Foreword
Out of the Ashes:
The Byzantine Empire
From
Basil II
To
The Present
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
“Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.”
Horace
“Antiquity is over, but its last war is yet to end.” (1)
Andrea Laiou, Prime Minister of the Empire of Romans
Foreword: The Byzantine Empire
From
Basil II
To
The Present
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
“Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.”
Horace
“Antiquity is over, but its last war is yet to end.” (1)
Andrea Laiou, Prime Minister of the Empire of Romans
It is difficult to find an elementary school student anywhere in the world who does not know that there was once a Roman Empire where people spoke Latin and which stretched from Britain to the Euphrates. Credit for this must be laid at the door of Alexander of Rome, whose pioneering careful study of primary sources set the tone of discussion for five hundred years. Yet, for all his scholarship, the crafty Patriarch of Rome never addressed one topic properly-the end of Empire, despite covertly acknowledging that it had happened before his time. Indeed, it is rather difficult to find people who claim that the Empire of antiquity had endured to the present, in spite of the continuing survival of a state calling itself “The Empire of Romans” and accurately claiming direct political continuation from Augustus himself.
A pan-Romanist by now might be contemplating if this book is worth its weight as fuel right now, assuming that such a person would acquire this provocatively titled manuscript in the first place. To them I am already committing a heresy most foul: ignoring Edouard Giselbert’s History of the Later Roman Empire, which supposedly showed how the New Rome was no different from the Old. Despite lacking the arrogance to believe that I could surpass the the famed Provencal Scribe in any way, I must nonetheless make the case regarding the flaws of his celebrated work. To put it bluntly, Giselbert was far more a politician than a historian, and his writing was heavily colored by a need to appease his benefactor-the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos. Though he cannot be accused of lying in order to make a point, he nonetheless chose to ignore and distort the truth in many ways to suit his thesis that viewed the medieval Roman Empire as a better reflection of the classical state of antiquity. Details in his tale have been torn apart by giants of Roman history like Anastasios, Laiou and others, but his overall coherent vision had mostly survived unchallenged, principally on account of the overall unwillingness of the aforementioned specialists to reach outside their relatively narrow interest.
I am also a specialist, but I focus on the modern history of Romania which Giselbert never lived to witness and thus have relatively little stake in preserving his account. In particular, I had always been somewhat wary of his interpretations in light of his failure in predicting the direction of Roman culture and society. Byzantinism for instance would have given him a heart attack, and yet that is the most popular ideology in Roman sphere of influence today. This particular failure in fact convinced me that there was a need to counter Giselbert’s artificial rigid attempts to map the classical past to the medieval era, and rather trace back the organic evolution of modern thoughts and ideas back to their source in the Macedonian renaissance.
Thus I wound up writing this manuscript that explicitly declares the use of Byzantinism to study the history of Romania from Basil II to the present day. I have ignored the Dark Ages almost completely on account of paucity of trustworthy primary sources (which Theophanes is not). Archaeologists had been fighting that war against Giselbert for long, and I have no desire to step onto their toes by reaching so far out of my brief. Literary material of high quality however is readily available from the time of Basil II onwards, accessible to anyone who has access to the Great Library of Constantinople. This is especially convenient seeing that he is typically hailed as the first pillar of the New Empire, a second Scipio whose singlehandedly pulled the Empire out of its nadir. I will not deny taking great pleasure in deconstructing these arguments, aided by not only writings from his victims but also his own letters. Similarly we will explore other facets of Alexander, John Callinicus and Constantine Palaiologos that the popular narrative obscures, and study the geopolitical situations and philosophies that resulted in these singular characters-who were by no means ‘Great men’ indispensable to their Empires.
Byzantinism’s origins is another aspect I hope to explore in this account, as well as it’s relationship with Islam. I can imagine a non trivial number of readers will stop right here and refuse to move on ahead---but I would urge them to continue. The history of the Roman state post antiquity is hard to understand without studying the influence of its greatest foe, one that it is still fighting in the present day. Rome might have been able to recover its lost territories on paper in “only” a few centuries, but it was left fundamentally changed by its brush with the faith of Mohammed. Me and many others to treat that interaction as the dividing line between the Rome and Byzantium-and there is no understanding of modern day Romania without analyzing the oldest surviving conflict in the world.
Take a deep breath and look at the map on the next page. It is not Trajan’s Empire but is rather the modern Roman territories that elect Senators to Constantinople. It is nonetheless an enormous patch of land, even despite the fact that the non-voting regions have been excluded. I will now take you on a journey that will show how a vestigial Anatolian Kingdom expanded out to conquer and assimilate all this, which would sound absurd to anyone not particularly familiar with the capabilities of the Hellenic race.
Your Sincerely
Ίωάννης Ιούλιος Κομνηνός
John Julius Comnenus
London, 29th May 2016.
Notes:
(1) Think El Yanqui said something like this somewhere, for something entirely different. The line stuck with me though.