Is Byzantine Studies A Colonialist Discipline?: Toward A Critical Historiography (ICMA Books - Viewpoints) 1st Edition Benjamin Anderson (Editor)

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Is Byzantine Studies a
Colonialist Discipline?
Toward a Critical Historiography
Edited by Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova

Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?
ICMA BOOKS | VIEWPOINTS
Copublished by the International Center of

Medieval Art and Penn State University Press,
the ICMA Books | Viewpoints series aims to
engage with and instigate new conversations,
debates, and perspectives not only about
medieval art and visual-material culture
but also in relation to the critical practices
employed by medieval art historians. Books
will typically be data-rich, issue-driven, and
even polemical. The range of potential subjects
is broad and varied, and each title will tackle
a significant and timely problem in the field
of medieval art and visual-material culture.
The Viewpoints series is interdisciplinary
and actively involved in providing a forum for
current critical developments in art-historical
methodology, the structure of scholarly
writing, and/or the use of evidence.
Is Byzantine Studies a
Colonialist Discipline?
Toward a Critical Historiography
Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova
The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Anderson, Benjamin, editor. | Ivanova, Mirela

(Historian), editor.
Title: Is Byzantine studies a colonialist discipline?
: toward a critical historiography / [edited by]
Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The
Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Series:
ICMA books. Viewpoints | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Summary: “A volume of essays by scholars of
Byzantine art, history, and literature addressing
the entanglements between the academic
discipline of Byzantine studies and the practice
and legacies of European colonialism”—Provided
by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023005021 | ISBN 9780271095264
(paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism—Historiography.
| Byzantine Empire—Study and teaching—
Historiography. | Europe—Colonies—
Historiography. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC DF505 .I83 2023 | DDC
945/.701—dc23/eng/20230213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005021
Copyright © 2023 International Center of Medieval Art

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802–1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member

of the Association of University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University

Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated
stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material,
ansi z39.48–1992.
Contents
List of Illustrations (vii)

Preface: The Historical Conjuncture (ix)
Introduction: For a Critical Historiography

of Byzantine Studies (1)
Part 1: How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

1 Hieronymus Wolf’s Silver Tongue: Early Byzantine
Scholarship at the Intersection of Slavery,
Colonialism, and the Crusades (39)
Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff
2 Byzantine Archaeology: Teaching the Tenth

and the Twentieth Centuries (52)
Hugh G. Jeffery
3 Byzantium in Exile (58)

Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun
Part 2: How Is Byzantium (Re)produced?

4 Methodological Imperialism (75)
Nicholas S. M. Matheou
5 The Price of Admission (83)

Anthony Kaldellis
6 Byzantine Studies: A Field Ripe for Disruption (90)

Averil Cameron
7 Subaltern Byzantinism (98)

Maria Mavroudi
vi Contents
Part 3: How Are Byzantine Texts (Re)produced?

8 Byzantine and Western Narratives:
A Dialogue of Empires (111)
Arietta Papaconstantinou
9 The Ethnic Process (121)

Alexandra Vukovich
10 Publication and Citation Practices: Enclosure, Extractivism,

and Gatekeeping in Byzantine Studies (133)
Matthew Kinloch
Part 4: How Is Byzantine Art (Re)produced?

11 The South Kensington Museum, Byzantine Egyptian
Textiles, and Art-Historical Imperialism (145)
Arielle Winnik
12 From Ethnographic Illustration to Aphrodisian Magistrate:

Changing Perceptions of an Early Byzantine Portrait (153)
Stephanie R. Caruso
13 Expanding and Decentering Byzantium: The Acquisition

of an Ethiopian Double-Sided Gospel Leaf (162)
Andrea Myers Achi
14 Equity, Accessibility, and New Narratives for

Byzantine Art in the Museum (172)
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams
A Collective Bibliography Toward a

Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies (179)
List of Contributors (189)
Index (193)
Illustrations
I.1. Solar diagram, Handy Tables of Ptolemy (18)

I.2. The separation of light from darkness (Genesis 1:3–5) (19)
I.3. Saint Michael defeating an attack on Constantinople (20)
I.4. Saint Peter and Bishop Petros I (22)
I.5. The meeting of Muhammad and Herakleios (23)
I.6. “The idolatry of the Ishmaelites” (24)
1.1. The coat of arms of Johann Jakob Fugger (42)
3.1. Interior of Hagia Sophia (69)
7.1. Mark Doox, Saint John Coltrane Enthroned (100)
7.2. Photis Kontoglou, murals, City Hall, Athens (103)
7.3. Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, Lion of Judah (104)
11.1. Plate depicting Byzantine Egyptian textiles (150)
12.1. Portrait of a benefactor (Rhodopaios?), Aphrodisias (154)
12.2. Engraving depicting the dance of the Chohos (158)
13.1. Double-sided gospel leaf, Tigray, Ethiopia (164)
13.2. Double-sided gospel leaf, Tigray, Ethiopia (165)
14.1. Installation of the “Emperor Roundel,” Dumbarton Oaks (173)
14.2. Phalera or harness pendant, Persia (176)
Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
In the summer of 2020, two events, at first glance unrelated, rendered

a series of questions about the study of the medieval Mediterranean
unavoidable. What is the remit of the field called “Byzantine studies”?
In which forums may Byzantinists speak with authority? What is the
basis of that authority, and how should it be deployed? When are schol-
ars compelled to engage in public debate?
The first event occurred on 25 May 2020, when a Minneapolis police
officer murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on camera. The
footage spread via social and mass media, becoming a metonym for an
entire system of racecraft, of structural inequality upheld by racialized
violence and newly exacerbated by a global pandemic.1 Renewed resis-
tance to this system crystallized under a phrase. “Black Lives Matter”
denotes in practice a social movement, but it is grammatically a credo—
one rejected, moreover, by many in power. The footage of Floyd’s mur-
der demonstrated that, to the agents of contemporary colonialism,
Black lives do not matter.2 The focus of the resistance thus expanded
from the immediate context of US-American policing to a transna-
tional reassessment of the enduring legacies of European colonialism
and white supremacy.
Contemporary private cultural institutions—most obviously muse-
ums and universities—are founded upon the fruits of structural ineq-
uities: surpluses unjustly accumulated and dedicated to a perpetual,
secular, mass of remembrance. At the same time, cultural profession-
als abhor outward demonstrations of racism and regularly seek to dis-
tinguish their institutions’ present activities from the circumstances
of their founding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, such institutions
took center stage in this new transnational reassessment of colonial-
ism. Many issued formal statements. Here is a characteristic document
from the summer of 2020:
x Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
At British Art Studies, we know from our work to date how thor-
oughly entangled histories of British art are with the legacies
of colonial violence, oppression, slavery, and systemic racism.
These histories manifest themselves variously in artworks,
art-historical writing, museum displays, and other forms of
heritage conservation. Acknowledging the ways that Brit-
ish histories and cultural production have been complicit in
anti-Blackness, colonial violence, slavery, and white suprem-
acy is only the first step. Recognising and dismantling the rac-
ism that affects and is perpetuated in our institutions today is
the essential next step.
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the
Yale Center for British Art, the co-publishers of BAS, have both
shared statements of solidarity in response to the killing of
George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, and the
Black Lives Matter protests throughout the United States,
United Kingdom, and around the world.3
Somewhere between a mea culpa and a manifesto, this statement

reveals how the murder of George Floyd caused those in positions of
cultural authority to engage seriously with the relationship between
their professional activities and the duties of global political citizen-
ship. Could the study of British art contribute to a more just society?
If so, then how? If not, why bother?
The relevance of colonialism to the study of British art, the cul-
tural production of a colonial empire, seems obvious. So too does that
of colonialism to those disciplines, such as classics, that have histori-
cally contributed to the assertion of Eurocentrism and white suprem-
acy. For these disciplines, 2020 was not the first reckoning. After the
white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, the Soci-
ety of Classical Studies, American Historical Association, and many peer
organizations denounced the appropriation of their scholarship by rac-
ists. At this point, however, Byzantinists saw no need to enter public
debate, even as members of the misogynist, racist “alt-right” increas-
ingly turned to Byzantium (or their concept thereof) as a model for a
patriarchal, Christian state.4
Preface: The Historical Conjuncture xi
In the following years, Adam Goldwyn and other Byzantinists consis-

tently pointed out the importance of engaging in public debate beyond
the confines of the academy, including on online platforms such as Red-
dit and Twitter.5 Thus, by the summer of 2020 it was no longer possi-
ble for Byzantinists to ride out the next reckoning. On 7 June 2020, the
Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), of which one
of us (Benjamin Anderson) was president at the time, published a state-
ment via its listserv and website. It expressed solidarity with the Black
Lives Matter movement and announced a small fund for Byzantinists
of color as well as an initiative to decolonize Byzantine studies, spear-
headed by the question “Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline?”6
BSANA’s call led to a collaboration with the New Critical Approaches
to Byzantine Studies Network, hosted at the Oxford Centre for Research
in the Humanities, of which the other of us (Mirela Ivanova) was a found-
ing member. Our first joint venture was a webinar, Towards a Critical
Historiography of Byzantine Studies, held on 13 August.7 The second is
the volume before you.
Oswald Spengler writes that “a philosophical question is merely a
thinly veiled desire to receive a particular answer that is already implied
in the question itself.”8 If this is true, then our question was not and is
not philosophical. It is intended rather to initiate a conversation within
and beyond Byzantine studies in the hopes that the answers would be
unexpected. In our opinion, the present volume amply fulfills that hope.
Initial responses to our question ranged from curiosity and enthu-
siasm to ridicule and scorn.9 Many sat in the middle: supportive of our
broader aims, but skeptical of the relation between the practice of Byz-
antine studies and contemporary politics, in particular Black Lives Mat-
ter and the project of decolonization. And yet, at precisely the same
moment, a second event, at first glance entirely distinct, triggered a
public discourse in which Byzantinists felt compelled to engage, thereby
demonstrating the thoroughly politicized nature of the existing disci-
pline of Byzantine studies. These events are covered in detail in this
volume by Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun; here
we provide a brief outline.
On 29 May 2020, the Turkish government celebrated the anniver-
sary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) both outside
xii Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
and inside Hagia Sophia.10 Built as a church in the sixth century, Hagia
Sophia became a mosque after the conquest; since 1935, it had operated
as a museum. The Greek foreign minister swiftly objected, specifically
to “the reading of passages of the Quran inside Hagia Sophia.”11 The pro-
test elicited a response from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
who stressed the sovereignty of Turkey’s borders: “Greece is not the
one administering this land, so it should avoid making such remarks.
If Greece does not know its place, Turkey knows how to answer.”12
Next, the Council of State (Danıştay), Turkey’s highest administra-
tive court, agreed to hear a suit to reopen Hagia Sophia to Muslim wor-
ship. Various national organizations of Byzantinists issued proleptic
condemnations of the anticipated result, including the Greek Commit-
tee of Byzantine Studies (8 June), the Italian Committee of Byzantine
Studies (23 June), the French Committee for Byzantine Studies (26 June),
and the National Committee of Byzantine Studies of the Russian Fed-
eration (29 June).13
The Danıştay, undeterred, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on 2 July;
one week later, on 10 July, Erdoğan transferred jurisdiction over Hagia
Sophia from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to the national Direc-
torate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Hagia Sophia was a mosque again.14
This precipitated another round of letters. John Haldon, as president of
the International Association of Byzantine Studies (Association Interna-
tionale des Études Byzantines—AIEB), wrote (13 July) that the decision
“damages Turkish scholarship and research in both the humanities as
well as the natural sciences in a way that is likely to have direct con-
sequences for Turkish participation in international scientific enquiry
for some years to come.” A few days later (18 July), the AIEB announced
that the International Congress of Byzantine Studies, planned for 2021 in
Istanbul, would be postponed and moved, citing both the ongoing pan-
demic and “concerns associated with issues of heritage management.”
The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque made evident that,
despite earlier hesitations to connect our practice with political global
citizenship in support of Black Lives Matter, Byzantine studies is, in fact,
a political discipline. Our professional practice is inseparable from our
geopolitical circumstances. When a historical monument of great sig-
nificance to the discipline became a pawn of regional politics, Byzantine
Preface: The Historical Conjuncture xiii
studies mobilized its national and international committees to inter-

