising to over one hundred in the 2010s. In addition, an increasing number of students started to attend graduate programs at universities abroad during this period. Besides the surveys and excavations carried out by Turkish universities, various events and conferences organized in Turkey increased the prominence of Byzantine studies. The participation of Turkish Byzantinists in international events also increased, which made their scholarly contributions more visible. The institutionalization of Byzantine studies in Turkey truly began in this period. The establishment of the National Committee of Eastern Roman / Byzantine Studies, under the aegis of the Turkish Historical Society, in 2000 was followed by Turkey’s joining the AIEB. The committee’s remit focused on the representation of Turkey in the AIEB but did not extend to establishing a strategy for the advancement of Byzantine studies in the country. Likewise, the national committee has not evolved an inclusive and participatory structure aimed at gathering scholars, researchers, and students of Byzantine studies into a community. On the other hand, the committee was instrumental in lobbying for the ICBS to be held in Istanbul—a proposal put to the AIEB for the first time in the early 2000s—and thus in the eventual decision to hold the twenty-fourth congress there. The Turkish national committee successfully oversaw the preparations until the decision to relocate it was made in July 2020. Another key development in the institutionalization of Byzantine studies was the International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, which was first held in 2007 and has gathered leading Byzantinists in Istanbul every three years since. The symposium offers crucial opportunities for networking and intellectual exchange between scholars and students of Byzantine studies in Turkey. The symposium’s proceedings have contributed significantly to the scholarly literature. What is more, the establishment of two Byzantine research centers at Koç

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University and Boğaziçi University in 2015—whose scholarships, events, and projects are significant contributions to the field’s advancement— has added further momentum to this process. In sum, more scholars and students than ever work on Byzantine history, art, and archaeology at Turkish universities and take part in surveys and excavations. At the same time, Byzantine studies in Turkey has become more integrated into international scholarship. The candidacy of Istanbul, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, for the ICBS thus needs to be evaluated in light of these developments.

Events: Between the Re-Byzantinization and Re-Ottomanization of Istanbul The last two decades, in which Byzantine studies has developed rapidly, have also witnessed the unprecedented growth of conservative and nationalist political movements in Turkey. As a result, the term “Byzantium” has become more than simply marginalized: it is the ubiquitous subject of political polemics that point simultaneously at “external” enemies, with religious and xenophobic connotations, and “internal” enemies, who advocate for the universal value of Byzantine cultural heritage and mostly represent secular segments of the population. It is, therefore, crucial to acknowledge that there are scholars in Turkey who are urged to use the term “Eastern Rome” instead of Byzantium, or who are stigmatized by the media—and sometimes even by their colleagues—because of their work in this field. Likewise, gatherings of Byzantinists are frequently targeted by various radical right-wing media organizations with claims that they are serving “Turco-Islamophobic foreign powers” by organizing “academic crusades” to “re-Byzantinize” Istanbul. In addition, in the context of the center-periphery relationship that dominates political discourse in Turkey and a climate dominated by racist and neo-Ottomanist movements, the pressures on academic freedom and the elite rhetoric have a more detrimental effect on scholars of Byzantine studies than those of other disciplines. In this political environment, it is difficult for Byzantinists to make their voices heard. The Panorama 1453 Museum, which has been among the most visited museums in Istanbul since its opening in 2009, stages

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the fall of Constantinople using a massive, 360-degree image replete with expressive content and dramatic effects. By creating an emotionally charged visitor experience, the museum aims to replace the official story of Turkish achievement in the nation’s collective memory, the War of Independence, with the Ottoman Conquest.6 Similarly, big-budget, neo-Ottomanist TV series and film productions reveal a dominant Ottoman nostalgia in popular culture. Nevertheless, a considerable number of Turkish Byzantinists spoke out over the further erasure of Byzantine cultural heritage from Turkish collective memory with the conversion of the churches of Hagia Sophia in Iznik, Trabzon, and Istanbul, as well as the Chora Monastery, into mosques. That some academic circles have decried the increased prominence of Byzantium among papers presented at a symposium on the Middle Ages highlights the complex conditions under which scholars of Byzantium work in Turkey. Istanbul’s candidacy for hosting the congress in 2011 was an important milestone for Byzantine studies. Undoubtedly, the Istanbul pogrom, which took place just a few days before the tenth congress was held in Istanbul in September 1955, had left deep marks on the history of the congress as well as on Turkish collective memory. As a matter of fact, the same forces that gave rise to those catastrophic events hindered the development of Byzantine studies for decades and lie beneath the current ideological attitude toward Byzantine cultural heritage. Thus, holding the congress in Istanbul would have provided Turkish Byzantinists with both an occasion to prove their mettle in the international arena and an opportunity to exert more influence and counter the opposing views at home. In any event, Istanbul lost by a single vote— 17 to 18—to Belgrade at the election held in Sofia. Judith Herrin was selected as the president of the AIEB in Sofia yet resigned shortly thereafter. In her resignation letter, Herrin argued that Istanbul was the more compelling candidate and criticized what she saw as an unacceptable lack of transparency and discussion in the process. One of Herrin’s most striking statements was her likening of the election of Belgrade, despite the conventions of the AIEB and the existence of a stronger candidate, to voting in the Eurovision Song Contest. Herrin conceded that “holding the Congress in Istanbul represents a

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challenge for some colleagues” and underlined the need for a “full and frank” discussion. In Belgrade, Istanbul was again a candidate (together with Munich and Nicosia), this time for the twenty-fourth congress, to be held in 2021. In 2012 and 2013, during the period between the congresses held in Sofia and Belgrade, Hagia Sophia in Iznik and Hagia Sophia in Trabzon were converted into mosques. In addition to these continued threats to Byzantine cultural heritage, an attempted coup that took place in Turkey in July 2016, just weeks before the congress in Belgrade, raised understandable concerns. The chances of Istanbul’s being elected seemed to be even slimmer this time. One of the authors of this paper recalls the joy of the participants from Turkey who were present in Belgrade upon the announcement of Istanbul as the venue of the twenty-fourth ICBS.

Reactions: Letters, Letters, Letters . . . The summer of 2020, aside from the worldwide pandemic, was the summer of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Around early June, rumors surfaced about the possible change of Hagia Sophia’s status from a museum to a mosque, and many open letters from the international community— both Byzantinists and others—expressing concerns about the future of the building started to circulate. Several of these letters, published by the national committees, are preserved in the AIEB newsletter archives.7 A brief analysis of these letters can provide insight into the differing positions and emphases of the national committees. The earliest publication was that of the Greek committee, which was published on 8 June. In the short text, Hagia Sophia is referred to as a “unique edifice of sixth-century Byzantine Constantinople,” thus giving priority to the Justinianic identity of the building. The Cypriot committee, on the other hand, addressing President Erdoğan in an open letter dated 20 June, focused on the universal status of Hagia Sophia as a monument of global importance. This position is often repeated in the letters, not only those made public by the national committees but also those from numerous online campaigns. The letter from the Bureau of the Italian Committee holds a similar position regarding Hagia

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Sophia as a World Heritage cultural monument. However, the bureau also suggests that the possible conversion would “have a deep impact on the scientific collaboration in the years to come.” It is not clear if this collaboration concerns only Hagia Sophia or refers to the possible cessation of Italian scholars’ projects in Turkey altogether. This letter, dating to 23 June, seems to be the first one where the future of scholarly activities is mentioned, but it is certainly not the last. The same concerns were repeated by the French committee on 26 June and by the Russian committee on 29 June, both also including warnings about the “touristic value” of Hagia Sophia. Along with these letters from the national committees, John Haldon, the president of the AIEB, wrote an open letter addressed to President Erdoğan on 25 June. His letter, especially in its tone, stands out from the others. He does not refer to Hagia Sophia as a Byzantine monument, instead recognizing its role in the past as “a place of worship both as a mosque and church.” This is strikingly different from, for example, the remarks of the Greek committee, which prefers to contextualize the building in “Byzantine Constantinople.” Haldon also portrays a (somewhat exaggerated) tolerant and multicultural Turkey and focuses on fruitful past scientific collaborations. His letter, therefore, can be seen as a diplomatic maneuver, evincing a more positive attitude when compared to the reactions of other bodies. The following events, however, demonstrated that these letters were futile. Hagia Sophia, from its very inauguration following the Nika revolts in the sixth century, has a long history of being used as a political tool— and this has also been the case in the Turkish republic. During election campaigns, or as a distraction from ongoing political or economic turmoil, various figures have often questioned and protested Hagia Sophia’s status as a museum. The current president himself promised the conversion of the museum to a mosque in 1994, when he was the mayor of Istanbul. However, when the Council of State announced the decision on 10 July 2020, the majority of scholars, politicians, journalists, and others were taken by surprise. The political opposition parties were silent, de facto supporting the decision. Protests from scholars and the media have been lost among national and international celebrations of the “liberation” of Hagia Sophia.

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Feelings: A Midsummer’s Nightmare The AIEB circulated a totally unexpected “special issue” newsletter about a week after the decision regarding Hagia Sophia was announced.8 It was a Saturday night, around 11 p.m., when news about the “conference” spread like wildfire among our colleagues. Most of us did not sleep that night. We stayed up, sending messages and emails, calling each other, and discussing what steps to take, because we were aware of the gravity of the situation for the future of Byzantine studies in Turkey. Many of our colleagues from around the world reached out to us, expressing their disapproval of the decision to take the conference away from Istanbul and asking how they could be of help. All this effort was fruitless. “As the result of the ongoing and uncertain future impact of covid19”: Everything that had been planned for the next two years—summer schools, trips, training courses—was and still is unknown, online, or canceled. Postponing the congress saves resources and averts the possible chaos caused by different border control regulations and lockdowns for the participants. “Together with other concerns associated with issues of heritage management”: Everyone who would be attending the conference, the people who study the Byzantine Empire in Turkey, was being punished for an action taken by the government. Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, and we—who had neither the authority nor the power to intervene with the process at any stage—were being punished for it. “[The congress] will no longer be held in Istanbul”: It was not very easy for us to understand the justification of, and the logic behind, this statement or to explain how it felt to read that we were left alone. Our hearts sank. Thus, taking the name “Graduate Students of Byzantine Studies in Turkey,” we decided to do what we had seen from many scholars in the past months: we drafted an open letter.9 We were mainly disappointed with three bodies, from whom we made some basic requests. From the international community of Byzantinists, we asked for solidarity and acknowledgment of the “hundreds of scholars in Turkey who work hard to contribute to Byzantine Studies, regardless of their religious and political identities.” Second, we asked for transparency and

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accountability from the National Committee of Eastern Roman / Byzantine Studies of Turkey. During the “months of Hagia Sophia,” the committee remained silent and did not engage with any of the national or international reactions. Aside from statements from a few scholars on an individual basis, the committee as an institution did not make a single announcement during this process prior to an email it sent out on 19 July, without any explanation, attaching the AIEB’s message. Finally, from the AIEB we asked for an explanation and financial support for Turkish students to attend the congress, wherever it was to be held. The swift reply from John Haldon, the president of the AIEB, was as transparent as we had hoped.10 Alongside assurances that the participation of Turkish students would be supported, Haldon made two crucial points. The first is that domestic political issues made the feasibility of holding the conference in Turkey uncertain. The Turkish national committee had applied for permission from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and from the Presidency to hold the congress and had been left without an answer. Additionally, the upcoming election of 2023 was considered risky, as it would have created an unsuitable environment for the congress. These issues were not communicated by the Turkish National Committee to the public at any point, even after the relocation of the congress. Haldon’s statements concerning the “high level of anger, or disappointment, or distress, or all of these, within the international community of scholars at the government’s decision regarding the Ayasofya museum” are vital for understanding how scholarly activity can turn political. Scholars were planning to protest the congress by not attending if the congress were held in Istanbul. It is, however, ironic how this in fact serves the Turkish government’s now open aim of degrading the Byzantine Empire—and Byzantine studies.

Reflections At the time of this writing, half a year has passed since the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque (fig. 3.1). Today, one needs to pass through barricades to arrive at its gate. The entrance of the campus of Boğaziçi University is currently also under police barricade due to

Fig. 3.1 Interior of Hagia Sophia, 20 January 2021. Photo: authors.

the ongoing protests against government intervention in its administration, which may eventually put the future of its Byzantine studies research center at risk. Entry into Hagia Sophia is not from the outer narthex, via the archaeological remains of the second Hagia Sophia exhibited in the courtyard, as it used to be. Instead, the southwestern entrance, which is known as the Splendid Gate and was formerly used as the exit door when Hagia Sophia was a museum, is now used to enter the mosque. The secular history of the monument as a museum, as well as its Byzantine heritage, fades away as you advance inside Hagia Sophia. An inscription dating to 1697, which contains the Prophet Muhammad’s hadith “Constantinople shall be surely conquered; how blessed the commander who will conquer it, how blessed his army,” meets the visitor, but not Paul the Silentiary’s Hagia Sophia, where “the glow of the Bosporus shimmers gently, black with an admixture of white” on the

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Proconessian marble flooring, which is now invisible under the green carpets.11 Finally, one crucial point that has been missing from all the discussions around Hagia Sophia and the relocation of the ICBS should be highlighted. Byzantine studies in Turkey is not limited to a few universities hosting research institutions that can support their students’ attendance at the congress. There are more than sixty universities in Anatolia that offer courses on Byzantine art and archaeology at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Hundreds study Byzantine history and culture and take part in archaeological projects. Before pottery sherds end up in the publications of eminent scholars in the field, they are excavated, cleaned, and documented by these students. This hostile attitude toward Byzantine studies is neither new nor unacknowledged. However, the discussion has often focused on the protection of Byzantine monuments and heritage in Turkey. We would like to take this opportunity to highlight the struggles of being a Byzantinist in this country. Art historians can be called infidels and degenerates even by their own families for studying Christian iconography. Historians struggle to find a place in a historiographic tradition dominated by nationalist sentiments and among a crowd of Seljuk and Ottoman scholars. Although Turkey was once the heartland of Byzantium, it takes courage and perseverance to study and teach Byzantium here. The Istanbul ICBS would have revalued the field of Byzantine studies in Turkey. Scholars engaged with Byzantine studies in one way or another were going to see that it is, in fact, worth pursuing their research despite the challenges they face daily. The cancellation did not affect the government or its supporters. It affected the people who had to apply for scholarships even for their travel to Istanbul. Travelling outside the country for a conference is a very distant dream for many. Byzantium has been exiled not only from Turkey but within it, through the experiences of its hundreds of struggling scholars.

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1. 1934 (Sofia), 4 participants; 1936 (Rome), 2 participants; 1948 (Paris), 3 participants; 1951 (Palermo), 1 participant; 1953 (Thessaloniki), 11 participants; 1955 (Istanbul), 28 participants; 1958 (Munich), 13 participants; 1961 (Ohrid), 3 participants; 1966 (Oxford), 9 participants; 1971 (Bucharest), 8 participants; 1976 (Athens), 11 participants; 1981 (Vienna), 14 participants; 1986 (Washington), 2 participants; 1991 (Moscow), 13 participants; 2001 (Paris), 10 participants; 2006 (London), 22 participants; 2011 (Sofia), 30 participants; and 2016 (Belgrade), 39 participants. 2. The Turkish History Thesis, which was formulated in a book titled Türk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (The main tenets of Turkish history) and published in 1930, aimed to respond to the nationalistic research agenda of the Kemalist regime. For a detailed account of the Turkish History Thesis, see Çiğdem Atakuman, “Cradle or Crucible: Anatolia and Archaeology in the Early Years of the Turkish Republic (1923–1938),” Journal of Social Archaeology 8, no. 2 (2008): 214–35. 3. Steven Runciman (1941–44), Ernst Diez (1948–49), and Philipp Schweinfurt (1950–54). For the historiography of Byzantine studies in Turkey, see Semavi Eyice, “Türkiye’de Bizans sanatı araştırmaları ve İstanbul Üniversitesi’nde Bizans sanatı,” in Cumhuriyet’in 50. Yılına Armağan (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1973), 375–428; Nevra Necipoğlu, “Türkiye’de Bizans tarihçiliğinin dünü, bugünü ve sorunları,” Toplumsal Tarih Dergisi 19, no. 112 (2003): 72–77; Melek Delilbaşı, “The Present and Future of Byzantine Studies in Turkey,” in Kλητόριον in Memory of Nikos Oikonomides, ed. Florentina Evangelatou-Notara and Triantafyllitsa Maniati-Kokkini (Athens: Vanias, 2005), 63–72; Engin Akyürek, “Byzantine Art History in Modern Turkey,” in Perceptions of the Past in the Turkish Republic: Classical and Byzantine Periods, ed. Scott Redford and Nina Ergin (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 205–24; and Şule Kılıç Yıldız, “A Review of Byzantine Studies and Architectural Historiography in Turkey Today,” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 28, no. 2 (2011): 63–80. 4. The congress was organized under the auspices of state officials, and an extensive restoration campaign was carried out for the Byzantine monuments before the congress. See Buket Kitapçı Bayrı, “The 10th International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Istanbul, September 15–21, 1955,” YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 1 (2019): 130–42. 5. Akyürek, “Byzantine Art History,” 214. 6. See Gönül Bozoğlu, Museums, Emotions, and Memory Culture: The Politics of the Past in Turkey (London: Routledge, 2020). 7. Byzantine News 33 (July 2020), “Regarding the Status of Hagia Sophia,” https://​aiebnet​.gr, 20 July 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20220621064153 /https://us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=719696e03a73ee3361188422f&id =7ec7740295. 8. Byzantine News, special issue, July 2020, “2021 International Congress of Byzantine Studies,” https://web.archive.org/web/20221230142316/https://mailchi .mp/6e519e804189/byzantine-news-issue-18-april-2786916?e=875d884f51 .

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9. Bizantolog, “24. Uluslararası Bizans Araştırmaları Kongresi Hakkındaki Gelişmeler,” www​.bizantolog​.org, 23 July 2020, https://bizantolog.org/24-uluslar arasi-bizans-arastirmalari-kongresi/. 10. www.bizantolog.org, 23 July 2020, https://bizantolog.org/24-ulus lararasi-bizans-arastirmalari-kongresi/ 11. Translated in Fabio Barry, “Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Art Bulletin 89, no. 4 (2007): 651.

Part 2

How Is Byzantium (Re)produced?

Chapter 4

Methodological Imperialism

Nicholas S. M. Matheou Byzantinists have a tendency, implicitly or explicitly, to adopt the analytical perspective of the central state and its imperial class. We ask what helped the empire survive and/or expand, and we judge the success of a given ruler, official, or policy according to this criterion.1 I term this tendency methodological imperialism. Methodological imperialism emerges from the fact that Byzantine studies is always already defined by an imperial state system. Regardless of whether individual Byzantinists research the medieval Roman state itself or a related aspect of its social, political, and economic history, the discipline as a whole still uncritically takes the empire as its organizing principle. Now, when I say “uncritically,” it is meant in a valueneutral sense. No living Byzantinist chose to organize things this way: we inherited these conditions from the past and, within these historically determined bounds, otherwise critical scholarship has been produced. The point is that, despite critical potentials, an imperially defined, analytical common sense remains in place because of those inherited frameworks.2 In making this disciplinary critique, it is important to note that methodological imperialism is not unique to Byzantine studies. The

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same tendency is found in many other disciplines, from Ottoman to Russian, Chinese, or Mongol studies, and all of these form specific iterations of the methodological statism found across the field of history as a whole. History proper is judged to begin with the first state systems of southwest Asia and north Africa, and this same boundary between “prehistory” and “history” is reproduced globally in each region where statehood subsequently developed.3 The specific claim might be that history as such begins with writing, but writing is itself a technology of statecraft. Equally, for contemporary historiography, methodological statism takes the common form of methodological nationalism: so many historical disciplines defined by a given “nation,” itself defined by eventual or potential realization as a nation-state.4 The methodological imperialism inherent to Byzantine studies, then, provides one example of the methodological statism endemic in all historiography. Still, we have inherited a particularly acute example. Especially in Anglophone scholarship but also in the discipline more broadly, macro-analytical questions remain defined by Edward Gibbon’s vision of a more-than-millennium-long decline and fall of the Roman Empire.5 As Gibbon stared at the ruins of classical Rome on his Grand Tour, his central question emerged: How did a mighty and powerful empire come to this? Taking the unashamed perspective that the empire’s extent and power was unequivocally a “good thing” (and so its decline and fall inherently “bad”), in six volumes that span Roman history from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine XI, he sought to provide the answer. Byzantinists today might be less explicit—though many are not—and, in any case, Gibbon’s ghost continues to structure the discipline’s methodologically imperialist common sense. Let us make this more concrete. What do I mean when I say that methodological imperialism forms our “analytical common sense?” Put most simply, this denotes what is taken to be given and unquestioned in the process of analysis—the obvious and assumed standpoint from which to approach a given question. In the case of Byzantine studies, this standpoint is always, at least tendentially, that of the central state and its imperial class. When, for example, we approach the question of the theme system, tenth-century land legislation, or the Komnenian restoration as one of “success” or “failure,” we are in fact

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asking, “How could the imperial state ensure its existence over time and space?” This is to take the same standpoint as the empire’s ruling class, assuming its reproduction in a relatively stable state system to be an unambiguous “good thing,” so that the extent to which this is achieved becomes the obvious measure of “success.” This becomes all the more troubling when we think concretely about what the imperial class’s reproduction actually requires: the effective domination and exploitation of subordinated or subaltern classes.6 That is not to say, of course, that methodologically imperialist scholarship always supports particular members or fractions of the imperial class in a given historical moment. In the case of the tenth-century land legislation, for example, much scholarship views the actions of the so-called dynatoi, imagined as the collection of powerful Anatolian families who dominated high imperial offices, as antithetical to the state system’s long-term survival.7 But the underlying logic remains the same: the empire’s effective reproduction is the marker of success, with the dynatoi’s actions judged to undermine this process, thereby ironically undermining their own class basis along with the whole state system—a seemingly obvious “bad thing.” The troubling—indeed, the tendentially reactionary—assumption of the ruling class’s position as an analytical standpoint is even more emphatic when we consider the medieval Roman state’s imperialist character. “Imperialism” is a much-tortured term but can be generally defined as the practice of expanding a particular state system’s political, economic, and cultural hegemony, either through direct territorial domination and exploitation or through a general but indirect control over political and economic life.8 This definition can be made more concrete by looking at the actual processes by which imperialist expansion, direct and indirect, takes place historically. And the first thing that should strike us is the extent to which Byzantine scholarship understands its role as analyzing the “success” of imperialist processes in the case of this historical state system. From awe at the “empire that would not die”9 to verdicts positioning this emperor or that dynasty as crucial to imperial “revival” in one or another moment,10 much scholarship has an underlying logic of retrospective advocacy for Byzantine imperialism.

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This might be simply frustrating were it not a reflection and reinforcement of imperialist worldviews in our own contemporary world. We must never forget that history is formed in the ongoing flow of humans in their social relations to one another and the ecosystems they are part of—living, social beings with hopes, desires, loves, losses, and whole lifeworlds that give their sense of self and social situation meaning, value, and direction. Holding this truth in mind, it should become clear just how violently imperialist it is to debate, for example, whether the eleventh-century conquest of the Bulgarian and Armenian kingdoms was “good” for the empire or provided a “poisoned” legacy in creating a more ethnically and religiously diverse state.11 The same line of thinking applied to the European wars and colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be considered somewhat gross, to say the least. Although seemingly excused by distance and difference, the same should be true of the world before European hegemony,12 not least because such perspectives on “premodernity” act to reinforce underlying, semiconscious, almost still commonsense justifications of modern and contemporary imperialism.13 To take an indicative example, a recurring imperialist practice in the early and middle years of the medieval empire of New Rome was mass population transfer and forced settlement—from Mardaites and Slavs in Anatolia in the seventh and eighth centuries, to Paulicians in southern Italy and the Balkans in the ninth century, to Armenians in Cappadocia in the tenth century. If we imagine what such a practice entails, then the inherent violence is inescapable. Thousands of people forcibly uprooted, their connections to their homes ruptured, a mass trauma undoubtedly including the separation of families, injury, illness, and death—all at the hands of the state in arms. Yet Byzantinists most commonly analyze these violent acts for their utility in the interest of that selfsame state.14 Emperors are praised for their “repopulation” of strategic areas—surely already populated, only by the “wrong sort” for imperial interests—and commitment to creating the agricultural and manpower basis for the imperial army. Imagine the same line of thinking applied to the deportations, ethnic cleansings, and genocides that have plagued the same regions of the Balkans and southwest Asia between the mid-nineteenth century and today. Would we be comfortable praising the founders of Balkan

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nation-states for their mass expulsions of Muslims, or the late-Ottoman genocides of Armenians and Assyrians, or the mutual ethnic cleansing between Greece and Turkey, or the forcible assimilation and massacres of Kurds and Alevis in Turkey, all because these attempted to create “stable,” ethnically homogenous nation-states? The answer is surely no, and yet, in presenting the East Roman state and imperial class’s analogous actions in that manner, we reinforce precisely such understandings in the populace at large. Now, even with all this said, done, and accepted, one empirical, not to say empiricist, response to the charge of methodological imperialism appears incontrovertible: it is difficult not to take the standpoint of the imperial class when all our literary source material, and most surviving material culture, was produced by and for elites. So, the argument goes, how else should we proceed? This problem is more apparent than real, however. Often this argument simply provides rhetorical cover for scholars’ overidentification with their objects of study, seeing themselves in learned elite actors, especially intellectuals whose work survives.15 These figures’ perspectives are sympathetically adopted and often generalized across the populace, re-creating in scholarship the realities of the imperial elite’s past cultural hegemony. Yet as many of these same studies demonstrate, we are all used to the idea that critical historical analysis involves looking as much at what is not said or displayed as at what appears self-evident. So, our challenge is to seek the gaps, inconsistencies, and anxieties in our elite sources, not from the elite’s assumed standpoint in a quest for what they “really meant” but from that of the vast, anonymous, empirically silent majority of historical humanity—that is to say, from the perspective of subaltern classes. It is not good enough to say, as the positivist-empiricists claim, “wherefore one cannot source, therefore one cannot speak.” Instead, we must assume subaltern presence as the agency structuring and defining the dynamics of elite phenomena. We must analytically assume the overwhelming majority of our ancestors’ and predecessors’ lived, experienced, and meaningful lives to be historical dark matter. We might, for example, wonder why so many Armenian, Bulgarian, and other non-Roman elites happily joined the imperial class and assert

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that this was a result of subaltern agency, driving them to seek more robust and effective modes of hegemony, domination, and exploitation. In place of competing “national” and “imperial” elite actors, we find elite classes in general whose shared interest is not the continuation of this or that polity but the long-term reproduction of elite hegemony, domination and exploitation in general. Or, on the other hand, periods of dislocation and “weakness” in the state—from the eighth-century “Dark Age” to the Seljuk invasions, the thirteenth-century collapse in Anatolia, and the inability of the post-1261 Second Empire to integrally cohere—can be seen not as general societal crises in which everyone desired imperial restoration but as specifically elite disasters, which provided openings for subaltern classes. The point is to look at the imperial state anew, with a squint from below and to the left, rather than assume that we, too, sit on the golden throne. In this way, we can respond to methodological imperialism (in the particular case of Byzantine studies) and methodological statism (in the case of historiography in general) without pretending that they can be wished away. States might remain inevitably central, but now they are centered as the object of critique and the problematic of inquiry rather than as uncritical markers of “goodness” and “badness.” In this manner, perhaps, history can be transformed from a field that functions to reinforce the claimed historical role and present hegemony of the state, exploitation, and empire into one that provides tools for their critique—and, indeed, their practical overcoming.

