Hello and welcome to the podcast Byzantium and Friends. I'm Anthony, your host, and this is a very special episode. First, it will be the last episode in what I suppose is a season of the podcast show. I'm going to take a little bit of a summer break into the early fall, as I did last year, to regroup, deal with some issues that I have to, and clear my head. It is also a very special episode because of the guest and the conversation that we have. As you will see, she is someone who's particularly adept at different media and experiments with different genres, and turned out to be a pretty spectacular guest for a podcast. More on that later. I was thinking about how to introduce today's discussion, and my thoughts turned to a hilarious science fiction novel by John Scalzi called Redshirts. This is about the crew of a spaceship that in most ways resembles the Enterprise from the TV show Star Trek, only it's not the main characters, it's the people in the lower decks, as it were.
And as they go about their posts on this ship and they do their duties, they realize that the main, the officers on the ship at certain times start to behave in very strange ways. It's almost as if they suddenly lapse into a script, and they start speaking and acting in very dramatic ways. There are dramatic pauses, all kinds of exciting things happen, people die. And the reference in the title of the book, Redshirts, is to the sort of auxiliary characters who show up in many episodes of the Star Trek series, who are there to die in the initial moments of an encounter in order to show that it is serious and that the main characters are in jeopardy. And so these crewmen realize that their lives are in danger every time, quote, the narrative takes over. And they don't know how this is happening and why. I won't give the book away, and it's a fun read. You should definitely read it. But they realize that they are essentially living in a script that's being written for a TV show, and it involves all kinds of time travel and spatial dimensions and things like this. Anyway, we don't need to get into that.
What's interesting about the storytelling aspect of the novel is the contrast between the day-to-day lives that these people live, which are normal, well, insofar as anything in literature can be normal, but, you know, within normal human parameters, and what happens when the narrative or the script takes over. This reminds me of something that happens in historical studies too. In other words, there's a way in which we as historians and scholars engage with the people of the past in their particular circumstances based on the specific information that we have about their lives. That is normally not very dramatic or exciting, that is not necessarily governed by huge abstractions, that in many ways is interchangeable with the lives of people who lived at the same time even in other cultures, on the one hand, and on the other hand, what happens when we understand certain civilizations through abstractions such as Byzantium and the Renaissance, because those abstractions are not necessarily composed of the aggregation of all the individual bits of information that we have about this, and that they are in fact abstractions that stem from a narrative about how history played out.
And specifically, this is a narrative that for those two civilizations is of Western manufacture and largely modern, and I would argue in many respects kind of 19th century. So there is a big narrative, a script if you will, about the kind of meaning of history right from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and Byzantium are characters in that narrative. They are there to represent specific kinds, sort of specific moments and clusters of values that are meaningful to the people telling the narrative of Western civilization, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. And it is in this sense that we can say that Byzantium and the Renaissance are invented categories. This is not to say that those societies didn't exist, that the people that we're talking about, whether Michael or Michelangelo, didn't exist and they didn't generally do the things that we know that they did. It's just that when we put them into the context of those civilizations and we expect them to act as standard-bearers for, you know, they're carrying these banners that make sense in a bigger story, a whole lot of distortions come in.
So if you were to do a quick response to the words Byzantium and the Renaissance, especially in the way in which they exist in the popular imagination, the short list would include certain characteristics and values and qualities and traits of those civilizations and what they mean for us, and are they, you know, deviant or are they moments of great progress for Western civilization or whatever. And you will quickly realize how those civilizations have been turned into characters in a grander narrative. So for example, I still have colleagues who assert to me confidently and, you know, without really being willing to consider exceptions, that the Byzantines never really understood the true spirit of classical Greek texts and that they read them solely for lexicographical and grammatical purposes in order to practice their ancient Greek, you know, Greek pros comp, and never really engaged with the content of those texts or grasped, you know, their meaning.
