The Emperors of Byzantium
Kevin Lygo
Thames & Hudson, £25, 336 pages
It hardly needs saying that any English writer who tackles the history of Byzantium does so in the shadow of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon is a superlative stylist, and moreover a scholar of almost impeccable accuracy and erudition: a colossus of English-speaking historiography, and the author who without rival first posed to the English reading public an account of the long succession of rulers whom Kevin Lygo now chronicles here. For Gibbon Christianity is the solvent of Roman civic and military virtue, and so it comes as no surprise that in the later volumes of the Decline and Fall, he does not hold back from the most caustic denigration of the civilisation that obtained in the Christian empire of Constantinople from its foundation by Constantine in 324 to its long-anticipated fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. For him the Byzantines “assume and dishonour the name of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity, nor animated by the vigour of memorable crime”. Thus he dismisses a millennium of Eastern Christian civilisation as a farrago of superstition, lethargy and eunuch-ruled decadence, a characterisation that appealed as much to his high-minded and earnest Victorian readers as it did to his sceptical and “enlightened” contemporaries.
