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[The following is an email interview I conducted with Eileen Stephenson, author of Tales of Byzantium: A Selection of Short Stories. It’s a very enjoyable book, and a great introduction to an unjustly-neglected time period. Ms. Stephenson’s answers are very helpful for independent authors, especially those writing historical fiction.  Enjoy!–BG]tales of byzantium

Q: How did you first become interested in Medieval Byzantium?

A: It was all because of the 2-3 hours I spend commuting to the day job. I came to rely on audio books for my sanity. One Saturday at the library, searching the shelves I came upon John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium. I didn’t know much about them, and expected little. Then in the introduction, the author says that the one thing you could never say about the Byzantines is that they were boring. “Oh, really?” I thought skeptically. He was right, though, as the three bookcases I now have filled with Byzantine history will attest.

Q: The third story, “Alexiad” is about Anna Comnena writing “The Alexiad”. I liked that it focused on a woman as the central character. Can you tell me a little about women in Byzantine society?

A: Medieval women anywhere usually had few rights and less education. However, 11th and 12th century Byzantium saw literacy, even for women, become common down into the middle classes. There were women doctors – paid about half as much as the men, and expected to work twice as many hours, but still far ahead of western Europe.

The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) had three women ruling empresses. The first was Irene the Athenian, the 8th century widow of an emperor and mother of another emperor. However, her reputation is tainted by the fact that she blinded her son to take the throne. The next was Zoe in the 11th century. She was the oldest surviving child of an emperor and married three men who each took the title of emperor at their wedding. After Zoe and her last husband died, Zoe’s sister, Theodora, succeeded them and ruled alone for 19 months before dying.  

During the Comnene era, from 1081 to 1185, women frequently influenced events, starting with the heroine of the novel I’m working on, Anna Dalassena, even if they never fully ruled in their own right. There were more than a few women of that period who left their mark in history.

Q: Both Anna Comnena and Constantine VII, who features prominently in the first story, seem to have been very notable because of their writing. Do you think that history is often, as you write in the notes to “Alexiad”, “told by the writer”? And if so, to what extent do you think that their perspective skews our understanding of history?

A: History is definitely told by the writer, although often the writer is paid by the winner. I think in Anna Comnena’s case she wrote partly because, with her intelligence and education, she needed something to do in the long years of her confinement, and partly to honor her father. Anna’s brother, the Emperor John II Comnenus, was a notably modest man and kept no historian on staff to record his accomplishments, so there is little history of his reign.

A better example of writers skewing perspectives is the 6th century historian, Procopios. A courtier in Justinian I’s reign, he wrote a typically bland official history and then he wrote his Secret History, a salacious retelling of every possible mistake and ugly rumor concerning Justinian and his wife, Theodora. I’ve never looked for a copy of his official history, but his Secret History is in paperback and still quite a read. That’s the one that people remember now.

Q: What is the most challenging thing about writing historical fiction? How do you balance historical accuracy vs. well-paced narrative, if the two conflict?

A: The most challenging thing about writing historical fiction is the writing. Grasping the elements of grammar is a start, but then there’s the need for a well-crafted story holding the reader’s attention. You can’t build a sturdy house just knowing how to hammer a nail.

Balancing historical accuracy vs. the well-paced narrative can be challenging but my reading of some stars of the genre – Sharon Kay Penman, Elizabeth Chadwick, Colleen McCullough – have provided examples of how to do it. Often it means having long periods of time pass between some chapters, while other chapters occur in close time proximity.

Q: What is the number one reaction you would like readers to have to your book? Do you want them to be more interested in studying history, or do you want them gripped by the story/characters?

A: Reading historical fiction as a kid made me want to learn more about the history. With the Byzantines, it was the history that came first, and when I found little fiction about them, I knew that was what I had to write. The reaction I hope my readers have is that the story and characters so grip them that they want to learn more about the history.

Q: What other authors in the historical fiction genre influenced you?

A: Sharon Kay Penman, Elizabeth Chadwick, and Colleen McCullough would be highest on that list. Others are Bernard Cornwell, Thomas B. Costain, Philippa Gregory. I’ve been fortunate to meet other historical novelists in the Historical Novel Society and many of them have been kind enough to share their wisdom with me. It’s been a great experience.

Q: If you were to write an “alternative history” story about Byzantium, what historical event would you like to change?

A: I think most historians would wish the outcome of the Battle of Manzikert to be different. But Manzikert was just the result of forces put in play thirty years earlier when Empress Zoe chose as her third husband a frivolous spendthrift who disastrously weakened the empire. So I would probably say my alternative story would be a better husband for Zoe than Constantine IX Monomachos.

[My thanks to Ms. Stephenson for her time and very thoughtful answers.  You can get Tales of Byzantium here.]

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One of the things I like to do in my spare time is watch history videos online.  I like the ones that I can cue up and then do something else (e.g. cleaning) while listening to the narration. Audiobooks are also good for this. My first preference would be to just read about the stuff, but often I’m just too busy.

Strangely, some historical incidents–especially battles–have tons of videos made about them, and others have next to nothing.  For instance, there are plenty of documentaries about the Battle of Marathon, but almost none about the Battle of Plataea.

