Kakistocracy

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.

Gold coin with an image of one of the better Byzantine emperors, Leo VI "the Wise" [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Solidus of Leo VI (reverse), CC BY-SA 2.5]

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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The emperor of books

In my novel The Scattering Winds, set seven hundred years in the future, an inquisitive and adventurous young man stumbles upon a relic of the distant past -- a library that somehow survived the cataclysms of our own time, and all the vagaries of circumstance in the following seven centuries.  When he starts going through the treasure-trove of books that have survived, he's struck by the tragic and devastating fact that what was preserved and what was lost was merely a matter of luck, and that for every precious title still in existence, there were a hundred others for which every copy had been destroyed forever.

My inspiration for writing this was that this is, honestly, the situation we're already in.  The vast majority of works from the ancient world are long gone, lost through violence, mishap, and the fact that before the invention of the printing press, making additional copies of books was a long and arduous process, so many of them only ever existed in the form of a copy or two in some monastic library somewhere.  We extol the works of authors like Sophocles and Euripides, but it bears keeping in mind that most of their writing no longer exists.  Our understanding of their work is as fragmentary as if we tried to comprehend the depth and breadth of Shakespeare using only five randomly chosen sonnets, Timon of Athens, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

It's curious, though, how sometimes circumstances conspire to allow a work to survive.  This is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, looking at how sheer luck resulted in the rediscovery of the single extant copy of the first century B.C.E. philosopher Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), the concepts of which were pivotal to the development of science during the Renaissance.  There's another example of this phenomenon, though, which I wonder if you've heard of.  Just about everything we know about the fifth century C.E. turmoil, which resulted in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the near-collapse of the Eastern one, is due to the efforts of a single man -- Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus of Byzantium, who reigned from 913 to 959.

Constantine was the son of Emperor Leo VI "the Wise" and his mistress, Zoë Karbonopsina ("Zoë of the Coal-Black Eyes"), and so he was "born to the royal purple" (that's what his mouthful of a sobriquet means).  When his mother gave birth to him, she insisted on doing so in the Purple Room of the Imperial Palace to emphasize his royal-purple origins in fact as well as symbolically.

Constantine was one of those people who probably shouldn't ever have been involved in politics.  He had a reputation for being smart, honest, generous, and kind, which certainly wasn't (and isn't) a combination that does all that well in office.  He was far more interested in history than he was in administration (a leaning I definitely understand), but was fortunate to have capable ministers who took care of most of the duties of office for him.  All in all, his reign went far better than other times there's been a bookish scholarly type on the throne.  King Henry VI of England comes to mind -- during whose chaotic reign the English got their asses handed to them repeatedly in wars with the French, and the War of the Roses broke out on the home island.

That Constantine fared better is largely due to his smart choices of helpers.  Fortunately for us, because this left him free to pursue his passion, which was saving old manuscripts.  He realized how much of the work of ancient writers had been lost in the paroxysms of the fifth and sixth centuries, so he set about pulling together and recopying everything he could find of what was left. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wooofer, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (2), CC BY-SA 4.0]

The result was a 53-volume set called Excerpta Historica, which contained everything from fragments to whole books by hundreds of ancient authors, some of whom have no other surviving works.  These include Polybius, Nicolaus of Damascus, Dexippus, Eunapius, Peter the Patrician, Menander the Protector, John of Antioch, Thucydides, Xenophon, Diodorus of Sicily, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Arrian of Nicomedia, Iamblichus, Appian of Alexandria, Cassius Dio, Socrates of Constantinople, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Sozomen, Philostorgius, Procopius, Agathias of Myrina, Theophylact Simocatta, John Malalas and Malchus of Philadelphia.

To name a few.

Two of the historians that Constantine included were Priscus and Zosimus, who lived in Constantinople in the fifth and early sixth centuries (respectively), and from whose writings we know as much as we do about the events leading up to the fall of the Roman Empire.  Imagine it -- without Constantine's preservation of these two writers' histories, we might only know that there had been this huge empire surrounding the Mediterranean, and then... something mysterious happened, and it collapsed.

It does leave you wondering, though, what other major events in history we know nothing about, because any records chronicling them have been lost over the years.  The sad fact is that the depredations of time in the last thousand years continued after Constantine's death, and even of his original 53 volumes, we only have four left -- we only know of the 49 lost volumes from references in other works, and can only speculate about what we might have learned from them.

But at least we have the four that survived.  Without the work of a brilliant, book-loving Byzantine emperor, our knowledge of the ancient history of Europe would be even more incomplete than it is.  And like my main character in The Scattering Winds, from these fragments we can get at least a glimpse into a long-gone world that otherwise we'd know almost nothing about.

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