10 ms·

The last day of Constantinople

111 points by benbreen 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jonhohle 3y ago
My kids love Istanbul by TMBG, but I never knew the history. Something I can share with them the next time it comes on. I hope for the sake of the subject of the song they didn’t have a date in Constantinople. I’m sure it would have been relatively chaotic, and romance might not have been a priority ;-)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  Small nit to pick: TMBG didn’t write the song— they covered it (quite well, too). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople... The song’s appearance on MTV’s Liquid Television was my introduction to TMBG.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I mean, they do love the TMBG cover, regardless of whether or not they wrote it.
    - Electricniko 3y ago
      I didn't even know it was a song by a real band when I was a kid. I only knew it from a cartoon. Depending on how old your kids are, they might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ
- xraystyle 3y ago
  It's not a TMBG song, they just covered it. It was originally released by a Canadian vocal quartet called The Four Lads in 1953.
dangerwill 3y ago
Constantinople was conquered by the Turks but not only the people but the name of the city (albeit transliterated into Arabic) remained for centuries. Istanbul wasn't the officially recognized name of the city until the 1930s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Yes but the name derives from a much older Greek colloquial expression, see al-Masudi for example.
- sedatk 3y ago
  Not only had the city's name remained Constantinople, Ottoman Empire had seen itself as the successor of Roman Empire too. One of the official titles of Mehmet the Conqueror was "Kaiser-i Rum" (Caesar of Roman). Ottoman Empire even adopted the Roman Empire's "hands-off" governance model at the beginning: mostly dealt with taxes, and refrained from interfering with people's daily lives. The name "Istanbul" is believed to be a contraction of "Eis tin polin" ("To the inner city") in Greek which was a commonly used term in daily chatter, and possibly adopted literally by Turks.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    > Ottoman Empire even adopted the Roman Empire's "hands-off" governance model at the beginning: mostly dealt with taxes, and refrained from interfering with people's daily lives. Yup: in fact many Jews, Christian schismatics etc fled from the terrors of the Inquisition in Europe to the Ottoman empire.
  - glonq 3y ago
    In my experience, a good way to piss off a Turk is to suggest that their country borrowed or stole anything from Greek language, food, art, or culture!
    - georgeplusplus 3y ago
DrPhish 3y ago
As nice as that is for a quick overview, the whole story was told rather well by Gibbon in his "History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire". If that has whet your appetite and you'd like a more in-depth telling of just this episode then you can skip right to : https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/895/pg895-images.html#linkJ2HCH0001 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/895/pg895-images.html#l... and enjoy. If you have an inclination, I'd heartily recommend the entire set of books. As an anecdote, it took me 2 years of reading 10-20 minutes per night most nights. I found it extremely enlightening and entertaining (Gibbon has a wicked wit). As much as Gibbon is not in fashion these days, the research I did showed that the essential parts of our understanding of the nuts and bolts of the history haven't changed since it was written, and I don't think anyone else has contextualized and editorialized the whole story with as much intelligence and careful thought since. I also found pretty well all the complaints about Gibbon's interpretation to have actually been though about and answered _by_ Gibbon in the text (in eloquent detail!), which I found surprising given the frequency with which he seems to be dismissed with simplistic arguments.
- countrymile 3y ago
  John Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantium is also well worth a read for coverage of this period
- colechristensen 3y ago
  I don't remember what they were, but Mary Beard had some seemingly credible criticisms or just updates to Gibbon. I got through a significant portion of the decline and fall but got bored somewhere after Justinian as the decline and fall of my interest in the Roman empire begins somewhere around the state conversion to Christianity.
  - DrPhish 3y ago
    > Mary Beard had some seemingly credible criticisms or just updates to Gibbon I had a look at her back when I was reading, but also just now revisited some articles comparing them, and I couldn't find anything substantial that didn't boil down to a dislike of his style, or disagreement over approach. I really would like to update any incorrect facts that I might have picked up when reading Gibbon, so something concrete would be much appreciated! I'm not too worried about having picked up his conclusions, since I've come to my own based on the description of events and supplementing with a fair amount of other treatments (mostly "The Learning Company" stuff, for better or for worse)
