To much excitement, I received an acceptance letter from the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies department at Oxford last Thursday. While I’m really going to miss skating next year as it has been a central part of my life for the last decade, my focus has been on school, and now it seems to have finally paid off. This place is the centre of the world in the study of Byzantium, so I was absolutely thrilled to be admitted. Of course, it is conditional upon graduating and getting an upper second-class honours’ degree. While the graduation is part out of my hands at this point, the grades shouldn’t be a problem. Even if I got a B- in Latin (a distinct possibility, as I haven’t studied it in three years and it is not coming back well), I should still average in at first-class honours this year. Nowhere outside of Oxford can I get the training in the physical disciplines (sigillography, numismatics, ceramics, etc.) of Byzantine Studies, nor is there such a fantastic selection of renowned scholars elsewhere. This is where people like Averil Cameron, Chris Wickham, and J.D. Howard-Johnston work and teach. The university also has experts in all of the ancillary languages (Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic) of which I’ll probably need to pick up one, as the Greek sources for the period I’m interested in are quite poor. They have some of the best libraries in the world and vast artefact collections. On top of that, I was assigned Dr. Mark Whittow to be my supervisor. His book The Making of Byzantium is easily the best survey of the Eastern Mediterranean world during the early middle ages that specifically focuses on Byzantium. On top of its actual physical and intellectual resources, the town of Oxford is incredibly beautiful, and many of its notable buildings are several centuries older than the country I live in.

Somewhat more impressive than the TFDL

There is, however, one major problem. Oxford is obscenely expensive for foreign students. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting on a college offer. I’m thinking that I’ll be getting at least some funding, but I doubt that it’ll be anywhere near the almost $24,000 CDN that tuition alone would cost per year. On top of that there are college fees, books, food, and rent. I think I could cobble together the resources to afford the M.Phil degree while only going into a bit of debt, but the issue is that the M.Phil is not the end of the road. The D.Phil at Oxford is the ultimate goal, and that would be several years of study after the M.Phil. Generally, there is more funding at the doctoral level just about everywhere (although I’m not sure about Oxford), but even then the M.Phil would have completely drained my resources. The other consideration is the EU fee status. I am eligile to get a German passport. All this would get me for now is the benefit of not needing a student visa to study in the UK, which does not seem very hard to get anyway. However, after two years of doing the M.Phil degree at Oxford, I would meet the residency requirement and thus be categorized in the Home/EU group for tuition at the doctoral level. So spending a lot now would make the D.Phil cheaper, but whether it is enough to make up the difference is unclear at this point. The last point is that the institution of my second choice, the University of Ottawa, seems to have generous funding. Between the departmental funding, a possible SSHRC grant in my second year, and TA work, I don’t think it would cost me much at all to go to Ottawa and I could come out ahead.

I now have until the 17th of February to let them know at Oxford as to whether or not I am accepting their offer. On the one hand, it is Oxford. It seems foolish to turn them down. On the other, it is very expensive and I plan on going there for the doctoral degree anyway. I got in once, and I can do it again. Thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated.

In brief, I think we see the genesis of what we define as Byzantium appearing over many centuries. Some of the military reforms, concepts of emperorship, and religion can be directly tied back to Diocletian. Constantine was an extremely important part of the formation of Byzantium through the toleration of Christianity, and so was Theodosius I for making it the state religion. Eusebius of Caesarea’s ideas of the connection between the divine realm and the state and the re-writing of Roman history to make the Romans God’s Chosen People are absolutely indispensable to the process. In the west this died out due to the lack of centralized authority and the high place given to the writings of Augustine, but in the east, if anything, the state became even more closely allied to the church during the crisis period. Under Justinian we saw the weakening of the landholders and the senatorial class. He re-arranged the elite to centre them firmly on Constantinople and away from the provinces, which helped to solidify the power of the emperor as the dispenser of all imperial titles and ensure the primacy of Constantinople.

I don’t see any fundamental break with Rome, but rather gradual change that started at the end of the third century. The state was thoroughly “Byzantine” in our loaded sense of the term by the death of Herakleios, but this transformation was a long process, and is certainly less rapid and less marked than the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate under Augustus. In the same way, Byzantium was never static: iconoclasm became an important part of its identity even long after that period had ended, and we see significant changes in how the empire was ruled under the Komnenoi in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Towards the end of Justinian’s reign, the Empire begins to enter a period of crisis. The state seems to have had a hard time paying their soldiers, unrest breaks out, and the frontiers on the Danube collapse. Keeping in mind that the fifth and sixth centuries were periods of peaceful transitions of power, we have to look at Herakleios and Phokas in this concept. As military usurpers, they had to justify themselves. We don’t know what Phokas did, if anything. The record slanders him excessively, so any sort of certainly is impossible. However, we have a very judicious sample of Herakleios’ propaganda, and this is one that strongly emphasizes the connection between God and the state and brings up Old Testament images frequently. This is the point, moreso than before, where we really begin to see a transition of the identity and the culture into one centred very strongly on God and the state, and concerned very much with their own survival (which looked bleak throughout much of the seventh and eighth centuries). If any single event sums up the change, it was probably Herakleios’ spectacular victory over Persia in 628. Only two years before, the Persians had attacked Constantinople with the aid of the Avars. The story was that the Virgin Mary’s robe had saved the city (acting in a manner very similar to that of the Roman palladia), and the regime actively promoted this idea. When the Persian government collapsed, all of the ideology about the Romans being God’s Chosen People was confirmed. They had been on the brink of destruction, and yet they had been delivered in a move so spectacular that it must have appeared divine to many people (and was actively promoted that way by Herakleios’ government). This helped to solidify the worldview that the Empire’s fortunes hinged on God’s favour, which was contingent with the sinfulness or lack thereof of the people and its rulers. This further meshed politics and orthodoxy together, and was a major component in the beginning of iconoclasm.

The upper parts of the church seem to have been rebuilt by the Turks later on, as you can see from the change in the masonry.Trying to get a decent picture of this proved really difficult, and the high angle here led to some serious washout.

