Johannes Preiser-Kappeler's History of Byzantium

Dhe Empire of Byzantium poses problems for historical studies for several reasons. On the one hand, its very existence refutes the common interpretation of the fall of the Roman Empire, which supposedly took place in the fifth century, but in reality was only a process of disintegration of the western part of the empire. On the other hand, Byzantium collapsed a thousand years later, which makes its history a complete one, but extremely diverse, complicated and sometimes opaque due to its long duration. And finally, despite its official end in 1453, the empire did not disappear because it was not only a political structure, but also an ideological one, in which the term “Rome” stood for the idea of ​​Christian-based world rule .

That is why today, in the age of a renewed Russian striving for hegemony, there is more talk of the “third Rome” in the former Tsarist Empire, which inherited the legacy of the “second Rome” Constantinople as the predominance of Orthodox Christianity. The fact that the bloody military implementation of this claim to power has nothing whatsoever to do with Christian values ​​is another matter.

They called themselves “Romans”

Johannes Preiser-Kapeller's “Byzantium” has appeared in a series on the history of antiquity, which has so far devoted individual studies to the development of Greece from the Archaic period to early Christianity. At first glance, the Viennese historian's book appears to be a foreign body because, at least in our perception, the Byzantine culture is the exact opposite of the ancient Greek culture. But the self-perception of the Byzantines, in whose squares and in whose palaces in Constantinople stood for centuries the statues that their ancestors had brought here from Athens or Corinth, was different. Not only aesthetes, history-writing monks and educated emperors fluently quoted Homer, Thucydides, Aristotle and other canonical texts of antiquity; and because they viewed their state not as a remnant, but as a new embodiment of the empire of Rome, which continued to live on the Bosporus, they called themselves “Rhomeans” – “Romans”.

This is also what Preiser-Kapeller calls it, and this is one of the virtues of his book: it does not look at the history of Eastern Rome from the outside, from the perspective of Western Europe, but follows its own development logic. A second advantage arises from the biography of the author, who is not only a Byzantine scholar but also an environmental historian and has already published two volumes on the history of climate and pandemics in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Against this background, he can better explain some key moments in the life of Byzantium – such as the empire's miraculous resilience in the face of the onslaught of the vastly superior Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, a resilience that had a lot to do with the climate-induced shift in agricultural production of oil and wine on livestock and grain, because this not only made up for the loss of Egypt's granary, but also made it easier to keep the farmers' movable property safe from Muslim plunderers.