Can someone unironically explain why this board has such a hard-on for the Byzantine Empire?
I fell for the meme and read a few books and from what I've read it seems just endless civil war followed by much wailing and gnashing of teeth and blaming Latins whenever its enemies took advantage of that perpetual internal strife
is it just typical Veeky Forums contrarianism?
Instead of fighting the hordes they bribed them to attack the west
i think thats why they hate them
I don't know what hard-on you're speaking of?
There's the general argument over whether it should be considered as the continuation of the Roman Empire, and the consensus on that is yes.
Other than that, it didn't do a whole lot other than decline.
People absolutely fucking hate Byzantium here. I love it, because it's a wonderfully tragic narrative, with every attempt at recovery met only by destruction by fate or complacency.
It was still the wealthiest and most developed part of Europe at the time.
Because it was the true successor and continuation of the Roman Empire.
Besides that it kinda just declined
Probably because they were a relic of history that survived a thousand years beyond their time, while enduring almost every calamity that could possibly be thrown at them.
Plus they were the last stage of the long continuum of classical civilisations that had ruled the Aegean, beginning with the Greek city states, and carried with them over two millennia of tradition and knowledge. Add to that that they were replaced by an originally tribal Muslim upstart empire, and you'll find they carry a lot of lost of mystique for Europeans.
They're not loved because they conquered a huge empire or fought in epic battles or had great heroes, but because of what they and their culture represent to a lot of people.
>Byzantine Empire
You mean the Roman Empire?
I liked the Roman empire ever since I was a little kid reading about the crusades. I read as many books on the subject, Barbara Tuchman comes to mind, and the thing that stood out was how the Romans actually cooperated with the crusaders as much as possible.
Emperor Alexios was leading the main army to relieve Antioch and was only stopped by the coward Stephen De Blois, who lied and said the crusaders were defeated. Yet had it not been for this watershed betrayal, Alexios could have asserted his rightful claims to the region. The Romans bankrupted the city to send an armada to Egypt and the promised Catholic land forces never arrived. The Romans sent an army to aid in the conquest of Damascus, and the Catholics just stood there watching, failed to attack, and Damascus gets conquered by jihadists.
The relationship passes more or less beneficially, until a blind venetian doge literally starves a crusader army on a desert island until it agrees to attack Constantinople. Under the pretense of installing a new dynasty, which may have been welcome, they instead sack the city, destroying 6,000 years of history, a land of famous civilization since the days of Troy, its descendants having fled Troy for Rome, and returned at the pinnacle of glory, all destroyed because Venice was overdue for the plague.
I like it for all the political backstabbing.
Childhood is when you idolize the Byzantine Empire. Adulthood is when you realize that the Ottoman Empire makes more sense.
It's because we never knew about it. We spend our whole school lives learning about how the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe fell into complete feudal chaos and the "Dark Ages" and so on. And then you offhandedly discover, one day, that this wasn't true at all. The Roman Empire survived for another 1000 years off in the eastern part of Europe. We were straight up lied to because Gibbon et al. screeching ROMAN EMPIRE IS WESTERN. IT CAN'T BE ROME IF IT DIDN'T INCLUDE US REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. And suddenly you have centuries of Roman Empire: The Adventure Continues to read about.
What's a good podcast to listen to that gives a broad history of the ERE/Byzantine Empire after the west falls up until the fall of constantinople?
History of Byzantium
Childhood is idolizing the hagia sophia. Adulthood is realizing the ottomans ruined it.
A confluence of a bunch of different camps that started to blur together lately. One is the purely academic crowd who formed around the recent golden age of Byzantine Studies, who started clamoring for pop history books and podcasts about the ERE and got some. From there came the vidya and Romeaboo crowd that grew up on historical strategy games and latched on not only to Rome, but also the Byzantines. Then with the rapid spread of the internet throughout Eastern Europe you had an influx of Greek and Slavic users who brought their previously opaque nationalist debates into an English speaking forum which brought with it some romanticism of the ERE as a lost cause or progenitor civilization for their own religious and ethnic views. Finally you have the rise of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim far right ideologies that view the Byzantines as a historical totem for all their beliefs and warnings about Islam today.
