Professor Donald Nicol (original) (raw)

Donald Nicol was almost the last of the generation of British Byzantinists who were adults at the end of the Second World War. He published 16 books and some 50 articles on Byzantine history from 1200 to 1500, and the history of late Byzantium has become largely synonymous with his oeuvre.

His advice to an earnest fledgeling postgraduate was: “It can be quite fun if you don’t take it too seriously.” A Canadian professor would often direct students who found Byzantium boring to Nicol’s article The Confessions of a bogus Patriarch.

His letters sparkled. Yet it was above all in speaking, when the modulations of his voice warmed and lightened his words, that he could inspire and entertain. He spoke in formulae, but their repetition had a certain epic charm, and behind the smooth shell was a mind of deep and unresolved complexity.

The son of a Church of Scotland minister, Donald MacGillivray Nicol retained a light Scots accent throughout a life spent mainly south of the border. His passage from St Paul’s School to Pembroke College, Cambridge, was interrupted by the war years.

Being a pacifist, he served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, which took him to Greece at the end of the Nazi occupation and the outbreak of civil war. This encounter with the land of Homer at the most painful moment in its history made a deep impression on the young classicist, who proceeded from a degree in classics into a doctorate on the breakaway Byzantine state that flourished in Epiros, the region he had got to know during his war service. The decisive intellectual influence on him at Cambridge was his thesis supervisor Steven Runciman, whom Nicol imitated in his cultivation of an urbane narrative style and the espousal of Byzantium as an irresistible, tragically misunderstood lost cause.

In 1952, Nicol left Cambridge for a lectureship at University College Dublin, where he published his thesis, The Despotate of Epiros, 1204-1261, in 1957. The book received mixed reviews, but they had the positive effect of revealing the need, which Nicol also recognised from his reading of Roman history, for a proper prosopography, or “who’s who”, of the era. In 1964 a fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington gave him the chance to compile a study of the Byzantine family of Kantakouzenos, which was published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1968.

The year in Washington, followed by a year as visiting professor in Bloomington, Indiana, ended his academic isolation. He returned to Britain as senior lecturer and then reader in history at Edinburgh. From there, election was assured to the Koraes Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek at King’s College London. In that post from 1970 to 1988, he was influential in ensuring the subject’s survival during some lean years in British higher education.

In the first half of his London tenure, Nicol published the two general surveys of late Byzantine history and culture that earned him election as a Fellow of the British Academy (1981). He set up and edited the journal Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, and despite his increased administrative responsibilities, he also wrote two further substantial monographs, one on the history of the Despotate after 1261 and the other on Byzantium and Venice. During these years, Nicol was also influential in setting up the British Academy project on the prosopography of the Byzantine Empire, which was established at King’s just before he retired.

The transition from London life, which he liked, to full rural retreat near Cambridge was eased by three years spent in Athens as director of the Gennadius Library, and was marked by the production of three biographical studies — of late Byzantine noblewomen, the Emperor John VI, and the Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos.

A paternal but not naturally pedagogical mentor, Nicol consciously left his mark by the making of many books rather than the training of minds or the organisation of events. It is a difficult act to follow, not least because he told the story so well that it is easy to overlook the problems, and his smooth narrative flow makes alternative perspectives hard to imagine.

A classicist by training and for 12 years of his teaching career, Nicol was surprisingly shy of the philological nitty-gritty that his sources required. Although frequently critical, he was rarely analytical, and once said of an article that it was the only publication in which he had tried to prove something. His four years in a history department with Western medievalist colleagues did not induce him to look at Byzantium as a medieval society. However, while sticking to the Runciman line that Byzantium was different, he joined the chorus of his predecessors in the Koraes chair in debunking the efforts of modern Greek historians to claim Byzantium for a continuous Hellenic tradition.

He had strong Greek attachments, yet delighted in reminding Greeks that they were not the descendants of Pericles; he saw it as his mission to preach Byzantium to unreconstructed classicists, yet he presented Byzantine culture as completely derivative.

Having rejected the Presbyterianism and Catholicism he knew from his home lives, he did not cross over to Orthodoxy, although he clearly had deep sympathy for the spirituality of the men he studied, notably in his book on the Meteora monasteries, written while he was teaching in Dublin.

Nicol had a feeling for identity crisis, and probably his best book was Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium, in which he explored the different ways in which late Byzantine intellectuals were pulled as their world fell apart. His favourite Byzantine character was the man whose biography he charitably entitled The Reluctant Emperor: John VI Kantakouzenos, who spent his monastic retirement writing his self-justifying memoirs of a political life that had brought the Empire to ruin. A famous manuscript miniature reproduced in the book shows a double portrait of Kantakouzenos as emperor and monk, “as it were beside himself with spirituality”.

Donald Nicol married Joan Mary Campbell in 1950. She survives him along with their three sons.

Donald Nicol, Byzantine historian, was born on February 4, 1923. He died on September 25, 2003, aged 80.