Mark Whittow
Historian of the Byzantine empire whose experiences as an archaeologist informed his teaching
MARK WHITTOW, who has died in a car accident aged 60, was a historian of the Byzantine empire and Provost-elect of Oriel College, Oxford, and an inspiring tutor with an infectious enthusiasm for the past.
Ever curious, and generous with his knowledge across an unusually broad range of eras and subjects, he was an unfailing source of vitality and stimulating conversation. These qualities had perhaps their greatest impact on the undergraduates he taught, many of them as a Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford, from 1998 to 2009.
There was nothing overbearing about Whittow. Those pupils who might have found the university intimidating were carefully set at ease over good coffee and iced buns. He once listened as a nervous candidate for a place asserted that Belgium had been the belligerent in the First World War. Another student in a mock interview set out all he had learnt about ancient Antwerp. He was gently encouraged to remember on the day that the city he had studied was Antioch.
Whittow’s own research centred principally on his conviction that Byzantium – the Greek-speaking, post-roman empire ruled from modern Istanbul – was in the early Middle Ages as much an Asia-facing power as the full stop to Western Europe. Its relationship with its neighbours was the mainspring of his only book, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium 600-1025, published in 1996.
Had he not been so dedicated a teacher, Whittow would undoubtedly have written more and so been better appreciated for the originality of his intellect. Well before a more global (instead of Eurocentric) approach to history became modish, he stressed the importance of wider networks of trade and knowledge, with Byzantium at their centre.
His strength was an ability to see patterns and connections, often informed by his parallel experiences as an archaeologist in the Levant and Turkey. He was a hands-on historian, and his eye for landscape allowed Whittow to discern evidence where written proof was often scanty. In turn, this enabled him to discourse on everything from the poetry of Central Asia to bad mothering in Byzantium.
Many a student was fired with enthusiasm by working beside Whittow in a trench, even if he confided that sharp-eyed Kurdish peasants were better at spotting finds. In his last year at St Peter’s more than three-quarters of its historians took Firsts in Finals.
The son of an accountant, Mark Whittow was born in Cambridge on August 24 1957. When Mark was 10, his father died, and he was subsequently educated at Lord Wandsworth’s College, near Odiham, Hampshire, on a scholarship for children who had lost a parent. There he achieved recognition as an actor – Julian Sands was a contemporary – and for going to school with a pot of marmalade and a pepper grinder. He later became an accomplished cook, with a liking for spices.
Whittow won a further scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a First in Modern History. After hitchhiking to Turkey, and teaching himself Greek, he wrote his thesis on St Lazarus of Galesion. The 10th century ascetic dwelt atop a pillar near Ephesus for several decades, spurning the impudent suggestions of succubi. At Whittow’s wedding, his father-inlaw decorated the cake with a likeness of the saint.
He became a junior research fellow at Oriel in 1984 and later lectured at Reading and at King’s College, London. In the mid-1990s, he supervised a field project on Byzantine castles in Turkey before succeeding Henry Mayr-harting at St Peter’s.
Whittow’s instincts were those of a liberal conservative, and besides college life he cherished Oxford’s other institutions and traditions. He had been a keen beagler, and when the Bodleian Library was contemplating building storage space along the Botley Road he was able to advise that the land there was too often waterlogged, knowledge acquired from his forays with the hounds.
He perhaps enjoyed playing up to the image of the tweedy don, but he was fastidious about his turnout. On a dig his unvarying attire would be shorts, a natty pair of New & Lingwood socks and walking shoes made by Ducker’s in Oxford.
Besides travel in a battered Land Rover to places such as Transylvania, Whittow and his wife latterly shared a love of reeling. He also enjoyed opera.
In 2009 Whittow became University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies, a post based at Corpus Christi College. In recent years he had helped to make Byzantine studies a more central part of the curriculum. He had also worked successfully to elevate Oxford’s standing as a centre for postgraduate research on the period.
Faculty colleagues much appreciated his willingness to take on committee work, not least because he never sulked when a vote went against him. How highly he was regarded within Oxford became clear last November when he was elected the next Provost of Oriel. He was due to take office this coming September.
Whittow’s gift for empathy and his unfeigned interest in everyone he met were seen as the panacea that would have unified and reinvigorated Oriel in the wake of the recent “Rhodes must fall” brouhaha. At the least, in one of his characteristic turns of phrase, it would have been “a hoot and a giggle”.
He is survived by his wife Helen, whom he married in 1987, and by their son and two daughters.
Mark Whittow, born August 24 1957, died December 23 2017