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The lion may be Chinese but the four horses in St Mark's Basilica are Greek looted from Constantinople during the fourth crusade (1204). Perhaps the lion was a
by stelliosk 2y ago
The lion may be Chinese but the four horses in St Mark's Basilica are Greek looted from
Constantinople during the fourth crusade (1204).
Perhaps the lion was also looted and brought to Constantinople originally which would fit with pre Marco Polo's travels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark
- sbdhzjd 2y agoLooting a collapsing empire just across the Mediterranean is easy. Looting an empire halls way across the world is a tad harder.
- rsynnott 2y agoI think their theory is that the lion was brought to Constantinople by legitimate means, then looted _from_ there by Venice.
- ithkuil 2y agoIt's a common misconception that the crusades were a crime of white christians versus non-white non-christians. In reality crusades were just as well a crime against other white christians as against non-white christians, white non-christians, non-white non-christians, an excuse would be found for any of these targets
- sbdhzjd 2y agoAll true. But they were also an anti-colonial struggle to liberate occupied native christians from the imperialist ambitions from the Arabian peninsula.
- ithkuil 2y agoOh yes that was surely a motivator for some but also an excuse for others. The political landscape of that time was truly complicated and chaotic in a way that is hard to truly capture in the image we have of that time period brought through general education, mostly because of lack of time to explain it all properly
- tsimionescu 2y agoIf they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? Just because they spoke Greek doesn't make them Greeks. Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?
- rsynnott 2y ago> If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoA better question would be, would the inhabitants at the time in question call themselves "Hellenes", "Graeci" (Greeks), or "Romans"?
- Exoristos 2y agoYes.
- ithkuil 2y ago>>> TIL that in 1912 when the island of Lemnos was occupied by Greece, some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier retorted. "No, we are Romans." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/thJwKoNhnn https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/thJwKoNhnn
- tsimionescu 2y agoWell, I think we could define it by what the people living there considered themselves to be. And generally, from what I know (but I'm not well read on this subject, so I'm happy to be corrected), the inhabitants of the area would have called themselves Romans, at least by the time the city came to be known as Constantinople. Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.