The date of the church is totally unknown. I cannot find anything concrete, but it seems to be a rather late Byzantine foundation. The name of the church should not be taken to indicate a foundation that was immediately after the end of iconoclasm. The story of St. Theodosia is told to us by Theophanes. She was apparently a pious woman who witnessed the removal of an icon of Christ from the Chalke Gate, near the imperial palace and the Hagia Sophia. In an attempt to prevent this, she pushed the ladder over which the soldier removing the icon was on, sending him plummeting to his death. She was then murdered by the other soldiers. The problem with this story is that it is a total fabrication. The Council of 787 accused Leo III, the emperor who began the iconoclastic movement of just about every heinous crime under the sun, but this never appears in the indictment. Considering that they seem to have invented many of the charges, it is surprising that they would not include a real a martyrdom that steadfastly supported the cause of the iconodoules. Eirene may have put an icon of Christ on the Chalke Gate at the end of the eighth century. It is possible that she fostered this legend to increase her own rather feeble support. Either way, there is really no contemporary evidence that Leo took anything down from the Chalke Gate, and thus no evidence that anyone was martyred. However, the Restoration of Orthodoxy became an extremely important feast in the Byzantine church to celebrate the end of imperial iconoclasm, so it is not surprising that a cult grew up around the legend of a Constantinopolitan saint.

St. Theodore Tiro is another Byzantine church that does not seem to get many visitors. It’s now the Molla Gurani Camii and seems to only be open for Muslim prayers so you’ll have to time it right (and be quiet and respectful) to get in and get a chance to look around. This does not seem to have been an important church, and even the association with St. Theodore Tiro is uncertain. This picture was taken from inside a nearby Ottoman-era cemetery. The minaret is obviously a later addition to the church.

I never actually managed to get into the church itself, but I got into the narthex. In the narthex I made an interesting discovery: the interior of the small domes had not been whitewashed over. Although most of the figures had been scrapped away, you can still clearly see a figure of Christ on the top of the dome amidst the general damage.

The windows around the dome are still in decent shape, and the mosaics, while small, are still quite pretty.

Given the sloppy job that was done in whitewashing this church as this pillar suggests, one can only hope that more of the Byzantine heritage of Istanbul awaits to be discovered under the plaster.

For such a large building, I have very little material on the Pantokrator Monastery. It was built by the Empress Eirene of Hungary, wife of John II Komnenos (r. 1118-1143). It became an important imperial religious foundation, and served as the tomb for John II and his wife, as well as their son, Manuel I (r. 1143-1180). Under John II, it had a hospital attached to it. Unlike many medieval hospitals, its doctors attempted to use the best knowledge of their day to actually treat illness, instead of providing a place for the ill to stay. It was funded by the state. Since its typikon (foundation document) survives, we also know that it was stipulated that it employ a certain number of female doctors to treat female patients. Today it is the Zayrek Camii. If you decide to visit, keep in mind that you are likely to be a bit of a novelty to the locals. Not many tourists go far from Sultanahmet (the eastern tip of the old city where some of the most magnificent structures are) but the Zayrek district is definitely a different Istanbul. It’s exceptionally poor. The buildings are run down, and you do not have to walk far before seeing the abandoned and dilapidated remains of old Ottoman houses, which Turkish law requires the preservation of. Sadly, the money is not available to keep all of these old buildings in a decent state of repair, and many are abandoned. It is also not uncommon to see empty lots full of rubble from burned and collapsed buildings. The Pantokrator Monastery is also not far from the Sultan Selim Mosque and the Fatih Mosque, the former situated beside the Cistern of Aspar, which is now a park, and the latter occupying the location of Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles. This is the district in which Istanbul’s fundamentalist Muslim community lives, and it is very uncommon to see a woman not wearing a burkha. It was definitely an uncomfortable place to be in, as the locals seem extremely surprised to see a tourist out so far from the main sites. I never had any trouble in the district. The people seemed very typically Turkish and were very eager to give (usually bad) directions. It was just uncomfortable, which may say more about me than the area of Istanbul. Still, if you’re going go up the Fatih Mosque, you now have some idea what to expect. Anyway, the Pantokrator Monastery/Zayrek Camii was closed for major renovations. I had a chance to wander around the work site a bit on the exterior. While I was disappointed that I did not get to go in, the fact that such an important church from the Komnenian area was receiving major work is very encouraging. Here’s a picture of it all fenced off.

Exterior of the main apse, which is pointing east. Work seems to be ongoing on the exterior here, explaining its sad appearance.

Kalenderhane and the sea walls tomorrow, I promise.

Istanbul was an incredible experience, although it was also sad to see the state of preservation of many of the Byzantine monuments. For the sake of this post, I am going to concentrate on the Byzantine buildings. This is not to suggest that there are not other things worth seeing in Istanbul. The major Ottoman mosques are quite impressive on the outside, even if on the inside they are almost entirely identical to each other and it is hard to get a good view of the elaborately painted ceilings on account of the vast number of cables coming down that hold up the lights. The St. Stephan of the Bulgars church is also worth stopping in, purely to see a hideous pre-fabricated metal Austrian church in all of its rusting glory.

The first church up is no longer a church. The Church of the Theotokos Pammakaristos actually has a bit of important history behind it, as it served for about 130 years as the Greek patriarchate in Constantinople after Mehmed II decided to bulldoze Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles. (While that act certainly caused a serious loss to posterity, the church seems to have been utterly decrepit when the Ottomans took the city in 1453.) Pammakaristos may have been a Komnenian foundation, and there is some slight evidence that Alexios I Komnenos, the emperor who called the First Crusade, was buried there. The church is still a mosque today, but the parekklesion (side church) has been restored and is now a museum. Although its interior is quite small, it is an absolutely brilliant building and it is covered in gold mosaic. The decorations inside date from the early 14^th century.

Central dome and apse. Old Testament prophets flank the dome, and a large Christ dominates the apse.

Sure, the curve seems a little odd, but it never alters the perspective of the figure.

Look carefully, and you can see some fresco hidden behind a crack in the brick, just there to make us wonder what sort of beautiful art remains covered in the mosque itself. You’ll probably have to look at the full size image to see the fresco.

The Christ Pantokrator from the dome. Since there was no one else there, I managed to get such a good picture by laying on my back beneath the dome and resting my arms on the floor to create a sort of tripod for my camera. It got a good picture, but the experience of laying the cool stone floor with golden Byzantine mosaics all around me was fantastic. This exact image now adorns my wall in gorgeous 8″x10″.

South wall of the church. Much of the decoration is gone, but most of the lower mosaics are intact, and the marble still looks good seven hundred years later.

