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Offler posted:Yeah, the idea that the Byzantines were untrustworthy and always scheming was something the Western Europeans believed long before Gibbon. Especially during the crusades there was mutual mistrust between the Westerners and the Greeks practically right from the start. To the Greeks the Westerners were little better than crude, violent barbarians who had to be kept under close watch the entire time they were in Byzantine lands - and to the Westerners the Greeks were constantly being difficult, stingy and ungrateful to the people who had come to aid them in their hour of need. This mistrust was a major reason that the Westerners attacked and sacked Constantinople during the fourth crusade - from their point of view they had been hired to help install a Byzantine pretender to the throne, but after he was made co-emperor he basically went "sorry, we can't pay you - go away". Because saying that to a literal army camped outside your walls never goes badly. Yeah, that all comes off as very familiar brainworms of a vestigial empire whose ruling class simply cannot understand that they aren't a superpower any more. You know what I'm talking about.
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Mar 31, 2023 14:42
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Mr. Fix It posted:yah, they were romans, but i still think byzantine counts as an exonym even with a huge time gap. tho there were folk that still considered themselves romans into the 20th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnos#Modern_period I have heard there are still to this day at least some communities in Greece where Rhomaioi is considered a valid term alongside, if not preferred to, Hellene, but I have no confirmation.
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Mar 31, 2023 14:58
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In that 10th century bishop's letter, they refer to the ERE as "the Greeks". Was that shade or was that how they were generally thought of at the time
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Mar 31, 2023 15:19
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zoux posted:In that 10th century bishop's letter, they refer to the ERE as "the Greeks". Was that shade or was that how they were generally thought of at the time Both, I think. Everyone knows they hate it, but they're Greek *really*.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:27
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zoux posted:In that 10th century bishop's letter, they refer to the ERE as "the Greeks". Was that shade or was that how they were generally thought of at the time Not sure about that specific incident, but it was both. The Romans were not happy about it, there's more than one instance where an embassy to Constantinople was sent packing because they referred to them as the Greeks instead of their proper Roman titles.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:38
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Freudian posted:Both, I think. Everyone knows they hate it, but they're Greek *really*. I mean they speak greek! They live IN GREECE
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Mar 31, 2023 15:45
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zoux posted:In that 10th century bishop's letter, they refer to the ERE as "the Greeks". Was that shade or was that how they were generally thought of at the time “Generally” among whom, is the real question. To themselves and probably some other peoples on their frontiers, they would have been the Romans. for example in the Muslim world, they would have been called Rum or maybe if they meant people from Greece specifically, Yunan (=Ionians; iirc this derivation was also taken up in ancient Indian sources as “Yavana”). To people from literal Rome at this time, or people from Latin Europe who wished to consider themselves successors to Rome in some way, they would have increasingly been Greeks as distinct from Romans. This distinction had made sense to Latin literati for a long time—the 4th century historian Ammianus, from the Hellenistic near east, excused his stylistic deficiencies in Latin by writing that he was “miles quondam et graecus”, a former soldier and a Greek, although of course he was a significant officer in the Roman army and Roman in every meaningful sense. It probably seemed like hilariously sour grapes to the Greek literati of the medieval ERE though.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:47
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There's also the distinction in liturgical languages, literally Latin and Greek.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:49
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Offler posted:Yeah, the idea that the Byzantines were untrustworthy and always scheming was something the Western Europeans believed long before Gibbon. Especially during the crusades there was mutual mistrust between the Westerners and the Greeks practically right from the start. To the Greeks the Westerners were little better than crude, violent barbarians who had to be kept under close watch the entire time they were in Byzantine lands - and to the Westerners the Greeks were constantly being difficult, stingy and ungrateful to the people who had come to aid them in their hour of need. This mistrust was a major reason that the Westerners attacked and sacked Constantinople during the fourth crusade - from their point of view they had been hired to help install a Byzantine pretender to the throne, but after he was made co-emperor he basically went "sorry, we can't pay you - go away". The real schemers in the 4th crusade were the Venetians, something that only the Pope understood
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Mar 31, 2023 19:36
