1 - Is Byzantinism an Orientalism? Reflections on Byzantium’s Constructed Identities and Debated Ideologies

Summary

It is well known that Byzantinists, when addressing a broader audience, often feel obliged to clarify that there never was a Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was the ancient name of the city of Constantinople before its refoundation by Constantine I, and it was only occasionally used by classicising Byzantine authors to refer to the imperial city. The terms mainly used by the people of the time to designate the medieval empire were Rhōmaiōn archē, Rhōmaiōn basileia, Rhōmaiōn politeia, Rhōmania and Rhōmaïs. This discrepancy between modern and historical terms and labels is in itself not a unique phenomenon confined to the Byzantine Empire. The problem in the Byzantine case, though, is related to the ideological connotations of relabelling and their interrelation with an established negative modern image of Byzantine culture.

Scholars have often raised this issue and sought to deconstruct Byzantium's negative image. Averil Cameron was among the first to point to Byzantium's essentialised identity and its orientalised image as in opposition to the ‘West’. Dimiter Angelov has provided a vigorous deconstruction of the notion of ‘Byzantinism’ as ‘an essentialist and negative understanding of a medieval civilisation that places it into rigorous analytical categories from a Western and modern view-point’. He argued that this essentialised, negative image of Byzantine culture needs to be deconstructed by examining its structures and usages while studying the Empire of Constantinople in its proper historical context without idealising it. In a similar vein, Przemysław Marciniak has recently pointed out the close relationship of ‘Byzantinism’ with Said's Orientalism, a relationship which Olof Heilo has addressed sceptically. While accepting the orientalising aspects of the image of Byzantium in the works of scholars of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Gibbon, Heilo argued that, contrary to the term ‘Oriental’, the term ‘Byzantine’ should be seen as having foremost a chronological instead of a spatial-cultural dimension, thus not presupposing or, for that matter, tacitly imposing a certain historical-cultural prejudice.

In the current chapter, I shall revisit the question of kinship between the concept of Orientalism and that of ‘Byzantinism’, which I define here as a historiographical discourse of negation.