Notes

1. For the most self-evident exponent of this general tendency, see Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 2. “Common sense” is here understood in its Gramscian sense. See Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 126–32. 3. State-centrism in analysis and history writing has been interrogated and critiqued by James C. Scott from different directions across a range of studies, including his Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University

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Press, 2009); and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 4. See, for example, the many titles across various disciplines titled “The Making of X Country/Nation/People.” Cf. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond,” Global Networks 2, no. 1 (2002): 301–34. 5. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776–89). 6. This term is meant in Antonio Gramsci’s generalized sense rather than the more specific recent usages of the Indian Subaltern Studies school. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 44–55, and Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 1999). 7. An argument that classically goes back to George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969). This view is endorsed in more recent works, such as Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600–1025 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 8. For a discussion of contemporary imperialism from which this generalized definition is drawn, see Salar Mohandesi, “The Specificity of Imperialism,” Viewpoint Magazine, 1 February 2018, https://​v iewpointmag​.com​/2018​/02​/01​/the​ -specificity​-of​-imperialism. 9. John Haldon, The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 10. See, for example, debates concerning which emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries contributed most to the empire’s “rebirth” in a new hegemonic cycle of the later ninth to eleventh century: Warren Treadgold, The Byzantine Revival, 780–842 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); John Haldon and Leslie Brubaker, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael T. G. Humphreys, Law, Power, and Imperial Ideology in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Juan Signes Codoñer, The Emperor Theophilos and the East, 829–842: Court and Frontier in Byzantium During the Last Phase of Iconoclasm (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 11. Michael Angold, The Byzantine Empire, 1025–1204: A Political History (London: Longman, 1997), 33–34. 12. Cf. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 13. Jon Stone, “British People Are Proud of Colonialism and the British Empire, Poll Finds,” The Independent, 19 January 2016, https://​w ww​.independent​.co​.uk​ /news​/uk​/politics​/british​-people​-are​-proud​-colonialism​-and​-british​-empire​-poll​ -finds​-a6821206​.html. 14. For the classic study presenting such a perspective, see Peter Charanis, “The Transfer of Population as a Policy in the Byzantine Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, no. 2 (1961): 140–54. Even more recent, purportedly

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more critical scholarship repeats the state’s perspective. See, for example, Yannis Stouraitis, “Migrating in the Medieval East Roman World, ca. 600–1204,” and Panagiotis Theodoropoulos, “The Migration of Syrian and Palestinian Populations in the 7th Century: Movement of Individuals and Groups in the Mediterranean,” in Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone, ed. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt, and Yannis Stouraitis (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 141– 65, 261–87. 15. See, for instance, the tension between this tendency and otherwise critical perspectives in Anthony Kaldellis, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Dimitris Krallis, Michael Attaleiates and the Politics of Imperial Decline in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011); and Krallis, Serving Byzantium’s Emperors: The Courtly Life and Career of Michael Attaleiates (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). The same dynamic also appears in “feminist” guise, with an overidentification with female rulers. See Judith Herrin, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiv.

Chapter 5

The Price of Admission

Anthony Kaldellis The academic field of Byzantine studies has, in its brief history, harbored and promoted Eurocentric narratives that accommodate European colonialism, white supremacy, and Christian identity. I propose that it has done so not, as is the case with some other fields, because such ideas grant it a position of prestige within the hierarchy of Western learning, because it derives positive material or ideological benefits from them, or because they advance the study of its subject matter. Instead, in harboring these ideas, Byzantine studies is a coerced lackey and so a victim: it has been forced by adjacent and more powerful interests to equip itself with these toxic ideas that harm both others and itself. Thus, my argument requires a nonbinary model: in addition to ideological assailants and victims, we have here the case of a field that has, against its own interests, been colonized by Eurocentrist ideas that damage its work but that were originally required for it to have a seat at the table in the first place. They were preconditions in an extortion scheme of academic “pay-to-play.” The conveners have asked us, for reasons of space, to focus on one object, site, problem, or practice. My analysis will revolve around the idea of “Europe.” As a coherent cultural block—a network of Christian states conceived as having a common identity, despite their incessant wars—Europe is largely an early modern artifact. To be sure, the idea

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had medieval precursors and emerged from Western medieval realities, but it became self-aware and normative in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an era of emerging absolutist monarchies, colonial expansion, and religious wars. Among the many constituent elements of the idea of Europe, I will here single out three: its appropriation of classical Greek culture; the Roman tradition in politics, empire, and law; and Christianity. As these elements are never precisely defined, their appropriation took (and still takes) the form of an ongoing debate and contestation. Ancient Greek culture was alternately extolled and attacked.1 Roman imperialism and imperial monarchy were rejected by partisans of republican politics.2 And the identity of authentic Christianity was contested by rival churches across Europe, while the faith as a whole was disputed by the Enlightenment. But it was precisely the contest over these valorized cultural elements that made them vital to the coherence of emerging western Europe. It was the debate that mattered, because it defined the stakeholders as belonging to a common arena and competing over the same prestige accessories. Others were excluded from this ideological arena or were only allowed to join it much later, once its parameters had already been set in western Europe. The Islamicate world, for example, remains largely excluded, even though it has a significant stake in the traditions in question.3 Byzantium, our focus here, played a unique role in this process from the start, one that entailed its simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. In sum, at every stage of its emergence into self-awareness, Europe cast Byzantium as a mirror image, a reversed reflection of its own appropriation of Greece, Rome, and early Christianity. One might almost make the case that this inverted Byzantium was itself a necessary constituent element for the emergence of the idea of Europe. Specifically, the discourses of Eurocentrism refracted the concepts of Greece, Rome, and Christianity into positive and negative aspects, with Europe claiming the positive aspect as its right and associating Byzantium with the negative. The reader will instantly recognize the truth of this when she reflects on the exact ways in which Byzantium was demonized in Western discourse down to the end of the twentieth century (including within specialized scholarship on Byzantium itself). The ideal form of “Europe” identifies with a classical Greece that

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is innovative, rational, enlightened, and creative, and with Greeks who established philosophy and democracy, invented tragedy and comedy, and defeated “oriental” tyranny. The Byzantines, by contrast, spoke and wrote in “degraded” versions of the language that were full of “errors” by Attic standards. Their texts were inanely rhetorical, lacked originality, and consisted of theological nonsense and court propaganda. They had no interest in classical antiquities—or feared them as the haunts of demons, which conveniently allowed Western collectors, including their governments, to appropriate art and manuscripts from Greek-speaking lands. Their pronunciation of the language itself was wrong, as the West discovered after Erasmus. The Greek language was thereby seized by the West away from those who still spoke it. As recently as 2002, James Morwood’s Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek claimed that Erasmus “liberated ancient Greek from the tyranny of its modern delivery” and its “distortions.”4 Moreover, stripped of their Roman identity, the Byzantines were recast as ethnic Greeks—that is, as effeminate and servile— unlike their ancestors, whose true heirs were the western Europeans.5 Just as the Byzantines were decadent Greeks, so too were they degenerate Romans, if they were that at all. The glory of Rome (the good version) consisted of conquest and civilizing expansion, the creation of a citizen body through law, and the vigor of the Latin language. Yet the Byzantines forgot Latin; they were not really citizens but only subservient subjects of an absolute monarchy, and their history was one of a long decline and fall, not conquest and triumph. Their politics consisted (allegedly) of court intrigue by eunuchs and unscrupulous women. In other words, it was a permanent but supercharged version of Tacitus’s account of the Julio-Claudians. This was not truly Roman but rather oriental—whence Byzantine studies as a field became an auxiliary subspecies of Orientalism. In many ways it remains so today. Fundamental to this conception is the denial that Byzantium was, as it called itself, Romanía, and that the “Byzantines” (an artificial modern term) were Romans. This denial, which began around 800 in western Europe and continues to this day, is essential for the “transfer” (the technical term is translatio imperii) of the rights to the Roman legacy from Constantinople to whoever in the West claims them, whether papal Rome, Aachen, Napoleon’s Paris, or Washington, DC.

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Likewise, Greek Orthodoxy was a favorite whipping-boy of Enlightenment discourse and generally of Western religious polemic. Its actual history and practice were irrelevant, for it became an ideal type of the degradation to which the faith could succumb under the wrong conditions. Orthodoxy was superstitious, violent, and theocratic, obsessed with dogmatic trivialities (unlike Western theology!), and mired in ignorance and illiteracy: thus were the impoverished conditions of the Church under Ottoman rule projected onto Byzantium. At the same time, Catholic writers took care to carve out the Greek Church Fathers and Church Councils and claim them for their own tradition, leaving to Byzantium only the “rump” that was left over (the recent field of “late antiquity” replicates and perpetuates this move today). Protestants and philosophes were happy to condemn the whole Byzantine period as theocratic and superstitious, yet their condemnation of it was largely instrumental: it functioned as a safe surrogate for critiques that, if directed openly against their real (Western) targets, would have landed their authors on the rack or pyre. The denigration of Romanía along these three axes—ethnic, imperial, and religious—was the logical and historical outgrowth of western European imperial projects and was consolidated by colonial encounters between western Europeans and East Romans (Romaioi). Specifically, the German imperial tradition that emerged after 800 was premised on the rejection of East Romanness, as were the universal aspirations of the reformist Church of Rome. Greek ethnicity explained both why the easterners had no authentic claim to the Roman political tradition and also why they were “disobedient” to Rome and had to be “restored” (i.e., subordinated) to it. This imperialist theory became historical reality after 1204, when the East Roman world was directly conquered, dismembered, and ruled in a colonial fashion by Latin powers that looked to western Europe for legitimacy. In early modern times, these stereotypes authorized the removal of Greek art and manuscripts from Orthodox communities subjected to Ottoman rule, on the Orientalist assumptions that “they did not understand their value” or feared the demons that lurked within them. In sum, the denigration of Byzantium both underpinned Western imperial ideologies and justified colonial practices in the east. Finally, the creation of Byzantine studies as an

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academic discipline emerged directly from these ideologies and practices in the nineteenth century: the rubric “Byzantium” came into use precisely as a replacement for the term “empire of the Greeks” in order to counter claims by the new Greek state in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, a project that the Western “Great Powers” reserved for themselves. “Byzantium” is, therefore, Western imperialism and colonialism all the way down. Thus, an imaginary Byzantium, stripped of its Roman identity and saddled with a negative “Greek” one, enabled Europe to come to terms with the mixed bag of its own cultural components. Yet while this was happening, the foundations were simultaneously being laid for the creation of Byzantine studies as a distinct scholarly discipline. These two phenomena were one and the same. There was not some specific moment in time when Eurocentrism was foisted on a scholarly project that had emerged elsewhere, in the way in which the Europeans’ colonies were foisted on their victims abroad. The basic axioms of Eurocentrism were already baked into the constitution of the field of Byzantine studies, because it was part of the overall project from the beginning, from the appropriation of its imperial tradition during the Middle Ages and of the classical tradition during the early Renaissance. Byzantinists are not supposed to press their subjects’ (perfectly legitimate) claims to the Roman tradition in the face of their colleagues who study ancient Rome, the papacy, or the German Empire. Nor are they supposed to remind their classicist colleagues how much their field owes to the East Romans—in fact, that the classical Greek canon is shaped by their choices. The tacit agreement is that “Byzantium” has little to do with Rome and that the Byzantines had no “real” interest in the classics. These axioms were not just grudging concessions that Byzantinists had to make in order to have a seat at the academic table. They were part of the field from the start and aggressively promoted by many professional Byzantinists into the late twentieth century. We see the operation of this ideology in the many negative things that Byzantinists and others have had to say about Byzantium, as well as in the positive arguments that they sometimes make for its importance (as all fields inevitably must in order to justify their existence in the eyes of the general public). These arguments remind me of the

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question posed by the victorious Spartans to the conquered Plataeans, “What have you done for us?”—but asked in this instance by Western audiences.6 We know the stock answers. The Byzantines “preserved” ancient Greek texts so that Western humanists could eventually “receive” them and have a Renaissance. This is framed teleologically as a project that benefited western Europe, the implied audience that needs to be persuaded. The underlying idea is that the Byzantines did nothing original with the classical texts, but, when western Europeans got hold of them, a Renaissance ensued. The narrative might otherwise have focused on why Byzantine scholars kept, copied, and studied ancient texts for their own purposes. Likewise, it is often said that Europe owes Byzantium a debt for blocking the expansion of Islam, as if such a thing formed the slightest part of Byzantine thinking about its own strategy. Thus, in both its negative and positive aspects, the Western construct “Byzantium” plays an instrumental role in the upkeep of Eurocentric narratives. While the study of Byzantium was twisted and distorted under the weight of those narratives, the field nevertheless served as a platform for their secondary projection. Conversely, the field is expected to stay quiet (and dutifully does so) while scholars in openly Eurocentric fields develop models for, say, the growth of states and economies in world history. Conceptual celebrations mark the transition in (western European) early modernity from “patrimonial states” and “feudalism” to more advanced statal modes premised on universal taxation, conscription, and law. These narratives need to pretend that the East Roman Empire was not precisely such a state for most of its history, for the rules of the game require Byzantium to stay out of the story of European progress. I close with a consideration regarding the historical scale of our question. A loose consensus today holds that the idea of “Europe” that is most salient to our moment emerged during early modernity (and the idea of the “West” is even more recent). Certainly, it was in early modernity that the foundations were laid—and the prejudices codified—for what would emerge in the later nineteenth century as the academic field of Byzantine studies. Yet those foundations, too, were laid upon earlier strata. Robert Bartlett traced Europe’s conceptual archaeology to a network of peoples and states that emerged in the broader

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Frankish world around the turn of the millennium.7 For our purposes, the story can be pushed earlier. The two institutions that benefited from constructing an unbalanced relationship between “Byzantium” and their own zones of interest were the papacy and the Frankish and then German emperors. It was they who, around 800, began to deny East Romanness, invented the theory of translatio, and asserted that the Romaioi were really ethnic Greeks (treacherous and schismatic). Their views prevailed for historically contingent reasons, especially through the violence of the crusades. It should therefore be noted that Charlemagne was, during his lifetime, praised as “the Father of Europe,” while, in a letter to Constantinople, Pope Leo IV (ca. 853 CE) claimed that the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome extended over “the whole of Europe.” Byzantium was excluded from Europe right from the start, and its modern academic study is still carrying that concept’s water.

Notes

1. Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 3. See, for example, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th– 10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998). 4. James Morwood, The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. 5. This story has been brilliantly explored in Nasia Yakovaki, Ευρώπη μέσω Ελλάδας: Μια καμπή στην ευρωπαϊκή αυτοσυνείδηση, 17ος-18ος αιώνας (Europe via Greece: A turning point in European self-awareness, 17th–18th centuries) (Athens: βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας, 2006). 6. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 3.68. 7. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Chapter 6

Byzantine Studies A Field Ripe for Disruption

Averil Cameron The field of Byzantine studies has had a history of negativity, positivist history, and national agendas connected with Orthodoxy, and in some quarters this continues. Developments in eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union have introduced further nationalist agendas. According to one defender of positivist histories of Byzantium, the field is “desperate to win acceptance.”1 The author of many well-known books on Byzantine history, the same scholar long ago complained about what he called “jargon versus the facts”2—and, more recently, about his failure as a “non-leftist” to obtain university positions. Despite valiant efforts by some scholars of Byzantine literature, a growing list of publications on reception and performativity, and an increasing number of publications on Byzantine identity and ethnicity—as well as the initiatives taken by the network responsible for this volume—the field of Byzantine studies remains undertheorized. Much of the reason for this lies in the fact that so many of the texts produced in Byzantium still need to be studied almost from scratch; many works even by well-known Byzantine authors still lack critical editions and studies. Compared with related fields—classics, late antiquity, early

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Christian studies—Byzantine studies lags behind. Byzantine archaeology was a late developer, hampered by an overemphasis on churches and fixed ideas about architectural phases, and even within living memory Byzantine art history was dominated by stylistic analysis and by the influence of a relatively small number of heavyweight scholars. Gender has been something of a forerunner in the development of new methodologies, but it is only recently that many long-established norms have begun to be challenged.3 The influence of younger Byzantinists, whose formation benefited (at least in the years before the pandemic) from the stimulus of easy travel and the proliferation of conferences, and during 2020–22 by online events and publications that have enabled even wider participation, has been significant. On the other hand, the overwhelming whiteness of Byzantine studies is striking but rarely commented on. So much is undecided about Byzantium. How medieval was it? Was it Roman or “Byzantine”? How does it fit the framework of global history? Is it European? Was it an empire or only a “rump state”? All these are valid questions, but all are contested. Over the many centuries of its existence, Byzantium was subject to repeated challenges from a changing world that it did not control. Everyone knows when it ended, but when did it begin? If its culture was Greek, how was it also Roman? Arguing for a single characterization against others, as Anthony Kaldellis does, cannot be an adequate approach to a culture that grew out of an earlier empire and underwent multiple transformations.4 Indeed, it is striking that some of the most forceful historians writing today have given up Byzantium’s traditional long chronology and instead limit their coverage only to parts of its history, usually from the seventh century CE to 1204. Byzantine studies still carries a heavy burden of prejudice. I argued over forty years ago that after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, Byzantium has suffered from being viewed through Orientalist eyes.5 In popular perceptions, the influence of well-known literary evocations of Byzantium and the gold and glitter associated with Byzantine art continue to locate it within the realm of Eastern exoticism.6 This coexists with the still-widespread perception in popular circles that Byzantine literature is difficult, Byzantine culture fossilized, and

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Byzantine government stiflingly bureaucratic. Indeed, as Anthony Bryer pointed out, even some holders of prominent chairs in the subject have subscribed to this view, and a glance at the history of the two major chairs at Oxford and King’s College London reveals the fraught, even schizophrenic relation of Byzantine studies to classics, on the one hand, and modern Greek on the other.7 At the same time, outside the countries that perceive it as part of their national and religious history, Byzantium is more often than not simply omitted from broader historical discussions, especially by Western medievalists.8 It is not surprising if some Byzantinists are searching for ways in which to deal with these issues or wondering why questions that are high on scholarly agendas in other fields are not more prominent in their own. In North America and the United Kingdom, aspects of the subject often reside in different departments. The fact that a critical mass is rare can create uncertainty. Where Byzantine history is found in large departments, its position is often precarious. I myself began as a classicist and did not find recognition as a Byzantinist altogether straightforward among those who had come to the subject through history or art history, or even among established senior Byzantinists at the time. To make matters worse, prominent classicists have often been scathing about the scholarship and textual criticism of the Byzantines themselves, though this is something that is at last beginning to receive due appreciation. Our field rests on uncertain foundations and is more dependent than most on the circumstances of different educational systems and the presence (or otherwise) of institutional structures. Byzantinists must often struggle to insert themselves into existing frameworks and find their own way in a field that can seem at once too rigid and too lacking in agreed definition. Insisting that Byzantium was medieval, treating it within the frame of the Mediterranean world, and approaching it as part of global history are all welcome strategies, but they are also indicators of the labile character of Byzantine studies as a discipline. At the same time, there is turmoil in some parts of the world of classics. The reasons are many. Young women scholars are afraid and angry about precarious employment practices and gender prejudice. The right wing and sections of the media persistently appeal to classical models

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they do not fully understand (Thucydides, the Spartans, even Pericles). The prevailing constructivism especially apparent in the growing literature on ethnicity and in early Christian studies has provoked some hostile reactions, even while calls for greater inclusivity have grown louder in relation to LGBTQ+ and disabled students and scholars. They are heard especially from students and scholars of color under the influence of the Black Lives Matter and antislavery movements, which have brought every aspect of imperial and colonial history into sharp relief. These demands extend both to the way classics is taught and to the contents of the curriculum. Some of these concerns are not new, and as I know from my own experience, many classicists in the United Kingdom have been working hard for years to keep the subject going in schools and to broaden its teaching in universities. But as a discipline, classics has now come under renewed fire for its association with privilege, its concentration on the study of “dead white males,” its continued male (and white) dominance at the senior level in many departments, the procedures used for peer review, and the acceptance rates of papers submitted to major journals. At the same time, appeals to the inheritance of classics are frequently made in the context of reassertions of the importance of “values” in education (sometimes framed as “Judeo-Christian” or “Western”), while legislators in the United States and United Kingdom alike are currently attempting to close down what the right refers to as “woke” teaching. The supposedly inevitable fall of the Roman Empire has been a common analogy for the Soviet Union and America alike and remains so. But it cannot be denied that classics has a public presence that Byzantine studies does not. Sometimes this public presence leads to negative results. It was good when the then British prime minister Boris Johnson—the product of an elite education who studied classics at Oxford—supported the cause of classics teaching in schools. However, he is also the author of an enthusiastic book with a clear political agenda extolling the example of Rome; his speeches are peppered with questionable classical analogies; and his invocation of Pericles (alongside Churchill) as his role model is far from convincing.9 Serious challenges have now come from within classics itself. Passionate articles have appeared on sites such as Eidolon, which describes

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itself as progressive and feminist, or The Sportula, dedicated to the interests of “working class and historically looted communities,” as well as in the blog Everyday Orientalism.10 Classics departments in privileged universities such as Princeton and Oxford have become notable targets for their students and, at one extreme, there are even calls for the discipline of classics to be dismantled altogether. As the website of the Cambridge Faculty of Classics put it: “The texts, artefacts and cultures of Greece and Rome . . . have historically been, and continue to be, appropriated and manipulated for racist and imperialist purposes. In part because of this, the community of Classicists in Cambridge and beyond, even more than many other academic communities, has a demographic composition that does not reflect that of society at large. In turn this historic and ongoing underrepresentation of people of color in the field impoverishes scholarship and places an additional burden on Classicists of color at every level.”11 Student organizations have been set up for classicists of color at both Oxford and Cambridge amid calls for the repatriation and relabeling of museum artifacts and the removal of offensive statuary. In 2020, separate open letters were sent by over two hundred students each to the faculties of classics in Oxford and Cambridge. The Oxford letter contained the following statement: “It is no longer possible to ignore that Classics has a long and painful history of upholding, benefitting from, and advancing structural racism and white supremacy in Oxford and across the world.”12 Both universities responded to the challenge. At Oxford, the Humanities Division, which includes the several faculties relevant to Byzantine studies, produced an action plan and set up a fund to support initiatives to diversify or decolonize existing curricula, and these responses have since continued. A month after the open letters in 2020, some 350 faculty members at Princeton signed an open letter calling for antiracism action across the entire university, including the introduction of curriculum changes. A number of leading academic bodies, including the Medieval Academy of America, have adopted declarations of commitment to inclusivity and diversity. The twin aims of decolonization and disruption are inherent to all of these movements, and their results include seminars in Oxford run by classicists of color and by LGBTQ+ students. The comparative lack of

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such initiatives in relation to Byzantium is thus striking. Why is this so? For one thing, Byzantine studies is not a school subject for young people in the United States or the United Kingdom—and rarely an undergraduate one. Rome and the Roman Empire feature more obviously in public awareness than Byzantium, and the fact that the subject is so dispersed across university departments and faculties (if it exists at all) means that it has not had a profile that might attract such critiques. To be sure, Byzantinists have discovered intersectionality, and many have attempted to move the discussion away from the elite culture of Constantinople by focusing on the provinces, or on popular religion or materiality, and by presenting Byzantium to a wider public.13 But, even so, younger Byzantinists need to prove their credentials, and awareness of Byzantium among the general public remains extremely low. Quite simply, while the field of classics engages a wide spectrum of attention, Byzantium does not. Many scholars of late antiquity are, in my experience, alive to the need to broaden and decolonize their subject. I suggest now that there is an equal need for consciousness-raising and disruption among Byzantinists, who could start by asking how Byzantine history or culture is approached. What changes have there been, and why? In a groundbreaking book, George Demacopoulos has recently advanced a postcolonial critique of Latin perceptions of the crusades.14 In this case, the crusaders were clearly colonizers, but so were the Byzantines, and they were passionate believers in their own superiority. Slavery was also alive and well in Byzantium.15 We might also reflect on the implications for Byzantine society and culture of the degree of othering to be seen in the early Christian and Byzantine labeling of groups and individuals as heretical, and the counterintuitive application of the same procedure to Jews and Muslims.16 Finally, the assertion of a single Orthodoxy in Byzantium rested on the absolute condemnation of others. It was a violent process.17 Gender was an obvious starting point for a more critical analysis of Byzantine culture, and a new emphasis on materiality permits a less conventional understanding of the place of religion in Byzantine society.18 Network analysis is now supplying better insights on many levels. The question of whether Byzantium was an empire (and if so, when)

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has acquired a new salience. But if Byzantine culture, Byzantine history, and Byzantine studies are not to remain a backwater, they cry out for new kinds of scrutiny—and perhaps for some of the passion felt by these classics students. This would require a great deal of rethinking. The customs of Byzantine studies will be resistant. But such rethinking is overdue.

