Robert Browning (2) (1914–1997)

Robert Browning ambitiously tackled the task of covering the history of the Byzantine Empire, from the time of the collapse of the Western Empire all the way through to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a period of a thousand years. Furthermore, he covered the material in a scant 292 pages as contrasted with the double or treble number of pages required by many of his predecessors.

Browning organized his material with methodical predictability, which, though it would have been a fault in a work of fiction, provides ease of use and greater accessibility in this work. He arranged the information chronologically, in five main sections of between 150 to 250 years each. In each section, Browning covered the salient political, social, economic and religious issues in the first part. He concluded each section with a survey of the artistic, architectural, literary and philosophical highlights of the period in question.
This approach necessarily forced Browning to maintain a fairly high level look at the material. Gallons of ink have covered reams of pages dealing with the Great Schism, the Filioque controversy, the use of leavened or unleavened bread, the Crusades, the civil wars of John Cantacuzenus, Genoan and Venetian trade empires, Hesychasm, Manzikert and Iconoclasm. Books larger than Browning’s exist on any one of those subjects; yet Browning managed to wrap all these up, and more, and present a surprisingly informative, well-organized and useful reference to Byzantine Society.

Browning’s book reads well. He has modernized and streamlined Edward Gibbon, George Ostrogorsky and A.A. Vasiliev. He condensed the material yet managed to retain the essential elements and major points. The result is an ex-cellent “jumping off�€? point for anyone making initial investigations into Byzantium. Furthermore, not only did Browning manage to reduce the information to its bare essentials, he also avoided being condescending or patronizing. Generally, one does not sense that the material has been diluted or “dumbed downâ€?; this is not “Byzantine History for Idiotsâ€?.

In that light, the glaring fault Browning’s work exhibits is the complete lack of source citation. With the exception of artistic items such as books, paintings, mosaics and textiles, Browning omitted citing any references for the information he provided. He did provide a bibliography; he even arranged sub-bibliographies for each of his sections. However, since he offered no clue as to which material came from which source, the researcher who wished to pursue a matter further would be hard pressed to get far using Browning as an aid.

Aside from that complaint, Browning’s work succeeds in serving up the key elements of the various periods of Byzantine history. His last three sections, which dealt with the great flowering of the Empire, the decline and sack by the Crusaders, and the gasps and struggles until the Turkish victory, seemed particu-larly well written. These years were rich with events in and beyond the Byzantine Empire. The political-religious complexities that characterised many of these years were dauntingly intricate. Browning coped with the intricacies competently. He guided the reader confidently and unpretentiously through the tricky issues without seeming to skip too much or explain too much. Any one of the many esoteric religious controversies that the Byzantines seemed to revel in could have stymied the uninitiated reader, yet Browning took them in stride and set out the main points with aplomb. Browning’s work has the happy advantage of serv-ing as an end in itself or of whetting the appetite for further investigation. Those who chose to pursue further studies will be well grounded by Browning’s survey of the period.

Alex Hunnicutt… (mere)