What I was really looking for was something in-depth on the Battle of Tours. (Which is also sometimes called the Battle of Poitiers, which is confusing, because there was another Battle of Poitiers, some 600 years later.  I know this because my friend P.M. Prescott wrote a short historical fiction story about it.)

It goes on like this.  You search on Napoleonic wars, and you can’t turn around without seeing stuff about Waterloo, but Jena, Austerlitz and even Trafalgar you have to dig to find.

Of course, there is an absolute wealth of material on World War II.  It just never ends.  I think it’s better documented even than more recent wars, especially Korea, the “forgotten war”.

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J.F.C. Fuller (Image via Wikipedia)

Recently, I have been reading a nice old set of military history books by a fellow named J.F.C. Fuller. It’s called A Military History of the Western World. I was reading it in preparation for a possible post I’ve been working on about Napoleon Bonaparte. Then I looked up Fuller, and decided that he was worth a post all by himself.

Fuller was a Major General in the British Army in the First World War.  He also came up with idea of using lights to aid with maneuvering troops at night. He was also called “Boney” for his admiration for Napoleon.

So far, this seems pretty normal for a military historian.  But then I got to the weirder bits of Fuller’s bio.  He was also really into the occult, and a follower of Aleister Crowley.  Says Wikipedia: “While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry he had entered, and won, a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s poetic works – he was apparently the only entrant to the contest.”  You can read it if you want–I tried, but it’s the most over-written, incoherent mythological babble I ever read, and I’ve read Clark Ashton Smith.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Fuller was not really the very model of a modern Major-General.  It gets worse: thanks to his influential theories on mechanized warfare, “Fuller was an honoured guest at Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday parade.”  During the war, the British government did not call him back to serve, due to his suspected Nazi sympathies.

Needless to say, after reading all this, I was a little less enthusiastic about his military history than I had been. You don’t expect to find out that the author of a rather dry history was also an occultist Nazi.  I mean, if I read a story with a character like that, I would say it was over the top. But now, I am tempted to write something with such a character as a villain.  It offers some interesting possibilities.

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Napoleon Bonaparte–shown here “avec pantalon”, thankfully. (Image via Wikipedia)

I was listening to the song “Waterloo” by Stonewall Jackson. (The country singer, not the Confederate General, who met his own Waterloo at the Battle of Chancellorsville.) The song gives “Waltzing Matilda” a run for its money in terms of lyrical quality. Witness:

Little Gen’ral–Napoleon of France– Tried to conquer the world, but lost his pants.

The point of the song is that “everybody has to meet his Waterloo”.  For some reason, the thought popped into my head that Nixon met his Waterloo at Watergate.  And then I thought about the phenomenon I have complained about before: referring to every scandal that happens along as “[whatever]-gate”. So, by that logic, shouldn’t we start referring to all crushing defeats as “[whatever]-loo”? For example:

No, you say?  That sounds stupid, you say? My point exactly.

UPDATE: In the comments, reader P.M. Prescott informs me that this actually happened.

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I watched two history documentaries yesterday. One was about Ancient Greece, and the other one was about Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow.

  1. In the Ancient Greek one, as the Persians were invading, the Greeks evacuated Athens and lured the Persians into it.  It was a bold and self-sacrificing move, but it ultimately enabled the Greeks to win and brought defeat and disgrace to the invaders.
  2. In the Napoleon one, the Russians evacuated Moscow (and burned most of the city and countryside around it) and lured the French into it. It was a bold and self-sacrificing move, but it ultimately enabled the Russians to win and brought defeat and disgrace to the invaders.

Now, I’m not saying the situations were identical.  The Greeks’ triumph was a Naval one, whereas the Russians just let nature take its course on the French army in an abandoned city with no food in wintertime. I’m just saying that you start to see the same things happening again and again in history.

You may find my blog posts boring, but when your Capital city is being invaded by the army of a Foreign Emperor, you’ll thank me.

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I was thinking today about some of the great thinkers in history, and how the vast majority of the great minds had so little access to information compared to the average person in the present day.

It’s sort of sad when you think about it.  Take any great thinker from history, and then think about the logistics required for him or her to get the level of education they received.  They had to go to school, study, get books from libraries–if they were available at all.  If you were reading and you found a word you didn’t know, you had to go find a dictionary and hope you could find it in there. Not to mention that the mundane day-to-day tasks also took longer and were more difficult.  And yet, there were people thinking deep philosophical thoughts, inventing new technologies, writing great books, founding nations, etc. etc.

Compare them to me: I have almost instantaneous access to all the recorded knowledge in human history via the internet, I can have it translated instantly if need be, and I can do it while sitting at my desk.  On paper, I should probably be more well-educated and accomplished than the entire population of the world in the 1600s.  But I’m not.  If somebody from past times came to the present, they’d be appalled by how little I’d done with the wealth of resources I have.

Suppose John Locke had been able to access the internet.  He probably would have invented the perfect system of government in 10 minutes, if he kept up his past rate of productivity. How many times over could the great economic minds have solved the U.S. economic crisis in the time I spent watching cat videos?

