Illustration: Byzantine enamel ware
Byzantium, even though for much of its life limited to the Eastern Mediterranean, had a huge influence on much of Europe, including the West. Many of the newly arrived tribes who took up residence in the provinces of the collapsed Western half of the Roman Empire, had numerous connections with Byzantium, some tenuous, others more binding. These tribes, who often saw themselves, as they still do, as the inheritors of the Roman World, even though they only ever had tenuous links with the system of empire, were to eventually incorporate the templates for the modern states of Western Europe, ranging from England and France, to the multi states of Germany and Italy. Many of the tribes and pseudo-states would have received gifts or tokens of friendship, or at least of bribery, from the then powerful empire of Byzantium with its unparalleled capital city of Constantinople. In many ways gifts were a form of Byzantium maintaining at least a tenuous balance between the many warring tribes and factions that had swamped Western Europe.
Illustration: Byzantine style capital, France.
Many of the gifts incorporated some of the particular craft skills of the empire including metal working and textiles. Silk was one of the exceptional gifts that Byzantium could bestow and this particular form of textile was much prized and handed down from generation to generation or even handed to others as significant gifts Therefore a number of the original gifts would have made their way around the different royal courts of Europe. A number still survive in various parts of the continent which gives some indication as to their perceived significance.
Apart from gifts, Byzantium also bestowed a particular style of architecture, decoration and ornamentation. This has become known as Romanesque but could equally be termed Byzantine-esque as the style owes perhaps more to the Byzantine world than it does to that of the original Roman of which it is said to derive. Romanesque painting, metalwork, textiles, glass, manuscripts, architecture and sculptural decoration could be found readily in many churches and cathedrals across Western Europe during the early medieval period when Byzantium still had a degree of influence. Although some of the finer pieces have been identified as being made by Byzantine artists and craftspeople, most would have been produced by the skills of localised craftspeople and therefore at least certain indigenous elements might well have been added to the mix.
Illustration: Byzantine style capital, Germany.
Much of the decorative work appears as undulating and intertwined leaves and plant forms. They can be found very often as border work and were applied to manuscripts, textiles often in the form of embroidered borders, and through architecture as decorative stone work borders of doors and the capitals of internal pillars. It is as ecclesiastical accessories to architecture that the Romanesque appears familiar to countless successive generations. Its visibility through decoration to fonts, pillars, capitals and door and window framing, allow us to experience some of the, admittedly second-hand splendour, that must have been Byzantium in its hey-day.
The carved stone capitals shown in this article are a representation of the wide-scale influence that Byzantium held over the young states of Western Europe. Therefore, there are capitals shown from England, France and Germany. All are significantly different from each other and all are more obviously medieval or gothic in manner than they are classical. Although Byzantium was, in every respect, the continuation of the Roman Empire, despite the fall of Rome itself, the continuation of classical decoration and ornamentation seemed somehow less significant to Byzantium than it did to Rome. There is less dependence on the classical obsession with realism and much more with the use of stylisation and symbolism. This change has perhaps more to do with the change in official religious affiliation of the Empire, from multi-pagan to Christianity. There is also the significant factor of the shift towards the east that replacing the capital from Rome to Byzantium caused.
Illustration: Byzantine style capitals. The central capital is from the Palace of Barbarossa, Gelnhausen, Germany. The outer two are from St Cross, Winchester, England.
Western Europe owes much, through architecture and decoration, to Byzantium, more so than it could ever have expected from Rome, which at Byzantium's height was little more than a large scrap store of second-hand building materials. That the full flowering of medieval European decoration sat on the foundation stones set in place by those who tried to both copy and emulate the splendour and power of Byzantium, as well as the significant and somewhat deliberate influence of Byzantium itself, says much about the complexity of the overlapping and multi-layering of cultures in general. Whatever we are led to believe by some individuals concerning the isolated uniqueness of specific cultures, this is rarely if ever the case. All cultures tend to be interlocked, and therefore owe each other significant amounts of respect, equal inclusiveness and an innate and mutual understanding, in order to be placed within the wider spectrum of a cumulative world culture.
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