PREVIEW： Epochs #238 ｜ The Fourth Crusade： Part III with Marcus Furius
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Summary
In this episode, we take a deep dive into the history of the Eastern Roman Empire, and look at the role of the Byzantine Empire as a military and diplomatic power, and the role it played in the development of modern Russia. This episode is brought to you by Modern Epochs, a podcast produced by Alex Blumberg.
Transcript
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So in essence, the Byzantines having this sort of capacity
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for gathering intelligence and almost having like a predecessor
00:00:44.780
You know, for instance, it covers a number of depth tribes
00:00:52.400
So, I mean, really, to some degree, even like the Peschnigs
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went extinct after the two battles they fought against Alexios
00:00:59.360
You know, we know about the Peschnigs because of them existing
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the first case of like a real, in an official sense,
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As I mentioned before, the process sort of begins
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towards the end of, you know, when you say about that east-west split
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under Theodosius, you know, with Arcadius and the eastern emperors,
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that the Byzantines cultivate and refine this mechanism
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which assists them, you know, both in a diplomatic context
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They sort of learn how to fight against different enemies
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and they sort of gather intelligence as to what their enemies might be,
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There's an example whereby I've got a feeling it was against the Bulgars
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and I can't remember if they invite the Cumans or the Peschnigs,
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whoever it was, and they got too powerful so they invited the Kievan Rus
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to sort of like counter-invade them, you know, because it's like,
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oh, we can't have one image that's too powerful on the Danubian frontier.
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You know, and Byzantine history to this point is quite replete
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You know, often even like the eastern campaigns,
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and I suppose we'll get to the presurgence in the eastern in a bit,
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but for instance, the emir of Aleppo or, you know, Homs
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would be a paid-up tributary of the Byzantine Empire
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rather than to the caliphate in Baghdad or in Egypt.
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But you've got to make the point about the Kievan Rus earlier,
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if you might remember where you were going to go with that.
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Well, it's just a whole massive story, isn't it?
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It's a whole massive element to the Byzantine story.
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Well, it's so big that, you know, whole books are written about it,
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I think what's important or what's worth mentioning is that, you know,
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sadly it's sort of overshadowed by the present situation in the Donbass,
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But the establishment of the – because actually in many ways
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this is the beginning of the Vranging Guard, well, it could be further forward,
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but under the reign of John Zemiskis that the failed raid on Constantinople
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by the Kievan Rus, and then he marries off his – was it his sister or his daughter,
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And, you know, and then in succession you have, you know,
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Olga and these other leaders of Kiev who sort of embrace orthodoxy.
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And what you actually have is the genesis of what we sort of understand
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And you have another example of that at the very end of the empire
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where Sophia Paleologos is the – and I think she's what,
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the niece of Constantine, the last Constantine of the empire.
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Therefore, another sort of – another influx of royal Byzantine blood
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And so it creates this sort of – sort of kinship between Greeks and Russians
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and it sort of acts as the basis of how the Russians have this sort
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of self-identification between themselves and their civilisation
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It has its basis with these interactions with East Rome, with Byzantines.
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When you try and – I always find this – whenever you try and condense
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down centuries' worth of history, you can only ever really –
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you can only ever do it at sort of low resolution, right?
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So, like, I don't know if – we haven't really got time to go
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into sort of the whole Kievan Rus thing and the Varangian guard
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I mean, one or two episodes could be an hour, hour and a half long
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Frankly, the entire duration of this discussion could actually
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I think a few months ago, AM and I did a discussion on the Komennoi
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and it was like a three and a half hour stream on one period,
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which, I mean, we're going to canvas it, but we'll have to just do it briefly.
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But it's very easy to do that once you start going to sort of depth
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So you mentioned before the period of iconoclasm.
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If you want to say a few words about that, how that all played out.
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Well, there were people who will know more about it than myself.
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So it's probably hard for me to sort of cast, you know,
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My expertise in history is sort of light elsewhere.
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It's more, you know, linguistics and warfare and, you know,
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the bureaucracy and like the state and all that, you know.
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So religion is probably less of a forte for me in that sense.
