THE BYZANTINE WAY OF LIFE

What did the Byzantine Empire do for itself, and for the world, and even for us, during the eleven long centuries when it was almost always—but not always—so rich and powerful?

You would not really know about the Byzantines unless you had the answer.

First of all, it defended a large part of the warm, civilized Mediterranean lands from the Asiatic barbarians. The word “Asiatic” is important, but maybe “barbarians from the Asiatic steppes” would be better, for these were barbarians of a special kind.

Our ancestors were barbarians, too, and the barbarians that came from the forests of Germany and the sandy shores of Denmark were capable of cruel destruction. But they were also free and independent, with a gift for self-government and an instinct that told them that one man has just as many rights as another. They even elected their kings, cheering and lifting them on their shields, and the kings they elected were men like Theodoric of Italy, Alfred the Great, and Charlemagne, all men who wanted to absorb the very best of the civilization they had taken over, and not merely tear things down.

If, instead of them, men like Attila and Genghis Khan, with their hard-riding, slant-eyed followers, had become the rulers of western Europe, iron discipline and a firm government might have been established a whole lot sooner. But our democratic way of living could never have been born. In other words, the Byzantines defended Europe from the Asiatic hordes and made it possible for Western civilization to develop in its own way.

The Byzantines would hardly be worth remembering if they had done nothing more than defend.

They also created a civilization of their own, and you can still see its influence in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and even Russia. And there are still traces of it all over Europe and Asia.

If a Byzantine had come to life and looked at the coronation of Elizabeth II of England over TV, he would have felt perfectly at home, for in many ways it was a Byzantine ceremony. The fact that this young woman was not only sovereign of the realm but head of the official church was Byzantine, too. She was following in the footsteps of the empresses Irene and Zoe.

In the East, even the Turks who finally conquered the Byzantines took over many of their ideas. In its early days the Turkish Empire was very much like the Byzantine Empire, except that it practiced Islam, the religion founded by Mohammed. The Turkish sanjaks, or provinces, had almost the same boundaries as the Byzantine themes, or provinces. Their grand vizier, or prime minister—but there is a difference, for the vizier’s name means “he who bears burdens,” rather than “accountant”—was practically the same as the Logothete of the Dromos. A Turkish bey was not too different from a Byzantine strategos, or governor general.

The Turks even used Byzantines to help them rule. A large number of the governors whom they sent out to their conquered territories were Phanariote Greeks, those Greeks who remained in Constantinople after the empire fell. All but twelve of their forty-eight grand viziers were either Byzantines or from former Byzantine provinces such as Albania, Dalmatia, or Greece.

Byzantine civilization affected much more of daily life than merely ceremonies and government, however. It entered into every phase of life. It was the Byzantines who invented the fork. From Constantinople it was taken to Italy, and medieval English tourists brought it back to Britain. But for a long time a man was considered sissy and affected if he used one instead of his fingers.

High on the list of the great accomplishments of the Byzantines is Byzantine art. In fact, many people think of it first, and sometimes it is the only thing they think about when they think of the Byzantines. Not long ago it was not very much appreciated, but we now realize that it is one of the finest arts there ever was. Besides that, it bridged the more than thousand-year gap in art between the wonderful statues of the Greeks and Romans and the oil paintings and frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

Two men painting

The most famous Byzantine art is the Byzantine mosaics. A Byzantine mosaic is a picture made of little pieces of glass and gold and precious stones. These mosaics were usually very large and set right into the walls of churches, and so it is almost impossible to see one unless you visit the church itself. You would have to go at least to Italy where there are some very fine ones in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. These Byzantine mosaics are quite stiff, and the people in them usually look straight ahead. But if you ever see a real one, or even a good picture of one, you will never forget it.

The Byzantines also did oil paintings and frescoes, particularly in their later days and particularly in the Balkans and Greece. There are frescoes in Yugoslavia and in southern Greece that are almost as good as those of the great Italian artist Giotto, and they were done 200 years before him. Byzantine sculpture ranged from richly carved marble, like the big throne of a patriarch in Ravenna, to ivory caskets and plaques. Byzantine illuminated manuscripts are also among the most beautiful ever made. Most of them are Bibles and other religious books, but there are several about the travels of Cosmas Who-Sailed-to-India. They are filled with saints in blue and scarlet, and one manuscript has a picture of a boatload of escaping martyrs showing what travel was like in Byzantine days.

Byzantine art is not only wonderful itself, but it shows how the Byzantines helped themselves to everything good that had been done before them. On the walls of a famous tomb in Ravenna, there is a mosaic of two doves at a drinking fountain that might have come from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. There is also Byzantine art that bubbles over with Greek love of life. Some of it is filled with early Christian saints and symbols, like the peacock and the fish. There is some with the lions and eagles of the ancient Hittites, and others whose fierce, bearded saints are like Assyrian warriors. But, of course, this practice of blending the ideas of different peoples wasn’t limited to art. It applied to everything the Byzantines did.