And when I hear these statements, I'm wondering, well, how can you possibly know this? In order to know this, you need to have read all of Byzantine literature, to have detected in it all instances of engagement with classical texts, to have, you know, burrowed into them deeply enough to know that they don't go very deeply and that there's nothing really here to see, folks, move along, and that you have also read all scholarship that claims that there's actually a close and serious engagement with classical texts in those, and to then have refuted that scholarship in every single instance in order to make that conclusion. And this is just impossible. It's impossible for anyone to have done this. And I know that it hasn't been done. And so I'm just left with the suspicion that that claim is just part of the narrative. It's been around since possibly the 16th century. It is very strongly asserted in Gibbon in the 18th century, and it's just been part of the, it's a staple claim that is made in connection with, quote, Byzantium.
And in this regard, Byzantium plays a role in the narrative that's like antithetical to that of the Renaissance, and the Renaissance is this contrast, right, where Italian humanists sort of rediscover the true spirit of antiquity and, you know, they revive it, and you get from there to democracy and capitalism or something like that. In this respect as well as in others, the character Byzantium stands in a kind of antithesis to the character the Renaissance, and both of them are, you know, actors on a stage where the play of Western history is being acted out. So if in our field the effort over the past generation or more has been to save the people that we study from the shadow of this big abstraction that the narrative has cast over their lives, so something similar happens in Renaissance studies, even though the polarities are there reversed, because the Renaissance is typically used as a shorthand for a good moment, and so its main characters have often been, you know, burdened with the task of always representing the ideals of humanism or you name it.
And this is also not true to their lives necessarily, and certainly not to the entirety of the societies in which they lived and all of their relationships. And so even though the phenomenon, the problem appears in its inverse form, it's still ultimately the same problem. And the idea for having a contrapuntal conversation on our two fields and the roles in which they play in the narrative formed inevitably in my mind when I saw and read my colleague at the University of Chicago, Ada Palmer's book, Inventing the Renaissance. Now it is difficult to introduce Ada briefly, and I think that most of you will form an opinion of how she thinks from the actual conversation. But let me just say that the most impressive thing about her is that she is willing to think in several genres at the same time and to experiment with media. For example, in addition to rigorous scholarship on the Renaissance and Renaissance intellectual history, she's also an award-winning author of science fiction novels.
This is in part why I was trying to find a science fiction novel to introduce this episode with that sort of hit the right themes, or at least I tried to make it seem that it does. And she's also a very innovative teacher. And some of her teaching techniques have actually been featured in the New York Times recently, specifically a mock papal election that she has students in a Renaissance class perform in full dress-up in the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago. And it sounds like a glorious experience actually for the students, also for Ada herself, I'm sure. And she talks about it in the book, Inventing the Renaissance, to get a sense of how she sets that up and what the goals are. And I just found that she's just a wonderful person in combining scholarship with a very acute awareness of the act of imagination that we're always engaged in when we're doing scholarship, and how not to let those, you know, how not to get carried away by them into sort of invented categories such as the Renaissance or Byzantium, and to kind of stay true to the very sometimes gritty reality of the people we're talking about who weren't necessarily always the bearers of such abstractions.
And I find that in our conversation, she was always engaged in these thought experiments that lay bare these kinds of assumptions that we're making in our imagination when we talk about history. It's a tremendous fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it too. As I said, this will be the last one of the season. I will see you all again in the fall at some indefinite date. I don't know yet when. Thanks also to medievalist.net for reposting these episodes. Here's my conversation with Ada. Ada, welcome to the podcast.
So, before we get started, I have to say that a number of times before class begins, I've had students discussing your classes. Ada, you're making us all look bad.
Especially in April, I assume, when they can't shut up about the election simulation. It runs 24/7, but they lose the ability to discuss anything else. Their roommates and friends all go mad hearing about nothing but popes and cardinals for a month.
And this year, you were featured in the New York Times specifically for that. Okay, you know, this is a whole other topic that we can talk about. And I'm sure the audience is now intrigued. In fact, maybe, you know, I'll put a link in the episode description.
