The Record 2006 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The Life of the College
The first church of Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople was built in the
fourth century. After the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, the
magnificent sixth century church –
which still stands today – became a
mosque, and is now a museum.
Averil Cameron, The Byzantines
(Blackwells, Oxford, November
2006)
their rulers were prone to the murder and mutilation of rivals, even
within their own families. While their icons are often beautiful, and
their luxury objects impressive, Byzantine Orthodoxy tends to be
seen outside the Orthodox world as something static and ‘different’,
rather than as a living and varied religious system. Above all,
everyone knows that Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and
consciousness of this impending event has left an apparently indelible
impression that the last centuries of Byzantium must have been marked
by feebleness and decline. It is somewhat ironic that this should be so
when the emergent countries of the Balkans their own struggle against
the Ottoman Turks is invested with heroic pride, even when as in the
case of Serbia, it was actually unsuccessful.
In my own case, my recent research has taken me from late antiquity to
the later world of Byzantium, and especially into its religious history. I
have written on Byzantium in relation to the rise of Islam and the Arab
conquests, on the controversy about religious images in the seventh
and eighth centuries, and on perceptions of orthodoxy and heresy in
Byzantium. I had already moved into Byzantium in my teaching before
I moved to Oxford, and once here I gave the introductory lectures
for graduates on Byzantine history for the University. In my view the
cultural or religious history of pre-modern periods can only be written
if it is firmly grounded in an understanding of the social, political
and economic fabric, and my experience of lecturing on the subject
led me to believe that the history of the Byzantine state was far more
dynamic than the usual stereotypes allow. Edward Gibbon did most
for English-speaking readers to convey the impression of Byzantium as
a weak successor to the classical world and the Roman empire (though
he was preceded by others including Montesquieu) and this image is
still likely to be the only impression of Byzantium with which most
people come into contact. My recent work aims in a way to normalize
Byzantium by showing first that like any other long-lived state, its
history was complex and varied, even in the key areas of court life and
religion, and second, that the history of Byzantium was an integral part
of the wider history of Europe and the Mediterranean. It cannot be left
aside as something exotic and different, or understood only through
the fascination of the icon exhibitions that currently draw such large
audiences.
Writing the book on Byzantium for Blackwells in the series The
Peoples of Europe was a way of preparing for a larger project currently
in the planning stage. The Byzantines has two broadly chronological
chapters but is otherwise arranged thematically, so that it can address
fundamental historical questions about the Byzantine state over the
entire period. The title follows those of other volumes in the same
series, but in fact the Byzantines were not a people in any ethnic sense.
The very term ‘Byzantine’ was given to them only in the sixteenth
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