Paolo Odorico, ed. Études byzantines et post-byzantines, Nouvelle série, Tome II (IX), La culture écrite des périphéries byzantines du Moyen-Âge à l’époque moderne

Abstract

Études byzantines et post-byzantines, one of the publications of the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy, brought out the proceedings of a particular session of the 12th International Congress carried out one year before by the Institute at Bucharest. The articles included in this volume approach the said area along its longue durée, as acknowledged by the editor, Paolo Odorico, going from Byzantine times up to the end of the Ottoman Empire. The focus is on a culturally rich periphery whose written culture is circumscribed here through eleven case studies, mostly treated in scientific detail as probable parts of larger projects.In the introductory article, “Commonwealth athonite? Une question de périphéries,” Paolo Odorico challenges the idea of a “Commonwealth athonite,” a phrase coined after the much-fetishized idea of Dimitri Obolensky (1971) of a Byzantine Commonwealth for the South-Eastern part of Europe and Russia. Odorico reacts by noticing that this improper denomination ignores the dissimilar realities of so many countries or regions that were neither federalized, nor subject to other alliance, nor felt any attachment to one another (“les guerres et les tueries étaient plutôt la règle” among these nations, p. 13; “la condition fondamentale d’une amitié qui lie entre eux ces pays, qui se reconnaissent dans un univers commun, manque totalement,” p. 15). The idea is not on its first challenge (see Anthony Kaldellis) but has been quite influential through the consideration given to the Orthodox beliefs as a (falsely) unifying principle. Odorico even notices that the Eastern Orthodox churches in these areas have remained very local, acting in favor of site-specific interests and always longing for autonomy. In particular, as far as the premodern Romanian principalities are concerned, their subjection to the spirituality of Mount Athos “cost” them a quarter of their territories, and a lot of valuables (gold, precious artifacts, etc.) were regularly and persistently forced to leave the country and increase the treasures of the Holy Mountain. In conclusion, coining easygoing phrases is not only a distortion of historical facts but also a creation of “métonymies dangereuses et vides de sens” (p. 23).Sergio Basso analyzes Barlaam kai Ioasaph, a Byzantine eleventh-century text whose inspiration is known to have originated in a Buddhist fable (avadāna). Apparently derived from the Sanskrit word bodhisattva, Ioasaph is an illuminated prince who will dedicate his life to Christianity, being influenced by the monk Barlaam. With the oldest manuscript dated 1021, the story became known in Byzantium from the long-distance Christians living close to the Buddhists in Iran and central Asia. Basso advances a theory, based on thorough examples, that this Byzantine text particularly derived from folios that he calls “menus textuels” (like the Italian canovacci in Commedia dell’arte), thus advocating for a sort of textual evolution that was not mono-causal, or tree-like, as derived from an Ur-text, but more like a spiral diffusion from disparate parts of a fragmented text. The author gives a few elaborate examples of common nouns from old Persian that are to be found, like unexplainable lexical fossils, in the originals left.Nedim Buyukyuksel writes about the brigands and feudal lords of the eleventh century in the south-eastern part of Byzantium. In contrast to the literary topos of brigandage, which presents the brigand as a social outcast and a monster, what Buyukyuksel reconsiders in this article is how strong Byzantine political agendas reshaped the hostile actions of opponents as banditry. He illustrates this idea with the example of several Chalcedonian Armenian lords, after reading between the lines of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, the Anonymous Syriac Chronicle, and the Chronography of Bar Hebraeus, among other sources, where the authors describe frequent cases of brigandage in some lost peripheries of the Byzantine Empire. For instance, in these narratives, Michael of Gargar, an Armenian chieftain ruling around Melitene, is presented as a robber, although at close scrutiny, it is revealed that both he and other Armenian lords were aristocrats with a certain political legitimacy in their territories, sometimes on better terms with the Franks than with the Byzantines, who libeled them as brigands. One of them, Philaretos Brachamios, eventually converted to Islam, ruled Edessa, invited in by the inhabitants rather than taking it violently by siege. Analyses of the political contexts that propelled such anti-heroes in forefront positions obviously reveal more complex historical details than the literary myths.Charis Messis writes on the relations between the Byzantines and Turks in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, in which one way to demean the image of the enemy to the Byzantines was the sexual stereotype of sodomy applied to the Ottomans. Perceived as heirs of the Arabs, with all related stereotypes attached, the Ottomans became a threat starting from the eleventh century and are given the paradoxical image of effeminized and lascivious soldiers second—yet not in contradiction—to their military impetuosity. The Christian patristic literature saw in them the exploitation of “toutes les voies pour le plaisir” (Macaire Makrès, apud Messis, p. 78), which was further advanced by the theologians as a behavior endorsed by the prophet Muhammad himself. In the wake of the tragic destinies of the teenage sons of Loukas Notaras and George Phrantzes, beheaded for having refused to let themselves be sexually abused by the conqueror sultan (although other versions disagree with that), the sodomite Turk also pervades the late Byzantine satire, like the fifteenth-century character Katablattas of John Argyropoulos, a rude, corrupt Ottoman soldier also ridiculed as a pederast, who climbs up to the high position of judge in Constantinople.Romina Luzi writes on the thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Palaiologan novels of the Byzantine periphery, adapted after