I

PERCEP T IONS & I DE N T I T I E S

  

Byzantinism:
e Imaginary and Real Heritage of
Byzantium in Southeastern Europe

Dimiter G. Angelov

 Byzantine Empire (ca. -), the dominant political and cul-

tural power in the Balkans for more than a millennium, left strong and
lasting traces in the cultural identity of the peoples of Southeastern
Europe. Signs of the long shadow that Byzantium cast on posterity are easy to
detect, the most obvious being the Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic alphabet,
which is a byproduct of the Greek script and is in use in several Balkan coun-
tries. Yet, for an empire that never made it into the modern age – Byzantium
ended its formal political existence in  as the Middle Ages were drawing to
a close – its influence on the Balkans of today appears to be truly remarkable,
at least according to some recent scholarly surveys of European history. Even
more remarkable is the agreement among their authors: the Byzantine legacy

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
in the area consists not solely of elements of cultural identity (such as religion,
language, and historical memory), but also – and mainly – of a crippling his-
torical legacy that has left this part of the world different and backward when
compared to the European mainland. Two aspects of Byzantine civilization are
usually pointed to as the formative – or rather de-formative – historical experi-
ences that have affected the present-day Balkans. These are Byzantium’s politi-
cal culture and its unique dynamic of church-state relations, both of which are
considered to have fallen short of medieval European standards and to have
become a burdensome legacy in Southeastern Europe.
Instances of this way of seeing Byzantium and its influence on the contem-
porary Balkans have multiplied in the past several years. A general survey
of the history of Eastern Europe asserts that the impact of Byzantine “politi-
cal culture on the mentalities of Eastern Europeans has been strong and long
lasting.” The Byzantine legacy in social attitudes, transmitted through the
uncanny ways of orthodoxy, has led the Balkan peoples to “confuse politics
and morality, to seek unanimity rather than decisions by a majority, to view
political leaders as sources of salvation” (Longworth , ). Another simi-
lar historical survey underscores the role of “caesaropapism” – the subjugation
of the church by the state – as the historical experience that differentiates the
Balkans and Russia from Western Europe. According to this analysis, Byzan-
tium missed the formative experiences of the Investiture Contest, the Refor-
mation, and the Renaissance. Furthermore, Byzantine caesaropapism persisted
as a mindset in the Balkans after Byzantium’s fall, impeding the “separation
of the secular and the spiritual spheres” in Southeastern Europe (Bideleux and
Jeffreys , ). A recently published history of the Byzantine Empire con-
curs with these opinions. It concludes that the Byzantine legacy, together with
the Ottoman and communist heritages, has discouraged the development of
democratic institutions in the Balkans and has deepened the tendency of the
Balkan people to depend on the government and to distrust businessmen and
politicians (Treadgold , ).
Further, the harsh judgments on Byzantium have left the pages of history
books and entered the discourse of political analysts and journalists. For an influ-
ential political scientist, the lack of “separation and recurrent clashes between
Church and State,” an unquestionable sign of a Byzantine influence on the
Slavic-Orthodox world, is a good enough reason to draw a sharp dividing line
between the developed West and the backward Balkans (Huntington , ).

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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
A German political analyst, describing Romania’s current economic problems,
exclaimed, “This is what one calls Byzantinism.” (Meier ). The expatriate
intelligentsia of the Balkans has also been taken in by the conviction that Byz-
antium has something to do with the problems of the modern world. The Bul-
garian-born literary critic Julia Kristeva, who lives and works in Paris, went so
far as to blame her country’s present troubles in the transition to capitalism,
which are chiefly economic, on a Byzantine and Orthodox cultural heritage in
intellectual life and church-state relations. “Our values,” wrote Kristeva, “have
been delayed for two thousand years in us.” According to her, the Orthodox
individual is incapable of adapting to modern society, a fact that became espe-
cially apparent after communism’s fall ().
These harsh judgments on a dead civilization – and their appearance at the
end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, despite the
progress made by the various disciplines forming the field of Byzantine studies
(history, philology, art studies, numismatics, etc.) – do warrant a response. To
many a historian, the assumptions underlying these views of a historical legacy
appear quite ahistorical. The simplistic, essentialist generalizations about such
a sophisticated civilization as Byzantium, and the drawing of causal connec-
tions between the Middle Ages and modernity are quite unreasonable. This
approach resembles too much the presentist, “Whiggish,” interpretation of his-
tory, which in a similar way has tended to draw a straight causal connection
between Protestantism and the emergence of the European capitalist economy
(see Butterfield ). Yet, unreasonable as these views of Byzantium and its
heritage are, they do not exist without a reason. Negative opinions about Byz-
antine civilization have become firmly rooted in Western intellectual traditions
at least since the period of the Enlightenment and have been carried over on a
more popular level through the negative connotations that the word “Byzan-
tinism” has acquired in several Western languages. Disentangling the process
by which Byzantium was turned into a caricature of itself is a complicated task.
It will take us beyond the Middle Ages and into the intellectual history of early
modern Europe, especially the European Enlightenment.
This brief paper can only sketch roughly the contours of the historical emer-
gence and nature of a unique understanding of “Byzantinism,” which is still
with us today. In the process of tracing the permutations and usages of this
view, we will discover that the real Byzantium and the imaginary one have
hopelessly parted ways. Nevertheless, as a historian, I cannot but perform a task