Yeah. Oh, and I talk about that simulation in the book a bit.
Yes. And I had to pick, I had to pick the topics I wanted to focus on here because there really is so much going on in the book. By the way, a bit of background. So, when I was an undergraduate at Michigan, this is in the early 90s, I took a number of courses with Marvin Becker. I don't know.
Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah.
At the time, he was in his mid-80s. He was this very tall, gaunt, very intimidating-looking person, but was very sweet. And he would just come to class. He was virtually blind by that point. And he would just talk about the Italian Renaissance, having spent, he said, something like 40 years in the Florentine archives. And I wanted to work with him. So there is a version of history where I did Renaissance studies, but he said, 'No, I mean, I'm 80-something, I'm blind, I am not taking on students.' So I'm like, 'Well, okay.' And there were also a bunch of people at Michigan who worked on late antiquity and Byzantium. And so I kind of drifted into that area. All right. So I've always kept the, I sort of sideways glances at what's going on in Renaissance. So I was very excited to read your book. And I was intrigued by the title, of course, because as it happens, my field is going through its own invention phase, and I'm actually going to publish a book next year which I would have called Invention of Byzantium had it not been for the fact that there already is a book with that title. So, okay.
So let's talk a little bit first about what it means to say that something like the Renaissance or Byzantium is invented. I mean, most people think that these are just things that just happened, that they existed, right? So what do you mean when you say the invention of the Renaissance?
I mean, it's easier to describe it for Renaissance and Byzantium because the short tell is if you ask people when the Renaissance begins and when it ends, and you ask them for actual dates, you get chaos, right? You know, there are some events that we can say definitely happened in a year, like the French Revolution. We can all point at some years and agree that this was a thing, it occurred. We may disagree about how many phases it had and exactly when the first tremors are, etc. But, you know, if it said, if 1789, we all agree a thing was happening in France, right? But if I go out of my office door and I turn right and I head down to the English department and I ask them, 'When is the Renaissance?' I'll say, 'Well, the Renaissance is Shakespeare, so it's coming to its peak in 1600 with the debut of Hamlet, and it's really getting going by 1550, you know, just the beginning of the peak of the Renaissance. And before that is just mostly medieval.' But if I turn left down the same hallway and I go to the Renaissance people in, or just anybody in the Romance Languages Department, and I talk to the Italianists and I say, 'When is the Renaissance?' 'Oh, well, the Renaissance is Dante. So, you know, it's getting going at about 1250, and it's, you know, approaching its peak in the late 1300s. So the pinnacle of it is 1400 to 1415, and then it sort of tapers off, and it's definitely ending by the 1510s, you know.' So the Renaissance is over at one end of the hallway when Shakespeare's grandparents haven't been born yet,
for it to come to a peak at the other end of the hallway. So that tells you that this isn't very real, right? That this is a construction and a name that people have made for a very amorphous thing, much more amorphous than Byzantium, where there's a city that has a name that gives its name to a sphere of power around it, and there is an end date, you know, that we can look at as a climax. So in important ways, Byzantium is much more real than the Renaissance, but the Renaissance is invented around the idea that there is some transitional period when something started that made humans be different and made the human condition be different. That began a transformation which moved us from medieval to modern, and that something came in in this zone that changed stuff, that made us become the modern people we are now. So it's not actually about the Renaissance, it's about modernity and how you define modernity. And there are lots of different theories about, you know, what specific thing comes in. And as you know, in the book, I call this an X factor, right? That people will say this began and this sparked the change, and therefore this defines modernity.
