Truth and Prejudice, and Steven Runciman

I've read a lot of historians who have the best reputations, who've written over the course of the past 2,500 years, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, English and some other languages, and the one who has impressed me the most, by far, is Steven Runciman, born 1903, died 2001. (The historians wrote in those languages. In the case of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and some other languages, I've read them in translation.) At the beginning of Chapter I of his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus & His Reign, published in 1929, Runciman lays out a lot of what his career is going to be about. He begins:

"In the battles between truth and prejudice, waged on the field of history books, it must be confessed that the latter usually wins."

So right away, he admits that he's fighting an uphill battle which he doesn't expect to win.

 

Also right at the beginning of his first book, he lays out the field of battle where he's going to struggle to put the facts across and defeat prejudice. It's a field my brother and I have often discussed recently: the image, in the West, of the Eastern Roman Empire (usually referred to in the West as Byzantium), after the Western Empire fell. Runciman describes how crude, warlike Westerners, the Crusaders, came into contact with Byzantium and found

 

"[...]a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war."

  

Runciman states flatly, here at the beginning of his first book, that up until shortly before his own time, prejudice had trounced truth even in the best history written in the West when it came to Byzantium. And then he spent a very long and brilliant career backing up this flat statement. Rather than admit that Byzantine society was more advanced in many ways than their own, Western historians made "byzantine" an adjective meaning decadent, flabby, lazy, cowardly, cunning, etc, etc. Runciman's mentor JB Bury (1861-1927), a pioneer in bucking this pervasive trend, went so far as to refuse to even use the term "Byzantium" to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire after the Western Empire had fallen. 

 

Bury, Runciman and some like-minded Western historians have made some headway in changing the attitudes of historians, and somewhat less, so far, in the consciousness of the general public. It's still quite common to encounter very well-educated Westerners who talk of the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, who refer to the Catholic Church before the Reformation, and Catholicism plus Protestantism since then, as "the whole of Christendom," completely ignoring Greek Orthodoxy, not to mention the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Nestorian churches who never acknowledged Catholic or orthodox supremacy.

It seems to me, now, simple enough to recognize that, for example, the Romans who were represented at Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate and a garrison of soldiers in the time of Christ did not go anywhere in AD 476, and to grasp why Christians who already had their own written languages were not inclined to accept either a Latin or a Greek spiritual overlordship. 

But did I see any of this before people like Runciman and Bury pointed it out to me? No, of course I didn't, any more than I saw how obviously Gothic cathedral towers, all built after the Crusades began, mimic Muslim minarets, before that was pointed out to me.

You have to see a truth first. Then it can become obvious. Not the other way around. Which usually means that someone else has to point it out to you. 

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

John Beckwith's 'Art of Constantinople' Contains No Colour Photographs

This shocked and saddened me: a book on Byzantine art, indeed, what appears to be considered a standard work on the subject,containing 203 photographs over 153 pages -- every single one of them in black and white.

I'm referring to the 2nd edition of 1968. The 1st was published in 1961. I thought that just possibly, what with Beckwith having spent the intervening 7 years in riotously-colorful Swinging London, it might have occurred to him add more color to his book on the very beautifully-colorful art of the Eastern Romans. This is an example of how buying books in used-book stores instead of online could have spared a horrible disappointment.

Beckwith begins his chapter on the iconoclastic period by remarking that there is an almost total lack of visual evidence relative to the time just before iconoclasm erupted. How ironic that Beckwith complains about this, the author of a book entirely lacking color photographs. Did color photography really suck that hard in 1968? Was Beckwith in 1968, not yet 50 years old, nevertheless already such a fogey that he was hopelessly out of touch with contemporary developments in color photography? Can it be that Swinging London did affect him, but negatively, so that he published his works in a black and white fashion as a form of conservative protest? (You know what would be really ironic, is if it turns out that the 1961 1st edition is chock fulla color.)

Something else which surprised me, much less unpleasantly so than the lack of color, is the very first sentence in Beckwith's book, at the beginning of the Acknowledgements, thanking Steven Runciman "for constant encouragement and advice." I'm so used to seeing lesser writers, enraged because Runciman has demolished their traditionalist, romantic, pro-Western notions about the Crusades with his consummate professionalism and command of many relevant source languages other than Latin and French, impotently attacking him or attempting to damn him with faint praise, but I can't remember having read anything nice about him in print before written by someone other than myself or William Gaddis or the writers of his obituaries.

Although I knew of course that Runciman had friends and admirers, still it was nice to see a dissent among all the usual anti-Runciman sniping. Still, it rebounded a bit against Runciman. Yes, I'm afraid I'm still on the photographs. You see, I'm the sort of guy who likes art books very much, but to look at much more than to read. I don't think I've ever actually read an entire art book. What've I got against Runciman now, because Beckwith was apparently his protogee to some extent? A renewed suspicion of elitism, is what. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for elitism in some cases, it's just that I'm against it in others. I'm all for it, for example, when in the preface to The Sicilian VespersRunciman bluntly informs the reader the the prose of the book to follow is complicated because the events it portrays were complicated, and advises readers confused by history to stick to fiction. But if Beckwith had nothing but black and white photos in his book because he, like Runciman, constantly traveled from one sumptuous collection of the actual objects under consideration to the next and gave little thought to those unable to do the same, well then there's an elitism against which I am, to imitate Winston Churchill.