The Küçuk Ayasofya is another mosque that was once a Byzantine church. It was a particularly famous Byzantine church, for this was Justinian’s church of Sts. Sergios and Bakchos. Most of its Byzantine decorations are gone, but even as a mosque today it remains an important part of the Byzantine heritage in Istanbul. The marble floor is now carpeted, something that you can hardly fault the Muslims for because it just feels so nice to take off your shoes and wander around mosques in your socks after long walks from site to site. The plan of the building is still very evident, and you can see why the Turks call it Küçuk Ayasofya, “Little Hagia Sophia.” It is a miniature version of that monumental structure, albeit with less of a nave and more of a centralized plan. In the Hagia Sophia you can at least see the basilical base to the church, but Sts. Sergios and Bakchos is much more rounded. How much of the original decoration lies under the Turkish plaster is anyone’s guess, and as far as I know no art or architectural historians have yet had the opportunity make some experimental cuts in the walls to see what might be underneath.

Part of the fun of exploring this building was hunting down its Byzantine heritage. The column capitals, at one point as elaborate as those supporting the Hagia Sophia, have suffered whitewashing, but their original intricacy is still visible underneath.

The carvings that wrap around the interior are also original, but are particularly notable for two things. The first is that their Greek inscriptions remain. The second is that the despite the church being dedicated to two saints, St. Bakchos seems to have got the shaft when it came to getting his name carved in. Only St. Sergios is mentioned.

Another great part about this mosque is the gallery. Unlike some troublesome churches in Europe, they let you go up into the gallery in this mosque for a different view.

Compared to the Hagia Sophia, the dome has an odd shape to it.

Not much remains of the grand hippodrome of Constantinople other than its shape and some of the decorations on the spina. Still, we should consider ourselves fortunate, because there is more of it left than the Circus Maximus in Rome, which is nothing more than an earthen depression. Because of the hilly nature of Constantinople, the hippodrome had to be built up quite a ways on the sphendone end to accommodate the massive size of the track. Modern construction has been built over one end of the hippodrome so even though you can wander into it and appreciate how big it is, you aren’t really getting the full size unless you go to the far end to see the exposed substructure of the sphendone. This isn’t even my picture of it. 6000 Turkey pictures, and I don’t have a decent one looking down to the hippodrome, probably because it was getting paved while I was there and thus filled with bright orange fencing, piles of bricks, and construction workers. I was forced to steal this picture from Wikipedia. The green spaces around the obelisks no longer exist. The entire area in front of the Blue Mosque is covered with large bricks. The Blue Mosque is the building to the right, and the Hagia Sophia is the more distant red building. The nearer column was erected by Constantine VII in the tenth century. The further one was brought from Egypt by Theodosius I in 390, and contains some carvings of his court.

This is the famous bronze serpent column from Delphi, originally cast after the Battle of Plataea in the 5th c. B.C. It was brought to Constantinople by Constantine I. One of the heads is in the Istanbul Museum. Amazingly enough, they lasted into the seventeenth century, only to be allegedly damaged by a drunken Polish nobleman. We have a sixteenth century Ottoman miniature that depicts the heads still on the column.

Theodosius’ obelisk, with a picture of one of the reliefs. And me.

Unfortunately, the obelisk of Constantine VII was undergoing repairs and covered in scaffolding, so I don’t have a good picture of it. So here’s some pictures of the substructure of the sphendone. This is construction allowed the hippodrome to be much bigger than topography would allow, and was constructed in the typical Roman style of using massive vaults to shape the land however they wanted it. Today some sort of school sits on the end of the hippodrome where seating and the hairpin turn that the chariot racers had to be make would have been.

That’s enough for today. Next time, I’ll post some pictures of St. Theodore Tiro, Kalenderhane, the Pantokrator Monastery, and the sea walls.

I was quite disappointed in this book. It sets itself up as a survey of how the world looked in 428, making a complete circle around the Roman Empire. Perhaps the problem was with my expectations. I was expecting a book that was written for a popular audience (as the price point and the fact that you can find this book in Chapters seems to indicate) but instead it was a rather dry academic book with a good fifty of pages of endnotes for only 130 pages of text. It’s not a bad book, but it fails to really bring life to the Roman world. This was the age of Augustine, Symeon Stylites, Aetius, and barbarians encroaching upon Rome, and yet it never feels alive. The view of the book is perhaps too academic and detached for something that isn’t really an academic work because it does nothing to advance our understanding of the period. It’s too godlike and too impersonal to really seem vibrant.

This was a much better book. Ward-Perkins’ premise is that the fall of the Roman Empire in the west was a much uglier thing than it has been taken to be in recent years, as much of the data comes from the east. It’s a lively account of the last years of the Roman Empire in the west and the barbarian kingdoms as much as it is an excellent complement to certain trends in the study of late antiquity. More advanced students will find the first half of the book pretty useless and Ward-Perkins sets up his late antique context, but the latter half of the book is concerned with the archaeological trends in which he sees decline following the end of the Empire. It’s a convincing book, even if it has a few holes. For example, Britain gets a disproportionate amount of page space, and one would think that Gaul never existed if this was the only book they ever read on the Roman Empire. The increasing sophistication of the barbarians beyond the Rhine and Danube frontiers is also curiously ignored. Still, it is a welcome wake-up call and easily accessible to a popular audience due to Ward-Perkins’ excellent writing.

This book intrigued me from the first time I had laid eyes upon it, so once I got it for Christmas I eagerly started reading and finished it rather quickly. The premise is that climate affects human civilization, and Behringer takes a broad historical look at climate change and what it does to cultures. While I wish more of the book was devoted to the ancient and medieval periods, its rapid sweep through human history provides example after example of how climate aided or destroyed human civilizations, as well as forcing them to adapt to changing conditions. Behringer makes a few particularly important points that only come about from looking at climate from a historical perspective, namely, that we are still in an ice age, and that for the vast majority of the time in which there has been life on Earth, the planet has had significantly higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is not an attempt to either shift the blame or indict humanity for anthropogenic global warming, but rather to put it in the grand perspective in which climate always changes, and that the cultures which are able to adapt best to those changes come out ahead. It may be a simple lesson, but it is one that humanity would best heed. This book has definitely given me some things to consider when working on the changes of the fifth through seventh centuries in the Roman world.