You know, one of the popular theories will be that it's rational, secular thought, sort of proto-scientific movements and rejection of superstition, and it comes in and it awakens the mind that was sleepy before, and then science and stuff begin, and then that's what gets momentum going toward modernity. Another theory that you get is that it's the beginning of national identity and nation formation and the articulation of the nation-state and the sort of advent of modern nation-state politics and the birth of nationalism that shapes what changes. There's another theory that it's banking and the invention of new ways of lending money at interest and exchanging currencies that enable the acceleration of trade, that make the first major exchange of commodities. And now instead of processing your wool at home, England is exporting its wool to Italy and then processing it there and back, and the beginning of a sort of a current of international exchange parallel to what ancient Rome had, but that the Middle Ages had less of, and that therefore it's capitalism being born that is what makes the Renaissance happen.
And you'll notice that each of these popular X factors can be turned into a claim that some political movement or social movement is the correct current of modernity, right? So the theory that the Renaissance is caused by banking and proto-capitalism is big during the Cold War because you can use it to write a New York Times op-ed that says the West and our capitalist mode is the continuation of all the noble, wonderful things of the Renaissance, and the bad, no-good communal dark ages are what the communists are doing, right? So that you can use these X factors, not the historian, but the journalist who reads the book and is like, 'I'm going to write something for the journalistic audience,' will transform this into a celebration of something that someone is claiming defines modernity. And this is really politically useful, right? You can use it propagandistically to say my movement, my ideology, my political party, my candidate, my bank, my investment program, my startup company is going to do the thing that continues what caused the Renaissance, and whatever my rivals are doing is similar to the dark ages.
And this is such a perennially useful framing for power and profit that no matter how many times historians come and say, 'Actually, it's not very modern at all,' and if you were there, you would be like, 'This is totally not modern. This is not similar to anything we're doing. These people are weirdos.' Nobody wants that to be true. Everybody wants there to have been a golden age because it's very narratively satisfying and propagandistically useful. And so the whole lie that there was a dark age and a golden age, which is a lie. And every historian will tell you that there's not a dark age and there's not a golden age, that these are eras that have complicated qualities, but not one of them is better than the other one. They're just both complicated bunches of stuff that happened. But the idea of a golden age and a dark age is so narratively satisfying, right? And if I take off my historian hat for a minute and put on my sci-fi fantasy novelist hat, you know, it's so satisfying to say long ago there was a golden age with elf kings, and then there was a dark lord and a dark age, and then there was a second golden age when the tribunal of five god princes did a thing, and then there was another dark age. Like, it doesn't matter whether you're setting this in a fantasy world or in a space empire. It's very narratively satisfying for your backstory to involve there being a dark age and a golden age, because this idea of cycles of history makes sense to us. And that's why it's so hard for a historian to come into the room and say, 'By the way, there's never been any such thing ever. We made it up. Sorry, we were wrong.' Because nobody wants that. Everyone likes the narratively satisfying ability to claim a golden age and a dark age, and to be a continuation of or aspiring to another golden age,
right? So my field finds itself on the opposite end of that logic, right? Because the Byzantine Empire is what becomes decadent, right? The decadent empire, and then falls amid the jeweled and silk-filled chambers where decadence reigns, which is also made up, but is also narratively satisfying, and so therefore hard to combat. Right. It's very often the example, it's the problem to be avoided, whereas yours is the golden age to be, you know, you strive for. So here's an interesting distinction. All of these attempts to use the Renaissance in this manner, there's all of these institutions and interests are using the Renaissance in this way to make their argument, right? Ideologies as well, just, you know, capitalism is just a, it's a sort of ideology.
Yep, they all presuppose that this thing, this period, whatever it is, is good. It was a turn for the better, right, in human history.
And it seems like they might, they're all kind of drawing on a presupposition that this is a golden age.
So I get the sense sometimes, and like when I'm reading authors from your, you know, the society you study, that they also kind of thought that, or were at least trying to make the case in some ways also.