vene and to reprimand both the Turkish state and ultimately also our
Turkish colleagues on the ground. A group of Turkish graduate students
of Byzantine studies in Turkey wrote in response (20 July): “In an era
of identity politics, it is all too easy to be stigmatized as ‘the enemy’
in our own field of study on account of presupposed affiliations. At a
time when we need your support more than ever, we are left to feel
ostracized.”15
The historical conjuncture of (1) the global reassessment of the lega-
cies of colonialism and (2) the controversy around Hagia Sophia requires
that we ask what Byzantine studies and Byzantinists have stood for in
the past and stand for today. As various as their answers may be, the
contributors to this volume are united by their recognition of the value
of this project and their desire to pursue it in a fashion both critical and
generous.
We thank everyone who participated in the webinar (some forty col-

leagues in total) and those who responded to our question under
separate cover. Sophie Moore and Alexandra Vukovich designed and
implemented the three-part program of small-group discussions, a for-
mat that was inspired in turn by an earlier conference co-organized by
Nicholas Matheou.16 Roland Betancourt, series editor for Viewpoints,
and Eleanor Goodman, executive editor at Penn State University Press,
welcomed our proposal for a collaborative volume that would continue
the conversations begun in the webinar.
In order to preserve the dynamic and multivocal character of
that meeting, we solicited short contributions (“position pieces”) in
response to one or both of the following questions: Is Byzantine stud-
ies a colonialist discipline? How can we write a more critical historiog-
raphy of Byzantine studies? We furthermore asked authors to focus on
one object, site, text, problem, subfield, or scholarly practice and to
advance their arguments with minimal footnotes.
Our introduction to the volume, by contrast, attempts a synthetic
account of the critical historiography of Byzantine studies. Rooted in
the discussions held during the webinar, it has continued to evolve in
dialogue with the position pieces and the two anonymous reviewers, to
xiv Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
whom we are deeply grateful for their detailed comments on the draft
manuscript. We presented sections of our draft introduction during
a roundtable discussion (“Theorizing Byzantium and Byzantine Stud-
ies”) at the Twenty-Fourth International Congress of Byzantine Studies,
Venice, on 23 August 2022 and shared a complete draft of the preface
and introduction with the Research on Art & Visual Culture workshop
at Cornell University on 6 October 2022. We thank all who joined and
discussed.
Taken as a whole, accordingly, this book offers a multitude of views
on Byzantine studies during a fascinating moment of self-reflection. It
reveals, in brief, a field in motion.
We conclude with thanks to those who helped lend this volume
its final form: to Sam Barber for assistance in preparing the final man-
uscript for submission, to managing editor Laura Reed-Morrisson for
copyediting the manuscript, to Ayla Çevik for preparing the index (and
the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell Univer-
sity for funding her work), and to editorial assistant Maddie Caso and
production coordinator Brian H. Beer for shepherding the volume into
print.
Notes
1. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in Amer-
ican Life (London: Verso, 2012).
2. For Black Americans as “a submerged nation in the heartland of U.S. impe-
rialism, the main bulwark of the collapsing colonial system,” see Harry Haywood,
For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (Chicago: Provisional Organiz-
ing Committee for the Reconstruction of a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party,
1958), available online at Marxists Internet Archive, accessed 13 July 2022, https://
www.marxists.org/history/erol/1956–1960/haywood02.htm. See further Harry
Haywood and Milton Howard, Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (New
York: International Pamphlets, 1932), available online, with an introduction (on
“the national question”) by Erin Gray: Erin Gray, Harry Haywood, and Milton
Howard, “Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (1932),” Viewpoint Maga-
zine, 9 January 2017, https://v iewpointmag.com/2017/01/09/lynching-a-weapon
-of-national-oppression-1932/.
3. BAS Editorial Group, “Editorial,” British Art Studies 16, 30 June 2020, https://
britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-16/editorial-574.
4. Adam J. Goldwyn, “Byzantium in the American Alt-Right Imagination: Par-
adigms of the Medieval Greek Past Among Men’s Rights Activists and White
Preface: The Historical Conjuncture xv
Supremacists,” in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, ed. Michael

Edward Stewart, David Alan Parnell, and Conor Whately (London: Routledge,
2022), 424–39; Roland Betancourt, “Why White Supremacists and QAnon Fans
Are Obsessed with the Byzantine Empire,” Salon, 8 March 2021, https://w ww
.salon.com/2021/03/08/why-white-supremacists-and-qanon-fans-are-obsessed
-with-the-byzantine-empire_ partner/.
5. See especially Adam Goldwyn, “The Byzantine Workings of the Mano-
sphere,” Eidolon, 11 June 2018, https://eidolon.pub/the-byzantine-workings-of
-the-manosphere-37db3be9e66.
6. “Statement by the Officers and Board of the Byzantine Studies Association
of North America,” Byzantine Studies Conference 2020 website, 7 June 2020,
https://bsc2020.net.
7. For a report on the webinar, see Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova,
“Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies,” Byzantine Studies
Conference 2020 website, accessed 13 July 2022, https://bsc2020.net/Towards
-a-Critical-Historiography.
8. Quoted in Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2020), 100.
9. For an example of the latter, see Anton Kulikov, “Why Is Decolonization of
History So Popular Today?,” Pravda, 11 June 2020, https://e nglish. pravda. ru/ world
/144661-decolonization_history/.
10. For a first attempt at a history of these developments, see Brian Croke,
Flashpoint Hagia Sophia (London: Routledge, 2022).
11. “Ministry of Foreign Affairs Announcement on Today’s Reading from the
Quran in Hagia Sophia, on the Anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople,” Hellenic
Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, 29 May 2020, https://w ww.mfa.gr
/en/current-affairs/statements-speeches/ministry-of-foreign-affairs-announce
ment-on-todays-reading-from-the-quran-in-hagia-sophia-on-the-anniversary
-of-the-fall-of-constantinople.html.
12. “Hagia Sophia Decision Does Not Concern Greece, Erdoğan Says,” Daily
Sabah, 9 June 2020, https://w ww.dailysabah.com/politics/diplomacy/hagia
-sophia-decision-does-not-concern-greece-erdogan-says. For an analysis of
the controversy from the standpoint of international law, see Lando Kirchmair,
“Turning Hagia Sophia into a Mosque (Again): Has International Law Anything to
Say About That?,” Völkerrechtsblog, 21 July 2020, https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/de
/turning-hagia-sophia-into-a-mosque-again/. Kirchmair concludes that “inter-
national law in the form of the World Heritage Convention does not forbid the
announced change of status or holds only weak sanctions ready.”
13. For a letter signed by an international group of Byzantinists and Ottoman-
ists, see Friends of Hagia Sophia, “An Open Letter About the Status of Hagia
Sophia,” Medium, 30 June 2020, https://medium.com/@hagiasophia/an-open
-letter-about-the-status-of-hagia-sophia-bea9afd1a62f.
14. For an analysis of the court’s decision, see “The Hagia Sophia Case,” Har-
vard Law Review, 11 January 2021, https://h arvardlawreview.org/2021/01/the-hagia
-sophia-case/. For the text of the decision, in Turkish and English, see Tenth
xvi Preface: The Historical Conjuncture
Chamber of the Council of State of the Republic of Turkey, “Court Decision Annul-
ling Cabinet Decision of 1934 Converting Hagia Sophia into a Mosque,” SHA-
RIAsource, 2 July 2020, https://beta.shariasource.com/documents/3778. For a
translation of Erdoğan’s decree, see Croke, Flashpoint, 56.
15. See the text of the letter here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e
/1FAIpQLSekKjs1-Qpt2LgAPu9dQsBf0-AH0PIHXwJMchZohcx4uO0-sQ/viewform.
16. Ilya Afanasyev, Nicholas Evans, and Nicholas Matheou, “Doing Conferences
Differently,” Verso Books Blog, 14 September 2018, https://w ww.versobooks.com
/blogs/4028-doing-conferences-differently.
Introduction
For a Critical Historiography
of Byzantine Studies
Byzantine studies applies a variety of humanistic disciplines (art history,

archaeology, history, literature, philosophy, theology, and philology) to
the study of cultural, political, and social phenomena within a circum-
scribed chronology (ca. 500–1500 CE) and geography (the eastern Medi-
terranean and adjoining landmasses). If conceptualized as a transnational
and multigenerational project to describe and understand human activ-
ity in the past, it may serve as a model for coalition building and prob-
lem solving in the present and the common envisioning of a just future.
If, by contrast, it is reckoned to be an arcane body of knowledge—diffi-
cult to access and limited in appeal—then it may serve as a redoubt for
reaction, a refuge for the highly educated who seek personal comfort
and security in the present and see little hope for the future.
The question of colonialism is key to the current trajectory of Byz-
antine studies and to the future of the field. That said, we do not pre-
sume to answer our titular question with a simple “yes” or “no,” much
less to save (or to damn) our discipline. Instead, we hope to highlight
the distinctive character of our object of study (the Byzantine Empire)
2 Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?
and of our discipline (Byzantine studies): namely, that both are simul-
taneously colonial and colonized.
We are not the first to inquire into the relationships between Byz-
antine studies and European colonialism. Take, for example, two works
published in 2019: one by Panagiotis Agapitos and the other by George
Demacopoulos. Agapitos studies an extractive mission undertaken by
the Byzantinist Franz Dölger to occupied Athos in 1941 and its relation to
his influential “view of the Byzantine empire as a fully developed system
of a national population under a constitutionally organized state.”1 Dema-
copoulos studies a much older group of texts about Byzantium—those
produced by participants in another extractive colonialist enterprise,
the Fourth Crusade—and employs postcolonial critique to understand
the enduring concepts of Christian difference embedded therein.2
Similarly, we are far from the first to address the historiography of
Byzantine studies. Among the many earlier contributions included in
the bibliography at the end of this volume, we wish to highlight one of
the most recent. Published in 2021 and edited by two contributors to
the present volume, Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, The
Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers an impressive “cross
section” of the discipline’s founding figures, albeit without explicitly
addressing their direct participation (or indirect implication) in colo-
nial projects.3
Our concept of “critical historiography” is shaped by two studies of
neighboring disciplines. In The Nation and Its Ruins (2007), Yannis Hami-
lakis demonstrates that modern Greek studies “can only be adequately
addressed if it is positioned within the discourse of post-colonial stud-
ies, and only when the interplay between colonialism and nationalism
is fully explored.”4 Similarly, in Beyond Balkanism (2019), Diana Mish-
kova highlights the origins of southeast European studies in the work
of “scholar-officials” employing “the language of the then triumphant
European colonialism.”5
As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, Byzantine studies
is no less entangled with the practices and legacies of European colo-
nialism than are modern Greek studies and southeast European stud-
ies, even as the contours of its entanglement—the specific knots and
nodes that tie the production of knowledge to projects of colonial rule
Introduction 3
and extraction—are distinctive. It is the job of a systematic critical his-

toriography of Byzantine studies both to map this topography and to
envision the alternatives: how Byzantine studies might contribute to
the formation of a more just and equitable society.
Accordingly, we consider the chapters below and the thematic bib-
liography that follows as contributions to this much broader project.
The bibliography is meant as a tool, not as a comprehensive record of
all works mentioned in this volume. It was compiled collectively by
participants in our original workshop and contributors to this volume.
It reveals that the critical historiography of Byzantine studies is still
a fragmented (more optimistically, a nascent) discourse. None of the
texts cite or refer to any substantial portion of the others. This is not
the intellectual production of a self-conscious field of critical historiog-
raphy; rather, it is an undercurrent of locally occasioned critical reflec-
tions. We hope that in mapping it across disciplines and specialties,
the book and bibliography may serve as a foundation for a more coher-
ent intellectual project, both by gathering various approaches to the
question of colonialism in Byzantine studies and by looking outward
and situating Byzantine studies among the neighboring disciplines of
classics and medieval studies.
Orientalism and Nationalism

