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Arts & Letters

The death of Sir Steven Runciman on November 1, 2000, brought to an end the life of a very distinguished man and a most remarkable scholar. His long life bore witness to extreme scholarly fecundity, to a breathtaking and perpetual travel, and to a remarkable influence, both personal and scholarly, in the small and somewhat arcane field of Byzantine studies. In addition, his genealogical and social background was clearly unusual in terms of the sociology of modern scholarship. His passing was copiously noted throughout much of the world that was either once part of the Byzantine empire, or else influenced by its civilization, as well as in the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and the Antipodes, in all of which the relatively modern discipline of Byzantine studies is, more or less, cultivated.

Both of Runciman’s parents sat in the British parliament. At their death, he became financially independent. Thus, he was able to eschew the pursuit of academic posts, and found himself with the leisure necessary for the life of an inveterate traveler and independent scholar. In short, he became the Byzantine paradigm of the gentleman scholar, but one who outdistanced most of his British Byzantinist colleagues in publications of high scholarly merit. His research and publications were based not only on an enviable mastery of the English language, but also on a profound knowledge of the Greek and Latin sources, as well as on a remarkable control of the modern secondary literature. He read modern Turkish, Bulgarian, and Greek, as well as western European languages. In 1927, at the age of 24 he received his doctoral degree from Cambridge University with an important dissertation on the Armeno-Byzantine emperor Romanos I Lekapenos, which was published two years later and inaugurated a brilliant career in Byzantine studies.

When one looks at the history of Byzantine studies in the 1920s, the time during which Runciman made his debut, one sees that with a few extraordinary exceptions, this field was largely absent from the British scholarly horizons of instruction and research. Indeed, Edward Gibbon had served rather as the nekrothaptes (the gravedigger) of Byzantine studies in his country. Among the more notable exceptions were the indefatigable and majestic figures of J. B. Bury and the barrister Norman H. Baynes, both of whom laid the foundations for Byzantine studies in Britain. As Anthony Bryer has written in a recent essay in the Bulletin of British Byzantine Studies, with the notable exception of Steven Runciman, Bury did not produce a group of British students who would continue and expand his monumental work. Even in this solitary case, however, Bury was “unwelcoming.” Bryer writes that he restricted his attention to Runciman to a unique and brief walk in the streets of Cambridge, during which he ascertained upon inquiry that Runciman’s knowledge of Bulgarian was sufficient for the purposes of his dissertation on Romanos I.

The era of the First World War and the post-war period saw the establishment of the Bywater and Korais chairs at the universities of London and Oxford, respectively, and the appearance of new and important young Byzantinists: Arnold Toynbee, Dimitri Obolensky, Romily Jenkins, Robert Browning, and others, most of whom laid the firm foundation for Byzantine studies in England and made major contributions to the field. More importantly, they helped to train the next generation of British scholars who chose Byzantine civilization as their main focus.

Jenkins, though a first-rate philologist, unfortunately lent himself to the racist and racial interpretation of classical, Byzantine, and modern Hellenism. His contributions were limited to philology and not to an understanding of the civilization out of which the texts arose. Conversely, Toynbee, in his magnum opus, put forward the idea that it is civilization rather than the state that is significant for the analysis and reconstruction of man’s cultural evolution. In his schema, he identified Byzantine civilization as something creative, responsible for the civilization of the Balkans and eastern Europe, and still alive today. Obolensky’s work opened up, more widely, the analysis of the relations of Byzantium with the Balkans, Kiev, and Moscow. Browning was in many ways the most multifaceted of this generation of scholars, as he carried no ideological burdens or prejudices into his scholarship, was highly analytical, and had, in addition to his excellent philological armor, the most comprehensive knowledge of “exotic” modern languages: Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and modern Greek. He could not only read these languages, he could converse in them.