Yes, but aspirationally, right? Exactly. No, this is where you have to break it down into chunks because the real phases, when we zoom in to the Renaissance and don't pretend that 300 years is one moment, admit that it's many, is at the beginning they're like, this is the apocalypse. Everything is terrible. Everything got worse, you know, we're on fire. We need to do something. Let's imitate the ancients. And then there's a, okay, everybody, let's imitate the ancients. And then there's a, okay, we're imitating the ancients now. And it's in stage three that you get the, and therefore this is a golden age. But you get it in, you know, prefaces of books dedicated to the Duke who just conquered the city, who justify the tyranny by comparing him to Augustus Caesar. And then you get the next one, which is, are we at a golden age now? These things are good, these things are not good. What's happening? And then they get wars that are worse. And then you're a hundred years into the process of this, and you hit 1500, and you have the Calamità d'Italia, these wars that get way worse than the wars were before. And then you have Machiavelli being there like, nope, not a golden age, failed. We got to do another thing here because this is not working. All of which is, you know, again, Machiavelli is dead when Shakespeare's grandparents are about to be born. So, like, all this is the first half of what people who go all the way through Shakespeare and early 17th century would call Renaissance. But there very much is a sense of desperation, an effort to try to imitate Rome to make a golden age, then propagandistic constructions of this is definitely a golden age is the public facing, and the private facing is, are we in a golden age?
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Even as there's also the recognition of things getting worse. And you saw me quote that letter that is one of my favorite Renaissance letters, where a friend wrote to Machiavelli, who had just written a half of a history of the decade that has 1500 in the middle of it, the decade that spans 1500, and Machiavelli had written the first half, and the friend wrote and said, 'My, you must finish this history, because without a good history of this period, future generations will never believe how bad it was, and they will never forgive us for having lost so much so quickly.'
Now that is the decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and Raphael is frescoing chapels and Josquin des Prez is composing the polyphonic music that gets celebrated as the birth of the beginning of high Renaissance music. All of this is happening in a decade that for those living on the ground felt like no future era could ever believe how bad it was. And indeed, we don't believe how bad it was because what do we see is we go to the museum and there's a Michelangelo and a Raphael and a Leonardo and we say, 'Wow, this is really great stuff. They must have lived in the golden age.' But how golden the stuff is in a museum doesn't necessarily correlate to how good it felt living through it.
So when does a Renaissance acquire a normative golden age status that becomes the pool from which all of these other institutions and ideologies later, you know, lean on it?
Right, because that's 100 to 200 years after we definitely believe the Renaissance is over, right? This is an 18th and 19th century construction, and it's based on the Grand Tour, and, you know, gentlemen from Britain or from Germany or etc., as you're touring, must tour the continent, and you must go to Venice, and you must go to Florence, and then you head down to Naples, and then Constantinople to see all these glorious things and buy them and bring them back for your private collection and strip them away from the places that they were made and bring them home and prove that you are cultured because you can discuss Italian Renaissance stuff. And it's interesting to remember paradoxically that art history is an older academic discipline within the university systems than history. Right? History had been practiced as a subgenre within the field of ethics, because you study the deeds of great people to learn about greatness and the deeds of wicked people to learn about wickedness. So it was a subgenre of being an ethicist. But art history then begins as a discipline of you must understand art and aesthetics in order to be a cultured person and have good taste. And, you know, every cozy murder mystery and Sherlock Holmes short story is extremely judgy about the degree of awareness of tasteful architectural choices and tasteful decor of all of the gentlemen. If they imprudently have ugly instead of beautiful Renaissance tchotchkes in their villa, you know that they're a rotten-to-the-core person whose secrets will come out later in the story. As even Holmes, who Watson describes as having no knowledge of culture or literature, carries a pocket copy of Petrarch's poetry to read on the train, right? Because even somebody who is indifferent to literature would of course read Petrarch. That this is the natural activity of a gentleman is to have this culture in Italian culture, and that's an after construction, right? That is the Grand Tour centuries later going through and seeing the stuff and then imagining the golden age that must have produced the stuff by seeing the stuff as produce of a golden age and comparing it to, we're about to enter the age of world's fairs, right, and great exhibition, and thinking, given that today we would say a country must be prosperous and golden if it is producing the kinds of stuff we display on world's fairs. Logically, the world that produced the Mona Lisa and the David must have been a prosperous world, not considering the opposite, that they can also be the other thing that makes people do impressive and incredible feats, which is desperation and fear, right? And the defense mechanism, the moonshot side of what they're doing in the Renaissance gets lost.
