I’m Jonathan Harris, and I am the professor of the history of Byzantium. When I first came to Royal Holloway I was appointed as lecturer of Byzantine history and that was at the very end of the last century. Before that I was at UCL. I came here because Royal Holloway received a grant from the Greek Ministry of Culture to establish a lectureship in Byzantine history. Their previous lecturer in Byzantine history, Julian Chrysostomides, had been my PhD supervisor but she retired. With funding constraints, they didn’t replace her with a Byzantine historian but a historian on Late Antiquity. So, the post of lecturer in Byzantine history collapsed but that’s when the Greek Ministry of Culture came in and said they would give a grant to revive the post. Which is how I came to be here.
Lucy: What kind of modules are you teaching here at Royal Holloway at the minute?
I’m quite unusual as I teach everything from first year to PhD. I teach a first year course on the introduction to the middle age. As you know, it teaches from the fall of the Roman empire to the Norman conquest, the black death, and the hundred years war. This is just to introduce the Middle Ages to people because they normally haven’t had the chance to learn it at school, well not at least since they were very young! Then in second and third year I teach more specialised courses and move onto more specifically Byzantine courses. It might be worth saying what Byzantium is because not all readers will know that! Effectively it is the eastern half of the Roman empire which continues after the fifth century CE when the rest of the empire is taken over by various German tribes. It carries on in the east as a Greek speaking Christian empire centred mainly on Constantinople, now Istanbul, and finally disappears in 1453. For second year, I offer a course that looks at the Byzantine empire between 641 and 1081 so takes it up to the eve of the first crusade. In third year, I have a course which looks at the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and the very last moment of Byzantine history. At masters level, I offer two modules on Byzantium and the crusades: Byzantium and the first crusade and Byzantium and the fourth Crusade. I’m also lucky enough to have two wonderful PhD students: Charlotte who is looking at late medieval crusading, and Petros who is looking at psychological warfare in Byzantium.
Lucy: You say that not many in our country really know about Byzantium, I mean I didn’t until I did your modules. So, how did you first get interested in it?
I was the same really, I sort of discovered it before I went to university but not properly. I read Robert Graves’ I Claudius which I like. But then I found another novel by him called Count Belisarius which isn’t nearly as well read or nearly as good as I Claudius. Count Belisarius is set in the reign of Justinian so I suddenly discovered that there was this part of the Roman empire that carried on. I was about 17 when I read that so I sort of knew about it. Then I went to Kings College in London and in those days, there used to be university of London lectures held at Senate House. I went to one by Donald Nicol who was then the professor of Byzantine history at Kings College. He gave a lecture on the fall of Constantinople and I was very taken by this. Then I read Steven Runciman’s Fall of Constantinople and that got me interested. In my second year, I opted to study with the person who became my PhD supervisor, Julian Chrysostomides from Royal Holloway. She offered a module on Byzantium between 527 which was the beginning of the reign of Justinian, through to the death of Basil II in 1025. In my third year, I also took her module on Byzantium Italy in the first crusade. You can see in many ways her teaching fed into mine and that’s really where I got started. I didn’t go straight onto doing postgrad after I got my degree but worked in various fields. This included antiquarian book selling and ephemera, little letters and things that people collect, and I catalogued them to be auctioned. I also taught English in Turkey for some time largely because I wanted to visit Istanbul and the Byzantine sites.
Lucy: Did you want to discuss some of the works you’ve published recently and what you’re currently researching?
Academics often do write a lot although I have to say a lot of it isn’t read by very many people. Much of it is very specialised, they go into academic journals and are probably read by five people. I’m sure those five really appreciate it but it’s very focused! All academics do a certain amount of this, but then we also write books that have slightly more traction. Some historians go down the line of having a literary agent and actually write books that sell in large numbers. I’ve never gone down that route personally as I’m not particularly interested in writing popular history. I suppose though there are a couple of my books that have had a bit more of an impact outside of academic circles. One is called Byzantium and the Crusades which is an academic book but I hoped that it would be a bit accessible and it’s currently in its third edition. It’s also just come out as an audiobook as well so I always think that is a bit of a success. The other one is called The Lost World of Byzantium which is a general history but it’s not a textbook as it does cherry pick more exciting events. That seems to plug along quite nicely and they’re doing an audiobook now. They’re very kind because they actually asked me to approve the reader so I can go on his website and hear his voice and approve it. You always do wonder of course because here is someone effectively being you!
