Return of the Romans?

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Caesar Maximus RE:Return of the Romans? 3/30/2005 6:09:14 PM

Byzantine navies were generally at a disadvantage vis a vis their Muslim counterparts; it was only Greek fire which saved their asses on more than one occasion. After the initial push by islam, it took the Empire quite a while to regain some naval initiative. The loss of the Balearic isles and carthage cost them dearly in their ability to trade in the West. I assume that once Egypt, Palestine and Syria were lost to the Caliphs, then maritime trade with india was rather difficult. I don't blame the Eastern empire of the 6thC for having a strong focus to the west; it had only fallen less than 100yrs b4, and was the origin of their empire. Italy would've proven a powerful province if Belisarius had been allowed to finish the job in 540. As military historians have stated, the problem with defeating Persia is that there is nowhere to stop. Alexander encountered this problem. Once you head east of the tigris euphrates there is a distinct lack of natural defensive frontiers like the rhine/danube. Though i see the importance of the ethiopian issue, i can hardly see Justinian being convinced that it was a better target than ROme, Ravenna etc.

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CJH RE:Return of the Romans? 4/2/2005 9:43:03 PM

I guess what I intended to convey was that the empire might have better responded to the collapse of the empire of the west by accepting the legitimacy of the barbarian presence in Italy, Africa, Gaul and Spain and proceeding to network the key locales together in commercial and eventually political arrangements. This as a way of using their intellectual, commercial, political, monetary, cultural, etc assets to establish security. Of course it is easy to come up with ideas like this. I do remember Edward Gibbon writing about the unparalleled natural and man made disasters which afflictd the empire in the 6th century. The province of Africa had been highly productive farmland. There were places which could grow crops in three seasons of the year. But it was permanently ruined through, I think, warfare. There were killer earthquakes and plagues too. A large portion of the population died of unnatural causes during the century.

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Constantine XI RE:Return of the Romans? 4/7/2005 11:26:35 PM

The Eastern Empire could very well have succeeded in conquering certain regions of the west and maintaining itself in the face of external agression on all fronts. I believe it was a wise strategy to destroy the Vandal kingdom as only that nation seriously had a navy worth mentioning, free of them the Byzantines could monopolize sea trade. After that Italy would need to be conquered simply because it had the strength and infrastructure to cause major problems later both in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. These two areas, Africa and Italy, could both be easily defended and offered major resources making them more assets than liabilities. Aside from this, however, the Byzantines should have concentrated on their main bases of power in the East. If you can level their failure to weather the Persian and Arab threat properly then point the finger at the disastrous Emperor Phocas. Had the Byzantines developed government and military control on the lines established by Mauricius and Heraclius the Empire and all its possessions would have been secure against just about any threat. Spain is another area which could have been taken and held once the previous conquests had been consolidated, but after that the Byzantines should have halted as the sheer mass of enemies coupled with the lack of natural defence barriers would have made holding areas like Gaul and Britannia extremely difficult.

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CJH RE:Return of the Romans? 4/8/2005 9:38:27 PM

Outright conquest of the Mediterranean kingdoms was probably something very difficult for the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Justinian was threatened when the Goths in Italy offered to make Justinian's general Belisarius their emperor. Justinian's response leads one to wonder how secure he was on the throne. Also, that one emperor could drastically degrade the empire's strength raises questions about the empire's underlying strength. Republican Rome did not conquer the empire outright but one way or another got involved in existing conflicts usually at the request of one of the parties. Rome declared war on Carthage in 265 BC after being begged by the men of Messana to rid the town of the Mamertines. Of course the Romans acted out of fear of Carthaginian encroachment on Italy because the Carthaginians controlled western Sicily and were moving east having also been invited to Messana. But mostly Rome did not act until it was called on on the basis of a special relationship, treaty or appeal for help by a combattant state. Although one may point out that these bases may have been pretexts there were many instances where Roman intervention was welcomed by one or more non Roman parties. Even in Caesar's conquest of Gaul, Caesar's clashes with new Gaullic or German peoples were occasioned for the most part by requests for protection by Gauls. The Romans of the republic operated as the British in India did in that they brought peace and orderly administration to the "subject" nations. The earlier Romans brought something of value with them everywhere but what was it that the Byzantines demonstrated they could have brought to those over whom they would be rulers (Unless it was a network of commerce from the rivers of Russia to the Middle East to India to sub Saharan Africa and to western Europe pre-Islam)?

