I picked up a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium (at almost four hundred pages, it's only short by comparison to his full three-volume History of Byzantium) at a used book sale. To be fair, it couldn't afford to be much shorter because it covers about eleven hundred years of history. I got it because it's a time and place I don't know much about, and when I opened it last week I kind of steeled myself for a dry, college textbook approach.
Turns out I shouldn't have been apprehensive. Norwich is not only a great historian, he's a great writer, and his prose gallops right along, focusing not solely on the usual names and dates but on the personalities involved. And... wow. What a parade of lunatics. The book certainly illustrates the truth of Dave Barry's trenchant quip, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy."
Honestly, there were a few good ones. The emperor Leo VI was called "the Wise" for good reason; and you may recall that I wrote about his scholarly and good-natured son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago because of his deep devotion to preserving the written works of the ancients. But some of the bad ones -- ye gods and little fishes. Michael III was an unstable drunkard about whom Norwich says, "Content to leave the responsibilities of government to others, he was unable to check his own moral decline which, in the last five years of his life, finally reduced him to a level of degradation that fully earned him his later sobriquet of 'the Sot.'" Constantine IV had "a streak of insanity that... [transformed] him into a monster whose only attributes were a pathological suspicion of all around him and an insatiable lust for blood." Nicephorus II was a "sanctimonious and unattractive old puritan" who was "pitiless and cruel, and whose meanness and avarice were notorious."
You might have heard the term kakistocracy -- "government by the worst." (Interesting that it went from being a nearly unknown word to being kind of all over the place in the last ten years. I wonder why that is?) Well, the Byzantines, with only a handful of exceptions, had what amounted to eleven centuries of kakistocracy, enduring long periods of intermittent chaos before ultimately collapsing into ruins in the mid-fifteenth century.
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What has struck me over and over, though, is that throughout its long history, people did whatever they could to get into positions of power, trying either to clamber onto the throne itself or at least get close to it. Why on earth would they want that? I mean, on one level, I get it; power usually comes along with money and luxury, and the peasants of the Byzantine Empire didn't lead any happier lives than peasants in any other age. My question, though, is why in the hell anyone was brave enough to risk it. Very few emperors died peacefully of old age; bunches of them were deposed or murdered outright. The same went for the nobles and the imperial advisors. And being on the losing side often didn't just mean exile; there's example after example of dethroned emperors and ousted courtiers being castrated and having their noses cut off and their eyes gouged out.
You'd think that seeing this happen once or twice would be enough to induce anyone else having royal aspirations to say, "Um, yeah, no fucking way." You'd be wrong. The amazing truth is that having one guy get mutilated and exiled -- and after all that torture and blood loss, usually they didn't survive for very long afterward -- seemed to trigger the other competitors to say, "Cool! One less rival to worry about! I'm sure that won't happen to me."
The whole thing reminds me of a Tony Robbins motivational seminar a few years ago that culminated in a supposed mind-over-matter exercise of walking on hot coals. The predictable happened, and thirty people were treated in a Dallas hospital for burns on the soles of their feet. When I heard about this, I immediately wondered why, when the first couple of people shrieked in pain, the rest weren't dissuaded. Did they line up in inverse order of IQ, or something? But apparently that tendency not to learn from other people's hard experience is not a modern phenomenon, to judge by A Short History of Byzantium.
You can't know how you'd react unless you'd actually been raised in that culture; that's one of the problems with passing value judgments on figures from history. But here, from my twenty-first century perspective, I find it a little hard to fathom. I can't imagine how anyone would think "you have a chance at being powerful... but you may end up losing your eyes, nose, and balls" is a good bet, especially considering how many of the emperors and their cadre found themselves drawing the short straw.
What also strikes me about this period of history is how many of the central players -- not only the emperors, but the Patriarchs of what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church -- were so completely certain that they were right. About everything. Me, I'm hardly sure of anything, but these guys make the Pope's claims of infallibility sound like waffling. One of the biggest disputes -- that went on for a hundred years and cost thousands of lives -- was about iconoclasm, the idea (still prevalent in most Muslim sects) that it was sacrilegious to depict holy figures in art, and worse still to venerate or worship them. The Byzantine iconoclasts went around destroying every piece of religious art they could find, and many of them were perfectly willing to murder anyone who got in the way. The iconodules, or "icon-worshipers," were equally violent. And because both the imperial throne and the Patriarchate swung back and forth between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, each time the ground shifted there was a bloody purge of the ones who had previously been in ascendancy.
I mean, come on. So some guy wants to pray to an image of the Virgin Mary, and you personally don't like that idea. Is the next logical step "I must therefore cut his head off"? Are you really that sure your position is the correct and God-approved one?
Of course, once again we haven't really progressed that far. We have a Secretary of Defense who apparently thinks that God is standing by smiling while we bomb Iranian girls' schools, and at least a few prominent military leaders who are having multiple orgasms over the thought that Trump's little "excursion" might be the lead-up to Armageddon.
I dunno. All it really proves to me is that I honestly have no idea what makes people tick most of the time. I've wondered before if I might be some kind of changeling, because when I look around me, mostly what I think is, "None of this makes any fucking sense."
Anyhow, I recommend A Short History of Byzantium if you are (1) a history buff, (2) like well-written non-fiction, and (3) want further evidence that the human race is irredeemably weird. I will say, though, that if ever time travel is invented, I am not going back to Byzantium. Fascinating as it is, and little as I have any desire to be in a position of power, it still was not a safe place for pretty much anyone. I like my various bodily organs securely attached where they are, thank you very much.
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