The Byzantines preserved classic culture. They preserved Greek literature, Greek science, Greek learning, and even the Greek language. And this at a time when almost everybody in the West had completely forgotten Greek, and as a matter of fact, only churchmen and a handful of ragged scholars even knew Latin.

This was a very important contribution. No civilization ever starts from scratch, and our modern one is based on the renewed interest in classic culture that is called the Revival of Learning. During that time, great writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio were willing to spend a fortune to get the services of some bearded ruffian who could teach them Greek. When Constantinople fell, the Byzantine scholars who escaped to Europe could sell any manuscript they brought with them for enough money to live on for a long time.

The Byzantines never had to rediscover Homer, or Plato, or Euclid, who invented geometry, or Eratosthenes, who knew the world was round 1,700 years before Columbus, even measuring its circumference as 25,000 miles, which is almost right. They never had to rediscover the ancients; they knew about them all the time.

Another thing the Byzantines did was to insist on education. Even the mighty French emperor Charlemagne had a hard time if he wanted to spell his way through a book and sign his name. Most Byzantine emperors could not only read and write but were thoroughly educated. Theophilus studied everything from Greek to natural history. Leo the Philosopher composed poems, sermons, and a life of his father. Constantine Born-in-the-Purple was famous for his books on the barbarians and on his empire. John IV and Manuel II, and above all Anna Comnena, a princess, wrote astonishingly good histories.

It was not merely the emperors and some of their courtiers who were learned. Although a few poor men—like the saint from Asia Minor who had to tend his father’s swine and did not learn to read until he was forty-seven—did not have the chance to be educated, most Byzantines went to school or a university from the time they were five until they were twenty.

If you had been a Byzantine, you would have trotted off to your classes accompanied by a pedagogue—in the old days, he was a slave—who carried your books and saw to it that you obeyed your teachers. Until you were ten, you would have studied reading, writing, and spelling. The last was very important because the way words were pronounced was always changing, although the spelling remained the same. After this you would have studied what the Byzantines called grammar. But it was not exactly like our grammar. It was more like literature. For instance, you would have had to learn Homer by heart and been able to explain everything he had written word by word. You were in trouble if you weren’t able to do this. The teacher merely nodded to the pedagogue, who always had a rod in his hand. After grammar, you would have studied rhetoric, and to pass your rhetoric courses you had to be able to discuss eloquently anything from a fable by Aesop to the pictures on the walls of the city council. Finally, and this was especially important if you were going to be a churchman or go into the government, you would have gone on to a university. That was the case only if you were a boy. Although many Byzantine women were as well educated as the men, everything they learned was in the home. None of them went to college or even to grammar school.

Besides giving us great art, keeping alive Greek culture and civilization, and seeing to it that there was at least one place in the world where everyone who wanted to be was educated, the Byzantines protected and preserved the Christian faith.

Long before the word “crusader” was ever heard, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius was fighting the Saracens in Damascus, Homs, Jerusalem, and Antioch just as the crusaders did in the days of Richard the Lion-Hearted 500 years later. Almost every Byzantine emperor who followed him did the same. Among the caliphs whom they fought, but could not defeat, was Harun al-Rashid, the hero of The Arabian Nights.

They did defeat many another Moslem leader, however, and so although the Arabs often advanced through the empire, they were never able to pour into the Balkans as they had poured into France and Spain.

But the Byzantines did more than just battle the enemies of Christianity, and they also did more than argue over the fine points of religion.

They tried to practice Christianity as well as preach it. They believed that philanthropia—from which our word “philanthropy,” or “love of mankind” is derived—was the first duty of those who were rich or had power. There were no people before the Byzantines, and only a few since, who believed so sincerely that every man was really and truly his brother’s keeper. And by being his brother’s keeper they meant taking care of him in every kind of need.

In the Byzantine Empire there were homes for travelers and pilgrims. There were homes for orphans. There were homes for the sick. There were homes for foundlings. There were old-age homes.

All of these institutions were heavily endowed when they were not actually supported by the government, and the officials in charge of them were important people. Take the orphan homes, for example. There were forty orphan homes in Constantinople alone. Each was headed by an orphanotrope. The Grand Orphanotrope who was over all of them, was appointed by the emperor himself. He held one of the highest offices in the empire.

Many of the Byzantine laws were Christian as well. In the old days of the ancient Roman Empire, the father was the absolute master of the family. His wife’s property, including her dowry, became his, and if he did not like her, he could divorce her with little more than a word. At least in the very early days, he had power of life and death over his slaves and almost as much over his children. If a son did not please him, he did not have to leave him a penny in his will.

But the Byzantines did not want laws like that. They wanted laws that the Saviour would approve of. In their opinion, Christ would not have approved of divorce, and so although they could not stop it altogether, they made it much more difficult to get. At one time there were only four recognized reasons for divorce. One of them was that you could get a divorce if your husband (or wife) tried to murder you!

