Judith HerrinBesprekingen

Più che a Poitiers, le radici dell'Europa vanno cercate a Ravenna (e il Cesare cui s'ispira Carlo Magno è forse Teodorico).

Judith Herrin argues here that neither later medieval/modern Western Europe nor the Islamic World would have developed as they did without the Byzantine Empire, and that religion was a key structural force in these varying developments. Byzantium was a buffer between the Dar al-Islam and much of Christian Europe, yet it was heavily influenced by Muslim aniconism; a rejection of iconoclastic extremes and also of Byzantine caesaropapism shaped how Christian institutions and particularly Carolingian power developed in western Europe. There are definite shades of Pirenne here, and parts of The Formation of Christendom have been superseded by later scholarship in the 30 or so years since this book was still published. Despite this and some other minor quibbles, there's still much to benefit from here; Herrin's explication of the icon controversy is authoritative.½

Durante mil años, un extraordinario imperio hizo posible que Europa alcanzara la modernidad: Bizancio. Esta breve y fascinante obra descarta el enfoque cronológico de las historias habituales para hablar de la arquitectura, la religión, la guerra, los personajes y mucho más, a través de episodios o temas concretos como la construcción de Santa Sofía, la iconoclasia, el papel de los eunucos o las cruzadas. Así, logra una historia más amena y accesible del imperio, desde la fundación en 330 de su magnífica capital, Constantinopla (la actual Estambul), hasta su caída ante los otomanos en 1453.

read 2022 in Italian

As Rome declined in the later years of the Roman Empire, various other cities grew to rival it for power and influence. Constantinople is the most famous of these, of course, but Ravenna was another of the "New Romes." It benefited from an enviable location as a port city on the Adriatic that was surrounded by marshy land which made it difficult to besiege. Judith Herrin here recounts the city's history from the fifth through to the ninth century, arguing for its importance to understanding the development of early medieval Europe.

It's an argument which I think has some merit to it, but I'm not sure that the structure of the book was the best way for Herrin to make it. The need to provide framing political context meant that the narrative was constantly jumping away from Ravenna for extended stretches, while the written sources that survive from the city are fairly fragmentary. I came away from Ravenna with a clearer picture of some of the key political figures associated with it over the centuries than I did of what it might have been like to walk the city's streets—though undoubtedly with the wish to visit the city and see some of the magnificent buildings and mosaics about which Herrin writes with such knowledge and affection.

A delightful exploration of the role of a city, that set its imprint upon the developement of Western Europe in the medieval period. Herrin's Ravenna is a narrative history of the Adriatic city, placing it in the context of the transiton from "Late Antiquity to "The Age of Charlemagne'" Her written sources are the historian Procopius, the book of Papal histories and the less authorative account of the Archbishops of Ravenna by Agnellus, an abbot of Ravenna, who wrote and embroidered his history in the 800's. The text is divided into nine sections which deal with the phases in which the city devolved from the operational capitol of the Western Roman empire into an argumentative, and evocative, but provincial, backwater. Her final chapter has a good view of her intentions: "Against both views, I have attempted to show that creation and innovation accompanied the conflicts and immiseration; that what had been the Western Roman Empire experienced the the birth pangs of a new social order as much as the death throes of the old one. A long process engendered the new social, military and legal order we call early Christendom."
There is a useful table paralleling Popes, Exarchs, the Archbishops of the City, and the Lombard Kings. The mapping is adequate, There are some unusual illustrations of the attractions of the city, not seen in other texts.

Buen libro sobre la historia de Bizancio, cubre esa larga historia con micha cita bibliográfica y gran interconexión con lo que pasaba en otros lados.

In this book the author has not come to bemoan the Fall of Rome, but to elaborate on the Rise of Christendom, as she focuses on topics alluded to in the subtitle, seeing as Ravenna remained a vibrant center of urban life and culture when the lights were largely going out all over the Western Roman Empire. That Ravenna remains somewhat obscure, other than as a place that used to be important, is a commentary on how it was usually the agent of some other polity; had the Gothic emperor Theodoric fathered a long-lived dynasty matters might have been different. Still, just as Theodoric took notes from his time in Byzantium, Charlemagne took notes on Ravenna, in the process of creating his own imperial image.

