Voltaire called it a “disgrace to the human mind.” His English contemporary Edward Gibbon assessed its history as “a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery.” The no-less-esteemed German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called it “a disgusting picture of imbecility.” By the late 19th century the historian W. E. H. Lecky felt safe to deem it a “universal verdict of history” that the Byzantine Empire was “without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed.”
Educated 18th- and 19th-century Europeans were hardly averse to dispensing unfavorable judgments upon the foreign peoples of the world and their histories. From the towering peaks of their own “Enlightenment,” everyone and everything else appeared to them barbarous, uncivilized and backward.
But in this case, the judgment of the leading lights of the French, English and German enlightenments was not directed at familiar targets such as far-off Indigenous people or “the Orient” but at Europeans themselves — a certain kind of European, at least. Their condescension fell on those who had the apparent misfortune of being European enough to escape the fate of the non-European world, but were not European enough to partake in the fruits of progress and civilization: the people of the Byzantine Orient.
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