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
that I consider to be my duty, namely to examine the correspondence (or lack
thereof) between subsequent views of Byzantium and the historical Byzantium
itself. In particular, I will show that two traditional ways of conceptualizing
church-state relations and imperial power in Byzantium – caesaropapism and
autocracy – greatly simplify a complex and variegated picture. Once seen as a
continuous historical legacy in the Balkans, these concepts become a building
block of Byzantinist paradigms that seek to relegate Southeastern Europe to a
lower historical taxonomy and to provide the Balkans’ present-day backward-
ness with legitimate, historical roots.

The Construction of Byzantinism

The denunciation of Byzantium as civilization and as historical legacy is a dis-
course and a mental construct with a very long history. Byzantinism, as I define
it, is an essentialist and negative understanding of a medieval civilization that
places it into rigorous analytical categories from a Western and modern view-
point. Several factors have driven Byzantinism through the ages: age-old ste-
reotypes, the imagination of medieval Western travelers in Byzantium and of
later Western intellectuals, presentist concerns, historical reductionism, and
evolutionist theories of progress. By looking closely into its historical devel-
opment and cognitive structure, one may distinguish two interrelated sides
of Byzantinism that feed into each other. On one hand, Byzantinism carries a
set of negative stereotypes about Byzantium that emerged during the Middle
Ages. On the other, it is a reductionist and essentialist view of Byzantium that
dates back to the European Enlightenment.
Byzantinism shares fundamental similarities with the Balkanist discourses
that Maria Todorova has recently studied in her pioneering book Imagining
the Balkans ().¹ Both Balkanism and Byzantinism are imaginary constructs
that the West has imposed on Southeastern Europe as its imputed identity. The
Balkanist and the Byzantinist discourses accompany and are superimposed
on each other (Todorova , -, ). This development is by no means
surprising. As the West discovered the Balkans during the nineteenth century,
the legacies of these two empires (the Byzantine and the Ottoman) that had
dominated the region for a millennium and a half provided a historical basis
for the classification and categorization of the Balkans as a distinct cultural
entity. Balkanism and Byzantinism also share epistemological similarities in

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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
their cognitive structure. Byzantinism, like Balkanism, is a concept of “other-
ness” by which Byzantium is turned into the crippled “other” of the cultural
construct of Europe. As such, Byzantinism, like Balkanism, involves the stereo-
typing and categorization of a world that lies on the borders of what the West
sees as its own cultural territory. Byzantinism, like Balkanism, categorizes the
“other” as an imperfect and incomplete image of the self, thus fitting it into the
common cultural construct of European civilization as a sort of caricatured
self-reflection. In this respect, the Byzantinist constructs differ from Said’s
Orientalism, for they deal with variations on a single type, but do not seek to
differentiate between two different types.²
Byzantinism has an old history that predates both the Western discovery of
the Balkans and the construction of the Balkanist stereotypes. The stereotypes
of the Byzantines appeared during the Middle Ages, and the history of their
development clearly shows that Byzantium was at that time conceived of as
the “other” within a common cultural family. The reasons for this are appar-
ent. Western medieval authors perceived Byzantium as a sibling culture that
shared with them the same Greco-Roman heritage and Christian religion. Yet,
attitudes toward the empire of New Rome became ambiguous as political rela-
tions soured between Byzantium and the West. The events that led to increas-
ing animosity between the West and Byzantium are well known: the revival
of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne in ; the formal split between
Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity in the mid-eleventh century; and,
above all, the passage of the Crusades through Byzantium in the twelfth cen-
tury and the sacking of Constantinople in . Indeed, negative stereotypes of
Byzantium multiplied in Western sources at the time of the Crusades. Based on
the ancient Roman stereotypes of the Greeks, these stereotypes were nothing
other than slurs (see Petrocheilos ). Thus, medieval chroniclers perceived
the Byzantines as perfidious and treacherous people. They also slandered Byz-
antines as being by nature servile, effeminate, and unwarlike. Perfidy explained
the chronic instability of the Byzantine imperial office and also served to justify
the Latin conquest of Constantinople in  (see Villehardouin ).
The negative medieval stereotypes of the Byzantines persisted into the intel-
lectual traditions of the West after Constantinople’s final fall to the Ottoman
Turks in . Their endurance on a popular level – in Western literature, visual
arts, and music during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries – is
an unexplored subject that certainly merits a study. Many of the very same