Unlike the study of ancient Greece and Rome and the study of the
Western Middle Ages, the study of the Byzantine Empire was never
essential to the formation of modern Europe and the pursuit of its colo-
nial enterprises. Rather, Byzantium was constructed as the decadent,
effeminate foil to a vigorous, manly Europe: in short, as an especially
proximate branch of an imagined Orient.6 Beginning in the nineteenth
century, this marginalization provoked a response on the part of schol-
ars in orthodox Christian nations who sought to construct an equally
imaginary, idealized image of Byzantium as a usable past in the service
of modern political projects.7
The foregoing observations, whose truth we fully acknowledge, have
led some of our interlocutors to pose two objections to our titular ques-
tion. First: Byzantium is so marginalized and orientalized that Byzantine
studies cannot possibly be a colonialist discipline. Second: nationalism,

not colonialism, is at the root of the discipline’s discontents.
It is hard to argue with the premise of the first objection. Of course,
and as we discuss in greater detail below, Byzantium has been mar-
ginalized by traditional histories of Western civilization. In a material
act with symbolic significance, Byzantine strata have been stripped
off excavation sites to reveal the prized yet architecturally formulaic
monuments of antiquity hidden below.8 Even while granting the prem-
ise, however, the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Marginalized
fields of study can be conducted in a colonialist manner: one need look
no further than the histories of the study of Sanskrit philosophy and
Arabic literature.9 In short, while Byzantium may be marginal to Euro-
centric discourse, Byzantine studies, if practiced in a colonialist mode,
can contribute further to its marginalization.
The second objection brings us to questions of definition. What is
colonialism? What is nationalism? And have they been, as the objec-
tion suggests, clearly distinct and mutually exclusive factors in shap-
ing the history of scholarship?
Defining colonialism is not a straightforward task. In 1995, Jürgen
Osterhammel devoted an entire book to this project, delineating six
forms of colonialism, six epochs, and three basic types with a pleth-
ora of subdivisions. According to Osterhammel’s preferred definition,
“colonialism is a relationship of rule between collectives, in which the
fundamental decisions about the lives led by the colonized are made
and carried out by a culturally foreign minority of colonial rulers, unin-
terested in acculturation, and primarily driven by external interests.
In modern history, this is usually combined with missionizing justifica-
tory doctrines, which rest upon the colonial rulers’ conviction of their
own cultural supremacy.”10
Such theoretical work continues, with various authors arguing at
different times that empire and colony are different, or that a colony
is a part of an empire, or indeed that the two concepts are best col-
lapsed.11 Nevertheless, the applicability of the concept of colonialism
to the medieval world remains contested. Osterhammel’s first epoch
is 1520–70, after the end of the Byzantine state and contemporary with
the origin of Byzantine studies.12
Introduction 5
In bringing the concept of colonialism to bear on the historiogra-

phy of Byzantine studies, we do not intend to contribute to this tech-
nical-definitional debate. We have not chosen colonialism because we
believe it to be a clear and bounded concept better suited to explaining
East Rome than the commonsense “empire.” Concepts in the world are
never siloed off from one another, nor are they composed of discrete
sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Their use is often messy,
“a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing,”
guided more by family resemblance than essence.13 Empire and colo-
nial empire have more commonalities than differences. Both rely on
the existence of a hierarchical extractive regime encompassing vast
swaths of peoples, cultures, and linguistic traditions. But they are dif-
ferent in what they evoke and in the history of their study.
Accordingly, we chose to bring colonialism to the discussion because
we hoped that its history would help reframe some key questions relat-
ing both to the history of Byzantium and to the history of Byzantine
studies. In particular, we believe that the field of postcolonial studies
offers us the tools to think critically about both the Byzantine Empire
and the field dedicated to its study.
With respect to the history of Byzantium, the term “empire” is suf-
ficiently ubiquitous in our field to have assumed a robust moral ambiv-
alence. It means different things to different people and thus allows
consensus without productive debate. Asking whether Byzantium was
a colonial empire, even only as a rhetorical provocation, can help rein-
troduce specificity and genuinely productive disagreement. “Colonial-
ism” conjures the realities of extraction and exploitation upon which
empires are based more vividly than the celebrationist studies of the
Byzantine Empire’s survival (on which see Nicholas Matheou’s chapter
below). It provokes a different emphasis, different semantic and emo-
tional associations, and, ultimately and most productively, different
responses. Foremost of these is a concern with the subaltern, the col-
onized and oppressed whose lived experience the term brings to the
forefront: “the experiences of those people who suffered as a result of
state and institution formation.”14
In terms of the history of the discipline, scholars and scholarship
are useful within colonialism as, in Osterhammel’s terms, one means by
which colonial rulers convince themselves of their own cultural suprem-

acy. This dynamic has been well explicated in postcolonial studies, dat-
ing back to the foundational works of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, and Talal Asad. These and many other thinkers have elucidated
the role of academies and scholars in the distribution of resources and
power. As Robert J. C. Young wrote in 1990, and in dialogue with Spiv-
ak’s work, “the difficult political questions . . . emerge from the analy-
sis of colonialism because it combines its critique of Western history
with one of Western historicism, showing the enactment of the links
between the two in the colonial past and the neocolonial present. The
effect of this has been to produce a shift away from the problem of his-
tory as an idea towards an examination of Western history’s and his-
toricism’s contemporary political ramifications. For that history lives
on: its effects are operating now.”15 Who gets to speak, and who does
not, is a question as relevant to our medieval sources as it is to our
modern conference programs, and colonialism impacts both.
By bringing the concept of colonialism to our field, we do not deny
the impact of nationalism on Byzantine studies. As Partha Chatter-
jee demonstrated in his 1986 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World,
the discourses of nationalism and colonialism have much in common,
including their civilizing mission and their patriarchal sense of gender
and sexuality. Indeed, although nationalist discourse “challenged the
colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellec-
tual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based.”16
Moreover, to construct the nation from the top down itself requires a
form of colonization, which irons out the creases of regional and local
difference.17
It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that nationalism as a discourse
emerged from centers of imperial and colonial rule.18 Some of the regions
whose medieval histories are studied under the remit of Byzantine stud-
ies—including Turkey and the Balkans—were never directly colonized
by modern European powers.19 Other regions, such as the Caucasus,
Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, were. Nevertheless, the intellectual
elites of both were often educated in colonial capitals: Amsterdam,
Brussels, London, Moscow, Paris, Vienna.
Introduction 7
Accordingly, we do not seek to dismiss the role of nationalism in

the construction of Byzantine studies, both historically and today.
Rather, we hope that by placing nationalist scholarly production within
a broader framework of colonial relations and intellectual hegemony,
we might view the role of nationalism in our field differently. Let us
begin by rejecting the pernicious distinction, effectively highlighted by
Chatterjee, between the “good” nationalism of the West and the “evil”
nationalism of the East.20 Nationalism is a condition that unavoidably
shapes all scholarship in Byzantine studies, regardless of the national
affiliations of the author. The question, then, is what we choose to do
with it. Can this shared condition serve not as a cause for perennial
lament, or mutual recrimination, but as a tool for comparing our own
field to others and for building transnational resistance to the ongo-
ing material and intellectual legacies of European colonialism?
Empire and Discipline, Colonizer and Colonized

Features of colonialism and coloniality can be found at different times
in both the East Roman Empire in the medieval Mediterranean and in
the modern discipline of Byzantine studies. This ambiguity makes Byz-
antium an especially fascinating object of analysis and should allow
Byzantine studies to contribute productively to postcolonial studies.
Byzantine history is conventionally related in terms of the shifting
fortunes of the East Roman state and its post-1204 successors, espe-
cially of their elites. Periods traditionally viewed as “golden ages”—
the era of Justinian, for example—are unmistakably marked by colonial
empire. In raw material terms, Corisande Fenwick has shown that the
Justinianic conquest of North Africa did not represent the return of
the beloved king, but rather an aggressive and unwelcome exploit-
ative regime run out of small fortifications amid the sprawling, yet no
longer defensible, urban landscapes.21 Similarly, Anthony Kaldellis has
argued that Byzantine rule in eleventh-century Bulgaria “looks more
like an occupation”: Bulgaria was governed “through primarily military
and fiscal institutions, without giving its people much opportunity to
rise in the Roman system.”22
To these instances of direct colonial rule, we may add less direct

mechanisms of Byzantine colonialism: in particular, production of eth-
nographic and geographic knowledge and conversion to Orthodoxy. East
Roman bureaucrats recorded information about the histories of nonlit-
erate peoples in the Balkans and central Asia for the purposes of dip-
lomatic domination. The most famous example is the De administrando
imperio by Emperor Constantine VII (913–59), the functions of which have
been aptly characterized by Paul Magdalino: “Constantine applies to
each geographic area on the imperial horizon the degree of historical
narrative and topographic description that is appropriate to his impe-
rial and . . . dynastic interests. The depth and angle of coverage varies
not only according to the quantity and quality of his sources and the
degree of processing, but also, and I would argue primarily, according
to the potential for imperial intervention and domination, both inside
and outside the empire.”23 For all its distortions, this record is often all
we have for imagining what those subalterns would say if they could
speak. As Alexandra Vukovich notes in this volume, who gets to name
a people is not a neutral question.
The relation of Orthodox missions to Byzantine colonialism is more
complex. Sergey Ivanov has charted the central contradiction of mis-
sionary work in Byzantium, which pitted a universalist, Christian dis-
course against an exceptionalist, civilizing one: “What happened when
these two discourses collided with each other? Almost always the cul-
tural snobbery inherited from the Roman Empire prevailed. Only Impe-
rial Christianity, in which the Imperial predominated over the Christian,
was recognized as genuine. A barbarian was located outside the dichot-
omy of ‘Christianity’ versus ‘paganism.’”24 In other words, Byzantine
missions closely resemble Osterhammel’s “missionizing justificatory
doctrines, which rest upon the colonial rulers’ conviction of their own
cultural supremacy.” It is telling that Dimitri Obolensky, the twen-
tieth-century Russian-British historian, employed the term “com-
monwealth” to describe the influence that Byzantium exerted on its
neighbors by means of its perceived religious authority.25 Perhaps he
sought merely to render the Byzantines sympathetic by analogy to the
British Empire’s postwar rebranding as a soft-power “commonwealth.”
In doing so, however, he opened up the possibility that Byzantium
Introduction 9
could itself be colonial. Outside our field, the colonial nature of Byzan-
tine missions has not gone unnoticed. For example, Alan Strathern has
compared Byzantine conversion of the Slavs with more recent colonial
Portuguese missions in Sri Lanka and Oceania.26
So, Byzantium could be colonial—and yet it could also be colonized.
In periods for which the principal narrative frame has been the decline
of state power, claimants to the inheritance of East Rome found them-
selves vassals or clients to emergent foreign powers. In the seventh
century, elite authors bemoaned the collapse of Roman hegemony in
the Mediterranean.27 After 1204, Constantinople and large portions of
the southern Balkans were added to the colonial conquests of the cru-
saders. Loss of territory continued, and East Roman elites lamented
their reduced state in elaborate prose. Many simultaneously integrated
into the new elite cultures—be they Latin or Islamicate—that shaped
the early modern eastern Mediterranean.28
So far, all these questions have concerned the shifting fortunes
of Byzantine elites on a global stage. By contrast, the exploitation of
masses of non-elites from the empire’s various ethnic communities
was a constant through the Byzantine millennium. These people served
the state as its laborers and soldiers in its various deadly wars. In the
late medieval period, they were exploited by the colonial ventures of
the Venetians and Genoese, who took control of key territories in the
Aegean and Black Sea.29 There is, of course, no need to assume that
exploitation along ethnic or linguistic lines is any less extortionate
than that done by “foreign” elites.
In brief, throughout Byzantine history, we find the key features of
colonialism both exerted by the East Roman state upon others (includ-
ing its own subaltern) and exerted by others upon East Roman elites or
their claimant successors. The Byzantine Empire—at different times
and places, and in regard to different social classes—was both colonist
and colonized.
Multiple contributors to this volume, including Arietta Papacon-
stantinou, Alexandra Vukovich, and Nicholas Matheou, draw atten-
tion to the realities of this violence, both physical and semantic. They
thus participate in a growing resistance within medieval studies to
the abstraction of medieval violence. As Geraldine Heng has written,
since it is “fictionalized as a politically unintelligible time, because it