_xnmw 3y ago
Here's a crazy tidbit: There are some Muslim eschatologists and preachers who believe that Constantinople is coming back! Based on their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ well-known prophecy regarding the conquest of Constantinople, they also believe that the Hagia Sophia will become an Orthodox church once again. See Imam Nazar Hosein's book titled "Constantinople in the Quran": http://imranhosein.org/n/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Constantinople-in-the-Quran.pdf http://imranhosein.org/n/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Constant...
- countrymile 3y ago
  It probably would have if the Russian empire had won ww1
  - ng12 3y ago
    It actually did for a few short years as an independent city-state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...
  - vondur 3y ago
    That’s also why the Crimean war was fought.
- pixel3234 3y ago
  So far quite opposite is happening. Until about 15 years ago, Istanbul was very cosmopolitan city. You could meet people from all corners of Africa, Asia and Europe there. Even locals looked very white because of all slaves Ottomans brought into Istanbul. To some extend Istanbul was culturally not part of Turkey (something like London and UK). Hovewer over last decade or so, Istanbul is being assimilated into Turkey. Many orthodox muslim turkish immigrants from east part of Turkey. More radicals... Foreigners are not so welcomed anymore...
  - derefr 3y ago
    Is it that foreigners are less welcome, or is it that anyone with other options for places to live is leaving the country to avoid the tanking ecomomy?
petesergeant 3y ago
https://www.netflix.com/title/80990771 https://www.netflix.com/title/80990771 was surprisingly watchable
- tacker2000 3y ago
  Came here looking for a mention of this! “Rise of Empires: Ottoman - The conquest of Constantinople” I enjoyed this. Really well made and some great actors in there.
worstestes 3y ago
If anyone is interested in an expansive podcast detailing the history of the Byzantine Empire, check out The History of Byzantium podcast! https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/ https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/ It’s truly in depth and picks up around where Mike Duncan stopped (roughly) after the History of Rome podcast ended.
- wsgeorge 3y ago
  I just started this after finishing The History of Rome. :)
- srcreigh 3y ago
  The Bishops series by Fr Thomas Hopko on Ancient Faith radio is pretty good.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
Did they really stamp "Museum Britannicum" with red ink on that Byzantine-era manuscript? Are they completely mad?
- acherion 3y ago
  They're British. We're talking here of the same people who used copper tools and wire brushes on the Parthenon Marbles that they stole, so that it could be more "pure white".
  - Wildgoose 3y ago
    The marbles that were bought, preventing them from being ground up to be made into cement - which was happening. Yes, the "cleaning" was stupid. People didn't realise they were meant to be painted.
    - acherion 3y ago
      >The marbles that were bought From whom? Whoever Elgin paid money to certainly didn’t own the marbles, and the firman that he quoted doesn’t exist. He helped himself to set up his own personal museum. >from being ground up to be made into cement Only the marble that was on the ground was ground up into lime. Elgin pulled friezes off the Parthenon, that’s a big difference. The Acropolis Museum has spaces reserved for the return of the marbles to their ancestral home. A museum that’s climate controlled and employs people who care about these artifacts a lot more than the British Museum [1] It seems to me that the people running the British Museum want to hold onto the Marbles lest other governments demand their antiquities back, if the Marbles ever make it back home. [1] https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1166224/possible-water-damage-in-the-british-museum-s-parthenon-gallery/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1166224/possible-water-...
    - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
      >> The marbles that were bought, preventing them from being ground up to be made into cement - which was happening. Are you saying the Parthenon friezes were being ground into cement? That's interesting, I had never heard of that. What I had heard was that the Parthenon sustained most of its destruction during the Ottoman occupation, during fighting with Venetians: Prior damage to the marbles was sustained during successive wars, and it was during such conflicts that the Parthenon and its artwork sustained, by far, the most extensive damage. In particular, an explosion ignited by Venetian gun and cannon-fire bombardment in 1687, whilst the Parthenon was used as a munitions store during the Ottoman rule, destroyed or damaged many pieces of Parthenon art, including some of that later removed by Elgin.