{"id":299,"date":"2017-10-28T22:15:59","date_gmt":"2017-10-28T19:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2020-09-24T17:37:32","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T14:37:32","slug":"the-fall-of-byzantium-ii-the-fall-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/299\/the-fall-of-byzantium-ii-the-fall-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of Byzantium, II – The Fall Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the previous post<\/a> we saw that the modern Russian film about Byzantium, having presented Byzantium\u2019s unique contributions and gifts, wonders how happened and such a great power fell. The answer given in the film is that wrong economical, political and cultural decisions caused the fall. Trade was surrendered to foreign nations, power moved from the central state to individuals, nationalism replaced the ecumenical spirit, Constantinople tended to care only for itself and not for the provinces, birth rate decreased, the educational system followed principles of individuality and did not manage to assimilate the foreigners, Orthodoxy was betrayed in an effort for western aid to be ensured against the invaders of Mohammed, apathy and death-wish spread to the people.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Although a great effort is put by the makers of the film to find as much and reasonable explanations as possible, in the end they are themselves puzzled by a fact: we are not speaking about Alexander\u2019s fireworks or the one-century-long Athenian democracy. We are speaking about a state that lasted more than any other state in human history. How comes and suddenly they made all the wrong decisions that they did not make for so many centuries?<\/p>\n

Mistakes were made before, and during the last period not all decisions were wrong. So far as I know the Byzantine history, I don\u2019t find enough evidence to support that Byzantium suddenly got mad and started to prepare its fall. Incompetent emperors existed before, they are not gathered together at the end of the byzantine history; Orthodoxy was \u2018betrayed\u2019 even before (and with incomparably<\/em> greater intensity, e.g. in the iconoclastic epoch<\/a>); economically Byzantium had serious problems on various occasions even before (e.g. with the loss of North Africa to the Arabs); nationalism appeared already with the entrance of the germanic tribes in Roman history; the byzantine educational system never included theology, i.e., not only in the end, but already from the beginning the Byzantines did not see the assimilation of peoples into the empire as a result of ideological catechesis; etc.<\/p>\n

We need caution in order to understand what happened. All the reasons provided by the film (most of them to be found in many history books) participate but are not enough to explain the Fall.<\/p>\n

Byzantium existed in the middle of attacks, obliged in a constant defence. The makers of the film of course know this, but they skip it saying that \u201cthe empire had experienced all these things before, and had overcome them.\u201d What they fail to understand is that each time Byzantium \u2018overcame\u2019 a problem, a serious wound was left in its body. The examples are many, if we want to know them. Justinian managed to regain the western provinces defeating the barbarians, in order to leave Byzantium exhausted and ready to lose the provinces later; resistance against the Persians left Byzantium unable to resist the Arab invasion, etc.<\/p>\n

Nowhere in the film is made a remark about this, although it is obvious and has been emphasized many times by many historians, that Byzantium in the course of time was getting almost identical with Constantinople<\/a>, since provinces were being lost one by one, and even Constantinople to the Crusaders<\/a> for half a century. However, I can not blame the makers of the film for such mistakes, when I remember that even some Byzantines, foolish men like Pletho, believed that certain political and economical\u00a0changes would save them against the Ottomans. The emperors tried hard and with sacrifices to get the only feasible help, western help, which, as the directors of the film also note, was never provided.<\/p>\n

Although having developed a science of war, as Runciman observes, Byzantium was not a military state. Obliged in a constant war, no matter how powerful it might have been, no matter how well it knew to combat, obviously it could not resist a global attack \u2013 from the East, the South, the North, and even from the West, from the Christian nations. That acknowledged, it is no wonder that Byzantium fell, but that it resisted for 11 centuries.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Beyond these and above all explanations one might give, we can not understand Byzantium if we imagine it to be a \u2018nation\u2019. With every province that was lost, especially of the western provinces that signified the start of the empire in the older Rome, Byzantines received not only\u00a0a political wound, but\u00a0even more seriously a\u00a0wound in their soul, in their ecumenical nature. A Byzantium that was getting identified with Greeks, due to the loss of eastern and western provinces, was not losing just power, but its very nature.<\/p>\n

The same disappointment can be observed even today in modern Greece. After their Byzantine past modern Greeks suffer a suffocation by the fact they are obliged to live as a nation, having lost an ecumenical vision. Membership in the European Union<\/a> could serve this aim of transcending oneself towards a greater reality of absolute importance, if Modern Greece and the European Union had understood that a \u201cgreater reality\u201d does not mean only political expansion and economical growth. Participating for the first time in their history into a political entity that has and wants nothing to do with Faith, modern Greeks instead of finding a new ecumenical objective are going to suffer\u00a0from suffocation even more.<\/p>\n

Let us also note one more thing. If Byzantium was a nation, its fall would not matter. Germany was ruined after the recent world wars, and in short time gained all the power that it needed. The same happened with Greece, which was under Ottoman rule for centuries. We can not expect the same from Byzantium.<\/p>\n

Culturally Byzantium is alive even today, anywhere an Orthodox people live. When we speak about its fall, we refer to the fall of the political power, but that is only a dimension. Even this dimension could re-emerge under certain conditions, but only as a work of a group of nations, not of a single nation. If such a prospect seems irrelevant, it\u2019s not Byzantium\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

Our own \u2018ecumenical\u2019 dream, is the multicultural dream of unimpeded global consumerism. Who cares about faith and truth, the values that made Byzantium what it was? These are private matters, these should be left in the private sphere. We don\u2019t want a civilization and political entities based on these values. Inside our houses we can be Christians or whatever, but for the outside, for our World, we want only \u201cpeace and prosperity\u201d to \u2018unite\u2019 us. We have our homes as oases in an external desert that we ourselves create and share. I don\u2019t know if such a \u2018reality\u2019 can last. It is only the beginning of it, but even now seems ready to fall apart by itself. However, no matter how long our desert might last, it has nothing to do with Byzantium, so Byzantium as a political entity\u00a0can not but stay dormant.<\/p>\n

If Byzantium is alive in modern Orthodox nations, as it is indeed, then which among these nations has the greatest responsibility for the real fall of Byzantium that happens today, that is, for the spiritual fall, the gradual replacement of a genuinely ecumenical vision with the multicultural \u2018paradise\u2019 of the consumers? We shall see this in the next post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the previous post we saw that the modern Russian film about Byzantium, having presented Byzantium\u2019s unique contributions and gifts, wonders how happened and such a great power fell. The answer given in the film is that wrong economical, political and cultural decisions caused the fall. Trade was surrendered to foreign nations, power moved from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,13,10,6],"tags":[221,551,118,89,550,92,36,53,552],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greek-history","category-orthodox-christianity","category-politics","tag-byzantine-history","tag-byzantines","tag-byzantium","tag-constantinople","tag-ecumenical-spirit","tag-greece","tag-nationalism","tag-orthodoxy","tag-roman-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}