So, I have to say, since my field has struggled for decades now to overcome many of the negative biases, right? Starting with the original sin, which is like Decline and Fall and all kinds of like, all of the negative associations and orientalism that is like my field, like we would seriously, we would sacrifice a few authors or a few provincial churches to have the kind of prestige and...
Yeah. Yeah. So what are you doing? I mean, you know, like why don't you just run with this?
Because I mean, one of the goals I had in writing Inventing the Renaissance is showing why we need historians as a culture. And one way to show that we need historians is to write histories of like, hey, here's an entire swath of people that has never had a book published about them in English. But another is to say here is the most overstudied spot that you can find that has more history books written about it than any other time and place pretty much, Renaissance Florence, if you compare it to population. There are more books about Rome, but Rome's population was way bigger. So, you know, and so it might not be the, but it's certainly one of the top four most places, right? And to say here is all the stuff we still don't know and that we've realized we're wrong about and that we're working on fixing, and why we still need new and better histories even of something of which we have 10,000 histories. Because as we evolve as people, as we improve ethically, as we improve scientifically, we learn how to ask new questions and we will ask new questions of the same material and therefore come to new conclusions and discover new things. Yeah.
And you saw how all the way through it, one of the threads of Inventing the Renaissance is the, okay, you know, historians as far back as Bruni in the 1400s are inventing the idea of the Renaissance by inventing an ancient era, medieval era, current era three-part division. Other historians of the Renaissance are continuing this. Then the 18th and 19th century historians and then the early 20th century historians including my dissertation advisor's dissertation advisor and then my advisor and then me and my colleagues and my students. And so just as there are anecdotes about Petrarch's life and Machiavelli's life, there are anecdotes about my life and my experiences at conferences and what my students are doing showing that the process of inventing the Renaissance is an ongoing and rich and dynamic process that has been going on for 450 years and is going to continue to yield rich fruits even as it continues for another century, two centuries. The act of making meaning and interpretation out of the past is continually rich. And one of my hopes is that by demonstrating this with a topic a lot of people find sexy, the Renaissance, they'll be also open-minded to understanding why we constantly come up with new histories of Ireland and new histories of Africa and new histories of bits of America, that the constant process of improving the questions we ask even of the same material in addition to bringing in new material is vital.
Yeah. Because you know one of the flip sides of creating a golden age is that it then becomes a yardstick, you know, also by which other civilizations are measured. And yeah, so there's a distortion that this inflicts on the people you study. But it's also a distortion that is inflicted on people you may not even have heard of, whose literature, whose engagement with the classics, whose architecture is always being held up to, yeah, you know, it's good for their, you know, for their time, but it's not quite like the Renaissance. And you know, like in my field in particular, we're always having to say in advance, no Renaissance was needed here. They had never lost touch with ancient Greek texts. They didn't need to rediscover anything. The rhetorical culture was always, you know, trying to recreate that level of, you know, in your field it would be latinity, in mine it would be Hellenism, and they were actually pretty good at it. And so like, you know, it never occurred to them, oh, you know, we're so terrible that we need to...
But it's part of how my students are always imagining that when we say the rediscovery of the classics, we mean Indiana Jones is breaking open a tomb and pulling the dusty tome out of the coffin of the crusader knight. Right?
And when I say no, actually the texts were just in libraries in Constantinople.
What you needed was a cultural movement that made people bother to go there and ask to learn Greek and read them and copy them and bring them back.
Yes. The ones, the ones in Switzerland, the ones all over. Right. They could have done this at any time. There's no technology.