With books, as with most endeavors, managing expectations is key. The problem with Ravenna is that most of its history – unlike that of Rome or Constantinople – is about what happened to or in Ravenna; although in 410 it became the capital of the western Roman empire, by then most of the action had moved eastward to Constantinople, and the impact of Ravenna on the world outside of itself was very limited. The remarkable churches, monuments and spectacular mosaics that have been preserved and restored – are the real testament to what happened in Ravenna. Unfortunately, the only other records are those of a not totally reliable 9th century historian and a series of mainly legal documents. We can know who was there; the Visigoth leader Theodoric, who became the Western Roman emperor; Belisarius, Emperor Justinian’s famed general who recaptured large parts of Italy and North Africa for the empire; the Lombards and, finally, Charlemagne and the Franks. But, other than their presence in Ravenna, and the testament of their buildings and monuments, we don’t know much about what they did there; the author thus resorts to far too many speculative or presumptive assertions about who must have seen or have heard or have done what there. In fact, for many of Ravenna’s illuminati, their most significant acts took place in Rome or Constantinople or elsewhere. Swathed in the swamps of the delta of the river Po, Ravenna sat like a bejeweled remnant of the ancient world, eventually swaying with the tides of history that went on around and outside of it.

A book with the subtitle "Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe" is thus necessarily somewhat aspirational. It does provide a good refresher on the history of the late empire and early Byzantium, but in order to be true to her subject, the author has to give equal billing to the less than enthralling details - which are often all that her sources provide - of "Living in Ravenna". Thus, the author interrupts the story of Belisarius' campaign to give a list of land sales, with the names of all the individuals involved and their professions or ranks and their relationships to each other, the Latin denominations of the land areas, and the amounts of money that were paid. Each chapter includes a similar excursus into the annals of the city and, even though each one refers to a different period, there is a certain monotonous similarity to them. In contrast, two whole chapters devoted - one to the surviving transcripts of lectures on the medicine of the ancient world by a 6th century Ravenna doctor, the other to the work of an “anonymous Cosmographer” of Ravenna – are quite interesting. The author emphasizes the continuing presence of Greek language and culture in Ravenna, both religious and secular. To the extent that this was also true of other Byzantine enclaves in Italy – Naples, Sicily and Sardinia – Ravenna was one of, but not necessarily the only, cultural fulcrum between East and West, between the Greek and Latin worlds.

The historical perspective is novel and, at times, illuminating; viewed from Ravenna, late antiquity and the early mediaeval does look different from the usual focus on Byzantium or Francia. The remaining western parts of the old Roman empire were less directly affected than the east, by the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, and they were increasingly left to their own devices, as Constantinople – having to deal with the constant Muslim threat as well as other local problems, such as the Bulgarians - was less able either to exercise its authority in the West or provide military support there against the continuing attempts of the Lombard kings and dukes to expand their territories in Italy. The author provides a detailed and vivid account of the triangular “love hate” relationship – depending on which emperor, Pope or archbishop was in charge – that developed between Constantinople, Rome and Ravenna. The mid 8th century imperial policy of iconoclasm was a clear watershed, that put Rome and Ravenna into the same camp, in defending and perpetuating the use of religious images. She also documents the way in which Rome, under the Popes, gradually slipped its ties to the authority of Constantinople, and became an autonomous Christian power center, effectively knitting together a Western Christendom out of the separate – but by then all Catholic Christian – players. This process culminated in 800 with the crowning of Charlemagne in Rome as the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

In her summing up, the author admits that perhaps the most significant way that Ravenna contributed to the West was, not as an actor like Rome or Constantinople, but in the way that it was acted upon by other players. Over the 400 years covered by this account, Ravenna was a conduit for the passage of religious and cultural movements from the East which influenced the formation of the Christian West. Ravenna was a source not just of ideas, but of material culture too; over the course of his several visits to the city, Charlemagne helped himself to marble from Ravenna’s buildings, a monumental statue of King Theodoric and the design for his palace church in Aachen – an octagonal plan with a dome on top like Ravenna’s church of San Vitale - introducing an Eastern novelty into northern Europe. Charlemagne’s successors too continued to plunder Ravenna’s artistic and architectural heritage. Perhaps the point the author is making is that, to understand the impact of Ravenna, you have to imagine how the rest of Europe would would have looked like without it.

A flawed effort, within a noble campaign to explain that Byzantium probably can't be summed up by an incense-bearing eunuch paying off manly masculine men from [wherever the author is from] until finally the whole mess collapsed because of its inherent weakness and, let's be honest, lack of manly masculine men. Byzantium is just the Roman Empire lasting until the fifteenth century. The next time some American neo-conservative complains that such-and-such an event in the USA is redolent of such-and-such an event in Rome just before the empire fell in the fifth century, throw this book at their head. A noble, noble cause.