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
negative stereotypes that emerged during the Middle Ages later became inter-
woven into Byzantinist views in the Enlightenment.
The true emergence of Byzantinism occurred after the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople, at a time when Byzantine studies had already become estab-
lished as a respectable academic discipline in Western universities. The founda-
tions of Byzantine studies as a scholarly discipline were laid in France during
the seventeenth century. It was in this period, for example, that the grandiose
project for the publication of the collected works of the Byzantine historians,
“the Paris corpus,” was undertaken.³ Furthermore, Byzantium captivated the
minds of the French monarchs, who took a personal interest in it and patron-
ized the study of its civilization. For example, the Bourbons liked to model their
court ceremonial on the Byzantine.⁴ Pierre Poussines, a French philologist of
the Age of Absolutism, considered it a special honor to re-dedicate an eleventh-
century Byzantine work of court oratory to the Sun King, Louis XIV.⁵ A treatise
on kingship written under Justinian circulated widely in the French royal court,
and Louis XIII himself translated parts of it from Greek into French.⁶
Yet, Byzantium was not to stay in fashion for very long. The eighteenth cen-
tury ushered in the period of the Enlightenment, which passed a harsh judg-
ment on Byzantine civilization. Byzantium became the embodiment of what
the Age of Reason opposed: an authoritarian political system; a culture per-
meated by blind religious belief and lack of creativity; and a society fervently
hostile to any notion of reform. Examples abound of Byzantium’s condemna-
tion by the luminaries of the Enlightenment. For Voltaire (-), Byz-
antine history was nothing but “a worthless collection of declamations and
miracles, a disgrace for the human mind” (Vaseliev , ). In his Outlines
of a Philosophy of the History of Man published in , the German philoso-
pher Herder (-) presented a similarly negative picture. He admitted
that Byzantium made some positive contributions to Western culture, such
as the transmission of the classical Greek intellectual heritage. Yet, he saw in
Byzantium itself no sign of progress of the human spirit, bemoaned the inex-
tricable fusion between the Byzantine church and state (a situation for which
he deemed Emperor Constantine the Great to be responsible), and wondered
how “such an empire stood for so long” (Herder ). The German philoso-
pher Hegel (-), who built upon Herder’s ideas in his Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, was harsher and has left us one of the most caricatured
descriptions of Byzantine civilization:

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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
Its [Byzantium’s] general aspect presents a disgusting picture of
imbecility: wretched, nay, insane passions, stifles the growth of
all that is noble in thoughts, deeds, and persons. Rebellion on the
part of generals, depositions of the Emperors by means or through
the intrigues of the courtiers, assassinations or poisoning of the
Emperors by their own wives and sons, women surrendering them-
selves to lusts and abominations of all kinds (, ).
Hegel acknowledged that Byzantium was a Christian civilization with an
elaborate culture, yet he thought that “the history of the highly civilized East-
ern Empire... exhibits to us a millennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weak-
nesses, basenesses and want of principle” (, ). The chief reason for Hegel’s
dislike of the medieval empire arose from his evolutionist theory of historical
progress, into which Byzantium did not fit neatly. It was in the West, among the
Germanic people in particular, that Hegel saw the triumphal train of progress
in history to have passed during the Middle Ages. In the structure of Hegel’s
book, Byzantium simply provided the foil for the West’s brilliance. In his chap-
ter following the section on Byzantium, Hegel introduced the Germanic people
as the true bearers of the spirit of reason and Christianity during the Middle
Ages. Byzantium was thus relegated to a side branch in the tree of historical
evolution, a sort of unwelcome historical aberration.
Not only philosophers, but also Enlightenment historians joined the chorus
of voices condemning Byzantium. Edward Gibbon (-), the first English
historian to write a full history of Byzantium, sharply criticized his subject as
an “age of barbarism and Christianity.” His work, entitled History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire and published in , has been instrumental
in sealing the negative verdict on Byzantium. Not only did Gibbon influence
Enlightenment philosophers like Herder, but he also set a tone dismissive of
Byzantium in historical scholarship.
As Byzantium was becoming increasingly familiar to and stigmatized by
Western intellectuals, negative essentialization and reductionism became the
order of the day. The word “Byzantinism” was coined sometime in the nine-
teenth century as a term that was to encapsulate the “true essence” of Byzantine
civilization. The two main definitions of Byzantinism introduced during this
period – as a form of church-state relations (caesaropapism) and as a political
ideology – have passed into the main Western languages spoken today. “Caesa-
ropapism” itself was a word coined during the Enlightenment. In , Justus
Henning Böhmer (-), a German Protestant professor at the University

