The first book on your list, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Michael Psellus, is an autobiographical story. What made you choose this job?
I decided it was very important to have a book by a Byzantine, because you get a much stronger sense of the culture and atmosphere of Byzantium by reading what was written by an individual who lived then. Byzantium, the ancient Greek city, established by the Greek colonizers of Megara in 667 BC. c. And named after King Byzantines, later renamed Constantinople, it became the center of the Byzantine Empire, a Greek-speaking Roman empire of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The city became Istanbul in 1930, the capital of modern Turkey. this book by michael psellus is so fascinating that if you only read one book about byzantine, by a byzantine, that would be the one i would choose.
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Would you say psellus is typically Byzantine?
is a product of the 11th century when things were changing very drastically and rapidly and in a way frightening. his reaction to these changes is very specific, but at the same time he expresses them in a very nice way, which I find eminently readable. It is quite different from previous Byzantium writers in that it inserts itself into the narrative all the time. psellus is a terrible egoist; he can’t stop talking about all the great achievements of his. he constantly refers to his own skill and brilliance, but you can see from the jobs he held and the way he clung to power and influence that he was highly intelligent and that the court still needed his skills. him.
what was, in general, the Byzantine culture represented by psellus?
Byzantium carries this very heavy heritage from immediate contact with ancient Greek culture and the intellectual achievements of the fifth century BC in Athens. you can see how ingrained the pagan culture is, yet overlapped with roman, christian and of course medieval influences that continue to enrich this mix, over the centuries. Clearly this culture changes all the time. one of the problems with studying byzantium is that it went on for so long, over a millennium, and people think it was static, but in fact it was changing and transforming every decade.
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your next book is the world of late antiquity by peter brown. How does this book enrich our understanding of Byzantium?
This is an extraordinary book. It was commissioned by an art history publisher, Thames and Hudson, and was to be an illustrated history of the area that Peter Brown was exploring in the 1960s and 1970s. Actually, Late Antiquity wasn’t much of a concept before it came out. that book. in very few words he managed to outline a whole new geography that taught us that one cannot think of the rise of Christianity without looking at the fate of the old established religions such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism; and that the rule of the roman empire had to be brought into the context of persia, the barbarian north and the followers of islam. that there was a much larger canvas on which to study the period from the third to the sixth centuries AD. It really put the late Roman period into perspective in a whole new way.
This late antiquity concept is quite different from the ancient gibbon decline and fall approach.
Instead of this notion of decay and being a shadow of its former self, the Roman world of late antiquity assumed a much richer, more colorful and culturally rich existence. peter brown showed very significantly that by looking at the wider world, one could see that roman ideas, in their christian forms, were spreading throughout the empire and far beyond, as in the case of nestorian christians, who they made their way through persia to china.
Peter Brown’s work appeared on the back cover of JB Bury’s A History of the Eastern Roman Empire, another one of your favourites?
I’m sure it does, but I think burying really belongs to the classical tradition. I have selected that work because it wrote beautifully. Bury’s analysis of the original sources is a lesson to all of us in how to read carefully and sympathetically, but constantly look for gaps or silences in the sources that indicate something we cannot fully understand, and that Bury was able to make sense in a way that is important. He produced this wonderful narrative, and Peter Brown certainly has the same ability to draw the reader through all sorts of complicated developments by writing so well and so convincingly that you won’t want to put him down. bury was in a class of his own. One of his most talented students was Steven Runciman. he certainly would have included the story of the runciman crusades if there had been room for more books because it is a very determined style, a style that is designed to interest and excite the reader. there is nothing boring about runciman or bury. we have to hold on to this tradition of enthusiasm and stylistic clarity that is often sidelined by too detailed an analysis of too many details.
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Could you tell me about your next choice, doingism?
hagarism is the most exciting book I read as a young graduate. gave meaning to the rise of Islam. Cook and Crone, the authors, have carefully analyzed what non-Arabic sources tell us about the rise of Islam and about this new prophet Muhammad. I met the authors and realized how seriously they took this delicate work. islam is a living faith and there are people who interpret the sources written in arabic, about the rise of islam, in very particular ways. it was very difficult to find a way to make sense of the rise of Islam through non-Islamic sources that would not offend all these specialists. many of them were offended. there is no way you can be an outsider in a living tradition like islam today and not upset certain muslim believers and thinkers who have their own different historical analyzes and viewpoints. cook and crone shed much light on how muhammad united the arabian tribes and, of course, how byzantium changed so radically with the rise of islam. we are talking about an extraordinary conquest of 40 years at the end of which almost two thirds of the empire had been lost. that was an extraordinary thing for a centralized government to have to come to terms with.
your fifth book walks through istanbul. what makes this book different from other istanbul guides?
is a wonderfully evocative guide that is a great pleasure to read. when i first went to istanbul back in the 60’s it was produced recently and was the most comprehensive and comprehensive guide – i was amazed at the details. the authors had walked and made sense of the city in a way that was very exciting. i wandered around these different parts of istanbul with my copy of his book, which was a joy to read. it’s still a great introduction to the many layers of the city: starting from the top layer, which is the contemporary world, and going deeper and deeper into the past.
Has there been a lot of historical or cultural cleaning of the city’s memory and monuments?
yes. there was a lot of destruction in the 20’s and then there was another rather more restrained wave in the 50’s when Greek merchants were more or less pushed out of the bazaar. those two events of the 20th century were very detrimental to the non-Turkish communities. but today there are many more greeks visiting istanbul and the new detente between turkey and armenia, which we have seen recently, is a positive step towards a greater degree of openness, tolerance and support for minorities. Istanbul is a very cosmopolitan city and that cosmopolitanism, which is very Byzantine, animates everything. istanbul is going to be the cultural capital of europe in 2010, and the turks are determined to make this an appreciation of their long-standing culture. byzantium will certainly get a good platform. I hope that the Greek community and others also feel that their presence has also been recognized. Istanbul has a wonderfully mixed and complex society and this should be something to appreciate rather than ignore or try to eliminate.
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