The Byzantine empire

[Dachs]

Dachs, you mentioned that JJ Norwich didn't do a good job on describing the Komneni, what do you mean by that? Most of the other books I've read on the Comneni seem to agree with him. However, that may be because the books by him are the most recent books on Byzantium my library has.

Norwich doesn't do anything at all to highlight how disastrous Alexios and Ioannes were for the empire's future (that is, after Alexios had stopped its alarmingly rapid collapse in the 1080s), or the massive shift in the method of imperial governance that occurred under the rule of the first three Komnenoi. His account, since it draws so heavily on the period historians like William of Tyre, Anna Komnene, Niketas Choniates, and Ioannes Kinnamos (though he might not have used Kinnamos that much, I forget), is very light on events in Anatolia in general (save for brief hiccups like the individual Crusades, a contextless laundry-list of Ioannes II's sieges, and Myriokephalon) and on the Italian and Hungarian campaigns under Manouel (IIRC).

The specific things I was thinking about when I mentioned that his interpretation has been discarded were things like his narration of the Battle of Dyrrachion/Durazzo (1081) when Alexios led an army to relieve Georgios Palaiologos' beleaguered garrison, under siege from Guiscard. Norwich employs moving, grand passages from the Alexiad, focusing on Sichelgaita, Guiscard's wife, and her effort to rally the Hauteville troops as the (Anglo-Saxon) Varangians swept all before them on the field. It's made to seem as though this was the turning point of the engagement. What actually happened was that the Varangians exploited their success too far, and charged outside the protection of the Byzantine missile troops; while Anna is waxing Homeric on Sichelgaita, Guiscard dispatched reserves to surround the isolated Varangians, who were nearly annihilated. This was then followed up by a general charge that shattered Byzantine morale (and most of the army).

 

[Ajidica]

LightSpectra: The reason I refered to the Byzantine Empire as a glorious failure is that overall their history was one long decline. They failed in restoring the Roman Empire, they failed to maintain control over Anatolia, and eventualy, they failed in defending Constantinople. It is glorious in how long they lasted despite setbacks on almost every singe frontier their whole history.

Dachs: Although ultimatly Alexius's 'reforms' didn't help the Empire much in the long run, it was scarcly his fault. The empire was broke and near collapse. Alexius put it back on its feet. Although the Angeloi didn't help matters, if the 4th Crusade hadn't sacked Constantinople, it would likely have weathered the Angeloi. I'm not the best at late Byzantine History so I may be forgetting a few things Alexius and his successors did. To my knowledge, what Alexius mainly did was formalize a feudal aristocracy that had been growing since Basil II and cemented under the MAcedonian Sucessors.

 

[LightSpectra]

LightSpectra: The reason I refered to the Byzantine Empire as a glorious failure is that overall their history was one long decline. They failed in restoring the Roman Empire, they failed to maintain control over Anatolia, and eventualy, they failed in defending Constantinople. It is glorious in how long they lasted despite setbacks on almost every singe frontier their whole history.

That's a bit of a teleological argument, isn't it? They started with something and ended with nothing, so therefore their whole history is "one long decline"? Going by the same logic, I could just as easy call it a roaring success because it survived a thousand years beyond the Western Roman Empire.

What about their eras of expansion under Justinian, Basil II, and the later Komnenids? It was the most powerful state in Europe for several centuries of its history. The Eastern Roman Empire was certainly not the sick man you think it was; not until the Fourth Crusade. Calling it a "glorious failure" completely ignores its impressive military and cultural accomplishments.

 

[aelf]

That's a bit of a teleological argument, isn't it? They started with something and ended with nothing, so therefore their whole history is "one long decline"? Going by the same logic, I could just as easy call it a roaring success because it survived a thousand years beyond the Western Roman Empire.

The teleological argument holds when it can be demonstrated that the goal of restoration has indeed been a constant enough telos for the empire. Success or failure can be judged on the basis of whether it met its manifest aim. And surely one can't argue that the empire merely aimed to survive a certain number of years beyond its Western counterpart.

 

[LightSpectra]

The teleological argument holds when it can be demonstrated that the goal of restoration has indeed been a constant enough telos for the empire. Success or failure can be judged on the basis of whether it met its manifest aim. And surely one can't argue that the empire merely aimed to survive a certain number of years beyond its Western counterpart.

