Byzantine Culture

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Byzantium in the Modern Imagination

Yeats sailed to Byzantium, Klimt painted in gold, and a hundred novels used it as shorthand for decadence. How the empire has been imagined in literature, art, film and games.

For most people who have heard of it, Byzantium is not a historical subject but an atmosphere: gold, incense, icons, eunuchs, conspiracies, an emperor behind a curtain, and an impending fall. That image was assembled in the nineteenth century, largely by people who had not read the sources, and it has proved extraordinarily durable.

Tracing it is worth doing, partly because it explains the reputation described in Byzantine studies, and partly because some of the art it produced is very good.

Yeats

The single most influential English text is W. B. Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium (1928), followed by Byzantium (1930).

Yeats’s Byzantium is not a historical place. In A Vision he explains what he meant: he imagines a moment, around the reign of Justinian, when religious, aesthetic and practical life were a single whole and the artist was anonymous, absorbed into a collective vision. It is a symbol of art outside time, set against the biological world of “whatever is begotten, born, and dies.”

The images that have stuck — the sages standing in God’s holy fire “as in the gold mosaic of a wall,” the poet reborn as a golden mechanical bird “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake” — are drawn from real Byzantine things: the mosaics, and the automata in the Magnaura palace that Liudprand of Cremona described in 949.

Yeats had read about these in a handbook. The poems are not history and do not pretend to be; what they did was fix Byzantium in English as the emblem of timeless, impersonal, golden art.

Decadence

The other nineteenth-century strand is the decadent one, and it descends directly from Gibbon by way of French Symbolism.

Byzantium supplied the fin-de-siècle with exactly what it wanted: a Christian empire of extraordinary wealth, ritualised to the point of paralysis, sexually ambiguous, politically murderous, and doomed. Théophile Gautier, Gustave Moreau and their successors used the setting; Sardou’s play Théodora (1884) made Theodora an exotic sensualist for the Paris stage; and the same taste produced a shelf of novels.

Gustav Klimt visited Ravenna in 1903, saw the mosaics of San Vitale and Sant’Apollinare, and came back to paint the gold-ground portraits — The Kiss, the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait — that are now among the most reproduced images in the world. That is the most valuable thing the decadent Byzantium produced, and it is a direct transcription of sixth-century mosaic technique into Viennese portraiture.

The Historical Novel

Byzantium has had a steady if unspectacular career in fiction.

Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius (1938) is the best-regarded English-language example, told by Belisarius’s servant and drawing heavily on Procopius. Rosemary Sutcliff’s Blood Feud and The Bull from the Sea touch it; Cecelia Holland, Mary Renault at the edges, and the historical thriller tradition have all used it.

The most sustained modern treatment is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic duology (1998–2000), which is a fantasy set in a version of Justinian’s Constantinople, built around a mosaicist, and which is considerably more attentive to the actual culture than most historical fiction.

Harry Turtledove, a professional Byzantinist before he was a novelist, has written extensively in and around the period, including an alternate history in which Muhammad becomes a Christian.

Film and Television

Byzantium has done badly on screen. There is no Ben-Hur or Gladiator for Constantinople.

The exceptions are mostly Turkish and Greek. Fetih 1453 (2012), a large Turkish production about the conquest, was a domestic box-office success and was criticised in Greece for its treatment; the Netflix documentary-drama Rise of Empires: Ottoman (2020) covered the same siege for an international audience.

The absence is itself an interesting fact. Hollywood has filmed Rome, Egypt, Greece, the Vikings and the crusades repeatedly; a thousand-year empire with sieges, palace coups, blinded emperors, Greek fire and the largest church in the world has produced almost nothing. The reasons are presumably the same ones that keep Byzantium out of school curricula: no established narrative, no familiar names, and a reputation for being complicated.

Games

Where Byzantium does flourish is in strategy games. Civilization, Age of Empires (whose second instalment features a Byzantine civilisation with cataphracts and a campaign), Crusader Kings, Total War and Europa Universalis all include it, and for a substantial number of people under forty, a video game is where they first encountered Basil II or the Varangian Guard.

Historians have been notably ungrumpy about this. Several have observed that games do a better job than most popular media of conveying the empire’s actual strategic situation — a state with limited manpower, excellent fortifications, a strong economy and enemies on every frontier.

