Tea at Trianon: The Secret to Byzantium’s Success

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 17, 2024

The Secret to Byzantium’s Success

From Engelsberg Ideas:

When I was first introduced to Byzantine history at university in the early 1990s, the book to which we were initially directed remained the English translation of the History of the Byzantine State, written by the great Russian and Yugoslav Byzantinist George Ostrogorsky, first published in German in 1940.
Ostrogorsky’s approach to the Byzantine Empire was totalising, emphasising what he described as ‘the essential interdependence of events at home and abroad, political, ecclesiastical, and cultural’. It was also broadly Marxist. Devotees of Byzantine art or Orthodox theology were never permitted to forget that ‘the wealth of the empire and the high level of its culture were bought at the expense of the masses who lived in misery without means of redress and without freedom’. As a result, the history of the empire, Ostrogorsky sought to explain, was punctuated by a series of internal political struggles, often informed by deep-rooted social and economic tensions. In 1997, by contrast, the US historian of Byzantium, Warren Treadgold, published his own History of the Byzantine State and Society. With his focus firmly fixed on military and cultural developments, with this 1,000-page tome Treadgold sought to displace Ostrogorsky, consciously eschewing as he did so ‘modern ideologies like Marxism, post-structuralism, or nationalism’.
To what extent Treadgold ever managed to supplant Ostrogorsky’s magnum opus with his own is hard to tell: the days are long gone when one could set undergraduate students a 1,000-page book as a mere part of their initial reading for a course. The therapy dogs would be summoned before you even had time to dictate the name Constantine Porphyrogenitus. With the publication of The New Roman Empire: The History of Byzantium, we now have a new 1,000-page history written by the US-based Greek scholar Anthony Kaldellis.
Kaldellis is without doubt one of the most original and productive scholars currently working in the field of Byzantine studies. In a series of sometimes brilliant books and articles, he has challenged how we should think about the political identity, intellectual culture, and literary output that we associate with the Greek-speaking, Christian Roman Empire of the East, which for more than a thousand years was ruled from the great city of Constantinople or ‘New Rome’ (as the Emperor Constantine had dubbed it), and which most of its subjects almost always referred to simply as Romania – ‘the Roman realm’ (the concept of ‘Byzantium’ or the ‘Byzantine Empire’ being a later western scholarly and political confection). With this book, we finally have Kaldellis’ take on the history of that empire as a whole, from the inauguration of Constantinople in the year 330 to its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The approach is largely narrative, but with significant and often highly informative excursuses on religious and literary culture. Indeed, the sections on intellectual and literary developments in late antiquity, the tenth century, and the Comenian and Palaeologan periods from the 11th to 14th centuries are among the highlights of this excellent book. Beyond the realm of the intellect and that of belief, the concentration is primarily upon high politics and the ways in which the fate of the empire was intricately bound up with the emergence, disintegration, and re-emergence of military and political rivals and foes along the empire’s frontiers: Huns and Goths; Persians and Arabs; Normans and Turks. (Read more.)