[64] It was this explosion that sent the marble roof, most of the cella walls, 14 columns from the north and south peristyles, and carved metopes and frieze blocks flying and crashing to the ground, destroying much of the artwork. Further damage to the Parthenon's artwork occurred when the Venetian general Francesco Morosini looted the site of its larger sculptures. The tackle he was using to remove the sculptures proved to be faulty and snapped, dropping an over-life-sized sculpture of Poseidon and the horses of Athena's chariot from the west pediment on to the rock of the Acropolis 40 feet (12 m) below.[65] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#Morosini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#Morosini I had also heard that the Ottomans had been taking the lead from columns to make into bullets, which caused the besieging Greeks to send them their own to avoid the destruction: During the first siege the besieged Ottoman forces attempted to melt the lead in the columns to cast bullets, even prompting the Greeks to offer their own bullets to the Ottomans in order to minimize damage.[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#War_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#War_of_Independe... So are you saying the occupying Ottomans, or the Venetians maybe, were grounding the Parthenon friezes to cement and Elgin stole them to preserve them?
pawelkobojek 3y ago
There's wonderful podcast on Spotify - Fall of Civilizations which has an episode on that subject: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iiSrljKh9sVHBgMPd9EPd https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iiSrljKh9sVHBgMPd9EPd
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  I generally quite enjoyed the podcast but I found it a bit weird how in the episode about the Aztecs the author was so adamant to call them by their actual name that the ‘Aztec’ people used themselves. However he had no issue at all with the Byzantine Empire/Byzantines etc and continued using these term throughout the entire episode.
  - namaria 3y ago
    Maybe because using Roman Empire/Romans would be confusing.
BenoitEssiambre 3y ago
In Laplace's 1795 essay introducing what is now known as Bayesian probabilities, one of the first example given was of a kind of simple language model, potentially making the first word used in such models, "Constantinople". "This principle gives the reason why we attribute regular events to a particular cause. Some philosophers have thought that these events are less possible than others and that at the play of heads and tails, for example, the combination in which heads occurs twenty successive times is less easy in its nature than those where heads and tails are mixed in an irregular manner. But this opinion supposes that past events have an influence on the possibility of future events, which is not at all admissible. The regular combinations occur more rarely only because they are less numerous. If we seek a cause wherever we perceive symmetry, it is not that we regard a symmetrical event as less possible than the others, but, since this event ought to be the effect of a regular cause or that of chance, the first of these suppositions is more probable than the second. On a table we see letters arranged in this order, C o n s t a n t i n o p l e, and we judge that this arrangement is not the result of chance, not because it is less possible than the others, for if this word were not employed in any language we should not suspect it came from any particular cause, but this word being in use among us, it is incomparably more probable that some person has thus arranged the aforesaid letters than that this arrangement is due to chance."
tcbawo 3y ago
I haven’t see this mentioned here, but I found Lars Brownworth’s “12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire“ (https://12byzantinerulers.com https://12byzantinerulers.com) particularly entertaining and informative back in the day.
Mobius01 3y ago
Somewhat tangential, but I started to read Baudolino by Umberto Eco last night, and the first chapter at least takes place during the (it seems) the last siege of Constantinople. So far it has been a wonderful read.
anonHash 3y ago
Pet peeve. Colloquially people call it, the Byzantine empire, or Byzantium but this is an error. It was always the Roman empire. a German historian in 1500s popularized by Louis XIV library retold the story of the Roman empire, as having broken up into the eastern and western Roman Empire, but in reality, the western and eastern empire never did officially split. The German goths conquered Italy but chose to remain part of the Roman empire. The Roman emperor at the time was a child. The Goths sent him the the purple cape, purple being a color of kings. The Roman historian who retold the story in the 16th century told it after the conquest of Constantinople. This retelling made it seem that the Roman Empire was succeeded by the German Goths, as the Holy Roman Empire. Either he did to throw shade at the Ottoman Empire as not being the real successors. Or he did this because he was a catholic, and the Roman Catholic Church had a problem with the Eastern Orthodox Churches and had been excommunicated