Women were given many other rights by the Byzantines. If a child wanted to marry, he had to get his mother’s permission as well as his father’s. A woman’s property did not belong exclusively to her husband; her property and her husband’s property now belonged to both of them. If the father died, the mother could become her child’s guardian.

The child also got some new advantages. If you got a job in the old Roman days, your earnings went to your father. Under the Byzantines, you could keep them yourself.

Slaves also had to be treated with justice. Under Christianity, even the most wretched slave was a human being with a soul which he could lose or save. He was no longer cattle, and his master could not slay him at will. He could not even treat him inhumanely.

Even the laws about business were based on the idea that the good of everybody was more important than the good of any individual. In fact, the Byzantines had an almost socialistic control of everything and everybody that made money.

Every branch of Byzantine industry was organized into corporations or guilds, and these corporations had the right to fix prices and wages down to the last penny. They had the right to decide who could go into a trade or business. They had the right to decide the exact place where a shop or booth or factory could be set up; for example, no shop selling wax and candles could be less than seventy yards from another candle shop. They also had the right to decide what goods could be imported, and what kind of goods, and in what amounts, could be shipped abroad.

But even at that, the corporations did not have absolute control of everything, for over them was the eparch, or lord mayor, and over the eparch was the emperor.

The emperor was supposed to be for all of the people and not for any group of them, and the emperor had the last word.

In spite of all they accomplished and their charitable principles and humane ideas, the Byzantines also had faults, however. There was a black side to their civilization just as there was a bright side, and some of it was very black indeed.

The Byzantines were very cruel. They were Greek, but they were also Oriental, and had in them a ferocious streak that not only was indifferent to suffering but seemed to take a fiendish pleasure in it. Most mobs are savage, but the Byzantine mob was even more savage than usual. Only the mobs of the French Revolution can compare with it.

For instance, when the Byzantines overthrew the emperor Andronicus, they were not satisfied with just tossing him from his throne. A howling crowd of men and women tore out his beard, broke his teeth, beat him, and dragged him through the streets at the tail of a mangy camel while shouting fearful curses at him. He was seventy years old, but although he begged to be put out of his misery, it was many hours before a soldier who was not one of the crowd took pity on him and killed him.

He was by no means the only emperor who died cruelly. As a matter of fact, it was a very rare thing for an emperor to die peacefully in his bed. Usurpers and would-be emperors were often treated just as savagely as Andronicus had been.

Byzantine laws could be cruel, too, although their cruelty was in the name of Christianity and mercy. The Byzantines thought it was against the teachings of Christ to condemn a man to death, and so the death penalty was rare. Instead, a criminal was mutilated; they tore out his tongue or cut off his nose or a hand. Blinding was a common punishment. The Byzantines actually thought it was merciful to blind a man instead of executing him.

The Byzantines were treacherous, and, in fact, “Byzantine treachery” became a well-known saying. Probably they were not as treacherous as their enemies said they were, and their enemies, including the crusaders, were also treacherous. But in everyday life just as when they went to war, the Byzantines were always ready to plot, trick, deceive, and lie. When they did tell the truth, it was usually because honesty happened to be the best policy, and not because they thought that honesty was the only right thing.

The emperors often gained the throne by trickery. Michael the Drunkard made Basil I his co-emperor in the kingdom because Basil had deceived him into thinking that Michael’s uncle, the Caesar Bardas, was a traitor. Caesar Bardas was executed. Then Basil waited until Michael was asleep, and had him murdered.

Michael’s grandfather, Michael the Stutterer, had come to the throne in the same way. As a matter of fact, he was in prison when he succeeded in outwitting a boyhood companion who was then the emperor. He actually still had chains on his wrists and ankles when he was crowned.

The Byzantines were corrupt and prospered on graft. Although most of this graft and corruption centered around the imperial court, business and the church were often corrupt. In all three of these places, you got ahead by giving—and receiving—favors.

The Byzantines were high-strung, excitable, and fiery.

The Byzantines were very fond of luxury whether in dress, food, jewelry, furniture, or even horses and chariots.

They craved entertainment. One emperor even told his signalmen not to light the beacons that carried news of an approaching enemy from hill to hill until it reached Constantinople. He was afraid it would cast gloom upon the horse races.

The Byzantines were much too fond of pleasure.

Even so, when you add the pluses and subtract the minuses for the Byzantines, it turns out that you have something pretty good, particularly for those troubled times.

Besides, not all the Byzantines were unprincipled and evil. The mob at the bottom and the courtiers and noblemen on top had glaring defects, but the middle-class Byzantines, of whom there were more than any other group, were often brave, high-spirited, and loyal; and they were always intelligent. The Byzantine father was steady and hard-working, and the mother sincerely pious and devoted to her children. Their life was sometimes hard, but it was often happy. And there always was a chance for self-respect.

Man and four horses