Yeah. They just decided this was the moment that had a cultural demand for change and therefore it reaches out. And I use the moonshot comparison very deliberately, right? There's a moment that comes in, Petrarch is the most famous articulator of it, when Italy is feeling extremely vulnerable. These northern Italian city republics which are really wealthy because of banking and so they have literal piles of gold in the basement of their rich merchant families and they have tiny populations because they have no big kingdoms around them, right? They have small territory so they only have tiny armies or they can hire mercenary armies, but mercenary armies aren't reliable and also all these cities hate their neighbors because they're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and the Montagues want to kill the Capulet and vice versa. So if an army marches in to get you, all of your neighbors will be like, 'Yeah, burn them. No one will come help you.' Right? And this is happening. And so they're watching these cities get sacked or overthrown or taken from inside by a coup or from outside when a successful mercenary commander gets to middle age and wants to retire and then picks out on the map like choosing breakfast cereal from the shelf which city he wants to take over, make himself duke of as he retires. Right? And this sense of apocalyptic danger to which no military solution is available makes them reach for the culture solution and say, 'What if we can reconstruct the methods that made ancient Rome stable and reliable and having rulers that were willing to self-sacrifice for the state instead of as soon as Romeo knifes somebody in the street, his dad immediately demands there be no meaningful consequences for this deed.' Right? The comparison between living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and reading about the Roman Brutus who when his sons tried to take over Rome executed his own sons was, you know, this is what we need. We need to do that and become like that in our moment of crisis. And that's when they spend money on sending the boats to Constantinople and trying to learn these things and bring them back because they felt like they needed them. And earlier in what we call the Middle Ages, they didn't feel like they needed them because they thought stuff was pretty okay.
Things were better in the Middle Ages, dark age, right? So they didn't feel they needed a revolutionary change.
Yeah. They didn't have a Renaissance because things were great. They had a Renaissance because things were terrible.
Yeah. The things they wanted from Constantinople earlier were like relics and sacred texts and those they got plenty in 1204.
Oh, they also wanted the porphyry and, yeah, you know, yeah, they knew what they wanted.
They did, but they didn't want Plato, they didn't want Homer, they did want Aristotle.
You know, the same sort of thing is happening on my end at the same time because, like around 1400, they know by that point, okay, we're not going to beat the Turks militarily, you know, we're not even going to be able to beat, you know, a few decades ago the Serbs or anything like that. And how are we going to get help from the West? Well, we'll dangle Union right in their eyes, but also we're going to use cultural power. And so we send some, we know that these Italians are now interested in Greek for some reason. And so we're going to send teachers and manuscripts. And they do that. That's the kind of soft power. And it looks like these two approaches kind of shook their hands over, you know, the Adriatic or something and they complemented each other. So, you know, this is going to sound irrelevant. I have to ask you whether you've seen the 2008 Conclave movie, the one that's about the 1458 election with...
No, I saw the recent one. Yeah.
No. So this is a Canadian-German film about the papal election of 1458 which has got Cardinal Bessarion and Isidor of Kiev.
Yeah. And has Piccolomini played by Brian Blessed no less. And it is the best and worst history film I've ever seen because they do not explain anything. They never even say who Cardinal Bessarion is.
Does he have a beard at least?
Oh yeah. Yeah. He's got the, he's good. He's got the beard. He looks Bessarion. He doesn't have the dog. But he's very Bessarion. He makes a lovely speech about the importance of defending Constantinople, right? But they do not explain anything. And here are the Orsini and Colonna fighting in the streets and they're like, 'We're not going to bother to explain this. Obviously, our audience already knows who the Orsini and Colonna are.' It's like unwatchable if you're not actually an expert in the field.
You are. It's magnificent. And it has all this foreshadowing of young Rodrigo Borgia, young Giuliano della Rovere. It's the best example I've ever seen of a totally brilliant complete failure of a film.
Okay. So, at least I won't be saying unnecessary exposition.
Yeah. Yeah. There is no exposition. It desperately needs exposition.