Notes

1. Warren Treadgold, “Byzantine Exceptionalism and Some Recent Books on Byzantium,” Historically Speaking 1, no. 5 (2010): 16–19, a disparaging critique of recent publications on Byzantium from a traditionalist perspective. 2. For which see John Haldon, “‘Jargon’ vs. ‘The Facts’: Byzantine History-Writing and Contemporary Debates,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9, no. 1 (1984): 95–132, at 124–27, in the context of a discussion of theoretical approaches based on Marxism, and at 127–29, pointing to the special relation of Byzantine studies to the history of the Greek state and to what has been called “romantic Hellenism.” For Treadgold’s complaints about “leftists,” see Warren Treadgold, “The Death of Scholarship,” Commentary, December 2017, https://​w ww​ .commentary​.org​/articles​/warren​-treadgold​/the​-death​-of​-scholarship​/; see also Treadgold, “The University We Need,” Commentary, February 2016, https://​www​ .commentary​.org​/articles​/warren​-treadgold​/the​-university​-we​-need​/. 3. Leonora Neville, Byzantine Gender, Past Imperfect (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). 4. See especially Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); cf. Yannis Stouraitis, “Roman Identity in Byzantium: A Critical Approach,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107, no. 1 (2014): 175–20. 5. Averil Cameron, “Byzantium: The Exotic Mirage,” Times Higher Educational Supplement 933 (21 September 1990): 13, 15; Cameron, The Use and Abuse of Byzantium: An Essay on Reception (London: King’s College London, 1992); Cameron, “Byzance dans le débat sur l’Orientalisme,” in Byzance et l’Europe, XVIe–XXe siècle, ed. Marie-France Auzépy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003), 227–42. 6. Averil Cameron, “Byzantium Now—Contested Territory or Excluded Middle?,” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 5 (2019): 91–111. 7. Anthony Bryer, “Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies: A Partial View,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12, no. 1 (1988): 1–26. 8. Averil Cameron, “The Absence of Byzantium,” Nea Hestia, January 2008, 4–59; Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 7–25. 9. Boris Johnson, The Dream of Rome (London: HarperCollins, 2006).

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10. Sarah Scullin, Yung In Chae, and Donna Zuckerberg, “Eidolon’s Mission Statement,” Eidolon, 21 August 2017, https://​eidolon​.pub​/eidolons​-mission​-state ment​-d026012023d5; “FAQ,” The Sportula: Microgrants for Classics Students, accessed 11 July 2022, https://​thesportula​.wordpress​.com; Katherine Blouin, Usama Ali Gad, and Rachel Mairs, eds., Everyday Orientalism, accessed 11 July 2022, https://​everydayorientalism​.wordpress​.com​/. 11. “Faculty of Classics Race Equality Statement,” Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, accessed 19 February 2022, https://​w ww​.classics​.cam​.ac​.uk​ /directory​/race​-equality. 12. The letter is archived at “Oxford and Colonialism,” University of Oxford, accessed 19 February 2022, https://​oxfordandcolonialism​.web​.ox​.ac​.uk​/faculty​ -of​-classics. 13. Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 14. George Demacopoulos, Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 15. Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 16. Averil Cameron, “How to Read Heresiology,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 471–92, repr. in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 193–212; Cameron, “Jews and Heretics—a Category Error?,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 345–60; Guy G. Stroumsa, “Barbarians or Heretics? Jews and Arabs in the Mind of Byzantium (Fifth to Eighth Centuries),” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfilet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 761–76 (though the habit continued long after the period Stroumsa considers). 17. Averil Cameron, “Enforcing Orthodoxy in Byzantium,” in Discipline and Diversity, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 43 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 1–24. 18. The 54th Symposium of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, to be held in Oxford in March 2023, will have as its theme “Material Religion in Byzantium.”

Chapter 7

Subaltern Byzantinism

Maria Mavroudi Byzantine studies explicitly parted ways with Edward Gibbon’s interpretations several decades ago, yet they continue to be recycled—sometimes without knowledge of their ultimate source—in both academic and popular literature. Furthermore, an active and consequential place has not yet been found for Byzantium in a comprehensive history of civilization. As a result, scholarly and popular approaches to Byzantine culture continue to be shaped by the axioms and assumptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period that coincided with the western European colonial expansion. It is still tacitly accepted in many quarters that ancient Greek culture is the cornerstone of Western modernity or that the political, economic, technological, and cultural dominance of “the West” was inevitable. The dismantling of European colonialism after the Second World War inevitably challenged these concepts and the academic disciplines that supported them. The study of Greco-Roman antiquity lost the central position it had occupied in Western academia and society. For more than thirty years now, its practitioners have felt compelled to apologize for the contribution of their discipline to colonial ideology. The image of Byzantium, deemed non-Western and antimodern, has benefited somewhat from this turn of events. Although this development remains underutilized in the work produced by Byzantinists, it

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certainly has been evident for a few decades now in the work of creative artists. A strand of current African American thought seeks to connect “peoples of African descent the world over with Christianity as a religion of African peoples well prior to the trauma caused by the mass enslavement and colonization of Africa’s people.”1 In this quest, Eastern Christianity holds particular appeal, since it has never been the form of Christianity adhered to by Africa’s European colonizers. Among the art produced by Eastern Christians, Byzantine art occupies a central position because it provided models adopted and adapted by its cultural peripheries in Africa. This includes the ancient Christian kingdoms of Aksum (Ethiopian Tigray and Eritrea), Makuria, Alodia, and Nobadia (Nubia). Their antiquity makes it possible for their Christianity to be considered native to Africa. Two additional facts, coming not from the medieval past but from a twentieth-century present, undoubtedly helped the anticolonial image of Byzantine art. In March 1965, Archbishop Iakovos, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, joined the historic marches in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr.—a turning point of the civil rights movement. Archbishop Iakovos was the only church leader, and one of very few non– African American clergymen, who had the courage to walk hand in hand with Dr. King, and the two were pictured together on the cover of Life magazine on 26 March 1965. A decade earlier, Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus had also become a face of anticolonial struggle, especially for countries seeking independence from British colonial rule. Following his abduction and imprisonment by the British, Makarios successfully engaged in a kind of “religious diplomacy”—forging links and building solidarity between Cyprus and the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. As Costas Constantinou and Maria Tselepou have argued, “Makarios managed to become something of an honorary African.”2 Not only did he officiate mass baptisms but he also helped found an Orthodox theological seminary in Nairobi—all against the backdrop of the brutal repression of the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–60) by the British. While officially the African Orthodox Church was under the authority of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, it was

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How Is Byzantium (Re)produced? Fig. 7.1 Mark Doox, Saint John Coltrane Enthroned. © Mark Doox.

“Makarios’s political-celebrity status,” write Constantinou and Tselepou, “which gave it glamour and visibility, and a distinctive Cypriot twist.”3 The solidarity of the Greek Orthodox church with the civil rights movement and anticolonial struggle had direct repercussions for the reception of Byzantine art in African American Christian worship. The icons and murals painted by artist Mark Doox for two communities in San Francisco are illuminating in this regard. In his own words, Doox

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started painting traditional icons more than 30 years ago as a novice monk in a Russian-affiliated Orthodox monastery in company with mostly American converts to the faith. . . . After about a year there, now bound for San Francisco, I left the monastery, convinced I didn’t have a vocation to be a monk. Instead, I felt I had found another vocation: to paint icons. In the years that followed, I was given spectacular opportunities. I painted a grand icon mural for St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco of 60 oversized saints led in a dance by an olive-skinned Christ. I have painted numerous icons of Black Christ for St. John Coltrane A.O.C. (African Orthodox Church), also in San Francisco, whose patron saint is the jazz great John Coltrane.4 The church of Saint John Coltrane was founded upon the death of this famous musician in 1967. Originally a jazz club, it was refashioned as a temple where John Coltrane was worshipped as God. In 1981, however, it was incorporated into the African Orthodox Church—an Episcopalian movement—with the proviso that “Coltrane would be demoted from God to patron saint.”5 Some of the icons of Saint John Coltrane painted by Doox reference the saint’s earlier divine status: he is enthroned, robed in the clothes of a Greek philosopher, and holds an open scroll— standard elements of the Byzantine iconography of Christ. With the help of the Byzantine iconographic tradition, Saint John Coltrane is Christ (fig. 7.1). The congregation of Saint Gregory of Nyssa is also distinctive, incorporating dance into its worship. Accordingly, in 2009 Doox executed a monumental mural, the “Dancing Saints Icon.” Wrapping around the church’s interior, the mural surrounds the viewer with ninety over-lifesized images of the “saints”—who include among their number conventional figures such as David, Teresa of Avila, and Francis of Assisi as well as individuals of other faiths, such as Malcolm X and Anne Frank. The program culminates in a monumental recontextualization of the Maiestas Domini: Christ, robed and haloed, joins the celebration from within his large blue mandorla. Designed in collaboration with the congregation,

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the mural program articulates the community’s inclusive values through the traditional visual language of Byzantine art: “as the congregation dances around the altar, the saints dance above, proclaiming a sweeping, universal vision of God shining through human life.”6 Doox was trained in a tradition of Byzantine painting re-inaugurated in Greece in the 1920s and 1930s by Photis Kontoglou, perhaps the most widely influential of all modern Greek painters. When Kontoglou started his career, Orthodox icon painting was done in the Western style with Russian influence. Kontoglou used the Byzantine style not only to paint icons but also to paint historical personages and scenes from throughout Greek and human history, as well as scenes from modern everyday life. One example is a series of murals at the Athens city hall, completed in 1937. They include Alexander the Great taming his horse, the Byzantine generals John Tzimiskes and Doxapatres Boutsaras fighting foreign enemies, and heroes of the 1821 Greek War of Independence (fig. 7.2).7 In these murals, Pericles (a symbol of classical Athens and its political legacy to the modern world) and Constantine Palaiologos (the most tragic of Byzantine heroes) are both depicted in a Byzantine style—a statement with strong aesthetic and political undertones, both in the 1930s and today.8 In 1933, after working as a conservator and copyist at the Byzantine Museum in Athens, Kontoglou accepted the invitation of the Coptic Museum in Cairo to work on its collections. This experience left an acknowledged trace on Kontoglou’s painting, though its possible effect on the artifacts and organization of the Coptic Museum is unknown. The colonial context of this Greek-Egyptian communication conducted through Kontoglou’s engagement with Byzantine and Coptic art has not yet been explored. Kontoglou’s influence is pronounced in the work of several artists active in the United States who paint in a Byzantine style. Robert Lentz, for example, is an American Franciscan friar of the Byzantine rite and of Russian heritage. In his own words, he is “active in promoting dialog between Muslims and Christians. He is also committed to the indigenization of Byzantine iconography in the various cultures embraced by the Church.” In his eyes, his painting is a function of his ministry: while aiming to remain true to the “essence” of Byzantine iconography, his icons are frequently directed toward contemporary subjects,

Fig. 7.2 Photis Kontoglou, murals, City Hall, Athens, 1937. Photo: Paris Tavitian.

particularly the lived experience of poverty in both the United States and abroad.9 How Lentz reinvents the visual tradition of the Eastern churches to deliver an anticolonial message is exemplified by his icon of Christ as the “Lion of Judah,” depicting the fulfillment of one among the oldest prophecies of the Old Testament. In Byzantine art, this is usually connected with Christ’s birth and is conveyed by depicting him as a beardless youth, asleep, an iconographic type known as Ὁ Ἀναπεσών (“The Reclining One”). In Lentz’s icon, Christ as the Lion of Judah is depicted as a Maasai warrior (fig. 7.3).10 His work also engages with other contemporary social issues. His 1994 icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus was unveiled at Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade and has since become a popular symbol among the gay Christian community.11 His depiction of Harvey Milk in the guise of a Byzantine saint has also been called a “national gay treasure.”12 True, Lentz’s iconography, and especially its service to gay rights, has generated a certain amount of controversy. In the fall of 2020, an equivalent controversy over the socially engaged use of Byzantinizing

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Fig. 7.3 Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, Lion of Judah. © Robert Lentz. Courtesy of Trinity Stores, www‌.trinitystores‌.com, 800.699.4482.

images of Christ erupted on Cyprus. There, Byzantine icons are not exotic or poorly understood artifacts (as is mostly the case in the United States) but are centrally inscribed within mainstream concepts of personal and collective identity.13 The point is not whether it is appropriate or desirable to use the style of Byzantine icon painting in order to bring contemporary social issues to the forefront. Whatever position

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one takes on this issue, it is important to acknowledge that the style of Byzantine icons is currently used, both within and beyond the “Byzantine Commonwealth,” to promote progressive political causes. In the United States, it has become a vehicle for the expression of social alterity—what in academic discourse has been termed “the subaltern.” This is a far cry from Byzantine art’s strong association with the established political and social order before the Second World War. At the same time, it is consistent with the intellectual and aesthetic engagements of socially liberal artistic movements, such as Arts and Crafts, with Byzantine art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Enough has been said to clarify that there are, and always have been, many different images and receptions of Byzantium. As for academic establishments in the world’s political and cultural centers, where Byzantine studies was shaped as a modern academic discipline—particularly Germany, Austria, France, England, and the United States—they were mostly staffed by men of western European descent until more than two generations ago. For longer than half a century now, and at a constantly accelerating pace, they are being staffed by men and women who were born, raised, and at least partly educated in the lands of the Byzantine Commonwealth and other countries that belong to the world’s political and cultural peripheries. This demographic change makes it inevitable that the voice of the former “subalterns” is now increasingly becoming “hegemonic” within the discipline. But is the voice of the discipline itself becoming “hegemonic” within the academy—and was it ever hegemonic to begin with? I think that any Byzantinist asked this question will laugh; such a concept can only be a joke. After all, bestsellers by Byzantinists include Byzantium only peripherally: Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, and Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads.14 The present moment, in which Western academia is in the process of dismantling and rebuilding its entire intellectual and institutional structure, represents a window of opportunity for Byzantine studies. An urgent mandate for the creation of a new order is the rehabilitation of former underdogs—a category for which Byzantium and Byzantinists eminently qualify. For academics in the United States, the challenge is to explain why Byzantium can help us address the tensions brewing

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in our own society although its race is white, its religion Christianity, and its language European. The key lies in the fact that, even though Byzantium can be described by such “hegemonic” labels, those occupying a hegemonic position within Western modernity have consistently treated Byzantium as “subaltern.” This is a powerful reminder that labels and categories are socially and historically contingent and may represent rhetorical attitudes rather than eternal and unchangeable truths. Social tensions cannot be resolved if the primary way of addressing them is through rigidly applied and sharply contrasting labels.

Notes

1. Adelle M. Banks, “Howard Divinity School Returns Sacred Ethiopian Manuscript to Orthodox Monastery,” Washington Post, 20 January 2016, https://​w ww​ .washingtonpost​.com​/national​/religion​/howard​-divinity​-school​-returns​-sacred​ -ethiopian​-manuscript​-to​-orthodox​-monastery​/2016​/01​/20​/1199452a​-bfc1​-11e5​ -98c8​-7fab78677d51​_ story​.html. 2. Costas Constantinou and Maria Tselepou, “Branding Orthodoxy: Religious Diplomacy and the Makarios Legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 13, no. 3 (2017): 179–93, at 180. 3. Ibid., 180. 4. Mark Doox, “The N-Word of God: Envisioning the Image of Christ,” Religion News Service, 24 June 2020, https://​religionnews​.com​/2020​/06​/24​/the​-n​ -word​-of​-god​-envisioning​-the​-image​-of​-christ​/. 5. Hua Hsu, “Fifty Years of Worship at the Church of John Coltrane,” New Yorker, 24 December 2019, https://​w ww​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/photo​-booth​ /fifty​-years​-of​-worship​-at​-the​-church​-of​-john​-coltrane. 6. “Dancing Saints,” Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church website, accessed 15 July 2022, https://w ​ ww.​ saintgregorys.​ org/​ the-​ dancing-​ saints.​ html. 7. Meropi Kokkini, “Στα άδυτα του Δημαρχείου της Αθήνας” (In the sanctuaries of the Athens city hall), LiFo, 11 March 2019, https://​w ww​.lifo​.gr​/now​/ath ens​/sta​-adyta​-toy​-dimarheioy​-tis​-athinas. 8. Eleni Mpistika, “H Mνημειακή Tοιχογραφία του Φώτη Kόντογλου στον Δήμο Aθηναίων παρουσιάζεται σήμερα, Σάββατο, 12 μεσημέρι, σε ειδική ξενάγηση από καθηγητές-ιστορικούς τέχνης” (The monumental mural of Photis Kontoglou in the municipality of Athens is presented today, Saturday, at 12 noon, in a special guided tour by art historians), Η Καθημερινή, 6 February 2016, https://​ www​.kathimerini​.gr​/opinion​/848419​/h​-mnimeiaki​-toichografia​-toy​-foti​-konto gloy​-ston​-dimo​-athinaion​-paroysiazetai​-simera​-savvato​-12​-mesimeri​-se​-eidiki​ -xenagisi​-apo​-kathigites​-istorikoys​-technis​/.

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9. “Br. Robert Lentz, OFM,” Trinity Stores: Religious Artwork and Icons website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​www​.trinitystores​.com​/artist​/br​-robert​-lentz​ -ofm. 10. See Robert Lentz, “Lion of Judah,” Trinity Stores: Religious Artwork and Icons website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​w ww​.trinitystores​.com​/artwork ​/lion​-judah. 11. Robert Lentz, “Sts. Sergius and Bacchus,” Trinity Stores: Religious Artwork and Icons website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​w ww​.trinitystores​.com​ /artwork​/sts​-sergius​-and​-bacchus​-0. 12. See Robert Lentz, “Harvey Milk of San Francisco,” Trinity Stores: Religious Artwork and Icons website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://​w ww​.trinitystores​ .com​/artwork​/harvey​-milk​-san​-francisco. 13. Giorgos Chrysanthous, “Δεν θεωρώ ότι προσβάλλω τον Χριστό ή τον Θεό” (I don’t think I’m insulting Christ or God), Alphanews.live, 16 September 2020, https://​www​.alphanews​.live​/cyprus​/den​-theoro​-oti​-prosballo​-ton​-hristo​-i​-ton​ -theo​-binteofoto. 14. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–54); Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–61); Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Part 3

How Are Byzantine Texts (Re)produced?

Chapter 8

Byzantine and Western Narratives A Dialogue of Empires

Arietta Papaconstantinou

A civilisation with an international language does not need to worry about the multiplicity of tongues. —Umberto Eco

To say that the term “Byzantine” and its derivations are not the most adequate terms to describe the “Empire of East Rome” is a truism, especially in a volume like this one. And yet we all use it, for lack of a functional alternative, or for reasons of academic identification. The semantics surrounding the adjective are, however, very different from those surrounding the noun when used to describe the polity in question. Indeed, the term “Byzantium” blurs the Byzantine Empire’s imperial identity, making it sound like a more coherent entity, the prelude to a future nation-state. And yet it was an empire, and like all empires, it was anything but culturally coherent. It also produced imperial and

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hegemonic narratives that resonated—and sometimes still resonate— among the people and peoples encompassed in its territories. In those narratives, which are the direct heirs of Roman imperial discourse, the empire is presented as a civilizing force in the territories it ruled as well as beyond its frontiers. Christianization and the advancement of the upright faith were the main vehicles of that discourse, and they were often made to coincide with the classic tropes of Hellenization, literacy, or the settlement and cultivation of desert space.1 Compared with those of other empires, Byzantine hegemonic narratives have been less recognized as such by scholars. This is no doubt because they are not as openly brutal as those of Rome, but also, I believe, because they map much more neatly onto western European hegemonic narratives. Byzantine coloniality speaks very directly to Western coloniality—and this is especially true when “Byzantium” is made to start with Constantine, thus exemplifying the Christian “new beginning.” With its imagined origin in Hellenism and its “clarity of thought,” and its grounding in Roman institutions and organizational qualities, the empire of East Rome could not but speak the same language as the Western scholars who were studying it. This may seem like a bold statement, given that early Western scholarship on the Byzantine Empire has often been patronizing and dismissive. Such judgments, however, were only expressed in comparison to the Western Middle Ages, from which vantage point the Eastern Empire looked schismatic and “oriental” to the Western scholars studying it. When we look at the early scholarship on the subaltern civilizations of the Byzantine Empire, however, we see the “Greek Middle Ages” hailed as a beacon of logic in a sea of oriental irrationality. In what follows, I take two examples from the area of language to show how Western scholarly discourse has sometimes projected its own imperial tropes on its perception and construction of the Byzantine world.

Linguistic Orientalism Disciplinary boundaries today separate European and non-European languages, joining Greek and Latin like twins while isolating them

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from other languages spoken in the Roman and Byzantine empires. Denounced in 2006 by Fergus Millar for the very partial understanding it provides of the Roman East, this separation is still in place and is being addressed at an extremely slow pace.2 Historiographically, such academic structures—based on what are ultimately imperial linguistic classifications—have not been without consequences. During much of the twentieth century, some orientalist scholars were thought to be also Byzantinists: they were specialists in Eastern Christian languages and cultures, which were understood as secondary emanations of Byzantine Christianity.3 Scholarship on those subjects started after the Reformation, with the Vatican’s early attempts to bring into the Catholic fold the various Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the creation of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (The Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), which was also concerned with countering the propagation of Protestantism in various European colonies. Learning the languages that gave access to the texts of Eastern Christian communities was deemed a necessary step. This movement touched Byzantine studies directly because of the large numbers of medieval texts in Eastern Christian languages edited and published in series such as the Patrologia Orientalis, the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, and the Orientalia Christiana Analecta, not to mention a host of journals. Until the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic mark on the Eastern Christian disciplines was very strong, and their orientation was powerfully theological. Yet the early practitioners of these disciplines, even while they were considered “orientalists,” had a grounding in Latin and Greek, as was common at the time. This classical education, often acquired in prestigious centers of European colonial powers, skewed the way they saw the non-European languages and cultures they studied. These were learned primarily for practical reasons, not as intellectual pursuits like Latin and Greek. The work of early orientalists often betrays an underlying belief in a hierarchy of languages, at the top of which sit Latin and Greek, whose achievements are superior by far to those of other tongues. This idea has a long history, which has tended to attribute civilizational—and civilizing—value to the imperial language of the time while interpreting

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any continuing use of the local languages as the inability to do better, or, more leniently, as an expression of “identity.” There is hardly a better illustration of this than the comments made on Coptic by Paul Peeters in his landmark volume, Le tréfonds oriental de l’hagiographie byzantine, published in 1950. Peeters was the first Bollandist to plow through hundreds of hagiographical texts in several languages with method and perseverance, producing the invaluable Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis and sundry editions of individual saints’ lives. His Tréfonds volume collected six lectures given at the Collège de France in occupied Paris and represented the synthesis of a lifetime of scholarship. They reflected the spirit and approaches of their time and are, therefore, revealing of a much more general attitude toward non-Western languages. To take but one example, for Peeters, Coptic was the language—and reflected the “thought-world”—of the “servile masses” of Egypt, led by a “minority of Hellenized Egyptians,” who (despite eight centuries of Greek administration and education in the country) had only acquired a “veneer of Greek culture.” In Egypt, Hellenism was confronted with the “barbaric mass” of the Egyptian peasantry, who had been rendered “amorphous” and “passive” by centuries of exclusion from learned culture by the scribal class.4 From its earliest “babblings,” Coptic did not even attempt to “fight against the monopoly” of Greek and “suffered the domination of a superior language and literature.”5 In 1922, Hippolyte Delehaye (another Bollandist), in a long article on Coptic hagiography, had expressed his views on its literary merits at great length. Delehaye had worked from translations, mostly in Latin, of the texts published at the time. He found the stories “artificial,” with “disdain for history,” “lack of measure,” and a strong “taste for exaggeration.” His conclusions are striking: “Those extravagances testify to an inferior level of culture and to a profound indigence of thought. . . . Those repulsive acts of butchery, interrupted by scenes of fantasy, recounted in gauche compositions that smack of barbarism, seem to be the natural products of the Coptic mind, and nothing could be further from the measure and the elegance of the Greek spirit.”6 Such judgments on the part of Western scholars before the middle of the twentieth century are not uncommon, even though they are

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not always as blunt and deprecatory as they are for Coptic. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish them from quotes referring to Indigenous cultures in the European empires of the time. Few imperial tropes remain unused in these passages: Coptic as a baby language in relation to Greek, passivity, barbarism, and the lack of elegance, logic, and measure. Noticeably, the “lacking” elements were precisely what the learned West considered the hallmarks of civilized thought and culture, so ingrained in the Western intellectual habitus that they were considered universal—and accordingly exported worldwide. For the colonized locals, acquiring those rhetorical and compositional forms gave access to high culture—understood, of course, in very Western terms. This vision, common among Europeans in the colonial nations, was the filter through which the Byzantine empire and its subject populations were interpreted: their different cultures were judged on their level of conformity to and compatibility with the yardstick of Hellenism. In a usage that was—and sometimes still is—quite common, Hellenism is afforded agency: “Hellenism did not deign to raise the Egyptian peasants to its level.”7 The notion was reified in the form of the high culture of the classical and patristic canon, interpreted as it was by centuries of European colonial cultures. Once again, however, this conception mirrors the Byzantine imperial narrative itself, which used the notion very similarly. The disdain of other cultures displayed in the classical Greek canon is notorious and has always unfailingly fascinated and commanded the approval of imperial elites. This was not a personal approach—far from it. The great Bollandist’s judgments were very representative of mainstream scholarship on classical and post-classical matters. If anything, Peeters was instrumental in raising the profile of oriental scholarship, enabling and accelerating its later developments. It is rather that the mainstream descended in a direct line from a long-standing imperial rhetoric that proved, and still proves, very difficult to shake off.