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Anna Komnene - the daughter of the emperor during the first crusade used both Roman and Greek to describe her people in The Alexiad. In this quote about the crusader Bohemond she uses both in the first sentence:Anna Komnene posted:Now the man was such as, to put it briefly, had never before been seen in the land of the Romans, be he either of the barbarians or of the Greeks (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying). Let me describe the barbarian's appearance more particularly – he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned and, one might say, built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus... His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk... His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the air freely; his chest corresponded to his nostrils and by his nostrils...the breadth of his chest. For by his nostrils nature had given free passage for the high spirit which bubbled up from his heart. A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible... He was so made in mind and body that both courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war. His wit was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape in every emergency. In conversation he was well informed, and the answers he gave were quite irrefutable. This man who was of such a size and such a character was inferior to the Emperor alone in fortune and eloquence and in other gifts of nature. The rest of the quote is quite interesting as well, since it almost seems like Anna has some kind of bad boy crush on Bohemond. Because she really dislikes the crude "Latins" in general, viewing them as basically barbarians. And she especially hates the Normans who had invaded the Empire just a few years earlier, which had been very costly for her father in both prestige and money. This invasion was also led by Bohemonds father, which of course meant that Bohemond himself was one of the leaders. So Anna had no shortage of reasons to dislike Bohemond, especially in this book which was literally called "The Alexiad" and was intended to document how great her father was. But even though Bohemond was a "barbarian" Norman who had led invading armies that had humiliated her beloved father by defeating him in several battles, this is how she describes him.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:13
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can't have your dad getting beaten up by some smelly weirdo, he's gotta be a witty and charming villain to be able to do so well against the might of the empire
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Mar 31, 2023 20:37
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Jazerus posted:can't have your dad getting beaten up by some smelly weirdo, he's gotta be a witty and charming villain to be able to do so well against the might of the empire This dude's nostrils were INSANELY good
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Mar 31, 2023 20:47
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I checked and the word she's using for Greek is Hellene in the original. I guess they would still dust that one off from time to time.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:58
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"Look at the nostrils on that hottie. drat bet he has a really nice chest" Grevling posted:I checked and the word she's using for Greek is Hellene in the original. I guess they would still dust that one off from time to time. Modern Greeks also still call themselves Hellenes. Greek is an exonym.
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Mar 31, 2023 21:07
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yeah greece is literally The Hellenic Republic
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Mar 31, 2023 21:17
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Jazerus posted:can't have your dad getting beaten up by some smelly weirdo, he's gotta be a witty and charming villain to be able to do so well against the might of the empire
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Mar 31, 2023 21:18
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Remulak posted:Yeah Saladin owned. He did, but I don't know if he fought much against the empire. Didn't he mainly fight against the Crusader States, the Assassins and in various inter-Caliphate power struggles?
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Mar 31, 2023 21:36
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Yup. Being called one name or another isn't a mutually exclusive thing; you can be more than one thing at once, or one thing can be described in more than one way, and the sheer nature of the world means that linguistically often different words will even literally mean the same thing, and big cosmopolitan cities will have the ruling class exposed to many wildly different languages at once. It's the same reason why the city on the Bosporus Strait has so many names. It's often easier for people with different languages to maintain different names, and in the absence of mass media, it's easy to even just not know the "official" name. What people talk about with the name "Rome" is more about prestige and an old beef of who in Europe could have the title of the "true rome" which is largely meaningless from a technical perspective, and from a practical perspective it's a centuries-old beef that all parties involved have passed on and no longer are claimants. Everybody has some history with Rome, nobody is the true Rome. Although there is a whole thing with East Orthodox Christianity where the Patriarch of Russia would sure like to maintain some kind of higher position in Orthodoxy above the Ecumenical Patriarch who traditionally was "first among equals", and the two churches have been clashing in their own way, so the "third Rome" conflict is ongoing, although it's not being talked about in terms of Roman-ness and it's more blatantly to do with current political events after Russian Orthodox schismed from Greek Orthodox over the issue of Ukrainian religious independence (which was a separate event from their political independence, but related). https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ecumenical-orthodox-patriarch-plans-lithuanian-branch-blow-moscow-2023-03-21/
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Mar 31, 2023 21:49
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Offler posted:He did, but I don't know if he fought much against the empire. Didn't he mainly fight against the Crusader States, the Assassins and in various inter-Caliphate power struggles?
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Mar 31, 2023 22:06
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Was he not?
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Mar 31, 2023 22:17
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I mean he obviously knew what he was doing. But he's become the archetypical noble and worthy adversary that we only lost to because he was so smart and great.