We see, accordingly, that although Runciman’s case was unique by virtue of his refusal to take on a teaching position, he was nevertheless a very important member of this second generation of British Byzantinists. Further, and in contrast to Jenkins, he did not deposit his political and cultural prejudices in his writings, although he undoubtedly had them, as we all do. He dealt with his subject – Byzantine history, culture, and texts – in as clinical a manner as possible, trying to feel the pulse of the historical flow by his reading of the pulse of the texts, and by his constructive, imaginative powers. He did not avoid evaluation of the phenomenon and of its parts, but his evaluations sought an even-handed handling of the texts. Though he acknowledges a stylistic debt to Gibbon, Gibbon’s and Gobineau’s predilections are completely absent from his voluminous writings. It is indeed a marked contrast with his “teacher” (if the word is appropriate), J. B. Bury, who believed that he could render Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire useful, useable, and modern simply by adding corrective footnotes. Runciman knew better. He imitated that which his time and class considered superior, the style, while rejecting the essence of the content. Thus it is that Runciman marks an important turning-point in British Byzantine studies from Gibbon’s antiquated understanding of history in the broader sense.

The late appearance of British Byzantine studies is partially explained by the more general lag in the appearance of such studies in western Europe and America. The Italian Renaissance had led to the western European rediscovery of the Greek classical authors which, the Italian humanists had come to understand, most often stood as the prototypes of much of ancient Latin literature. Renaissance humanism, in turn, led to a classicist concept of the history and culture of western Europe that, among other things, saw the ancient Greeks as coming to an end with Pericles, Alexander the Great, or the Roman conquest of Greece.

Having thus defined the classical era, and ancient Hellenism, as a base of western European civilization, the entire modern structure of university education and research propagated a periodization in which almost everything Hellenic ended in antiquity, without any continuity with medieval and modern times. Although some European scholars concerned themselves with Byzantium (notably Hieronymus Wolf {1560-80}, Johannes Leunclavius (1533-1593), and the prodigious C. du F. Ducange {1610-88}), the eighteenth century saw the appearance of an Enlightenment historiography in which the Englishman Edward Gibbon and the Frenchman Lebeau condemned Byzantium as a degenerate, corrupt assemblage of cowardly rulers, effeminate eunuchs, fearful soldiery, and prejudiced bishops, all of whom, together, created an ignominious history. As such, Byzantium, especially after Gibbon’s kiss of death in Britain, did not qualify for the new university curricula. It was not part of the classical or late classical world, and the new values of the Enlightenment were directly opposed – or so it was thought – to those of Byzantine civilization.

Certainly, Runciman’s greatest contribution was that he put Byzantium back on the British historical and cultural map as a civilization worthy of scholarly study and crucial in the formation of eastern and Balkan Europe, as well as in understanding the relations between the two Europes, east and west. This was the work not merely of some “gentleman scholar,” but of a profound scholar who understood that the Gibbonian prejudice had to be put aside once and for all. Runciman’s treatment of the eastern European world, as well as that of papal-Byzantine relations and Byzantino-Latin military and political encounters, reveal a powerful mind that reordered the understanding of much of all this, not only for British scholarship, but also – as the prolific sales of his books reveal – for the larger British reading public. Today, some 20 of his 27 books remain in print and are available in paperback editions. One eulogist remarked that next to God, Runciman had earned more money for Cambridge University Press than any other author.

What were the subjects of Runciman’s books? They included Byzantine civilization, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the last Byzantine renaissance, Byzantine style, and Byzantine autocracy. All these subjects are of a thematic nature that somehow ties in to the larger categories of historical experience and institutional history. Other books by Runciman deal with narrative history: the reign of the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos; the First Bulgarian Empire; the Sicilian Vespers; and a monumental three-volume history of the Crusades. Runciman’s history of the Crusades is an incredible achievement, and will probably remain the last major effort by one scholar to write such a history. The books on Romanos I and on the First Bulgarian Empire remain basic for the English reading public, as few will have the competence to read the many excellent scholarly works of modern Bulgarian scholars.