This was something that I needed to read for my honours’ thesis. It was a nice change from the usual Gesta Francorum based accounts of the First Crusade. The text focuses around Tancred, the nephew of Bohemond, the famous Norman leader who took part in the First Crusade. The story is not terribly different from the other accounts, so it is the little details that make it particularly interesting. For example, the other sources make no mention of Byzantine aid at Antioch, but Ralph of Caen does. There are also some interesting details on the capture of the Dome of the Rock by Tancred when the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099. The real value of the account besides that it is not another iteration of the Gesta Francorum is that it extends beyond the capture of Jerusalem until about 1108 detailing Tancred’s activities around Antioch. This information is far more incomplete and less detailed than the earlier sections concerning the First Crusade, but there is still some important details on the battles with the Danishmend Turks and the ongoing struggle with the Byzantines over Cilicia and the port of Latakia south of Antioch.

Another book which I got for Christmas. Cities have fascinated me for a long time, and this book was particularly interesting, if overly American and rather repetitive. The crux of the book is that cities are actually better for humanity, because they allow for the rapid sharing of ideas, face-to-face communication that the internet does not allow, and that urbanites are greener because of their smaller homes and limited driving habits. The author never does much to convince his audience that city-dwellers are actually happier or healthier, despite what the book’s cover claims, but many of the his other ideas (particularly Jevon’s Paradox as applied to traffic in cities) are quite interesting. The ideas of cities as potential intellectual hotbeds is definitely something I’ll be considering more in the future when working on the end of antiquity.

It’s been on the shelf for a while. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it really hasn’t said anything new. Good maps, though. If anyone happens to identify the location/date of the fresco on the cover, please let me know.

The empress Theodora is one of the most famous figures in late Roman and Byzantine history. There is good reason for this, largely because we have a good quantity of highly-controversial source material. The brilliant sixth-century mosaic from the San Vitale basilica in Ravenna helps bring her to life as well.

Her background is also atypical for that of a great woman. Theodora was born as a commoner, and her father worked for one of the circus factions in Constantinople. At a very early age, Theodora seems to have followed her sister into low-class theatrical entertainment which essentially constituted prostitution. As a friend of mine likes to remind me, Theodora must have had some charm to be able to attract the eye of Justinian, for not every day do “go-go dancers” seduce emperors. To be fair, Theodora did not actually marry an emperor in name at this point, since Justinian first had to remove the law prohibiting the marriage of a noble citizen to a prostitute.

Justinian had little trouble doing this since his uncle was the emperor. Both were born as low-class rural peasants in Illyria. Justinian had followed his uncle Justin when he had gone to Constantinople to enroll in the army. Justin must have done something to impress the then emperor Anastasius or arrived at a good time, because he managed to secure a position in the imperial guard. Even better for Justin, he somehow managed to convince Anastasius to name him as his successor. (The details of this are murky; although it is worth noting that several generals bloodlessly assumed power in the sixth century: Justin I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurikios. This is definitely an avenue for further study.) Now Justin was illiterate and never bothered to learn his letters (so that he could sign imperial documents, the chancellery had a stencil made so Justin could trace his name), but he still valued education and made sure that his nephew Justinian received one. It was during the 520s that Justinian met Theodora and prompted his uncle to change the laws.

In 527 AD, Justin died, and Justinian finally took over power in name, since he had clearly had an enormous amount of influence over his uncle. The Roman Empire at this point was rather reduced in size from a century earlier. Gaul was under the control of the Franks. Ostrogoths ruled Italy. The Vandals had seized Africa and even sacked Rome in 455 AD. Spain was occupied by the Visigoths, and Britain had been left to fend for itself since the early fifth century. There was no time for the west, however, as Persia, an extremely potent adversary necessitating a lot of military attention since a dynastic change in the third century anno domini, was stirring up trouble.

But there was soon trouble in Constantinople, too. In an attempt to curb the violence between the circus factions (there were four circus factions, but only two really mattered: the Blues and the Greens. Chariot racing in the hippodrome was a huge spectator sport, and these partisan organizations grew up around it. They have been associated with a lot of violence and troublemaking in the streets, and frequently compared to modern football hooligans) some quarrelsome members had been sent to jail. The factions got together and broke them out. Violence escalated, and soon Justinian was blockaded in his own palace with the populace of the city trying to dethrone him. His own soldiers guarding the palace seem to have decided to wait it out and side with the victorious party.

During this crisis, Justinian suggests that those few loyal members of his household take the royal treasury and flee on ships. Theodora interrupts and delivers a famous speech, which ends with the line “Royalty is a good burial shroud.” She argues that she would rather stay and die as she is than run, in opposition to her husband. This passage has been picked up by all sorts of feminists who look for woman-power in the ancient and medieval worlds. Here they see a great example of a strong woman who climbed from poverty and prostitution to the top of the imperial hierarchy. They see a woman who is ready to stand, fight, and die while her husband runs away with the money.

The problem is, they’re wrong. The issue of gender in Prokopios’ works is an important one because he frequently uses it to contrast people who are not behaving as they ought to, and while they should give it more attention to that issue it is not where they have erred. It is possible that Prokopios himself was present in the palace when the decision to stay was made. He was the secretary of the general Belisarios, who was in the city at that time and would play a role in ending the riots. However, Prokopios was highly critical of both Justinian and Theodora, he was highly intelligent, and he had a good education in the classics. Prokopios was so critical of the emperor and empress that he actually wrote a secret companion volume to his major work, the Wars, which was publicly published. He desired to fill in all the details about the scandalous behaviour of the sovereigns and anyone else who managed to irritate him over the course of his career.

However, it has been proposed that Prokopios’ works are not really all that different, and that his history of the wars is also full of more subtle criticism of his enemies. This is one of those examples. On the surface, by having Theodora declare that “royalty is a good burial shroud” he makes her look strong and independent, especially in light of her husband, who as Roman Emperor is supposed to be strong and independent. However, Prokopios is cleverly and subtly misquoting an incident recorded by classical historians in which Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, was besieged in his palace by his rioting populace. Dionysius is quoted as saying, “Tyranny is a good burial shroud.” Thus to a few well-read individuals, the parallel between the imperial couple in Byzantium and the Sicilian tyrant would be made. They would recognize the deliberate misquote and see that instead of making Theodora the hero of the day, he was calling both her and Justinian tyrants in a clever manner.