True, but accomplishing said objective would be impossible, whereas what they accomplished in pursuit of the former was great in itself. For example: Moltke wanted a complete surrender of the Austrian army at the Battle of Königgrätz, which he did not accomplish; nevertheless, nobody would call his plan a failure, since his victory was significant enough to decide the fate of the war.

 

[Dachs]

Dachs: Although ultimatly Alexius's 'reforms' didn't help the Empire much in the long run, it was scarcly his fault.

This is something I take issue with. Alexios quite purposely ignored the offensive in Anatolia against the Seljuqs when he had the opportunity, and when he was finally compelled to attack he let himself be satisfied with the ghost of a promise from an unpopular, soon-to-be-dead sultan. He consciously pursued a policy of resettlement when he could that disastrously eroded the chances of a successful conquest and reimposition of government on the Anatolian plateau. He focused on near-useless Cilicia long after it had become a useful tool for reimposing Byzantine control over Anatolia - by the time the Komnenoi had any effective control over the region, in the mid-to-late 12th century, they had nearly exhausted themselves in the effort, and they had wasted excellent opportunities to recapture the central Anatolian plateau in and of itself.

The empire was broke and near collapse. Alexius put it back on its feet.

I recognize Alexios' achievement in so doing. It's why my opinions are so mixed about him. He both revived and helped kill the empire.

Although the Angeloi didn't help matters, if the 4th Crusade hadn't sacked Constantinople, it would likely have weathered the Angeloi. I'm not the best at late Byzantine History so I may be forgetting a few things Alexius and his successors did. To my knowledge, what Alexius mainly did was formalize a feudal aristocracy that had been growing since Basil II and cemented under the MAcedonian Sucessors.

Meh, the aristos weren't as important as Angold et al claimed they were; most of the hype about them is drawn from a few ambiguous references (such as to dynatoi, "Powerful", which sure as hell doesn't necessarily mean a feudal aristocracy) and from historians being overeager to compare developments in the Byzantine state with contemporaneous Western ones. The military aristocracy wasn't able to put an emperor on the throne until Isaakios I, and even that was more Psellos' (and the civil service's) doing than Isaakios' and Kekavmenos'. Even under the Komnenoi, when admittedly you can see things, if not entering a 'feudal' state, at least focusing more on the family unit as the basic building block of power and security (chiefly because of the Doukas-Komnenos union and the ensuing extraordinary appropriations of power to members of that family), many of the former Byzantine civil bureaucratic services were maintained. Andronikos Komnenos tried to rely on their support (having lost that of the family) in his famous 1180s reign of terror, but he had other problems and it didn't quite work out.

No, my complaint with Alexios - and the other Komnenoi in general, really - lies more in his Anatolian decisions rather than his familial power-sharing (though that in and of itself wasn't, to my mind, a very positive trend). And in a way, they're both symptomatic of the central Komnenid problem: everything, but everything, was ad hoc, done on the fly. The familial power-sharing system was instituted as an expediency in the uncertain days after the 1081 coup. Alexios rebuilt the army on much the same lines, scraping up troops from all over the place as he lost battle after battle against the Koumannoi, the Normans, or whoever. And the Anatolian campaigns show a little of the same thinking. Cilicia became the primary target because it had a bunch of Armenian co-religionists, because it was richer than the Anatolian plateau, and because it offered the glimmering prospect of serving as a barrier to further Turkish influxes into Anatolia. It was a nice idea, but as soon as Cilicia became the locus of Byzantine-Crusader power struggles and when the Roubenids revolted for the umpteenth time while right next door the Seljuqs were alternately getting the tar kicked out of them and engaging in internecine fighting, somebody should have recognized that the Komnenoi were going after the wrong target. They did, but it came awfully late, and never amounted to anything because Manouel Komnenos didn't know a damn thing about march security. (I exaggerate. Slightly. Myriokephalon was his screwup, though; his actions, first with inadequate march security and patrolling, and second with his utter meltdown in the face of adversity, turned a campaign that ought to have captured Ikonion into a disaster.)

