The Pope's Emperor

In the previous post I mentioned the Star Tribune article about the Byzantine emperor quoted by Pope Benedict that got him in hot water with Muslims. Here is some of that article, written by Classics professor Andrew Overman of Macalaster College:

...The emperor was Manuel Paleaologus II, who ruled from 1391 to 1425. He was the second-to-last Christian-Roman emperor.

Christian Byzantine emperors, like the pope today, carried the official titles of the old Roman emperors. They believed they carried on the true Christian traditions and defended Christendom against alien beliefs and threats. The largest and most immediate threat to late Byzantine emperors was the advance of Islam.

Byzantine Christianity was reduced to the confines of Constantinople during Manual's lifetime, with the city under siege most of that time. Any visitor to Istanbul can see the walls these emperors constructed to try to save their city and faith from the forces of Islam which, if not for the Mongols and the French, would have taken all of Europe.

Byzantine Christianity was reduced to serving Islam well before 1453, when Constantinople fell. Pope Benedict's source, it turns out, worked for a Muslim caliph. Manual was a prisoner of an Islamic colonial lord fighting with other regional Islamic forces from Greece, Serbia and the Black Sea.

Christianity appeared to be a vanishing religion. Manual was marginalized, his people reduced to service, and life was lived at the whim of those who ruled his world -- the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Manuel spent a few years in prison. He watched many of his people die trying to defend his city, and he saw many Christians convert to Islam. He lived and ruled -- if you can call it that -- surrounded by an occupying force. There was a small part of Constantinople where he was free to move. You might call it a Byzantine Green Zone. He tried in vain to get Western Christianity to come to his aid.

He spent his final years writing. He copied a form from late antiquity, a highly polemical style developed by earlier Christian writers who attacked Jews. In fact, the style was called in some places "Adversus Ioudaios," that is, "against the Jews."

In this style, the writer's opponent is usually made up, a straw man constructed to serve the author's purposes and characterized in a stereotyped and hyperbolic manner. Manuel thought what seemed to work in the 4th century against Jews might work as well in the 15th century against Muslims.