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
of Halle, branded as caesaropapism the political aspirations of the papacy as
well as the control over the church once wielded by the Byzantine emperors
(, -).⁸ The word became fully established within the analytical vocabu-
lary of historians and philosophers during the nineteenth century, referring to
a political arrangement where the secular ruler “exercises supreme authority
in ecclesiastic matters.”⁹ It was also used as a slur to hurl against the Ortho-
dox Church.¹⁰
The newly coined concepts of Byzantinism and caesaropapism converged
semantically in the works of the famous Swiss historian of the Italian Renais-
sance, Jacob Burckhardt (-), who appears to have been among the first
to use the word “Byzantinism” with this meaning. A pious Protestant and a
supporter of the failed liberal revolution of , Burckhardt saw Byzantium
as the antithesis of his own ideals and those of the Renaissance. In his Reflec-
tions on World History and in his biography of the emperor Constantine the
Great, he saw Byzantinism as a “spirit compounded of Church and politics”
that “had developed analogously to Islam” (, ). Burckhardt liked noth-
ing in Byzantium:
At its summit was despotism, infinitely strengthened by the union of
churchly and secular dominion; in the place of morality it imposed
orthodoxy; in the place of unbridled and demoralized expression of
the natural instincts, hypocrisy and pretense; in the face of despo-
tism there was developed greed masquerading as poverty, and deep
cunning; in religious art and literature there was an incredible stub-
bornness in the constant repetition of obsolete motifs. (, )
It is remarkable how age-old stereotypes (“deep cunning”) and the stigma
of the Enlightenment (“constant repetition of obsolete motive,” or intellectual
sterility) converged in Burckhardt’s views of Byzantium. Yet, his definition
of Byzantinism has been quite influential. As recently as  the historian C.
Toumanoff devoted a serious book to the subject of Byzantinism as a social
myth, arguing that it was rooted in the survival of a pagan confusion between
the social and the divine (; ).¹¹
The word “Byzantinism,” newly coined in the nineteenth century, was also to
gain another meaning. In the eyes of German liberal intellectuals it came to sig-
nify an authoritarian political culture and imperialist ideology, both of which
they disliked and criticized as anachronistic. Thus, for Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer
(-) Byzantinism became a “destructive process”(Nivellierungsprozess) of

10
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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
the human spirit incompatible with the individualism inherent in the German
soul ([] , ). A historian of the Empire of Trebizond and of Frankish
Peloponnese, Fallmerayer worked as a journalist in Istanbul and throughout his
life supported the ideas of German liberalism. He found no saving grace either
in Byzantium or in its legacy. He defined modern Greek identity in a notoriously
racial fashion, hypothesizing that the Greeks completely lost their connection
with the ancient Hellenes during the Byzantine period and became nothing
else than Greek-speaking Slavs, themselves a low race in the Hegelian scheme
of evolution. Fallmerayer also denounced the Byzantine legacy in Russia. In his
essay “Rome and Byzantium,” Fallmerayer saw an uninterrupted line of ideo-
logical continuity between Byzantium and the Russian empire. Condemning
the Byzantine emperors as despots and caesaropapists, he considered Byzan-
tine autocracy to have been reborn in Moscow. But most of all, he was horrified
at the prospect of restoration of a Greco-Slavic “Byzantine” empire dominated
by Russia on the Bosporos ([] , -). Byzantinism became thus syn-
onymous with an ideology of despotism and expansionism. Even Karl Marx
(-), in an article about the Crimean War written in  in London and
published in New York in the New York Daily Tribune on  August , saw
Russia’s Byzantinism as the antithesis of Western civilization and as synony-
mous with monarchism, expansionism, and a reactionary ideology.
Thus Byzantinism, originating from the stereotyping and essentializing of a
medieval civilization, was transformed into a popular construct used by jour-
nalists and politicians, and detached from original historical reality of Byzan-
tium. It became a political slogan, a rallying cry against the conservative gov-
ernments in nineteenth-century Europe. The understanding of Byzantinism
as hatched during the nineteenth century has passed intact into the modern
vocabulary of Western languages. The Webster’s Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage equates Byzantinism with “state domination over religion,” a definition
that corresponds to Burckhardt’s views. In German, Byzantinismus means des-
potism and servility in the face of authority, the true marks of Byzantine polit-
ical culture (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie ).
In French and Italian, Byzantinism has a slightly different meaning. It is
described as the propensity to discuss subtle and trivial matters, perhaps by
analogy with the petty religious disputes of the Byzantines, and is also a syn-
onym of decadence and verbal intricacy (Larousse ; Dizionario Enciclo-
pedico Italiano ).

