Historians of the Age of Expansion

Abstract

In retrospect, the years roughly from 950 to 1050 were a Byzantine century, when Byzantium became the greatest power in the Western world and a promising subject for its historians to celebrate. Yet contemporaries often fail to see which advances or setbacks are temporary and which represent lasting change. If today we may be too ready to believe that whatever has just happened will transform the future, the Byzantines, conservative by tradition and used to a far slower pace of change than ours, were more likely to overlook the significance of new events than to exaggerate it. Of course they saw and welcomed their victories over the Arabs and the increasing quiescence of the Bulgarians after 925; but the Arabs and Bulgarians had suffered defeats before yet recovered to attack the empire, and soon they did recover under the Fatimids and the Cometopuli. Certainly the Byzantines realized that their state had become quite strong and prosperous; but it had been quite strong and prosperous for some time, and was nonetheless weaker and poorer than it had been in late antiquity, as all educated Byzantines knew. Only in the later part of the tenth century did many Byzantines begin to see that the empire’s fortunes had taken a decisive turn for the better.