Pioneers of Popular Byzantine History

At the end of the eighteenth century a wide readership in western Europe was familiar with Byzantium. Montesquieu and Voltaire had created a vision of political corruption and imbecility, religious authoritarianism and obscurantism, the antithesis of France in the “Age of Reason.”¹ Grand narratives had sought to demonstrate at inordinate length the absurdity of the decaying empire, for example the twenty-two volumes by Charles Le Beau published between 1756 and 1779, later expanded by Ameilhon, with the twenty-ninth volume appearing in 1817.² And of course there was Edward Gibbon, whose work had appeared in English in six volumes (1776–88), and in a full French translation in 1813.³ Similar sentiments were to be found in Greece, where for a century up to 1821 the classical past prevailed over the Byzantine period for those seeking a model past for an emerging state.⁴ The Byzantine centuries were considered dark by the leading, if not all, Greek intellectuals of the Enlightenment. The most famous detractor was Adamantios Korais, for whom “Byzantium stood for obscurantism, monkishness, oppression, inertia.”⁵ No bridge between Ancient and Modern was sought. However, by the middle years of the nineteenth century a different mood prevailed both in Greece and in western Europe, where popular histories appeared extolling the medieval Christian empire of East Rome.