lacks the signifying apparatus expressive of, and witnessing, modernity,
medieval time is . . . absolved of the errors and atrocities of the mod-
ern, while its own errors and atrocities are shunted aside as essentially
nonsignificative, without modern meaning, because occurring outside
the conditions structuring intelligible discourse on, and participation
in, modernity and its cultures.”30 By naming colonial violence when we
see it in our sources—whether enacted by, against, within, or despite
Byzantium—we render Byzantine history intelligible as human history
and thus combat the fictionalization of Byzantium as an extrahistori-
cal entity.
Like Byzantium, the discipline of Byzantine studies, embedded as
it is within national academic regimes, has found itself on both sides
of the colonial/colonized coin. In the longue durée of Western historiog-
raphy, the study of the East Roman Empire has always been the pre-
serve of a hyperliterate elite, versed in dead languages and provisioned
with the necessary corpora and instrumenta. Similarly, its entanglement
with European colonialism has remained a constant over time, even
as its institutional configurations have shifted. As Aschenbrenner and
Ransohoff show in this volume, the earliest humanist scholars of Byz-
antium, such as Hieronymus Wolf, relied for their patronage on the
system and profits of early modern European colonialism, while the
knowledge they produced was instrumentalized in power politics (as,
for example, a tool against the Ottomans).31 The efflorescence of Byz-
antine studies at the court of Louis XIV (1643–1715) coincided with the
establishment of the French colonial empire in North America and the
Caribbean. Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the architect of France’s notori-
ous Code Noir, which legitimated and regulated slavery in the colonies;
a patron of the Byzantine du Louvre, a new corpus of Byzantine historical
works; and a collector of medieval Greek manuscripts, nearly nine hun-
dred in total, all now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France.32 Whereas absolutist France deemed Byzantine splendor wor-
thy of emulation, the balance shifted in the following century, even as
the relation to contemporary empire remained. For Edward Gibbon,
the long history of the Roman Empire exposed the flaws of universal
Introduction 11
monarchy; Britain’s maritime empire (he believed) was immune to any

analogous decline into despotism.33
These colonial entanglements continued into the age of universities.
As Ihor Ševčenko observed, the “old Byzantinists” of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries “lived in an elitist world that was deemed
conceptually and intellectually stable. . . . It was commonly understood
that few people would land at the top and that those who did would
wield considerable power.”34 Some wielded that power directly in the
service of colonial empire. For example, as a Byzantinist, Arnold J. Toyn-
bee wrote an authoritative monograph on Emperor Constantine VII; as
a colonialist, he served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of
1919.35 The nature of his advocacy is intimated in his Nationality and the
War, in which he explicitly calls for the colonial partition of Afghani-
stan between Russia and British India.36
Not all Byzantinists were so directly involved, but Byzantine stud-
ies legitimized itself as a discipline in part through the promise of pro-
ducing useful knowledge for the colonial powers that funded it. Thus,
for example, Karl Krumbacher, justifying the independence of his dis-
cipline in the first issue (1892) of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift—the first
journal dedicated to Byzantine studies and, to this day, one of the most
prestigious—remarked that “neither the Turkish nor the present-day
Greek nor indeed the Slavic law can be understood without the his-
tory of Byzantine law.”37
Krumbacher’s claim is characteristic not only in its instrumental-
ity but also in its perception of Byzantium as a superior, civilizing force
within the complex linguistic and religious landscape of the eastern
Mediterranean—in his words, “a unique, half-cultured, half-wild ethnic
complex that lies between civilized Europe and barbaric Asia.”38 As Papa-
constantinou shows in this volume, the so-called Oriental Churches,
too, were perceived as secondary emanations from Byzantine Chris-
tianity, to be studied by Byzantinists who believed the achievements
of Latin and Greek far superior to those of Coptic or Syriac. Even now,
the study of medieval Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, or Slavonic
is often offered as a supplement to Byzantine studies proper; in the
Metropolitan Museum’s influential exhibition and catalogue of 1997,
the material remains of such cultures are displayed as testaments to

the “glory of Byzantium.”
This intellectual environment shaped the discovery and use of Byz-
antine material culture. In this volume, Arielle Winnik shows how the
acquisition of Byzantine-period materials was directly entangled with
colonial rule. Art from the Byzantine period was taken from Egypt during
the so-called British Protectorate, then displayed and interpreted in
step with the broader colonial project of nineteenth-century Britain.
At other times the relations were far more complex than colonizer-col-
onized, as discussed in this volume by Hugh Jeffery, with reference to
the archaeological work done by the Russian Archaeological Institute
in Constantinople (1885–1914), and by Stephanie Caruso, with reference
to such local agents as Osman Hamdi Bey, the French-educated direc-
tor of the Ottoman Imperial Museum in Istanbul.
By drawing attention to connections between European colonial-
ism and the emergence of Byzantine studies, we do not discredit the
genuine intellectual curiosity that has motivated many individuals to
undertake arduous scholarly labors, often with little remuneration or
recognition. We seek, instead, to elucidate the underlying conditions
that have enabled such work and to which each scholar has of neces-
sity responded, whether explicitly, through support or opposition, or
(as far more frequently) implicitly, through silence. We must engage
frankly with the fact that Byzantinists could, at one time or another,
be the profiteers of colonial wealth, the intellectual architects of colo-
nial rule, or simply passive but complicit participants in these wider
political processes.
This view of Byzantine studies may seem fully at odds with some of
the other essays in this volume. More generally, it may appear jarring
to some Byzantinists today, whose experience has often been defined
by a sense of marginality. The East Roman Empire has never held the
same central position in narratives of Western civilization as its classi-
cal ancestor. As Averil Cameron notes in her contribution to this volume,
even some prominent chairs of Byzantine studies held a disparaging
attitude toward Byzantine culture and civilization. Consider, for exam-
ple, a judgment by Romilly Jenkins, then Lecturer in Modern and Medie-
val Greek at the University of Cambridge and later named to the Koraes
Introduction 13
Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature

at King’s College, London: “The Byzantine Empire remains almost the
unique example of a highly civilized state, lasting for more than a mil-
lennium, which produced hardly any educated writing which can be
read with pleasure for its literary merit alone.”39 Or consider how Cyril
Mango, briefly Jenkins’s successor in the Koraes Chair and later Bywater
and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine Greek at the University of Oxford,
concluded his account (still widely praised) of the Byzantine reception
of classical statuary: “Here ends our sad story—sad, because the Byz-
antines derived so little benefit from the statues that they took care
to preserve. Byzantium fulfilled its historic role by transmitting to the
more receptive West the Greek heritage in parchment and paper; it was
unable to transmit in the same fashion and at the right time the heri-
tage in bronze and marble.”40 As Kaldellis notes in this volume, the der-
ogation of Byzantium by Byzantinists represents the internalization of
the Eurocentrism of the (Western) academy: a Eurocentrism that left the
medieval Roman empire in the cold while laying claim to ancient Greek
and Roman culture as the foundations of Western liberal democracy.
In this account, Byzantium is no more than the hapless but nec-
essary conduit of the surviving scraps of classical culture (“the Greek
heritage in parchment and paper”). Frequently, editions of classical
sources extract excerpts and publish them with no reference to their
medieval collectors. Figures as complex as Constantine VII and Eusta-
thios of Thessaloniki—not to mention the anonymous but equally com-
plex authors of the Souda lexicon and similar compilations—are seen
as no more than passive vessels for this great inheritance.41
It is tempting to characterize this as a problem of representation:
Byzantium lacks a national successor, and thus Byzantine studies lacks
an advocate in the world of national academies.42 The young Greek
state, as Hamilakis has shown, was eager to cash in on Western fascina-
tion with classical Athens and accordingly remained ambivalent toward
its Byzantine past. In the historiography of other Balkan nations, Byz-
antium has become an uncomfortable reminder of Eastern isolation, its
textual output no more than an awkward imperial record from which to
rescue national histories.43 Nor is Eurocentrism the only foe of a flour-
ishing Byzantine studies. As Şebnem Dönbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and
Zeynep Olgun discuss in this volume, other hegemonic frameworks can

marginalize Byzantine history, such as (in Turkey) a mythologizing glo-
rification of the Seljuks and Ottomans.
One might argue in response that the Byzantines were in fact truly
European, or truly Anatolian, but this is an intellectual dead end. The
politics of representation will not save Byzantine studies. Efforts to
integrate Byzantium into Europe, as Kaldellis notes, harm both others
(for example, those east of Byzantium who are pushed out) and the
discipline itself. The cost of admission is too high. It solidifies existing
parochialisms, when the ambiguous status of Byzantium might help
rather to destabilize and dissolve them.
Race Before Modernity

How might this destabilization work in practice? By way of an example,
we turn to one of the most contested questions in premodern scholar-
ship today: the origins of race and racism.44 A steady stream of publi-
cations over the course of the last two decades have argued that race
and racism existed in the classical world and in the Middle Ages. In
2004, Benjamin Isaac published his case, entitled The Invention of Rac-
ism in Classical Antiquity.45 In 2018, unperturbed by this, Geraldine Heng
published her The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.46 Other
contenders for the birth of prejudice, and particularly anti-Black prej-
udice, can be found in the histories and rhetoric of Judaism, Islam, and
Christianity, or in ancient philosophy.47
By contrast, and as Jules Gleeson has recently observed, “Byzantine
studies still awaits a treatment of racism and ethnic-prejudice equiva-
lent to Geraldine Heng’s book The Invention of Race in the European Mid-
dle Ages.”48 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to argue that modern
racism or white supremacy were invented in Byzantium—precisely
because Byzantium rarely, if ever, served as a positive exemplum for
the architects of European colonialism. Nevertheless, and as we dis-
cuss in detail below, anti-Black prejudice is amply attested in Byzan-
tine art and literature. Accordingly, a view from Byzantine studies can
help shift the discussion of premodern race from a debate about ori-
gins to an analysis of cultural practice.
Introduction 15
In its broadest outlines, the debate about origins pits gradual-

ism against catastrophism. The former position identifies elements
of ancient and medieval thought that later evolved into modern rac-
ism. For example, Cord Whitaker identifies a medieval transition from
a “desire for unity” to the “desire for strife,” predominantly in the con-
text of religious thought. When the desire for strife was bonded to a
metaphorical conception of sin as black and salvation as white, con-
temporary hierarchies of race began to fossilize.49
Among scholars of premodern race, Heng is one of the most uncom-
promising in her assertion that the logic and functions of racism can
be found in the medieval world. For Heng, race “is a structural rela-
tionship for the articulation and management of human differences.”
It thus names “a repeating tendency . . . to demarcate human beings
through differences amongst humans that are selectively essentialized
as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and pow-
ers differentially to human groups.”50 Her benchmark example is thir-
teenth-century England, where the state used a series of racializing
policies and technologies to demonize Jews, legalize violence against
them, and eventually expel them en masse. For Heng, not calling this
racism is a historiographical failure.
The objections raised against this literature are plentiful, and
some have been motivated by ill will. But a more potent and intellec-
tually robust critique holds that our modern racial order is different in
kind, not degree, from those of the classical and medieval world. The
catastrophes of colonialism and transatlantic slavery and the subse-
quent globalization of white supremacy render modern racism funda-
mentally distinct from the production and policing of racial, ethnic, or
religious difference in the premodern world.
Vanita Seth and Charles Mills are among the most recent and forceful
advocates of this position. For Seth, looking for race in the Middle Ages
is a failure of intellectual historical practice, as it rests on “the implicit
presumption that racism is an empty vessel residing outside the his-
tory it is said to contain.”51 She suggests instead “that it is possible to
speak of conversations across time without presuming a continuity of
meaning over time. . . . One can recognize, for example, the long history
of Christian vilification of Jews or Muslims without thereby presuming
that medieval renderings of heathens and infidels share the same con-
ceptual meaning as contemporary anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.”52
Similarly, Mills emphasizes the radically unique conditions that pro-
duce and sustain modern white supremacy and, with it, the possibil-
ity of an oppositional Black philosophy. For him, a number of necessary
conditions must be fulfilled for racial subordination to be identified,
including “the existence of race as a social category, the existence of
Blackness as one of the extant racial categories, and the subordination
of Africans and Afro-descendant populations under that designation.”53
The premodern world cannot fulfill this third condition in particular,
because “even if race as ideology, discourse and iconography is older
than the conventional post-war narrative claimed, race as a planetary
system is unambiguously modern. . . . Race is ontologized in a way that
it is not in premodernity because inherited discourses of racial stigma-
tization, whether secular or Christian, now have coercive power behind
them in the form of the racial state.”54 While Mills grants that medieval
states could be racial, pointing to Heng’s example of thirteenth-cen-
tury England, the modern, post-Enlightenment racial state is rendered
unique by the contradiction between the “declared universal equality”
of liberalism and the new inequalities that it consolidated.55
Byzantine Anti-Blackness
We turn now to the question of race in Byzantium, in the hopes that it
might help dissolve the strong dichotomy between the gradualist and
the catastrophist positions on premodern race. Since Byzantium was
neither the origin of nor the chosen exemplum for modern Europe,
Byzantine ideas about race cannot have evolved directly into modern
racism and white supremacy. We are therefore free to consider not
whether Byzantium was (or Byzantines were) racist, but how certain
ideas about skin color could be deployed to different ends under dif-
ferent circumstances. Skin color was not and is not the only basis for
racialization, but a study of the full complexity of race in Byzantium
lies outside the scope of this introduction. Accordingly, and because of
the origin of our volume in Black Lives Matter, we focus here on Byz-
antine anti-Blackness.
Introduction 17
In this investigation, we take our cue from Stuart Hall’s concept of