That said, and for all the strengths of the book--nice detail, wide range--it's a little infuriating that Herrin spends so much time talking about things that happened to her when she was a tourist in some part of what used to be the Byzantine empire. It feels like someone (agent? editor? Herrin herself?) decided that this book needed 'livening up.' Herrin, for better and worse, is not William Dalrymple. That's not to say Herrin shouldn't have written this book, only that it could easily have been much better.

Considering that Byzantine history lasts for a thousand years, I think it was really smart to not try to tell a chronological story but to explore different aspects of Byzantine culture in individual chapters. If you're looking for a narrative history, this isn't it, but if you want a good overview of Byzantine culture and its influence on the world, this book is excellent.

Informative and beautifully written, with maps and photographs.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3088441.html

Gibbon very unfairly neglects the Byzantine Empire, and Judith Herrin here argues for its rehabilitation as a vibrant civilisation in its own right, until it was dealt a deadly blow by Western Christianity in 1204 (and yet still survived another quarter of a millennium). She avoids doing a straight historical narrative, instead concentrating on different aspects of Byzantine politics and culture, arranged roughly in chronological order; there is an early chapter on the Hagia Sofia, a late chapter on Trebizond and the other post-1204 splinters. I felt that the risks of this approach did not quite pay off - there ends up being some repetition between chapters, and the whole thing seemed a bit unmoored from a firm timeline. Of course the risk of going the other way is that you would get too much into the dynastic politics of the people at the top, to the neglect of the rest.

Speaking of the people at the top, I had not appreciated that several women ruled the Byzantine Empire in their own right, or that two of them responsible for ending the two spells of iconoclasm. And having complained about the weak connection to the passage of time, I must say that I was very satisfied with the book’s treatment of the shifting geography of the Byzantine empire, particularly the account of how the Ravenna mosaics came to be in Ravenna. Fans of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors will be enlightened by this book, which may be better absorbed chapter by (short) chapter, rather than reading through in a few sittings.

"The three empresses... profoundly altered the course of history"
By sally tarbox on 27 August 2017
Format: Paperback
I got interested in Byzantine history- about which I knew very little - during a visit to Greece.
This is an extremely well-written work, requiring no background knowledge, which focusses on three 9th century empresses - Irene, Euphrosyne and Theodora - and the role they played in restoring icons to a church which had previously banned them. The reader gets a good overview of the empire at this time - the court life, the importance of monasteries (in one of which Euphrosyne grew up, in enforced seclusion with her repudiated mother), the politics, and also the wider world - Arab and Slav invasions and an at-times difficult relationship with the West.

I wouldn't call it a heavy read but it requires concentration. You're not going to remember all the events, but I think it leaves the reader with a good general understanding of an era we hear little about. Most informative and interesting.

Well written overview of the history of the Byzantium empire½

A collection of short pieces that Herrin has seen collected in other people's collections over the years, as well as a couple of original works. Her analyses are interesting, and the essay on the ancestry of Fermat's last theorem is startling. There are also two pieces on welfare in Byzantium, and an interesting piece on the means whereby the Roman Curia achieved its prominence. Good stuff, well written by an eminent Byzantinist.

A competent and readable history of the Byzantine empire. It updates earlier histories, such as the eloquent trilogy of John Julius Norwich, incorporating a more skeptical eye and covering a broader range of topics, albeit in a much briefer work. For example, Herrin argues that the gruesome punishment of Bulgar prisoners captured after the battle Kleidion is most likely a myth, and she does a better job than Norwich untangling the various rulers of the Palaiologan dynasty.

The work is organized in four chronological sections, but the chapters within each section often move across chronology to look at topics such as rise of icons as a Christian art form, the linguistic inventions of Saints Cyril and Methodios, the monasteries on Mount Athos, the writings and life of Anna Komnene, and the cosmopolitan nature of the Byzantine Empire. This approach gives a sense of Byzantium as a civilization and stresses its continuity across a 1100-year history.

Much has been made by some reviewers of a slip of the pen that makes Stilicho the successor of Romulus Augustulus in 476 (it was Odoacer). This is clearly an oversight of both author and editor, but it in no way detracts from the scholarship of the rest of the book.

