To jkay
I've read your argumnets on both thread and seems to me you should really retake that course
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Trust me, they coulda raised a nice loan if they'd offered a good prospect of reexpanding their Empire by inventing cannon.
And who would have ever given them that money? The Pope didn't have any and he would have asked for the conversion of the byzantines, at very least! Venice had actually worked quite hard to bring down the empire and rob it of its more profitables cities and so on so forth.
The west saw the Byzantine empire just as a land to be conquered and exploited. I agree that was a shortsighted politc, but with hindsight everybody is a great strategist.
Besides don't forget that during that siege of Costantinopole (1453 AD) cannons were not really crucial. The city felled because there weren't enough soldiers to man the walls and there was no navy. All this against an enemy who fielded an army several times larger than the byzantine's one.
Yeah, the cataphract was cool, but in the meantime their neighbors had come up with bunches more ideas than the legions, not just one. They shoulda had good horse centuries earlier, to counter the horse nomads and have a good answer to Persian horse. I mean, if the nomads kept winning, shouldn't it've occurred to them to, er, copy them? Oh, but they're just barbarians - what me worry?
You seem a bit confused about the actual state of warfare during the roman and the byzantine empire.
The Legion was the best formation of her times. Proof of this is that all the late ellenic states tried to convert their armies to a legion style. Only the parthians were able to resist the romans given their better horsemanship. You should note, thou, that they weren't actually better than the romans, since they clashed along the borders with no definitive victory for centuries...
In the third century the romans copied the cataphractoi from the parthians and cavalry started to have an ever increasing importance in the army, especially in the fourth century with the division between limitanei and comitatenses made by Diocletian (by the way, he's the emperor who choose Nicomedia as his seat).
In the following centuries the byzantines increased the importance of cavalry to the point that Belisarius army during the Gothian war was composed nearly completely by cavalry.
With Heraklius we have the creation of the themata system, which allowed to raise large armies without having to pay them all the times (not a trifle argument, since the military spending was stranglig the byzantine economy).
Finally in the 11th century the byzantines tried to adopt the heavy armoured knight, but the empire had already suffered many bloody defeats and its emperors failed to revive it.
As for the question about the developing of a good cavalry, you should remember that without the stirrup cavalry itself wasn't really efficient. The antiquity never produced a good cavalry and in the end was infantry that carried the day. The notable exceptions are the Macedonian eteroi and the parthian cataphraktos, which were the expression of a landed nobility and of a "feudal" goverment system, something that was too alien from the roman mentality, and, notwithstanding that, they did adopt the heavy cavalry. Note, thou, that the parthian armies weren't invincible. Trajan conquered ther capitol with his legions...
As for the horse nomads, the romans actually defeated the huns (remember Aetius!) before the fall of the western empire, while the byzantines managed to repel and defeat several horse nomads (Avars, Hungars, Cumans, Bulgars etc.)
It's a common mistake thinking that the germans fought like cavalry. They usually fought as infantry, using horses just to move quikly. The only exception were the eastern german tribes which had came in contact with the huns, like the ostrogoths.
In the end, all the empires are doomed to fall, since nothing is eternal. It doesn't matter which goverment you choose or how much you invest into the military.
When Scipio watched Carthage burning down, he exclaimed: "And one day, Rome"