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
The evolution of the Byzantinist discourses did not stop with the creation of
an essentialized, stereotypical understanding of a medieval civilization and the
coining of a concept that entered popular language. A new step was taken in
the nineteenth century among journalists and political thinkers, who imposed
Byzantinism as a legacy on Eastern Europe. At the time when Fallmerayer and
Marx imputed to Russia a Byzantine ideological heritage, in tsarist Russia itself
the word “Byzantinism” (vizantinizm) also entered the political vocabulary
with a meaning similar to Fallmerayer’s and Marx’s. In contrast to the West, in
nineteenth-century Russia the assessment of Byzantium was gloatingly posi-
tive and its legacy welcome. Konstantin Leontiev (-), a blue-blooded
Russian aristocrat, Panslavist, diplomat to the Ottoman Empire, and prolific
essayist, saw Byzantinism as the principle of imperial autocracy. Yet, he viewed
Byzantinism positively as the ideological alternative to Western bourgeois lib-
eralism, defining it as the body of religious, political, philosophical, and aes-
thetic ideas that made Russia unique. One may be struck by the remarkable
similarity in the construction of the Byzantinist discourse in nineteenth-cen-
tury Russia and in the West: in both cases Byzantium was reduced to an essence
(the autocracy that differs from Western liberalism) and was grafted onto the
present as a historical legacy. The sole difference lay in the fact that the Rus-
sian intellectual admired what the German stigmatized.
Byzantinism was projected as a historical legacy not only onto Russia, but
also onto the Balkans. It was a crippling legacy that sealed the historical fate of
the region. The British diplomat Sir George Young, whom the Carnegie Endow-
ment for World Peace commissioned after the end of the Second Balkan War in
 to investigate the causes for conflict in the Balkans, blamed the failure of
the Ottoman Empire to modernize on nothing else than “Asiatic Byzantinism.”
The British diplomat saw in Byzantinism a “decadent social system” with “no
democracy, no simple virtues, and no sound vitality.” “The decadence of the
Turk,” he wrote, “dates from the day when Constantinople was taken and not
destroyed.” The imperial legacy of Byzantinism, transmitted through the sym-
bolism of the city on the Bosporos, was diametrically opposed to European
nationalism, which Sir Young (writing shortly before the outbreak of World
War I) viewed in very positive terms. “The failure of the Turks,” he concluded,
“is due to Byzantinism, the daughter of the horse leech” (, ).
With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the final establishment
of the modern Balkan states, Byzantinism continued to be viewed as a sort of

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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
historical stigma on the area. For English novelist, historian, and social anthro-
pologist Robert Briffault (-), the Byzantine legacy had inflicted irre-
versible historical damage on the Balkans. In his philosophy of history (char-
acteristically, he entitled one of his chapters “Barbarism and Byzantinism”)
published in  he wrote:
Byzantium contributed nothing to human culture and civilization,
nothing to the resurrection of Europe. To those countries which
developed under its influence, to Russia and to the Balkan people,
it has bequeathed those elements which constitute not their civili-
zation but their barbarism. (, ).
The Hegelian assumptions of the author emerge clearly from the book’s title,
Rational Evolution. Therefore, his views of Byzantium and Byzantinism need
not surprise us.
Byzantinism appeared in yet another form after the Soviet Revolution in ,
this time viewed as a macabre historical legacy that led to the establishment of a
Marxist regime in Russia. R. Jenkins, a twentieth-century historian, wrote as the
Cold War was raging that the study of Byzantium, and in particular the under-
standing of Byzantinism, can help one comprehend better the Soviet Union.
He saw Byzantinism primarily as a political and ideological legacy, and was of
the opinion that the Soviet Union had adopted “its theocratic and monolithic
structure, its divinely sanctioned claim to world domination, its instinctive
hatred and its mistrust of the West” from Byzantium (, ).¹³ In another
book Jenkins elaborated on the idea of a Byzantine legacy in Russia. He explic-
itly declared his theoretical assumption: “[A]s in the development of species, so
in the development of ideas or moulds of thought, sudden and radical change
is unknown.” Accordingly, Byzantium was considered to have left a gruesome
legacy among the Russians in the form of an imperialistic and authoritarian
ideology. The medieval empire – and not the Marxist ideas formulated in nine-
teenth-century Germany and England – was called upon to account for the
ruling ideology of the Soviet Union (Jenkins , , ).
The mechanisms through which Byzantinism is constructed appear clear
cut. Byzantinism begins from simple stereotypes, passes through reduction-
ism and essentialization, and then proceeds to impute Byzantium’s supposed
essence onto the modern Balkans or Russia as a burden of history. It is a con-
struction that seeks to categorize the Balkans as Europe’s “other” through the
glib creation of a historical “context.” The premise underlying the various per-
mutations of Byzantinist discourses is simple: nothing has changed since the