The central point here is that the Anatolian plateau provided strategic depth for the Byzantines' rich coastal possessions, and if the Byzantines had had it the Turks, well, wouldn't have. Instead of making a serious effort to acquire that strategic depth, Alexios, Ioannes, and to a lesser extent Manouel concentrated instead on preventive defense, by using diplomatic and later preemptive military strikes to focus the fighting away from the Byzantines' most wealthy provinces. This was all well and good in a time of military emperors with sufficient power and backing to do that sort of thing. It was a stupid presumption to think that all emperors would have had the ability to continue doing so. Instead, the clear solution was to take advantage of the Turks' various problems and hit them hard, early, before they grew deep enough roots in the area. Conquer the Anatolian plateau and it doesn't mean a damn thing if the Komnenoi are succeeded by idiot Angeloi, because the Anatolian possessions would have had the strategic depth to resist invasion. Instead, the Seljuqs made themselves a present of Paphlagonia and the vital port of Attaleia, and heavily raided the western coastline. Go frickin' figure.

 

[Ajidica]

Alexis focues on the now rather than the future, understandable in his situation. The Normans Sicilians looked like they could easily conquer Constantinople and the Seljuks were still settleing down in Anatolia posing no real threat to the remaining Byz holdings. Alexius acted as any competent Emperor would do, address the pressing problem. I'm not saying ALexius was perfect, and his beneficial qualities have been overstated, but he was alot better than Michael Parapinaces, Michael Calaphates, or any of Zoes (generaly) idiot husbands.

 

[Dachs]

I'm not saying that his wars against the Normans weren't well conceived, but his focus on Cilicia to the detriment of Anatolia itself was ill-advised.

Comparing him to Zoe's husbands isn't exactly fair; they weren't what anybody would call "competent" rulers. Alexios certainly was no Basileios II, Leon III, or even Konstantinos IV. There is one Michael that I would think mirrors Alexios' career very closely - Michael VIII Palaiologos. Genial emperor, repelled very dangerous invasions from the west time and again, but in western Anatolia, his original power base, he acted with less prudence, and neglected its defense (much less the offensive against a weakened Seljuq sultanate that had been nearly destroyed by the Mongols) to such a point that the Byzantine position in the region was set to erode extremely rapidly and very dangerously after his death. As such, he deserves appreciation for his actions in defeating the Angevin threat, but censure for being one of the primary architects of the end of Byzantine Anatolia.

 

[Ajidica]

I forgot about John Comnenus in Cilicia, a bunch of needless posturing with the Crusader states.
Agree on other points.

As long as we are on the topic of Byzantium, why did Andronicus Ducas betray Romanus at Manzikert? I haven't been able to find a good explanation for it and JJ Norwich doesn't give a great explanation about it.

 

[Kyriakos]

Romanos Diogenes is argued, in a book i read about him, to have been a good emperor, but he fell victim to the schemes of the court, with disastrous effects.

Anyway the Byzantine Empire, like anything important and positive, still gives inspiration for art

 

[Winner]

After having listened to the 12 Byzantine Rulers lectures, my admiration of this state turned into ambivalence.

Yes, the preserved a lot of knowledge, they kept Islam at bay for long enough to give Europe a fighting chance (thank the Gods for that one, the thought of Arabs conquering the whole of Europe before 1000 A.D. is scary), etc.

On the other hand, they brought about their own downfall. Each time they had a chance to deliver a crushing blow to their enemies, they wasted it due to some palace coup, bureaucratic machinations or dynastic squabbles. They never quite realized that the world wouldn't just kindly wait until they settled their internal problems.

Their greatest sin was their religious orthodoxy bordering on insanity, which had prevented them from striking a working alliance with the Latins against the heathens.

At least they went out fighting. If someone ever invents a time machine, you can bet a bunch of Byzantophiles led by Dachs, armed with modern weapons, will go back to that day, destroy the Turkish army, hang Mehmet II from the Theodosian walls and then recover the lost lands, EU3 style

 

[Lillefix]

At least they went out fighting.

True or not. You can forgive a lot if the ending is good.

The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, was last seen casting off his imperial regalia and throwing himself into hand-to-hand combat after the walls of the city were taken.

 

[Winner]

Too bad these things are usually just myths. For example in this country, some people praise a regiment of 'Moravians' who during the 'Battle' of White Mountain (which sort of marked the beginning of the 30 years war) fought to the last men. They often forget to mention that they were really just mercenaries who were cornered against a cemetery wall and couldn't flee like the rest of the rebel army

So maybe something similar happened to the last Byzantine Emperor, although we prefer to believe in the more heroic version of the story

BTW, I am surprised that Hollywood has not yet made some ridiculously expensive epic blockbuster movie about the fall of Constantinople. Or an HBO series or something like that. Byzantine Empire would be such a great theme to explore...

