Byzantine Rhetoric’s Political Messaging and Narrative Tactics: The Work of Historian Florin Leonte

You probably know that today’s leaders might learn from their predecessors

…But I bet you didn’t know this: the only Byzantine emperor to visit England arrived almost 600 years before I did.

England was also where I first met Manuel II Palaiologos; I studied him closely during my Oxford Byzantine MPhil, from 1997-1999.

And, like clockwork, England also acquainted me with Manuel’s literary biographer, Dr. Florin Leonte, when in 2021 an Oxford editor suggested I review Leonte’s book.

Having met neither the emperor nor Dr. Leonte personally, I must take their past and present existences on faith, as is common enough concerning beings in time. My review was published in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Vol. 46, No. 2, October 2022), though its existence is veiled, hidden behind the paywall of Cambridge University Press.

This fact, and that publisher’s tight copyright policy, led me to approach today’s article differently. Since Dr. Leonte takes an innovative approach to Byzantine history (and as he’s just published another new book), I’ve opted for exclusive comments from the scholar himself, instead of repeating my own review.

While I can’t completely unwrite myself from existence in this way, I’ll hopefully magnify the great virtues and astounding achievements of this most eminent scholar below.

Manuel II: Master of Rhetoric

“My, Chris, that’s a blatantly obsequious rhetorical statement,” you’re probably saying. Ακριβώς! (There are no accidents, at least not in the present carefully-cultivated garden of writing).

Indeed, Leonte’s whole purpose is to understand how the well-traveled, Classically-educated Byzantine emperor adapted the Ancient Greek art of rhetoric to the real-life challenges of his own time.

Leonte’s book is Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium: Manuel II Palaiologos and Rhetoric in Purple (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). In it, he argues convincingly that Manuel II, relying on his wits, education and political pragmatism, carefully crafted rhetoric to advance his political narrative, to enhance good governance, consolidate his authority, and appease rival camps within the secular and ecclesiastical intelligentsia.

Manuel thus used rhetorical texts and speeches in his larger political communications strategy, to preserve his own authority against internal enemies and rival power structures, at a desperate time of terminal decline in the Eastern Roman Empire.

Today, most folks who’ve even heard of Manuel II know him only from Pope Benedict XVI’s ill-advised 2006 citation of the emperor’s 1391 Dialogue with a Persian. The Pope’s Regensburg Lecture sparked street protests and political denunciations in the Muslim world, as the Voice of America reported at the time.

With typical Aussie candor, The Age mocked the pontiff that week in an article entitled, “Subtle scholar, but what an inept politician.” Had Leonte’s book only been out sooner, perhaps Benedict might have avoided the communications snafu.

Ironically, it appears the Dialogue with a Persian itself was to some extent an invention of rhetoric; there was no ‘Persian’ scholar, and Manuel’s intended audience would have been fellow Orthodox Byzantines. He was seeking to better position himself vis-à-vis rival minds within his own milieu. But we should never underestimate the 21^st century’s ability to create anachronistic context for wildly colorful abreactions and consequences.

“The Dialogue with the ‘Persian,” Dr. Leonte told me in correspondence of 12 March, remains subject to “some confusion.” While there was no real-life Persian involved, it was probably not a complete fabrication either; the emperor’s interlocutor was “a real Muslim Ottoman scholar (Muterizis), with whom Manuel had a series of interviews during his stay at the Ottoman camp in Ankara in 1390-1391. Ottoman Turks were commonly referred to as Persians in Byzantine rhetoric.”

As I had suspected, the rhetorical intention of Manuel was not to anger the Muslim world, as today’s critics of him through the Pope’s iteration might have assumed. Actually, his intended audience, Leonte adds, “was most likely the Constantinopolitan court, not just the Byzantine clergy, which was familiar with the arguments against Islam. I would argue that Manuel was probably intending to present himself as a theologian in the intellectual circles of his time. “

If You Think We’re Living in Turbulent Times…

You may think that life in the post-9/11 era is unstable and filled with crises. By the time Manuel II Palaiologos arrived at the English court of Henry IV in December 1400, he had endured not only the rough crossing from Calais, but an entire lifetime of instability, turmoil and treachery.

By 1400, the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was six years into a claustrophobic Ottoman siege that would only be broken with the July 1402 Battle of Ankara, when the  forces of Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I were defeated by the Turco-Mongol forces of Timur. This event bought the Byzantine Empire a half-century reprieve, until Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

Manuel II (1350-1425) grew up amidst the turbulence of sudden system change. His empire, ultimately based on the laws, customs, languages and traditions of ancient Greece, Rome (and augmented by the Orthodox Christian heritage) was ended as a political polity barely 28 years after his own death.

The changes he witnessed were sudden, and certainly sharpened his wits. In 1370, Manuel was governing Thessaloniki, the empire’s second city. Then, his elder brother, Andronikos IV, failed to overthrow their father, John V. This led to Manuel’s unplanned announcement as co-emperor in 1373. However, even after John’s death, Manuel had to deal with Andronikos’ troublesome son, John VII. While governing Thessaloniki himself, John schemed against Manuel to take over the empire, supported by certain scholars and ecclesiasts, who saw their own holdings diminished along with the ever-reduced Byzantine territory.

Calls for crusades against the Turks in the 1390s led to a defeat (of the Hungarian King Sigismund, at Nicopolis). Thus the potential for a union of Eastern and Western churches became more urgent, but also more controversial among the Orthodox faithful. It was in this context that we see Manuel’s 1400 trip to France and England, and his (supposed) ill-will against Islam a decade earlier.

The Unique Contributions of Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium

As promised, I’ll avoid reciting my BMGS review of Leonte’s book in this space. Just o note that its value lies in its precise articulation of Manuel’s use of various modalities of voice in specific different rhetorical works (the book’s second half), and to some extent the historical context and network-based approach of the book’s first half towards Manuel’s scholarly and clerical intelligentsia, known to specialists but not to the general reader.

A further use of this book is rhetoric as supporting history, because for various reasons, few contemporaneous historiographical sources exist for Manuel’s reign. What we know of it comes from writers living the time of his son John VIII, grandson Constantine XI, or even later.

Most fundamentally, the work illuminates the way rhetoric was used in late Byzantine politics: even for those used to this term as a pejorative, something that is deeply complex and challenging to understand today, due to its multiplicity of influences, rapid-fire events, and political players from all directions- indeed, even the King of England had his meet-and-greet.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Studies from Professor Leonte

Because Byzantine Studies is a rather rarified discipline, and as much has changed in the 26 years since I began my own MPhil at Oxford, I thought it best to get the scholar’s own views on his work and the state of the discipline today. But first, as I realize everything is slightly out-of-order today, I have still to properly introduce the scholar…

Assistant Professor at Palacký University of Olomouc in the Czech Republic, Florin Leonte has taught since 2017 at the Departments of Classics and History. Previously, he taught at Harvard (2013-2015) and Central European University (2009). His many travel research postings include the major Byzantine Studies center in Washington DC, Dumbarton Oaks; Villa I Tatti Research Center, Florence; and the New Europe College in Bucharest.

“I believe that Byzantine Studies has a lot of potential to develop in the upcoming decades,” Professor Leonte told me in correspondence of 12 March. “There is still a lot of material to uncover and analyze (both textual and non-textual).”

Further, he notes the field’s remarkable diversity of approaches – something that can be attested by the kinds of cross-disciplinary and cross-civilizational academic publications of the last 20 years – in expanding on his view of future trends in Byzantine Studies.

“I think what makes Byzantium interesting as an object of study,” Leonte notes, “is its position at the crossroads of different powerful empires, influential civilizations, beliefs, or social and political forces.”

Professor Leonte confirms that his medium-term plans include further focus on Byzantine rhetoric and “the use of specific figurative devices like metaphors, similes, and even rhetorical questions.” Readers can expect a new research paper from him in the future on the use of metaphors of light in the poetry of Byzantine author John Chortasmenos, research that stems from a three-year project funded by the Czech Grant Agency, on the representation of women in late Byzantium.

Breaking News- Florin Leonte’s March 2023 New Book

Despite all this amount of work, Professor Leonte somehow found time for another monograph on Byzantine rhetoric, which was published just one week ago. This new book is Ethos, Logos, and Perspective: Studies in Late Byzantine Rhetoric (Routledge, 2023).

“The book grew out of an effort to untangle some of the long-recognized challenges associated with studying laudatory texts, including their sheer number and diversity, the difficulty of decoding their rhetoric (which is rife with stock images and vague language), and our inability to grasp the full picture of their context,” Professor Leonte tells me.

Despite the inherent difficulties of the Byzantine rhetorical canon, Leonte says, “we should place more emphasis on appreciating their unique qualities, than on lamenting the challenges they provide. The laudatory writings of this era feature a unique mix of traits.”

However, he notes, Byzantine writers “often create a setting rich with metaphors, rhetorical devices, and reinterpretations of old assumptions about time, space, or political reform. These writings, on the other hand, shed light on several aspects of Byzantine culture, such as emperors seeking political support abroad, territorial conflicts, arguments amongst friends, or even understanding urban settings.”

The new book is billed by its publisher. Routledge, as “the first comprehensive study of late Byzantine court rhetorical praise as a general phenomenon surfacing in many types of rhetorical epideictic compositions dating from the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries: panegyrics, encomia, city descriptions, encomiastic verses, or letters.”

Unlike Imperial Visions, the new book covers the works of several different authors of late Byzantium. It examines their rhetorical work from two perspectives, idealism and pragmatism, and seeks to understand how these apparently contradictory views influenced “authorial choices in matters of rhetorical style and composition.”

In this way, the book contends that not only Emperor Manuel II, but in fact all Byzantine rhetoricians, had some part to play in cultivating and steering the social, political and religious narratives that exacerbated and eased the underlying tensions of late Byzantium, stuck unpromisingly on an island between the land-hungry Turks, wealthy Venetians and Genoese, and crafty Popes looking to increase their Eastern influence.

“As is always the case in history, the story of praise is a story of continuity and change,” Professor Leonte concludes. “There are many continuities with previous forms of rhetoric but there is also an overarching change, the introduction of a new perspective that answered to a sense of urgency in the years before the Fall of Constantinople.”