“the elements of a cultural practice,” which “do not in themselves have
any necessary political connotations. It is not the individual elements
of a discourse that have political or ideological connotations; it is the
way those elements are organized together into a new discursive for-
mation.”56 In the following, we are concerned with a specific element of
Byzantine cultural practice, namely, the figure of the Ethiopian demon.
Our question is not “Is this figure racist?” but rather “How has this fig-
ure been recombined and deployed to political ends?”
All students of Byzantine art and literature confront the frequent
representation of demons as Black, African, and ugly.57 In a character-
istic example from the tenth-century Life of Saint Basil the Younger, the
saint’s late servant, Theodora, relates that on her death she “saw clearly
multitudes of Ethiopians standing around my bed, creating a distur-
bance and commotion . . . contorting in mockery their black and gloomy
and dark faces, the mere sight of which alone seemed to me most ter-
rifying and more bitter than even the Gehenna of fire.”58 The medieval
figure of the Ethiopian demon shares with modern anti-Black stereo-
types an association between black skin and African origin, on the one
hand, and moral and aesthetic depravity, on the other.59 In Theodora’s
account, moreover, as in other contemporary saints’ lives, the demons
are counterpoised to beautiful, virtuous, White angels: “As I turned
my eyes here and there away from the loathsome and accursed sights
and directed the spiritual gaze of my soul elsewhere (for I could in no
way stand to see or hear the chatterings of those polluted creatures),
I suddenly saw two exceedingly beautiful young men just then coming
toward me, their heads resplendent with golden hair, their skin white
as snow, exceedingly sweet in appearance, clad in dazzling garments.”60
The figure of the Ethiopian demon finds precedents in earlier eras.
In pre-Christian Greek and Latin literature, “demonic beings” and “the
unquiet dead” were characterized by black skin, sometimes associated
with African origin.61 For example, Suetonius describes a masque “in
which scenes from the lower world were represented by Egyptians and
Ethiopians.”62 However, some ancient authors considered the fear of
Black people to be childish, a principle enunciated by the geographer
and historian Agatharchides (second century BCE): “But the Ethiopians
Fig. I.1 Solar diagram
from the Handy Tables
of Ptolemy, ca. 800.
Vatican City, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana,
Vaticanus graecus
1291, fol. 9r. © 2023
Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana.
will terrify the Greeks. How? By their blackness and the strangeness of
their appearance? Among us such fear does not persist beyond child-
hood. In wars and important disputes, however, the matters at issue are
decided not by appearance and color but by daring and intelligence.”63
The demonic combatants of early Christian literature both hard-
ened preexisting associations between black skin and moral and aes-
thetic depravity and weakened the accompanying skepticism.64 Among
the earliest examples is the Acts of Peter, in which Marcellus beholds in
a vision the apostle beheading a demon, “a most hideous woman, in
appearance entirely Ethiopian, not Egyptian, but completely black.”65
As David Brakke has argued, such stories served above all to illustrate
their heroes’ divinely granted clarity of vision, which enables them to
perceive the demons’ blackness.66
The contrast between demonic blackness and saintly clarity of
vision was further developed in middle Byzantine hagiography. In the
Introduction 19
tenth-century Life of Saint Andrew the Fool, the hero explains that only
blackness separates demons from angels: “the angels of God are spot-
less and pure . . . whereas the demons are useless, black, dark, sinful,
and accursed.”67 The faces of the righteous shine with white light.68 By
contrast, the devil’s eyes emit smoke, as when a monk recognizes the
devil “in the shape of a black Ethiopian, smoke coming forth from his
eyes.”69 In the closely related Life of Niphon, the hero’s friend tells him,
“your face looks black, like an Ethiopian,” upon which Niphon “realized
that his vision had been darkened from the multitude of his sins.”70
The association between black skin and visual impairment may
underlie the Byzantine convention of representing night as a Black
woman. The goddess Nyx appears rarely in ancient Greek and Roman
art and is not distinguished by skin color.71 By contrast, in the Vati-
can Ptolemy, produced around the year 800 in Constantinople, a ring
of twelve “black- and white-skinned women represent the night and
the day, respectively” (fig. I.1).72 In the Octateuchs, manuscripts of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries that contain the first eight books of the
Bible, personifications of Night and Day accompany Genesis 1:3–5, the
separation of light from darkness. Once more, Night is a dark-skinned
woman at left, Day a light-skinned boy at right, and the hand of God
illumines the latter (as in fig. I.2).73
One final aspect of the Ethiopian demon is worthy of note in the
present context: its conflation with the figure of the Muslim “Saracen.”
Fig. I.2 The separation

of light from darkness
(Genesis 1:3–5), twelfth
century. Smyrna, Evan-
gelical School A.1 (lost),
fol. 4v. D. C. Hessel-
ing, Miniatures de l’Oc-
tateuque grec de Smyrne
(Leiden: Sijthoff, 1909),
fig. 3.
Fig. I.3 Saint Michael defeating an attack on Constantinople, 1347–49, from the
church of the Archangel Michael, Lesnovo, North Macedonia. Photo: Erich Lessing /
Art Resource, New York.
For example, in the eleventh-century Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, the

devil places “terrible snares” in the hero’s path, among them “a crowd
of Saracens—black Ethiopians with wild eyes, evil faces, all appear-
ing like demons—reclining beneath a grove of trees.”74 As Kalina Yam-
boliev observes, “the vitriolic language the hagiographers employed
in reference to the Muslims, in sharp contrast to the terms of angelic
purity they assigned to the demeanor of the saints, was essential to
the affective framing that promoted Italo-Greek oppositional identity
to the Muslim Saracen.”75
For an analogous figure of the Black Saracen in visual art, consider a
fourteenth-century painting in the Monastery of the Archangel Michael
in Lesnovo, which depicts the first Arab siege of Constantiople (674–
78). The attacking sailors, identified by the inscription as “Saracens,”
are vanquished by the archangel (fig. I.3). As Paul H. D. Kaplan remarks,
“the nine attackers all have tightly curled hair and dark skin. Although
their ethnicity surely denotes Islamic religious identity, the presence
of the winged archangel Michael also suggests that the dark men have
a demonic dimension.”76 Thus, both saint’s life and painting take an
additional step: the racialization of Muslims as Black.
Introduction 21
In most of the representations discussed thus far, the figure of the

Black Ethiopian serves as a foil to a figure of divine Whiteness. The
Ethiopian demons at Theodora’s bedside in the Life of Saint Basil the
Younger are contrasted to White angels; the personification of Night
serves as a foil to divine illumination; and the figures of Black Muslims
reinforce the divine protection accorded to Christians. In this sense,
the Ethiopian demon falls short of Mills’s final necessary condition for
the existence of racism. The intent was not to subordinate Africans.
Byzantine anti-Blackness did not spur wars of conquest against Afri-
can states. Nor is it clear that it correlated to, or encouraged, prejudi-
cial treatment of black people in Byzantium.77
Nevertheless, and as Yamboliev writes, medieval hagiography and
European anti-immigrant discourse share a common structure and
purpose: “The resonant utilization of an affective rhetoric of violence,
danger, and invasion, whether directed at Muslim ‘Saracens’ or mod-
ern migrants is, at its root and across the centuries, a language of
self-preservation employed by those who seek to protect traditional
hierarchies of power and privilege.”78 Just as contemporary anti-immi-
grant discourse results in actual violence against the individuals whom
it casts as foreign, so too did the metaphorical conception of Black-
ness in premodernity directly affect the lives of Africans—for exam-
ple, the actors in Suetonius’s masque, and the Ethiopian man who was
kidnapped by Venetians and forced to mock imperial ceremonial in the
reign of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80).79
Cultural Practice, Then and Now

Returning now to Hall’s account of the elements of cultural practice,
it remains for us to investigate how Byzantine concepts of Blackness
could be deployed in new discursive formations with distinct politi-
cal connotations.
We have sought in vain the textual record of Black Byzantines. We
know no analogues in medieval Greek literature to the Black poets who
used Arabic poetic forms to comment upon their racialization.80 For a
reflection on Byzantine racialization, we might rather turn to the Nubian
painters at the cathedral of Pachoras, who carefully distinguished the
Fig. I.4 Saint Peter and

Bishop Petros I (974–
97) from the cathe-
dral of Pachoras, Faras.
National Museum in
Warsaw, 234031 MNW.
dark brown complexion and black mustache of Bishop Petros I (974–97)

from the white complexion and white beard of Saint Peter (fig. I.4).81
As Andrea Myers Achi and Seeta Chaganti write, Nubian art is “of nei-
ther Byzantium nor Africa” but “of both worlds.”82 It therefore provides
a space within which black artists could represent and reconceive the
poles of Byzantine anti-Blackness, simultaneously preserving differ-
ence and rejecting any associated moral or aesthetic hierarchy.
However, Byzantine concepts of Blackness have also been deployed
in a manner closer to their original purposes, namely, to produce an
ideal concept of Whiteness. Consider, as an example, the illuminated
manuscript Biblioteca Marciana Gr. VII, 22 (=1466), executed in 1592 in
Venetian-ruled Crete by the artist Georgios Klontzas.83 Over the course
Introduction 23
of some 217 paper folios containing extensive texts in Greek and over
400 drawings in pen and ink, the Klontzas Codex presents a universal
history from a Christian viewpoint. Of these, 22 folios and 25 drawings
relate the life of the Prophet Muhammad from an explicitly anti-Mus-
lim perspective. Muhammad’s skin is consistently marked by cross-
hatching, in contrast to those around him; the manuscript, accordingly,
depicts him as Black.84
In one drawing, for example, the blackness of Muhammad, at right,
establishes by contrast the whiteness of the Byzantine emperor Her-
akleios, at left (fig. I.5). Another drawing, entitled “the idolatry of the
Ishmaelites,” accompanies an excerpt from the anti-Muslim treatise
of John of Damascus, according to which the Arabs “worshipped the
morning star and Aphrodite” (fig. I.6).85 The artist uses the same tech-
nique, crosshatching, to depict both the skin of the worshippers and
Fig. I.5 The meeting of