 

[Mathalamus]

i am interested in Byzantine history. but for some reason i apparently dont know enough to change it from the beginning.

basically Byzantium survives till modern day, retaining the position as a superpower. the basics are clearly not that great.

i don't know when i first got interested in Byzantium.. i probably stumbled on it by Wikipedia. (was interested in Rome at the time)

i have to say i respect Byzantium. they kept Islam at bay, more or less, declined badly, recovered in a rather impressive scale, then declined again, recovered again, declined at 1204-1261, recovered yet again, and finally died in an epic battle. (it says in Wikipedia the ottomans still couldn't breach the walls, they got in because someone forgot to lock the gate).

i have a saying: to destroy Byzantium, make sure you take every city.

Byzantium showed us a civilization can conceivably survive with just Constantinople (in Wikipedia there were even new artistic stuff during those times!), and lest not we forget, the Byzantine Empire survived just long enough to ensure a new Era in humanity.

Byzantine Influence is virtually unmatched at the time. except maybe by the pope. they influenced many other civilizations, even turning Russia into more or less a clone of Byzantium.

i can type a lot more stuff, but i'm kinda tired.

 

[Ajidica]

After the 1204 fall of Constantinople and the Catalan Grand Company under Andorincus II, Byzantium never really recovered, so there wasn't any resurgance after 1204, the Paleologei just postponed the inevitable.

As for the 1453 fall of Constantinople, the walls were breached by Ottoman siege guns, but the Byzantine defenders were able to put up palisades to hold the walls. In addition the majority of the ottoman troops were Bashi-bazouks IIRC (I don't know the exact translation but they were glorified levies) and the majority of the Byzantine troops and mercs were well armoured giving them a massive advantage.

Russia is not a clone of Byzantium, although most of their early culture is similar to byzantium, no society is ever a clone of another.

 

[LightSpectra]

The 1453 siege is rather embarrassing to the Ottomans when you begin to study it. They brought the heaviest, most advanced weapons in all of history up to that point to attack the city, but the Romans repaired the walls faster than the Turks could fire. Mehmed only achieved a breakthrough when one of the gates to the inner fortifications was left unlocked by chance.

 

[Mathalamus]

i wonder how did the Byzantimes repaired the stone walls. did they have a bunch of stone blocks lying around?

 

[Ajidica]

The byzantines didn't exactly 'repair' the walls, they built palisades out of wood and lumped the rubble from the walls into piles, quite hard to get over especialy when people are shooting at you and your slipping on the rubble.

 

[Dachs]

After having listened to the 12 Byzantine Rulers lectures, my admiration of this state turned into ambivalence.

Yes, the preserved a lot of knowledge, they kept Islam at bay for long enough to give Europe a fighting chance (thank the Gods for that one, the thought of Arabs conquering the whole of Europe before 1000 A.D. is scary), etc.

On the other hand, they brought about their own downfall. Each time they had a chance to deliver a crushing blow to their enemies, they wasted it due to some palace coup, bureaucratic machinations or dynastic squabbles. They never quite realized that the world wouldn't just kindly wait until they settled their internal problems.

Presumably this is why the Byzantines outlasted the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid Caliphates, two Bulgarian Empires, the super-Frankish empire of Charlemagne, the Seljuq sultanate, and the Latin Empire...the Byzantines outlasted or destroyed their enemies all the time. They just had a lot of them cause, well, you get a lot of enemies over the course of a thousand years.

Each state plays a role in its own destruction just as much as others do, and survival is often as not due to the interplay of external and internal factors, coincidence, and narrowly missed chance. That's the way history works; no state exists in a vacuum, and the best-laid plans gang aft agley.

So by the same token, judging an entire people by intermittent political and military successes and failures is skewing the whole thing. Sure, you can rant and rave about 'missed chances' (and I indulge myself sometimes in doing so), get all butthurt about Yarmuk and the 11th century and the Komnenoi and the Angeloi. You could ignore all that and focus on all the awesome stuff they did - Herakleios in Iran, the remarkable resilience of Zenon, the amazing tenth century emperors. You could totally ignore all that and pay attention to the mosaics, to Hagia Sophia and the multitude of other churches brilliantly constructed, and to the well crafted histories and epic poetry (Digenes Akrites anyone?). Or you could just avoid all that admiration/disgust/ambivalence and just try to, you know, get it all down and understand what the hell was going on back then, anyway.