A beautifully structured account of the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Medieval era. Rather than give separate histories of the rise of the papacy, the evolution of Byzantium, and the establishment of the Carolingian Empire, Herrin synthesizes these movements and shows how their interrelationships formed post-Roman Europe. For example, she discusses how rivalry between iconoclasts and iconophiles in the east helped drive the Pope and Charlemagne into an alliance that broke the hold that the emperor in Constantinople had over the western church, culminating in Charlemagne being crowned Emperor in 800 by Pope Leo III. The final chapter is a lovely meditation on the monastic libraries of the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance. It doesn't provide a grand summation so much as a lovely coda to an ongoing story.

My knowledge of all things Byzantium was embarrassingly meagre prior to reading "Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire". I knew of the great military generals Belisaurus and Narses ("The Hammer of the Goths"), and the plague that nearly wiped out the Empire but I'm now happy to state that I know a lot, lot more about the Byzantines.

Some of that "lot more" I know about Byzantium contains a lot of references to the differences between Byzantine and Roman religious practices. This was interesting at first but started to tax my patience as Herrin dove into the intricacies of ecumenical council and iconoclasm. Similarly, Herrin's decision to write on topics rather than chronologically led to some confusion, particularly over the names of Emperors and Patriarchs (there's only so many Constantine's one can keep track of). On the plus size, Herrin introduced me to Emperor Basil "The Bulgar Slayer". If nothing else, the Byzantines could sure coin a good nickname.

Wie der Titel dieses Buches schon zeigt, werden hier erstaunliche Alltagsgeschichten rund um das Thema Byzanz beschrieben. Hauptschwerpunkt bleibt die Entwicklung des Reiches von Konstantin und Justinian über die ersten arabischen Einfälle bis hin zur Eroberung ihrer Hauptstadt Konstantinopel durch die Osmanen. Judith Herrin führt ihre Kapitel nicht nach einer strengen Chronologie der Geschehnisse an, sondern nach besonderen Merkmalen dieser Zeit. So werden Herrscher porträtiert, die Wirtschaft des Goldes näher erläutert oder was es heißt im Purpur geboren zu sein. Auch die kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen, wirtschaftliche Folgen sowie die Entwicklung der Religion werden ausreichend beleuchtet. Durch die kurzen, aber mit vielen Informationen ausgeführten Kapitel, kann der Leser in jedem Kapitel ein farbenfrohes und lebendiges Bild, über die damalige Zeit des mittelalterlichen Byzanz, entwickeln.

Ms Herrin wades into an area with little surviving evidence, and has the courage to produce a very readable synthesis from a number of disparate sources. I applaud her work!½

"Byzantium: the surprising life of a medieval empire" is a highly readable thematic history of the Byzantine empire which de-emphasizes the usual murder and betrayal stories around the emperors. The author presents the cultural and religious achievements of Byzantium of continuing and preserving the Roman civilization (in Greek clothes and language). The book's subtitle actually runs counter to its message: Instead of being a "medieval empire", Byzantium emerged from the Arab, Turkish and Bulgarian challenge as a medieval kingdom. Having been sacked by the Crusaders and Venice, it soldiered on for a few centuries more before it vanished into the pages of history.

Quite interesting but a bit too much christianity - pages and pages about who's allowed to say what in prayers, which churches have which icons, who's destroyed what books etc. I know that most of the written sources from the time must have been from christian monks but it coould have done with more about the lives of ordinary Byzantines.½

Very good indeed. Byzantium remains elusive, but this one brought the place a bit more into focus.

I'm glad I read this book. Nothing in this review should detract from the ultimate statement that I am glad I read this book, and I do not regret purchasing it. I think Judith Herrin is a remarkable historian, I think her work is important, and I am glad that she wrote this.

I am somewhat frustrated at her methodology, at the realms of speculation which she indulges in (Siria's remark about her use of the present tense as a tool for inducing urgency is, I think, a little generous; Herrin uses the present rather than the conditional when she is making assertions which are backed by her education and informed hypotheses rather than historical documents), at how difficult it was for me to keep track of who was who and who was doing what. This is clearly a specialist book, and it was harder for me to read than I was anticipating, even as a trained historian; I have never studied the sixth through ninth centuries in much detail, nor have I ever studied Byzantium seriously, and that is my failing, not Herrin's. But this was less of a pleasure to read than I was anticipating, and I'm left with a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth.