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Speros Vryonis

The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Through the Fifteenth Century (Acls History E-Book Project Reprint Series) Hardcover – December 31, 1899

by Speros Jr. Vryonis (Author), Jr. Speros Vryonis (Author)

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Product details

Publisher : ACLS History E-Book Project (December 31, 1899)
Language : English
Hardcover : 564 pages
ISBN-10 : 1597401595
ISBN-13 : 978-1597401593
Item Weight : 2.12 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 1.38 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #10,089,847 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,489 in Turkey History (Books)
- #10,785 in History of Civilization & Culture
- #26,868 in Travelogues & Travel Essays

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Stefano NikolaouTop Contributor: Philosophy

The Tragic Story of the Decline and Fall of Hellenic Anatolia

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book made me cry!

The destruction of Hellenic Culture in Anatolia by the Turks is a sad story indeed. The aggression by the Turks basically destroyed the urban culture of Anatolia. Much of Anatolia became desolate and was used by nomadic Turkish tribes as grazing land. The success of the Turks was due to their 'warrior culture' not any superiority in arms, tactics or leadership. A civilised society like Byzantium was easy pickings as most people were peaceful farmers and artisans. Once the relatively small army was defeated the floodgates were opened.

What happened to the native population is a thorny issue. There was conversion and cultural assimilation but probably not as much as you'd might think. Massacres and population displacement played a greater role than Turkish historians would care to admit.

In many ways the Turkish take over of Anatolia was like the Spanish invasion of the New World!

Hellenic culture hung on in Anatolia until 1922 when Turkish Nationalists dealt it a final death blow.

Despite being Greek, Vryonis does not have an axe to grind. I found him sympathetic to the Greeks but that is to be expected. You can hardly blame them for the invasions. They are very much the victims of Turkish aggression. Vryonis has profound knowledge of the sources, Persian (the original language of Turkish administration), Greek and Turkish.

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Joseph M. Dolan

The sad decline of the Church by radical Islam in Asia Minor

Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2011

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BY any measure, the cultural transformation of Hellenistic Asia Minor -- which saw the Turkish language supplant the Greek, and most of the peninsula's Chalcedonian Christians comply with the maxim cuius regio eius religio* and become Muslims -- was a process of enormous proportions. At the beginning of the 11th century, this principal province of the Byzantine Empire was both populous and productive, and seemingly secure after surviving the Arab intrusions of the 7th-9th centuries. As possibly the most intensively Christianized region of the late ancient world, it was also religiously pre-eminent: 'a spiritual reservoir of Byzantine society', in the tight embrace of the intricately structured Orthodox Church, whose 'vast ecclesiastical bureaucracy' paralleled the civil bureaucracy of the government in Constantinople. But by the end of the 15th century, the region had been so thoroughly appropriated by Turkish invaders/settlers from Central Asia, who arrived via Khurasan after about 1040, that only a 'residue' of the Hellenistic civilization remained. This was evident in such phenomena as Byzantine agrarian practices, idiosyncrasies of domestic architecture, loan words in the language of Turkish rural life, and a 'syncretization of the old and new elements (of religion), at the lower levels of society', which manifested itself, at times, in a highly heterodox Islam.

This study, in which the author adopts the perspective of a social anthropologist, rather than of a historian, is thus an examination and analysis of 'the last great...contraction of Hellenism', which ended more than a millennium of cultural domination of West Asia by the Greeks, and returned their civilizing mission to its point of departure in the southern Balkans. This contraction, which occurred over four centuries of inscrutable chaos, broken only by the peaceful interlude of the 13th-century Seljuk-Nicaean equilibrium, is contrasted with the first great retreat of Hellenism after the rise of Islam in the 7th century. This saw 'the regions of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, disaffected (by) religious persecutions...and weakened by the disbanding of the Arab client armies, (fall) rapidly and definitively to the Arabs in less than a decade'. More comparable, in some respects, is the protracted, contemporaneous Christianization and Hispanization in Iberia, where the taqiyyah (dissimulation of belief) of the Moriscos forcibly converted to Christianity finds a parallel in the crypto-Christianity practised by some Anatolian Greek converts to Islam who came to regret their apostasy. Likewise, in both situations, the respective native languages, Arabic and Greek, were largely forgotten, though the scripts were retained, and used to write, respectively, Aljamiado and Karamanli Turkish. But on a religio-political level, the analogy breaks down, for the eventual triumph of the Turks, with the capture of Constantinople in 1453, resulted in a regularization of the position of the church, under the shari'ah , and thus in a guarantee of the survival of Christianity in the Ottoman domains, albeit in straitened circumstances, while the triumph of the Castilians, with the capitulation of Granada in 1492, meant only one thing for Islam in Spain -- eventual extirpation.

In light of the above, Vryonis propounds seven theses: (1) The Turkish invaders of Asia Minor had to subdue and absorb a vital society. Claims that the peninsula was depopulated and semi-desolate in the 11th century are not supported by primary sources. (2) The peninsula was not completely subdued and reunified until the late 15th century, when the ascendant Ottomans moved south and east from Bithynia. (3) Christian society was severely dislocated by the see-saw warfare, and its members psychologically conditioned for conversion. Nevertheless, Christians possibly constituted a majority of the population as late as the mid-13th century. (4) The Turkish conquest destroyed the Greek church as an effective social, economic and religious institution, and thus erased much of the Byzantine character of Asia Minor. (5) The cultural transformation of the Christians was consummated by their conversion to Islam under the aegis of Islamic institutions -- notably the 'latitudinarian' dervish orders, such as the Bektashis and Mawlawis -- which were materially based on the expropriated possessions of the church. (6) The loss of their world, as they knew it, resulted in much aetiological rationalization among the ever-decreasing number of Anatolian Christians. Some saw the Turks as instruments of divine wrath, or as heralds of the chiliastic end of human history. Like the 16th-century Moriscos, many anticipated a miraculous resurrection of their empire and developed several myths to support this faith. (7) Though effaced on a formal level, Byzantine culture exercised a determinant role in much of Turkish folk culture.

These theses form the basis of the seven chapters, which take the reader through the various stages of the cultural transformation of Asia Minor. But as Vryonis notes in his Preface: 'There has been no attempt to present a conventional chronological history of events. Rather, the approach has been topical.'

In Chapter 1, which describes Asia Minor on the eve of the Turkish invasions, there is a salient observation that 'the professional mercenaries who took the place of the indigenous thematic (provincial) soldiers in this period of crisis were ineffective replacements and were unable to halt the Turks'. A map of the themes would have been helpful here. Chapter 2 looks at the political and military collapse of Byzantium in Asia Minor, and claims the most significant factor was not the first Turkish incursions, but 'the violent struggle between...the civil bureaucracy in the capital and the military magnates in the provinces'. Then, as now, the Christians understood little of Islamic precept and practice. Consequently, they were unprepared for Muslim offers of peace before the battles of Manzikert (1071) and Myriocephalum (1176), both of which resulted in disastrous defeats for the Byzantine army. Vryonis shares their puzzlement, describing a further peace proposal, made as the emperor's troops were being routed at Myriocephalum, as 'incongruous with the nature of (the Sultan's) victory', and overlooking the Qur'anic call for magnanimity on the battlefield as a possible explanation for it.

In Chapter 3, the crucial role played by the nomadic Turkmen in the process of cultural transformation comes into sharper focus. These people, whose 'tribal interests and conduct were frequently inimical to those of sedentary society', were a nuisance in all 'civilized' areas. Indeed, it was the policy of the Seljuk rulers from the early days in Khurasan '(to send) the Turkmen tribes westward to raid the frontiers of the Christian states of Armenia, Georgia, and Byzantium'. In subsequent centuries, in Anatolia, they harassed the settled societies of both Muslims and Christians, with ultimately fatal consequences for the Rum Seljuk and Byzantine state structures. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the final decline of the church, and the conversion of most of the remaining Christians to Islam. Here, Vryonis cites more than 10 primary sources, both Muslim and Christian, to support his controversial contention that 'forced conversion was far from insignificant'. The folly of such 'conversion' -- indeed, the utter inutilty of it -- is fully exposed.

In Chapter 6, the Muslims' and the Christians' respective religious polemics are outlined, and placed in their psychological contexts. Then, towards the end of the final chapter, the author turns his attention to 'important Christian practices that Muslims appropriated', though presumably only at the level of the folk culture mentioned above. These included baptism, which was invested with bizarre magical powers. According to the Byzantine canon lawyer Balsamon, some Muslims believed the rite protected their children from demons, and prevented them from smelling like dogs. Others, paradoxically, believed it prevented their children from becoming Christians!

When The Decline of Medieval Hellenism was first published, in 1971, it was hailed by several reviewers as a 'monumental' work of scholarship. And the criticism of its few detractors, three of whom questioned the objectivity of the Greek author, was cogently and comprehensively countered by Vryonis in a 60-page article in The Greek Orthodox Theological Review (Vol.XXII, No 22, 1982). But for all its scrupulous reliance on primary sources, and its wealth of fascinating detail, the book has its faults: it is occasionally repetitious; it has no glossary of obscure Byzantine and Seljuk terms, and often leaves the untutored reader to guess the meaning of these from the context; it sometimes refers to Muslims as Saracens; and it contains, even in the latest edition, numerous typographical errors. (For instance, 'Keul Khan' (Page 271) should read 'Kelu Khan'.) Finally, it must be pointed out that 224 of the 253 primary sources utilized in the 2219 footnotes are quoted from the writers' original Greek, Latin, French, German, Arabic and Turkish -- a demanding range of languages for the average (or even scholarly) reader.

Alan Ireland in The Muslim World Book Review

25 people found this helpful

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Dogus Bayazit

Terrible Kindle Edition

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2013

This book's Kindle edition has obviously not been proofread by a human being. It's full of typos, nonsensical paragraph breaks, problems with spacing and a dozen of other annoying errors that you would get when you just machine-convert a pdf file and not bother to actually check the output. Even a brief glance would have made these issues obvious. I admit I should have checked Look Inside section, but this kind amateurism was absolutely something I was not expecting from a company like Amazon.

13 people found this helpful

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