Byzantium 330 - 1453 at the Royal Academy: throwing new light on the Dark Ages
The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great made two extraordinary decisions which changed the world.
The first, in 313, was to end the persecution of Christians and to declare Christianity a legal religion in the Roman empire. The second, in 324, was to found a new city on the site of Byzantium, which he dedicated in 330 and called Constantinople. Today it is the vast city of Istanbul.
Constantinople flourished and by the reign of Emperor Justinian the Great (527-65) it was the Christian capital of a reduced Roman empire. Its rulers aspired to preside over a unified Mediterranean state with a common faith and a humane law code. We call this the Byzantine empire - though they still called it the Roman empire. It survived until 1453 when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks.
Byzantium 330-1453, a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, assesses the effects of Constantine's decisions. It brings back together many of the widely scattered objects which are the visual legacy of this empire. But it also poses two important questions. What is the real legacy of Byzantium? And is the picture of doom and gloom painted by the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon more rhetoric than fact?
Gibbon published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. In it, he damned Byzantium as a "degenerate race of princes" mired in intrigue and corruption, concluding: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." The shadow of Gibbon still falls over the modern view of Byzantium. Unlike the attention and affection inspired by ancient Greece and Rome or Elizabethan England, Byzantium receives little mention in British education. It is quite simply "the Dark Ages" - coming after the glories of antiquity and before the light of the Renaissance.
To read Gibbon today is to encounter a very particular type of history, all about wars and civil administration. And, of course, decline - lasting century after century. Art and culture do not even get a look-in.
Yet, even as political history, Gibbon is out of step with our world. Europe today has many features derived from Byzantium: its concepts of law, its inclusion of faiths, its regional concepts (Georgia and Ukraine were within the Byzantine world).
Byzantium lived through difficult times - there were the challenges of mass immigration into Europe and the rise and advance of Islam. It is worth remembering, too, that Russia has inherited many Byzantine traditions. Yes, Byzantium was a bureaucratic state - but almost nothing on a modern scale. "Byzantine obscurity" is a great term of abuse, but is it accurate? The Royal Academy's exhibition, which I have co-curated, offers a chance to think again about Byzantium, and to look at what Gibbon ignored...
Read entire article at Daily Telegraph (UK)
The first, in 313, was to end the persecution of Christians and to declare Christianity a legal religion in the Roman empire. The second, in 324, was to found a new city on the site of Byzantium, which he dedicated in 330 and called Constantinople. Today it is the vast city of Istanbul.
Constantinople flourished and by the reign of Emperor Justinian the Great (527-65) it was the Christian capital of a reduced Roman empire. Its rulers aspired to preside over a unified Mediterranean state with a common faith and a humane law code. We call this the Byzantine empire - though they still called it the Roman empire. It survived until 1453 when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks.
Byzantium 330-1453, a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, assesses the effects of Constantine's decisions. It brings back together many of the widely scattered objects which are the visual legacy of this empire. But it also poses two important questions. What is the real legacy of Byzantium? And is the picture of doom and gloom painted by the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon more rhetoric than fact?
Gibbon published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. In it, he damned Byzantium as a "degenerate race of princes" mired in intrigue and corruption, concluding: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." The shadow of Gibbon still falls over the modern view of Byzantium. Unlike the attention and affection inspired by ancient Greece and Rome or Elizabethan England, Byzantium receives little mention in British education. It is quite simply "the Dark Ages" - coming after the glories of antiquity and before the light of the Renaissance.
To read Gibbon today is to encounter a very particular type of history, all about wars and civil administration. And, of course, decline - lasting century after century. Art and culture do not even get a look-in.
Yet, even as political history, Gibbon is out of step with our world. Europe today has many features derived from Byzantium: its concepts of law, its inclusion of faiths, its regional concepts (Georgia and Ukraine were within the Byzantine world).
Byzantium lived through difficult times - there were the challenges of mass immigration into Europe and the rise and advance of Islam. It is worth remembering, too, that Russia has inherited many Byzantine traditions. Yes, Byzantium was a bureaucratic state - but almost nothing on a modern scale. "Byzantine obscurity" is a great term of abuse, but is it accurate? The Royal Academy's exhibition, which I have co-curated, offers a chance to think again about Byzantium, and to look at what Gibbon ignored...