Book Review: Warren Treadgold - A History of the Byzantine State and Society

Surely the best single-volume history of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire I've read, and perhaps the best one out there, despite being published in 1988. Copiously researched and well-organized, Treadgold balances alternating military/political chapters with economic/social chapters, so there is extensive coverage of not only the expected battles and dynastic cycles, but also the more humanistic aspects, with plentiful maps and tables of statistics on everything from military strength to budgetary woes to population distribution to help the reader keep track of how the Byzantines continuously tinkered with their society for over a thousand years in the face of continuous waves of plagues, invasions, and civil wars. 

While the Roman Empire will forever be more highly esteemed by laymen for how they steadily assembled their pan-Mediterranean state (everyone loves watching winners conquer one enemy after another), over the course of the book I developed a grudging and then unabashed respect for how the Byzantines did their best to adapt that rigid, ethnocentric, coup-prone Roman governance model to maintain a surprising amount of coherent identity in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multifariously-threatening world. They may have failed eventually, but you try creating an empire that lasts for over a millennium!

One of my main thoughts when reading was that I'd been previously been underrating the Great Man theory of history, or at least the ability of powerful individuals to redirect nations on different courses. Treadgold is scrupulously polite towards even plainly inept rulers - he will refrain from more than a few mildly critical adjectives of inarguably terrible emperors, and well-meaning emperors who had events beyond their control wreck their reigns get "he did as best as could be expected given the circumstances" - but it's striking how even the vast machinery of an ancient empire could be utterly upended by the whims of its leader. Peter Turchin's Seshat project, as well as his structural demographic theories of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in books like War and Peace and War, remain invaluable for understanding broad historical trajectories and "inevitabilities", but as I read the various expansions under successful emperors like Justinian I, Constantine VII, and Basil II, and the following contractions under unsuccessful emperors like Valens, Phocas, Romanos IV, and many others who ruled for about 10 minutes, I started trying to construct a mental model of the empire's varying health, with the ruler at the top of the pyramid:

• "hard" quantitative factors like GDP, population, territory
• "soft" qualitative factors like religious concord, social unity, "asabiya"
• random accidents and enigmas of chance
• personal qualities of rulers

Obviously no ruler, no matter how personally gifted, could completely prevent a plague, a revolt, or an invasion of Persians, (or Bulgarians, or Serbs, or Arabs, or Turks, or Crusaders, or...), and plenty of perfectly capable individuals suffered grievous misfortunes, yet it was striking how frequently, given the nearly unlimited authority vested in the emperor, their mistakes had vast consequences that took decades or even centuries to correct, if at all. In this the Byzantines were hardly unique, of course, but their exceptionally long existence gives you many more opportunities to watch one emperor carefully save money, reconquer land, and heal religious divisions, only for his idiot son to ruin everything and waste golden opportunities to defend against their enemies. This fundamental instability was exacerbated by their tendency towards conspiracy, famously memorialized today in the adjective "byzantine". Here was one of my favorite incidents of conspiracy, from the year 780 AD, in the midst of the Iconoclasm debate:

Irene, an orphan in her mid-twenties from the shrunken provincial town of Athens, had keen political instincts, a strong will, and some devoted allies in the bureaucracy. The precariousness of her position seems to have given her a sense of urgency. A month and a half after her husband's death, she foiled a plot, led by the postal logothete and the domestic of the Excubitors, to put Constantine V's second son Nicephorus on the throne.

There's no exact contemporary parallel, but imagine how we'd react if, in the middle of a near-civil war over whether to make flag-burning unconstitutional, Donald Trump suddenly died, leaving Melania as regent for Barron (ignore Ivanka and Tiffany for a moment), and she thwarted a scheme by the head of the Secret Service and the Postmaster General to put Don Jr in the White House by having them all declared felons and exiled to Guam. 

Now imagine that tended to happen every few decades! Every other major power struggled with the same issues of succession and legitimacy to some degree, but despite their impressive longevity the flaws of the Roman governance model were clearly key to Byzantine difficulties. They may not have ever been able to reconstitute the Roman Empire of old (and in fact they wisely stopped trying to reconquer obviously unattainable lands after a while), but while experiments like the senior/junior emperor system, the creation of the Themes, and professionalization of the bureaucracy gradually made the empire more resilient, up until the very last minute they perpetually had multiple claimants for the throne inviting foreign powers to aid them by promising vast rewards, and these allies would of course then immediately turn on the empire for protection money or simple plunder. It's no way to run a country.

The Byzantine religious controversies, which have earned the rightful scorn of scholars going back to Gibbon, are another great example of unnecessary conflict, given the sheer amount of time wasted and blood spilled over them. Diarmaid McCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years has a lot of great details on how the idea of a single "Christianity" has always been a fiction, as the Biblical material has been layered on top of an enormous variety of existing Mediterranean religious traditions (for a modern analogy, see the way that indigenous Mexican religious elements like the Virgin of Guadalupe, Santa Muerte, or Maximón have been smoothly and syncretically incorporated into a Catholicism that's not quite the same as in Europe or Africa). So to some extent you would have to expect some major disagreements as diverse traditions chafed under a single unified theology, particularly as the Patriarchs determined orthodoxy more or less independently from the geographically and culturally distant Popes in the west. 