Muhammad and Her-
akleios, 1592. Venice,
Biblioteca nazionale
Marciana, Marc. gr. VII,
22 (=1466), fol. 48r.
Photo courtesy of the
Ministero per i beni e
le attività culturali e
per il turismo.
the atmosphere that envelops them: their Blackness, and the obscu-
rity of their vision, the ultimate source of their heresy.
The Klontzas Codex gathers many of the elements of Byzantine
anti-Blackness. Black skin is associated with moral depravity, obscu-
rity of vision, and Muslim faith. It thereby establishes the Whiteness
(and corresponding righteousness) of the Byzantines. To what end?
Klontzas was an affluent, Greek Orthodox resident of Chandax, the
center of Venetian rule. His Black Muhammad serves, at least in part,
to establish the Whiteness (and righteousness) of the subaltern com-
munity to which he belonged.86
Klontzas was not a Byzantinist, but he was a contemporary of the
first full-time scholars of Byzantium. As Aschenbrenner and Ranso-
hoff observe in this volume, the work of one such scholar, Hieronymus
Wolf, was funded in part by the labor of enslaved Africans and Native
Americans and was intended in part to aid European powers in the
Fig. I.6 “The idolatry

of the Ishmaelites,”
1592. Venice, Biblioteca
nazionale Marciana,
Marc. gr. VII, 22 (=1466),
fol. 43r. Photo courtesy
of the Ministero per i
beni e le attività cul-
turali e per il turismo.
Introduction 25
fight against the Ottomans. Wolf’s investment in Byzantium was very

different from Klontzas’s—Aschenbrenner and Ransohoff note that he
“reserved special loathing for the people he sometimes called Byzan-
tini”—but both were produced at the nexus of race and colony, and
they entailed a careful and deliberate organization of the preexisting
elements of Byzantine cultural practice.
The primary challenge posed by this comparison, then, is to under-
stand Byzantine studies, the academic discipline, as part of a much
broader field of cultural production, within which the elements of Byz-
antine cultural practice have been deployed to a dizzying variety of ends
by a wide cast of characters: scholars, yes, but also artists, authors,
politicians, and amateurs.
Many have followed Klontzas and Wolf in placing elements of Byz-
antine culture at the service of anti-Muslim polemic. In 2006, Pope
Benedict XVI quoted at length from the work of “the erudite Byzan-
tine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos” (1391–1425) in an address held at
the University of Regensburg. Benedict used the Byzantine author to
position Christian Europe as the heir to Greek reason, in contrast to
Muslims, who posit an “absolutely transcendent divinity,” whose “will
is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”87
In 2016, Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić opened the Twenty-Third
International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Belgrade by calling upon
attendees to assist him against the majority-Muslim state of Kosovo.
He then compared himself to Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos (1449–
53), who had likewise “turned to Europe to ask for help against the infi-
dels [неверника].”88
Benedict is a scholar—albeit not a Byzantinist—and Nikolić is not,
but both share a conception of Byzantium as an “antemurale state,”
or “Christendom’s rampart against the barbarians.”89 This conception
appears in Krumbacher’s founding statement, too: “This multiform con-
fusion of peoples [i.e., Byzantium] formed in the past Europe’s defen-
sive wall against Asiatic barbarism.”90 As Byzantium had witnessed the
rise of Islam, Byzantine polemics against Islam (such as those by John of
Damascus, Niketas Byzantios, and Manuel II Palaiologos) are accorded
a particular authority.91 Similarly, as Byzantium fell to a Muslim power,
its fate becomes a cautionary tale—either of its own doctrinal intran-

sigence or of the Western powers’ failure to intervene.92
In extreme versions of the latter trope, Byzantium becomes the
original “lost cause”: a strong Christian state betrayed by European
powers.93 This conception permeates right-wing American discourse
on Byzantium.94 It finds its grisliest manifestation in the manifesto
penned by the white supremacist who murdered fifty-one people in
two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019, which
proclaimed that “until the Hagia Sophia is free of the minarets, the men
of Europe are men in name only.”95
There is another way. Other artists and authors have followed the
lead of the Nubian painters at Pachoras and reconfigured the elements
of Byzantine cultural practice to anti-racist ends. Take, for example, the
artist Mark Doox, whose work Maria Mavroudi discusses in her contri-
bution to this volume. Doox’s self-described “iconoclastic icons” expose
the “weakness in our sacred images, which have been steeped in Ameri-
can divisions of race and power.”96 Many more examples of such progres-
sive appropriations, ranging from the playful to the studied, appeared in
a recent exhibit at the Pera Museum on Byzantium in popular culture:97
for example, the artist Fikos, who painted Greek-Nigerian basketball
star Giannis Antetokounmpo in Byzantine style;98 the Greek Commu-
nist comic artists of the mid-twentieth century, who related Byzan-
tine history through the lens of “an implicit pacifism, internationalism,
and universalism”;99 and the authors of science fiction, who take Byz-
antium as a starting point for “pondering about notions of empire.”100
So too can Byzantine studies, as a scholarly pursuit, be practiced
in a decolonial mode. Geraldine Heng and Sierra Lomuto have called
for a global medieval history that is not simply a diversity exercise but
one that actively dethrones European hegemony through the introduc-
tion of multiple centers and temporalities.101 Byzantinists have much
to offer this project, but not by demanding greater representation in
traditional forums for business-as-usual work—more Byzantine art in
undergraduate surveys, more Byzantine articles in flagship journals,
more chairs of Byzantine studies. Instead, we must begin by actively
questioning our own orthodoxies: first and foremost, those about the
strength and beneficence of the Byzantine state, the pliancy of its
Introduction 27
subjects, its dazzling image in the eyes of its neighbors, and even its
coherence as a stable object of analysis.
Byzantium’s peculiar position, as a medieval state that lacks an obvi-
ous modern successor, can in this sense count to its advantage. Byzan-
tium’s national homelessness draws to its study many of those whom
former British prime minister Theresa May derogatorily called “citizens
of nowhere.”102 Early-career Byzantinists today often lead itinerant lives
on short-term (one-year or even one-semester) contracts across conti-
nents and countries. The neoliberalization of the academic market has
meant that, across East and West and across national boundaries, the
experiences of early-career scholars have much in common. Global pre-
carity has opened possibilities for global solidarities. This kind of soli-
darity can result in critical reflection, and it is not surprising that many
contributors to this volume have received their intellectual formation
not in single, siloed, national academies but through engagement with
multiple national, and indeed multi- and transnational, scholarly insti-
tutions and discourses.
In short, Byzantine studies is increasingly practiced beyond national
boundaries, and its object of study defies traditional national histories.
It should accordingly play a leading role in the production of a new, rad-
ical, global history. This potential can only be realized on the basis of a
constant and critical examination of our own history and our own cul-
tural practice. In our introduction, we have attempted to review the
former. But it is not enough to simply be conscious of the contradic-
tion that we inhabit and share with our fellow scholars in other disci-
plines: our material reliance upon the spoils of hierarchical systems of
oppression (be they colonial, imperial, or national) that we outwardly
abhor. We must also make use of the distinctive nature of our field of
study—our own intellectual capital—to change the conditions that our
own students and successors will inherit.
A number of contributors to this volume suggest concrete steps that
we can take toward this goal. For example, Matheou calls for us to write
histories that do not simply avoid identifying with a particular modern
nation but rather disavow identification with states (both empires and
nations) altogether. Matthew Kinloch asks us to think explicitly about
whom we cite and why: these are political choices, even if they seem
natural and commonsensical. Finally, Andrea Myers Achi and Elizabeth

Dospěl Williams ask how we can transform the institutions whose cus-
todians we may become.
Taken as a whole, the following chapters illuminate the mecha-
nisms by which Byzantine studies and the very idea of Byzantium,
as a distinctive culture with its own art and literature, are produced
and reproduced. Colonized and colonizer, cultural hegemon and exotic
other, Byzantium and its scholarly reception remain ripe fields for crit-
ical inquiry. Their potential to generate new radical histories lies pre-
cisely in their ambiguity. If the proposals found in this volume oscillate
between the simple and practical and the utopian, we consider that a
virtue—we must not let the pessimism of the intellect suffocate the
optimism of the will.
Notes
1. Panagiotis A. Agapitos, “Franz Dölger and the Hieratic Model of Byzantine
Literature,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 112, no. 3 (2019): 707–80.
2. George Demacopoulos, Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Iden-
tity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
3. Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, eds., The Invention of Byzan-
tium in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection, 2021).
4. Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National
Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), x.
5. Diana Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 15.
6. On the relation between Byzantine studies and Orientalism, see Averil
Cameron, The Use and Abuse of Byzantium: An Essay on Reception (London: The
School of Humanities, King’s College, 1992); Robert S. Nelson, “Living on the
Byzantine Borders of Western Art,” Gesta 35, no. 1 (1996): 3–11; Dimiter G. Ange-
lov, “Byzantinism: The Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium in South-
eastern Europe,” in New Approaches to Balkan Studies, ed. Dimitris Keridis, Ellen
Elias-Bursać, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2003), 3–23;
Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014);
Premysław Marciniak, “Oriental Like Byzantium: Some Remarks on Similarities
Between Byzantinism and Orientalism,” in Imagining Byzantium: Perceptions, Pat-
terns, Problems, ed. Alena Alshanskaya, Andreas Gietzen, and Christina Hadjiafx-
enti (Mainz: Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2018), 47–54;
Leonora Neville, Byzantine Gender (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 5–21; and
Yannis Stouraitis, “Is Byzantium an Orientalism? Reflections on Byzantium’s
Another random document with
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had not cracked off. And we rode on and on, paralleling the dim Black Mountain
barricade. Finally, with bitter exasperation, the Witch called out: “Dammit all! ain’t
you cold?”
“Froze,” I gasped.
“Well, there’s a trading-post hiding in this side cañon, [290]if I can find the road to
it. You’ll never sing out. I give up. Let’s make for camp before we both perish.”
I uttered choking sounds of thanksgiving. And it drearily seemed, for a space,

that he would not be able to find the trail. The snow was unbroken in the hills.
Then we caught a gleam from the black, gave a hail, and found a cedar-fire
welcome.
Those are Arizona adventures.
One may encounter them in boggy flats, or in blinding snowstorms; in seeking to

cross a river in springtime without too much knowledge of the ford; in facing the
hot sand’s lash that stings as powdered glass; with exhausted horses and far
from the town, on hearing the crunch of a drive-pinion twenty miles the wrong
side of home; at nightfall; at midnight, noon, or dawn. The blush of morning on
snow-encrusted cliffs, the wistful mysteries of summer twilight, the burnished
glories of an autumn sunset, have no appeal then. Simple struggles with the
elements and distances of the lonely Desert, when tired out, cold, hungry. They
are the day’s work, hard, exhausting work. And one does not record such things
in Annual Reports.
But, since adventures are in demand, perhaps I can resurrect a thrill or two from
the notebook. Long ago I listed them as scenery for stories, meaning to import a
few interesting and even beautiful types as characters, for the honest-to-God,
on-the-ground people steadily refused to become heroic. Relatively mild affairs
these, with only two persons killed, two crippled up a bit, some little blood
spilled, and lots of nervous imagining. My men were uneasy at the time, and I
most scared of all.
If I had thrust these episodes on a New York editor, out of their order and true
atmosphere, garnished with a [291]picaresque dressing, he might have praised
them; but I was not among those killed, and reflection urges that this would
probably make a difference to him. Aside from having a thumb sprained when an
angry Indian tried to wrench it off my hand, I was not physically hurt; but my
nervous system was slightly warped each time, and I have been reported on as
an efficient, but very profane man. Quite so. I will admit that I never took any
saints along on these trips.
And in every single one of these affairs, the enemy triumphed. “The man or the
hour had not yet come”; and while I have had mounted messengers of both
sexes come to me on both frosty and tepid nights, their errands, after due
investigation, and however irritating, could not be classed as tragic; but there
were times when “the feeling of it had me to bed and up again” in a round of
anticipation and some little suspense, decidedly not so pleasurable as romantic
Stevenson found his.
One undertaking began with Limping Joe paying attention to Do-hahs-tahhe’s