by them as well as excommunicated them (until the 20th century). Or both. His narrative led to the coining of terms East and West, something that continues today (aka western world). Pejoratively Eastern Europe is just alien to Western Europe as the “Eastern world”, hence why Ukraine gets so much flack. He named the “Eastern Roman empire” as the “Byzantine” empire. This Byzantium term had not been used since ancient history preceding the Roman Empire. (It’s like calling northeast America as the Iroquois States, or midwest US as the French Plains, or southwestern US as the Mexican States.) Byzantium was the name that preceded Constantinople. The eastern Roman Empire always called themselves the Roman Empire and claimed the territories of the western Roman Empire. Now only if I could find the name of this historian.
- jtbarrett 3y ago
  > Now only if I could find the name of this historian. Is it Hieronymus Wolf? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Wolf
  - anonHash 3y ago
    Yes it was!
- jmyeet 3y ago
  While Byzantium was still somewhat Roman it was also something distinct. For one thing the official language right up until the Fall of Constantinpole was Byzantine Greek not Latin. so it may be true that the Goths in Italy were Romanized (as had repeatedly happened with conquerors, interestingly), the empire that remains after the Fall of Rome was, in total, different in character, culture, language and territory.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
> "This year marks the 570th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, on 29 May 1453." Always kind of amazed to think how recent this was. Columbus did his discovering only about 40 years later.
- Kamq 3y ago
  I mean, why do you think he was looking for a new route to India? Constantinople was in unfriendly hands.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Constantinople was a just a small city state at this point since the empire had lost most of its territory centuries earlier. Most trade with the east was done through the Levant and Egypt.
    - Kamq 3y ago
      A small city state that controlled the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles). If you're trying to transport things by water, say, along the Black Sea, things will end up in Constantinople. That isn't to say the Ottomans completely shut down trade, but they did charge significantly more.
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        I agree, just saying that it wasn’t the cornerstone of Mediterranean trade networks at the point anymore? Also weren’t the main ‘goods’ exported from the area north to the black sea mainly slaves and grain? IIRC The demand for slaves in the Ottoman empire only increased in the 1500s.
    - namaria 3y ago
      The city was a sort of clearing house center. Venetians controlled the Mediterranean trade and depended heavily on their privileged presence in Constantinople to do so. Losing that led to its inability to make the market, making everything much more expensive to Christian traders shut out of the financial system that underlined this trade. Which in turn led to the incentives for Lisbon based traders to go around Africa.
nologic01 3y ago
Western culture and polity never quite got to terms with the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. Yet for a millenium it was the most developed part of Europe and Constantinople its only true capital. For reasons that are not entirely clear it remained a medieval, stagnating center well past the time it was safe to do so. Eventually it got dismembered, first by the rising new European powers and finally by newcomers from Asia. The resulting new equilibrium wiped out thousands of years of Greek/Hellenistic cultural influence in the Eastern Med basin and successor societies in the region have practically no connection with that heritage.
- namaria 3y ago
  "(...)for a millenium it was the most developed part of Europe (...)" "For reasons that are not entirely clear it remained a medieval, stagnating center" I think you made it quite clear. It was very developed very early, and it got complacent. When competition came knocking it had no further source of advantage and quickly lost ground until it was gobbled up by a rising polity.
dtheodor 3y ago
If you are interested, I highly recommend the youtube channel Kings and Generals. It has very good history content on the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Ottomans, among others. Rise of the ottomans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfb9fIMzuRw&list=PLaBYW76inbX5BKGRPzlqdztQySZmJLjJt&index=34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfb9fIMzuRw&list=PLaBYW76inb... Fourth crusade and the restoration of the roman empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vp_IENiSnA&list=PLaBYW76inbX4ZjR4rodOOSc-zL1orP4hW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vp_IENiSnA&list=PLaBYW76inb...
atahanacar 3y ago
>No longer Byzantium or Constantinople, it started a new life as Istanbul. I wish this was written in the beginning so I could stop reading there. Constantinople became Istanbul (officially) only after the Republic.

