Finley inherited Gibbon's research on the history of Byzantium.
Finley's original history was based on the Greek Revolution, but in order to clarify the history of modern Greece, Finley turned to the history of Byzantium.
In Finley's writing, law and economics are described in detail, which is inseparable from Finley's own position on Greek national independence, and Finley's attempt to find historical legitimacy for the actual Greek national struggle and social reform through the protection of the poor classes by imperial law.
However, Finley's research center was still Greek history, and the real pioneer of modern Byzantine history was Bury.
Finley regarded the Eastern Roman Empire as the only orthodoxy that existed at that time, and Bury made this position clear in his revised History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Burry's writing on the late Roman Empire shattered the previous academic perception that the Eastern Roman Empire was a decaying empire.
Unlike past academic positions that the Roman Empire was primarily morally broken, Bury argues that the reduction of intellectual obedience to authority and innovation in the Roman Empire is the root of its demise, thus attributing the cause of its demise to a deeper rigidity in the social structure.
At the same time, Bury concluded that the Germanic invasion was overstated through a large number of facts, and argued that the changes in the empire since the 4th century AD, such as the policy of partitioning east and west, did not cause chaos and violence in the vast territory.
Thus, Bury begins his narrative of the late Roman Empire in 395 AD.
Bury's research attempts to jump out of the limitations of writing that basically focuses on the "decline" and "death" of the Roman Empire, and intends to recreate a more complete empire, so it provides a detailed description of the empire's provincial administration and court politics.
At the same time, Bury took the relationship between the stability of Byzantine politics and religious thought, and he believed that when ideas entered rigidity, the development of the country would face a crisis, and only by constantly innovating ideas and breaking the shackles of authority could the country's continuous prosperity and stability be continuously achieved.
Bury earned him a reputation and standing in academia for his Byzantine historiography, and his History of the Late Roman Empire and History of the Eastern Roman Empire are important works in this field of research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he even called Bury the most valuable scholar of historical chronicles at Trinity College Dublin.
Constantinos Amantos, a famous scholar of Byzantine history, wrote to William Miller that Bury was the third of the three British scholars of Byzantine history in chronological order, and he had a more objective position and a broader perspective than his predecessors Gibbon and Finley; His examination of political events is more sober and comprehensive, so he is always able to evaluate historical facts fairly.
In my opinion, as a historian, he was superior to the other two great predecessors.
In Britain, many scholars have also inherited the research on the history of the late Roman Empire that Bury inherited from Finley.
A.H.M. Jones, a prominent British Marxist historian of the 60th century, drew inspiration from Bury to re-examine the social formation, political economy, culture and religion of the late Roman Empire in 1964, published Late Roman Empire: 284-602 AD, focusing on the achievements rather than mistakes of the empire.
Jones' historical writing represents the collapse of the historical view of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire since Gibbon, and her comprehensive study of Roman Imperial society since the 3rd century presents a new picture of Roman society.
As the only student of Bury, the famous medieval historian Sir James Cochran Steven Runciman, who was also influenced by Bury, re-examined the historical fact of the Crusades, and made a comprehensive and in-depth comparison between the Byzantine Empire and Muslim society in the context of the Crusades, thus having a profound impact on the established understanding and popular ideas about the Crusades in academic circles.
This inspiration stems directly from Bury's critical study of the Eastern Roman Empire from the 4th to the 6th centuries with a rational attitude, as well as from Bury's theory of historical contingency.
In 1453: The Fall of Constantinople, Runciman blames the fall of the empire on the weakness of the Byzantine Empire itself, and also fully analyzes the historical contingency of the Venetian army's poor rescue.
Bibliography:
Bury,JohnBagnell,AHistoryoftheLaterRomanEmpirefromArcadiustoIrene(2vols.),London:MacmillanandCompany,1889.
