There was never anything like it: not a city but the world city for over a thousand years, her domes, towers and colossal walls dominated the crossroads between east, west, north and south. It replaced the ruins of Rome and made Paris, Beijing and Delhi look like overgrown market-towns.
The subtitle of Judith Herrin's Byzantium is "the surprising life of a medieval empire", and she sets out to persuade us how astonishing this imperium was. More, she guides the reader towards understanding a millennial tragedy. Byzantium / Constantinople (now Istanbul) was a precondition for what we now call modernity, above all in the large peninsula to its west, "Europe". Yet in that mighty achievement lay a fate unimaginable to the inheritors of Rome: the great conurbation's own disappearance - as the centre of humankind, that is, rather than today's overblown regional capital stuffed with "relics".
The cosmopolitan source
Tom Nairn's article appears in the Australian journal Arena, and is republished here with kind permission of Arena and the author
Judith Herrin's book Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire in published by Penguin and (in north America) by PUP 2008)
Judith Herrin is professor in the department of Byzantine and modern Greek studies at King's College London. Her other books include The Formation of Christendom (1977; PUP, 1989), Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (PUP, 2002)
Also by Judith Herrin in openDemocracy:
"How did Europe begin?" (4 July 2001)
"Edward Said: the man and his music" (26 September 2003Judith Herrin's introduction points out how decisive was Byzantium's resistance to various invasions from the east - above all that of the 7th century CE (common era), when the first great expansion of Muslim power threatened the city. Had the Arabs succeeded then, they would undoubtedly have colonised "throughout the Balkans, into Italy and the West....at a time when political fragmentation reduced the possibility of organized defence." The north shore of the Mediterranean would have been "converted" as well as the south, there would have been caliphates in the Baltic, as well as the Levant and today's Mesopotamia.
By preventing this, the crossroads metropolis "made Europe possible...allowing small units time to develop their own strengths" and eventually repel the invaders. Developing nation-states like France, Spain and England were given the chance to consolidate and arm, and a century later turned back the invaders, and confined them, on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, to one part of Iberia. Thus the magnificent capital of the eastern empire shielded everyone to the west and north: "Without Byzantium there would have been no Europe."
Here of course lies the strong contemporary resonance of Herrin's argument (see also her article, "How did Europe begin?" [4 July 2001]). Her lively portrayal of a forgotten civilisation impacts on the revived Muslim awareness and expansion of today. It also encounters a world which (by recent calculations) is already or will soon be 50% urbanised, where ever-growing multitudes are heading for cities far larger than Constantinople. The latter's population was about half a million, she estimates, huge for those days but commonplace today. However, the idea of global or world-level cities seems to be more than keeping pace with such growth; and the author contributes something important to that debate too. She shows how "cosmopolitan" originally meant something relatively specific: anything but a moral posture or vain aspiration. It betokened all those who belonged to the city, in something like being "national" (or "naturalised") in a 21st-century sense.
The binding force
Like it, but also quite different. The most important chapter here is "A Cosmopolitan Society", her overview of Byzantine social and political structures. The denizens of Byzantium descended from one part of an imperial domain, speaking mainly an old Greek that has little to do with 19th-century "little Greece", the nation-state that rebelled against Ottoman rule. They were in a sense "born old", inheritors of a regime whose western regions had deserted the True Way (or been taken over), and hence forced to maintain eternal (or "orthodox") standards in all time coming. Their territories included zones of 20th-century Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, the middle east and Russia. But, "from its greatest extent in the sixth century, to its smallest, when it became a tiny cluster of city-states in the fourteenth, Byzantium was always an empire, not a nation". Its resident populations and tongues took what we perceive as "multiculturalism" completely for granted, and stuck together by other means.Tom Nairn is an expert on globalisation, nationalism, British institutions and Scotland.