Raymond Van Dam masterfully sketches out how two of the greatest cities of the later Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople affected emperorship, imperial ideology, and history writing and how they in turn affected the cities. The central premise of this book is that imperial history had to be re-written at the end of antiquity. The city of Rome had a long and glorious heritage, but no longer looked the part as it was depopulated and falling into ruin. The city of Constantinople, on the other hand, was a grand city with an enormous population, but no real Greek, Roman, biblical, or Christian history behind it. The first chapter describes Rome and Van Dam argues that much of the grand construction was designed in a city associated with the Roman Republic and created to imitate that. However, in late antiquity the means of imperial power for emperors changed from that of “safeguarding” the Republic to appealing to the armies for power, and as such Rome itself lost some of its significance. It lost even more under the Christian empire, because the places of interest and locations of intercession with the divine were not closely tied up with the old city itself, and many of the important Christian sites were located on the periphery. Many of its civic festivals were associated with paganism as well, making association with such things in the city dangerous for emperors. The second half of the book moves on to Constantinople, a city which Van Dam argues was forced to steal heritage from sites around the Graeco-Roman world and adorn itself with Christian relics in order to create a history. However, things were noticeably different in Constantinople because it was not designed around pagan monuments and its precise lack of a Roman Republican past allowed for a creative break with that system of power for emperors. As such, churches were integrated into imperial ceremonial, and it was not even necessary that any pretenses of power be kept up: the senate was always weak and the emperor was God’s vice-regent on earth. Finally, Van Dam discusses the textual rewriting of history in Hesychius of Miletus’ world history that combines Greek mythology, Greek history, Roman history and divine intercession to firmly establish Constantinople as the New Rome. It’s a very convincing argument, although it is one that he could take a bit further by applying it to early Byzantine chronicle writing and worldviews.

While I think that this book is masterfully argued, there are a few little quibbles. For one, his cramming of all of a page’s citations into a single footnote is a bit of a pain. I would much rather individual notes behind each citation, purely because it is simply cleaner and easier to find specific references. There are a few arguments that also do not seem to be terribly convincing, or simply need a little more evidence or explanation. For example, Van Dam briefly discusses imperial involvement in the late antique doctrinal conflicts and how emperors may have chosen to side with particular theological schools associated with major cities like Antioch and Alexandria for the sake of controlling them. It is an interesting argument, although how exactly control of the theological schools in Antioch has any sort of impact on Antioch’s ability to act as a hub in defending northern Syria and Mesopotamia from the Sassanids is unclear. Another example of an argument that he may take too far is the idea of the actual concern in the east about representing a capital without Roman Republican institutions. I simply do not see how such ideas would have had much currency or relevance in the late antique Greek east, and how many people would have been aware of them. Regardless, none of these are central to his argument.

This is a very good book. It’s brevity means that you can read the entire thing in an evening, but anyone interested in the trappings of imperial power in late antiquity shouldn’t be able to put it down. Van Dam’s writing is very engaging, and his scholarship is good. Highly recommended.

This is a good book. I admit that I was extremely skeptical when I first saw it, assuming it to be some sort of modern nonsense on how Constantine created Christianity or something like that. However, when I saw that the Philip Jenkins is indeed an academic historian with serious credentials, I decided to give the book a read. I am glad I did, because I now have a single volume popular history on the late antique church councils and the politics that surrounded them that I can pass on to others as a good summary of the period. A shoddily abridged version of this review can be found on Amazon.

The essential premise behind Jenkins’ work is that the politics surrounding the church councils which took place from the early fourth century to the middle of the fifth played an enormous role in their respective outcomes. At times it feels like Jenkins is trying to make his thesis sound more controversial than it is, despite the fact that this book is basically academic orthodoxy. That hardly detracts from the lively narrative, however, as Jenkins cogently discusses the relations between the great sees in the east, as well as Constantinople and Rome. While he does a very good job in summarizing the theological issues, the core of this book surrounds the politics that characterized the councils. Jenkins does not fall into the trap of disregarding the beliefs of the major actors just because politics are involved, and in fact he does a good job demonstrating how Eusebeian Christianity made the theological issues imperative for both churchmen and the rulers of the later Roman Empire. The section on Nestorius (chapter five: “Not the Mother of God?”) is particularly well done, and Jenkins helps to rehabilitate his reputation as well as show the role that the squabbling Theodosian women played in his deposition. Interested readers should take a look at Holum’s Theodosian Empresses, and Jenkins’ references to the similar deposition of John Chrysostom at the beginning of the fifth century are carefully placed inside their context. None of Jenkins’ arguments for Nestorius’ orthodoxy is novel or controversial today in academic spheres, and he should be applauded for bringing it into the sphere of popular history so smoothly. He demonstrates how the previous councils led to Chalcedon in 451, but then goes on to show that despite the importance of Chalcedon in the west, many of the matters were hardly settled.

Nonetheless, this is not a perfect book. For one, Jenkins wrote on the politics of the late Roman church councils, and yet I really wonder about his understanding of the late Roman world. It seems that everything has to be interpreted inside the religious sphere for Jenkins, and as such many of the momentous events of the fifth to seventh centuries are forced into a religious context that they do not necessarily belong to. For example, he states that the persecution of the “Nestorian” church drove them to expand in Persia. It is true that the Nestorian church was persecuted, but it was not done because they did not harbour Chalcedonian views: it was done because their Romanitas was questioned because of the group’s success in Persia. The Persian element and the Roman fear of a fifth column in Syria lay behind the persecution of this group, but Jenkins never mentions it. Another example is the insinuation that the emperors of the fifth century in the east were more interested in theological questions than in governing their empire. Contrary to the picture that the author attempts to paint, the fifth century in the eastern half of the Roman Empire was remarkably peaceful, especially when compared to the west. There were a couple of notable incursions by the Huns, but the Persian frontier was remarkably quiet and on the whole the east survived the century that brought an end to the west almost unscathed. The emperors had their hands somewhat tied by barbarian generals and aristocrats in this period, which may explain the prevalence of their female relatives in politics. Nonetheless, the interest shown by the emperors towards establishing orthodoxy was both an activity that attempted to assert their authority by acting like a new Constantine, as well as one that had major implications on God’s favour under the Eusebeian belief system.

Most of the problems in this book belong to the penultimate chapter, “How the Church Lost Half the World” where this good book begins to unravel precipitously. The argument of this chapter is based around the emperors of the six century beginning to more consistently support Chalcedonian Christianity. His treatment of Justinian’s subtle policy of allowing Theodora to have Monophysite views is very good and almost certainly correct. The idea that he is trying to push here is that imperially mandated Chalcedonian Christianity led to the establishment of separate churches in the east. There is no denying the fact that separate, Monophysite clerical orders were established in the east, but he downplays the attempts at reconciliation. Jenkins brings up Monotheletism, an imperial attempt to ignore the results of Chalcedon by arguing that Christ whether Christ had one nature or two, he had one will. This was not merely an attempt by a struggling empire to keep its provinces theologically “correct”, but rather just one side of what the Monophysite provinces tried to do as well. To them, Constantinople and Rome were in error and they needed to fix that if the Roman Empire was going to continue to prosper. They did not try to secede from the Empire due to their religious differences, they fought for just what they had fought for at Nicaea, Ephesos, Constantinople, and Chalcedon: universal belief. It was the political separation that resulted from the Muslim conquest that forced the churches who were trying to work together to go separate ways. Even after this time reconciliation attempts were made by both sides. For example, in the ninth century the patriarch of Constantinople tried to settle issues with the Monophysite Armenian church.

