352th byzantium thread

What was the point of no return Veeky Forums? how could they prevent it?

>what was the point of no return Veeky Forums? how could they prevent it?

1204. They had managed to regain a shit load of lost land. 1204 fucked them permanently.

Greeks and Albanians need to reunite and form Byzantinum

Albanians? why albanians of all things?

This

Because they're trustworthy and reliable allies, and because all the Armenians have been genocided so can't use them.

The empire was literally bankrupt in the 1180s. The only reason the fourth crusade even succeeded was due to how bad was the imperial economy at the time, which literally made it impossible for a decent army to be raised. The latin empire itself, while shit, was loads better than the late 12th century ERE by sheer virtue of having the money required to raise enough troops to fight the bulgars.
The idea that the latins somehow sabotaged a fledgling phoenix is downright hilarious.

If the Byzantines didn't act like shitheads the crusaders wouldn't have been there

Can someone explain how the Turks managed to get to Greece before Byzantium/Constantinople itself?

>They had managed to regain a shit load of lost land.
Oh aren't you a disingenuous little shit. You post a map from decades before the crusade, ignoring that in 1200 the empire looked like pic related, half its territory lost.
Let's not even talk of how the empire barely managed to raise 15k men to defend itself against the latins. For comparison's sake, let's just say that is was an amount so piddly that Venice (for all intents and purposes a city state at the time) could afford to loan out 18k men out to Byzantium in the 1180s to act as the byzantine navy.
Some fucking empire indeed.

boats

Earthquake destroyed the defenses at Gallipoli and they just landed and planted their flag

Nice muslim map. Post something from a western source

Despite popular opinion the end was not in 1204, let alone in 1071.
Michael II reconquered Constantinople and rebuilt Byzantium as a regional power. At the end of his reign he outmanouvered all of his enemies and the empire had a great opportunity to recover entire Greece. Keep in mind Byzantines had to fight on several fronts (Latins, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs). Even without the rest of Greece it was still a rich and populous state.
However then came his son and pretty much wrecked shit by making several idiotic decisions.
Even then there was a chance for them to survive and remain a regional power, however after civil war and plague they were pretty much doomed.
So around 1350, Byzantium had little hope.
So while 1071 was a blow and 1204 was a very hard blow, things could easily have gone the other way even after all that.

>Can someone explain how the Turks managed to get to Greece before Byzantium/Constantinople itself?
Dumbass John VI granted the turks some land around Gallipoli.
Turks took advantage of an earthquake (after which basically the whole population left the peninsula) to seize the whole region.
John was powerless to get it back (but then after his coup the empire could do little more than just ask nicely, so eh).
Turks proceeded to use Gallipoli as a springboard to fight serbs and bulgars, taking land left and right.

You have to keep in mind that those territories were far richer and more populated than the rest of Balkans and Anatolia.
Institutional weakness and chaos under Angelos dynasty doesn't mean Byzantium lack potential.

>Institutional weakness and chaos under Angelos dynasty doesn't mean Byzantium lack potential
I'd agree with you if "institutional weakness and chaos" wasn't the norm for Byzanium through most of the second millennium.
The fact is that the empire was in such a bad condition in 1204, that the latin take could have very well prevented a bulgar takeover. Greece exchanged an empire so bankrupt it could barely raise 15k men with an empire organized enough to raise 40k just a couple decades later.

The only way?

Send a terminator back in time to kill this mad lad!

Latin Empire was absolute shit, I have no idea where are you getting that impression from. They totally wrecked the economy of that region and were even worse than Angeloi. And when the fuck did they raise 40,000 men? Did you pull that number out of your ass?
You're either reading some weird bullshit or you're a retarded revisionist trying to paint 1204 as a good thing or something. Latin rule was a catastrophe, however not as apocalyptic as commonly thought, as I explained in this post.

The latin empire was shit, HOWEVER it wasn't as shit as the angeloi (yes, they were that bad). It's literally all there is to it, but quite frankly it's still a lot.

Yes it was worse because they totally dismantled imperial system along with wrecking their capital.
Latin Empire was a joke anyway after the first decade of it's existence.