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But it is intriguing that the Byzantines stumble into this sort of period
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of iconoclasm whereby up until this point and even after iconoclasm,
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and it's a hallmark, certainly of Catholic and of Orthodox Christianity.
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I know in Protestantism there's a slightly different, you know,
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a slightly different interpretation of like icons and statues and whatever.
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the Muslims are very much against the representation of religious figures
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But they were so sort of beset and were probably rightly concerned that the world
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as they knew it was coming to an end, you know,
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when the Arabs are brushing aside Roman armies from, you know,
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Syria to Tunisia and they're knocking on the doors of the Taurus mountains
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and they, you know, literally around the walls of Constantinople, you know.
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Are the Byzantines thinking, you know, have we forsaken our God?
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It's, you know, a bit like that, the comment used with Genghis Khan,
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it's like, you know, God has brought me here to punish me for your sins.
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You know, it's, I am the, you know, I'm the scourge of God as it were.
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And that coincides with the iconoclastic period and the Byzantines having this belief
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that, you know, maybe this representation of icons we have, you know,
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sinned gravely and it ended up being an internal ideological dispute
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And it was only kind of reversed towards the end of the Phrygian dynasty,
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of which, like I said to you, I've mentioned Michael the Drunkard.
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but he was probably the real last fervent iconoclast emperor.
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Well, they're smashing the faces off all their images and mosaics.
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Very much like hardline Protestants did during the Reformation.
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It's just that was wrong, so we're going to smash it.
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We're just going to rip it down, rip it out, get rid of it.
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What I would say is that I think there's a distinction between,
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and I mean, I'm not an Englishman, so correct me if I'm wrong,
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but I think the Protestants were more concerned
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and this internal context of Catholicism and Protestantism within England.
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we are beset by an outside force that is going to overwhelm us.
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And we wish to achieve some kind of salvation lest we lose our country.
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If the net result is the images of people get their faces ripped off
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or ripped down or their nose broken off or something,
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And the way it happened, it played out in Germany or in France
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or how it played out in Britain during like the 17th century or something,
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So, yeah, although there are massive parallels there,
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Different means and motivations, but similar outcomes
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So, okay, let's mention, let's talk about the Great Schism then.
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Well, maybe just before that, I was going to say,
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because there's a period between the end of the Phrygian dynasty,
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which is sort of the beginning of the, you might say,
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Because what you have is the emergence of a number of these
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sort of landed aristocratic families, magnates,
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The Phokoi, they're a famous example because, I mean,
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You have John Zemiskis, you have the Korkuos family.
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John Korkuos, for instance, was probably one of the most successful generals
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Again, unless you're like a Byzantus, you don't really come across him.
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But these are the men who, you know, very famously lead to the victory
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of Katakalon, which is in sort of eastern Anatolia.
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It's one of the real successes they have against the caliphate.
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Because right at the end of the Phrygian dynasty, actually,
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the Arabs do sack Amorion, which at this point is like the second capital
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of the empire because that's where the Phrygian dynasty is from.
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Amoria or Amorion, the city, is in Phrygia, which is sort of –
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West of Monde, Ankara, if you sort of drove south directly from Istanbul,
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Like it's in that western half of – or the western third of Anatolia.
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Amorion was a very, very wealthy city and a very powerful city,
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sort of not too far from Dorileon or something like that or Gordion.
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But it was a very, very, very powerful city this time, and the Arab sack it.
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And after you have the emergence of the Macedonian dynasty and these magnates
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and generals who end up rising, permeating to the top of Byzantine society,
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And it actually almost gets to a point where they're almost annual.
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They recapture Melatine, which is one of the biggest successes they have
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And the capture of Melatine sent shockwaves to the Arab world
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because it's the first time they've actually genuinely suffered a reversal
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whereby a foreign power has retaken a city that Islam has captured.
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It in some ways is – in the same way that Tours Portiers is important to us
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in the West, in the Latin West, the recapture of Melatine is an equivalent example.
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And in some ways actually more important because it's not just a battle,
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a victorious battle, it's the recapturing of the city.