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timon_phocas RE:Return of the Romans? 4/9/2005 2:55:15 PM

This has been a very good thread, informed and reasonable. Quite pleasant, aside from the unpleasant truth about my namesake, who was (I must admit) a good general and a bad emperor. CJH has a good point about the earlier Roman conquests being incremental. This way the new possessions were gradually absorbed and securely tied to the empire. Perhaps Justinian's attempt to reconquer all of the west was just too much at one time?

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CJH RE:Return of the Romans? 4/10/2005 2:37:24 PM

I could be biased against the Greek (Byzantine)Empire. The weak seem to have been oppressed by the strong. The government seems to have been rigidly authoritarian. The church seems to have been more interested in advancing its own authority than the Kingdom of God. But it's a shame that this empire which was the custodian of classical civilization couldn't have found a way to spread prosperity, peace and civilization to its neighbors.

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Constantine XI RE:Return of the Romans? 4/10/2005 7:45:31 PM

I would have to disagree with such a view. It is rather convenient that we in the west give our Roman parents full credit and look to them for inspiration, while to our Byzantine uncle of who we are not cultural decendents we slander. This is due mostly to the literature stemming from Edward Gibbon. While the man himself was brilliantly eloquent his summary was also deeply flawed. As a result for the past 200 years Byzantium has endured an atrocious press. Byzantine government was authoritarian, but such organisation was viewed as necessary to mobilize every resource possible to resist an Islamic threat which could field vastly more resources than the Byzantines themselves. In the early 8th century the taxes brought in by the Byzantine government was only one tenth that brought in by the Abassid Caliphate. Any emperor who chose to relax too long or let his people take it easy faced the prospect of being unprepared for what was a very real threat to the Empire's survival. The threats Byzantium faced were so tough that it took only a decade of weak leadership to reverse centuries of hard work. You need only look at Emperors Phocas, the Emperors of 705-717, Constantine VI and Irene, the Emperors of 1041-67 and Alexius III to see evidence of this. In much of the laws from the 7th to 11th centuries the Emperors tried genuinely hard to preserve the freedoms and prosperity of their less advantaged subjects and actually did a pretty decent job of it. We forget that in the early 9th through to early 11th centuries Byzantium underwent a regeneration and resurgence, its history is not one of continuous decline at all. As for the role of the church it would also be wrong to say it was interested only in its own advancement. On a number of occasions Patriarchs who felt the moral decisions of the Emperor to be wrong resigned in protest (look at the Arsenite split of the 13th century). In many areas of life the church genuinely performed charitable deeds and helped the disadvantaged in society. Is the Western church any better? Well if the Papacy of the 9-10th centuries is anything to go by, with Popes who regularly used torture, practiced sexual perversity etc then probably not. The Papacy throughout the middle ages was always steeped in power politics and manipulation, the 9-10th centuries were so bad in particular that this period of Papal activity is known to history as the "pornocracy". It would also be wrong to say Byzantium left no useful legacies to the world. For us in the West we had a nation which stubbornly resisted the advance of eastern threats for over a thousand years so that by the time Byzantium did collapse the West had recorved sufficiently to defend itself. You ignore the fact that Byzantine learning provided massive impetus for the Renaissance which led western civilization to gain an edge it still enjoys today. Meanwhile Byzantium had a hugely beneficial impact in the eastern world. To the Balkan and Slavic peoples Byzantium gave an alphabet, Christianisation, contact with classical civilization which they, unlike us in the west, had been deprived of. One can righly speak of a sort of Byzantine commonwealth in eastern Europe, a group of nations which heroicly had to defend itself from Turkish and Mongol onslaughts from the East and in doing so left the West free to develop itself. It is also wrong to say Rome just brought peace and prosperity where ever it went. To many areas it did. But remember that Rome was massively powered by a huge slave economy which helped ensure a prosperous society which could take an aggressive attitude to the world it lived in. Why is it we do not see any Byzantine Spartacuses? Because Byzantium was a nation which could not rely on slavery but for much of its history fought hard to defend the interests of a small-holding peasant class from which it obtained its prosperity and manpower. In this instance it appears it was the Romans who used and abused the weak and Byzantium which defended its poorer citizens. These are just a few of my thoughts and I am sure everyone will have plenty to say on the topic. naturally for something this big I have left out alot and there is plenty of room for further discussion. Basically what I am saying is look a bit more carefully at the facts behind the literature, as we in our Western society are naturally told things which make us take pride, even elitism, in our own history and identity.