The View from the Edge In Tréfonds, Peeters also devoted chapters to “hybrid Greeks and hellenizing Orientals” (Grecs hybrides et Orientaux hellénisants) and

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“oriental colonies and polyglot centres in the Byzantine Empire” (colonies orientales et centres polyglottes dans l’Empire byzantin). There, he showed that translations from Eastern languages into Greek, and more generally cultural borrowings in that direction, were always the result of the activity of Easterners who knew Greek rather than vice versa. Peeters argued that multilingualism within the empire was always linked to “foreign” presence, making the unspoken assumption that the natural language in the empire was Greek. This view remained the orthodoxy for almost half a century, until Gilbert Dagron took up the subject once again in two articles published in 1993 and 1994.8 Focusing on the Middle Byzantine period, Dagron argued along the same lines as Peeters: once the “really” multilingual provinces were lost, namely, from the seventh century onward, the empire essentially became Hellenized, with pockets of linguistic diversity at the margins—Italy, the Balkan frontier, the Arab frontier. Linguistic pluralism, Dagron argued, was no longer a function of geography and local languages but of migration and displaced groups. Dagron came to these conclusions by analyzing several types—one might say ideal types—of Byzantine men who either would have been bilingual or would have in some way engaged with more than one language. These categories of people came very directly from Dagron’s own research interests. They included ambassadors and interpreters, based largely on the Book of Ceremonies and more generally on the works of Constantine VII and descriptions of embassies; missionaries, with a focus on Cyril and Methodius and on issues of language and orthodoxy; soldiers, frontier dwellers, and prisoners of war, mentioning in particular the cases of Digenis Akritas and Pakourianos; scholars, especially in the context of intellectual exchange with the Arab world; and, finally, “the man in the street.” The first four categories were chosen as the occupational loci where engagement with other languages was necessary and therefore obvious. As in Peeters’s case, that choice reflects an underlying assumption that Greek was “Byzantium’s mother tongue,” so to speak, and that only necessity could usher in linguistic pluralism. I shall leave this discussion aside here because I would like to focus briefly on the last category, which represents the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of

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the empire. “The street” was mainly located in Constantinople. Dagron comments, “The image of Babel that inevitably looms behind the ambiguous notion of cosmopolitanism should allow us to understand that cities isolate strangers even while they welcome them. They are open externally but partitioned internally; they are multilingual in the sense that all sorts of languages are spoken, but with hardly any exchange, or then at an extremely rudimentary level of communication, which is, so to speak, infra-linguistic.”9 The internal partition in question refers to the regulations in the Book of the Eparch and to agreements with the Russians, according to which foreign visitors were not to mingle with the population at large or even with their compatriots who lived in the city (also in neighborhoods separated by origin). This reflected the authorities’ concern that foreigners—often by implication heretics or infidels—were dangerous and subversive. Citing several sources, Dagron painted a picture of medieval Constantinople divided into and organized around ethno-linguistic neighborhoods, and he concluded that the streets between them were the only place where exchange took place. Five years later, Nicolas Oikonomidès addressed the same subject and came to very different conclusions.10 For him, the “unilingualism” of Constantinople was nothing more than a façade. There was little doubt in his mind that “Constantinople and the imperial administration were the loci of a linguistic melting-pot” (le lieu d’un melting-pot linguistique).11 This is not entirely surprising: although Oikonomidès was treating the same period, he was not looking at the same evidence. He gave more weight to documentary sources, which are closer to social practice than the productions of the capital’s learned upper-class inhabitants. Examining seals, letters, and documents, he found that “a certain linguistic unity based on Greek” was gradually establishing itself in the empire. This was, he said, “recognised by the Byzantines for ideological reasons rather than reasons of linguistic training . . . ; to speak Greek—or something resembling Greek—was a way to assert one’s participation in the Empire.”12 Without pressing the point too much, Oikonomidès suggested that this was, among other things, an economic decision, as the inhabitants of the empire had a high standard of living that only the mastery

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of Greek could ensure. Thus, the linguistic unity was superficial and based on a sum of individual ambitions for social mobility. “The result of this collective attitude,” says Oikonomidès, “was that Greek, spoken more or less well, became a sort of lingua franca inside the Empire,” even as it continued, to a large extent, to be a lingua franca outside it.13 Such a statement assumes not only that Greek was not the only language spoken in Byzantine lands but also that it was, for many, a second language, and that its function within the empire was similar to the one it had in the broader eastern Mediterranean and Near East. What made those two scholars, so close in so many ways, differ in their approach to this subject? One reason is certainly their choice of sources. Dagron’s texts can be defined as normative: they emanate from a learned practice that was in constant conversation with Greek antiquity. They are imperial in nature, and they project onto the empire’s reality the obsessions of its elites: civic order, religious orthodoxy, linguistic and cultural superiority. One of the themes raised by Dagron was the lack of trust on the part of the “orthodox” Greek speakers toward those who officiated and prayed in different languages. Yet such complaints on the part of the empire’s elites had stakes that went well beyond theological correction and accuracy: they asserted linguistic legitimacy, claimed a monopoly on the expression of truth, allowed control of record keeping, and defined ethical and moral registers in correlation with cultural and linguistic identities. Arguably, the very need to assert the intellectual, linguistic, dogmatic, and moral superiority of Greek is in itself a sign that it was constantly confronted with other languages as potential competitors. As pointed out by Oikonomidès, the use and praise of Greek were above all a form of cultural allegiance—especially obvious, perhaps, in the case of people like John of Damascus, who in eighth-century Syria chose to write in Greek despite having been born outside the empire and being conversant in both Greek and Arabic. Choosing sources is not an entirely neutral activity, however. We all prefer certain types of sources to others, and we constantly make decisions on what to use and what to leave aside. We do this on the basis of our interests, which are themselves shaped by our personal and social circumstances. The divergence between Dagron and Oikonomidès admirably illustrates the importance of positionality in scholarship.

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Structurally, Dagron can be construed as the scion of an imperial center, one whose mother tongue was other people’s lingua franca. As Umberto Eco put it, he “need not worry about the multiplicity of tongues”: the one that matters is the one everyone speaks. Oikonomidès, on the other hand, came from the margins of the European empires. In Byzantine terms, he was a nomadic provincial who spoke several languages. It is not surprising that he should be much more sensitive to that same multiplicity of tongues.14 The mirage of a “Greek Byzantium” has a long history and many functions. From the late nineteenth century onward, the imperial overtones of its European construction were in perfect harmony with the national narrative of the new Greek state. The integration of Greece and Hellenism in the imagined filiation of western European identity meant—indeed, still means—that the empire’s legacy today is understood not in territorial terms but on the basis of an ethno-linguistic imperial lineage, shaped to fit the narratives of post-Ottoman national states, in the Balkans and in western Europe alike. The clear demarcation between the Orient and Hellenism, the promotion of a lingua franca and archaizing learned language to that of a mother tongue, and the adoption of the Byzantine elites’ view of themselves all combine to integrate the Byzantine empire, like the Greek state, fully and exclusively in the hegemonic history of western Europe.

Notes

This chapter’s epigraph is from Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 11. 1. See Arietta Papaconstantinou, “The Desert and the City: The Rhetoric of Savagery and Civilization in Early Byzantium,” in Identity and the Other in Byzantium, ed. Koray Durak and Ivana Jevtić (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2021), 83–92. 2. Fergus Millar, “Epilogue,” in Rome, the Greek World, and the East, vol. 3, The Greek World, the Jews, and the East, ed. Hannah Cotton and Guy M. Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 506–7. 3. I use “orientalist” in the sense of “specialist in oriental languages,” a common appellation in Italy, France, and Belgium, where such scholarship first developed.

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4. Paul Peeters, Le tréfonds oriental de l’hagiographie byzantine (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1950), 14–15. 5. Ibid., 167. 6. Hippolyte Delehaye, “Les Passions des martyrs d’Égypte,” Analecta Bollandiana 40 (1922): 148–49. My translation; emphasis added. 7. Peeters, Tréfonds, 14: “l’hellénisme . . . a dédaigné d’élever jusqu’à lui la paysannerie égyptienne.” 8. Gilbert Dagron, “Communication et stratégies linguistiques,” in Η επικοινωνία στο Βυζάντιο. Πρακτικά του Β’διεθνούς συμποσίου του Κέντρου Βυζαντινών Ερευνών, ed. N. G. Moschonas (Athens: Εθνικό Ιδρυμα Ερευνών, 1993), 81–92; Dagron, “Formes et fonctions du pluralisme linguistique à Byzance (IXe–XIIe siècle),” Travaux et Mémoires 12 (1994): 219–40. 9. Dagron, “Formes et fonctions,” 238. 10. Nicolas Oikonomidès, “L’‘unilinguisme’ officiel de Constantinople byzantine,” Σύμμεικτα 13 (1999): 9–21. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Ibid., 12: “une certain unité linguistique, sur la base du grec, était en train de s’établir dans l’Empire . . . une unité généralement reconnue par les Byzantins pour des raisons idéologiques plutôt que pour des raisons de formation linguistique . . . ; parler grec—ou quelque chose qui ressemblait au grec—était une façon d’affirmer sa participation à l’Empire.” 13. Ibid.: “Le résultat de cette attitude collective fut que le grec, plus ou moins bien parlé, devint une sorte de lingua franca à l’intérieur de l’Empire.” 14. For a broader discussion on positionality in Byzantine studies, see Helena Bodin, “Whose Byzantinism—Ours or Theirs? On the Issue of Byzantinism from a Cultural Semiotic Perspective,” in The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture Since 1500, ed. Przemysław Marciniak and Dion Smythe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 11–42.

Chapter 9

The Ethnic Process

Alexandra Vukovich Medievalists and, certainly, Byzantinists employ ethnic terminology to mark group boundaries in the Byzantine world. Ethnic markers, such as “Latins,” “Slavs,” “Romans,” or “Arabs,” not only function as descriptive markers but also shape broad ideas about people, grouping them by the intersection of geography, language, faith, custom, and race. Ethnicization (both in medieval texts and by medievalists) and the interpretation of markers of difference are often sites of generalization, essentialization, and oversimplification in medieval historiography. I will briefly explore some of the parameters of the ethnic process, by which I mean the discursive process of shaping human communities as emplaced and sharing a series of ever-shifting cultural coordinates that include elements (such as language, religion, and custom) whose combination articulates ethnicity. Here, I explore the ethnic process as it pertains to Rus, both in terms of its place within the Byzantine cosmos and as a historiographic paradigm: an inchoate basis for subsequent (nation-)states. This is, to be sure, an urgent issue: the Russian regime’s militarization of Rus as, in President Vladimir Putin’s words, the source of the “unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is a fundamental ideological basis of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, which began in February 2022.1 Although the idea was neither novel nor particularly well developed, the treatment and shaping of information about ethnicity,

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the ethnic process, has again proved its lethal potential as compelling, coercive, and creative—a process bound up with that of colonization and the colonial management of people. Before exploring the historical framework for the ethnicization of Rus, it is worth considering some of the intellectual currents that have shaped the critical evaluation of the question “What is ethnicity?” At its most basic, this term delineates perceived common characteristics within a group, whether in terms of religion, language, or social practices. There is great variation in terms of the factors that make up an “ethnic group,” especially when many ethnic markers are not distinct and can be shared by many groups, such as language or religion. Thus, ethnicity is the accumulation of a set of markers that, for a period of time, whether short or long, make salient a group identity and its distinction from other groups. Max Weber viewed ethnicity as one of his “primordial phenomena,” the importance of which would decrease as a result of modernization, industrialization, and the rise of the individual as a social category. Weber viewed alienation, resulting from the acceleration of industrial capitalism, as a means of socially dislocating groups.2 However, as both Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson showed, the ethnic process only accelerated in the twentieth century, with both colonial and postcolonial polities using new technologies to enforce ethnic and national identity and cohesion. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes, ethnic nationalism remains a political tool for grouping disparate people along commonalities, real and perceived, and one that offers a veneer of stability. Eriksen further demonstrates, using the examples of ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the role of trauma in both forming and entrenching ethnic identity and nationalism among targeted communities, even where those communities did not exist as such prior to the traumatic event.3 While no single definition firmly pins down what is meant by ethnicity, and most attempts lead to many “buts” that detract from a compelling definition, ethnic and ethnoracial reasoning are social and political forces. Sociologists such as Rogers Brubaker have questioned the very existence of group ethnic identities. What is without a doubt is that an ethnic (and ethnoracial) process exists. It can be found in premodern texts that ascribe a set of coordinates to real and imagined people, and

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it has been deployed and redeployed to materialize the national imaginary—what Stathis Gourgouris called the dream-work of the nation. Either through perceived ancestry or through assimilative naturalization, it confers citizenship privileges that allow one to avoid increasingly exclusionary and militarized national border regimes. Gourgouris observes that modern nations cannot be reduced simply to the sum of historically anchored texts, discourses, or cultural practices. They also require psychosocial investment and fulfillment (enjoyment). However, the assembly of these elements requires what Brubaker called “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” who seek to summon, invigorate, and mobilize the ethnic process.4 We have a good idea, then, of the intersection of ethnicity with nationalism and how these can form through a historical process that includes traumatic events, but ethnicity in and of itself remains elusive. Hannah Arendt writes that “the political space” (the commons) is a space of diversity and plurality, but it becomes bounded by powerful social units (such as the family) and through prejudice.5 Arendt situates the power of prejudice in prejudicial thinking, always anchored in history and thus becoming conventional (or commonplace). The shaping of knowledge and the production of historical arguments to support a prejudice inform the present basis for knowledge. Here, Arendt cites anti-Jewish racism and anti-Black racism in America as examples of historically rooted prejudicial processes, ones that gain truth value through scientific reasoning. Although the premise, outlook, and methodology behind current efforts to scientifically map historical human migration are, in terms of purpose and appearance, antithetical, they are more often antipodal, as the knowledge basis for ethnic identity and group homogeneity remains intact.6 The reproduction of the groupist logic of ethnicity as developing historically and bounding the group is queried by exploring the intersection of race and ethnicity and their dialectic. Rather than abstracting race from ethnicity, it is their intersection, as well as the diversity of outcomes this ethnoracial process engenders, that Geraldine Heng has labeled the “racial dialect,” “racial logic,” and “racial strategies” used to register difference historically.7 Previously understood racial boundaries—that is to say, what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem

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of the color-line”—are evaluated in tandem with the discursive logic of race and racialization, with social and economic dimensions.8 Thus, slavery can be viewed as an institution closely associated with racial formation, both in creating new ethnoracial boundaries and in dissolving previous ones, a logic and a process indispensable for labor exploitation and for colonialism. It is the discursive regime of knowledge, instantiated by the colonial production of ideas, that produces new ethnoracial boundaries, those that facilitate and naturalize processes of exploitation and domination. Incidentally, a similar logic is being applied today in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, where, in a delusional attempt to historically embed aggressor and aggressed, the racist notion of “oriental despotism” has reemerged to emplace Ukraine (albeit contingently) within the European oikoumene by contrasting a purportedly Asiatic, despotic, premodern Russia—depicted, according to this racist worldview, as the scion of the Mongol Empire and thereby inheriting its supposed brutality and irrationality—with a proto-democratic Kyivan Rus.9 Here, historically rooted ethnoracial markers are deployed to quite literally orientalize the enemy by adopting a colonialist logic to naturalize and reify difference. Historical documents are central to this type of reification and, as we will see, the ethnic process as a colonialist process fits with the logic of empire, including in the Byzantine period. In Middle Byzantine sources, Rus is either a place or a people. Sometimes the designation is assumed based on context. For example, in the Taktika of Leo VI, we find “the northern and Scythian peoples” (τῶν βορειοτέρων καὶ Σκυθικῶν ἐθνῶν) who, like the Turks, use ambush as their military strategy.10 Here, we have a classical designation (Scythians), a more recent ethnonym (Turks), and a cumulative designation (northern tribes). The convention for translators is to footnote Scythians as Rus, as the tenth century saw the multiplication of references to Rus in Byzantine sources as allies, enemies, and trade partners. It is a fair designation, but the presence of associated “northern tribes,” which could likewise encompass the Rus, and the early date of the composition (late ninth or early tenth century) render the association less obvious. In some ways, the translator makes an ex post facto decision to attribute to Rus the prominence it would only have later.

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The classicizing word choice is both a rhetorical convention and an abstraction, one that defies genre, as military treatises and chronicles may use Scythians (or Hyperborean Scythians).11 By contrast, Psellos’s panegyric dedicated to Constantine Monomachos, a work of classicizing rhetoric, identifies the Rus by name: in describing the forces from “Old Rome” and from the East that made up the rebel army in southern Italy, he noted that “the Rus contingent was not the smallest” (καὶ τῆς Ῥωσικῆς μοίρας οὐκ ἐλάχιστον).12 Tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantine sources on Rus cluster around the period before textual production began in Rus, but they correspond to the period of intense economic relations across the Black Sea before Rus commenced its initial colonial expansion out of the Volga region and into Eurasia. Byzantine-produced information about Rus suggests the latter’s subordinate position, but one that does not appear to have been characterized by a tributary relationship or the threat of imperial assimilation. Incursions from Rus into Byzantine territory during this period were short-lived and very likely provoked Byzantine diplomacy (via bishops, trade, and technology) rather than reprisals. Thus, the shaping and treatment of information about Rus were undertaken by a literate, oftentimes Constantinopolitan, and ecclesiastical elite that viewed Rus euphemistically as a sometimes threatening, sometimes generic, northern Other. The statist logic of these depictions situates Rus as a periphery that produced trade goods, slaves, and limited exchanges. Byzantine source material places limitations on our knowledge of Rus and its interactions with the Byzantine Empire. The reproduction of Byzantine cultural artifacts (the translation of texts or the building of cross-in-square churches) at times overshadows another colonial and boundary-making process, one internal to the expanding territory of early Rus. As a place, Rus is most often associated with river routes, followed by the formation of fortified towns and their dependencies that gained territorial cohesion (at the expense of other groups, such as the Polovtsi) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The story of the population of Rus is one of a diversity of social and political groups, a “concatenation of peoples, routes, and hazards,” according to Jonathan Shepard.13 The story of Rus is often told from the perspective of the

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Viking diaspora that circulated along the river arteries. Less often, it is told from the perspective of local groups that practiced slash-andburn agriculture in the interior (away from the much-discussed river routes), those who practiced herding and planting, and even less so from the perspective of the Eurasian nomadic groups that continued to feature in the chronicles of Rus until the advent of the Mongols. Although the role of long-distance trade was instrumental in the settlement (or emergence) of Rus, the identity of the traders remains obscure. The production and assemblage of new hybrid artifacts in Viking-age graves and hoards reflect both a process of distinction of certain small groups from the Viking pack as well as the advantageous position of Rus along trade routes, as evidenced by burial goods that included Byzantine and Islamic coins and textiles with Baltic and central Asian designs.14 This diversity of experience is often evaluated according to whatever interaction a given historian wishes to highlight. It is only through the literature of Rus that group cohesion becomes salient, in particular through conversion to Eastern Christianity by the Rus elite in 988/989. Such details are found in the locally produced chronicles of Rus, an agglomeration of information organized annalistically, with Byzantine chronographic material, Old Norse saga excerpts, oral traditions, and local variations on established Eastern Christian genres. Of these, the Primary Chronicle (Повесть временных лет) is the oldest—having been compiled in the late eleventh or twelfth century—and best-studied text. The Primary Chronicle offers an ex post facto rationalization for the dominance of the Rus over other local groups and offers several legendary tales for their emergence, including Riurik the Varangian and the founding of Kyiv by Saint Andrew. Historians often describe the ethnic process of Rus by comparing the information contained in the Primary Chronicle with archaeological material and other historiographic traditions (most often Byzantine or Arabic). However, this methodology elides the chronological chasm that separates the compilation of the Primary Chronicle from the early period it covers, further skipping over the internal logic of the chronicles of Rus: namely, the process of distinction whereby an elite gained dominance, forming Rus. Thus, not only does the Primary Chronicle offer a historically specific snapshot, at least a century after the earliest events it describes, but it also serves

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to delineate the social conditions that initiated the development of the princely elite, an ethnopatriarchal elite. To a large extent, the ethnic process presented in the chronicles of Rus is one in which identity is mediated by martial power, controlled by men. Within the emergent space of Rus in northeastern Eurasia, the ethnic process, already (albeit furtively) glimpsed in Byzantine sources, articulated a colonial process that was underway. The emergence of a Christianized princely elite that controlled a multipolar series of fortified towns was neither entirely linear nor exclusive. However, the ethnic and national formation of Rus as a precursor to the rise of distinct nation-states in northeastern Europe has been a mainstay of magisterial regional histories stretching into the modern period. Serhii Plokhy’s comprehensive and critical Origins of the Slavic Nations, for example, takes a transhistorical approach to the question of the ethnic and national genesis of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus from the tenth to the mid-eighteenth century.15 Unlike the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who posited that modern Ukrainians descended from a pre-Christian tribe called the Antes, Plokhy positions his project as a “modernist” one, rejecting a “primordialist” or ethnoessentialist view that sought to embed ethnicity in the medieval period and prove continuity. Interestingly, Plokhy notes that many medievalists who currently work on early Rus reject a post-medieval resonance for medieval identities and territorial entities.16 Nevertheless, he writes that “there is little doubt in my mind that the Kyivan-era project involving the construction of a single identity had a profound impact on the subsequent identities of all the ethnic groups that constituted the Kyivan state.”17 Plokhy consistently maintains that premodern textual production was undertaken by elites associated with institutions that had a stake in sustaining certain identities over others. He also notes other relational modes of “groupness,” such as the family or clan, but argues that these should not be taken to mean that “ethnonational identity did not exist before that period or did not contribute significantly to the formation of collective and individual self-consciousness in premodern societies.”18 It is this modernist-inflected unwillingness to cross the proverbial Rubicon of nationalist methodology for the premodern period that leads to overdetermination in his chapter on early Rus. Thus,

