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Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture, by J. F. Haldon
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This book presents the first analytical account in English of major developments within Byzantine culture, society and the state in the crucial formative period from c.610-717. The seventh century saw the final collapse of ancient urban civilization and municipal culture, the rise of Islam, the evolution of patterns of thought and social structure that made imperial iconoclasm possible, and the development of state apparatuses--military, civil and fiscal--typical of the middle Byzantine state. Also, during this period, orthodox Christianity finally became the unquestioned dominant culture and a religious framework of belief (to the exclusion of alternative systems, which were henceforth marginalized or proscribed).
- Sales Rank: #1845928 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 1997-11-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x 1.06" w x 5.98" l, 1.60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 524 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"This is an excellent resource, superbly organized, and very well written, for students of ancient and medieval history at all stages." History
"...a good, well-informed synthesis with strong personal opinions...." N. Oikonomides, Canadian Journal of History
"A detailed survey of the following subjects, fully and impressively documented, serves to provide the reader with the first serious, comprehensive survey of all the major changes of this period: politics, economics, social relations, urban and rural societies, state fiscal and military administration, state and law, the imperial church and politics of authority, religion and belief, infrastructures and hierarchies, language, literature, and the icon....an absolute must for every student of Byzantium because it provides a substantial foundation for understanding how the Later Roman Empire became transformed into a distinctly Byzantine Empire. This is an excellent resource, superbly organized, and very well written, for students of ancient and medieval history at all stages." John E. Rexine, History
"...Haldon has made an important contribution which tackles problems not considered by other studies through well informed theorizing and places them together for the first time with the results of recent scholarship. It presents an ...attractive view of this culture in transition and provides a fine introduction to the history of the seventh century. Haldon is successful in depicting not only the seventh-century Byzantine world, but also its worldview." Paul M. Cobb, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Hard But Useful
By Arch Stanton
There is a very clear thesis for this book. It is that the 7th Century represented a clear break between the Late Roman period and the Byzantine one. Every chapter in this book resolves around this thesis. Which is admirable, but it makes for hard reading. I came into this book expecting a detailed look at the events and issues of 7th Century Byzantium. What it ended up being is a very detailed argument that looked at what came before and compared it with what came after. Now I will not state that this was useless information or that this represented nothing new which I didn't know already, but the overpowering nature of the thesis means that it is not as useful a reference as I had hoped. This book is very useful for professional Byzantinists but less so for anyone else.
The book begins usefully enough with about a hundred pages outlining the political/military history of the period. This is a fairly detailed and mostly uncontrovesial review of the period and explains it pretty well. This section serves as more than an introduction, but it is not the main focus of the work. As such I found it interesting and informative. Anyone looking for an overview of this century would be well advisded to read the first section and then quit.
The second hundred pages deal with economics. I have to admit that this was the hardest part for me to read. I find economic history to be as dry as toast and this is no exception. Haldon considers himself a 'Marxist' historian in the sense that he believes that economic incentives are the biggest motivators in society. So he considers this section to be very important, which is why he spends three whole chapters on economic issues. These chapters cover the decline of cities, the growth of a more rural society, and the fiscal administration of the country.
The first part of this was the most interesting for me since it goes into detail about something which I've come across before in other works but never seen from this late a period. The decline of the civis is something that is often discussed in works on the 3rd and 4th century when it was in the middle of its decline and emperors were taking action to deal with the consequences. This book deals with their end and explains how this was the inevitable result of a long process, not just the sudden wars of the period. If it had been otherwise then the cities would have survived in other areas and been rebuilt in times of peace. I'd have thought this was obvious and without having read many books on the subject I have to wonder whether this is an area where the division between the classical and medieval history interferes with drawing the obvious conclusion. Or possibly he is simply stating the majority view and making it seem more controvertial than it is? I don't know.
I do have to say that there were sections in this part which were either contradictory or confusingly worded. On page 96 he states that Constantine and Constantius were the first to damage to the cities' economic independence when they confiscated their civic lands and revenues, but on the next page he says that the decline of the curials was only slowed by the confiscation of the civic lands and revenues. Which means that he's either crediting this one action with both saving and destroying the cities or he's obscuring the fact that he has no explanation for the decline. The first part states flat out that it was a bad thing for the cities that Constantine did this, yet the second page suggests that in doing this he saved the cities (at least for a time).
The following section contained some of the most useful information in the book. The change from the provincial to the thematic system was a major change and one which I haven't seem covered in detail before. I'm not saying that it hasn't been covered, simply that I haven't come across it yet since I haven't really been looking. This book establishes pretty clearly when and why the changes occurred, but it doesn't establish clearly what all the changes were. Yes, he outlines the approximate ranks and who was responsible for what in both systems, but that doesn't mean that I have any better understanding of how those officers did their jobs. But as to the reasons for these changes I feel he covered them well and clearly.
It's hard to define precisely what I don't like about this book. It is extremely detailed in many ways, which is usually exactly what I want. The details are very specific and focused, yet somehow they seem too focused to allow a clear glimpse of the whole. While I learned a great many specific things about the Romans of this time and the way that those details changed over the century, I never got a feel for the culture which changed. And yet that doesn't quite cover it because he makes quite clear the anxiety and panic of the time. Perhaps what this book could have used is a more general survey of the change before going into such detail. Because by the time you get through a chapter to see the end result of the change you have to return to the beginning to remind yourself of what was said before. A book which offers a general survey of a period should not be so focused that the details overwhelm the general view. As I said, it is hard to define precisely why but I felt that this book focused so much on the change itself that it lost track of detailing what it changed from and to. That isn't the best way of putting it but every other sentence I came up with offered at least a dozen exceptions to the rule.