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It's the first one that Islam loses to Christianity in a reconquest context.
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Sorry if I get dragged through the comments, but –
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That's the sort of time I was thinking, which is to say –
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And the Sac of Amorion is like 880s or something like that.
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They're reeling for two and a half centuries, practically.
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I mean, they fight off the siege and they hold the frontiers,
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but it's a long time until they actually go back on the counterattack
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We're just not used – in the modern world, postmodern world,
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we're just not used to those sorts of timeframes on things, are we?
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So America's about to turn like 250 years old, thereabouts, right?
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But the time in which the Byzantines reverse the Arab conquest
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and recapture a city from Islam is the lifespan of the American nation.
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We have to think in similar time spans because this is how civilizations are.
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Like, they don't just crop up every five minutes and vanish in 10 minutes.
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Like, you know, civilization is a complicated thing.
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And the fate of nations is something that doesn't – I mean,
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But, you know, say in the case of the Byzantines, you've got to think,
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you know, from the moment that – you've got to think.
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It's a long time between – you know, it's like you're almost looking at,
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So with the Great Schism, then, there's this period where there's no male emperor
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Yeah, because you have two princesses of the Macedonian dynasty,
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Who are descended from Basil the Bulgur Slayer, of course.
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And people, scholars, historians, argue about the details and various motivations
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But some have said – I don't know if you agree with this –
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There's something in the Western Christian mind or something in the Pope at the time
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that sees this as an excuse or a reason or an opportunity to say we don't recognize
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And therefore, we're not going to recognize – we're not going to recognize your empire
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We're not going to recognize, yeah, your version.
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Yeah, we don't recognize your version of Christianity, like formally, same.
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We're formally not recognizing it from now, go.
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And so we are now the real church, the Catholic church.
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And you can call yourself whatever you want, but we're different things now.
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The full spiritual authority is in Rome, and you tried to usurp it for a few centuries
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Yeah, it's – schism sounds so much like incision, like it's –
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You're trying to say the word scissors and didn't finish.
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Well, this sort of has a little bit of a back story and precedence with the crying
00:15:54.640
And it's around – I'm trying to think it's around Christmas or New Year or something.
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But it's like – it's an important part of the calendar, right?
00:16:04.800
I think it's New Year's Day or New Year's Eve, I think it was.
00:16:09.520
And there's always that what if scenario is that had he married the empress at the time,
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you would have had a unification of the Frankish kingdom and the East Roman Empire,
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which would have been quite a tantalizing prospect.
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And see, what you have here is this sort of coincides with the absolute erosion of Byzantine authority
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And we sort of touched on the feats of the Byzantines who were suffering at that time
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and them just trying to survive the Arab consulate.
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And so the Pope, with the degree of legitimacy in this context,
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felt that the Byzantines could no longer ensure the protection of Rome
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and the safeguarding ship of what we understand to be the Vatican City today,
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but of St. Peter's Basilica and the head of the church.
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And the most logical option for the Pope in that sense was obviously Charlemagne.
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I mean, Charlemagne, by this point in time, had accumulated a lot of power in Francia.
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Oh, God, yeah, he was the most powerful man in Europe easily, by a long, long way.
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And the kingdom of Charlemagne was a very powerful and a very unified and strong entity.
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And you've got to think it's like two or three generations have moved from Charles Martel.
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So, you know, from Poitiers, where the Franks dismounted from their horses
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and made a stand against the Arabs in southern France,
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to, you know, you're talking about a kingdom that spans from Brittany
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to the border of modern-day Hungary down to, from central Italy,
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It's a very powerful kingdom, a very strong kingdom.
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And Charlemagne is also engaging in something of a,
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like a mini-Renaissance in the Frankish kingdom.
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You know, monastic scholarship is, you know, coming to the fore once again.
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They're building, you know, new towns and cities and trades flourishing.
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You know, Europe hasn't seen this kind of stability since Roman times.
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Well, I mean, not to its full extent, but something resembling it.
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Charlemagne doesn't return to those high watermarks,
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If you lived within Frank here, it's the most sort of peace that you've had.