Runciman was also very concerned with the history of medieval religiosity, and he dedicated three important books to the subject. The Eastern Schism is a balanced account of the great historical and hostile encounter between the Latin and Byzantine churches, which ended in the great Schism of Latins and Greeks, Catholics and Orthodox, and which, in one sense, divided eastern and western Europe. In his work on medieval Manichaeism, Runciman traced the evolution and migration of old Iranian dualist religious thought and practice through medieval Armenia, Byzantium, the Balkans, and northern Italy, to France, where they became the basis of the Albigensian heresy that led to the creation of the Inquisition.

Perhaps his most enlightening work for western Europeans was his book on the Great Church under Ottoman “captivity.” Of all of Runciman’s books, this is the only major effort by the author to investigate what, if anything, of Byzantium survived the Ottoman conquests of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Constantinople. Many of Runciman’s most valuable contributions came at a time before the current efforts to create a united Europe no longer separated by religious or cultural lines. Thanks to scholars such as him, as well as to the growth and expansion of Byzantine studies, our knowledge of this millennial empire is vastly different from what it was in 1927, when he submitted his doctoral dissertation. We should also note that Byzantine studies in Britain in particular have now assumed a very important place.

In writing The Great Church in Captivity, Runciman crossed a great and artificial border that separated Byzantium (234-1453) from the rest of history, that is from the empire’s fall to the present. As the intellectual offspring of classical philologists, Byzantinists had adopted a rigid periodization. Byzantine civilization, after all, is not the same thing as the Byzantine empire. Just as European civilization is not the same as the history of the British empire. The two categories are not exact and interchangeable equivalents. One is greater than the other. One is more inclusive, the other less so. Even today, most Byzantinists, independent of those in the various Balkan countries and Turkey, are hostage to a rigid periodization that does not go beyond 1453. Byzantium collapsed, and so, according to this way of thinking, its civilization came to an end. What was Runciman’s view of this matter?

In The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, Runciman declares his position on the fate of Byzantium and its civilization: “Nevertheless, the date of May 29, 1453, marks a turning point in history. It marks the end of an old story, the story of Byzantine civilization.” In bringing Byzantine civilization to an abrupt end, and writing these lines in 1965, Runciman was only repeating what he had written in his book on Byzantine civilization some 30 years earlier in 1933: “On May 29, 1453, a civilization was wiped out irrevocably.…For eleven centuries Constantinople had been the center of the world of light.”

Runciman’s dicta in these two books assumed that empire and civilization are coterminal, that when the political institution disappears, so does its civilization. This is not only erroneous, but also a gross transmogrification of historical understanding. Like their classicist progenitors, Byzantinists have been enslaved by a sterile element in a general Western historical tradition, which is expansive and dynamic.

Obviously, the civilization of Byzantium is still deeply rooted, albeit greatly enriched and altered by Western civilization, in eastern Europe and the Balkans. Nor was Byzantine civilization destroyed when the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan in 1453. The structures of family, church, and popular culture in the agrarian, commercial, and maritime domains – and much else – continued in its Byzantine forms. Inasmuch as most Byzantinists have felt comfortable in the accepted “wisdom” of Byzantine studies, however, they have created an unhistorical chronological cocoon that isolates these studies from a great and important part of its history. There is a further linguistic obstacle: One needs to be able to read the Balkan and Turkish languages in order to uncover the further history of Byzantine civilization. The failure of many Byzantinists to do so greatly impoverishes their historical understanding.

Runciman read modern Greek, Bulgarian, and Turkish. Indeed, as mentioned above, Runciman crossed the artificial chronological border that Byzantinists have imposed on their subject: the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In The Great Church in Captivity, published only three years after his book on the fall of Constantinople, Runciman finally abandoned his older and long-held convictions that Byzantine civilization had disappeared in 1453. His detailed study of the patriarchate and the patriarchal church under Ottoman rule thus invalidates his early dicta on the disappearance of Byzantine civilization in 1453. It also shows that among Runciman’s greatest scholarly and human virtues were modesty and faith in the historical truth. In the end, he was willing to change his position, held for three and a half decades, that Byzantine civilization no longer exists.