But to a modern reader it's striking how frequently the empire was nearly brought to its knees at key moments by violent conflicts over arcane controversies that, one thinks, a calmer scholar like Thomas Aquinas would have wasted barely a few pages resolving with some choice Aristotle quotes. Here's a vastly oversimplified cheat sheet I kept for some of the major heresies, in chronological order:

• Arianism - Christ had a separate nature from God, though the two also share one nature in the Trinity, somehow differently than in "correct" Trinitarianism
• Nestorianism - Christ had two natures
• Monophysitism - Christ had one nature
• Monoenergism - Christ had one energy
• Monothelitism - Christ had one will
• Iconoclasm - Images of Christ/God/etc are blasphemous
• Paulicianism - Armenian Gnosticism, taking Christianity back to its mystical roots
• Bogomilism - Bulgarian Gnosticism, taking Christianity back to its mystical roots
• Palamasism - Performing hesychasm (meditative prayer) allows direct experience of the "uncreated" light of the Transfiguration, which is of God yet not the Trinity

Many of those theological controversies acted as synecdoches for those larger questions of cultural identity, of course (as I type this, the Russian Orthodox Church has momentously severed from the Patriarchate of Constantinople over their recognition of a separate Ukrainian Church in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is the biggest split since the Great Schism in 1054), yet I would love to be able to ask the various religious figures of the era exactly what they thought they were accomplishing by launching one acrimonious empire-wide quarrel after another over these openly meaningless nitpicks while various hostile powers slowly closed in; the phrase "quibbling while Rome burns" comes to mind. 

And that doesn't even cover the political, non-theological controversies that had consequences for religious unity, such as the alternations of strong Patriarch/weak Emperor and weak Patriarch/strong Emperor, or the Patriarch and the Pope fighting over bishop appointments and excommunicating each other out of spite. It's poignant to watch the East and West churches slowly squabble each other into the permanent Great Schism for no real theological reason, periodically attempting half-hearted reunions like a broken-up couple that can't quite bring themselves to move on, repeated Crusades and ecumenical councils achieving nothing but greater recrimination.

But again, whatever criticisms you have of the Byzantines, you have to be impressed by their surprising resilience in the face of continuous threats from all directions. While the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed and faded fewer than two centuries after the division under Diocletian, the eastern half maintained its heritage for a millennium. And what the Byzantines did was arguably harder than what the Romans did: it's very common for a single high-asabiya warlike group to expand their empire until there are no more worlds left to conquer, but it's far more difficult to then stably administer that empire, particularly if it's much more heterogeneous (as it should be, if your wars have gone well), particularly if you're not interested in further expanding your territory, and particularly in a high-risk area with multiple vulnerable frontiers. The Byzantines never really tried to conquer outside of what the Romans had built during the Augustan Age, and aside from occasional attempts like Justinian's to reclaim parts of the ancient west, for the most part they simply tried to maintain their territorial integrity against fairly staggering odds. 

In some ways the flexibility of Byzantine identity was actually a strength; most but not all Byzantines were Greek, or Orthodox, or followed Byzantine law, or were even necessarily under Byzantine rule, so the movement of the frontiers back and forth was not as immediately traumatic as it could have been. When Greece finally won its eventual independence in the 20th century, that its capital was not at Constantinople and its borders excluded the Ionian coast was due to the expulsion of the Greeks after the 1922 war with Turkey, which easily could have turned out differently, and thus had the collapse of the Ottoman Empire unfolded slightly differently, the entire Aegean might still reflect the political, cultural, and ethnic boundaries of a thousand years ago. There are also other legacies, less prominent but just as enduring, in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, and everywhere else that was once part of the empire.

There's too much more to say about the Byzantine Empire, so I will just compliment Treadgold on his intensive research (many of the photos of Byzantine churches are credited to him and his family) and skill at presenting a coherent narrative out of nearly a millennium and a half of history, much of which was built out of inherently unreliable ancient accounts. The analyses of how art, architecture, and literature were affected by the political upheavals were great, my primary complaints being that I wanted more, even if the book would have been swollen to many times its already considerable length. 

In fact at many points I wished he had digressed a bit more, such as on how Islamic resistance to religious images affected the Christian iconoclasm debate, or the downstream effects of Byzantine missionaries inventing the Cyrillic alphabet, or political relations with the western states, etc, even if those were tangential to the main story. An updated edition would be nice after 30 years, but his history seemed fairly solid, and I'd bet that newer research would only enhance his conclusions. Treadgold is vivid enough at presenting the power struggles to the point where I frequently found myself doing that history nerd thing where you look up from the book and start making completely spurious analogies. This is as good as history gets for me.