The Adjective

Running underneath all of this is the word itself, which in English means devious and over-complicated. Newspapers describe bureaucracies, tax codes and corporate structures as byzantine several times a week, and the usage carries a judgement about a real civilisation that most of the people using it could not place on a map. The history of the term is in Why “Byzantine”?.

The Turn

Something has shifted in the last two decades. Major exhibitions — the Metropolitan Museum’s Byzantium series, the Royal Academy’s Byzantium 330–1453 in 2008 — drew very large audiences. General histories by Judith Herrin, Anthony Kaldellis, Peter Frankopan and others have sold well. Podcasts on Byzantine history have found substantial audiences.

The image that is emerging is less gold and incense and more what the empire actually was: a functioning state with a tax system, a legal code, a professional civil service, a strong currency and an unusually good record of surviving things that should have destroyed it. That is a less atmospheric story than Yeats’s, and it has the advantage of being true.

Sailing to Byzantium, Read Closely

Since the poem is the single most influential English text about the empire, it is worth reading with some attention to what it actually says.

The first stanza establishes what is being left: a country of the young, of birds in the trees, of “whatever is begotten, born, and dies” — the biological world, which has no use for an old man.

The second sets out the alternative: the soul must clap its hands and sing, and there is no singing school but “studying monuments of its own magnificence.” Hence the voyage.

The third is the famous invocation:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul.

The sages in the gold mosaic are Byzantine saints on an apse wall, standing in a gold ground that Yeats reads as fire. The request is to be gathered “into the artifice of eternity.”

The fourth stanza states the terms: once out of nature he will not take bodily form again, but will become a golden bird, made by Grecian goldsmiths, set on a golden bough “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake.”

That final image is a real object. The mechanical singing birds in the gilt tree at the Magnaura palace were described by Liudprand of Cremona in 949 and are discussed in Byzantine science. Yeats had read about them and chose an automaton — a made thing, not alive, singing — as his figure for the artwork that escapes decay.

Whether the poem endorses that choice is genuinely ambiguous, and readers have argued about it for a century. The bird is the answer to mortality and it is also a mechanical toy amusing a bored monarch.

The Reading List

For a reader who wants the fictional Byzantium rather than the historical one, the field is small enough to list.

Novels

  • Robert Graves, Count Belisarius (1938) — Procopius dramatised, told by Belisarius’s servant
  • Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors (1998–2000) — fantasy, Justinianic in all but name, built around a mosaicist, and unusually well informed
  • Harry Turtledove, the Videssos sequence — fantasy by a professional Byzantinist
  • Cecelia Holland, Belt of Gold (1984)
  • Nicholas Guild, Stephen Lawhead and others have used the period

Poetry

  • W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium (1928) and Byzantium (1930)
  • C. P. Cavafy, several poems — the Alexandrian Greek poet wrote about Byzantine subjects from inside the tradition, and “In the Church” and the Anna Komnene poem are worth seeking out

Non-fiction that reads like narrative

  • John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history (1988–1995) — criticised by specialists, enjoyed by everyone else, and responsible for more general interest in Byzantium than any academic work
  • Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2007)

Cavafy is the most interesting entry. A Greek writing in Alexandria in the early twentieth century, he treated Byzantine and Hellenistic history as a continuous inheritance rather than as exotic material, and his Byzantine poems are the only ones in the modern canon written from inside rather than looking on.

Why Not Filmed

The absence of Byzantium from screen is unusual enough to be worth explaining, and the reasons are instructive.

No familiar names. An audience knows Caesar, Cleopatra and Napoleon. Basil II and Nikephoros Phokas require introduction, and introduction is expensive screen time.

No clean narrative. Rome has a rise and a fall. Byzantium has eleven centuries of recovery, decline, recovery and decline, which resists a three-act structure.

Religious complexity. The central conflicts are doctrinal — iconoclasm, the schism, hesychasm — and doctrine is difficult to dramatise without either trivialising it or losing the audience.

Contested memory. The two nations with the strongest claim to the material, Greece and Turkey, have incompatible views of it, which makes co-production difficult and each national production partisan. Fetih 1453 (2012) demonstrated this precisely.

Costume and setting costs. A world of mosaics, marble and ceremonial is expensive to build convincingly, and there is no established visual shorthand for it as there is for Rome.

The gap is closing slightly — documentaries, popular histories and podcasts have found substantial audiences — but the absence of a single mainstream dramatic treatment of a thousand-year empire remains one of the odder facts about popular historical culture.

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