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I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
times of Byzantium. As a discourse of “otherness,” Byzantinism evolves from,
and reflects upon, the West’s worst dreams and nightmares about its own self.
Thus, Byzantium was demoted to a sort of lower branch of the evolutionary
tree of history, into which the West – the idealized West – never evolved, but
might have. During the Enlightenment, Byzantium became the embodiment
of the culture and politics from which the West wanted to liberate itself. Byz-
antium represented also the repulsive union of state and church, or the domi-
nation of the former over the latter, to which the West did not want to return.
During the nineteenth century, Byzantinism became the ideological princi-
ple of imperialism and absolutism that the West had in the meantime shaken
off – or was still seeking to shake off – in exchange for the ideal of the liberal
nation-state. During the mid-twentieth century, Byzantinism was called upon
to explain the existence of communist ideology, a sort of disclaimer for the
fact that Marx and Engels actually came from the West. Now that communism
is gone, Byzantinism as a series of de-formative historical legacies has been
held responsible for the dire contrast between the peace and prosperity in the
West, and the political and economic disaster in most of the Balkans. And this
is unlikely to be the last face of Byzantinism.

Byzantinism vs. Byzantium

The medieval legacy that the Byzantinist discourse projects onto the Balkans
is a feeble construct with shaky foundations. Yet, for all the distortions that
Byzantium’s image underwent throughout the centuries, none of these later
developments could have taken place without the existence of a real, historical
Byzantium itself. So, was Byzantium a caesaropapist and ruthlessly authoritar-
ian, expansionist state? The answer to this question is not easy; it is both yes
and no. Any attempt to fit Byzantium into simple analytical categories runs
into the daunting problem that Byzantium was a millennial empire that under-
went historical change over time. The empire in , when it encompassed the
whole of the Mediterranean from Syria to the coast of Spain, was quite different
from Byzantium in , when its territory consisted solely of Constantinople’s
environs and a few disjoined appanages. Along with its territory, Byzantium’s
politics and political ideologies changed through the centuries.
Scholars have long recognized that the term “caesaropapism” does not accu-
rately reflect the position of the emperor with respect to the church, nor does it

14
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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
pose in a meaningful way the question about the relation between the secular
and religious spheres in Byzantium. Indeed, a famous historian has proposed
the term “dyarchy,” or two powers, as a more appropriate designation for the
dynamic of church-state relations in Byzantium (Ostrogorsky , -).
Caesaropapism refers to a political system in which the head of state is also the
head of the church and supreme judge in religious matters. To quote Weber’s
famous definition, “The caesaropapistic ruler exercises supreme authority in
ecclesiastic matters by virtue of his autonomous legitimacy” (, :). In
Byzantium, the emperor’s control over the church consisted of some important
rights, such as the appointment of patriarchs, changes in the diocese structure,
and convocation of ecumenical councils. On the other hand, the Byzantine
emperor had less control over the appointment of bishops than over the des-
ignation of the patriarch. According to the legal regulations, the patriarchal
or episcopal synod was empowered to elect the bishop from among three or
more candidates nominated by an electoral college consisting of city notables
and clergy. Laymen were explicitly prohibited from interfering in the election
and ordination of bishops (Bréhier ,  ff; Dagron , -).
Furthermore, imperial control over the church never meant that the emperor
managed to impose in a lasting way new dogmas and belief practices. Indeed,
the church was a powerful institution that no emperor could ignore. In all the
dogmatic conflicts throughout the centuries where emperors and the church
crossed swords – the Christological controversies, iconoclasm, the Union of the
Churches, and so on – the church always gained the upper hand. On occasion,
Byzantine patriarchs opposed and excommunicated emperors. To be sure, a
persistent struggle between rulers and popes, like the Investiture controversy
in the West, never took place in Byzantium; yet, like in the West, strong-willed
patriarchs did at times claim an ideological superiority over the emperor and
even developed hierocratic theories of patriarchal kingship.
The concept of caesaropapism reduces church-state relations in Byzantium
mainly to the power of the Byzantine emperor over the church. The moment
when the inquiry is broadened beyond the position of the emperor with respect
to the church, the secular and the religious spheres appear to coexist in Byzan-
tine society on an equal footing. Secular and ecclesiastical learning, secular and
ecclesiastical courts, Roman and ecclesiastical law, all coexisted in Byzantium.
In some respect, Byzantium appears to have drawn a more rigid line between
politics and religion. Unlike the medieval West where the pope was empow-