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while Plokhy very clearly states that the chronicles of Rus are compilatory works produced by a literate elite, he posits a narrative wherein a large cluster of burial sites near Kyiv corresponds to the “retinue culture” of the Polianian tribe, the size and importance of which the Primary Chronicle sought to downplay in its ex post facto narrative. The paucity of information about this group opens up a space for speculation and imagination, but it also demonstrates the irretrievable gaps between medieval literary monuments and extant material culture. To a large degree, the Primary Chronicle is transparent about its aims: to recount a Christian history of the princely elite. Whatever ethnic cohesion can be found in its narrative could be derived from any number of coordinates, such as a unity of enterprise: to engage in trade and settlement and to obtain tribute. The numerous names in the early portion of the Primary Chronicle, such as the Chuds, the Merians, and the Krivichians, present a diversity of identities for elusive groups, many of which subsequently disappear from the narrative. The choice of Rus as standing for the collective reflects unity of purpose among a certain literate elite. It is understandable that a glut of source material describing a highly successful ruling strategy over an ever-expanding network of fortified towns and polities should attract attention. The colonial process characterized by the “expansion of Rus” is often articulated glibly, as a process of naturalized territorial expansion, which the earliest written sources of Rus discursively elevated to render colonial expansion inevitable and divinely ordained. Emplacedness is valorized by chronicle accounts, lacking as they did the propensity to describe spaces and inhabitants beyond the dominant boundary-making framework of the state and its territorialized polities and people. Thus, there are very few references to the Eurasian space beyond the polities of Rus, often referred to according to a dominant river system, such as “the Ugra.” Historians of Rus extend this ancestry westwards, excluding the steppes and steppe nomadic societies (which eventually came to dominate the region) from national storytelling. It is a result of the boundary-making technology of the state form, then, that Rus / the Rus (rather than the Berendei or Chernye Klobuki / Black Caps) would stand in for the proto-national community as the ancestors of the Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians, a methodological mainstay that has

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now produced its logical violent conclusion in the form of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is unsurprising, since the ethnic process has always been a political process, and ethnicization via Rus chronicles only began with the study of the chronicles as ethnographic sources during the expansion of the Russian Empire as a colonial project. It was in the eighteenth century that the ideology of historical continuity was developed to posit a clear lineage for the people of the western Russian Empire (commissioned by the ruling elite) as distinct from the people of the territories acquired through the colonization of Siberia. The Normanist–Anti-Normanist debate disputed the theory that western Russians descended from Scandinavian settlers (Northmen/Normans) by positing an Indigenous line of descent from “the Slavs.”19 This project sought to elide the period of Mongol suzerainty and posit a linear narrative of ethnic and cultural distinction. The debate had obvious racial undertones and set into motion a process of racialization that would eventually pseudoscientifically embed a set of criteria to differentiate ethnoracial groups in the Soviet Union. Although the Petrograd Bureau of Eugenics of the Russian Academy of Sciences focused on biological criteria, the purpose of these investigations was to retrofit scientific data into long-standing social categories. The social hierarchy was formed by an ethnic process that looked to history, especially medieval history, for the ethnic categories that gave meaning to these data sets. The reception and interpretation of ethnic markers in the sources for early Rus reflect the many entanglements and permutations of political organization, philosophical notions, and the shaping of (ethno-)(nation-)states. The markers and determining factors for ethnicity are malleable and are easily challenged once set.20 This is what makes the ethnic process a discursive asset of state power and, by extension, colonial power. In the medieval period, the literate and Byzantinized clerisy of Rus controlled the written word, a technology of state power that narrativized the ascendance of an ethnopatriarchal elite, the righteous protagonists of the colonial project known as Rus. In Rus sources, Byzantium forms a narrative substrate in the form of chronography, liturgy, and remote spiritual ancestry. Often vague and mostly contingent, the historic relationship between early Rus and the Byzantine Empire lent itself to heritage

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formation. Thus, the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople could (and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did) legitimate imperial enterprise by evoking its Byzantine heritage, using its embassy in Constantinople to coordinate the removal of Byzantine manuscripts and other monuments to Russia. Here, the role of Russian scholarship on the Orthodox world, including the Balkans, was to use an ethnically inflected knowledge regime around “co-religionists and co-ethnics” (edinovertsy i edinoplenniki) of which Russia, as the intellectual and imperial center, would be the leader. The ethnic process anchors identity in place and (a remote) time, obfuscating the role of material, intellectual, and technological power deployed to initiate and instantiate this transhistorical process. And yet, historically, collectivities have not had the privilege of self-identification. As Benedict Anderson points out in his “three paradoxes,” nationality has become a universal sociocultural concept in the modern world, where everyone is expected to have a nationality and, increasingly, assert an ethnic identity.21 The ethnic process thus functions more and more effectively in the arsenal of biopolitical technologies that states, including modern postcolonial states, continue to use as an institutional sorting mechanism to determine who gets to be “the People.”

Notes

1. Vladimir Putin (attributed to), “Об историческом единстве русских и украинцев (On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians),” 12 July 2021, http://​kremlin​.ru​/events​/president​/news​/66181. 2. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) (1921; Tübingen: Mohr, 1980). 3. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto, 2002); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 2016). 4. Stathis Gourgouris, “Notes on the Nation’s Dream-Work,” Qui Parle 7, no. 1 (1993): 81–101; Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” Archives européens de sociologie 43, no. 2 (2002): 163–89. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005). 6. One of the ongoing tensions within medieval DNA projects that seek to map human migration in the premodern world has to do with the ethnicization

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of data sets. Fundamentally, the biodata from burial sites are vague and offer a broad regional history of migration with limited potential for interpretation. Often, the interpretation of data sets, viewed in conjunction with grave goods, leads to the attribution of ethnic identities—Wends, Slavs, and so on—that could never be surmised from the biodata alone and only contingently asserted using grave goods. See Florin Curta, “Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent Perspectives,” Journal of Archaeological Research 21, no. 4 (2008): 371–402. 7. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1. 9. Yaroslav Trofimov, “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past,” 6 July 2018, https://​ www​.wsj​.com​/amp​/articles​/russias​-turn​-to​-its​-asian​-past​-1530889247. 10. Leo VI, Taktika 14.38, ed. and trans. George T. Dennis (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 312. 11. Anthony Kaldellis tackles Byzantine ethnographic writing about others and about themselves. The definitions offered derive from Byzantine texts that articulated a worldview to map out new peoples, often according to an ethnographic tradition inherited from antiquity, an effort that ceased in the Middle Byzantine period. See Anthony Kaldellis, Ethnography After Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 12. Psellos, Orationes Panegyricae 2.719, ed. George T. Dennis (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1994), 46. 13. Jonathan Shepard, “Rus’,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 369. 14. Iuliia Stepanova provides a catalogue of grave goods unearthed along the Upper Volga, the area of Rus, wherein the variety of the provenance of grave goods escapes cultural homogenization. The excavation sites are treated regionally because of the modern and national excavation context. The burials and grave goods display both internal diversity and general similarity with the Baltics and probably would with sites in other directions, had the data been available for study. See Iuliia Stepanova, The Burial Dress of the Rus’ in the Upper Volga Region (Late 10th–13th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 15. Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16. For example, V. Ia. Petrukhin, “‘Etnichnost’ v drevnei Rusi,” in Vostochnaia Evropa v drenosti i srednevekov’e, ed. E. A. Melnikova et al. (Moscow: Institute of History RAN, 2017), 190–94, or Oleksiy Tolochko, “The Primary Chronicle’s ‘Ethnography’ Revisited: Slavs and Varangians in the Middle Dnieper Region and the Origin of Rus’ State,” in Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Ildar Garipzanov, Patrick Geary, and Przemysław Urbańczyk (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 169–88.

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17. Plokhy, Origins of the Slavic Nations, 2. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. On this question, see ibid., 134–53. 20. W. E. B. Du Bois concluded his search for an African ethnoracial type with this: “The Negro has no history, culture, or ability, for the simple fact that such human beings as have history and evidence culture and ability are not Negroes.” So, the moment one begins investigating the constituent elements of a given social identity, it becomes clear that within a group of people, no individual ever corresponds to a representative “type.” Du Bois continues, “We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not to physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts.” He thereby makes salient what Benedict Anderson would later assert for nationalism: namely, that social identities are an abstraction based on a historical snapshot, one that determines political and social status and entrenches identity, often from without. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1915), 83, 85. 21. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–7.

Chapter 10

Publication and Citation Practices Enclosure, Extractivism, and Gatekeeping in Byzantine Studies

Matthew Kinloch In a recent paper, Dan-el Padilla Peralta examined the publication and citation practices of three prominent North American classics journals to lay the foundations for exposing and demystifying the anti-Black and racially exclusionary genealogies that white Euro-American classicists have invented for themselves and their field.1 Byzantine studies urgently requires similar treatment. The work of classicists such as Padilla offers more than just a useful starting point for Byzantinists, given the closely related and often coeval development of classical and Byzantine studies as scholarly disciplines. Byzantine studies, as this volume’s introduction sets out, has yet to confront (and in some cases even to fully articulate) the kind of canonical genealogies that Padilla critiques in classical studies.2 The project of confronting the imperial and colonial implications of Byzantine studies and fashioning an anti-racist and anti-imperial field will require— as a first step among many—a critical reassessment of its disciplinary

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genealogies. Such a project must interrogate what it means for Byzantine studies, as a scholarly field, to have emerged from early modern western European anxieties concerning the Ottomans and the coeval development of French and German imperialist projects, as is considered in Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff’s chapter in this volume.3 At the same time, it must contend with the fact that Byzantine studies was also pioneered within and framed by later imperialist and colonialist discourses by scholars such as Edward Gibbon. Finally, any reckoning must confront the material inequalities rife in contemporary academia and the neoliberal university. The Byzantine Studies Association of North America’s call to begin this work, which precipitated the workshop from which this volume emerged, represents an important starting point on both counts, even if real change will require “focused and sustained action.”4 With this starting point and the objective of laying the groundwork for a different kind of Byzantine studies in mind, I follow Padilla and his interlocutors in calling for the interrogation of publication and citation practices in Byzantine studies, both historically and today. There can be no critical historiography of Byzantine studies without the systematic analysis of who, and what, has been published under its auspices— and the citational afterlives of those publications. Detailed quantitative and qualitative examination of publication and citation practices over time is needed. This analysis will be most fruitful in publications capable of demonstrating change (and continuity). The obvious starting point is the journals that have traditionally constituted the “main organs of communication” in the discipline—notably, but by no means exhaustively, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Échos d’Orient / Études byzantines / Revue des études byzantines, Byzantinoslavica, Vizantijskij Vremennik, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Byzantion, and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies—and perhaps also the proceedings of the quinquennial congresses of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines.5 Other forms of publication offer themselves up less obviously for diachronic study, but publication series such as the Byzantina Sorbonensia and the proceedings of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies or Dumbarton Oaks symposia offer possible frameworks for identifying meaningful change over time.

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The Demographics of Publication Analysis must first focus on who is published. The detailed analysis of the ethnicity and race, citizenship, gender and sexuality, institutional affiliation and institutional wealth, class position, and international mobility of those published in Byzantine studies will provide essential groundwork for identifying disciplinary patterns. This study can begin by drawing on the rich body of literature regarding publication and citation practices in journals in the humanities and, in particular, the social sciences. The increasingly detailed and interdisciplinary study of gender inequality in journal publication and citation practices offers an implementable model for the examination of a wider range of intersecting inequalities in Byzantine studies scholarship.6 Recent studies of the journal Anatolian Studies and a range of classical studies publications likewise offer useful examples, in more closely aligned fields, of how such a project might be carried out in Byzantine studies.7 Closer inspection is, of course, likely to demonstrate that Byzantine studies participates in Euro-American academia’s trademark elitism, chauvinism, and inaccessibility, although we cannot know what other stories it will tell until serious labor is committed to its study. A brief survey of contributors to the most recent ten issues of Dumbarton Oaks Papers (2011–20), for example, reveals that male authors account for 64.8 percent of the journal’s research articles.8 When compared to the journal’s first ten issues (1941–57), where this figure was 94.2 percent, these pilot statistics can be made to tell the predictable and as yet incomplete story of the slow inclusion of female scholars in a central disciplinary organ. At the same time, the statistical anomaly caused by a thematic section on Byzantine and early Islamic furnishing textiles (2019), without which the percentage of male contributions would have risen to 69.4 percent, illustrates one of many gendered rifts between the discipline’s various subdisciplines and the necessity for a more detailed examination of the available data. Given the relative ease of collecting data on the gender of authors, this represents an excellent starting point for analysis of the demographics of publication in the field. However, if carried out in isolation from the demographics of race, class, wealth, and mobility, it will be of limited value.

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The Politics of Citation The call to action by women art historians of color Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Ananda Cohen-Aponte sets out the case for the second half of this project. They argue convincingly that “citation is political. The temporal breadth, linguistic diversity, intra- and interdisciplinary range, and demographics of our citations have tremendous impact on how scholarship is disseminated and who gets recognized. Exclusionary and self-referential citational practices produce distorted historiographies of the field that erase or elide important interventions created from the margins.”9 Citation practices map directly onto the demographics of publication in obvious ways, and they must be identified and meaningfully challenged through what Sifford and CohenAponte call the reevaluation of our citational footprint. It is not just about what kinds of people are being cited but about what types of publication are deemed worthy of citation.10 It is impossible in this short piece to adequately cover all the dynamics of citational politics relevant to Byzantine studies. Some areas for future consideration will include the tendency toward self-citation, which seems to correlate closely with authors’ age, and toward the citation of an author’s friends and collaborators.11 This of course intersects with the over-citation of senior scholars, even where no intellectual debt is owed, in order to signal guild membership and authority. However, particularly relevant in Byzantine studies is the question of linguistic diversity raised by Sifford and Cohen-Aponte. The polyphony of the modern states and institutions in which Byzantine texts and material culture are studied today will be essential to any discussion of citational politics in Byzantine studies. Serious attention must be paid to the tendency of scholars within certain language groups to occupy self-referential scholarly debates.12 The increasing dominance of English as the academic lingua franca at the expense of other western European languages, notably German, French, and Italian, is perhaps the most obvious story—one symbolically signaled by the recent re-/dual-naming of the Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik as the Austrian Journal of Byzantine Studies. However, the tendency for Turkish-, Greek-, and Slavic-language publications and scholarly discourses to be overlooked is perhaps more important to the theme of this book.

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While Anglophone journals such as DOP, BMGS, and GRBS generally only accept publications in English, Francophone and Germanophone journals are often more open, but typically only to Germanic and Romance languages. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the most recent author guidelines of the Revue des études byzantines, which welcomes articles “in French and in other European languages,” specifically German, English, Spanish, and Italian, before explicitly stating that “the review does not publish articles in Greek or Slavic languages.”13 The implication here that Greek and Slavic languages are somehow not European, and that this has consequences for their legitimacy as languages of scholarship, demonstrates precisely why these dynamics deserve the attention of the field. Despite my disinclination to argue for anything, Byzantium included, on the basis of its “Europeanness,” it is an idiosyncratic definition of Europe that does not include Greece or anywhere in which Slavic languages are spoken. While acknowledging the lively community of Byzantinists in Spain, not least in Valladolid and Madrid, the inclusion of Spanish as a language of publication, as it is for example in both REB and Byzantion, is a curious anomaly for Byzantine studies given the relative paucity of publications willing to accept contributions in Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, or Serbo-Croat. The politics of “Europe” and languages is also discussed at greater length elsewhere in the volume, in articles by Kaldellis and Papaconstantinou. Of course, individual scholars cannot be expected to acquire fluency in every language in which Byzantium has been studied. Even the many extremely gifted linguists among us, and I do not count myself among their number, participate in and are formed by the linguistic and scholarly dynamics of their training. However, if Byzantine studies is to articulate its own historiography and confront its imperialist and colonial implications, the linguistic politics of citation will be central. A further question of citational politics that bears mention is the tendency toward inward-facing citation and enclosure, intertwined with an extractivist relationship to outward citation. Beyond extending the survey of demographics from the authorial title page to footnotes and bibliographies, the examination of citational practices will illuminate other significant problems in Byzantine studies: its relative isolationism and its tendency toward theoretical and methodological conservatism. Padilla

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began his aforementioned lecture by analyzing the results of a small quantitative pilot survey. As well as demonstrating the unrepresentative profile of contributors to the three flagship classical studies journals, he also showed that the papers in these journals overwhelmingly engaged in what he terms “inward-facing” citational practices, with 80 to 90 percent of the citations in the issues he examined referencing other classical studies publications. In practice, determining whether a citation should be labeled as “internal” or “external” is so arbitrary that quantitative data, as Padilla notes, should be given limited weight. My own idiosyncratic pilot survey of the most recent ten issues of Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, and Dumbarton Oaks Papers suggests that prominent North American and western European Byzantine studies journals are situated within a similar range to that offered by Padilla, although I would hesitate to make any stronger claim. While such preliminary observations, which most Byzantinists could intuit, require verification through systematic study, it is worth thinking through the implications of a discipline organized around inward-facing citation. Byzantine studies remains relatively undertheorized, albeit unevenly. Even where recourse to the research of scholars in other disciplinary silos seems to offer obvious potentials, it is seldom deployed by Byzantinists. For example, debates concerning the identity, ethnicity, romanitas (“Roman-ness”), and Hellenism of the Byzantine Empire’s inhabitants that have come to the fore in recent years are strikingly inward-facing and often bear a surprisingly limited citational footprint of critical theories of nationalism, identity, race, and colonialism. The citation of critical theory, when it does occur, is often limited to somewhat outdated canonical works—such as Edward Said’s Orientalism or Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities—which are regularly invoked without much sustained engagement beyond a commonsense understanding of the famous titles of these works.14 In some cases, even such talismanic citations fail to penetrate the citational practices of Byzantine studies. This is exemplified by the remarkable absence of references to Judith Butler’s oeuvre, despite the increasing proliferation of the term “gender” in Byzantine studies over recent years.15 Although interdisciplinarity has been turned into another tired checkbox in the perpetual grant proposal that is the neoliberal university, the

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concept of interdisciplinarity—to the extent that it can be made to mean the undoing of disciplinary silos and gatekeeping practices—still has something to offer. The inward-facing citational practices of Byzantine studies are part of the project identified by Carolyn Biltoft as “scholarly enclosure,” whereby scholars seek to take ownership of “fields”—the parallel of the agricultural term and scholarly metaphor is developed by Padilla—from which they can extract both status and capital.16 This plea for genuine interdisciplinarity should not be taken, as it often is, as a plea for new supplementary methodologies. On the contrary, the fetishization of methodologies, and their workmanlike application as tools, is part of the problem. The real potential of interdisciplinarity is not to create additional ways of asking the same questions but rather to challenge the foundational assumptions that have undergirded, framed, and restricted research. Outward-facing research, for example, offers the potential to find alternatives to Byzantine historiography’s foundational positivist/empiricist accumulative knowledge framework. If we are in need of a methodology, it is thus Jack Halberstam’s “queer scavenger methodology,” conceived of as the refusal of “the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence.”17 Stepping outside the disciplinary confines of Byzantine studies and its subfields, however, must be done with care. Padilla has highlighted the pitfalls in classical studies of an overly extractivist approach to the work of other disciplines. What will be particularly important for Byzantine studies—and here I am particularly thinking of my own specialization, Byzantine history—is to resist an interdisciplinarity that either appropriates only the terminology of or only the methodologies associated with critical approaches. As Kalle Pihlainen has observed more generally, (disciplinary) history has the tendency to institutionalize and domesticate radical approaches and denude their critical and radical potential, as in the cases of microhistory and women’s history.18 Such processes of domestication and institutionalization can already be seen in Byzantine studies, perhaps most clearly in its incorporation of gender into the positivist framework of its quest to accumulate knowledge about the Byzantine past. This is a problem of which those contributing to the current volume must also be aware. Lazy uses of the terminology of decolonization that reduce it to metaphor and cheap

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comparisons with the histories of modern imperial states present similar dangers of domestication, institutionalization, and co-optation.19

Suggestions Individual scholars need to (re)evaluate their own citational footprints and those of the scholarship they read. They must also consider who and what they want to cite—if they actually owe that publication an intellectual debt or if they are merely signaling guild membership. It is time to consider, when stepping outside the safety of Byzantine studies, not only what we can take but also what our work might give back. The discipline at large must commit to the systematic study of the publication and citational practices that have constituted the field. Wholesale commitment to this project is essential for a critical historiography of Byzantine studies. Institutions must put time, money, and energy into examining the practices of their flagship publications. Here, well-financed institutions in western Europe and North America must take the lead in paying back with action, as well as words, the decades of status and capital that they have accumulated on the basis of these inequalities.

Notes

1. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “Darkness Visible: The Haunted House of Classics” (lecture, All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years, Stanford Humanities Centre, 2 November 2020), available at Stanford Humanities Center, “Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Darkness Visible: The Haunted House of Classics,” 3 November 2020, YouTube video, https://​youtu​.be​/C5d0kMOaSak. 2. There is, for example, no equivalent to the text that Padilla uses as a case study to make his argument: John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship: From the Sixth Century B.C. to the End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 3. See also Agostino Pertusi, Storiografia umanistica e mondo bizantino (Palermo: Istituto siciliano di studi bizantini e neohellenici, 1967). 4. Here I follow the call for disciplinary change by art historian women of color, themselves citing the Anti-Racism Digital Library. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, “A Call to Action,” Art Journal 78 (2019): 118; Anita S. Coleman, Anti-Racism Digital Library website, accessed 1 March 2021, https://​ sacred​.omeka​.net.

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5. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack, “Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. 6. Rebecca Pearse, James N. Hitchcock, and Helen Keane, “Gender, Inter/disciplinarity and Marginality in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Comparison of Six Disciplines,” Women’s Studies International Forum 72 (2018): 109–26; Dawn Langan Teele and Kathleen Thelen, “Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science,” Political Science and Politics 50, no. 2 (2017): 433–47. 7. Roberta Stewart and Dominic Machado, “Progress and Precarity: 150 Years of TAPA,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 149, no. 2 (2019): 39–60; Naoíse Mac Sweeney, “Anatolian Studies: Diversity and Inclusivity in Archaeological Research and Publishing” (paper presented at the Anatolian Studies Virtual Seminar Series, 21 July 2020), available at British Institute at Ankara, “Anatolian Studies: Diversity and Inclusivity in Archaeological Research and Publishing,” 21 July 2020, YouTube video, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com​/watch?v​=MuS6SBP8WqA. 8. Gender was identified from the personal pronouns used by authors in their articles and elsewhere and is meant as an indicator. 9. Sifford and Cohen-Aponte, “Call to Action,” 118. 10. Both Padilla (“Darkness Visible”) and Sifford and Cohen-Aponte (“Call to Action”) identify online resources and oral presentations as important citational lacunae. 11. Scott Hutson, “Self-Citation in Archaeology: Age, Gender, Prestige, and the Self,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13 (2006): 1–18. 12. For a detailed example of Anglophone trends in education studies, see Andreas Fejes and Erik Nylander, “The Economy of Publications and Citations in Educational Research: What About the ‘Anglophone Bias’?,” Research in Education 99, no. 1 (2017): 19–30. 13. “Normes editoriales,” Revue des études byzantines, updated February 2016, https://​www​.icp​.fr​/medias​/fichier​/normes​-reb​-2016–1​_1456749832337​-pdf?: “Elle accueille des articles rédigés en français et dans d’autres langues européennes (allemand, anglais, espagnol, italien). La revue ne publie pas d’articles en langues grecque et slaves.” 14. On these canonical texts, see Yannis Stouraitis, “Is Byzantinism an Orientalism? Reflections on Byzantium’s Constructed Identities and Debated Ideologies,” in Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World, ed. Yannis Stouraitis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 15. Jules Gleeson has recently observed that the first citation of Judith Butler that she could find in a Byzantine studies journal was from 2014, although this followed earlier citations in edited volumes and monographs. Jules Gleeson, “Bringing Research of the Byzantine World Up to Speed with Post-Butler Gender Theory” (seminar, New Critical Approaches to the Byzantine World Network Webinar Series, 18 October 2019), https://​w ww​.torch​.ox​.ac​.uk​/event​ /bringing​-research​-of​-the​-byzantine​-world​-up​-to​-speed​-with​-post​-butler​-0;

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Charis Messis, Review of Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society ed. by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland, Catholic Historical Review 101, no. 1 (2015): 148–49. 16. Carolyn N. Biltoft, “Against Scholarly Enclosures: Reconsidering the Art and Economics of Review,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1, no. 1 (2019): 231–40. 17. J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 13. 18. Kalle Pihlainen, “The End of Oppositional History?,” Rethinking History 15, no. 4 (2011): 463–88. 19. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this reference and a correction to my own tendency toward metaphor.

Part 4

How Is Byzantine Art (Re)produced?

Chapter 11

The South Kensington Museum, Byzantine Egyptian Textiles, and Art-Historical Imperialism

Arielle Winnik In 1886, the South Kensington Museum—renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899—purchased 291 textiles from Akhmim in Upper Egypt. It was the museum’s first major acquisition of material from Egypt’s Byzantine period. The period in which the textiles were acquired coincides with the early years of the British occupation of Egypt (1882–1956). In the late nineteenth century, European imperialism was deeply intertwined with the collecting and display of Egyptian objects. In this essay, I explore how the treatment of Byzantine Egyptian textiles at the South Kensington Museum related to British imperial policy. The study and display of these objects disconnected them from their original functional contexts so as to maximize their usefulness for the British design industry. As such, the treatment of

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the textiles mirrored broader colonial policy, wherein imperial powers mined occupied territories of materials for the economic and cultural gain of the metropole.