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Mar 31, 2023 22:21
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What's up with Norway?
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Mar 31, 2023 22:45
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Omnomnomnivore posted:What's up with Norway? According to Norwegian wikipedia it has to do with Norway's unusual one-language-two-writing-standards thing. It used to be called Grekenland until the 30s, when proponents Nynorsk - the writing standard that aimed to reduce Danish influence - suggested that this name had to go since it was imported from Danish (who got it from German). Why it caught on in the entire country I don't know, maybe Nynorsk had a lot more influence in the 30s? Nor do I know why most other country names sound very similar to Danish or Swedish but this one had to change. For example, Hungary is called "Ungarn" in both Danish and Norwegian today, so Nynorsk users must not have fought very hard for "Magyarorszag". The adjective is still based on Greece or Grekenland btw. I know because one of the few times I - a 50/50 Swede/Norwegian that grew up in Sweden - can remember not having a clue what my Norwegian father was saying was when he said the word "gresk" in a Bergen accent.
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Mar 31, 2023 23:14
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Omnomnomnivore posted:What's up with Norway? Norwegians are weird. But in an endearing way
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Mar 31, 2023 23:16
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Grevling posted:I checked and the word she's using for Greek is Hellene in the original. I guess they would still dust that one off from time to time. The word Hellene had become more common again by the 12th century, but in late antiquity it largely fell out of use due to its association with paganism. Once paganism in the Imperial core had become a distant memory that issue presumably faded. There's not an unbroken chain of the word Hellene being used as an endonym, since for quite a while in late antiquity Christian Greeks stopped using it to describe themselves entirely. Later, 18th/19th century Greek nationalists also strongly preferred the word Hellene, which pushed Romanoi out use.
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Mar 31, 2023 23:20
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Grevling posted:I checked and the word she's using for Greek is Hellene in the original. I guess they would still dust that one off from time to time. It never totally went away but the meaning changed. For most of the ERE's time, Hellene was used to refer to people still worshiping the ancient gods. To be Roman was to be Christian, Pagans were Hellenes. It then starts showing up now and then in the Crusades period as an identity alongside Roman, though Roman is still primary. In the last century or so of the ERE it becomes more common, but the people we call Greeks still refer to themselves as Romans until the nationalist movement for Greek independence in the 1800s finally pushes Hellene as the primary ethnic identifier.
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Apr 1, 2023 02:46
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The real schemers in the 4th crusade were the Venetians, something that only the Pope understood From what I understand Venice was basically scheming as a major industry for quite a long time.
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Apr 1, 2023 03:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:From what I understand Venice was basically scheming as a major industry for quite a long time. Look man if you lived on a swamp with no natural resources you’d scheme too.
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Apr 1, 2023 05:29
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The real schemers in the 4th crusade were the Venetians, something that only the Pope understood The fourth crusade was honestly such a clusterfuck from all sides than no-one escapes blame, the Pope included. Because it was the Pope who had had the idea to ship the entire crusade in one fleet directly to Egypt, so he asked Venice to build a fleet large enough to carry more than 30,000 men and several thousand horses. This estimate was a tad optimistic, and when it was time to sail there were only about 12,000 knights and soldiers ready to depart. This meant that they didn't come close to being able to pay for the entire fleet. And since Venice had dedicated an entire year to building the fleet and training enough sailors to man it, they were not about to just write off 2/3 of the fleet. So they were in no mood to transport anyone to Egypt before they had been paid for the entire fleet. So both Venice and the Crusaders were in a situation where both factions were desperate to find some kind of solution, before the (now very broke) army would have to disband in disgrace and head home. All because the Pope had wildly overestimated how many people would join the crusade he had called. The best solution the Venetians could think of was to have the Crusaders work off their debt by helping Venice bully some lesser port/trade cities in the Adriatic into becoming Venetian subjects. This combined fleet and shakedown army looking for targets is noticed by the exile Byzantine pretender, who of course promises to pay for the entire fleet and make everyone rich if they help him seize the throne. Only he is a bit light on cash just now, so he can only pay them after becoming emperor. Normally this kind of dime-a-dozen pretender who can only pay in IOUs until the job is done would struggle to recruit anyone who wasn't starving in the streets, but this guy found an army that had set out for holy war against the