wife. This was not appreciated by either of them, and the husband first warned,
and then threw Limping Joe bodily out of his neighborhood. This angered the
potential home-wrecker, and he returned with a light rifle. Do-hahs-tahhe was
sacking corn in his field close to his hogan. He saw Limping Joe approaching,
and while .22’s are rabbit-guns, they sometimes go off when least expected and
injure people. Again Do-hahs-tahhe flung himself on Limping Joe; he wrenched
the rifle away from him, threw out the single shell, and smashed the stock over a
stone. Observing then that he held only the barrel, he whirled it around his head
and let go of it. It winged off, end over end, and down into the wash. [292]
Limping Joe went down into the wash and found the gun. He examined the lock
and saw that a shell would go into it. Pointing it in the air, he pulled the trigger.
Bang! it was all right, even though it had no stock for the shoulder. Then Limping
Joe put in another shell, stalked up the bank, and shot Do-hahs-tahhe through
the lungs.
Therefore the Indian Agent had to forward one physician, one stenographer, one
notary public, and a few police, promptly, hurriedly, to take the man’s dying
statement: the doctor to tell him he was dying, the stenographer to report him,
and the notary to swear them all. The police meantime grabbed Limping Joe.
Do-hahs-tahhe died in a few hours and Limping Joe sat in the guardhouse with
gyves upon his wrists, also shackles securing his ankles, and a log-chain
connecting the two contrivances. I did not intend that he should—and he did not
—get away.
This was in Territorial days, and a Reservation criminal-case came, strangely
enough, within the jurisdiction of the Territorial courts. I sent for the county
sheriff, and he arrived with one huge deputy, both of them heavily armed.
“Why the arsenal?” I asked of the officer, who had a reputation for fearlessness.
“Well, I have had Indian prisoners taken from me before,” he said.
Now there had been some little rumor of dissatisfaction among the relatives and
friends of Limping Joe. They felt he should be tried by the Agent, quite as one
who had purloined a sheep, and they expected that he would receive a mild type
of punishment. Gossip had it that they would oppose his being removed from the
Desert.
“I’ll go with you to the Reservation line,” I said to the [293]sheriff, “and this side of
it, they will have to take him away from me.”
“Very good,” replied the officer, “because I wouldn’t fight for him.”
And I made up my mind that neither would I.
We started with the stars still bright in the sky, three o’clock of a morning, to
cover the thirty-five miles to the line. The sheriff and deputy rode in a buckboard,
the prisoner with them. An Indian boy drove my buggy, and I sat with a gun on
the seat. Nothing happened. We did not see a Navajo on the trip. After lunching
at the line, we parted with the officers, and prepared to return that same day.
Seventy miles for the team would be a hard drive and would bring us in late at
night; but this is in the day’s work too.
All that afternoon the horses jogged homeward. The prisoner off my hands, I
dropped the gun into a bag under the seat. It was getting on to dark when the
team began wearily climbing the last long rise that separated us from the drop
down into Keams Cañon. There was a fringe of cedars at the top, black as
spectres against a dull red sky. The horses plodded nearer and nearer to the
crest of the ridge. One could see the branches of the old trees now, as if etched
on the sky’s plate.
Then came a call, a Navajo cry. My boy pulled in the team with a sudden
wrench. He had been watching the edge of the hill. And from the trees four or
five men stepped quickly into the road. I made a swift clutch on the seat for the
gun, and then realized that it could not be there. The bag had slipped back into
the boot, and was mixed with halters, nose-bags, and the clutter of a desert
buggy. There was a moment—it seemed a week—of tense chilliness, while they
lingered in the dusk, as if [294]waiting for us. One cannot wheel a buggy in a
desert road. It was either stop or go on. Then they crossed into the cedars, and
we heard them moving off, talking in Navajo. One began to sing. My Indian boy
laughed as if relieved.
“The miners,” he said.
And sure enough, they were my own coal-working gang that had quit the drift at
five o’clock and had reached that point on their way home. But I had thought,
and so had my driver, that friends of Limping Joe were about to greet us. It was
just the right time in the evening, and just the right color in the sombre
landscape; and they had stepped from the trees, half-waiting, in just that
manner.
IN THE TWIN-BUTTE COUNTRY

SILVERSMITH JIM: A TYPICAL NAVAJO
Limping Joe? The court treated him with customary severity. For this deliberate,
cold-blooded murder he received the terrible sentence of three years in the
penitentiary, and had quite six months off for good behavior. During his
protracted absence I issued rations to his aged parents and, after quite a little
correspondence, some of it acrid in tone, convinced my Washington critics that I
had not persecuted the poor fellow.
The East contains very few officials having the courage of Roosevelt, who wrote,
with respect to the Navajo particularly:—
These are as a whole good Indians … although some are very bad and should be
handled rigorously.…
For the last quarter of a century the lawless individuals among them have done much
more wrong (including murder) to the whites than has been done to them by lawless
whites. The lawless Indians are the worst menace to the others among the Navajo and
Utes; and very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern philanthropists
who have encouraged and protected these criminals.
[295]
And Francis E. Leupp, one-time Commissioner of Indian Affairs, held this view:
—
Agents and other Government officials, when of the best type, have done most good;
and when not of the right type have done most evil; and they have never done any
good at all when they have been afraid of the Indians or have hesitated relentlessly to
punish Indian wrongdoers.
Apart from the administration period of these two men, few Indian Agents have
expected to receive support in any effort thoroughly to punish Indian criminals in
the Desert. The tone of the Indian Bureau this last decade has been largely one
of compromise and apology: with superiors in office; to sentimentalists; with and
to discontented or stupid or evil Indians who blocked progress. Annually, when
seeking appropriations, it has apologized to Congress for asking, and then
apologized most humbly when denied. Charged with the protection and welfare
of incompetent human beings, one would think it dealt in wooden dolls.
Inconsistent, and of little vision, wastefully parsimonious, ignoring sage advice,
ready to compromise, it has been a poor source for justice and a sorry judge of
men. Of timely intelligence it has demonstrated little, and of sincerity, less. To
manœuvre in the winds of expediency, to trim sail for maintenance in office, to
drift hopefully, has been its course and policy. The distant field has viewed such
variable charts with suspicion and dismay.
Perhaps a parable may prove amusing.
“Colonel” Oldhouse, who had about reached the retirement age, suspected all
new-fangled methods. Behind his desk rested an old hand-made army-chest,
strapped and locked to withstand the strains and bruises of frontier [296]travel.
The Colonel dated from those days when the stage ran “to the States,” and
Santa Fe was an outpost of progress. In that chest reposed his warrants and
accounts, neatly arranged, jacketed, and briefed. He could go to it in the dark
and instantly find Voucher 137 for the second quarter of 1889.
“Colonel,” said a very young man, “Why don’t you order some files for your
papers, with sliding drawers, and rods, and—”
The Colonel snorted.
“They’re no good,” he snapped; “the damned things are made by machinery!”

Exactly, Colonel; you have accurately described the ineffectiveness of a filing-
case. [297]
[Contents]
XXIII
THE RED BOOTLEGGERS
And I will make it felony to drink small beer.—
King Henry VI
The heart of the Enchanted Desert, consisting of the Hopi Reserve

and a wide strip of Navajo country surrounding it as a frame, was not
troubled by the liquor problem among its natives so long as the State
of Arizona remained generously wet. The Hopi Indians have no use
for liquor, and will not tolerate it. On one occasion men of the mesas,
who were without authority to act as policemen, arrested and
brought in a Navajo who had simply exhibited a suspicious bottle; a
very singular thing for Hopi to do, since they are not bold, even when
commissioned. For years Hopi and Navajo freighters packed
Government stores from the railroad town of Holbrook, distant eighty
miles from the Agency and nearly fifty of them outside the
reservation, without engaging in sprees or bootlegging. The Navajo
rather likes his beverages, and they do not improve him as a
neighbor; but drunkenness was rare even among the Navajo in
those days.
When the State went dry, the acquisition of liquor presented

something of adventure to those who were naturally lawless. And it
was not long before cargoes of cheering fluids began to arrive in the
Navajo country from New Mexico. The town of Gallup became a
point of interest for Indians who never before had visited it. Gallup is
one hundred and five miles from the Hopi Agency, and of course
contraband is not packed along highroads. [298]When the “special
officers” of the Indian Liquor Service descended on Gallup, the
Navajo organized relays to serve the back country; and the special
officers did not follow into the lonesome places. One might be sure
that at every Navajo gathering there would be boozing, and at points
one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles from the source, and that
same distance from special officers. The smugglers would hide the
liquor beyond the great circle of campers, in the black of some
thicket, and along in the early morning hours, when chance visitors
had departed and watchers were tired out, the bibulous would
appear in various stages of intoxication. They were then dangerous.
My police force consisted of eight Indians, half of them Navajo. This

was the “army” granted me in 1911, with due regard for Colonel
Scott’s recommendation that I should have twenty-five men headed
by a white officer. And in 1921, ten years after that first
recommendation, Major-General Scott, retired, of the Board of Indian
Commissioners, reviewed the Hopi-Navajo situation, and again
reported:—
In 1882 an Executive Order set apart 2,472,320 acres (3863 square

miles) of land for the Moqui Reservation, for the use and occupancy
of the Hopi and such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior
might designate.
At that time someone with a ruler drew on a map a parallelogram

which represented an area, approximately 75 by 55 miles, for a
reservation, without the least regard to topographical and
ethnological conditions, and misnamed it the “Moqui Reservation.”
It is quite apparent that in 1882 the authorities in Washington either

were densely ignorant of the situation in this country at that time, or
were utterly indifferent to it; and by laying out the reservation with a
desk ruler and an utter disregard [299]of the welfare of the Hopi, they
laid the foundations for trouble and suffering which have developed a
situation that calls for remedial action by the Indian Office.
This whole land is semi-arid, and a large portion of it is absolute
desert. The Navajo are aggressive and independent. There is no
doubt that the majority of those on the Moqui Reserve have come in
from all sides with a deliberate purpose of taking the grazing land
which rightfully belongs to the Hopi. When a Navajo sees a Hopi with
anything he wants, he takes it, and there is no recourse.
For years this preventable situation has continued. In 1911 I was

sent by President Taft to Keams Cañon with troops, to enforce some
regulations of the Indian Office. I then found the Navajo encroaching
on Hopi land and mistreating the Hopi Indians. The Agent, at that
time, was given but three policemen, too poorly paid to attract the
right men with which to maintain order on a reservation having the
area of an empire. I then recommended that he be given twenty-five
well-paid policemen with a white chief. The number was increased to
eight without change of compensation, which number has lately
been reduced to six.
This statement is enough to show the absurdity of any expectation

that the superintendent can keep order. The superintendent is
powerless to maintain the dignity of his office, with the result that the
authority and dignity of the Indian Office and of the United States are
made a mock over a large section of Arizona.
You see, my successor was having his troubles too with the gentle
feudists, and the Hopi were petitioning as usual. So the Office
changed the name of the Reservation.
In addition to the eight men that had been granted me, several of the
range employees were commissioned as special officers of the
Indian Liquor Service. Perhaps I [300]should say, “Deputy special-
officers of the Service for the suppression of the liquor traffic among
Indians.” But what is a title among friends? And the commission was
a splendid gratuity, carrying no extra compensation, whereas the
employee so acting, in a true missionary spirit, simply risked his life.
Few men care for this work, and fewer are zealous at it. Those who
came into the regular Service as farmers or stockmen did not relish
finding themselves drafted as policemen. It is dangerous work
among such Indians as the Navajo, and the man, white or Indian,
who accepts this duty expects assurance of consideration and
backing should anything unpleasant occur. And in time they all heard
of the Walter Runke case, plus the charming experiences of that
Agent’s faithful subordinates.
Several times my white deputies, aided by Indian police, made

arrests in camps in the wee sma’ hours, and had their prisoners
taken from them. Several times they managed to deliver prisoners at
the Agency, and the apology of a guardhouse failed to retain them.
After I had the window-bars reënforced and the door double-grated,
and chained a few worthies to the wall, the effect of punishment
slightly improved. But I could do this only after having procured the
guilty ones, and the hunting of them was becoming more and more
dangerous. One night, between the hours of ten and two, I searched
a number of Navajo camps in the north, seeking an escaped
prisoner. This was probably a hazardous proceeding, for the
innocent Indians felt aggrieved at the invasion of their privacy, and
the guilty had the pleasure of outwitting me—a very easy
performance.
When next a dance was advertised, I assembled the Indian police,

