Review: Byzantium by Judith Herrin

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire
by Judith Herrin
392pp, Allen Lane, £20

The Byzantines "present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity, nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes" - thus Gibbon. When he wrote his history of the decline of Rome, he found to his dismay that it had not really collapsed towards the end of the fifth century. Part of it had survived and flourished - the eastern half, with its great capital at Constantinople - and its people called themselves "Romans" (to this day, the Turks of Anatolia are called Rumi in Kurdish). So Gibbon had to plough on through the records of the Byzantine empire and he did not much like what he had to do.

It is a complicated story, defeating all but the best chroniclers. Eastern Rome exhausted itself in a long war with Persia, and then lost almost all of its Middle Eastern territories to the Arabs (Muhammad was one of Gibbon's few heroes). There was a recovery in the 10th century, as the Arabs themselves declined, but towards the end of the 11th century, a good part of Anatolia fell to the nomadic Turks. The Byzantines looked to the west for help, but that again was a sad story. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, marauding Normans and scheming Venetians, ruthlessly sacked the great city. In Istanbul they are doing a good job, at last, of restoring the great church of the Pantocrator, where emperors of the Comnenos dynasty were buried. The Crusaders sacked the tombs and now there is only a tiny sliver of the original gold left: all the rest was looted and carted off to Italy.

The Fourth Crusade is one of the landmarks in the rise of western technology. The Byzantines traditionally defended themselves with a combustible called "Greek fire", which burned wooden ships and siege-towers. The Venetians worked out an antidote, treating leather with chemicals that resisted the flames, and enabled ships to approach the great sea walls on the Golden Horn. The Byzantines, convinced of their superiority, could not work out how their semi-savage enemies could be so skilled in such arts. But Constantinople was almost finished.

The empire lingered on for another 250 years, but in the main it had become a football, kicked around by rival Italians. The Galata tower, built in 1384, is one of the city's landmarks, and you assume that it was meant to deter Turks or even Russians. It was in fact part of the defences put up by the Genoese against the Venetians, who were trying to get into the Black Sea trade, which Genoa monopolised. When the Turks finally did take Constantinople in 1453, the "Latins" had in effect weakened the place to the point of indefensibility; the gulf between Catholics and Orthodox was so great that, up to the very last moment of the siege, the great Church of the Holy Wisdom, the Aya Sofya as it is now called, had to be kept closed because if the two sides congregated in it, they fought.

The Byzantines regarded theirs as the great civilisation, and Judith Herrin splendidly shows how right they were. She has not tried to follow the path of so many narrative historians, of greater or lesser gifts. Told in a particular way, the story of Byzantium can appear surreal - quarter-century civil wars between blinded grandfather and scheming grandson, manipulated by Genoese and Venetians who use Catalans and Turks as their agents; eunuchs leading armies; the deranged monks whom Gibbon mocked. Herrin is a leading Byzantinist, and she presents eastern Rome as a civilisation, with its strengths and defects. This is a very difficult business because the sources are extremely demanding and in some areas very thin indeed (there is an excellent presentation of this problem at the start of Mark Whittow's Making of Orthodox Byzantium 600-1025) - and paradoxically we often depend for knowledge on the manuscripts and artefacts looted by the Crusaders, who took them to Italy.

Chapters, sometimes very short, discuss matters both great and small. Herrin is excellent on the Ravenna of Justinian, with the extraordinary mosaics that somehow survived the second world war (when Allied bombing could be ruthless) and she is very good on that odd Byzantine (and Russian) phenomenon, the woman in power. Why is it that Orthodoxy, such a masculine creed (the monks of Mount Athos would not even allow hens into their vast monastery), produces so many feeble male rulers and so many competent female ones? She even manages to make iconoclasm - the enormous destruction of graven images in the early-middle period of Byzantium - comprehensible, though its relationship with the doctrine of the Trinity might have been explored.

There is a superb book by Alain Besançon, L'Image interdite, which discusses these matters in a long-term philosophical context (it ends up with a description of Mondrian, remorselessly reading the works of Madame Blavatsky, spiritualist extraordinary). Overall, just the same, Judith Herrin can work her way into the mind of Byzantium, and she gives prominence especially to the artistic side. A very good book, all in all.

· Norman Stone's World War One: A Short History is published by Allen Lane