111 points by benbreen 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

My kids love Istanbul by TMBG, but I never knew the history. Something I can share with them the next time it comes on. I hope for the sake of the subject of the song they didn’t have a date in Constantinople. I’m sure it would have been relatively chaotic, and romance might not have been a priority ;-)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EvanAnderson 3y ago
Small nit to pick: TMBG didn’t write the song— they covered it (quite well, too). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople... The song’s appearance on MTV’s Liquid Television was my introduction to TMBG.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I mean, they do love the TMBG cover, regardless of whether or not they wrote it.
  - Electricniko 3y ago
    I didn't even know it was a song by a real band when I was a kid. I only knew it from a cartoon. Depending on how old your kids are, they might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ
xraystyle 3y ago
It's not a TMBG song, they just covered it. It was originally released by a Canadian vocal quartet called The Four Lads in 1953.

dangerwill 3y ago

Constantinople was conquered by the Turks but not only the people but the name of the city (albeit transliterated into Arabic) remained for centuries. Istanbul wasn't the officially recognized name of the city until the 1930s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul

selimthegrim 3y ago
Yes but the name derives from a much older Greek colloquial expression, see al-Masudi for example.
sedatk 3y ago
Not only had the city's name remained Constantinople, Ottoman Empire had seen itself as the successor of Roman Empire too. One of the official titles of Mehmet the Conqueror was "Kaiser-i Rum" (Caesar of Roman). Ottoman Empire even adopted the Roman Empire's "hands-off" governance model at the beginning: mostly dealt with taxes, and refrained from interfering with people's daily lives. The name "Istanbul" is believed to be a contraction of "Eis tin polin" ("To the inner city") in Greek which was a commonly used term in daily chatter, and possibly adopted literally by Turks.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  > Ottoman Empire even adopted the Roman Empire's "hands-off" governance model at the beginning: mostly dealt with taxes, and refrained from interfering with people's daily lives. Yup: in fact many Jews, Christian schismatics etc fled from the terrors of the Inquisition in Europe to the Ottoman empire.
- glonq 3y ago
  In my experience, a good way to piss off a Turk is to suggest that their country borrowed or stole anything from Greek language, food, art, or culture!
  - georgeplusplus 3y ago

DrPhish 3y ago

As nice as that is for a quick overview, the whole story was told rather well by Gibbon in his "History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire". If that has whet your appetite and you'd like a more in-depth telling of just this episode then you can skip right to : https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/895/pg895-images.html#linkJ2HCH0001 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/895/pg895-images.html#l... and enjoy. If you have an inclination, I'd heartily recommend the entire set of books. As an anecdote, it took me 2 years of reading 10-20 minutes per night most nights. I found it extremely enlightening and entertaining (Gibbon has a wicked wit). As much as Gibbon is not in fashion these days, the research I did showed that the essential parts of our understanding of the nuts and bolts of the history haven't changed since it was written, and I don't think anyone else has contextualized and editorialized the whole story with as much intelligence and careful thought since. I also found pretty well all the complaints about Gibbon's interpretation to have actually been though about and answered _by_ Gibbon in the text (in eloquent detail!), which I found surprising given the frequency with which he seems to be dismissed with simplistic arguments.

countrymile 3y ago
John Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantium is also well worth a read for coverage of this period
colechristensen 3y ago
I don't remember what they were, but Mary Beard had some seemingly credible criticisms or just updates to Gibbon. I got through a significant portion of the decline and fall but got bored somewhere after Justinian as the decline and fall of my interest in the Roman empire begins somewhere around the state conversion to Christianity.
- DrPhish 3y ago
  > Mary Beard had some seemingly credible criticisms or just updates to Gibbon I had a look at her back when I was reading, but also just now revisited some articles comparing them, and I couldn't find anything substantial that didn't boil down to a dislike of his style, or disagreement over approach. I really would like to update any incorrect facts that I might have picked up when reading Gibbon, so something concrete would be much appreciated! I'm not too worried about having picked up his conclusions, since I've come to my own based on the description of events and supplementing with a fair amount of other treatments (mostly "The Learning Company" stuff, for better or for worse)