infidel but was now guiltily shaking down fellow Christians to pay off a debt. And this army came with a massive fleet, manned by thousands of Venetians who stood to lose a great deal of money very soon if the Crusade disbanded. They were more than primed to go for a high risk, high reward gamble. So it's not like Venice could have planned to attack Constantinople from the beginning or anything. If the entire army the Pope had ordered a fleet for had shown up and paid for their passage, the Venetians would have to be suicidal to try to boss this army around in any way instead of shipping them straight to Egypt. And since the entire Western army was probably not more than 20,000 strong when you included the Venetians, I highly doubt that any of them, no matter how much they schemed, planned to sack a city of 500,000 with formidable walls from the start. That really should not have been possible, and probably wouldn't have been attempted if the city had halfway decent leaders. But the leaders they had were far from decent, so they just kept making things worse with every decision. They could probably have simply stayed behind their walls and waited out the army that was only getting paid in IOUs, but instead the reigning emperor tried to go out and fight them several times, which only got many of his best soldiers killed and showed the Westerners just how decisive their heavy knights could be, even when heavily outnumbered they could still disperse almost any formation with a proper well timed charge. One day the emperor even gathered an army and went out to fight, but lost his nerve completely and called for a retreat before anything happened. After that he gave up and fled the city. Rather than appointing someone to keep fighting, the demoralized citizens appointed the pretender's father as emperor - even though he had previously been blinded to make sure that he would never make a bid for the throne himself. He then invited the pretender to become his co-emperor, but he either forgot to ask what he had promised to pay the army or he didn't care. Because they quickly found out that the pretender had overpromised hard, and owed way more than what they could offer. So making him emperor only made the situation worse, since the Westerners now expected payment immediately. In desperation, the new emperor went so far as to melt down a bunch of religious icons for gold to make coins of, but since he was still way short of all he had promised, the only thing this accomplished was to demoralize the citizens even further. Once the Westerners began attacking the city, the emperor gathered one last army inside the city, but in a last poo poo decision he fled in the night instead of leading his army as planned. So if anyone in the city had any spare courage after everything, this move probably took care of that, in addition to creating confusion about leadership right before the final battle. I feel that when you look at what a clusterfuck the entire fourth crusade was from the very beginning, and how much everyone was clearly improvising most of the time, it looks very unlikely that anyone planned to sack Constantinople from the start - even if both the Venetians and the Crusaders gained land and riches afterward. Either of those would not have stood a chance if the other decided to cut their losses and head home at any point, and even when they cooperated a not-useless emperor at any point should have been able to deal with them without losing his capital.
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Apr 1, 2023 10:49
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Omnomnomnivore posted:What's up with Norway? I'm going to say Harold Hardrada and you can’t convince me otherwise.
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Apr 1, 2023 11:17
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...okay, so the Fourth Crusade was like an Always Sunny episode of Crusader Kings. A lot of history's most embarrassing atrocities seem to happen when you have an entire literal army all dressed up and nowhere to go. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 11:34
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When all you have is a crusade, everything looks like an infidel.
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Apr 1, 2023 11:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:...okay, so the Fourth Crusade was like an Always Sunny episode of Crusader Kings. It's one of the most absurd events in history. Constantinople, capital of the seemingly undying Roman Empire and one of the best defended cities in all of history, finally falls after a thousand years to Mr Magoo and the Keystone Kops.
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Apr 1, 2023 12:02
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Grand Fromage posted:It's one of the most absurd events in history. Constantinople, capital of the seemingly undying Roman Empire and one of the best defended cities in all of history, finally falls after a thousand years to Mr Magoo and the Keystone Kops. And apparently because they forgot how walls work.
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Apr 1, 2023 13:10
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Idk if this gets covered anywhere in the proper historiography but on the History of Byzantium podcast which very recently covered the sack, Pierson argues also that the city may have only done a half-assed effort at defense because from their perspective the threat looked more like yet another aristocratic coup and not a proper foreign invasion and existential threat. The former wouldn't have much interest in sacking the city and enslaving the inhabitants. Gibbon of course blames the sack on the unmanly defense effort of all of the effeminate Greek eunuchs who lived in the city.
