The Formation of Christendom PDF
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THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM The Formation of Christendom JUDITH HERRIN With a new preface by the author PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 1987, by Princeton University Press Preface to the Princeton Classics edition copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey, 08504 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939835 First Princeton Classics Paperback edition, 2021 Paperback ISBN 9780691219219 This book has been composed in Linotron Garamond Cover photo (top): by Kieran Dodds, (bottom): iStock Cover design by Michael Boland Printed in the United States of America For Anthony Contents List of Plates viii Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition ix Acknowledgements xvii Introduction 3 PART I. LATE ANTIQUITY 15 1. Romans and Non・ Romans 19 2. Christian Influence in Late Antique Culture 54 3- The Churches in the Sixth Century: The Council of 553 90 PART II. FROM CHRISTIAN SCHISM TO DIVISION 129 Introduction to Part II 133 4. The Achievement of Gregory the Great 145 5. Byzantium Confronted by Islam 183 6. The Visigothic Alternative 220 7. The Roots of Christian Disunity, 649-92 250 PART III. THE THREE HEIRS OF ROME 291 Introduction to Part in 295 8. Eastern Iconoclasm: Islamic and Byzantine 307 9. Divergent Paths 344 10. The Carolingian Innovation 390 11. The Two Emperors of Christendom 445 12. Conclusion 477 Afterword 481 Abbreviations 489 Index 493 LIST OF FIGURES 1. Map of the World of Late Antiqu让y 16 2. Map of the Med让erranean East 130 3. Map of the Christian West 293 4. Comparative Chronology 532 LIST OF PLATES (In a separate section, following page 278) 1. Bridge of Fabricius, Rome, third century. (Photo: Courtauld Insti tute, London.) 2. Land walls of Constantinople, fifth century. (Photo: Courtauld Insti tute, London, © by G. House.) 3. St. Sophia, Constantinople, sixth century. (Photo: Byzantine Visual Resources, © 1968 by Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.) 4. Icon of Christ and St. Menas from Bawit. (Photo: Cliche des Musees Nationaux, Paris.) 5. Icon of Madonna and Child, Pantheon, Rome. (Photo: Istituto Cen- trale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome.) 6. Gospel book cover, treasury of the Church of St. John the Baptist, Monza. (Photo: Courtauld Institute, London.) 7. Votive crown of King Recceswinth, Museo Arqueologico Nacional, Madrid. (Photo: Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispanico, Ampliaciones y Reproducciones MAS.) 8. The Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai. (Photo: Courtauld In stitute, London, © by R. Cormack.) 9. Byzantine and Islamic coins. (Photos A, C, and F: The Barber Insti tute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees. Photos B, D, and E: The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) 10. The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. (Photo: Courtauld Institute, London.) 11. The Great Mosque of Damascus. (Photo: Courtauld Institute, London.) 12. Medieval Greek and Latin minuscule scripts. (Photos: The Bodleian Library, Oxford; Berlin (West), Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kul- turbesitz.) 13. Mosaic of St. Peter, Pope Leo III, and Charlemagne; Rome. (Photo: Windsor Castle, Royal Library, © 1988 by Her Majesty Queen Eliz abeth II.) 14. Manuscript of the Rule of St. Benedict, Latin with Old High German translation. (Photo: Monastery of St. Gall, Switzerland.) 15. Manuscript of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. (Photo: Warburg Institute, London.) 16. The Chludov Psalter, Moscow State Historical Museum. (Photo: Courtauld Institute, London, © by D. Wright.) P reface to the Princeton Classics Edition It is a strange honor for an author to be invited, after more than thirty years, to republish a book that is now deemed a classic. I must therefore begin by alerting any new reader to two features of The Formation of Chris- tendom. First, this is the work of a young woman, written with youthful overconfidence and determination. Second, since it was published in 1987, an enormous amount of high-quality research has been undertaken on the period it covers, circa a.d. 500–800. Our knowledge of the period has been transformed, which means it would be an impossible task to try and update the book. In addition, I feel that its spirit and energy should be retained. This book sets out to show how the entire Mediterranean world between the sixth and ninth centuries a.d. was shaped by a set of forces that— although they formed different societies—venerated the same single God, divided over his nature, contested how to worship him, and struggled to attain a heavenly afterlife. From the periphery of this world, non-Roman agents remade a Roman Empire that was centered in its enormous, new capital of Constantinople. The shared origins of the “West,” the “East,” and the “Islamic”—a tripartite division that still haunts us—go back to this early formative period when each was in active relationship with the others. Such is the claim of The Formation of Christendom. By way of introduction, I’ll try to answer three questions: How did I come to write a history with this ambition? What sort of a historian does it make me? What would I change, were I to “update” it? The Path to Writing The Formation of Christendom When I studied European history as a student at Cambridge in the early 1960s, I felt constrained by the blinkered focus on the British Isles, France, and Germany. I became aware of Byzantium thanks to lectures by Philip Grierson, who used the evidence of coinage to point out the existence of a long-lasting empire that was not part of “the West” yet exercised consider- able influence over it. It had a spectacular gold currency, the solidus, that remained stable for over seven hundred years, suggesting there was far more to the history of Europe than was generally taught. This provoked in me an interest in Byzantium from a comparative point of view and led me to do a PhD at Birmingham University under the guidance of Anthony Bryer. I decided to contrast an area under Byzantine imperial rule—central Greece x PREFACE TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION in the twelfth century, documented in the letters of ecclesiastics like Mi- chael Choniates, Metropolitan of Athens—with a more familiar region of the West, selecting the northern European homeland of Geoffroi de Ville- hardouin and Guillaume de Champlitte, knights who participated in the Fourth Crusade, which captured Constantinople in 1204. I hoped to trace differentiating elements in these two styles of government, imperial and Western, in the complex thirteenth-century social formation that resulted from the crusaders’ conquest of central Greece and the Peloponnese. It proved impossible to complete this overambitious comparison, but studying Choniates’s letters provided me with a familiarity with Byzantium from within and strengthened my resolve to make this medieval empire more familiar. The contrast between Byzantine and Western medieval art led me to the importance of icons and then to the paradox of iconoclasm, which was the topic of the Birmingham Spring Symposium in 1975. With Bryer, I edited the papers in what was the first publication of the Centre for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Since fairly stylized images of Christ, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary (known as Theotokos, Mother of God), and saints were greatly revered in Byzantium, how could they have provoked “the battle of icons,” which involved removing and destroying these holy images? It was through my study of iconoclasm that I realised more fully what a critical role the Arabs played in Byzantine history. From the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century onward, which I now know were not written in classical Arabic but in a dialect of Mecca used in much earlier oral poetry, Islam challenged Byzantium in multiple ways— not merely military. In order to survive as a Christian medieval empire, the eighth-century emperors had to put the entire society on a war footing and concentrate all efforts to resist Muslim expansion. Leo III and his son Con- stantine V are famous for introducing iconoclasm, yet closer investigation of their policies revealed the inner strengths that guaranteed survival and the growth of Byzantium into its medieval state character. From these studies I grasped the significance of studying Byzantium not in isolation but as one of the great powers of the medieval Mediterranean world, in ongoing relations with the Arab caliphate in Damascus and later Baghdad, with the central papal authority in Rome, and with the western regions that were becoming what we know as Europe. More distant out- posts of Christianity in Britain, Scandinavia, and the Balkans were also linked to this world; indeed, Constantinople had organized the missionary activity that converted Bulgaria and Russia. Clearly, Byzantium played an integrated, leading role in the Mediterranean world, which I planned to analyze in The Formation of Christendom.
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