I feel like an under-achiever, I guess is what I’m saying.

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He explains his earlier comments:

The point about ‘Game of Thrones’… is that conscience and fear of judgement are entirely absent from the lives of all, and that this is most evident in the deeds of the most successful characters. Compare Hamlet’s self-torture over whether he can kill Claudius , when Claudius is at his prayers. Or the genuine horror of the English people at the alleged murder of the Princes in the Tower by Richard III.

Two things:

  • One, Hamlet was a fictional character written in the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.  Thus, his behavior is at best an indication of what Shakespeare thought a Prince would behave like, not what they actually did.
  • Two: okay, so the English were properly horrified. But I want to point out that Hitchens is undercutting his own point by bringing up the idea that Richard III would do that. Game of Thrones is about the medieval elite and their ruthless power grabs–just exactly like the real-life power grabs of people like Richard III, Henry II, Henry VIII and so on! He complains “conscience and fear of judgement are entirely absent… in the deeds of the most successful characters”, and yet, by his own showing, the most successful people in the actual Middle Ages were the same way! Nice guys, by most accounts, finished last in the Middle Ages.

Remember, I have no wish to defend Game of Thrones.  I’ve never seen it, and for all I know it may be the worst and most loathsome thing ever to darken a television screen.  I just have issues with Hitchens claiming that “the society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages”.

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Peter Hitchens is one of my favorite conservative writers.  I do not agree with him on very much, but he is an intelligent man, who usually analyzes political and social matters very well, even if he comes to very different conclusions than I do.

That said, sometimes he makes some pretty wacky assertions. For example, in his column today, Hitchens writes:

I am worried by the TV popularity of George R.R. Martin’s clever fantasy Game Of Thrones.

Mr Martin’s imaginary world is frighteningly cruel. The society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages, because its characters are entirely unrestrained by Christian belief. [Emphasis mine] There’s a lifeless, despised religion but nobody takes it seriously.

I fear it will make those who watch it worse people than they were before.

I never watched this show, or read the books it is based on.   Yet, I still find this statement very, very difficult to believe.  There were a lot of bad things done in the Middle Ages, and its hard to see how George R.R. Martin could have invented something crueler than any one thought to do back then.

My core disagreement with Hitchens is that “Christian belief” made the Middle Ages more restrained.  He would have been correct if he had said that people who practiced Christian teachings were more restrained–“All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword“, after all–but the fact is there have been many people throughout history who professed Christian belief without ever letting the tenets of such belief color their actions in any way.

I think it’s pretty clear there were people in the Middle Ages who were unrestrained by Christian teaching.  And I am only talking about in the places that were generally “Christian” lands–that becomes even more obvious when you consider all the non-Christians in the Middle Ages.

Is April Fools’ Day on the 6th this year? Or am I missing  something?  I wish Hitchens would have gone into more detail about what cruel acts the Christian restraint of the Middle Ages prevented, because I frankly can’t come up with much evidence for the claim.

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Because of this post and P.M. Prescott’s comments on it, I was reading again about the populists and William Jennings Bryan when I came across this page, which not only has the text of Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, but also an audio recording of Bryan himself giving excerpts from it.  The recording is from 1921, 25 years after he first gave the speech at the Democratic convention. Apparently, it was such a big hit, he gave it many times.  His performances of it are even mentioned in the book East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I recently read.

It’s funny; I’ve studied the Populists and WJB a fair amount, and considered myself pretty familiar with the Populist party and the issues of the time.  But there is something about actually hearing him speak–even if it was a recording made much later–that really brings the reality of it home to me.  Makes it seem more real, in a visceral way.  That sounds corny, but it’s true.

As for the speech itself–can you imagine a politician today giving such a speech?  It’s brilliant rhetoric, but it uses so many big words and complex concepts. I bet a lot of people would tune out.

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in the comments on the previous post, Patrick Prescott made a good point about the Populist party, and how they influenced Federal government policy.  He’s right that the Populist party’s big moment was William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, but it was first created in 1892.  They laid out the Party’s aims in something called “the Omaha Platform“.  they did not get a lot of what they wanted, but there are two major things in it that stand out (Numbers from the original):

3. “We demand a graduated income tax.”

And in the section titled “Expression of Sentiments”:

8. RESOLVED, That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people.

They would get both the income tax and the direct election of Senators. It has been about a century since both were enacted via the Sixteenth and Seventeenth amendments to the Constitution.  This would have been a few years after the Populist party had disbanded–or, perhaps more accurately, consumed by the Democratic party.

Now, granted; they didn’t get everything they wanted.  Like:

9. RESOLVED, That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.

Good luck getting rid of that.

But the point is, some of the demands of a third party composed largely of impoverished farmers were implemented 20 years later, and not merely as laws, but as Constitutional amendments.  Constitutional amendments are not easy to get.

Just as a successful small start-up company gets bought out by a larger corporation, a successful third party gets taken over by one of the major parties.  But it’s still a victory for their ideas–so what if there was no Populist party as such, if the Democrats were accomplishing what the Populists wanted? The Populists set the stage for many of the reforms made in the first half of the 20th Century.