Walter Emil Kaegi Jr., a pathbreaking historian at the University of Chicago and Oriental Institute noted for his scholarship on the Byzantine and Roman Empires, as well as early Islam, has died.
Kaegi joined the University’s history faculty in 1965 after receiving his BA from Haverford College and PhD from Harvard University. He taught at Chicago for 52 years, retiring in 2017. His work was known for integrating a wide range of sources, and for crossing cultural and scholarly specializations. He gathered insights from military, religious, visual arts, numismatic, and other cultural perspectives. He drew from sources in many languages, as he spoke Arabic, Armenian, French, German, Greek, and Latin, and had reading knowledge of several Slavic languages.
His books included Byzantium and the Decline of Rome (1968); Byzantine Military Unrest (1981); Army, Society, and Religion in Byzantium (1982); Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (1992); Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (2003); and Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa (2010). He was co-author or editor of 22 other books, and wrote over 100 articles spanning a wide range of topics. He co-founded the Byzantine Studies Conference, edited the journal Byzantinische Forschungen, was president of the US National Committee for Byzantine Studies, and was a voting member of the Oriental Institute. He taught and mentored three generations of historians.
In 2017 his students and fellow scholars collaborated on a book celebrating Kaegi’s work, entitled Radical Traditionalism: The Influence of Walter Kaegi in Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies.
Kaegi’s early career focused on the Byzantine and Roman Empires, and how they coped with the challenges of decline. After learning Arabic in his early 40s, Kaegi gained new insights from Arabic language sources. This led him in a new scholarly direction, as he focused the latter part of his career on the expansion of early Islam, especially into North Africa at the expense of the Byzantine Empire.
Kaegi traveled widely. He was proud of having visited all of the Roman Empire’s more than 100 provinces, checking off the final destination—Benghazi province in Libya—during a very brief interval of peace in 2013. He lived for extended periods in every Middle Eastern country west of the Persian Gulf states, with lengthy scholarly stays in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. He and his family lived in Paris, France, in 1978–79. Late in his career he developed an interest in China, living for a period in Taiwan, teaching at the Fu Jen Catholic University about the decline of empires.
He was born in New Albany, Indiana, spending most of his childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. He was drawn to history at an early age, inventing historical games with his grade school friend Hunter S. Thompson, who later became a noted journalist. The two worked as boys on their self-published newspaper, The Southern Star, and shared a lively correspondence about military history into adulthood. By elementary school, Kaegi knew that he wanted to be a historian; by the end of high school he had decided he wanted to focus on the Byzantine Empire. He was proud to be commissioned a Kentucky Colonel by Governor Andy Beshear in 2021.
At home, Kaegi was a lifelong collector of coins, stamps, and books. He was an avid gardener, frequently seen tending his front yard by passers-by on Greenwood Avenue in Hyde Park. Generations of pets were particularly drawn to him, usually while he consumed a heavy diet of newspapers and TV news shows. He and his wife Louise both loved American folk music, and he enjoyed attending performances by Louise’s band (The Windy City Jammers). He was the Kaegi family’s genealogist and archivist, sustaining connections with relatives in his family’s home countries of Switzerland and Germany. Raised a Presbyterian, he converted to the Catholic Church later in life, in 2004.
Kaegi’s wife, Louise, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia and they met through their shared interest in the Middle East. They lived for two years during sabbaticals in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Louise passed away in 2018.
Kaegi is predeceased by his brothers Richard and George, and survived by his sons, Fritz (Rebecca) and Chris; his three grandchildren; and his sister Karen Kaegi Dean (Tom), of Indianapolis.
A memorial will be held on March 26 at 10am at St Thomas the Apostle Church, 5472 South Kimbark, in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Questions and arrangements can be made through Cage Memorial in South Shore. He will be laid to rest in a private ceremony at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.