De Administrando Imperio

"In my last year at Cambridge, I wanted to do a paper on early Russia. Russia and Ukraine—as they are now—are formed by Scandinavian traders who come into contact with the near East. We think of the Vikings as being interested in heading to Newfoundland or coming out of the mists to ransack the British Isles. But the really smart, ambitious Vikings all headed down the Russian river systems into the Black Sea to trade with the East. You don’t learn about that in school. I had never learnt anything about the Byzantine Empire before, but my professor, Jonathan Shepard—who is a genius—introduced me to this world where Christianity and Islam sat side-by-side. You have the Caucasian countries which we don’t think of as being important—and yet if you ever do something wrong in the States, you’re going to hear ‘We’re looking for a Caucasian male’ over the police radio. We don’t ever think about why. “We use the word ‘Byzantine’ to mean smoke and mirrors and shady dealing, when, in fact, it’s the most single successful political entity in history.” So, there’s this world of exchange from China to the Mediterranean, from the Persian Gulf up to Scandinavia. And Western Europe was a bystander. It was completely irrelevant—not just in terms of trade but also in terms of scholarship and ideas. The Byzantine Empire lasted more than a thousand years and was multilingual, multi-ethnic and multiregional. The Byzantines managed to work out an administrative system that the European Union could actually learn quite a lot from. We use the word ‘Byzantine’ to mean smoke and mirrors and shady dealing, when, in fact, it’s the most single successful political entity in history. That revelation was fantastically exciting. The De Administrando was written not at its peak moment but in the 10th century. It’s a very complicated text. I love it because it’s a series of chapters that may or may not have been written at the same time. They have lots of gaps in them and we need to work out why. It’s a real enigma that requires difficult answers. But it has in it, for example, long sections on the routes taken by Viking traders as they came south. It records the names of the different rocks where they could smash their heads and where they would have their rests. It shows CIA-style intelligence gathering thousands of years ago and thousands of miles from Constantinople. It’s the sophistication of this world—and how the same sorts of questions are being asked: ‘How can you manage the arrival of a new threat? What benefits might they bring? How do you manage to play people off against each other to your benefit? How do you build a network of connections’? “The Byzantines managed to work out an administrative system that the European Union could actually learn quite a lot from.” It has been seen, by some scholars, as an intelligence manual to be studied and read by operatives before they went out into the field. That’s probably a little bit simplistic but it’s a fantastically rich, beautiful text. The book starts off with the emperor saying ‘This, my son, is to explain to you how the world is all connected and who everybody is.’ It’s a kind of history book and the kind of thing, probably, that we should give our children today: ‘Here’s the history of the world, this is what you need to know, here are the people who pose a threat and I’ll explain to you why. I can’t necessarily tell you how to deal with them but here are a set of answers that you can give in a series of set circumstances.’ It’s a text I first came across 25 years ago. It’s like my laptop and my iTunes folder, something that I cherish. I love picking it up and looking at it. There’s a sense of humour going through it too. It’s the introductory text for anybody studying the Byzantine Empire and yet no one has ever heard of it. Constantine VII is called ‘Porphyrogenitus’ which means ‘born in the purple’. If you were the son or daughter of a ruling emperor, you were born in a purple marble chamber. You were extra important if you weren’t just heir to the throne, but your father was the emperor before you and was ruling at the time."