_xnmw 3y ago

Here's a crazy tidbit: There are some Muslim eschatologists and preachers who believe that Constantinople is coming back! Based on their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ well-known prophecy regarding the conquest of Constantinople, they also believe that the Hagia Sophia will become an Orthodox church once again. See Imam Nazar Hosein's book titled "Constantinople in the Quran": http://imranhosein.org/n/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Constantinople-in-the-Quran.pdf http://imranhosein.org/n/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Constant...

countrymile 3y ago
It probably would have if the Russian empire had won ww1
- ng12 3y ago
  It actually did for a few short years as an independent city-state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...
- vondur 3y ago
  That’s also why the Crimean war was fought.
pixel3234 3y ago
So far quite opposite is happening. Until about 15 years ago, Istanbul was very cosmopolitan city. You could meet people from all corners of Africa, Asia and Europe there. Even locals looked very white because of all slaves Ottomans brought into Istanbul. To some extend Istanbul was culturally not part of Turkey (something like London and UK). Hovewer over last decade or so, Istanbul is being assimilated into Turkey. Many orthodox muslim turkish immigrants from east part of Turkey. More radicals... Foreigners are not so welcomed anymore...
- derefr 3y ago
  Is it that foreigners are less welcome, or is it that anyone with other options for places to live is leaving the country to avoid the tanking ecomomy?

petesergeant 3y ago

https://www.netflix.com/title/80990771 https://www.netflix.com/title/80990771 was surprisingly watchable

tacker2000 3y ago
Came here looking for a mention of this! “Rise of Empires: Ottoman - The conquest of Constantinople” I enjoyed this. Really well made and some great actors in there.

worstestes 3y ago

If anyone is interested in an expansive podcast detailing the history of the Byzantine Empire, check out The History of Byzantium podcast! https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/ https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/ It’s truly in depth and picks up around where Mike Duncan stopped (roughly) after the History of Rome podcast ended.

wsgeorge 3y ago
I just started this after finishing The History of Rome. :)
srcreigh 3y ago
The Bishops series by Fr Thomas Hopko on Ancient Faith radio is pretty good.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

Did they really stamp "Museum Britannicum" with red ink on that Byzantine-era manuscript? Are they completely mad?

acherion 3y ago
They're British. We're talking here of the same people who used copper tools and wire brushes on the Parthenon Marbles that they stole, so that it could be more "pure white".
- Wildgoose 3y ago
  The marbles that were bought, preventing them from being ground up to be made into cement - which was happening. Yes, the "cleaning" was stupid. People didn't realise they were meant to be painted.
  - acherion 3y ago
    >The marbles that were bought From whom? Whoever Elgin paid money to certainly didn’t own the marbles, and the firman that he quoted doesn’t exist. He helped himself to set up his own personal museum. >from being ground up to be made into cement Only the marble that was on the ground was ground up into lime. Elgin pulled friezes off the Parthenon, that’s a big difference. The Acropolis Museum has spaces reserved for the return of the marbles to their ancestral home. A museum that’s climate controlled and employs people who care about these artifacts a lot more than the British Museum [1] It seems to me that the people running the British Museum want to hold onto the Marbles lest other governments demand their antiquities back, if the Marbles ever make it back home. [1] https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1166224/possible-water-damage-in-the-british-museum-s-parthenon-gallery/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1166224/possible-water-...
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    >> The marbles that were bought, preventing them from being ground up to be made into cement - which was happening. Are you saying the Parthenon friezes were being ground into cement? That's interesting, I had never heard of that. What I had heard was that the Parthenon sustained most of its destruction during the Ottoman occupation, during fighting with Venetians: Prior damage to the marbles was sustained during successive wars, and it was during such conflicts that the Parthenon and its artwork sustained, by far, the most extensive damage. In particular, an explosion ignited by Venetian gun and cannon-fire bombardment in 1687, whilst the Parthenon was used as a munitions store during the Ottoman rule, destroyed or damaged many pieces of Parthenon art, including some of that later removed by Elgin.[64] It was this explosion that sent the marble roof, most of the cella walls, 14 columns from the north and south peristyles, and carved metopes and frieze blocks flying and crashing to the ground, destroying much of the artwork. Further damage to the Parthenon's artwork occurred when the Venetian general Francesco Morosini looted the site of its larger sculptures. The tackle he was using to remove the sculptures proved to be faulty and snapped, dropping an over-life-sized sculpture of Poseidon and the horses of Athena's chariot from the west pediment on to the rock of the Acropolis 40 feet (12 m) below.[65] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#Morosini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#Morosini I had also heard that the Ottomans had been taking the lead from columns to make into bullets, which caused the besieging Greeks to send them their own to avoid the destruction: During the first siege the besieged Ottoman forces attempted to melt the lead in the columns to cast bullets, even prompting the Greeks to offer their own bullets to the Ottomans in order to minimize damage.[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#War_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles#War_of_Independe... So are you saying the occupying Ottomans, or the Venetians maybe, were grounding the Parthenon friezes to cement and Elgin stole them to preserve them?