 15
I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
ered to declare Crusades against internal and external enemies of Christendom,
warfare in Byzantium remained the sole prerogative of the Byzantine emperor.
Nor was there in Byzantium an ideology of holy war comparable to those of
the Crusades or of Islamic jihad (Laiou , -).
The view of Byzantium as an authoritarian state with a monarchic and expan-
sionist ideology appears to be closer to reality than caesaropapism. After all,
the Byzantine emperor wielded unlimited power as a supreme commander-in-
chief, legislator, and judge. No one in Byzantium ever questioned the divinely
sanctioned monarchical constitution. In this Byzantium was not unlike the
medieval Western kingdoms. Yet, the political principles that governed the
operation of the Byzantine monarchy reveal a rather different picture. Here,
as nowhere else, the subsequent image of Byzantium and the realities in the
medieval empire have hopelessly parted ways. The separation of image from
reality began during the Middle Ages, and the sources permit the reconstruc-
tion of the cognitive processes of “otherization.” Western travelers during the
period of the Crusades were deeply impressed by the personality cult centered
on the Byzantine emperor.¹⁷ Observing the elaborate ceremonial and pomp
that surrounded the public appearances of the emperor, they drew the conclu-
sion that the Byzantines were subservient by nature and prone to worship their
despotic rulers like idolaters. Further, Westerners easily attributed the strik-
ing instability of the imperial office in Byzantium, where revolutions were fre-
quent and the dynastic principle of succession never became fully established,
to the notorious perfidy of the Byzantines. After all, an astonishing number
of emperors experienced a violent end to their rules. In the period between
 and , sixty-five Byzantine emperors were deposed: eight perished in
battle and fifty-seven were overthrown through revolutions; only thirty-nine
ended their reigns peacefully (Bréhier , ).
Yet, when we look with a more informed and understanding eye at the his-
torical phenomena that led to the Western condemnation of Byzantine poli-
tics – court ceremonial and the constant rebellions against the emperor – we
may find that both had a logical raison d’être embedded in the principles of
operation of the Byzantine polity. We may also discover the existence of cer-
tain ideological limitations to imperial power. The typically Byzantine empha-
sis laid on court ceremonial and public propaganda in general stemmed from
a preoccupation with legitimizing the emperor’s hold on power, which was
never fully secure and stable. At the same time, the state of “perpetual revolu-

16
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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
tion,” in which Byzantine politics lay throughout the centuries, was a sign of
the openness of the imperial office to any candidate. The late Roman tradition,
by which the senate, the army, and the people elected and acclaimed the new
emperor, was an important part of Byzantine political thought. This consti-
tutional theory, together with Old Testament models of rulership, provided a
constant justification for rebellions against emperors deemed not to have ful-
filled their political duties. Indeed, the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler
constituted an important element of the political thinking of the Byzantines, a
political principle that looks too modern to be included in Byzantinist models
(Karayannopoulos , -).
One may also discover Byzantine practices of governance in the late Middle
Ages that paralleled contemporary European trends, yet do not fit into the evo-
lutionist model of “formative historical experiences” and are therefore excluded
from the imputed essence of Byzantium. Twenty-five popular assemblies con-
vened in Byzantium between  and , at a time when representative par-
liaments were emerging also in medieval England and France (Tsirpanlis ,
-). Some of these assemblies were even convened in order to approve the
introduction of new taxes. The similarity with the constitutional principle of
taxation versus representation embodied in the Magna Charta is obvious. Even
expansionism, the denounced ideological principle of a universalist empire,
was not the ideology that drove Byzantine foreign policy in the late period
of its history. The re-conquest of lost territories did indeed play a significant
ideological role during the reign of Justinian (-) as well as in the ninth
and tenth centuries. However, in late Byzantium, as the empire became smaller,
fragmented, and more ethnically homogenous, the ideology of political unity
among the Hellenes emerged as an important political principle (Ahrweiler
, -).
The comparison between Byzantinism as a construct and Byzantium as a
real historical phenomenon may continue endlessly and proceed to focus on
ever-greater details. This is not our goal, nor is it particularly expedient to do
so. It seems that no sane historian nowadays would claim that a millennial civi-
lization could easily be reduced to a simple essence. And certainly others have
bemoaned the grave injustice that Byzantinism as a construct has inflicted on
the real Byzantium. Twentieth-century scholars, whose life-long devotion to
Byzantine studies often made them appreciate their subject, have already tried
to crack the nut of Byzantinism by attempting to place the real Byzantium in its