So besides the few Byzantologists on Veeky Forums, you've got people from /v/, /int/, /pol/ all projecting their interests on a historical nation that each only really knows just enough about to project their favorite memes onto, be it painting the map blurple, claiming to be the true light of European civilization before dirty Catholics and Germans ruined everything, or believing how (sea) Jewishness and lack of commitment caused the fall of a civilization to Turkish hordes. There's not much contrarianism involved here because popular culture would have to give a shit about Byzantium in the first place for there to be a backlash by social outcasts on Veeky Forums.
Bump.
I dont like dying empires/kingdoms. So I don`t like Byzantium that much.
good post and undeserving of this board
Yeah, this is /thread right here. An excellent post that's defined my view of the subject
>the few Byzantologists on Veeky Forums
>romanticism of the ERE as a lost cause or progenitor civilization for their own religious and ethnic views
I'm both.
Good post tho.
Cheap trash and easy age 3s
A lot of good responses here, especially I'll only add that you can't help but notice that in map's such as OP's, all those little surrounding kingdoms which kept vulturing the dying empire all consist of lands which were once the empires. There's something poetic about that
>Seljuk
>Sultanate
>Rum
As Ostrogorsky said. Byzantium bought peace from Bulgaria and Serbia, in the manner of cutting one's vein so the wolves feast on your blood hoping they will be sated. This run the treasury dry, along with the Aragonese raiding the countryside (Catalan Company), only a small cavalry force of a few thousand could be kept as a standing army. IIRC 3k in the Balkans and 4k in Anatolia (it's been more than a year, and i read that part around 2 am)
In a lot of ways, the same thing that did in the WRE brought down the ERE. Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic migrations eventually led to the formation of independent power bases and states that cannibalized the old empire from within. When before the Roman Emperor was the undisputed master of of Southern Italy, the Balkans, and Anatolia, you now had Norman, Serbian, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Turkish vassals who at various points could rise up and declare themselves kings, tsars, or sultans while supported by a large number of military, landowning aristocracy.
Before, wen that sort of thing happened, it was usually more a civil war that had a general gather up support around him to march on the capital and take the imperial crown rather than form his own state with its own reason for existence beyond Roman traditions.
Furthermore, the ERE kept trying to play these different groups off against each other, just as they would their Greek vassals, and further entrench them into the political landscape.
This is literally what happened to me. Over and over we were taught that"476! 476! Fall of the Roman Empire!"
Because most of Histocucks grew up on Western European perspective history of Europe which stated that the Roman Empire fell in 5th Century, but for some reason you must not pay attention to the Eastern Cunts that somehow failed to receive the memo and fell with the Western Empire.
Oh and the name. Byzantine Empire makes them sound like a different entity altogether.
>Can someone unironically explain why this board has such a hard-on for the Byzantine Empire?
They're a fascinating culture with a rich history which goes largely ignored in the traditional eurocentric historiography that we all learned in our middle school social studies class.
>is it just typical Veeky Forums contrarianism?
It's primarily a discussion over labels. "Roman Empire" is a modern invented term which the Romans themselves never actually used, as is the term "Byzantine Empire". Byzboos (people who hold up the Byzantines as some sort of ideal) think that the distinction cheapens the value and we should call them the same thing, others think that doing away with them would only lead to confusion and the labels help people understand how society changes over time.
It's only typical when you throw in the people who are pushing a historical narrative solely to support a political agenda.
>They were the last stage of the long continuum of classical civilisations that had ruled the Aegean, beginning with the Greek city states, and carried with them over two millennia of tradition and knowledge. Add to that that they were replaced by an originally tribal Muslim upstart empire, and you'll find they carry a lot of lost of mystique for Europeans.
this
nice post