It's only a suspicion, far from a certainty, and for all I actually know no-one was more upset by and protested more energetically against the lack of color illustrations in Beckwith's and Runciman's book than Beckwith and Runciman. An author, after all, is not the same thing as a publisher.

Anyhoo. Perhaps this will be the first book about art whose text I actually read from start to finish, and perhaps reading it will actually benefit me when and if I actually come across a book full of quality color photographs of Byzantine art. The fact that Runciman encouraged Beckwith definitely makes me more interested in his prose.

(And btw, yes, I am aware that quite a few of my blog posts, like this one, refer to books which I am about to read, instead of, much more conventionally, books which I have already read. A few thoughts about that. For one, a difference between a post like this and many a conventional book review is that I freely admit I haven't read the book, while book reviewers often lie and claim they have. One of many good reasons to read jack green's FIRE THE BASTARDS!is the way he busts big-time book reviewers for this rather serious sin. The entire book is about the shortcomings of the reviews of William Gaddis' first novel The Recognitions,which I, like green before me, have actually read. For the full delicious effect of righteous indignation I recommend reading the novel first, and then green's book. And two, eh, I think I write interesting stuff. So, just two thoughts about that, not a full few as promised.)

Steven Runciman

James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, that is. 1903-2000, A Cambridge-educated historian who wrote mostly of medieval things, especially topics relating more or less closely to Byzantium, and best-known for his three-volume History of the Crusades,published in the 1950's and still pretty universally accepted as the standard work on the subject. I first came upon the name Runciman in William Gaddis' novel Carpenter's Gothic.If the protagonist McCandles had not so emphatically recommended Runciman to another character, I don't know when or if I ever would've read him. Now Runciman is one of my favorite authors and it's hard to imagine not having read him, not to mention not having read many of the authors Runciman mentions in his bibliographies. I first started reading medieval Latin because of Runciman's praise of Orderic Vitalisand William of Tyre

The most common criticism of Runciman is that he has a pro-Byzantine bias. The more I look into the matter, the more I think that what seems like a pro-Byzantine bias to a Western reader has above all to do with the distance between Runciman's version of events and the huge anti-Byzantine bias which has generally prevailed in the West for about as long as there has been a West -- somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years, I'd say. For about that long it has been repeated like a mantra that Byzantine society was dreary and rigid -- but somehow, at the same time, decadent and luxurious. Which of course is a ridiculous contradiction in terms, it's like Americans calling Mexicans lazy and at the same time accusing them of stealing all their jobs. The simple fact is that the West is very ignorant of what went on the Greek world in the period which Westerners have called Byzantine. Few people in the West have read Greek, and most of those few have read only ancient Greek, and of the very few who read Byzantine Greek, by far the most prominent and influential has been Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,whom Runciman calls "our greatest historian," but who shared the prevailing anti-Greek bias, most of the time.

As I was saying, I don't generally agree with the accusation that Runciman was biased in favor of the Greeks, and against the West. Generally. Occasionally he gets carried away, as when he calls the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 the greatest crime in the history of humanity. It was bad, but it was not as bad as what the Europeans have done to the indigenous populations of the western hemisphere, what the Turks did to the Armenians during World War I or what the Germans did to the Jews before and during World War II. In fact, to judge from Runciman's own writings I'm hard-pressed to see how it was substantially worse than what happened when the knights of the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem. It seems clear that Runciman has a special fondness for the culture which was centered in Constantinople between the time when Constantine established the Roman capital there in the fourth century, and when it fell to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth, and so lets his emotion overrule his judgment when describing how the city was sacked and defiled in 1204. And there's no denying that the Fourth Crusade was a thoroughly despicable and savage affair.

Aside from that, I believe that Runciman -- following directly in the footsteps of his mentor, Professor John Bagnell Bury,1861-1927, who by the way strenuously objected to the term "Byzantine" and always referred to "the later Roman Empire" -- does a great job of correcting some deep errors in the conventional view of history which prevailed in the West before him, and which still prevail, although to a lesser degree, today. Such as the whole notion of the Rennaissance. The "rebirth." The name implies that Classical culture had died, and then waited about a thousand years for Western civilisation to re-discover and give it life again. Well, bullshit. They never stopped reading Plato and Aristotle and Homer et al in the Greek world -- or in the Arab world, either. And the barbarians who had conquered the former Western Roman Empire, and then claimed to have reconstituted it again starting with Charlemagne, had with very few exceptions never learned any Greek, and there was very little conception of the overall dimensions and profundity of the Classical world until the Westerners learned about it through contact with Byzantines and with Moslims, and then claimed that it had been "reborn" through their own efforts. Nothing against Charlemagne personally, he was truly extraordinary, but he was an extraordinary barbarian chieftan, which is not the same as a Roman Emperor. Charlemagne was semi-literate. Most Western rulers for centuries before and after Charlemagne were completely illiterate, as were most of their subjects, in stark contrast to the Roman Emperors, some of whom were also great authors, and the widespread literacy in all social classes which had existed in the part of the Empire which the barbarians conquered and the equally widespread literacy which persisted in the Eastern Empire.