The Muslim conquest brings up my final bone of contention with the penultimate chapter. Like many before him (including the venerable G. Ostrogorsky), Jenkins rehashed the idea that persecution of the Monophysites by Constantinople allowed the Muslims easy entry into Syria. They supposedly welcomed the tolerant Muslims with open arms. The Muslims were certainly very tolerant of the divergent beliefs in the lands that they conquered, but this argument has one fatal flaw in it. How were the Syrians supposed to defend themselves? The Limes Arabicus (“the Arabian Frontier” in Latin; it was a chain of forts) never seems to have been intended to be a solid frontier. It was a set of fortified tolls on roads leading into Arab-dominated areas, and by the time of Justinian may have been totally defunct due to the sixth and seventh century reliance on Christian Arab tribesmen to guard that frontier. In comparison, the Mesopotamian frontier with the Persians was guarded by fortress after fortress, and even when the Persians attacked when the emperor Maurikios was murdered in 602, it still took them almost a decade to grind through the defenses. There never were any major defences to the south, because there had never been any major threat from the Arabian peninsula before. In the Roman Empire, it was also illegal for private citizens to own weapons. Given that much of Syria and the Levant had been peaceful save for the occasional Persian raid and local revolt since the time of Pompey’s conquest in the first century B.C., there was little impetus for civilians to attempt to obtain illegal weapons. Despite Herakleios’ order that the cities resist the Muslims, one has to wonder just how they would have done so. Imperial troops had been withdrawn to the area around Antioch, and would shortly be withdrawn into the Tauros Mountains, where the Byzantines would hold the Muslims for the next couple of centuries. Regardless of how they felt towards Constantinople, a populace with no soldiers, no weapons, minimal defences, and who had just seen a near-miraculous imperial recovery (Herakleios’ campaign in the mid-620s took him just outside the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, where the government there collapsed) had no good reason to resist to the death.

Despite these long criticisms, I have to stress that this is a really good book, minus the penultimate chapter. Jenkins tells the story of both theology and politics in the late Roman church councils masterfully. It is very readable, and the dense theology is summarized nicely. This is a good history of the formation of Christian orthodoxy.

This post’s topic is decline. A few years back in a university course on late antique and early medieval Christianity, the instructor said that Byzantium declined after Justinian until it was no more many centuries later. Territorially, this is a valid conclusion on the grand scale although it hardly does justice to Byzantine history in several respects. It is true to state that under Justinian (ca. 527-565), the empire reached its greatest territorial extent. Africa was taken in a lightning campaign, Sicily fell quickly, Italy was re-conquered, largely lost and then re-conquered again after many grueling campaigns. Imperial troops took Sardinia, Corsica, the Balaeric Islands, and even parts of southern Spain. Imperial territory would never reach such heights again. Parts of Italy fell to the Lombards within a few years, although the popes would continue to look east for another couple of centuries. The coincidence of the rise of Islam and the end of the last great war between Rome and Sassanid Persia (if the Muslims hadn’t destroyed Persia, there certainly would have been more wars. Despite many treaties, Rome and Persia had been staring at each other nervously in northern Mesopotamia since the rise of the Sassanids in the early third century and war after war had broken out) sheared off large parts of imperial territory. Syria, with the great city of Antioch, was lost. Egypt fell a few years later. Byzantine Africa was gone by the end of the seventh century. By this point, power in Italy was growing increasingly fragile, and much of the Balkans had been lost to Slavs, Avars, and Bulgars. Constantinople itself was besieged four times in just under a century (626, 654, 674, 717) and this demonstrates just how much territory had been lost. Ancient logistics were a fragile thing, and Constantinople was well-defended and rather out of the way. The fact that multiple major expeditions could be launched with reasonable belief that they would finally eliminate the Roman Empire suggests the desperation of the time. The emperor Herakleios even issued coins with the rather depressing and desperate DEUS ADIUTA ROMANIS (“May God help the Romans”) stamped on them. Byzantium was no longer holding the barbarians back in Mesopotamia or the European river frontiers (the Rhine and Danube had been the limes in Europe); Byzantium was desperately trying to keep the barbarians off the walls of its capital city.

Red is the territorial extent of the empire at the beginning of Justinian's reign. The gold is what he re-conquered.

This was not the end, however. The Arab conquests had taken Egypt and Syria, and Arab raiders regularly crossed the Taruros Mountains to attack Byzantine territory. Italy was largely gone, and in 751 pope Zacharias I in Rome turned to Pipin, the maior domus of the Merovingian Franks for aid against the Lombards. Rome had spent the previous two centuries looking east, but the east was in no position to provide aid. Sicily still held out at this time, and although some Balkan territory had been retaken, much of that was still beyond imperial control. In response to the crisis, Byzantium reinvigorated itself along lines that extended beyond territory. Byzantium continued to assert its identity as the leader of the Christian world, and thus it had citizens beyond its own borders. One of the most famous is John of Damascus. Despite never setting foot once in his life in imperial territory, he was considered one of the most influential Byzantine theologians. The Armenians were heavily influenced by Byzantine culture and style, and sought to emulate them. Even the Muslim Arabs imitated Byzantine institutions, and produced coins very much like the Byzantine ones, surprisingly enough, with pictures of people! (Tradition Islamic art is aniconic and figural, for the belief is that on judgement day Allah will ask the artist to breathe life into his work. When he fails, he will Allah will destroy him for doing what is Allah’s prerogative alone. Still, this clearly didn’t bother the early Umayyads, who decorated their palaces with nude female figures. I guess the Taliban missed this little detail, since this is the era they desire to return to.) Both the Bulgars and the Rus would be brought into the Byzantine orbit by the mystique of ancient power that the Byzantines worked very hard to maintain.

