Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

Military reverses aside, there were encouraging signs in the ninth century that the empire was slowly regaining its strength. Shrunken by the losses of war, it had been reduced to a core in Asia Minor, Thrace, and Greece, but these territories were strong and united. Religious dissent had largely disappeared with the turbulent territories of Syria and Egypt, and the smaller imperial government was reasonably efficient regardless of who sat on the throne. New gold mines were uncovered, overflowing the impoverished treasury, and a rich merchant class sprang up in the wake of such unexpected wealth.

Even more encouraging was a great revival of learning sparked, ironically enough, by the dying embers of iconoclasm. Attempts to justify one side of the argument or the other by quoting obscure references to earlier church fathers led to further study to rebut them. Private schools began to appear throughout the empire as interest in education spread, and literacy began to pick up a momentum of its own. Under the emperor Theophilus in the mid-ninth century, teachers were endowed at the public expense, scriptoria were opened, and the University of Constantinople was endowed with new faculties of law and philosophy. *

This was in marked contrast with the West, where the church was slowly spreading the fragments of learning that it had preserved. Western medieval thought, though quite vital, had been cut off from its rich classical heritage and would have to wait for the Renaissance to build on the learning of antiquity. Eastern schools, however, could draw on their undiminished philosophical and literary traditions. Within a few years, Byzantium’s renewed intellectual fame was so great that a caliph even asked for a specialist to be sent to Baghdad. Perhaps wisely, the emperor refused to let him go, choosing instead to set the scholar up in the capital to continue the ferment. Encouraged by the new air of curiosity, court historians once again took up their pens, young nobles returned to their study of the classics, and Byzantine scholarship, which had been nearly dormant since the reign of Irene, sprang once again into bloom. His armies may have been scattered in Asia Minor, but Theophilus presided over a cultural renaissance, winning the hearts of his subjects with his concern for justice.†

In an age in which the emperor was seen as an unapproachable figure—the human representation of God on earth—Theophilus was remarkably visible to his subjects. A devoted fan of chariot races, he once entered the competition under the banner of the Blues and delighted the crowd with his skill.‡ Most astonishing of all to the citizens of Constantinople, however, was the emperor’s habit of wandering in disguise through the streets of the capital, questioning those he met about their concerns and ensuring that merchants were charging fair prices for their wares. Once a week, accompanied by the blare of trumpets, he would ride from one end of the city to the other, encouraging any who had complaints to seek him out. Those who stopped him could be certain of a sympathetic ear no matter how powerful their opponent. One story tells of a widow who approached the emperor and made the startling claim that the very horse he was riding had been stolen from her by a senior magistrate of the city. Theophilus dutifully looked into the matter, and when he discovered that the widow was correct, he had the magistrate flogged and told his watching subjects that justice was the greatest virtue of a ruler. *

To be accessible, however, didn’t mean that the emperor intended to be an inch less regal, and he poured gold into a building program unlike anything seen since the days of Justinian.† All emperors have expensive tastes, but Theophilus put most of his predecessors to shame. With a flurry of activity, the walls along the Golden Horn were strengthened, a magnificent new summer palace was built, and the Great Palace was completely renovated for the first time in nearly three hundred years.‡ This last accomplishment caught the imagination of contemporary historians, who left breathless accounts of the work. Before their watching eyes, Theophilus transformed the sprawling, somewhat stuffy collection of buildings that made up the Great Palace into a residence fit for a ninth-century emperor *Such a renovation was long overdue. Originally built by Septimus Severus in the second century, the palace had been haphazardly added to by successive emperors, who had built reception halls, living quarters, churches, baths, and administrative buildings, until the rambling structures threatened to cover the entire southeastern tip of the city.

Theophilus imposed a welcome order on the Great Palace, clearing out cluttered walls and unused rooms and linking its buildings with clean corridors. The polo grounds that had been built by Theodosius II four centuries earlier, when that emperor had imported the royal sport from Persia, were enlarged, and fountains fed by underground cisterns soon adorned graceful walkways and terraced gardens. Creamy white marble steps led up to breezy chambers, forests of rose and porphyry columns supported delicate apses, and silver doors led to rooms filled with glittering mosaics. The true luxury, however, was saved for Theophilus’s unparalleled throne room. No other place in the empire—or perhaps the world—dripped so extravagantly in gold or boasted so magnificent a display of wealth. Behind the massive golden throne were trees made of hammered gold and silver, complete with jewel-encrusted mechanical birds that would burst into song at the touch of a lever. Wound around the base of the tree were golden lions and griffins staring menacingly from beside each armrest, looking as if they could spring up at any moment. In what must have been a terrifying experience for unsuspecting ambassadors, the emperor would give a signal and a golden organ would play a deafening tune, the birds would sing, and the lions would twitch their tails and roar. Rare indeed was a visitor who wasn’t awed by such a display.

Nowhere was the growing confidence of the empire more apparent, however, than in the religious realm. There were few things more galling to the Byzantine religious mind-set than the increasingly insistent papal claim that the Bishop of Rome’s voice was the only one that really mattered in deciding church policy. The four other patriarchs of the Christian world had traditionally deferred to the successor of Saint Peter, but great questions of faith had always been decided by consensus, in contrast with the growing authoritarianism of the western capital. In the past, the East and the West had managed to mask their increasing divisions beneath polite, distant relations, but a new combative spirit was in the air. When the pope sent Frankish missionaries to convert the Slavs, the patriarch Photius responded by sending his own contingent, the brilliant brother monks Cyril and Methodius.

The pope’s men had a head start, but they alienated the Slavs by insisting that all services be conducted in Latin, even though their new converts didn’t understand a word of it. Cyril and Methodius, by contrast, set to work immediately learning Slavic, and when they found it had no written alphabet, Cyril provided one. *Western bishops angrily complained that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were the only tongues worthy of a sacred liturgy, but Cyril countered by saying that since God’s rain fell on all equally, then all tongues were fit to praise him.† The Bulgarian khan, impressed by the new freedoms promised by Photius (and in any case unwilling to subordinate himself to Rome), traveled to Constantinople to be baptized in the Hagia Sophia, and Bulgaria entered the Byzantine cultural orbit, in which it remains to this day. By allowing Byzantine culture to be separated from the Greek language, Photius had spread the empire’s influence far beyond its borders and immeasurably strengthened the bonds that held the diverse Byzantine world together. It would be more than six centuries before Latin was similarly dethroned in the West.