Everyone tends to blame a particular reign or campaign, but the real turning point for the ERE was the introduction of non-Roman legitimacy. Until the rise of the Arabs and Franks, there was only Persia as a diplomatic rival to the ERE. Even if the empire was weakened, the very idea of a Roman polity with a Roman emperor reigned supreme to the point where anyone who wanted to aspire to independent power had to aim for the imperial title, meaning they had to appeal to Roman political institutions, aristocrats, and armies.

The Arabs and Franks started to break that spell, drawing away the respect and loyalty of old Romanized populations from the ERE by intermarrying with the Roman population to create a new class of political elites distinct from the Byzantine Greeks.

This shrank the ERE's influence to Southern Italy, the Balkans, and Anatolia. The next, more mortal blow however came with the rise of the Latins, Slavs, Caucasians, Moors, and Turks. Each of these groups started to form distinct cultural elites and political institutions, and over time they would go from petty dukes and emirs to kings and sultans who commanded a similar level of prestige as the emperor.

So it wasn't the invasions of the Normans, Bulgars, or Turks that forever destroyed the ERE's chances of recovery, but the establishment of rival polities like the Kingdom of Sicily, the Sultanate of Rum, and others which created independent power bases which no longer needed or even cared for the elite of Thrace and Asia Minor.

Sorry but that's absolute bullshit when it comes to discussion about Greek core of the empire, which was Byzantium for most of it's history.
As for ERE in it's full extent, that was gone with the rise of Islam.

Perhaps you misread me, but I was talking broadly about how the empire dwindled slowly to that Greek core. That core used to be much larger after all, and only became staunchly Greek after the other Roman populations around the Mediterranean gravitated towards more local powers.

Even then, it absolutely applies to that Greek core in the form of the Ottoman advance, which came after centuries of Seljuk integration into Anatolian society creating a situation where political loyalties were fluid between Greeks and Turks serving either the emperor or the sultan.

I love the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire but I feel like a shmuck because I know so little about it (aside from some emperors and dynasties).

I mean with the Roman Republic + Empire you have tons of famous dudes who aren't heads of state: Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, Cato, Suetonius, Livy, etc...

Same with the Greek+Hellenistic states: Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Xenophon, Aristophanes, etc...

but who the heck was in the Eastern Roman Empire? Surely they had to have a buttload of famous people (aside from leaders)?

I mean I can think of Procopius, Boethius and some other historian dude I can't remember.

Any cool byzantine dudes I can look up? Besides emperors.

Belisarius I guess. Most Byzantines of note were emperors.

well shucks, there had to have been some famous writers or scientists or something.

this was not a particularly forgiving time for western philosophy.

>Belisarius
Narses as well.

In Turkish history classes, we were taught that Orhan Beg, Osman Beg's heir, married a Byzantine Princess, whose dowager was a castle on the European side of Gallipoli.

I never validated this claim on my own, so it could be total propaganda bs. In the vein of "Oh yeah we Ottomans fucked their way into Europe lololol"

Andronikos III was the last Emperor with a shot of having a weak but Independent Byzantine Empire. He unified most of European Greece which could have theoretically held the Turks in Anatolia and the Serbs in Serbia... but then he died and the 1 millionth Byzantine Civil War broke out, this one resulting in Byzantium being a pawn of its neighbors at best.

>Albanians
>trustworthy
Literally every single nation bordering Albanians hates Albanians. Literally every single one.

There were a lot of interesting people surrounding Justinian I, and also during the Senatorial resurgence in the 11th century, when a slew of weak emperors allowed a number of politicians and philosophers to take center stage. Those people ended up buttfucking the Empire something fierce, but still.

Aside from that, there were a lot of important religious figures like Photios I, John of Damascus, Constantine and Cyril, Leo the Mathematician, a lot of historian like Anna Komnina and Procopius, and a fuckton of rebels who kept making the emperors' lives miserable.

We should have listened to Karbeas.

who?

The grandmother of the guy that conquered Constantinople was a Byzantine princess but Gallipoli wasn't part of a dowry

the first crusade helped them get back most of anatolia from the turkmen, the point of no return was when they let the ottomans cross over and take over Adrianople.