r/byzantium

Anastasius the Librarian (810-878 AD) was the chief archivist and librarian of the Church of Rome. Despite being well educated in the Greek language, he was passionately anti-Greek and had made it his mission to "reclaim" the heritage of the Roman empire from its current unworthy custodian "The Greeks" of the eastern empire. In his mind, the Latin West was the proper owner of that tradition and had to reclaim it from "Greek falsity". He made a point of identifying the Latin language as a core part of Romanness (Far more so than any of his precedessors ever did, if they ever did so at all). His writings would have ramifications for the public perceptions of Byzantium in the west that would carry over right to the present.

Anastasius was employed as a translator and ghostwriter for various Popes and by Carolingian emperor Louis II. This gave him the opportunity to voice his views on imperial / ecclesiastical texts and dissemate them widely thus influencing western attitudes. This was also during a time when the papacy was reconstituting itself as a secular authority and attempting to formulate itself as the legitimate Roman authority and "the ruler of the entire world".

From one of Anastasius' writings:

>"The Greeks have ceased to be emperors of the Romans on account of their bad opinions when it comes to religious faith. Also, not only have they abandoned the city and the seat of the empire [Rome] and the language itself [Latin], having migrated in all ways to a different city, seat, people and language [Greek]"

The view in which the city of Rome never lost significance was a new innovation and this sort of attitude presupposed that the eastern Romans werent Romans at all, merely despicable "Greeks". (And not even as the famed Greeks antiquity, who were viewed positively in the West, but rather as devious "modern" Greeks)

There is a widespread belief that Hieronymus Wolf is a sort of devious villain that saught to delegitimize the Eastern Roman empire by conjuring up a new exonym in his writings and that this led to widespread misconceptions in subsequent centuries. However it was not Wolf, but rather Anastasius the Librarian whose polemics had lasting significance and would shape western attitudes of Byzantium and ultimately lead to its downfall and subsequent "orientalisation".

Further reading: Phantom Byzantium by A. Kaldellis

My understanding so far is that it’s quite likely that the 3rd century BC poet Callimachus’ Hecale and Aitia were lost, as I believe that Michael Choniates, the archbishop of Athens, possessed copies in his library just prior to the crusade. It’s also possible that considerable portions of Cassius Dio’s history were lost. Finally, it’s conceivable that the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 3rd century bc complex mathematical treatise anticipating calculus thousands of years before Newton and Leibniz, was lost because the the sack caused a highly erudite Byzantine refugee from Constantinople to deposit the manuscript for safekeeping at a certain monastery where, because the monks weren’t equipped to understand it, it would eventually be reused as writing material.

Does anyone else know of other Ancient Greek literature that may have been lost because of the direct or indirect consequences of the crusade?

I've recently been reading Chris Wickham's Medieval Europe, and it has made me think a lot about the differences between the fiscal systems of Western Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire.

>This very Roman desire had a very un-Roman effect: it became less and less necessary to pay the now landed army. Tax régimes themselves became less necessary as a result, and since they were both disliked and complex to collect, could eventually shrivel away.  

>...... But already when Justinian conquered the Vandal kingdom, and even that of the Ostrogoths, he found that re-establishing the tax system was hard and unpopular. In Frankish Gaul, tax levels had dropped precipitously by the time the historian Gregory of Tours was writing in the 580s, and kings can be seen granting tax immunities by then as a standard political privilege; by the 640s the land tax hardly existed any more in Gaul except sporadically in the Loire valley. Kings began to rely on the revenues from their own lands, which were very extensive everywhere (as imperial landowning always had been), rather than fiscal receipts, except for tolls on commerce. The whole economic basis for political action shifted, from taxation to landowning.

>...... even the revived tax régimes of late medieval western Europe did not fully reverse this shift. Indeed, it was a shift that only fully changed back in the west in the very different economic world of the Industrial Revolution.

>By the end of the fifteenth century, the strongest and richest state in Europe, with the most remunerative taxation system, was certainly the Ottoman empire, which was based on fiscal patterns inherited from the Byzantine empire and the caliphate alike (see Chapter 9). It had a density of assessment and exaction which was not paralleled by any western polities except the most effective of the Italian city-states – for, as we have seen, Roman and Islamic fiscal expertise had been lost in the west, and the western states, in their reinvention of taxation, created less efficient structures, and failed to learn from their more sophisticated neighbours.

This honestly shocked me. I had always assumed that a Western European monarchs would look at Constantinople and think something along the lines of: “The Roman emperor is enormously wealthy. How exactly is he collecting all this tax?”

(Did the loss of tax system make Justinian's attempt to reconquer the Western Mediterranean significantly more difficult ?)

I've discussed this with others, and I got two opposite answers.

• View A: Yes, Western European fiscal system took many centuries until nearly the 19th century to match the bureaucratic peak of 11th-century Rome.
• View B: No, the Byzantine fiscal system ultimately failed. After Nicaea reconquered Constantinople, the state collapsed into total economic ruin. The late medieval Roman state was doomed to fail, and the Ottomans had to build a brand new administrative system from scratch.

So now I'm particularly curious about the How much did the Osmanlılar actually learn from and absorb of the administrative and fiscal system of late Byzantium?

and have any Western European scholars, monarchs or governors considered learning from east ?After all, there is already a lot of Roman document and knowledge were brought to Italia in late medieval.

Maybe this is more of a Greek linguistic question than a Byzantium one, so I can just change the tag to Alternate History instead of Military if necessary.

But what would be the "proper" Greek translation for the legion name Herculiani Iuniores, understood as "The youngers among those of/pertaining to Hercules/Herakles (compared to their Western senior counterpart)"?

What did the byzantines invent?

John Katakouzenous VI making alliances with Serbia and the Turks to win against the Regency of John V Palaiologos but ravaging the Eastern Roman Empire beyond repair takes the crown but there are honorable mentions.

>Alexios III requesting aid of the Sultanate of Rum to attack the Nicaean Empire just because Theodore Laskaris rightfully refused his authority.

>Andronikos IV Palaiologos giving Gallipoli to Murad I and the Ottomans, allowing him to easily attack not just the Empire itself but also the rest of Eastern Europe.

I'd like to know if there are more incidents in Eastern Roman History beyond these.

I feel like the empire could have accomplished more under his leadership, Justinian is highly overrated IMO and could have headed off a lot of threats had imperial leadership been competent in the capital.

Or: does a more multitasked Bellisarius lose his effectiveness somewhat if he is stretched thinner?

I wonder sometimes. Does anyone ever think about that?