Territorially, a century after the shock of the Arab conquests the recovery began. Parts of the Balkans were retaken, and Asia Minor was repopulated. In the ninth and tenth centuries, serious conquest was undertaken. Crete was recovered, the Balkans were finally pacified in the early eleventh century by the wonderfully titled Basil the Bulgar-slayer, Armenia fell into the Byzantine territorial orbit, and parts of Syria and Mesopotamia were recovered. The recovery of Jerusalem was considered (it likely could have been taken with little trouble) and the conquest of Baghdad was also a possibility (holding it would have been difficult.) The imperial presence in Italy was strengthened. This period alone disproves that Byzantium simply declined territorially until it was no more.

In the late eleventh century, territorial losses were again incurred. Much of Italy was lost to an adventurous band of Normans, and the Seljuk Turks took large parts Asia Minor. Things again looked bleak in 1081 when a young and somewhat unsuccessful general by the name of Alexios Komnenos took the throne. The Turks were near the Bosporos, and the Normans were looking hungrily at the Via Egnatia, the road to Constantinople. However, he managed to drive the Normans back to Italy and masterfully use the crusaders to recover large parts of Anatolia. His successors expanded on what he had done, although they never really tried all that hard to retake a large part of Anatolia. When Manuel I Komnenos set out in 1176 to take Ikonion (modern Konya), it was a move to improve his status in the west. There was no real interest in recovering that region because financially it was not worth it. This brings us to another point in the idea of territorial decline: does it really count as decline when a people does not view a part of their own territory as worth holding? Priorities in Byzantium had changed. A chain of Anatolian fortresses was no longer needed to hold the Arabs back. The Turks were too weak and divided to ever threaten Constantinople, the power base of the empire, so why would it be worth the risk and expense of retaking marginal land? The aristocracy had little interest in this land, because unlike in Western Europe, they were not based on that land. Their power came from offices that they held in Constantinople, and although they had estates, that is not where they received their status from. The Phokas family of the tenth and eleventh centuries is a perfect example of this. We know that they had large estates in the east, but once the family was removed from power in the capital due to an attempted coup, they disappear utterly from the sources. Once they no longer held offices they were no longer relevant. It is important to remember that land was not viewed in the same way it was in the west. Power was in the capital, as was civilization. Where the Farnks saw the world in terms of forest and field, the Byzantines saw it in city and countryside. Certain religious concepts were also an important part of the Byzantine mindset. They were, after all, God’s Chosen People. All of the land in the world was His, and it was thus given to them. They may temporarily lose parts of it, but in the end it all would come back to them. The concepts of central power in Constantinople and the religious ideology help to explain why territorial integrity was not of prime importance to the Byzantines. This is important, because it fleshes out the original question and gives us much greater insight into Byzantine life and society as opposed to looking at the empire as a purely territorial entity.

After the death of Manuel Komnenos in 1180, things spiraled out of control. Part of the empire that had never fallen to barbarian incursion before was lost in 1204 when the crusaders took Constantinople. At this point, we can safely say that Byzantium declined territorially until it was no more. The Latin Empire of Constantinople was a sad, sickly entity that managed to lose its first emperor in his first year, and was retaken sixty years later by the Byzantine government-in-exile at Nicaea. But by this point there were several little “empires” and the Turks began to steadily chip away at that territory until in 1453, Turks from the House of Osman, who by that point had become a major military power, took Constantinople.

So when we look back at the stereotype, what do we see? We see that on its most basic level, it is true. Byzantium did decline territorially until it was gone. However, such a statement hardly accounts for the idea of the Byzantine commonwealth and what that land actual means, not to mention the fact that there were several centuries that saw major expansion and consolidation. The idea behind this series of posts is explore some historical concepts that we think we know and demonstrate how we need to challenge those ideas and give them a serious examination before accepting them. We need to look beyond our own ideas regarding how we view the world and how we view a state, and look instead at how the people we are examining viewed their world and their state, which was one where ideas of territorial integrity and sovereignty are not the same as ours. And this, I believe, is one of the major reasons why we study history. The critical thinking and reading skills that it can provide are essential to anyone who wants to take a broader and deeper look at the world. The “facts” should not be accepted as they are: read the sources and think about them, rather than just believing the opinion of someone who claims to have read all of the sources.

So why do we have this idea of decline in Byzantium? Edward Gibbon certainly has to take a large part of the blame. After all, things never improved from the time of the Marcus Aurelius’ death in the second century to the Enlightenment in his eyes. It was a long, terminal decline that was certainly fatal when Constantine accepted Christianity. At that point, the empire became Christian and autocratic, two concepts that Enlightenment thinkers despised. I also suspect that such classifications are a part of human nature. It is much easier to define other groups by simple traits. The ancient Greeks saw everyone who did not speak Greek as a barbarian, and our literature is not all that different. Take Star Trek as an example. What defines the Romulans is that they are sneaky, and the Klingons are angry warriors. To understand or create such diversity takes a lot more effort: Tolkien did not write his works in one day. In the same way, we need to give serious inspection to easy historical classifications. It is easy (and lazy) to call the Merovingian Franks axe-happy based on Gregory of Tours’ descriptions. Real history, on the other hand, looks at why Gregory of Tours might have viewed the Franks in that manner, and other sources to see if the Franks really liked to chop people right down the middle with big axes like Clovis is said to have done. Ogres have layers, and so does human history. To take what we see on the surface as fact is to do an injustice to the complexity of that history and the people who lived it. (And real historians will mock you in their books and classes for being lazy like that.)

During the later Roman Empire, a new genre of literature was born: the world chronicle. The world chronicle has not entirely received the attention that it deserves, probably on account of the generally unreliable nature of much of the non-contemporary history in any given chronicle (or in the case of Malalas, most of the contemporary information is unreliable, too). Additionally, most English translations do not bother with the entirety of the chronicle. Two of the most important, the Chronicon Paschale from the early-mid seventh century and the Chronographia of Theophanes from the early ninth century are good examples of this, as the Whitbys’ translation of the former only begins in 284 A.D., and Turtledove’s translation of the latter starts in 602 A.D. Even the $350 translation of Theophanes by Cyril Mango starts in 284 AD. This is, technically, the entire Chronographia, except that the Theophanes sections start where George Synkellos left off. The fact that it had more than one author does not necessarily discount the idea that it was intended to be a single chronicle. The reason for translators not bothering with translating the entire work is rather simple: most of the history contained the earlier parts is derived from known sources and is often poorly synthesized, understood, and arranged, and what use is Old Testament history if you’re looking to study late Roman or Byzantine political history? Occasionally a later chronicler uses a now-lost source for an earlier period, like parts of Zonaras for the third and fourth centuries, but that is the exception rather than the norm.

