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    Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History Archived Message

    Posted by t on July 2, 2023, 8:13 pm

    I find Byzantium culture and history fascinating. Hence this post. Crusaders and the Frankish Roman Empire have some hard questions to answer for destroying it.

    https://www.unz.com/article/byzantine-revisionism-unlocks-world-history/

    I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:

    At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.[1]

    The same author informs you that, in 1018, the same Basileios (or Basil) II was “the most powerful and victorious ruler in the Christian world,”[2] reigning from a city whose walls could contain the ten biggest cities in Western Europe. Vladimir the Great (980-1015), whom the Russians consider the founder and patron saint of their nation, wedded Basil’s sister, adopted his faith, and built a Church of Hagia Sophia in Kiev. The young German emperor Otto III (996-1002), himself half-Byzantine by his mother, was about to marry Basil’s niece when he died at the age of 21. Everything in the Ottonian court was modeled after Byzantium, with their title kaiser borrowed not from the Latin caesar, but from the Greek form kaisar.

    At this point you may start to wonder if you have not accidentally stumbled into an alternate history. At least you suspect that you have been missing something in your “medieval studies,” that your picture of the “Middle Ages” has a huge hole in the middle, or, rather, that it is only a fragment of a much bigger image, the larger part of which has been torn off and thrown away. You begin to look for it in the proverbial dustbin of history. Before you know it, you are on the path of “Byzantine revisionism”.

    I didn’t think of this expression until a French article recently called me a “Byzantine revisionist”. Coming from a Catholic, it was not meant as a compliment, but I decided to earn it anyway with the present article. I will explain what “Byzantine revisionism” can possibly mean, and what is so great about it. Byzantine revisionism unlocks world history. It gives you more than a glimpse of those karmic forces that move civilizations, and it can even help you guess in what general direction the world is going. It is one of the most exciting quests for historical truth that I have engaged into. Byzantine revisionism is not just about Byzantium: it is a mirror for the West to know itself. And I don’t mean a mirror for White man to hate himself. On the contrary, I will argue that it is a path of repentance for what White man did to himself, under the influence of an evil, deceitful and divisive god. It is a path to self-healing, renewed pride, and invigorating hope.

    The name that first comes up if you Google “Byzantine revisionism” is Anthony Kaldellis, a Greek-born American professor who has brought new insights into the field, and made it attractive to hundreds of students. The quote above is taken from one of his books. I have read most of them and consider his reputation well deserved (see the list of his publications and videos on kaldellispublications.weebly.com).

    I started reading about Byzantium about ten years ago. My first introduction was through the works of the British historian Steven Runciman (1903-2000), starting with his massive History of the Crusades (1951). Runciman had a talent for telling the story of Byzantium with accuracy, insight, and empathy, while Kaldellis is more into theories about Byzantium. With a prior training in hard sciences, he knows the difference between proving a point and just illustrating it. And he can tell a faulty argument when he sees one. This article is, in part, a review of Kaldellis’s major books, about Byzantine civilization. But I will use his material as a springboard to ascent to a higher viewpoint on the relationship between the West and the East, and the nature of Western civilization. In the last section, I will point to some incompleteness in Kaldellis’s Byzantine revisionism and push it into unexplored territory.

    The End of the “Middle Ages”
    Byzantine revisionism starts by putting Constantinople back on the map. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was by far the largest city in the Christian world. According to Runciman, its population reached one million in the twelfth century, counting the suburbs.[3] Its wealth deeply impressed all newcomers. In the twelfth-century French roman Partonopeu de Blois, Constantinople is the name of Paradise, a city of gold, ivory and precious stones. Robert de Clari, who was among the crusaders who sacked it in 1204, marveled: “Since the creation of this world, such great wealth had neither been seen nor conquered.”[4] Up to that point, Constantinople was the greatest international trade center, linking China, India, Arabia, Europe and Africa.

    Constantinople must also be restored to its proper place in the timeline. Anthony Kaldellis writes:

    Byzantine civilization began when there were still some people who could read and write in Egyptian hieroglyphics; the oracle of Delphi and the Olympic games were still in existence; and the main god of worship in the east was Zeus. When Byzantium ended, the world had cannons and printing presses, and some people who witnessed the fall of Constantinople in 1453 lived to hear about Columbus’s journey to the New World. Chronologically, Byzantium spans the entire arc from antiquity to the early modern period, and its story is intertwined with that of all the major players in world history on this side of the Indus river.[5]

    From that perspective, the “Middle Ages” appears as a cover for what should be properly called the “Byzantine Age”.

    The medieval world is a fuzzy construct in both time and space and it is never clear whether a particular society belongs to it properly. But Byzantium, the primary referent in the field of Byzantine Studies is by contrast extremely easy to identify. There is no ambiguity or chronological fuzziness here: the field is defined by the history of a particular state, which one can always spot in the evidence, and that state harboured a Greek-speaking Roman and Orthodox society that had a distinctive national culture.[6]

    If the term “Middle Ages” coined in the Renaissance is “inherently problematic” when one takes Byzantium into account, Kaldellis says, the more recent invention of “Late Antiquity” just added to the confusion: “late antiquity drove a wedge between Byzantium and its ancient roots.” It also “appropriated for itself major areas of Byzantine innovation that had world impact, such as the creation of most aspects of post-Constantinian Christianity, including its doctrines, literatures, churches, councils, canons, and institutional structures. Most of this was created in the east by Greek-speaking Christian Romans, i.e., by Byzantines.”[7]

    Byzantium doesn’t fit well in our picture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, because those categories were created to marginalize Byzantium. We have been taught that Byzantium was the left-over of the fallen Roman empire, slowly declining into insignificance. A decline lasting 1,123 years! Think about it! The reality is that Byzantium was the Roman Empire until the West, having seceded from it, erased it from history. “Byzantium in the tenth century resembled the Roman empire of the fourth century more than it resembled any contemporary western medieval state.”[8]
    Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages are therefore provincial constructs that are irrelevant from a Byzantine perspective — as they are, of course, from a Eurasian perspective (what does “China in the Middle Ages”, or “India in the Middle Ages” mean?).

    Even our Western notion of “medieval Christianity” is seriously biased, Kaldellis argues: “‘medieval Christianity’ is understood to be of western and central Europe, even though the majority of Christians during the medieval period lived in the east, in the Slavic, Byzantine, and Muslim-ruled lands, and farther east than that too.”[9]
    Not to mention that, until the 8th century, the bishop of Rome was appointed by Constantinople.

    Byzantine revisionism also means getting the Byzantine side of the story of its long struggle with the West, acknowledging that the victor’s narrative is deceptive, as it always is. We have been told that the crusades were the generous response of the West to the Byzantines’ plea for help. And if, by some historian’s indiscretion, we hear about the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204, he at least explains that “the Venetians made them do it”, or that it was a regrettable case of friendly fire caused by the fog of war. Byzantine revisionism clears that fog away. “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade,” wrote Steven Runciman.[10]

    It is hard to exaggerate the harm done to European civilisation by the sack of Constantinople. The treasures of the City, the books and works of art preserved from distant centuries, were all dispersed and most destroyed. The Empire, the great Eastern bulwark of Christendom, was broken as a power. Its highly centralised organisation was ruined. Provinces, to save themselves, were forced into devolution. The conquests of the Ottoman were made possible by the Crusaders’ crime.[11]

    Too long to copy all. Just a flavour ... etc

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