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You know, I mean, not that the same person would be alive three centuries prior,
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but it's the most prosperity that any of those people would have, you know, lived under.
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And also as well is that the Frankish kingdom, if you sort of look into the real nitty-gritty history of the Franks,
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they're the Germanic tribe who adopt the most Roman sort of features, I suppose.
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Like the reason why French is a Romance language,
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but with German affectations is because of that,
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essentially in ethnogenesis of the closing Gaul,
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you know, the Franks are this sort of melding of the Germanic and the Gallo-Roman.
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And so, you know, for the Pope, there's a strong degree of familiarity with them,
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truly European or true to the Latin heart of Rome itself
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there's absolutely no question it's going to be Charlemagne.
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They only resurrect it because Charlemagne exists.
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the Pope doesn't acknowledge the authority of Constantinople.
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Certainly from a, let's call it like an imperial secular sense.
00:20:00.880
We're now in the 11th century again we're talking.
00:20:05.500
So the, and this is sort of the argument between the Pope
00:20:16.300
And so you have this situation whereby the Patriarch
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And there's a sort of series of furious letters sent back and forth.
00:20:23.600
Because what's sort of interesting is that the Byzantines have this really strange example
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and, in my opinion, a more fitting and effective example of where the Patriarch
00:20:32.880
and the Emperor do quite a good job of coexisting with each other.
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For the most part, coexist fairly well and mostly to the benefit of, you know, the empire
00:20:50.120
Whereas what we sort of see is from this point onwards and into the medieval period, this
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idea that the Pope would have, you know, religious and spiritual dominion over everybody
00:21:01.040
in the West, including the aristocracy and kings of Europe, if you get what I mean.
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Whereas in the West, you have, like, the Pope and then all the monarchies underneath.
00:21:12.600
So there's sort of a bit of a power play, a cynicism towards papal power play that one
00:21:20.320
The religious and doctrinal questions notwithstanding.
00:21:24.620
But yeah, sort of, and the sad thing is a bit like Yarmouk in a sort of military context.
00:21:33.020
The Great Schism has immense political and civilizational, you know, repercussions that
00:21:41.660
You know, go ahead and think about the Greek church and the Pope are still technically not
00:21:48.440
I mean, they engage in dialogue, but I mean, the two churches are still in technical
00:21:54.940
You know, I mean, they will meet occasionally, but there's modern photographs of the patriarch
00:22:05.380
But yeah, we don't agree on what God thinks and wants and what heaven is like.
00:22:12.640
And also, too, is that, and maybe I do have a bit of a Byzantine bias, despite the fact I'm
00:22:17.520
Catholic, is that there was a Pentarch, you know, and there are five heads of each
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There's Rome and Constantinople and Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria.
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But the Pope in Rome feels as if his position is above the Pentarchy.
00:22:34.680
Whereas even though the patriarch within the empire, and you got to think there was a time
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where all five of those churches existed under the Byzantine East Roman sphere, under its
00:22:44.140
dominion, the patriarch never was above them as such.
00:22:49.080
He was only maybe technically above them in a judicial sense because of his proximity to
00:22:52.860
But, you know, the Pope in Constantinople is technically no more powerful than the Pope
00:22:58.780
in Antioch, sorry, than the sort of the representative of Antioch or of Alexandria.
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Whereas the Pope in Rome has fashioned himself into something else.
00:23:10.000
And, you know, if you want to go into the whole, like, thing, again, it could be like
00:23:14.780
But the idea that in some ways, Peter, as in the original St.
00:23:18.500
Peter, you know, fashions himself as Pontifux Maximus, which is, obviously, we know, a Roman
00:23:27.160
And those two become melded into what we understand as the Pope in Rome.
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And that's its own thing because, you know, the equivalent patriarch in Alexandria or Jerusalem
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I wish our esteemed friend was here because I think Mr. Majesty would have a better take
00:23:51.180
Even the Pope today is sometimes called the pontiff or the chief pontiff or something.
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But also any inscriptions like, you know, pont max.
00:24:02.000
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