“A Schoolroom for Everyone” From their earliest assembly, the collections of the South Kensington Museum were considered of national import. The museum, which was originally known as the Museum of Manufacturers, was founded in 1852 in the wake of the famed Great Exhibition the previous year. The Great Exhibition showcased innovations in technology and design with the aim of promoting British manufacturing on an international stage. Albert, prince consort of Queen Victoria and a major benefactor of the Great Exhibition, advocated for the creation of a permanent institution—inspired by the Exhibition—that would teach the public about the arts and sciences. The museum’s first director, Henry Cole, described the museum as a “schoolroom for everyone,” emphasizing its educational mandate, with a broader aim of bolstering British manufacturing’s clout in international markets.1 In the nineteenth century, the world was undergoing a textile revolution. Textiles began to be produced in immense quantities in large factories to meet the demands of the new department stores, which kept stocks of materials on site. The textile collections of the South Kensington Museum were meant to teach designers, students, manufacturers, and consumers how to recognize and produce good design. The museum sought to assemble a comprehensive collection, with material from diverse times and places to serve as didactic tools. In their quest to delve deeply into the history of textile design and production, agents of the South Kensington Museum turned to archaeological excavations for authentic examples of ancient textiles.

Collecting Egypt and the Colonial Project From the beginnings of the modern field of Egyptology, the study of Egyptian art was deeply associated with European imperial ambitions. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte led a French military campaign to Egypt.

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In true Enlightenment fashion, the mission was both political and cultural in scope. The mission aimed to establish French economic power in the region, impede access to India by rival Britain, and collect evidence of the ancient world. When Napoleon’s armies failed in their mission, other European powers scrambled to control the region. As Christina Riggs has shown, throughout the nineteenth century, European nations played out their rivalries through the collection and display of Egyptian art.2 The first ancient Egyptian objects of monumental scale to reach Britain were seized from the French, amplifying their political import. The antiquities were sent to the British Museum, an institution owned by the state and located in London, the very center of the British Empire. They were a trophy for the metropole, marking a triumph over rivals in Europe and beyond. Antiquities were not the only products that Europeans collected from Egypt to demonstrate imperial authority. In the burgeoning global economy of the late nineteenth century, national industries were essential to geopolitical power—and industry depended on access to materials and markets to thrive.3 As a result, European nations, including Britain, sparred for control over material-rich regions to support their booming manufacturing sectors. From the mid-nineteenth century, Britain’s textile mills, concentrated around the city of Manchester in northern England, wove half the world’s cotton cloth. Since cotton did not grow in the British Isles, manufacturers needed to acquire the material from elsewhere. For decades, cotton imports to Britain had come from the southern United States, where enslaved people undertook the grueling labor required to harvest the crop. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, however, the American cotton supply swiftly dwindled. This demand was met by Egyptian producers. Poor Egyptians worked the cotton fields, laboring on plantations that belonged to wealthy landowners. While Egypt exported just 600,000 kantars of cotton in 1861, that number had more than doubled to nearly 1,300,000 kantars just two years later.4 By 1899, it had risen to as many as 6,500,000 kantars.5 When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, its primary interest was the region’s strategic location en route to its imperial holdings in India, but the cotton industry was also of vital importance. Britain needed

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to ensure the economic stability of Egypt to supply the textile mills of Manchester. The importance of Egyptian cotton to British manufacturing was an essential factor informing the collection and display of Byzantine Egyptian textiles by the South Kensington Museum—an institution dedicated to enhancing British design and manufacturing in response to the shifting geopolitics of the industrial era and European imperialism.

Byzantine Egyptian Textiles at the South Kensington Museum In line with the South Kensington Museum’s mandate to educate the public and enhance industry, administrators and scholars believed the Byzantine Egyptian textiles acquired in 1886 were valuable for their iconography, which provided rich inspiration for designers. In a memo concerning the acquisition, Thomas Armstrong, director for art, noted that the collection was “of the greatest interest as much from the decorative as from the archaeological point of view.”6 As was common practice in the museum, an artist, in this instance the renowned painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, inspected the textiles and consulted on the acquisition. During this period, Alma-Tadema also designed costumes and furniture. That museum administrators engaged an artist practicing both fine and decorative arts demonstrates that they connected the importance of the textile collection to contemporary artistic practice. Indeed, in an 1888 catalogue of textiles in the museum, Alan S. Cole writes of the Byzantine Egyptian textiles acquired in 1886: “Shedding new light upon a development of certain artistic textile manufactures and processes, and illustrating survivals and modifications of older ornament, the specimens are of peculiar value in a museum of art manufactures.”7 The material, then, was valued as ornamental specimens to be used by emerging designers. The manner in which the textiles were displayed in the South Kensington Museum emphasized these ornamental features. Many of the objects consisted of single motifs that had been cut from larger textiles before the material entered the museum. According to a pamphlet of 1876 that describes the museum’s display cases, textiles could be

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held in individual mounted frames; pivot racks, which displayed multiple frames that viewers flipped like the pages of a book; or vertical stands with rotating displays. With space at a premium, the museum aimed to exhibit as many objects as possible. To that end, in many cases a single frame held multiple textiles. A plate from Cole’s 1888 catalogue reflects the appearance of such displays (fig. 11.1). Four fragments lay flat on a white background. They are cut into neat silhouettes, emphasizing their ornamentation. Their placement alongside one another typologizes their decorative motifs. While the fragments were originally part of garments or soft furnishings, their composite, piecemeal display obscures their function. An article from 1889 in The Magazine of Art describes the museum’s Byzantine Egyptian textiles as exhibited in the south corridor alongside textiles of other provenances and eras.8 The comparative display of the Egyptian material further erased its geographic, temporal, and cultural specificity and encouraged a purely formal engagement with it. The South Kensington Museum was not the only institution to exhibit Byzantine Egyptian textiles in this way. Indeed, museums and private collections across Europe and North America decontextualized Byzantine Egyptian textile fragments and displayed them as framed specimens, emphasizing ornamental features over original function and context. This mode of display is reminiscent of illustrations in British architect and designer Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament.9 Like the South Kensington Museum, The Grammar of Ornament grew out of the Great Exhibition and aimed to instruct the public on principles of good design with the goal of buttressing British manufacturing. The volume consisted of vividly colored plates that reproduced ornamentation from objects of both Western and non-Western provenance. In transposing decorative motifs onto two-dimensional plates and displaying them alongside material from various cultures, both the South Kensington Museum and The Grammar of Ornament extracted ornamentation from its original material, functional, and cultural contexts. The act of decontextualizing foreign design elements for the purpose of British economic gain was in step with the broader colonialist project of nineteenth-century Britain.

Fig. 11.1 Plate depicting Byzantine Egyptian textiles displayed in the South Kensington Museum. Alan S. Cole, A Descriptive Catalogue of Tapestry and Embroidery in the South Kensington Museum (London: HM Stationery Office, 1888).

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Conclusion The Byzantine Egyptian textiles of the South Kensington Museum were amassed during the period of Britain’s occupation of Egypt. The museum collected fragments that had been dug up from the ground— often from funerary deposits—and cut from larger textiles before being mounted on flat backings. As we have seen, the textiles’ display emphasized their ornamentation in order to educate the public on principles of successful design and thereby, it was thought, afford a competitive advantage to British industry. In doing so, the original functional and historical context of the textiles was lost; the bodies from which the materials were torn, abandoned. To be sure, Britain was not the only nation in which Byzantine Egyptian textiles were cut into pieces and displayed as pictures—it was a practice employed by dealers and collectors throughout Europe and the Middle East as well as on site in Egypt itself. Likewise, the South Kensington Museum was not the only museum in Europe to utilize such displays. That they were displayed in a museum aimed at improving British textile manufacturing at the very same time that Egyptian cotton was being imported for use by those same manufacturers creates a context with unique implications. In his landmark study, Colonising Egypt, Timothy Mitchell notes that British agricultural policy “convert[ed] the country’s ‘productive powers’—meaning villagers and their lands—into commodities.”10 Such is the nature of colonialism in the nineteenth century, wherein every part of a colonized land, including its history and culture, was considered fodder to increase the wealth of the metropole. In their status as imported goods and as didactic tools, the Byzantine Egyptian textiles of the South Kensington Museum operated as both raw materials and commodities of the British Empire. Their placement on the museum’s walls—removed from the sands of Egypt, from the original textile objects that wrapped bodies of deceased Egyptians, and exhibited for the sole benefit of the center of empire—exemplifies the colonial project.

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1. “Building the Museum,” V&A, accessed 22 July 2022, https://​w ww​.vam​.ac​ .uk​/articles​/building​-the​-museum#slideshow​=31131014&slide​=0. 2. Christina Riggs, “Ancient Egypt in the Museum: Concepts and Constructions,” in A Companion to Ancient Egypt, ed. Alan B. Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 2:1134–35. 3. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 309–10. 4. Peter Schwartzstein, “How the American Civil War Built Egypt’s Vaunted Cotton Industry and Changed the Country Forever,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed 22 July 2022, https://​w ww​.smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/how​-ameri can​-civil​-war​-built​-egypts​-vaunted​-cotton​-industry​-and​-changed​-country​-for ever​-180959967/. 5. Arthur Edwin Crouchley, The Economic Development of Modern Egypt (London: Longmans, Green, 1938), 170. 6. Helen Persson, “Collecting Egypt: The Textile Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum,” Journal of the History of Collections 24, no. 1 (2012): 6. 7. Alan S. Cole, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Collections of Tapestry and Embroidery in the South Kensington Museum (London: HM Stationery Office, 1888), 1. 8. Francis Ford, “Egyptian Textiles at South Kensington,” The Magazine of Art 13 (January 1889): 132. 9. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856). 10. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), x.

Chapter 12

From Ethnographic Illustration to Aphrodisian Magistrate Changing Perceptions of an Early Byzantine Portrait

Stephanie R. Caruso Today, the museum at the archaeological site of Aphrodisias in Turkey exhibits some of the best-preserved examples of surviving late antique sculpture, offering visitors a viewing experience that can elucidate these sculptures’ original contexts. For Byzantinists, the site provides evidence of some of the last statues of antiquity, manufactured in the sixth century. The majority of the sculptures housed in the museum are discoveries of the archaeological program Kenan T. Erim initiated in 1961 and directed until his untimely death in 1990. Research, conservation, and excavation at the site continue to this day under the direction of R. R. R. Smith. However, the first large-scale excavations of the site took place in 1904, before the establishment of the Republic of

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Turkey, and were directed by the French engineer and amateur archaeologist Paul Gaudin. A remarkable discovery from this first campaign was a portrait sculpture now in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) (fig. 12.1) that today we can identify as one of the last stone portrait sculptures produced in late antiquity. From an aesthetic perspective, with its missing nose, chin, and mouth as well as its imperfect surface condition, the piece does not immediately stand out as a highlight for an encyclopedic museum with such an expansive collection. A reflection on the head’s original classification as that of “an Ethiopian,” in contrast to its current interpretation as a local provincial magistrate, however, provides an opportunity to engage with issues critical to Byzantine archaeology in a museum display. At the time of their discovery, the substantial quantities of sculpture discovered by Gaudin did not stay in place at Aphrodisias but were taken—either to Constantinople,

Fig. 12.1 Portrait of a benefactor (Rhodopaios?), Aphrodisias, ca. 500 CE. Marble, 21 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Jerome M. Eisenberg and Richard Titleman, 1971.18. Photograph © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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on account of imperial ambitions, or to France, on account of a deeply embedded colonial mindset. While Gaudin himself was not a colonialist, the story of his work at Aphrodisias and his interpretation of this sculpture demonstrate both the strong imperialist underpinnings of archaeology in Ottoman lands and how archaeological and ethnographic research could mutually reinforce each other to perpetuate colonialist and imperialist viewpoints. During the first half of the nineteenth century, foreign archaeologists could excavate within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire and encountered little, if any, resistance to exporting antiquities. By contrast, the second half of the century saw the implementation of successive laws making it more challenging for foreign archaeologists to keep their discoveries. Gaudin’s work at Aphrodisias coincided with a period of strong Ottoman interest in utilizing the archaeological pasts within its geographic borders to shape a competing narrative to those being expounded by western European colonial powers through museum displays. A key player in the effort to develop an image of a modern Ottoman empire through the exploitation of its ancient past was Osman Hamdi Bey. Educated in France, Hamdi Bey trained as a painter, with Orientalist themes being a genre he particularly favored. After working in a range of cultural and administrative roles, Hamdi Bey established and served as director of the Imperial Museum (now the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul), a position through which he controlled the archaeological projects undertaken within Ottoman territory. A tension, however, existed between the desire to situate the Ottoman Empire among European colonial powers through modernization projects and the cost of undertaking such work. Filling a museum required numerous expensive, large-scale archaeological projects. While Hamdi Bey was responsible for writing an 1884 law prohibiting the export of antiquities, some exceptions were made for foreign archaeologists willing to finance and conduct the excavations supporting Hamdi Bey’s mission under Ottoman oversight. Hamdi Bey visited Aphrodisias in 1892, and, confident in the potential for discoveries that would enhance the Imperial Museum collection, he set out to have the site excavated. A firman for the site’s excavation was issued in 1898, but, lacking the necessary funds, Hamdi Bey

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invited Paul Gaudin of Smyrna to undertake the work, provided that he financed the project. Gaudin had been working in the empire since 1892, contributing to the Ottoman modernization efforts through railway projects. Under Gaudin and Hamdi Bey’s arrangement, most discoveries would go to the Imperial Museum (where they remain on display to this day), while Gaudin would be permitted to keep some of his finds. Since Gaudin had exported antiquities to France between 1895 and 1902 while showing little regard for the 1884 law, Hamdi Bey surely recognized his expectations for keeping some of the discoveries he made. Their agreement seems to be in keeping with others made between Hamdi Bey and other foreign archaeological missions, such as the one at Assos run by the Archaeological Institute of America. Gaudin’s 1904 campaign lasted just six weeks but yielded a large amount of sculpture, which he selectively recorded in written reports and photographs. One photograph documents a head with a preserved neck, attached iron dowel, and a right shoulder. The head’s physiognomy is difficult to describe from Gaudin’s photograph alone. The face does seem damaged, yet the deeply drilled, curly hair is clearly visible. When Erim published Gaudin’s photograph in 1967, the head was thought lost, but in 1970 this very portrait head was loaned to the MFA and entered the collection in 1971. Unfortunately, at the time of its arrival in Boston, the piece was missing its neck, shoulder, and dowel. Correspondence between Gaudin and Hamdi Bey, subsequent communications between Gaudin’s widow and Hamdi Bey’s brother and successor, Halil Edhem Bey, and Erim’s visits to Gaudin’s widow in France all suggest that Gaudin had a significant corpus of statuary shipped to France from Aphrodisias.1 Since Erim did not see the Boston head in the Gaudin collection when he visited in the 1960s, it was likely sold in a 1922 auction of Mme Gaudin’s collection, as part of a group described as “three small heads in marble. To be divided” (Trois petites têtes en marbre. A diviser).2 Gaudin’s accounts of his discoveries in his 1904 report, if mentioned, were terse. For instance, in the case of a group of four heads found in the Hadrianic Baths, he wrote that “two are Roman portraits that possess only the virtue of being naturalistic. The third, a head of an Ethiopian(?) is interesting, but it has suffered much.”3 Erim believed Gaudin’s

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tête d’ethiopien referred to a head now in Brussels, which Gaudin “erroneously labeled Ethiopian because of fire, smoke, and humidity stains on the stone.”4 Erim’s identification assumes that Gaudin was using the term “Ethiopian” to describe someone with black skin. If Gaudin employed “Ethiopian” in the manner of Herodotus, to describe all black Africans, the black marble statue of a black African from the Hadrianic Baths seems like another discovery to which he would have applied the label. Yet Erim does not suggest this statue was ever referred to as an Ethiopian in Gaudin’s files, and he himself describes it variously as a “young negro slave” and a “negro youth.”5 Further, a 1922 auction catalogue describes the black marble statue as “a slave carrying a vessel, inset eyes. Black marble, a very beautiful piece. Rare.”6 The possibility has not been raised that Gaudin employed the identifier “Ethiopian” in a narrower sense, perhaps based on contemporary representations of people from Ethiopia specifically. When considered in light of Gaudin’s worldview as shaped by his status as a foreign national working in the Ottoman Empire, his profession as a railway engineer, and his interest in archaeology, the “Ethiopian head” he described could very well be that now in the MFA.7 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeological research and ethnographic research were so interwoven that it is challenging, if not impossible, to disentangle them. Both contributed to strengthening and supporting the imperial ambitions of European colonial powers at the time. Assertions and observations about local populations frequently made their way into archaeological publications. John T. Wood’s 1877 Discoveries at Ephesus, for instance, makes a point of describing not only the excavated antiquities but also the “characteristics of workmen, Arabs, Turks, and Greeks.” In his pseudo-ethnographic descriptions, he notes that the Turks were “very slow and deliberate in their movements,” while the Arabs, “showing more agility than strength, appeared to take pride in working more quickly than the Turks,” and the Greeks “were generally quick and intelligent.”8 Gaudin was surely familiar with archaeological publications, but he was also a railway engineer. While Gaudin worked on the Smyrna railroad project run by French developers, Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia granted

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Fig. 12.2 Engraving depicting the dance of the Chohos. M. M. Théophile Lefebvre et al., Voyage en Abyssinie: Exécuté pendant les années 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843 (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1845–51), vol. 3, plate 36.

permission to a French company to build a railway that would connect Addis Ababa with Djibouti, then a port city of the French Somaliland colony, with construction commencing in 1897. Given the use of French developers for the contemporary Ottoman and Ethiopian railway projects, it seems reasonable to think that Gaudin had some knowledge of contemporary Ethiopia as filtered through a European lens. Engravings from nineteenth-century travel accounts of Ethiopia portray Indigenous people with hairstyles that are almost identical to that worn by the MFA head (fig. 12.2).9 Such quasi-ethnographic publications would not be out of place in the library of an amateur archaeologist like Gaudin. Archaeological publications also often tried to establish formal relationships between the dress and physical characteristics of contemporary local inhabitants and those from ancient times. For instance, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an American consul in Cyprus whose discoveries formed the basis of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s classical

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antiquities collection, published an illustration comparing the hat worn by a “modern priest” and an ancient “stone head from Golgoi.”10 For Gaudin to see a relatively contemporary portrayal of an Ethiopian and then match it to a late antique statue would not be unreasonable, given the types of observations being expounded in contemporary archaeological literature. Furthermore, when Gaudin discovered the head, no portrait statue with a comparable hairstyle was known. Lacking a frame of reference for understanding its place within the ancient world, he found a compelling parallel in contemporary ethnographic representations of one group of Indigenous Ethiopians. In contrast, when the statue entered the MFA’s collection, its identity was generally understood. Portraits discovered in Ephesus in the 1950s and 1960s, and the discovery of Flavius Palmatus’s portrait statue (along with its inscribed base) in 1972 at Aphrodisias, made it possible not only to roughly date the head in Boston but also to identify the individual as a local magistrate. He has a furrow in his brow and at the top of his nose, thick eyebrows, and large eyes. A deeply drilled and undercut hairstyle of tight curls frames the face with its stubble beard. His hairstyle—sometimes referred to as the fashionable “mop” or “helmet” hairstyle, which was likely popular in Constantinople—and his flat, disc-shaped pupils help date the head stylistically to the fifth or sixth century. On account of the ongoing research at Aphrodisias, we can further refine the archaeological context of the head. Julia Lenaghan has recently argued that the head in Boston can be connected to a chlamys statue and tripartite base that was originally situated in front of the north pier of the monumental arch marking the caldarium façade of the Hadrianic Baths.11 The individual identified in the statue base inscription, named Rhodopaios, is also recorded in two additional statue bases at Aphrodisias, all of which have been dated to the mid-sixth century. From these inscriptions we know that he held a local civic office, oversaw the restorations of the Hadrianic Baths, and was responsible for increasing food supply in the wake of the Justinianic plague. In the proposed display for the portrait head at the MFA, two second-century Roman imperial pilaster capitals frame the head to evoke the type of architectural decoration that adorned the entrance to the baths against

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which the statue monument was originally set.12 A poster showing the proposed reconstruction to which the head belongs would accompany the sculptures. The ensemble of Roman imperial architectural sculpture and early Byzantine portrait sculpture stresses the continuity of sculptural and architectural modes, an accumulation of different ornamentation, and the juxtaposition of personal styles and carving techniques, all of which are naturally evolving tendencies of a city with a long and vibrant history. The remarkable combination of freshly carved (head) and reused (the body and sculpture base) sculptural elements allow both to be seen in a new light and attest to a popular aesthetic of the early Byzantine period. Many museums have collections larger than they are able to exhibit. Debates continue about whether it is better to display objects where more is known about their provenance, despite their more quotidian nature, or objects of exceptional beauty, even when we know little about their history and origins. A portrait statue’s fame generally correlates with its beauty, exceptional state of preservation, and existence in a world-famous collection, as Elizabeth Marlowe has shown. She points out, however, that these are often the objects we know the least about from an archaeological perspective, and she argues for the display of contextualized artifacts, regardless of their perceived aesthetic value, over “ungrounded” ones.13 The proposed display of the MFA’s Aphrodisias head focuses on contextual information. By placing the portrait in a firm archaeological context, the museum would educate viewers about an important and ongoing archaeological project in Turkey as well as the type of knowledge that can come out of this continued work—in this case, a better understanding of the urban fabric of a modest-sized sixth-century Byzantine city. The display, however, also prioritizes another critical context: that of the object’s discovery. The dynamics of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were complex. The MFA portrait was discovered at a time when both ethnography and archaeology were being used by imperial powers to assert geopolitical strength and intellectual superiority. Gaudin’s original identification of the portrait is evidence of a deeply ingrained colonial mindset. By addressing how and why this head was initially identified as Ethiopian, the display

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acknowledges and confronts the problematic ideological frameworks of these early archaeological projects, which have shaped the corpus of objects we study as Byzantinists.

Notes

I thank Christine Kondoleon and the Department of the Arts of Ancient Greece and Rome at the MFA for their support of this display proposal, which I began to develop during my time as the Stavros Niarchos Fellow at the museum. 1. As quoted in Kenan T. Erim, “De Aphrodisiade,” American Journal of Archaeology 71, no. 3 (1967): 233–43. 2. Charles Dubourg and Jean-Pierre Enkiri, Catalogue des antiquites grécoromaines: Collection de feu M. Gaudin (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1922), no. 99. 3. Paul Gaudin, “Memoire sommaire: Fouilles d’Aphrodisias—campagne 1904” (unpublished report, 20 October 1904), 13: “deux sont des portraits romains qui n’ont que le mérite du naturel: la troisième, une tête d’éthiopien (?) est intéressante, mais elle a beaucoup souffert.” 4. Erim, “De Aphrodisiade,” 237n21. The head was purchased for the Musée du Cinquantenaire, Brussels in 1908 (inv. A 1561). 5. Ibid., 237–38. 6. Dubourg and Enkiri, Antiquites gréco-romaines, no. 97: “Esclave portant un vase, les yeux incrustés. Marbre noir, très belle pièce. Rare.” The statue did not sell and remained in the possession of the Gaudin family in Versailles until 1995, when Gaudin’s sons gifted it to the Louvre. 7. I thank Julia Lenaghan for drawing my attention to this connection. 8. John T. Wood, Discoveries at Ephesus: Including the Site and Remains of the Great Temple of Diana (London: Longmans, Green, 1877), 229–30. 9. See, for example, Théophile Lefebvre et al., Voyage en Abyssinie: Exécuté pendant les années 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843, 6 vols. (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1845–51). 10. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878), 180. 11. Julia Lenaghan, “Another Statue in Context: Rhodopaios of Aphrodisias,” in Visual Histories of the Classical World: Essays in Honour of R. R. R. Smith, ed. C. M. Draycott, R. Raja, K. Welch, and W. T. Wootton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 502–18. 12. The pilaster capitals are MFA 66.71 and 01.8211, both of which are from Asia Minor. MFA 66.71 may also be from Aphrodisias. 13. Elizabeth Marlowe, Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Chapter 13

Expanding and Decentering Byzantium The Acquisition of an Ethiopian Double-Sided Gospel Leaf

Andrea Myers Achi In 2006, the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) acquired an Ethiopian double-sided gospel leaf (2006.100) (figs. 13.1 and 13.2). The leaf includes standard elements found in medieval Christian gospel books, such as a Eusebian canon table within a domed space, knotted curtains, vegetal ornament, and animals. Ge’ez inscriptions identify the figures and animals, which are all local variants of traditional motifs painted on parchment gospels across the medieval and Byzantine worlds. The verso depicts a Crucifixion scene, represented by a monumental jeweled cross and a lamb, the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. In the arch are the sun and moon and a pearled roundel with an inscription that may read “the sheep given to God as a sacrifice to remove the sins of the world.” To the sides are two men who were crucified at the same time as Christ. Flanking the foot of the cross are two Roman soldiers. The leaf represents the connections that existed between Ethiopia, Byzantium, and other Eastern Christian

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communities of the medieval period. One of the first regions to embrace Christianity as the state-sponsored religion, Ethiopia was a reliable ally of the Byzantine Empire in fighting proxy wars in the Arabian Peninsula and controlling the trade routes that linked the empire to sub-Saharan Africa in the west and India in the east. The Ethiopian royal court, ecclesiastical authorities, and monks also developed and sustained contacts with other Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean. Despite being the first Ethiopian object acquired by the Department of Medieval Art for the Byzantine collection, the gospel leaf’s purchase was the result of a long-term collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA). Since the acquisition of monumental Ethiopian gospels (1998.66), The Met has actively built an exemplary Ethiopian Christian art collection. The strength of this collection—late and post-medieval Ethiopian Christian art—resides in AAOA, however. According to the gospel leaf’s acquisition papers, when curator Helen Evans organized the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries’ installation for Byzantine Art in 2000, the lack of Ethiopian material was considered so significant that the special issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin on the Byzantine galleries, The Arts of Byzantium, included AAOA’s gospel. This chapter considers the context in which the gospel leaf entered the collection and the implications of displaying Ethiopian art within the Byzantine galleries. In considering the impact, I focus on an area in the collection that was absent, and I contend that the presence of Ethiopian art in the Byzantine galleries creates space to disrupt established narratives in Byzantine art history.