The fall of the Roman Empire didn't occur in 410 when Rome was sacked by Goths, it didn't happen in 476 when the Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus surrendered, the last Western Emperor until the Pope crowned Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day in 800. The Empire fell in 1453 in Constantinople, long after the Western "Rennaissance" was under way. The Empire had lived continually up until then and had continually preserved and developed upon Classical culture.

Rennaissance my ass. Just because YOU personally didn't know about something doesn't mean that it had died.

Runciman called the Crusades "the last of the barbarian invasions." Now that's a bold statement, and one which has offended many people who cling to the Romantic image of the Crusaders as dashing good-guy knights on white horses. But Runciman backs up his sweeping statements with copius reference to sources, not only in Latin and Greek, but also in Arabic and Hebrew and Syriac and Armenian and many other languages. Dozens of other languages. I wonder if he himself kept track of the number of languages he could read. (PS, 8. June 2013: I've long wondered whether Runciman was the inspiration for the character Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,who "speaks 33 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it," although Runciman was a Cambridge man.) I know of no other scholar who has been in a position to examine the various factions of the Crusades in such detail by reading their accounts in their own untranslated words. I don't personally know of another scholar, in any field, who was such a polyglot. My impression is that he really does always try to be scrupulously fair to all sides, to all cultures and peoples and sects and individuals. He seems to me to have a slight pro-Greek bias. I'm not the only one who has said so. But how would I know, I can barely read any Greek. And I can't read any Arabic or Syriac or Armenian or Hebrew or soandandsoforth, so I can't check up on Runciman's accounts of Byzantium's dealings with the other peoples of the Middle East, or of how the Crusaders seemed to others in the Middle East. But as far as I know, no specialist has come forward and claimed that Runciman's expertise in this or that language was not in fact so great, no one has come forward and said: Clearly, thisandthat shows that Runciman misread the text of soandso and strongly suggests that he was not at all fluent in the language.

In spite of what seems to me and to others to have been a pro-Greek bias, the one historical figure for whom Runciman seems to have the most admiration and respect, at least within the confines of his three-volume History of the Crusades, is Saladin, the Moslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

I should probably say something about the word "barbarian." When I use that word I mean no more or less than the tribal peoples, mostly Germanic, who conquered and ruled Western Europe after the Romans. I do not mean the word to imply anything, one way or another, about the degree of civilization of these people, or their manners, their cruelty or lack of it or anything else. If the term is not PC, well, good!

The word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greek, and it originally referred to anyone who spoke a language other than Greek, because, to some ancient Greek person, the foreign language sounded like "ba-ba-ba," which strongly suggests to me that the Greek was not listening to it very closely. The ancient Greeks were sometimes a bit on the xenophobic side, in strong contrast to the Romans and the later, Byzantine Greeks.

So by all means, if you haven't already, I would urge you to read something by Runciman. I'd recommend starting either with the first volume of the history of the Crusades (first published in 1951), or with The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).Either of those serves as a good introduction to Runciman's other works, which tend to be more specialized.

In his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and his Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium,although it's an excellent book and well worth reading, Runciman, in his mid-20's, hasn't yet reached his fully mature writing style. (I haven't yet been able to find some other of Runciamn's earlier books, but by 1947 at the latest, when Runciman published The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy,that outstanding writing style is there in all its glory.)

Runciman's history of the Crusades comes in three volumes, entitled A History of the Crusades, Vol. I: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Vol. II: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187, and Vol III: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades. The first volume has also appeared in an abridgement by the author, entitled simply The First Crusade.This abridgement, aimed "at a wider audience," as they say, has no footnotes or bibliography, and ends with the Crusaders taking Jerusalem in 1099, leaving out the two final chapters of the unabridged version. The material in the remaining chapters has also been condensed slightly.

The unabridged 3-volume history of the Crusades has appeared in many different editions. If you live in a large city and don't object to buying used books -- I know at least one person who refuses to buy used books or touch library books -- then if you shop around you might find a variety of editions available, available either as 3-volume sets or as separate volumes.

In addition to the paperback edition of the abridged account of the first Crusade, there is also at least one hardcover edition of the same text, but with many many brilliant illustrations, many in color.I have a copy of this one, just because of the pictures.

I personally can't really understand how anyone could prefer a book, any book, which has been abridged, and the thought of removing a book's footnotes and bibliography almost hurts me physically, but Runciman was really smart, and he abridged his account of the first Crusade personally, so what do I know? I have a feeling that perhaps my rants on especially arcane subjects should be abridged, and I hope, assuming you've read all the way to the end of this post, that I've given you some helpful information and not just made you sleepy.