Arguing It Out: Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium (Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series at Central European University, Budapest)

The author's argument starts from a kind of literature that has not so far seemed important enough to be included in this new wave of publications on the literary and intellectual culture of the day. The study contends that Byzantium deserves its place in the broader development of Europe, even as it also reaches out to the vast territories of Anatolia and the Caucasus, and to the eastern Mediterranean. The long twelfth century from the seizure of the throne by Alexius I Comnenus in 1081 to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is a period recognized as one of the most brilliant in Byzantine history in cultural terms, especially in terms of its literary production. The study focuses on the prose dialogues in Greek from this period--of very varying kinds--and on what they can tell us about the society and culture of the era when western Europe was itself developing a new culture of schools, universities, and scholars. Yet it was also one in which Byzantium felt the fateful impact of the Crusades, and which ended with the momentous sack of Constantinople in 1204. Despite revisionist attempts to play down the extent of this disaster, it was a blow from which arguably the Byzantines never fully recovered.