Ethiopian Art and The Met’s Byzantine Exhibitions Through the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine Art and large-scale exhibitions centered on Byzantium, The Met helped expand the scholarly and public perception of the Byzantine world. Helen Evans’s groundbreaking exhibitions, The Glory of Byzantium (1997), Byzantium: Faith and Power (2004), and Byzantium and Islam (2012), were transformational for the study of Byzantine art and brought many objects to the United States for the first time. Innovatively, the exhibitions

Fig. 13.1 & 13.2 Double-sided gospel leaf, Tigray, Ethiopia, first half of the fourteenth century. Tempera on parchment, 27.8 × 19 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Oscar de la Renta Ltd. Gift, 2006, 2006.100.

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included works from the “peripheries” of the Byzantine Empire, such as Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, and Christian communities in the Islamic East. The incorporation of arts of Byzantine-adjacent regions counteracted a long-standing misperception and separation of artworks made and used by communities beyond the borders of Byzantium and those originating within the empire. Scholars could no longer view those traditionally marginalized regions as peripheral; instead, the exhibitions encouraged the field to recognize the multiple religious, intellectual, and economic centers of the empire and beyond. The inclusion of Ethiopian art in the Met’s Byzantine collections coincided with Byzantinists’ increasing interest in it after the 1993–96 exhibition African Zion. This pioneering exhibition opened at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and then traveled to the Schomburg in New York City, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Museum of African American Life and Culture in Dallas, the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, the Chrysler Museum in Virginia, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, ending at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1996. The exhibition introduced many American viewers to Ethiopian art for the first time. As the Byzantinist Thelma K. Thomas wrote in her review of the catalogue, “African Zion has increased public visibility of historic Ethiopia after years of severely restricted access to its monuments, museums, and libraries due to dire political difficulties.”1 Yet the exhibition was limited in its scope and perspective. Of the catalogue, Thomas critiqued the perspective in which the material was presented and remarked, “this is a story for Western eyes not familiar with ancient Christian churches of the Near East and Africa.”2 Curators and scholars saw the close connections between the arts of the Eastern Christian cultures, and Byzantine-centered exhibitions that followed African Zion, like The Glory of Byzantium, diverted the Western gaze from Ethiopian art.3 In The Glory of Byzantium’s exhibition catalogue, Thomas discussed Ethiopian motifs in Byzantine and Byzantizing traditions. She noted the compositional formats of Ethiopia’s wide-ranging artistic repertoire and the reuse of early Christian Eusebian canon tables. Byzantium: Faith and Power featured AAOA’s fourteenth-century illuminated gospel. In her catalogue entry for the manuscript, Annie Labatt highlighted

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Byzantine visual quotations found in this manuscript and in Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts in general.4 The inclusion of Ethiopian art in these exhibitions allowed a broad audience to engage with Ethiopia’s visual culture. The ripple effects of these efforts have been felt long after the exhibitions closed. The exhibition catalogues were placed on medieval or Byzantine art syllabi; they became incorporated into coursework and woven into scholarship. Graduate students in medieval or Byzantine art began to write dissertations on new topics concerning the borders of the medieval world. They went on to serve as professors and curators working and publishing on this material and training more students, thus expanding the definition of the field. The incorporation of Ethiopian art in the field of Byzantine art is not anachronistic. Medieval writers also expressed the connection between Ethiopia and Byzantium. For example, the tenth-century Arab author al-Istakhri wrote about this connection when he described communities near the border of the Nubian kingdoms: “Some of Sudan, [those] who live nearer to these well-known kingdoms, do resort to religious beliefs and practices and law, approaching in this respect the people of these kingdoms. Such is the case with the Nuba and the Habesha, because they are Christians, following the religious tenets of the Rum (Byzantium). Prior to the rise of Islam, they were in neighborly contact with the Byzantine Empire, because the land of the Nuba borders on Egypt, and the Habesha live on the Sea of al-Qulzum (The Red Sea).”5 These connections were seen as key in the eyes of non-Christians, because Ethiopians and Byzantines were both Christian. This shows that Christianity acted as a key cultural connector in the medieval period, just as much as existing within the same political borders did. The addition of Ethiopian objects in the Byzantine galleries allows us to share these nuanced stories of the Byzantine world.

Expanding Byzantium: Egyptian Art in the Byzantine Galleries at The Met Meanwhile, in between organizing trailblazing exhibitions, Helen Evans facilitated the transfer of Byzantine Egyptian art from the Egyptian

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department to the medieval department in 2000, thereby moving these objects from their geographic place in the museum to their appropriate temporal location. Evans installed the Egyptian artworks in the space under the stairs of The Met in The Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery of Byzantine Egypt.6 In many respects, the transfer of Egyptian materials to the Byzantine collection helped decenter Byzantine art history, which means moving medieval art history away from a center-periphery model surrounding Constantinople and western European sites and creating space for other, complex, integrated, and plurotopic narratives. The inclusion of Egypt under Byzantium’s purview provided a natural opening for Ethiopian art to enter the Byzantine collection. The Byzantine Egypt gallery has a permanent installation of artworks and archaeological objects from Egypt, early Byzantium’s wealthiest province, which was often marginalized in the medieval and Byzantine art conversation. There is also Egyptian art in the galleries that comes from the period following the Islamic conquest but continues the Byzantine tradition. The art displayed in the gallery also reflects the multireligious milieu of northern Africa. For example, a recent acquisition (2014.629a– e), once thought to be an early Christian textile, may instead be traced to a Jewish context. With its naturalistic depiction of the crossing of the Red Sea, the textile challenges the pervasive but erroneous notion that late antique Jewish art was primarily nonfigural. The gallery additionally includes gold jewelry, sculpture, painted wooden panels, manuscript leaves, carved ivory, ceramics, and textiles, all made on Africa’s continent or used by people who lived on the continent. The works’ original functions range from quotidian domestic objects to architectural fragments from churches and monasteries. Above all, the gallery highlights the movements of objects, texts, and peoples in Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and Africa.

The Intimacies of Byzantium The emphasis here has been the addition of the Ethiopian leaf to the Byzantine collection, but it was not the first Ethiopian object in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. According to collection records, a nineteenth-century Ethiopian prayer book entered The Met’s

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library collection in 1895, and it later moved to the medieval department in 1986. The text includes copies of earlier medieval Ethiopian prayers. Because of shifting priorities in the medieval department, the book was transferred to AAOA in 1991. Along with a few other Ethiopian objects, it is one of the earliest African objects to enter The Met’s collection. The movement of the book from the library to the medieval department, and to AAOA, exemplifies issues curators at Western institutions have when they must categorize art that does not fit neatly within the art-historical canon. With the medieval department’s acquisition of the Ethiopian double-sided leaf and, later, a processional cross (2011.367), one might question the extent to which visitors are expected to read Ethiopian art as Byzantine. Of course, the object’s labels explain connections with Byzantine art, such as Ethiopian motifs that might be based on sixth- or seventh-century Syrian manuscripts brought to Ethiopia by missionaries. However, more generative questions have the curators of the medieval department looking forward to the future of Ethiopian art within the Byzantine galleries. For example, how do we ensure that our knowledge of Byzantium and its significant legacy does not overshadow the conflicting narratives represented by the Ethiopian material? In many respects, Ethiopia’s empire was equal to Byzantium’s, but that perspective is difficult to center with only one or two objects. As tempting as it might be to describe it as such, this specific decentering of art-historical categorizations is not a decolonization project. In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang urge scholars to take care in using terms such as de/colonization in situations that do not directly engage with settler colonialism. They assert that “decolonization specifically requires repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.”7 Still, Lisa Lowe’s work on privileging silenced voices in settler colonial contexts provides a useful framework to think through the absences in the collection: it creates an effective measure that can be replicated throughout the discipline of Byzantine art history. In introducing her approach, she argues that “in pursuing particular intimacies and contemporaneities that traverse distinct and separately studied ‘areas,’ the practice of reading across the archive unsettles the

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discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history invested in isolated origins and independent progressive development.”8 Reading the museum collection as an archive, with its acquisition papers, object files, and decades of curatorial notes, we can view the absence—and then, the steady addition—of Ethiopian art in the collection as a sustained effort to broaden the scope of the Byzantine world. Skewing the Western-centric perspectives, the measure unsettles and decenters narratives within Byzantine art history. The archive reveals shifting priorities of institutions, curators, and scholarship. Just as the incorporation of Egypt expanded the purview of Byzantine art, the addition of Ethiopia does the same. And, though the Ethiopian collection is small at the moment, its presence in the permanent collection in the Byzantine galleries allows us to present a fuller, more complete picture of the medieval oikoumene.

Notes

1. Thelma K. Thomas, review of African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, by Marilyn E. Heldman et al., Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 265–68, at 265. 2. Ibid., 268. 3. Connections between Ethiopian art and Byzantine art, narrowly defined, were explored by a previous generation of historians of Ethiopian art, but these links remained little known to the general public. For these earlier considerations of the topic, see Stanislaw Chojnacki, “Short Introduction to Ethiopian Traditional Painting,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 2, no. 2 (1964): 1–11; Jules Leroy, “L’évangéliaire éthiopien du couvent d’Abba Garima et ses attaches avec l’ancien art chrétien de Syrie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 104, no. 1 (1960): 200–204; and Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, Le Psautier Éthiopien Illustré de Belēn Sägäd (Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 1983). Robert Nelson’s review of an Ethiopian art publication suggests that Byzantinists’ engagement with Ethiopian studies spread beyond museums. See Robert S. Nelson, review of The Marian Icons of the Painter Frē Ṣeyon: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Art, Patronage, and Spirituality, by Marilyn E. Heldman, Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (1996): 855–57. 4. Annie Labatt, “Illuminated Gospel,” in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen Evans (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 441. 5. Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 40–41. 6. Thelma K. Thomas was a consulting curator for the project, and Elizabeth Bolman wrote the first exhibition review of the space.

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7. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 21. 8. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 5.

Chapter 14

Equity, Accessibility, and New Narratives for Byzantine Art in the Museum

Elizabeth Dospěl Williams This book concerns itself with the extent to which Byzantine studies is a colonialist discipline, but as a curator of Byzantine art, I must also contend with the colonialist history of the museum itself. Questions of power dynamics and imbalances, both historical and current, pervade my curatorial work. I am responsible, for example, for the collection of Byzantine art at Dumbarton Oaks, a center dedicated to scholarship on Byzantine culture. Our Emperor Roundel, presiding above our nave-like gallery, counts among the most iconic works in our collection (fig. 14.1). Here is an elite man, traditionally interpreted as the emperor John II Komnenos, standing regally in his loros, in a circle, from which more circles radiate. When I bring visitors through the galleries to talk about this sculpture, attention immediately turns to the emperor’s unusual costume and to comparisons and inconsistencies with details of imperial

Fig. 14.1 Installation of the “Emperor Roundel” in the Byzantine Gallery at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC (2008–present). Constantinople, ca. 1110–118. Marble, 90 × 90 cm. © Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC.

dress as depicted on gold coins. We discuss the reuse of the marble from a large column, presumably once in an imperial monument; we debate the roundel’s connections to Constantinople and Venice, two major centers of medieval empire; we discuss why Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, our founders, and their art advisor, Royall Tyler, took interest in it.1 This is an object that speaks of circles and centers, of elite owners and elite materials. But what we rarely, or do not, talk about is this: it is an object of empire, possibly carried to Italy in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, where an elite male ruler gazes down on us. It was purchased on the eve of the Second World War from a Prussian prince, Friedrich Leopold of Prussia, later murdered at Dachau. The acquisition was promoted by Fritz Volbach, a prominent Byzantine art historian exiled to the Vatican from his teaching position in Germany in 1934 for being of Jewish descent. It is on view in a gallery next to the room where the

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United Nations was born, in Washington, DC, a center of politics, a city of increasing economic inequalities, the capital of a country that would deny viewing itself as an empire. The historiographic considerations are important and yet unexplored. The topic of decolonization is of increasing urgency in the museum world, but its roots can be found in at least two decades of scholarship that has questioned the ethical, legal, and moral issues related to the ownership of objects, the practices of display, and the practicalities of restitution and repatriation. In recent years, movements like Decolonize This Place (DTP) have raised awareness of these issues in popular culture and have also pushed for diversity, inclusivity, and equity in recruitment, salaries, funding, programming, and board membership. These movements attempt, in short, a total reckoning with the historical underpinnings of power in museums and with the implication of institutions in the systemic inequalities of today. However, these broader conversations about equity and access in museums rarely address medieval art (much less Byzantine art). I suspect that this oversight is due to the faulty assumption that medieval art was not implicated in a colonialist enterprise, that legal title is no issue for medieval artworks, or that the narratives such objects tell are not included in the same critical frames. So what does it mean to decolonize Byzantine art in museum galleries, in the midst of a sea change in institutional culture in the United States and around the globe? Some of the most provocative work in this vein has been those exhibitions that challenge center-periphery models of scholarship while considering the larger historiographical contexts of museum objects. For example, recent special exhibitions like Armenia! (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018–19) or Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (The Block Museum, The Aga Khan Museum, and The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2019–22) have reconsidered the power dynamics at play in center-periphery interactions by situating medieval art in a global frame, usually through focus on trade routes and economic exchanges in a cross-cultural perspective. This kind of exploration is a challenge at Dumbarton Oaks, where the collection long foregrounded the uniqueness of Byzantium and the

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imperial realm. Yet the collection does include examples of art attesting to Byzantium’s connections to neighboring cultures. These include a substantial number of Arabic-inscribed seals, coins, textiles and ceramics, Coptic woodcarving, an Armenian manuscript page, and ceramics made in the Persianate sphere, among others; many have never been on view and have remained marginal in our galleries and museum publications. A phalera or military pendant with a Sasanian-style face, for example, not only speaks to Byzantium’s conflicts with neighbors in the east but raises important questions about production and trade (fig. 14.2). An object like this presents many opportunities for decentering a gallery narrative focused on Byzantine heartlands and instead opens up questions about cultural exchange in many directions. Multidirectional work of this kind is indeed a pragmatic challenge in museums. Objects’ physicality roots them to specific galleries and storerooms and often makes cross-disciplinary work logistically complex. Some of the most interesting and challenging work being done in museum galleries right now compares and contrasts artwork from vastly different geographic areas and time periods in the relatively nimble format of temporary exhibitions. Exhibitions like Byzantine Things in the World (The Menil Collection, 2013), Jewelry: The Body Transformed (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018–19), and the Crossroads Project (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), for example, placed Byzantine and medieval art in unusual and unexpected combinations with art from other traditions.2 Interventions like these offer opportunities to reflect on shared values across cultures and disciplines and, even more importantly, the rare chance to probe the profound, revelatory differences that come to light when objects from different areas and historical time periods are brought together. Critical evaluation of the deeply embedded, sometimes unacknowledged, narratives in permanent galleries is another important task. In the case of collections of Byzantine art in the United States, for example, there has been a tendency to frame objects within a narrative of the decorative arts, itself an approach founded on exclusionary hierarchies and categories ranked according to material value, artistic excellence, and technical complexity. The collection at Dumbarton Oaks, for instance, like those of many other American museums, was built

Fig. 14.2 Phalera or harness pendant, Persia, seventh century. Silver with gilding, 13.2 × 12 cm. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC, BZ.1952.9. © Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC.

following the enormously influential exhibition L’art byzantin, held at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris in 1931. When one reviews archival photographs of permanent exhibitions at Dumbarton Oaks over the decades, it is remarkable to see how this framework persists despite the rearrangements of objects over the years: exhibition cases remain organized largely according to medium and period, with a focus on singular masterpieces, luxury materials, and elite consumption. Ornament:

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Fragments of Byzantine Fashion, on view in the Dumbarton Oaks courtyard gallery in 2019, offered an opportunity for us to respond to this narrative by highlighting the multiple and problematic lives of late antique textiles as they went from functional dress, worn by individuals long ago, to grave goods removed from the ground in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to works of art problematically decontextualized on the art market and prized for their ornamentation and aesthetic qualities. Furthermore, the inclusion of objects like an infant’s worn tunic or coarsely woven clothes spoke to a broader representation of late Roman through early Islamic Egyptian society—in terms of gender, age, social standing, and religious background—and served as a counterpoint to the elite, ruling-class, Orthodox, and Byzantine identities on view in our permanent galleries. If reevaluating, critiquing, and reimagining current displays of Byzantine art are essential conceptual steps in exploring new art-historical narratives, reaching more diverse audiences through accessible publications and programming represents the pragmatic side of this equation. Improving access pushes beyond the intellectual or historiographical concerns of curatorial work to address head-on the systemic and historical barriers to participation facing museum audiences. To take just one example, museum collections have long been published in expensive catalogues raisonnés with limited print runs, aimed primarily at scholars. However, following the exemplary work of the Getty’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), Dumbarton Oaks’s Museum has made a push in the past five years to promote born-digital publications of our Byzantine coins, seals, and textiles collections, in the hopes that the resources might serve the broadest possible community of readers. While this sounds like an uncontroversial approach now, when we embarked on the textile catalogue raisonné in 2012, we were often asked by well-intentioned colleagues why we were just doing an online publication and not a “real” book. That this distinction no longer seems to be of such great weight now seems to me a sign that questions of accessibility and audience reach are of increasing concern to all. I end this essay on a cautionary note. In 2017, Sumaya Kassim concluded that despite museums’ best intentions to diversify staff, audiences, and gallery narratives, “the museum will not be decolonised.”3

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Kassim argued that the colonialist history of the museum, its enduring tendency to create taxonomies and to exclude, was fundamentally at odds with the greater decolonizing project focused on equity and inclusion. Kassim’s point is that decolonization is a total and constant process, one that concerns a radical reimagination and perhaps even a fundamental rejection of the institution itself. Her arguments offer important guidance in the challenges facing collections of Byzantine art—and perhaps Byzantine studies more generally. Kassim reminds us to probe not only the visible inequalities but also the more deeply rooted ones: the underlying narratives in our scholarship, the manner in which we work, the treatment of staff, our expectations of academic work, the barriers to entry put up for others. In the end, to decolonize means to look beneath the surface to see the systemic inequalities pervading our profession and our institutions and to take whatever action we can to rectify them.

Notes

1. The latest research on this roundel and its close relation in Venice is published in Niccolò Zorzi, Albrecht Berger, and Lorenzo Lazzarini, eds., I Tondi di Venezia e Dumbarton Oaks: Arte e ideologia imperiale tra Bisanzio e Venezia (Rome: Viella, 2019), and particularly Benjamin Anderson, “The Prussian Tondo,” 35–49. 2. For a recent reevaluation of Byzantine objects in museum collections, see Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel? (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). 3. Sumaya Kassim, “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised,” Media Diversified, 15 November 2017, https://​mediadiversified​.org​/2017​/11​/15​/the​-museum​-will​-not​ -be​-decolonised.

A Collective Bibliography Toward a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies

In our initial announcement of the webinar (see the preface), we requested that participants suggest relevant readings (essays, books, blogs, and so on) to help guide our discussion. The responses that we received form the core of the following bibliography, to which the present volume’s editors and contributors have continued to add. It makes no claims to be exhaustive, just as inclusion of a work does not imply endorsement of its arguments. Rather (and as we write in the introduction), we hope that it might serve as a foundation for a more coherent and systematic critical historiography of Byzantine studies, both as a means to highlight relevant resources and stimulating provocations and as an invitation to our readers to chart and patch the inevitable lacunae. On Empire, Colony, and Decolonization Abu-Khafajah, Shatha, Rama Al Rabady, and Shaher Rababeh. “Urban Heritage ‘Space’ Under Neoliberal Development: A Tale of a Jordanian Plaza.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 5 (2014): 441–59. Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000. Anderson, Warwick, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga, eds. “Forum: Decolonizing in Theory and Practice.” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020): 369–447. Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31. Banaji, Jairus. “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History.” 1977. In Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, 67–101. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Historicism and Its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies.” In Medievalisms in the

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Post-Colonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, 109–22. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Change the Museum. Instagram account. https://​w ww​.instagram​.com​/change themuseum. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books, 1986. Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso, 2000. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Gaunt, Simon. “Can the Middle Ages Be Post-Colonial?” Comparative Literature 61, no. 2 (2009): 160–76. Heng, Geraldine. “The Global Middle Ages: An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities, or Imagining the World, 500–1500 C.E.” English Language Notes 47, no. 1 (2009): 205–16. Herzfeld, Michael. “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 899–926. Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020. Jaime, Angela. “The ‘Art World’ Can’t Exist in a Decolonized Future.” Teen Vogue, 30 June 2020. https://​w ww​.teenvogue​.com​/story​/decolonize​-art​ -photography. Kassim, Sumaya. The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised. Video essay, 2019. https://​ vimeo​.com​/302162709. Kinoshita, Sharon. “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.” In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, 61–75. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2007. Kumar, Krishan. “Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 2 (2021): 280–309. ———. Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. ———. “Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice?” Theory and Society 39, no. 2 (2010): 119–43. Lomuto, Sierra. “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages.” postmedieval 11, no. 4 (2020): 503–12. Minawi, Mostafa. The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Moosavi, Leon. “The Decolonial Bandwagon and the Dangers of Intellectual Decolonisation.” International Review of Sociology 30, no. 2 (2020): 332–54. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen. Munich: Beck, 1995. Pinderhughes, Charles. “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism.” Socialism and Democracy 25, no. 1 (2011): 235–56. Procter, Alice. The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It. London: Cassell, 2020. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

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———. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Savoy, Bénédicte. Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat. Translated by Susanne Meyer-Abich. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Sefa Dei, George J., and Meredith Lordan, eds. Anti-Colonial Theory and Decolonial Praxis. New York: Peter Lang, 2016. Sifford, Elena FitzPatrick, and Ananda Cohen-Aponte. “A Call to Action.” Art Journal 78, no. 4 (2019): 118–22. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 67–110. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. The Sportula. “Western Imperialism in the Classics Classroom.” Eidolon, 18 May 2020. https://​eidolon​.pub​/western​-imperialism​-in​-the​-classics​-classroom​ -75190bd6eb39. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Turner, Joe. “Internal Colonisation: The Intimate Circulations of Empire, Race, and Liberal Government.” European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 4 (2018): 765–90. Warf, Barney. “Teaching Time-Space Compression.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 35, no. 2 (2011): 143–61. ———. Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Young, Robert J. C. Empire, Colony, Postcolony. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. ———. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. On the History of Byzantine Studies and Neighboring Disciplines Achi, Andrea Myers, and Seeta Chaganti. “‘Semper Novi Quid ex Africa’: Redrawing the Borders of Medieval African Art and Considering Its Implications for Medieval Studies.” In Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, edited by Catherine E. Karkov, Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, 73–106. Earth: Punctum Books, 2020. Agapitos, Panagiotis. “Karl Krumbacher and the History of Byzantine Literature.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 108, no. 1 (2015): 1–52. ———. “Franz Dölger and the Hieratic Model of Byzantine Literature.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 112, no. 3 (2019): 707–79. Akyürek, Engin. “Byzantine Art History in Modern Turkey.” In Perceptions of the Past in the Turkish Republic: Classical and Byzantine Periods, edited by Scott Redford and Nina Ergin, 205–24. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

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Contributors

Andrea Myers Achi is an assistant curator in the Department of Medieval Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Trained as a Byzantinist, Achi’s scholarship and curatorial practice focus on late antique and Byzantine art of the Mediterranean Basin and northeast Africa, and she has brought this expertise to bear on exhibitions like Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (2017), Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020), and The Good Life (2021) at The Met and in presentations and publications. Currently, she is working on exhibition projects related to the material culture of Late Antiquity, Byzantine Art in Africa, and grief in Byzantium. Benjamin Anderson is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. He studies the visual and material cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent landmasses, with a particular focus on late antique and Byzantine art and architecture and the history of archaeology. He is author of Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (2017) and coeditor of Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison (2017); The Byzantine Neighbourhood: Urban Space and Political Action (2022); and Otros pasados: Ontologías alternativas y el estudio de lo que ha sido (2022). Nathanael Aschenbrenner is Lecturer in History at the University of California, San Diego. He is coeditor, with Jake Ransohoff, of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (2021). His current work examines cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He is currently working on a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Bahattin Bayram graduated from the Department of History at Akdeniz University in 2016. After earning a master’s degree in Mediterranean medieval studies from the Mediterranean Civilisation Research Institute in 2020, he developed an interest in cultural heritage studies and worked in this area in the scope of the European Union as a project manager in Italy between the years 2020 and 2021. He is the translator (English to Turkish) of the books The Byzantine Economy (2007), by Angeliki Laiou and Cécile Morrisson, and New Rome: The Empire in the East (2022), by Paul Stephenson. Currently, he is a PhD student at Istanbul Medeniyet University. Alongside the perception and cultural heritage of Byzantine in Turkey, he is interested in the intellectual and social history of the late antique and Byzantine Mediterranean.