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Apr 1, 2023 15:45
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CommonShore posted:Gibbon of course blames the sack on the unmanly defense effort of all of the effeminate Greek eunuchs who lived in the city. I’d love to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Thanks to Eunuchs if you have a copy, but in the real book (chapter 60, in vol 6) Gibbon squarely blames the fall of Constantinople on Alexios III’s complacency and failure to respond until it was too late, and the general unwillingness of the Greek population to rise in defense of their leaders. Which may well be unfair but given the portrait Gibbon has just painted of those leaders, he obviously expects your sympathy to be with the Greek people here and not Alexios. The only mention of eunuchs during the section on the fourth crusade is a quote from Niketas Choniates, who (apparently, I’ve never read him) complained that the imperial fleet at the time had fallen into decay because the eunuchs in charge of forestry refused to allow lumbering. Which I’m pretty sure is one of the random AI resign messages in Age of Empires 2.
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Apr 1, 2023 16:13
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skasion posted:I’d love to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Thanks to Eunuchs if you have a copy, but in the real book (chapter 60, in vol 6) Gibbon squarely blames the fall of Constantinople on Alexios III’s complacency and failure to respond until it was too late, and the general unwillingness of the Greek population to rise in defense of their leaders. Which may well be unfair but given the portrait Gibbon has just painted of those leaders, he obviously expects your sympathy to be with the Greek people here and not Alexios. I was being glib with the eunuchs part, but here's the passage I was paraphrasing: quote:By these daring actchievements, a remnant of twenty thousand Latins solicited the licence of besieging a capital which contained above four hundred thousand inhabitants, able, though not willing, to bear arms in the defence of their country. (3:680) And repeatedly in the rest of the chapter we see the cowardice of the Greeks (of "rich pavillions" (3:680) in opposition to the "firm order and manly aspect of the Latins" (3:682) and the like. And really, through the whole of his text, he never misses an opportunity to dunk on the national character of the Greeks who, having fallen so far from their manly peak under Trajan, are servile, luxuriant, decadent, silk-wearing, and womanly. And whenever there's a eunuch that Gibbon can go after, he does.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:26
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CommonShore posted:blames the sack (...) of the effeminate Greek eunuchs who lived in the city.  
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Apr 1, 2023 18:54
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CommonShore posted:I was being glib with the eunuchs part, but here's the passage I was paraphrasing: Gibbon virtually always goes for a moral-cultural explanation. That’s his whole thing. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay.” But again, he’s reflecting the attitudes of his sources in doing so. Ditto the eunuch-bashing which could cite a long history of Greco-Roman angst on the topic. Gibbon repeatedly defaults to praise of conquerors and fault-finding against the conquered. I don’t blame anyone for finding it uncomfortable and tiresome especially by the later volumes. At times it’s laughable. But it’s an attitude which itself dates to antiquity (vae victis!) and has every chance of outlasting the post-Gibbon practice of historiography that aspires to provide no moral comment. Idk what point I really have with this post apart from people should read Gibbon. He’s often wrong or contentious but he’s also much more than a caricaturist or a simple bigot and frankly, is both better at reading and writing than many of the historians who came after him (lookin at you Carlyle). He’s one of the first authors who followed anything close to modern historical methodology and almost all modern “ancient history” is riffing off of him in some way.
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Apr 1, 2023 19:55
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skasion posted:Gibbon virtually always goes for a moral-cultural explanation. That’s his whole thing. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay.” But again, he’s reflecting the attitudes of his sources in doing so. Ditto the eunuch-bashing which could cite a long history of Greco-Roman angst on the topic. Gibbon repeatedly defaults to praise of conquerors and fault-finding against the conquered. I don’t blame anyone for finding it uncomfortable and tiresome especially by the later volumes. At times it’s laughable. But it’s an attitude which itself dates to antiquity (vae victis!) and has every chance of outlasting the post-Gibbon practice of historiography that aspires to provide no moral comment. It also has to be remembered that Gibbon is British and writing in the back-half if George III's reign. IIRC the first edition of his first volume was actually published in 1776, and he finished out the last volume in 1789. So, you know, people fretting about ineffective rulers, moral decay, the decline of empire, what happens when the needs of the people can't be met by the state, the role of notable aristocrats and statesmen in both the growth of empire and wasting it away, etc. were all kind of on people's minds in a general sense. So when he's writing about lunatic monarchs goatfucking foreign policy and directly leading to great empires crumbling to dust he's not JUST writing about Rome, you know?
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Apr 1, 2023 21:32
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