pawelkobojek 3y ago

There's wonderful podcast on Spotify - Fall of Civilizations which has an episode on that subject: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iiSrljKh9sVHBgMPd9EPd https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iiSrljKh9sVHBgMPd9EPd

ffgjgf1 3y ago
I generally quite enjoyed the podcast but I found it a bit weird how in the episode about the Aztecs the author was so adamant to call them by their actual name that the ‘Aztec’ people used themselves. However he had no issue at all with the Byzantine Empire/Byzantines etc and continued using these term throughout the entire episode.
- namaria 3y ago
  Maybe because using Roman Empire/Romans would be confusing.

BenoitEssiambre 3y ago

In Laplace's 1795 essay introducing what is now known as Bayesian probabilities, one of the first example given was of a kind of simple language model, potentially making the first word used in such models, "Constantinople". "This principle gives the reason why we attribute regular events to a particular cause. Some philosophers have thought that these events are less possible than others and that at the play of heads and tails, for example, the combination in which heads occurs twenty successive times is less easy in its nature than those where heads and tails are mixed in an irregular manner. But this opinion supposes that past events have an influence on the possibility of future events, which is not at all admissible. The regular combinations occur more rarely only because they are less numerous. If we seek a cause wherever we perceive symmetry, it is not that we regard a symmetrical event as less possible than the others, but, since this event ought to be the effect of a regular cause or that of chance, the first of these suppositions is more probable than the second. On a table we see letters arranged in this order, C o n s t a n t i n o p l e, and we judge that this arrangement is not the result of chance, not because it is less possible than the others, for if this word were not employed in any language we should not suspect it came from any particular cause, but this word being in use among us, it is incomparably more probable that some person has thus arranged the aforesaid letters than that this arrangement is due to chance."

tcbawo 3y ago

I haven’t see this mentioned here, but I found Lars Brownworth’s “12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire“ (https://12byzantinerulers.com https://12byzantinerulers.com) particularly entertaining and informative back in the day.

Mobius01 3y ago

Somewhat tangential, but I started to read Baudolino by Umberto Eco last night, and the first chapter at least takes place during the (it seems) the last siege of Constantinople. So far it has been a wonderful read.

anonHash 3y ago

Pet peeve. Colloquially people call it, the Byzantine empire, or Byzantium but this is an error. It was always the Roman empire. a German historian in 1500s popularized by Louis XIV library retold the story of the Roman empire, as having broken up into the eastern and western Roman Empire, but in reality, the western and eastern empire never did officially split. The German goths conquered Italy but chose to remain part of the Roman empire. The Roman emperor at the time was a child. The Goths sent him the the purple cape, purple being a color of kings. The Roman historian who retold the story in the 16th century told it after the conquest of Constantinople. This retelling made it seem that the Roman Empire was succeeded by the German Goths, as the Holy Roman Empire. Either he did to throw shade at the Ottoman Empire as not being the real successors. Or he did this because he was a catholic, and the Roman Catholic Church had a problem with the Eastern Orthodox Churches and had been excommunicated by them as well as excommunicated them (until the 20th century). Or both. His narrative led to the coining of terms East and West, something that continues today (aka western world). Pejoratively Eastern Europe is just alien to Western Europe as the “Eastern world”, hence why Ukraine gets so much flack. He named the “Eastern Roman empire” as the “Byzantine” empire. This Byzantium term had not been used since ancient history preceding the Roman Empire. (It’s like calling northeast America as the Iroquois States, or midwest US as the French Plains, or southwestern US as the Mexican States.) Byzantium was the name that preceded Constantinople. The eastern Roman Empire always called themselves the Roman Empire and claimed the territories of the western Roman Empire. Now only if I could find the name of this historian.