the judges, and a dozen of the influential head-men or chiefs of the
tribe. I counseled them all to [301]assist in this campaign against
liquor, which was ruining their young men; and this they promised to
do. Especially were the older chiefs earnest about it. They did not
wish the tribe to suffer discredit, with the strong probability of a few
murders to boot. About twenty men departed to the place of the
dance, all pledged to exert their very best grade of moral suasion,
fatherly counsel, and peaceful penetration.
Two days later a squad of indignant head-men assembled in my

office. They were evidently angry about something; and the
spokesman talked plainly.
“We have failed,” he said. “After midnight the drunkards began to

appear, and dance and shout and annoy decent people. Several
were arrested by the police, but they were supported by others, and
the police could do nothing without fear of hurting someone. Then
we old men undertook to shame them. They rose against us all, and
drove us headlong from the camp—police, judges, chiefs. This
matter places us in a shameful position before our people. We want
you to write to Washington for soldiers. They have sent soldiers here
before, and they can do so again. We need them. You tell
Washington that.”
But just at that time Washington had its hands full of typewriters,
holding the Germans to strict accountability on paper; and one Villa
was scouting along the Border.
My remaining hope was to trap the smugglers before they reached

the scene of disposal. And following this method, it came about that
One-eyed Dan and his partner, hailing from the Fort Defiance district,
were arrested as they traveled north on my reservation. They had a
trunk loaded with the most diabolical booze. It was in [302]standard
bottles, with all seals intact; but the bottoms had been plugged by an
electric process, and the good stuff replaced with a concoction that
suggested Battle-axe tobacco in a solution of nitric acid. Two drinks
of this would cause a jack rabbit to assault a bobcat. And for this
enthusiasm Navajo Indians would cheerfully pay thirty-five dollars
the quart.
We lost little time in questioning these fellows. The Federal Court

was in session at Prescott, Arizona. One-eyed Dan et al., arrested at
noon, were delivered at the Agency by two o’clock; and by three,
autos were rolling with these gentry and witnesses and the evidence,
toward the railroad. We would catch the night train, and make a swift
job of it; one day peddling in the empire, the next in court and ready
for sentence. Dan and his compadre were made comfortable in a
back seat, handcuffed, and shackled together. A Navajo will not
hesitate to leap from a car if free, and then it is either let him go or
wing him. It doesn’t pay to wing him.
But we were delayed. One cannot make an average twenty miles per
hour through that country, and it was close to six o’clock when we
reached the Indian Wells trading-post, just across the reservation
line. All through that district the Navajo are settled upon alternate
sections of land governed by the Leupp Indian Agency, and it is not
“reservation” of a solid block. The intervening sections are “railroad
lands,” bonus grants for building what is now the Santa Fe system.
In this fashion the Government gave the first railway a very large part
of the Southwest, a seemingly unimportant and nonproductive
country at that time, and one could find Santa Fe titles forty miles
either side of its tracks. The Indians knew nothing of these paper
records, and roamed indiscriminately [303]with their camps and
sheep, wrangling about water with range cattlemen who had leased
from the railroad, viewing with suspicion those few men who bought
outright; and Washington found it—still finds it—“a very perplexing
question.”
The trading-post was closed, its owner at supper. But sitting on the
stone doorstep was a dejected Navajo who appeared to have had a
desperate and losing battle. His head, face, and shirt were covered
with blood, some of which had dried; and some of the fresh he was
still trying to staunch. Just then the trader appeared.
“Glad you arrived,” he said, seeming relieved. “I was wondering what

to do about this. I saw the whole affair. This man fought with two
Navajo off there in the flat. They were through here several days
ago, going to the railroad for liquor. Seems that they got back with it
all right, and wouldn’t give this chap his share. Anyway, they fought it
out, beating him over the head with their forty-fives. I’ve been
washing his scalp this last half-hour.”
He could give the names of the two, and the location of their home
camp.
“Just back in the hills,” he said, waving. “Not more than two miles at
most. They ought to be cinched.”
“It’s not my jurisdiction,” I said. “Their Agent is fifty miles away, and
one hundred miles roundabout the railroad.”
“Time he gets here,” said the trader, “booze and all will be gone, and
may be another scrap or two; like as not, murder done.”
“Have they been gathering for a sing?” I asked.
“No, nothing scheduled like that. They’re running north into your
country, peddling a little along the way.” [304]
Now it looked as if someone should do something without waiting for

telegrams and a handful of printed tracts. I had One-eyed Dan
already in hand, and three “special deputies” to assist in the capture
of those who had trimmed the fellow on the doorstep. The injured
man agreed to identify and to appear against them. We would bag
the whole outfit, and stand four in court next day. The trail was warm,
and the Leupp Agent could not hope to arrive before the next
afternoon. And it was only two miles over the hill.
“We’ll have some supper, and then get those fellows, if you”
(meaning the trader) “will show the road.”
“I sure will,” he agreed.
After a meal, he led the way in his car, and we followed. Two miles
over the hill! It is true we found one deserted camp. And then we
went on and on. The orders were, silence, and lights out. The road
into the Castle Butte country is winding, over little steep-pitched hills
and down through narrow washes. When we had gone five miles,
deep night had shut down, lighted only by a misty moon that rather
obscured things in those twisted little vales and defiles. Suddenly the
trader stopped his car.
“I believe that’s one of them,” he called.
Ahead of us showed a pony. Two of the deputies jumped out and ran
forward, to find a man and a boy on the one horse. Off came the
man, and the boy too. At the car he was identified as one of the
assailants. The pony was turned loose to graze. The man joined
One-eyed Dan et al. in the rear seat, another pair of handcuffs
making the three secure in one squad.
But we had reckoned without the boy. He was about ten years old,
and these things seemed to him as mysterious, not to say alarming.
When he realized that strange [305]men had chained up his kinsman,
he raised a soul-stirring bawl to Heaven. It was no time or place for
explanations, so we gagged him with a handkerchief and prepared to
go on.
“How much farther?” I asked the guide.

“Just over the next hill.”
“Well, this speedometer says we have come seven miles.”
“From the next pitch we shall see the camp,” he assured me,
confidently.
“How many live there?”
“Two families.”
And from the next rise we could see the light of a fire.
“It looks like a larger camp than that,” I told him. “Are you sure there
is no sing going on?”
“Not a sign of it these last several days. That fire’s in the corral, just
beyond their hogans.”
“Then run all three cars fairly close to the gate of it. Keep these
prisoners in the last one, back in the shadow, and don’t make a show
of guns. I’ll go in and investigate. If you fellows hear a row, you can
then come up.”
The light of the fire grew brighter as we crept on, driving the cars as
noiselessly as possible, and one learns to do that in the Desert. The
corral was a large one, the logs set on end, and the firelight
streamed through the crevices. One could not see inside until very
close. About twenty yards from the gate or entrance we lined the
cars, throwing the headlights on that opening. It is trying to face a
brilliant auto-lamp, and those behind it have an advantage. I jumped
from the step and went quickly forward, carrying a quirt.
In a strange country and among strange Indians, a gun may prove a

dangerous weapon; but that does not prevent one from carrying a
quirt having a loaded grip. [306]
If anyone had caught the boy’s cries or had heard our approach,
there was no sign of it. Apparently there was no one to hear. The
place seemed deserted. Outside the corral, one could see only a
silent camp, untenanted, noiseless, painted by a great wave of
brilliant light. No dogs started up. It was very strange, and decidedly
unlike most Navajo camps.
At a brisk walk I went through the corral gate—to face fifty or more
husky Navajo Indians, all males, crowded together, waiting. And
each one of them eyed me as if to ask my business. They knew that
I was not their Nahtahni.
There was no going back. I would have to chance their sober or

drunken condition. I walked up to the fire, and asked, with as much
unconcern as possible to muster: “Where is Bitani Bega?”
Silence—that sullen, contemptuous silence of the suspicious Navajo

who has not come forward to greet one, and who will hide whatever
he knows behind a mask of indifferent and stolid ignorance. I looked
them over, wondering if they were all strangers to me. A colony of
my Navajo lived in the southern line and traded at the Indian Wells
post; but not a man of them could I see. Then, in all that crowd, I
sighted an educated face. One learns to distinguish between the
Navajo who has been to school and the one who has never had a
hair-cut. The former has a keener expression, a brighter cast of
countenance, though his hair may be once again uncared for. I
walked up to him, and demanded: “Where did you go to school?”
He wavered for a moment, as if to deny his knowledge of English,

and then answered: “At Leupp.”
“Why did n’t you speak up before? You know me?” [307]
“Yes,” he said. “I remember you at Leupp. I was a little boy then, and
you went away. You are superintendent up here somewhere.”
I felt easier now. But I did not care to have any one of them straggle
outside, to learn that I had three Navajo handcuffed in my car, and
one of them their own, to say nothing of a boy who had been
gagged. Just then the trader and one of my deputies, who had
waited long enough and were wondering what had happened to me,
appeared in the gateway. I told them to stop there; and, as I
expected, so long as they were there, no one of the crowd sought to
go out.
“You can interpret for me,” I said to the returned student. “I am

looking for a man named Bitani Bega, who lives in this district, and
who runs booze. He beat up another Navajo this afternoon at Indian
Wells. I want to know where he is.”
The young Navajo rattled this off to the crowd.
“Ep-ten,” they began to exclaim, in various tones, shaking their

heads, meaning that this was entirely outside their knowledge.
“Do you see that fellow here?” I called to the trader, wondering what I
should do if he did recognize him. But the trader shook his head.
At one end of the corral was a brush shelter or shed. Under it camp
equipment was scattered: harness, boxes, kegs for water-carrying,
and blanketed bundles.
“Tell them I am going to search the camp,” I said.
“Search for what?” several asked.
“For liquor,” and with no positive assurance that I would be permitted

to continue long, I went about it. It was simply a display, to keep up

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Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist

Discipline?: Toward a Critical

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Edited by Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova

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Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova

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Names: Anderson, Benjamin, editor. | Ivanova, Mirela

Copyright © 2023 International Center of Medieval Art

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List of Illustrations (vii)

Introduction: For a Critical Historiography

Part 1: How Is Byzantine Studies (Re)produced?

2 Byzantine Archaeology: Teaching the Tenth

3 Byzantium in Exile (58)

Part 2: How Is Byzantium (Re)produced?

5 The Price of Admission (83)

6 Byzantine Studies: A Field Ripe for Disruption (90)

7 Subaltern Byzantinism (98)

Part 3: How Are Byzantine Texts (Re)produced?

9 The Ethnic Process (121)

10 Publication and Citation Practices: Enclosure, Extractivism,

Part 4: How Is Byzantine Art (Re)produced?

12 From Ethnographic Illustration to Aphrodisian Magistrate:

13 Expanding and Decentering Byzantium: The Acquisition

14 Equity, Accessibility, and New Narratives for

A Collective Bibliography Toward a

I.1. Solar diagram, Handy Tables of Ptolemy (18)

In the summer of 2020, two events, at first glance unrelated, rendered

Somewhere between a mea culpa and a manifesto, this statement

In the following years, Adam Goldwyn and other Byzantinists consis-

studies mobilized its national and international committees to inter-

We thank everyone who participated in the webinar (some forty col-

Supremacists,” in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, ed. Michael

Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova

Byzantine studies applies a variety of humanistic disciplines (art history,

and extraction—are distinctive. It is the job of a systematic critical his-

Orientalism and Nationalism

studies cannot possibly be a colonialist discipline. Second: nationalism,

In bringing the concept of colonialism to bear on the historiogra-

which colonial rulers convince themselves of their own cultural suprem-

Accordingly, we do not seek to dismiss the role of nationalism in

Empire and Discipline, Colonizer and Colonized

To these instances of direct colonial rule, we may add less direct

since it is “fictionalized as a politically unintelligible time, because it

monarchy; Britain’s maritime empire (he believed) was immune to any

the material remains of such cultures are displayed as testaments to

Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature

Zeynep Olgun discuss in this volume, other hegemonic frameworks can

Race Before Modernity

In its broadest outlines, the debate about origins pits gradual-

In this investigation, we take our cue from Stuart Hall’s concept of

Fig. I.2 The separation

For example, in the eleventh-century Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, the

In most of the representations discussed thus far, the figure of the