Ronchey, S. “Profilo di storia della storiografia su Bisanzio da Tillemont alle Annales.” Europa medievale e mondo bizantino (Table ronde du XVIII Congrès du CISH. (Montréal, 29 August 1995). Eds. G. Arnaldi and G. Cavallo. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo, 1997. 283-304.

The contribution offers an overview of historiography on Byzantium from the 17th to 20th centuries.

Interest in the Second Rome develops alongside the history of the idea of the state and tends to be associated with the modern revival of Byzantine political forms, which at times assumes the connotation of an authentic transference.  From this point of view, despite notable precedents in the Protestant scholarship of Wolf and Melanchthon, the beginnings of the history of historiography on Byzantium should be located in Louis XIV’s France with Tillemont, Du Cange, and the first work of classification and editing of Byzantine historiographical sources (the Corpus del Louvre) under Colbert’s patronage.   At this time there was little English interest apart from the partial exception of Richard Bentley. The French Enlightenment, to which we owe the first interest in going beyond the prevailing Eurocentric and Christian-centric considerations of the Middle Ages, cultivated a negative view of the history of Byzantium (Montesquieu, Voltaire), thought of as “the description of a perpetual collapse,” the same view that we find in the late 18th century works of Gibbon and Le Beau.  Throughout the entire 18th century (in which Fabricius’s philological scholarship was the greatest contribution to the study of Byzantine history), the history of the Byzantine Empire was judged, moreover, to be inseparable from that of the Roman Empire.  During the second half of the 19th century, the Balkan Crisis, aestheticism, and exoticism contributed to the reawakening of an interest in Byzantium. In France the aesthetic and literary attractions of the works of Rambaud and, especially, Schlumberger and Diehl encouraged the spread of a Byzantine imagerie in the culture of Decadentism and heightened popularity of the subject matter also among the general public. If the rise of Germany right after the Congress of Vienna coincided with the beginning of the Bonn Corpus, the evolution and aspirations of the Prussian monarchy in the age of positivism moved at the same pace, with recognition of the independence of the study of Byzantine history from that of Rome of the Caesars, and determined ultimately the birth of Byzantine studies as a ‘positive’ science and a modern university discipline.  The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries saw, moreover, the flourishing of Balkan, Greek, and especially Russian - with its dual populist slavophile and social-economic orientations (Leont’ev, Vasil’evskij, Uspenskij) - Byzantine studies.  In fact, the contributions of the Russian, then Soviet, social-economic school, together with those of the French Annales School, generated the winning current of 20th century historiography on Byzantium.  This is the current whose principle exponents were Dagron and Kazhdan, who, in the 1980s and 1990s, in their respective roles at the Centre de Recherches d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance in Paris and Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Byzantine Studies in Washington, D. C., mark the period of greatest energy in the field of historical research for both academic institutions.

 

REVIEWS

F. Tinnefeld in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 55 (1999), pp. 290-2.