jtbarrett 3y ago
> Now only if I could find the name of this historian. Is it Hieronymus Wolf? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Wolf
- anonHash 3y ago
  Yes it was!
jmyeet 3y ago
While Byzantium was still somewhat Roman it was also something distinct. For one thing the official language right up until the Fall of Constantinpole was Byzantine Greek not Latin. so it may be true that the Goths in Italy were Romanized (as had repeatedly happened with conquerors, interestingly), the empire that remains after the Fall of Rome was, in total, different in character, culture, language and territory.

UncleOxidant 3y ago

> "This year marks the 570th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, on 29 May 1453." Always kind of amazed to think how recent this was. Columbus did his discovering only about 40 years later.

Kamq 3y ago
I mean, why do you think he was looking for a new route to India? Constantinople was in unfriendly hands.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Constantinople was a just a small city state at this point since the empire had lost most of its territory centuries earlier. Most trade with the east was done through the Levant and Egypt.
  - Kamq 3y ago
    A small city state that controlled the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles). If you're trying to transport things by water, say, along the Black Sea, things will end up in Constantinople. That isn't to say the Ottomans completely shut down trade, but they did charge significantly more.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      I agree, just saying that it wasn’t the cornerstone of Mediterranean trade networks at the point anymore? Also weren’t the main ‘goods’ exported from the area north to the black sea mainly slaves and grain? IIRC The demand for slaves in the Ottoman empire only increased in the 1500s.
  - namaria 3y ago
    The city was a sort of clearing house center. Venetians controlled the Mediterranean trade and depended heavily on their privileged presence in Constantinople to do so. Losing that led to its inability to make the market, making everything much more expensive to Christian traders shut out of the financial system that underlined this trade. Which in turn led to the incentives for Lisbon based traders to go around Africa.

nologic01 3y ago

Western culture and polity never quite got to terms with the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. Yet for a millenium it was the most developed part of Europe and Constantinople its only true capital. For reasons that are not entirely clear it remained a medieval, stagnating center well past the time it was safe to do so. Eventually it got dismembered, first by the rising new European powers and finally by newcomers from Asia. The resulting new equilibrium wiped out thousands of years of Greek/Hellenistic cultural influence in the Eastern Med basin and successor societies in the region have practically no connection with that heritage.

namaria 3y ago
"(...)for a millenium it was the most developed part of Europe (...)" "For reasons that are not entirely clear it remained a medieval, stagnating center" I think you made it quite clear. It was very developed very early, and it got complacent. When competition came knocking it had no further source of advantage and quickly lost ground until it was gobbled up by a rising polity.

dtheodor 3y ago

If you are interested, I highly recommend the youtube channel Kings and Generals. It has very good history content on the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Ottomans, among others. Rise of the ottomans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfb9fIMzuRw&list=PLaBYW76inbX5BKGRPzlqdztQySZmJLjJt&index=34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfb9fIMzuRw&list=PLaBYW76inb... Fourth crusade and the restoration of the roman empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vp_IENiSnA&list=PLaBYW76inbX4ZjR4rodOOSc-zL1orP4hW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vp_IENiSnA&list=PLaBYW76inb...

atahanacar 3y ago

>No longer Byzantium or Constantinople, it started a new life as Istanbul. I wish this was written in the beginning so I could stop reading there. Constantinople became Istanbul (officially) only after the Republic.