Herrin's Byzantium: Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Introduction and Author Background

After the fall of Rome, all of Europe is often said to have entered a "dark age." Yet the eastern part of the former Roman Empire, known as Byzantium, flourished, led by the great capital of Constantinople. Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) provides an overview of the history of this great empire and its greatest city. She examines why it flourished — and also why it ultimately perished. Herrin's central thesis is that, far from being a mere footnote to history as it is so often reduced, Byzantine civilization played a critical role in preventing the Islamic empire from spreading across all of Europe, and thus played a vital part in making the Western world what it is today, for better or for worse.

Herrin is the author of many popular and scholarly works on this era and geographical region. For most of her academic career, Judith Herrin was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London. According to the King's College departmental website, Professor Herrin retired in 2008 to focus on her writing and to become a Research Fellow in the Department of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the college. Her most current area of research concerns women in the Byzantine Empire and Byzantium's role in negotiating relations between Islam and Christendom in the medieval and modern eras. She originally studied history at the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham. She has also worked and taught in Athens, Paris, and Munich, and held the post of Stanley J. Seeger Professor in Byzantine History at Princeton University before returning to England to take the position of second Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's. She is best known for her books that address a wide audience in the United States and the United Kingdom, including The Formation of Christendom (1989) and Women in Purple (2000) ("Professor Judith Herrin," King's College, 2009).

Herrin has been honored for her historical scholarship as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and also by the President of the Hellenic Republic of Greece, from whom she received a Golden Cross of Honor in 2002 ("Professor Judith Herrin," King's College, 2009). She was recently quoted in The Guardian, a popular British newspaper of record comparable to the New York Times in the United States, on the subject of the prohibitive costs of special museum exhibitions. She urged readers instead to seek out less publicized, free exhibits: "much Byzantine material can already be seen free… Sometimes it is labeled 'early Christian', not Byzantine… the biggest collections are in the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert [Museum]" (Bridge, 2008).

Central Thesis and Historiographical Argument

In Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire, Herrin strives to write against a common stereotype. Byzantium has often been associated with something obsolete or excessively bureaucratic — indeed, "Byzantine" has become a synonym for something negative and retrograde. Yet the empire was led by many paradigm-shifting leaders, not least of whom was Constantine I, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire and the first Christian emperor. Actual Byzantium was diverse, complex, and ever-changing — a fusion of cultural and religious identities. Herrin has made it her life's work to combat the negative and pervasive inaccuracies surrounding the civilization. To do so, she deploys a panoramic lens. Her work unfolds in a series of twenty-eight short chapters spanning practices, people, places, objects, and doctrines, organized topically in a vaguely but not strictly chronological manner. Chapters illuminate great historical issues alongside mundane aspects of daily life, addressing matters both great and small. Greek Orthodoxy, the Hagia Sophia, Rome and Roman law, the military technique of "Greek fire" at sea, eunuchs leading armies, icon worship, and the Towers of Trebizond are among the topics she addresses. Herrin presents material in a fairly straightforward manner, though on some issues — such as the Byzantine economy — she is willing to take a controversial stand, arguing, for instance, that Byzantium may have had a currency even though the archaeological record lacks supporting evidence.

Her central analytic contention runs against a previous academic assumption that stressed how Islamic expansion, which cut off the northern European economy from trade with the rest of the world, caused European Christendom's rapid economic and cultural decline, sparking the development of feudalism. According to Herrin, Byzantium provided a kind of safe-house of Christian culture, and the decline was not nearly as precipitous or sharp as historians have led readers to believe.

Herrin's technique is engaging even for readers unfamiliar with the period: she uses micro-level issues to address matters of macro importance. She writes in a manner that is accessible without sacrificing scholarly integrity, making the book equally suitable for general audiences and those with some background in medieval history.

Iconography, Religion, and Politics

One of the most interesting chapters concerns Byzantine iconography. If the lay reader is familiar with any aspect of Byzantium, it is likely this artistic practice. Herrin argues that icons cannot be understood primarily as artworks, as they tend to be regarded today, but must be placed in their historical and theological context to be properly interpreted. Manufacturing icons, for example, was seen as providing worshippers with a direct form of access to God. The artist functioned as a kind of medium — a vehicle of inspiration connecting the faithful to the saints or other figures in heaven. This stands in profound contrast to the reverence for the individual artist in Western culture and its emphasis on theological reproduction rather than the veneration of sacred art. The distinction highlights an essential difference between Western and Eastern Christianity that persists even today. In Byzantium, gazing at icons was a religious, not an aesthetic, experience, and the physical veneration of manmade artworks was not considered blasphemy — for most of Byzantium's history, at least.

However, in a stunning turn of events, the iconoclast movement gained in significance, eventually banning images during one period of the empire's history. After enduring a series of significant military defeats, imperial authorities concluded that idol-worship was to blame — just as God had allowed His chosen people to be destroyed when they worshipped idols, so too had Byzantium suffered. This episode illustrates how religion, art, and politics were inseparable in Byzantium, though the Christian advocates of icons ultimately won the day. Herrin notes that, viewed from a strictly anthropological perspective, the veneration of icons does carry strong pagan resonances. Nevertheless, iconography remains central to Orthodox practice today, a direct inheritance from this Byzantine Christian tradition.

Conclusion and Critical Assessment

Byzantium collapsed with the invasion of Turkish forces in 1453, but Herrin's fascination with the period lives on. At the beginning of her book she explains that she wrote it to help ordinary readers understand what she does for a living — and why Byzantium still affects their lives today. At times, the work reads more like an apologia, with the historian acting as an advocate for the civilization's greatness. However, the readability of the work compensates for the moments when Herrin sounds intensely partisan, writing in defense of the subject that has shaped her entire scholarly life.

At times, Herrin's familiarity with her subject leads her to assume too much on the part of the reader. Someone better versed in modern Orthodox theology might be better positioned to appreciate some of the theological controversies she highlights — many readers' only point of contact with Byzantine practice may be the "Jesus Prayer," which, according to Herrin, arises from a belief system called Hesychast theology, based on the constant repetition of a single prayer phrase. Nevertheless, Herrin's main accomplishment is that she tells a compelling story and mounts a defense of Byzantium without appearing anti-Turkish or anti-Islam — a notable achievement in a contemporary era fraught with religious controversy, not unlike Byzantium itself.

Works Cited

Bridge, Mark. "Who Said This Stuff Is Priceless?" The Times. 23 Aug. 2008, p. 6. ProQuest. 17 Feb. 2009. http://www.proquest.com/

Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

"Professor Judith Herrin." King's College, London. 17 Feb. 2009. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/bmgs/staff/herrin.html