Okay. I think the scene explaining that Constantinople fell is probably the only exposition it ever has. Like, okay, at one point somebody brings up the French claim to the throne of Naples without explaining it, and then they just talk about it for two seconds and then they move on, and you're like, 'Yep.' Because everyone, of course, already knows about the French claim to Naples in the 1450s.
Okay, this movie must be a playground for you. I can tell why you're okay.
It is so fun and ridiculous. But it's also a neat reflection of the way Byzantium gets talked about, and the fall of Byzantium gets talked about in the Renaissance, right? Because the Renaissance, you know, Renaissance Italians don't help, but they're constantly rhetoricking about helping Constantinople, right? And there's really a 50-year period where the humanists are writing speech after speech about how important it is to revive Constantinople, you know, and popes and kings are presenting themselves as, you know, planning to go help Constantinople, having parades and showing off all of their stuff of going. And then they meanwhile, you know, Andreas Palaiologos, emperor in exile, is literally starving to death in the streets of Rome because nobody will give him money to live, as they make so much use of the rhetorical imagining of, yes, we will restore the thing. No, we will not.
It was a great topic for speeches.
Yep. Yep. Oh. Uh-huh. So, it's really great seeing people make those speeches in the film, and you're like, you can so tell you're not going to keep this promise at all. And Bessarion is like, I can so tell you're not promising.
But it's a neat example of how it's hard telling stories about these moments of political complexity because it's hard to thread the needle between way too much exposition and oversimplification. And oversimplification is where Dark Age Golden Age is such a convenient thing to stick in, right? And so when people do a Renaissance movie and they don't want to try to explain to us the French claim to Naples and the Orsini-Colonna feud and the 15 other things, and who Cardinal Bessarion is, they're like, that's too much. What do we do? We do dark age golden age because that's easy.
Right. And I think with Byzantium they do, we do decadence and decline and fall. Mhm.
That's way easier than explaining the branches of the imperial family and why Venice sacked it, which never makes any sense because it didn't make any sense originally.
And the real history is way too baroque and twisty and also not plausible. And a golden age is plausible, and a decline and fall is plausible, and what really happened isn't plausible.
And that's one of the great challenges as a storyteller, whether you're writing fiction or non-fiction, if you're using real history, is how to make what actually happened plausible when often it really isn't.
Well, you are a great storyteller, and I was actually paying attention to this when reading your book because you use case studies and the lives of individuals here and there to illustrate and illuminate exactly that complexity. There are a lot of people in there, and they really come alive. In particular, I think you do this well, and you know, I'm sort of speaking as a reader of your book now, so I'm sort of characterizing it, but I got the sense that your characters come alive because you present the range of choices that was so, some choices we just don't have, but you kind of lay out, well, here are the kinds of choices that a person in this position might have made, and you know, some are more plausible, some are riskier, some are whatever. And I think you kind of situate them in that. And I think it's by understanding the range of choices and not by psychologizing them, which I like, I don't like it when historians do that. And the given doesn't, because we don't know what the person was thinking.
No, you do know what the five things were that they might have chosen to do. And if you're a young man growing up, do you go into the church? Do you become a mercenary? If you become a mercenary, do you work for the pope or do you work for the Duke of Milan?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, we don't know what he was thinking when he chooses pope, but we do know what the array before him is when he chooses, right? And I think that's how you understand an age, right? It's like when you know what the range of the possible was for a person in that situation. And of course, they all were in different situations, but yeah. Yeah. So, I think that's my sense at least of how you thread that needle. And I think it works, but you know, it's a long book. Um, inevitably, I just wrote a long book, too. Um, and that's the trade-off.
I kept offering to the publishers to cut it down. I was like, 'Isn't it too long?' And they were like, 'No, no, it's great. We want...' I know. This has never happened to anyone ever. I can't explain why I got the backwards Bizarro World where they were like, 'Yeah, leave it long.' And I was, 'Okay, I will.'