I've read neither Brownworth's book nor heard his podcasts, but I have read an article by him that somebody brought up in another forum. (It was about Konstas II and an allegedly missed chance to reconquer Egypt, Africa, and much of Italy.) Seems to me that he over-emphasizes how much was actually possible for the Byzantine state to accomplish in military terms, and how much, well, wasn't. It's probably an exercise in rhetoric.

Their greatest sin was their religious orthodoxy bordering on insanity, which had prevented them from striking a working alliance with the Latins against the heathens.

Nonsense. First of all, you're painting with overly broad strokes. Religious orthodoxy "bordering on insanity" wasn't universal. What of the Councils of Lyon and Florence?

Then there's the problem of, well, what made their beliefs such a "sin" anyway? The central sticking point in the arguments between the Latin and Greek churches, the filioque clause, was demonstrably heretical, an alteration of the original formulation. Putting that in changes how the Trinity works, and the nature of the relationship of the believer to her God. I mean, this isn't just something you can just elide, these are, you know, really important issues for people for whom they are issues. Treating them as a political expedient, to be discarded if necessary, doesn't seem "sinful" to me. One could as easily ask why the Latin hierarchy didn't change, and lay the issue on them - murder by ideological inflexibility, as it were, instead of suicide. If one were interested in apportioning blame. Which I'm not. Mostly.

Although it's not as though changing the religious end of the equation would have fixed everything - it probably wouldn't. No matter whether there was officially a schism or not, Latin rulers were often simply more interested in plundering a near-prostrate state than in attacking a well-prepared enemy. Charles of Anjou didn't care if he had papal sanction or not, or whether the Byzantine Emperor was a schismatic or not, he wanted easy pickings, and he might have gotten them too, save for the Sicilian Vespers, Pedro II, and Michael VIII. By the same token, the Catalans were more interested in making money and acquiring political power, whether independent or hijacking the Byzantine Empire, than they were in killing Turks. Not that either of those things is necessarily bad, or anything - they're both quite reasonable positions to take. But to claim that the Byzantine people were foolish for refusing to abjure their beliefs, in exchange for 'help' that often as not would target them as their enemies, is a bit off the mark, in my view.

 

[Winner]

Am I suicidal enough to argue with Dachs about Byzantine history? Nope

Presumably this is why the Byzantines outlasted the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid Caliphates, two Bulgarian Empires, the super-Frankish empire of Charlemagne, the Seljuq sultanate, and the Latin Empire...the Byzantines outlasted or destroyed their enemies all the time. They just had a lot of them cause, well, you get a lot of enemies over the course of a thousand years.

Each state plays a role in its own destruction just as much as others do, and survival is often as not due to the interplay of external and internal factors, coincidence, and narrowly missed chance. That's the way history works; no state exists in a vacuum, and the best-laid plans gang aft agley.

You should listen to the podcast and then then post a review The impression I got was that their Empire could easily have survived to the modern era if it hadn't made certain suicidal mistakes at crucial points of its history. No, I won't be more concrete.

Nonsense. First of all, you're painting with overly broad strokes. Religious orthodoxy "bordering on insanity" wasn't universal. What of the Councils of Lyon and Florence?

Then there's the problem of, well, what made their beliefs such a "sin" anyway? The central sticking point in the arguments between the Latin and Greek churches, the filioque clause, was demonstrably heretical, an alteration of the original formulation. Putting that in changes how the Trinity works, and the nature of the relationship of the believer to her God. I mean, this isn't just something you can just elide, these are, you know, really important issues for people for whom they are issues. Treating them as a political expedient, to be discarded if necessary, doesn't seem "sinful" to me. One could as easily ask why the Latin hierarchy didn't change, and lay the issue on them - murder by ideological inflexibility, as it were, instead of suicide. If one were interested in apportioning blame. Which I'm not. Mostly.

Most countries in Europe learned how to ignore religious difference when necessary. Which is (for example) why Catholic France allied with the Protestants against the Catholic Habsburgs, and even cooperated with Muslim Turks to harm their interests.

It seems to me that the Byzantines never realized that you can't be too picky about your prospective allies when your mortal enemies are knocking at the door. Though I agree with your point that the Western Christian countries were pretty difficult potential allies.