Lucy: Did they not offer you to read it?
I think I would have refused. He has a much nicer voice. Some of these people who read audiobooks sounds as though they’re going to burst into Shakespeare and he is just a nice ordinary everyday voice so I thought yes, I liked that!
Lucy: You don’t really think about this sort of thing going on in the background.
Well, yes, the other thing I didn’t think about is as you know there is an awful lot of specialist vocabulary that most people just don’t know how to pronounce. When they were recording the Byzantium and the Crusades audiobook, they came back to me asking how to pronounce things. I had to go to a special website where the word would be written and I had to record myself speaking it to them to help the reader. That didn’t occur to me
Lucy: What are you currently looking at, I know your most recent one was the textbook for the Introduction to Byzantium. Are you working on anything at the minute?
I’ve got various irons in the fire and I mean most of us are juggling multiple things at one time. I’m editing the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and there was an Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades in 1995 edited by Jonathan Riley Smith who was actually a professor here for a long time before he moved to Cambridge. He published the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and it’s great but it’s of its time. Of the contributors there was only one female and the emphasis is very much on certain things like military history. We’re trying to widen it out a bit in the new one by having a more balanced profile of the contributors. Some of the themes are much more sensory and also looking at the Islamic and Jewish points of view while also gendering the crusades. So that’s one thing I’m doing.
I’m also doing a Byzantine sourcebook in the Crusade Texts in Translation series. Luckily there’s two of us and Georgios Chatzelis my college is doing most of the actual translating. I come along and make suggestions but he’s the one doing most of the translation work. But I’m the one editing, providing footnotes, and doing the introduction. They’re lots of little texts to supplement Anna Komnene who of course writes an account of the first crusade. But there’s lots of little texts that lots of people don’t know about that we’re making available to people.
Lucy: Are there any final points or any thoughts on why people should study Byzantine history because it’s great, although I might be a bit biased!
It is great, it will to some extent always be a less popular topic. One thing that has of course suddenly put it into the limelight was what happened early 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly people have started asking questions really about what’s the origins of this, where did this all come from? Yes, you can go back to the Tsarist period with the expansion of Russia or the communist revolution and how the leaders decided there would be separate republics and made Ukraine a separate republic within the Soviet Union. But then you can also in many ways look back to early history. The Ukrainians can argue Kiev existed long before Moscow as Moscow doesn’t get going until the 14th or 15th century. Effectively Ukraine is actually a much older society than Russia. The Russians would say that this just shows Ukraine has always been Russian because nobody talked about Ukraine and the people who lived in Kiev were called the Rus.
Of course, where Byzantium comes into it is this is where the Russians got their orthodox religion. The Byzantines chose Kiev because that is where they could get across to go down the river Dnipro and trade. It is through that interaction with Byzantine Constantinople that the people of Kiev were converted to Orthodox Christianity rather than Catholicism. That does largely feed into Russia’s slightly problematic relationship with the west. There is a strong streak in the Russia psyche that sees the west as slightly sinister, as having some kind of plot against Russia because of what happened in 1204 when the crusade sacked Constantinople. Now we’ve got the same thing again. So, it has sort of come back into the limelight with that. Sometimes I think a little more awareness of Byzantium might help people in the west understand Russia a bit more.
Thank you to Jonathan for taking to time to speak to me, if any of his modules looked interesting to you then please do get in touch with him!
Written by Lucy Ham (22-23 Editor), 3rd Year History. Issue 13 The Rise and Fall of Empires, Summer 2023
Image of Emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025) minature replica
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