190

Contributors

Dame Averil Cameron retired in 2010 as Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford. She has always been interested in theoretical approaches to late antiquity and Byzantium, and her recent publications include “The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present,” in The Past as Present: Essays on Roman History in Honour of Guido Clemente (2019), and “An Accidental Scholar,” Catholic Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2021). Stephanie R. Caruso is currently the Giorgi Family Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has published on Byzantine jewelry assemblages and on a portrait sculpture from Aphrodisias, which questioned hierarchies of artistic production in the Roman world through formal, stylistic, and archaeological analysis. Her current research includes a study of the Byzantine textiles from Egypt at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is preparing her first book, which considers the expression of the aesthetic of thauma in late antique poetry and decorative arts. Şebnem Dönbekci completed the MA in Archaeology and History of Art program at Koç University in Istanbul, where she is currently a PhD candidate. She received the Koç University Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies (GABAM) Fellowship for her graduate studies. Dönbekci’s concentration is Byzantine art history. Her research interests are Byzantine monumental painting, images of saints, artistic and cultural interactions in the medieval Mediterranean, and the historiography of Byzantine studies. Dönbekci is currently conducting an oral history project entitled “Being a Byzantinist in Turkey: The Past, Present and Future of Byzantine Studies in Turkey” for her dissertation on the development of Byzantine studies as an academic discipline in Turkey. Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. She studies the social and cultural history of the Byzantine world broadly conceived, with a particular interest in written culture, multilingualism, and cultural transmission in the Balkans and the Steppe. Relatedly, her work explores the historiography of Byzantium and central and eastern Europe. Her monograph, Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing Between Rome and Constantinople, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Hugh G. Jeffery is an archaeologist. His work addresses the post-antique settlements of western Asia Minor, most recently a monograph study titled Middle Byzantine Aphrodisias: The Episcopal Village, AD 700–1250 (2022). Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has published many books and articles on the history, culture, and literature of Byzantium ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. His most recent monograph was Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (2019), and he is currently

Contributors

191

writing a new, comprehensive history of the Eastern Roman Empire. He is also the host of the academic podcast Byzantium & Friends. Matthew Kinloch is a research fellow in History of Ideas at the University of Oslo. He is currently leading a comparative narratological and historiographical project, Narrative Hierarchies: Minor Characters in Byzantine and Medieval History Writing, funded by the Research Council of Norway. His principal research interests are narratology, philosophy of history, and gender/queer history. Nicholas S. M. Matheou is Lecturer in Global Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the social and economic history of medieval Afro-Eurasia, especially commercialization, urbanization, and the interrelations of steppe and settled societies, with Armenian sources in particular providing a decentered and decolonizing window onto wider historical transformations. Matheou’s articles and book chapters range from Italy to Mongolia, and his monograph Narrating Crisis in the Imperial East, 1000–1071: Aristakes Lastiverci’s History and Homily on the Seljuq Turkish Invasions is currently in completion for publication with Oxford University Press. Maria Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship has focused on identifying the place of Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek within Byzantine literary culture and the reception of Byzantine literary culture in “East” and “West” during the medieval and early modern period. This begs reconsidering the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. For a list of publications, see https://​history​.berkeley​.edu​/maria​-mavroudi. Zeynep Olgun is a PhD student in the Faculty of History, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her thesis focuses on the Byzantine approaches to, perceptions of, and experiences with the sea. Her research interests are in the maritime culture, materiality, and society of the Byzantine Empire: ships and shipbuilding, merchant and sailor communities, naval administration, and warfare. Zeynep holds an MA degree in Maritime Archaeology from Koç University and an MA degree in Medieval Studies from Central European University. Arietta Papaconstantinou is a historian of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean, currently Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading and Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Among her publications are Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides (2001), The Multilingual Experience in Egypt from the Ptolemies to the ‘Abbāsids (2010), and Conversion in Late Antique Christianity, Islam, and Beyond: Papers from the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, Oxford, 2009/10 (2015), as well as a broad selection of articles on the religious, linguistic,

192

Contributors

social, and economic aspects of the transition from Rome to the Caliphate in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing more specifically on the history of late antique and early medieval Egypt. Jake Ransohoff is the Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Center for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. He is coeditor, with Nathanael Aschenbrenner, of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (2021). His research focuses on the intersection between corporal punishment and political exclusion in the wider Byzantine world. Alexandra Vukovich is Assistant Professor in Late Medieval History at King’s College, London. Her research focuses on northern Eurasia in the middle to late medieval period, from the emergence of early Rus to the establishment of Muscovy as a successor state of the Mongol Empire. She has explored the movement of texts, ideas, and objects across Eurasia, as described in medieval Slavonic chronicles and other texts and through material culture. Her forthcoming publications include “Thoughtful Agglomeration: Late Byzantine Sources for Muscovite Ceremonial,” in Texts and Contexts in Medieval Rus’ and Early Modern Russia (2023), and “Princely Processions and Peregrinations: Itinerant Rulership in Early Rus’” in Urban Ritual in Byzantium and Neighboring Lands (2023).  Elizabeth Dospěl Williams is Curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. Her teaching, publications, and exhibitions explore dress practice, sensory experience, materiality, and aesthetics in the medieval eastern Mediterranean through a focus on wearable objects and interior design; she has also published on provenance and collecting history. Williams was coeditor and contributor to the born-digital Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection (2019) and Liminal Fabric: Byzantine and Early Islamic Furnishing Textiles (2019). Her recent exhibitions include Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion (Dumbarton Oaks) and Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt (George Washington University Museum/The Textile Museum). Arielle Winnik is a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a PhD from Bryn Mawr College; an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on Byzantine and Islamic textiles across transregional networks and the history of the study and display of these objects.

Index

Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. Acts of Peter, 18 African Zion exhibition, 166 Africans, enslaved, 16, 24, 44 Agatharchides, 17–18 AIEB (Association Internationale des Études Byzantines), xii, 59, 62, 64, 65–68, 134 Akhmim, 145 Aksum, kingdom of, 99 al-Istakhri, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi, 167 Alodia, kingdom of, 99 Anderson, Benedict, 122, 130, 138 anti-Blackness, 16–22, 24, 123, 133 anti-immigrant discourse, 21 anti-Muslim perspective, 23–26 anti-racism, 26, 133–34 Aphrodisias excavation, 153–54, 155–56, 160 Hadrianic Baths, 156, 157, 159 Rhodopaios, possible portrait of, 154–61, 154 Arabs, 23, 121, 157 Archaeological Museum (formerly Imperial Museum), Istanbul, 12, 155–56 archaeology Byzantine, 1, 53, 56, 63, 70, 91, 154 Christian, 53, 55–56 classical, 52 historical, 1, 53–56 history of, 54–56, 91 Mediterranean, 53

part of imperialist and nationalist projects, 55, 60–61, 155, 160–61 pedagogy of, 52–56 Arendt, Hannah, 123 Armenia and Armenians, 78–80, 175 study of medieval language of, 11 art, Byzantine anti-Black prejudice in, 14, 17 anticolonial image of, 99, 100, 103, 105 association with established political and social order, 105 decolonizing museum exhibits of, 174, 177–78 at Dumbarton Oaks, 172–77 Egyptian, 167–68, 170 and Ethiopian art, 163–67, 168, 170 and medieval art, 168, 175 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 163–70 in popular perceptions, 91 Turkey, university courses in, 60–61, 70 visual language of, 101–3 assimilation, forcible, 79, 125 Association Internationale des Études Byzantines (AIEB), 59, 62, 64, 65–68, 134 Ayasoluk (Selçuk), basilica of Saint John, 56 Barbarorossa, Frederick I, 47 Benedict XVI, Pope, 25 Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis, 114 Black Lives Matter, ix–xii, 16, 93 Blackness, concepts of, 16–24 Book of Ceremonies, 116 Book of the Eparch, 117 Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), 154, 156, 157, 158–60

194 British Empire, 8, 147, 151 Bulgaria, 7, 78, 79–80, 166 language of, 137 Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de, 46 Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (BMGS), 135, 137, 138 Byzantine du Louvre, 10, 48 Byzantines (Romaioi) as ethnic Greeks, 85, 86, 87, 89 Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 11, 134, 138 Byzantion, 134, 137 Byzantium (Byzantine Empire) colonized and colonizer, 2, 7–14, 28 connection with Ethiopia, 162–63, 167, 169, 170n3 Europe’s defensive wall against Islam, 25–26, 88 Greece as “official” inheritor of its legacy, 61, 119 imperial identity of, 111–12, 115 languages of the, 113, 116–19 as a mirror image for Europe, 84–89 as non-European, 84–89, 98 and political polemics in Turkey, 63–64 post-1261 Second Empire, 80 public awareness of, 95, 98 “Roman-ness” of, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 138 as a state without a modern successor, 27, 49 subaltern civilizations of, 112 Byzantium: Faith and Power exhibition (The Met), 163, 166–67 center-periphery discourse, 63, 99, 105, 125, 166, 168, 174–75 Cesnola, Luigi Palma di, 158–59 Charlemagne, 89 Charles V (also Charles I of Spain), 43–44, 47 Choniates, Niketas, 40, 41, 46, 47 Chora Monastery (Istanbul), 64 Christianity Byzantine, 11, 106, 112–13, 167 (studies in) early, 18, 84, 93, 95 Eastern, 11, 99, 113, 126, 162–63, 166

Index in Ethiopia, 163, 167 idea of Europe and, 84, 86 Imperial, 8, 163 Orthodoxy, 3, 8, 86, 90, 95, 116 racism and, 14 as religion of African peoples, 99 Church of Rome, 86, 89 citation as guild membership, 136, 140 inward and outward facing, 137–39 linguistic politics of 136–37 civil rights movement, 99, 100 class imperial, 75, 76, 77, 79–80 position, 9, 135 ruling, 77, 177 scribal, 114 subaltern, 77, 79, 80 upper-, 117 working, 94 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 10 colonial rule, 2–6, 8, 12, 99, 145–8, 151 colonialism British, 146–48, 150–51 concepts of, 4–6, 8, 48 critical theory of, 138 ethnoracial boundaries and, 124, 138 European, 2, 10–12, 14, 78, 83, 98, 155 intellectual, 6, 7, 12, 49–50, 113, 115 and medieval art, 174 of the Russian Empire, 129 settler, 169 and Byzantine studies, 86–87 coloniality, 7, 112 colonization, 6, 41, 49, 99, 121–22, 128 “commonwealth, Byzantine”, 8–9, 105 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), 113 Constantine I the Great, 112 Constantine VII, 8, 11, 13, 116 Constantine IX Monomachos, 125 Constantine XI Palaiologos, 25, 102, 76 Constantinople Byzantine, 65, 66 crusader conquest of, 9 (elite) culture of, 95, 159

Index fall of, xii, 40, 60, 64 Hans Dernschwam visit of, 46 language spoken in, 117–18 rights of the Roman legacy of, 85, 89 Russian Archaeological Institute in (RAIK), 12, 55–56 sculptures of Aphrodisias taken to, 154 Copts and Coptic language, 11, 114–15, 175 Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantine, 48 Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, Hieronymus Wolf, 40–41, 47–48 Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 113 Corpus Scriptorum Historae Byzantinae, 48 cotton, 147, 151 critical historiography, concept of, 2–3 crusade, 2, 9, 47–48, 89, 95, 173 Cuspinianus, Johannes, 46, 47 Dagron, Gilbert, 116–19 Day, personification of, 18, 19, 19 decolonization of Byzantine scholarship, 49–50, 94–96 of Classics, 93–94 of museums, 169–70, 174, 177–78 use of the term of, 139–40, 169 Decolonize This Place (DTP), 174 Delehaye, Hippolyte, 114 Demons, 17–21 deportations, 78 Dernschwam, Hans, 45–46, 48 Discoveries at Ephesus (Wood), 157 Dölger, Franz, 2 Doox, Mark, 26, 100, 100–102 Du Bois, W.E.B., 123–24, 132n20 Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine art at, 172–78, 173 Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion exhibition, 177–78 publications (DOP) and symposia, 134, 135, 137, 138 dynatoi, 77

195 East Roman Empire see Byzantium Eastern Christianity, 11, 99, 113, 126, 162–63, 166 Egypt British occupation of, 12, 145, 147– 48, 151 Byzantine, 6, 12, 145, 167–70 Coptic Museum, Cairo, 102 cotton from, 147–48, 151 Hellenism and Coptic language in, 114–15 intellectual elites of, 6 Islamic, 168, 177 Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign to, 146–47 Egyptians, 17, 114, 147 Egyptology, 146–47 Eidolon, 94–95 elites Boris Johnson, 93 Byzantine, 7, 9, 119 ecclesiastical, 125 “foreign”, 9 Imperial, 115, 118 intellectual, 6, 10, 63 John II Kommenos, 172 literary sources and material culture by and for, 79–80, 127–29, 172– 73, 176–7 Rus, 126–29 Emperor Roundel, 172–74, 173 empire, concept of, 5 Enlightenment, 84, 86, 147 Ephesus, 157, 159 Erim, Kenan T. 153, 156–57 Ethiopia and Ethiopians, 17–18, 20, 157– 59, 158, 163, 167 ethnic process, definition, 121 ethnicity of Byzantines, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90 colonization and, 122 constructivism in literature on, 93 definition, 122 Greek, 86 and Islamic religious identity, 20 markers of, 121–22, 124, 129 nationalism and, 122–23, 127

196 ethnicity (continued) of those published in Byzantine studies, 135 race and, 123–24 ethnicization,121, 122, 129 Eurocentrism, 4, 13, 83–88 Eusebian canon table, 162, 166 Eustathios of Thessaloniki, 13 Everyday Orientalism (blog), 94 Fikos, 26 Flavius Palmatus’s portrait statue, 159 Frederick I Barbarossa, 47 Fourth Crusade, 2, 9, 173 Fuggers of Augsburg Anton Fugger 42, 45, 46, 48 banking dynasty, 41–42 coat of arms, 42, 45 Johann Jakop Fugger, 46 mining interests in Europe and the Americas, 42–44, 47–48 patronage of Hieronymus Wolf’s work, 46–48, 49 use of enslaved (African) labor, 44–45, 48 Gaudin, Paul, 154–59, 160 gender analysis of publications in Byzantine studies by, 135 Byzantine studies and, 91, 95, 138, 139, 177 nationalism, colonialism and, 6 prejudice, 92 genocides, 79–80 Gibbon, Edward, 10–11, 76, 98, 134 global history, 27, 41, 91–92 Glory of Byzantium exhibition (The Met), 12, 163, 166 gospel books, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166–67 Grammar of Ornament, The (Jones), 149 Great Exhibition, 146, 149 Greece ancient or classical, 3, 84–85, 87–88, 94, 98, 115, 118 Byzantine painting in modern, 102

Index as historical other in Turkish nationalism, 61 mutual ethnic cleansing between Turkey and, 79 Greek language, 37, 85, 112–19 Gregoras, Nikephoros, 40, 41, 47 Hagia Sophia (Istanbul), xi–xiii, 58, 64, 65–70, 69 Hagia Sophia church (Iznik), 64, 65 Hagia Sophia church (Trabzon), 64, 65 hagiography, 18–19, 20, 21, 114 Handy Tables of Ptolemy, 18, 19 hegemony Byzantine, 79–80, 106, 112 cultural, 77, 79 elite, 80 European, 26, 78, 112, 119 intellectual, 7, 105 Roman, 9, 112 state, 75–76, 80 of the study of Seljuks and Ottomans, 14 Hellenism, 112, 114–16, 119, 138 Heng, Geraldine, 26 The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, 9–10, 14–15, 16, 123 Herakleios, meeting of Muhammad and, 23, 23 Iakovos, Archbishop, 99 ICBS (International Congress of Byzantine Studies), xii, 58–65, 67–68, 70 icons in Byzantine style, 102, 103–5 by Mark Doox, 100, 100–101 by Photis Kontoglou, 102, 103 promoting progressive social issues, 100–105 by Robert Lentz, 102–3 in Western style with Russian influence, 102 identity Byzantine, 85, 87, 90, 111, 138 Byzantium’s Imperial, 111–14 Christian, 83–84 critical theory of, 138

Index Hagia Sophia’s Justinianic, 65 icons inscribed with personal and collective, 104 Italo-Greek, 20 local languages as expression of, 113 Muslim Saracen, 20 nationalism and ethnic, 122–23, 130 Rus and ethnic, 126–30 Western European, 119 Imperial Museum, Istanbul (present– day Archaeological Museum), 12, 155–56 imperialism archaeology and, 55, 151, 154–55, 157, 160–61 Black Lives Matter and antislavery movements and, 93 Bourbon, 48 British, 8, 145, 146–48, 149, 151 Byzantine scholarship and, 41, 75, 77–80, 111–15 definition, 77 European, 86–87, 94, 134, 145–48 modern and contemporary, 78, 140 Roman, 84, 112 Russian Empire and, 129–30 study of Coptic language and, 115 inequality and Byzantine studies, 134–40, 178 gender, 92, 135 of the modern racial state, 16, 174 systemic, 174 International Association of Byzantine Studies (AIEB), xii, 59, 62, 64, 65–68, 134 International Congress of Byzantine Studies (ICBS), xii, 58–65, 67–68, 70 Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, The (Heng), 9–10, 14–15, 16, 123 Jenkins, Romilly, 13–14 John of Damascus, 23, 25, 118 Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament, 149

197 Klontzas, Georgios, Klontzas Codex, 22–25, 23 knowledge production, 2, 10–11, 56, 75, 123, 124 Komnenian restoration, 76–77 Komnenos, John II, Emperor Roundel, 172, 173 Kontoglou, Photis, 102, 103 Krumbacher, Karl, 11, 25 Kyiv(an) state, 124, 126, 127–28 land legislation, tenth-century, 76, 77 Latin (language), 85, 112–13 literature in, 17 translations to, 40, 41, 114 Lentz, Robert, 102–3, 104 Leo IV, Pope, 89 Leo VI, Taktika, 124 Lesnovo, Church of the Archangel Michael, 20, 20 Life of Niphon, 19 Life of Saint Andrew the Fool, 18 Life of Saint Basil the Younger, 17, 21 Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, 20 lingua franca, 118–19, 136 Louis XIV, 10 Makarios III, Archbishop, 99–100 Makuria, kingdom of, 99 Mango, Cyril, 13 Manuel I Komnenos, 21 Manuel II Palaiologos, 25 marginalization of Byzantine studies, 3–4, 12, 14, 50, 58, 61, 63 Maximilian I, Emperor, 47 methodological imperialism, definition of, 75 methodological statism, 76, 80 Metropolitan Museum of Arts Armenia! Exhibition, 174 Byzantium: Faith and Power exhibition, 162, 166–67 Crossroads Project, 175 Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA), 163, 169 Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 162, 163, 168

198 Metropolitan Museum of Arts (continued) Ethiopian art, 162–66, 168–70 Glory of Byzantium, The exhibition, 12, 163, 166 Jewelry: The Body Transformed, 175 Jewish art, 168 Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine Art, 163, 168 Modern Greek studies, 2–3 Mongols (study of), 76, 124, 126, 129 Muhammad, Prophet, 23–24, 24, 69 Multilingualism, 116–17 Napoleon Bonaparte, 85, 146–47 National Committee of Eastern Roman/ Byzantine Studies, 62, 67–68 nationalism archaeology and, 55 colonialism and, 2, 4–7, 41 critical theories of, 138 in eastern Europe, 90 ethnicity and, 122–23 International Congress of Byzantine Studies and, 59 methodological, 76 Turkish, 58, 61, 63, 70 nation-state, 60, 76, 78–79, 111, 121, 127, 129 Night, personification of, 18, 19, 19 Nikolić, Toimislav, 25 Nobadia (Nubia), kingdom of, 99 Nyx, 19 Octateuchs, 19 Oikonomidès, Nicolas, 117–19 Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 113 Orientalism, 85, 86, 91 Origins of the Slavic Nations (Plokhy), 127–29 Orthodox Church African, 99, 101 Greek, 99–100 Greek of North and South America, 99–100 Russian, 101 Orthodoxy, 3, 8, 86, 90, 95, 116

Index Osman Hamdi Bey, 12, 155–56 Ottoman Empire archaeology in the, 155–57, 160–61 Christian groups in the, 113 conquest of the, 64 dissolution of the, 53, 87 Fugger banking dynasty and the, 41, 47–48 genocides of Armenians and Assyrians by the, 79 interest in the history of the, 60, 64, 70, 76 nostalgia for the history of the, 64 Orthodox church under, 86 railway project of the, 156, 157, 158 Russian military occupation of parts of the, 56 threat of the, 47–48, 134 Ottomans, 10, 14, 25, 47–48, 134 Pachoras, cathedral of, 21–22, 22, 26 Panorama 1453 Museum (Istanbul), 63–64 papacy, 87, 89 Patrologia Orientalis, 113 Peeters, Paul, 114–16 Pericles, 93, 102 Petros I (Bishop) and Saint Peter, 22, 22 Plokhy, Serhii, Origins of the Slavic Nations, 127–29 postcolonial studies, 5, 6, 7 Primary Chronicle, 126–28 Psellos, 125 race, critical theory of, 138 racialization, 16, 20, 21, 124, 129 racism, 14–16, 21, 41, 94, 123 RAIK (Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople), 12, 55–56, 130 Reformation, 41, 113 repatriation, 94, 169, 174 reproduction of Byzantine cultural artifacts, 28, 125 of elite hegemony, 77, 80 of ethnicity, 123 of methodological imperialism, 76–77

Index restitution, 49, 174 Revue des études byzantines (REB), 134, 137 Rhodopaios, possible portrait of (MFA), 154–61, 154 Roman Empire (decline and) fall of the, 76, 85, 93 public awareness of, 95 traditions in politics, empire and law, 84, 85 western Europeans as true heirs of, 85–86 Romaioi (East Romans), 85, 86,87, 89 Romanía, 85, 86 Rus, 121, 124–30 Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (RAIK), 12, 55–56, 130 Russian Empire, 129–30 Said, Edward, 6, 91, 138 Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church (San Francisco), 101–2 Saint John basilica (Ayasoluk/Selçuk), 56 Saint John Coltrane, church of (San Francisco), 101 Saint Peter and Bishop Petros I, 22, 22 Saracens, 19–21 “scholarly enclosure”, 138–39 Scythian peoples, 124–25 Seljuks, 14, 80 Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, 62 slavery Byzantine, 95 Code Noir, legitimizing and regulating, 10 Fugger family and, 44–45, 48, 49 of Native Americans, 24, 44 racial formation and, 124 Rus involvement in, 125 transatlantic, 15, 24, 39, 44–45, 48, 99 Slavs, 9, 35n90, 78, 121, 129, 131n6 Souda lexicon, 13 Soviet Union, 90, 93, 129 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 6 Sportula, The, 94

199 state hegemony of the state, 75–76, 80 Kyivan, 127–28 languages of modern, 126 nation-, 60, 76, 78–79, 111, 121, 127, 129 “patrimonial”, 88 systems, 75, 76, 77, 88 subaltern of the Byzantine Empire, 9, 77, 112 Byzantine Empire seen as, 106 Byzantine icon painting and, 105 Byzantine studies and the voice of (former), 105 Georgios Klontzas and the Whiteness of the, 24 perspective of the, 5, 8, 79–80 Suetonius, 17, 21 supremacy cultural, 4, 6, 8 papal, 48 white, 14, 15–16, 83, 94 Tacitus, 85 textiles with Baltic and central Asian designs, 126 Byzantine (Egyptian), 135, 145, 148– 51, 150, 168, 177 design and manufacture, 146–49, 151 early Islamic, 135 Fuggers of Augsburg, merchants of, 42–43 Jewish, 168 Toynbee, Arnold J., 11, 105 translatio imperii, 85, 89 Trebizond (Trabzon), 56, 64, 65 trefonds oriental de l hagiographie byzantine, Le (Peeters), 114, 115–16 Turkish History Thesis, 60 Turkey, Republic of Byzantine (also Eastern Roman) studies in, 60–63, 67, 69–70 protection of Byzantine monuments and heritage, 70 racist and neo-Ottoman movements in, 63 Westernization and modernization projects of, 60

200 Turks, 124, 157 Ukraine, 124, 127–29 Vatican Ptolemy, 18, 19 Venetians, 9, 21 Viking diaspora, 126, 129 violence, 9–10, 15, 21, 78, 89 Weber, Max, 122 white supremacy, 14, 15–16, 26, 83, 94

Index Whiteness, concepts of, 21–24 Wolf, Hieronymus, 10, 24–25 Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, 40, 47–48 paternity of Byzantine studies”, 40, 49 Fuggers’ patronage of, 46–48, 49 translation of Demosthenes, 46 Wood, John T., Discoveries at Ephesus, 157 Zonaras, John, 40, 41, 46, 47