His many books include Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (Verso, 1998), After Britain (Granta, 2000) and Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom (Verso, 2002), and Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-terrorism (Pluto Press, 2005)
Among Tom Nairn's articles on openDemocracy:
"America vs Globalisation" (a five-part essay, January-February 2003)
"On the beach: a bonfire of monarchies in Melbourne" (15 November 2005)
"Ending the big 'ism" (26 January 2006)
"The Queen: an elegiac prophecy" (27 September 2006)
"Not on your life" (14 May 2007)
"Globalisation and nationalism: the new deal" (4 March 2008)
Herrin reminds us just how powerful those civic and cultural means were. They included a still celebrated culture of "icons", or sacrosanct imagery, and elaborate juridical observances and formality. Today, "Byzantine" remains a deprecating term for probably devious or self-serving mediation, but she reminds us how for Byzantines "bureaucracy" was a majority interest. In effect, social cohesion by administration and iconic splendours were substitutes for later "nationalism", they bound together nationalities and classes into a common will - indeed, a common superiority over barbarians, armed illiterates and heathens. Externally, Byzantium was defended by a weapon better than American "star-wars" missiles are ever likely to be: "Greek fire", an oily mixture they could fire through their mastery of hydraulics at hostile fleets. The exact formula remains something of a mystery, but could be fearfully effective.
In Melbourne today, anyone passing down one of the duller stretches of Lygon Street can hardly avoid being struck by the patterned marble façade and dome of St John Baptist Orthodox Church: a bejewelled spaceship incongruously parked at No 1000, in between a Clean-Cleaners and the Lygon Health Centre. At its main door the visitor is overwhelmed by a vast cupboard offering every imaginable shape and size of icon for home consumption, alongside appropriate bells, books and candles. Byzantium reminds us that such ships don't just come out of time past, they're staking a claim on the future. Nor is that claim merely nostalgic or (in today's terms) "ethnic". The archaic may also be disturbingly relevant for mentalities enduring a surfeit of present-time parochialism.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the question of gender. Women played a formidable part in Byzantine greatness, and Judith Herrin described their role more fully in her earlier Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (Princeton University Press, 2002). Among Byzantium's illustrations is a famed and awesome mosaic portrait of the 6th-century Empress Theodora and her court. Herrin reminds us the lady was actually a renowned circus artist "appreciated for sexy acts and knock-about comedy", who later allowed Emperor Justinian to marry her, and helped him save the city from a threatened civil war. She was one of "a series of forceful women who exercised great power", bent the autocracy to their will and were "responsible for great bloodshed". These were mainly women "born in the purple" (another Byzantine phrase), who also restored the splendours of imperial art and architecture after the unfortunate episode of (male-military inspired) "iconoclasm". I think one may reasonably doubt whether Hillary Clinton would live up to such standards, were she lucky in November's election.
A claim on the future
There was never anything like it; nor will there ever be again, in a nationalist world. The modern world made possible by Byzantium bypassed and destroyed its maker. So in one sense it did end in 1453, when at last Turkish/Ottoman invaders surrounded the city, advanced from Kallipolis (Gallipoli), and smashed the walls with superior artillery.
But hang on there: isn't nationalism supposed to be on the way out? Or at least, threatened enough to make speculation about successors possible? I suspect this is what explains this remarkable book's appeal and commercial success. There will be no successor city to Constantinople; but ought there not to be a successor to some of its standards, at least, and above all to its cultural alchemy?
Judith Herrin insists time and again on the internal "Greek fire" that sustained and replicated such incredibly durable traditions: the cross-fertilisation of different strains composing what she calls the underlying "DNA" of Byzantium's domain. The latter welcomed and transcended both religious and secular genes, in "a coexistence of conflicting strands" that reached from Homer and pre-Christian times up to the early Renaissance. Does such deeply urban humanism require a literal conurbation and walls, in order to return and flourish? Isn't it possible for "globalisation" to escape its economic shackles, and foster some broader, systematic alternative?