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timon_phocas RE:Return of the Romans? 4/10/2005 11:06:37 PM

>>But it's a shame that this empire which was the custodian of classical civilization couldn't have found a way to spread prosperity, peace and civilization to its neighbors.<< It did. The Bugerians, Romanians, Serbs and Russians all became literate through the work of Orthodox missionaries. They all absorbed technology from Byzantium. The Eastern Empire was not as ruthless as Julius Caesar, who pacified Gaul after killing over a million of its Celtic inhabitants.

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CJH RE:Return of the Romans? 4/15/2005 6:15:46 PM

I did not mean to compare the Rome of Julius Caesar or the Roman Empire with the Byzantines. I meant to compare the Roman republic with them. After Rome came into contact with Greek culture and after it became hugely wealthy it started to become corrupt. That all occurred in the second century BC and before the Julius Caesar was born. Slavery didn't become big until the final period of the republic. Before that, the households of the wealthiest families in Rome had no more than around three slaves. Slavery was common in the Mediterranean world at that time and slavery only died out with the spread of Christianity. The Byzantines were already formally Christian and therefore I don't believe their relationship to slavery is rightly comparable to that of pre-Christian Rome. Oh, I left out that the Romans also brought law which even more than peace and administration or even construction engineering has to be the greatest of their contributions. As for the Byzantines. I am sure they made positive contributions. But look at Poland which inherited the legacy of Rome and compare it in it's heyday (circa 1596 AD) with the Dukes of Moscovy or the czars in theirs or any of those in the east who inherited the legacy of the Greeks. Is it a coincidence that Peter the Great changed Russia by looking outside itself to the Roman west? Look at the history of eastern Europe as compared with that of western Europe. In which end of Europe did the Renaissance take root? But go to Krakow to Wavel and see one of the best extant examples of Renaissance architecture outside of Italy. I think that as an explanation for the Byzantine Empire to have been in retreat throughout most of its history, what Gibbon said fits. I can't vouch for Gibbon's intellectual honesty or lack of same. But look at the evidence.

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timon_phocas RE:Heritage of the Romans and Byzantines 4/16/2005 5:09:57 PM

>>look at Poland which inherited the legacy of Rome and compare it in it's heyday (circa 1596 AD) with the Dukes of Moscovy<< I would not ascribe the tyranny of Muscovy solely to its inheritance from the Byzantines. The fact that they had to wrest their independence from the Khanate of the Golden horde after centuries of foreign domination might have something to do with it as well. And the fact that their independence was precarious for canturies after. Only strong leaders made independence possible. The Russian Orthodox Church still believes that an emperor is a more "God Ordained" style of government than a democracy. But that was Catholic doctrine as well for many centuries. They both believed that earthly government should be a mirror of the divine order in heavan. God, king of the universe, should be modelled by the Tsar, king of all the Russias.

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