 17
I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
proper historical context. In so doing, they have objected to Byzantinism both
as a modern construct and as an imputed legacy. Thus, Herbert Hunger took
issue with the definition of Byzantinism in German encyclopedias as “subservi-
ence” and “servility,” qualities that had once manifested themselves in Byzantine
court ceremonial. He conscientiously disproved the stereotype by historicizing
Byzantine ceremonial and by showing that the rituals at court actually per-
formed important political functions and did not cater to the depraved tastes
of a morally corrupt civilization (Hunger , -).
Another twentieth-century scholar, John Meyendorff (), proved that
Byzantinism as a legacy projected onto tsarist Russian has similarly been a
modern cultural construct. He showed that the famous dictum by the Musco-
vite monk Filofei (ca. -), traditionally taken as the earliest articulation
of Russian Byzantinism – “two Romes have fallen, the third endures, and a
fourth there will not be” – was formulated in an apocalyptic context and had
little practical application for state ideology. There was no direct continuity in
Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of an official ideology
of Moscow as the “Third Rome.” During the nineteenth century, nationalist
ideologues in Russia and their Western opponents turned this perception of
a Byzantine legacy into caricature of Byzantine political ideology.
The historicizing approach of disproving Byzantinist discourses by pitting
Byzantium against Byzantinism is doubtless useful. Yet, sadly, this is unlikely
to affect in any way the ghost of Byzantinism that still haunts our present. The
ghost is still with us, despite the fact that the Enlightenment during which it
was originally conceived passed long ago, despite the fact that many of the
societies that allegedly embodied Byzantinism (the Ottoman Empire, tsarist
Russia, the Soviet Union) have also vanished, some of them quite recently. In
the post-communist period of today, Byzantinism has appeared in new clothes
as a crippling historical legacy in Europe’s backyard, the Balkans. It does not
matter that the legacy does not accurately reflect the medieval empire. Nor
does it matter that there are no historical mechanisms by which such a pow-
erful legacy in political, cultural, and economic attitudes could be transmitted
from the Middle Ages. For how does a series of “formative” historical experi-
ences translate itself into a political legacy to modernity?
Rather than seeing Byzantinism as a crippling political legacy in the Bal-
kans, we should consider it as our own burdensome intellectual heritage. It has
become part of the intellectual baggage that we all carry, whether consciously

18
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 e Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium
or unconsciously. Byzantinism may be dealt with in the same way as has been
done with Orientalism and Balkanism. We may deconstruct it by examining
its structure and usages; we may disprove it by putting Byzantium in its proper
historical context while at the same time not idealizing it; and in the end we
may just dismiss it as a simple paradigm, as a pure construct of language. Yet,
dangers do exist. The way Byzantinism has been projected onto the troubled
region of the Balkans reaffirms age-old perceptions and deflects attention from
real problems. By using a stereotype derived from and about a medieval empire,
we may unawares push the Balkans back into the Middle Ages.

N  C O

 I should like to thank Professor Todorova for her helpful comments and encourage-
ment while I was writing this article.
 See Todorova (, -) on the differences between Orientalism and Balkanism.
Other aspects of Orientalism, such as the presence of exoticizing and colonialist dis-
courses, seem to be absent from Byzantinism.
 On the beginnings of the scholarly study of Byzantium and on some harsh judgments
of the Enlightenment, see Vasiliev  (-).
 The court of Louis XIV had adopted elements from Byzantine ceremonial. See Kan-
tarowicz  (-).
 Poussines published the eleventh-century oration of Theophylaktos of Ohrid on Con-
stantine Doukas in . He rededicated it to Louis XIV and furnished it with a new
title more appropriate for the occasion (Gautier , -).
 On the enduring popularity of the treatise by Agapetos the Deacon in France, see
Ševčenko  and Blum  (-).
 The fact that Herder knew of Gibbon is evident from a footnote comment in his Out-
lines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, published six years after the publication of
Decline and Fall. In it Herder defended Gibbon against the detractors of his book, who
accused its author of having made an offense against the Christian religion (Herder
, ).
 See also G. Dagron  ().
 The definition is by the father of the discipline of sociology, Max Weber (-).
See Weber  (:).
 On the use of “caesaropapism” as a slander, see Dagron  (-).
 As Toumanoff himself admits, much of his analysis is indebted to the nineteenth-cen-
tury French historian Fustel de Coulanges and his famous La cité antique (The ancient
city) (). For an analysis of the ideas of Fustel de Coulanges about church-state

 19
I. PERCEPTIONS & IDENTITIES
relations in Byzantium, which are as important in the French intellectual tradition as
Burckhardt’s are in the German, see Dagron (, -).
 Leontiev put forth these ideas in a political manifesto entitled “Byzantinism and Slav-
dom,” written in the period - when he served as a diplomat in the Ottoman
Empire, published in , and reprinted in  (, -). For a biography of
Leontiev during this period, see Lashkevich  ( ff.). Several of Leontiev’s essays
have been translated into English by G. Ivask ().
 Very similar to Jenkins’s definition of Byzantinism, although without the drawing of a
connection with modernity, is the one by C. Mango ().
 See also Geneakoplos (, -); and Dragon’s overview of the historiography criti-
cal to concept of caesaropapism (, -).
 Such was the case, for example, of the Patriarch Arsenios (-, -), who
excommunicated Michael VII (-).
 For the case of the Patriarcal Michael I Keroularios (-), see Dagron (, -
). Two other examples are the theories elaborated by Patriarch Arsenios in the thir-
teenth century and Patriarch Athanasios (-, -).
 Such were, for example, the impressions of Robert of Clari (, ), who took part
in the Fourth Crusade. Similar was also the impression of Odo of Deuil (), the
French official chronicler of the Second Crusade.

R L  C O

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