chivalrous models of Western literature, despite the hatred that the Byzantines felt toward the Latins after the Fourth Crusade (1204). The Byzantine adaptations of several medieval Latin narratives gave birth to a corpus of literature, mostly translated from Italian intermediary versions and sometimes only as particular episodes. For instance, Vieux Chevalier is just an individualized episode from Gyron le courtois by Rustichello da Pisa, Phlorios et Platziaflore is a Greek version of the interreligious love story of Floris and Blanchefleur translated into Greek only in the late Middle Ages, and Apollonios de Tyr is also adapted from Cantare di Apollonio by Antonio Pucci. Luzi is also interested in how the originals were stylistically transposed into, and embellished with, the Homeric verse. The conclusion is that these medieval Latin stories, marked by anachronistic feudal ideals, survived only at the edges of late Byzantium, remote from the imperial center, and were adopted by urban middle-class groups. In areas like the Venetian Crete, the survival of Western literary models is longer, lasting at least until the seventeenth century.Elena Nonveiller approached two manuscript collections of animal-related prescriptions of the fourteenth century in order to estimate the continuation of pagan animal sacrifices in the Byzantine Christianized areas. The texts were probably copied in Cyprus, but she finds these rituals in the Balkans, in South-Eastern Europe, and in Armenian communities, and despite official interdiction of such rites in the canonical texts, she appreciates that the origin of such regulatory feasts was an old Arab custom (kourbani) via Ottoman intermediation, indistinctly hybridized with pagan, Jewish, and Christian creeds. Sabine and Dieter Fahl analyze the Paleya literature, a collection of texts from the Old Testament going up to the book of King Solomon. The authors’ interest is in the expression of time in a fifteenth-century Slavic chronograph from the Novgorod area. Graphic hand-tables and the symbolism of certain dates (e.g., March 25, marking the beginning of the Flood, the creation of Adam, the Annunciation) put special emphasis on the scribe’s interest in calculating the time up to the end of the world.Ioana Feodorov gives relevant details (accompanied by a few consistent manuscript translations from Arabic) about the seven-year travels of Paul of Aleppo, a seventeenth-century Christian from Syria, son of the patriarch of the Church of Antioch, who left precious historical information on Byzantine churches and other vestiges of Constantinople about two centuries after the Ottoman conquest of the city. By the time of his visit, the Christian iconography of those sites was still resplendent and, to a larger extent, undestroyed, which is much telling (and sad) in the present era. To Paul of Aleppo, “oublier Byzance était inconcevable” (p. 149), and his journal (with copious details of architecture, mural decorations, icons, urban sites, etc.) provides valuable new information to art and architectural historians or other scholars. Unfortunately, the journal does not have a full translation (or critical edition) into either Romanian (Feodorov’s native language) or any language of international circulation.Xavier Agati proposes an article about The Book of Reigns by Constantine-Caesarius Dapontes, an eighteenth-century historiographical text about the rulers and destiny of the former Byzantine Empire. Dapontes also spent ten years as a dignitary in the Romanian principalities, and his work, subject to a “re-modélisation créative” (p. 153), is very rich and still understudied. With expressions of the author’s ego in the text, now admitted as part of the modern historian’s emerging conscience, this text is regarded as a form of transition toward a completely matured historical writing. The Greek and Greek-speaking intellectuals of the eighteenth century also make the subject of study for Aspasia Dimitriadi, who is more interested in how the new ideas of the Western Enlightenment inspired the Greeks living at the edges of the Ottoman Empire or in vassal states in their transition toward a modern national ethos, cut from the idealized (and nation-free) classical antiquity. The Geography (1728) of Meletios, Metropolitan bishop of Athens; Miroir des Femmes (1766) by Constantine Dapontes; the translations into Greek of Ioannis Stanos; the works of Dimitrios Katartzis, known as Fotiadis (1703–1807); Géographie moderne (1791) by Daniil Filippidis and Grigorios Konstantas; or the works of Rigas Velestinlis (Thessalos) reshape the troubled history of the ancient Greeks through the Byzantium into the neo-Hellenic ideology of modernity. Some of the aforesaid authors had close connections to, politically acted from, and even wrote their literature in the premodern Romanian states of Moldavia and Wallachia, where the Phanariot regimes supported by the Ottomans favored a Hellenizing culture (to be later abandoned).Last but not least, Efstratia Sygkellou’s article is on how the Despotate of Epirus is reflected in the modern Greek historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The despotate was established after 1204, in parallel with those of Nicaea and Trebizond, as one of the Byzantine enclaves not ruled by the Latins and that preserved the Byzantine culture and rules. Because it represented the most western part of Byzantium, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it even had Italian rulers, but it was also threatened by the Bulgarians, Albanians, and Serbians and eventually conquered by the Ottomans. The article is interested in how the nationalist Greek historiography of the nineteenth century integrates the history of these independent states (the “despotates,” particularly that of Epirus) into one ideological structure and how the medieval Byzantine lords are designed as forerunners of the Greek nation or “champions of Hellenism” (p. 200).Every article in the volume elaborates, in much more relevant detail, the themes and ideas that are only roughly outlined in this review. Some of the authors are PhD candidates and also colleagues in the Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux operating within Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).