I will admit that this disapointment is at least partly the result of my preconceptions about the kind of book this was. I have read a few of John Haldon's previous books and they have been directed more at the general audience. I expected this book to be much the same, and even when I realized that he was going more scholarly than his other books I was excited to be getting a well-written scholarly guide to the 7th Century. So I have tried to temper my review given that part of the problem I had was with my own preconceptions.
But the fact still remains that this book is useful pretty much only as an extended thesis. It goes into great detail on many issues, but it in no way details everything that one would wish to know about the Byzantine state in this period. As a work of scholarship it is supurb and should be read by anyone writing on this period, but as a book read for pleasure it is less useful. I feel that it could have been trimmed and that many of the chapters would be better in article format. A few of them (such as the one on art) seem added on simply to complete the set and not because of any real interest in covering the subject. People with a heavy background in the Byzantine state may find this book useful as it collects much data into one place. People lacking this are in for a hard time.
This is written for a specialist audience. If you are such a specialist then you are in for a treat. If you are not then you are likely to be dissapointed
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A society on perpetual "red alert"
By Arild Nordby
Haldon's magnificent analytic history of seventh century Byzantium provides a compelling picture of a culture imbued with a sense of crisis and impending demise.
Not that surprising per se, remembering the devastating Persian wars, the Avars and Bulgars and most importantly, the cataclysmic arrival of the Arabs "robbing" Byzantium of well over 2/3 of their previous income!
However, Haldon's patient analysis is rewarding, and we see how these crises led to the degeneration of towns into mere refuge citadels, how the established senatorial class loses to a rising military buraucracy, how the strategy of a few, mobile field armies is abandoned in favour of a militarized countryside with local militiae, and how the church and state bureaucracies are, at times painfully, welded together.
The commissioned artworks bring out this mentality as well:
The surge in popularity for the icons, who by their compelling gaze and austere figures demand of the individual first and foremost, conformity and subservience.
It is definitely not a very "nice" culture Haldon describes, quite the opposite, but given the circumstances, the evolutions are quite understandable, and lucidly portrayed by him.
In addition, although I would have hated to live in seventh century Byzantium with its bigotry and impending doom-mentality, I cannot help myself from admiring their resourcefulness in weathering those disasters they were living through, even flourishing by the ninth and tenth century.
Haldon's ability to call forth such admiration from us, without any need to specify it, but only through vividly bring back for us a very alien culture is, at least to me, a major achievement on its own.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A masterpiece or when the Eastern Roman Empire became Byzantium
By JPS
First posted on Amazon.co.uk on 8 February 2012
There are two excellent books telling the story and explaining how and when the Eastern Roman Empire - "the Rome that did not fall" to paraphrase the title of another suberb book - became the Byzantine Empire. One of them is Marl Whittow's "the Making of Byzantium" and this one, from John Haldon, is the other one. Both are just as good and have more or less the same starting point (around 600 AD).
Both also show how the Empire survived, although just barely, the invasion of the Balkans by the Slavic tribes, and even more daunting, the Arab onslaught. However, their scope and perspectives are a bit different. Whittow's book covers a much longer period, from 600 to 1025, the death of Basil II whose reign is often viewed as the apogee of the Byzantine Empire. By contrast, Haldon surveys a much shorter period of what is generally called the "crisis of the Seveenth century" - from 600 to the end of the reign of Leon III (741) who successfully withstood the last great siege of the Ommeyade caliphate (717) and began, even in a limited way, to turn the tide against the Arabs in Asia Minor.
This is the period during which everything changed as the Empire had to adapt or die and this what Haldon's book shows so well. This was about "survival" on all levels, from the peasant to the magnate, from the country village to the metropolis of Constantinople which was besieged three times in less than 120 years. All the institutions and the administration of the Empire had to change, starting with the military. This is also when the themes appeared, initially as a means for a bankrupt Empire to sustain the armed forces that were so vital for its survival and then, as the system developed and was refined over time, as a way of governing and defending the Empire's territory. This was achieved through a combination of localized defenses and armed militias in each province under the command of a strategos who had both civil and military powers with a central and professional army which became the Tagmata ("The Regiments"). This evolved from the Obsequum of Maurice and Heraclius which had itself been developed from the old praesental armies of the time of Justinian and his predecessors of the Eastern Roman Empire.
As Haldon (but also Whittow) shows brilliantly and in detail, the whole economy was transformed: the rural society but also the cities. To a large extent, this was the end of the model of the Greek-Roman city whioch either shrank or were abandoned. Those that survived became smaller and more defensible, in a way that was largely similar to what had happened in the Western part of the Roman Empire some 200 years earlier. The State was impoverished. The religious beliefs and the exercize of authority, whether civil, military or religious, were transformed. The Empire shrunk and lost more than two-thirds of its territories, populations and resources, including its most of its prosperous provinces: Egypt (which, alone, represented probably one-third of the State's financial income), Syria, and Africa, not to mention the loss of most of Italy and most of the Balkans.
Essentially, this book explains why Byzantium is often portrayed as having been "the bullwark" of chritianity, because this is what it turned itself into, so as to survive. Note, however, that this masterpiece is a rather massive and very detailed book to read and digest. Despite being well-written, it is probably not for those who have only a passing interest in Byzantium and its civilization. It is, however, so comprehensive that it fully justifies its sub-title because it does, indeed, tell the story of "the transformation of a culture".
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