Without further ado, I suppose that it is time to explain just what the world chronicle was. Typically, these chronicles begin with some carefully calculated date from the creation of the world, typically derived from the Biblical sources that the chronographers used. At this point, one could easily ask the question as to why the chronographers are writing several thousand years of skeletal history based upon a widely-available source, the Bible? The reason that they wrote this way is actually quite simple: because it was an essential part of their worldview. This was the Roman East, after all, a place where the Empire did not end in the fifth century when barbarians finally supplanted Roman authority in Italy. This was also an extremely Christian empire, and the two concepts were tied directly into each other. The issue of the relationship between ekklesia and basileia was never a settled in the Roman east and led to lively debate through the centuries between emperors, patriarchs, and monks. ‘Caesaropapism’ is term that is both inaccurate and unfair because it fails to account for the dynamic intellectual tradition and the actual history. The emperor did not have total control of the church, even though that was what was attempted at certain points.

In the west, thanks largely to the shock that beset a particular Augustine of Hippo when Alaric and his Gothic peoples sacked Rome in 410, we do not typically share that concept. For most of western history since the fall of Rome, there has been a separation of church and state. I cannot count the times that I heave heard the criticism that the Middle Ages in the west were a particular horrible time due to the domination of the church, and yet the opposite is actually true. It is true that the church dominated intellectual life in the west, but it was a vibrant and lively intellectual life that ebbed and flowed with the times. However, one of the major founding figures of the west’s intellectual tradition in the Middle Ages was that very same Augustine of Hippo, author of de Civitate Dei (‘Concerning the City of God’), where he argued for the separation of church and state. It is still not agreed upon exactly what he designed the respective “City of Man” and the “City of God” to be, but the relevant point is that this was an immediate reaction to the shock caused by the sack of Rome.

Augustine needed to find a way to explain this, as did other equally shocked figures like St. Jerome who was living in Bethlehem at that time. (Whether he was currently engaged in making a shoddy translation of the Bible into Latin while not wearing a shirt, as Titian depicted him, or conning wealthy Roman matrons out of their money is unknown. I’m personally of the opinion that the whole “Bible translator without a shirt” image was probably influential in attracting the money from the ladies.) Augustine’s route was novel in that he chose to directly challenge the ideas of Eusebios of Caesearea, the biographer of Constantine. In his triumphalist works, Eusebios had conceived an idea that would remain influential in the east well in the religious sphere well past the actual existence of the Empire, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (or 1461, if you’d rather consider the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond the last Byzantine state). Eusebios took Roman history and Biblical history, and had them mesh together and reach an apex his account of the reign of his patron Constantine I. His works were another case of imperial panegyric, but few have proved to be so long-lasting and important. His argument went like this: God’s Chosen People were the Jews. After Jesus, God’s Chosen People were the Christians. The Roman Empire was destined by God to be an important vessel in salvific history as evidenced by the fact that Jesus and Augustus lived at the same time. (I’m not quite following his logic on this point.) Under Constantine, when the Empire became Christian (it did not; Constantine only extended toleration to Christians. It would be another half century before Theodosius I would make the exclusive religion of the Empire Christianity) the Romans became God’s Chosen People.

This is the background to the Byzantine world chronicle, and the explanation as to why it was central to the world view of these people. It demonstrated how God’s plan was revealed first in the Jews, then Jesus and the Christians, and finally, in Constantine and the Roman Empire. The idea that this Empire was without end and God-guarded was prevalent, and this is exactly what Augustine was reacting against when he wrote de Civitate Dei. The importance of the world chronicle should not be understated, because it defined the very basis of how most Byzantines viewed the world even past the end of the Empire. The chronicles continued to be written throughout imperial times. One could regard them as an aberration if the genre did not last long, or changed significantly in scope, but it did not. One would also wonder about the primacy that I have given them here if other literary genres did not support this idea, but they did. The concept of God and the Romans working together remained a constant theme, even if there were serious questions raised in times of troubles (particularly the late seventh and first half of the eighth centuries) as to whether God really was helping the Romans. The idea influenced iconoclasm, brought on its second phase, and appears in various texts and on instruments of propaganda like coins throughout the entire chronological breadth of the empire.

The scholarly explanation is over. Back to the ranting part. If this was so important, and the Byzantines were Greeks (in the sense that they had a continuous, independent, Greek identity from pre-Roman times to the foundation of the sad state known today as the Hellenic Republic) then why was there this focus on Roman history in the chronicles? Thousands of years of history elapse in these writings, and yet the deeds of Themistokles and Perikles, a crucial element in later Greek thought surrounding their heritage, are totally absent. The argument has been raised that they decided to leave out this part due to its pagan elements, but that argument hardly squares against the occasional appearance of Olympian gods in the chronicles and the centuries devoted to pagan Roman history. As has been shown above, the entire genre is based upon the invention of history, so it would not have been difficult to find a way to reconcile Greek history into God’s plan for humankind. One could easily invent some Hellenic origins to Rome like how Virgil invented Trojan origins in the first century. Some ostracized official veteran of the Persian wars could have made their way to Rome and connected the two histories. Or Alexander the Great could play a role in it, because in Byzantine thought he had contained Gog and Magog far to the east who would only be unleashed at the end of the world. However, there is no evidence that anyone made an attempt to connect the Hellenic history of the late antique Greek speaking populace of the eastern Mediterranean into the salvific history of the Jews and the Christians, and eventually, the Romans. There are even opportunities aplenty to try and tie Greek and Jewish history together. Ioannes Zonaras’ chronicle frequently mentions Cyrus and Xerxes in the chronologically relevant sections, and yet there is no mention of Cyrus as he appeared in Herodotos, only the Old Testament. Xerxes is the same; he only matters in relation to the Jews, not the ancient Greeks, despite being the elaborately-pierced Big Bad Guy in the appalling movie 300. If this history mattered so much to them, as some people assert, why did they choose to leave it out of the literary works that best define the late Roman and Byzantine worldview? The answer is quite simple and one that will continued to be ignored by nationalist historians who have never read a primary source document in their lives: because that history did not matter to them. They did not view themselves as having had a part in that history. It was not “their” history: their history was one of God, Jews, Christians, and Romans, all coming together in an eschatological empire, in which they continued to view themselves as citizens of.