Posted on 08/18/2009 6:27:29 AM PDT by Nikas777
They didn't really need protection ~ they needed to be bathed!
Fortunately, and barely in time, Byzantine soapmakers arrived as refugees in Venice and other "hot spots" and civilization recovered ~ well, at least "chemistry" recovered. In the meantime French knights crushed the remaining Islamic outposts in Spain.
The rest is history.
The birth of the modern administrative state - so complex it is "Byzantine."
Byzantium was still a magical place in Napoleon’s time. I understand he proposed to make the City the capital of his world empire.
He invaded Russia because they would not stop trading with the British.
At this point in time Napoleon was arrogant to the Nth degree.
If he had instead allied with the Russians in a joint invasion of the Ottoman empire if the Russians cut off trade with England he would not have lost his army and empire at the gates of Moscow.
Of course neither France nor England wanted Russia to have a warm water port and because of this the French and British a generation after Napoleon allied with the Turks to fight the Russians in Crimea.
The Turkish empire was preserved by the so called Christian nations of the West because it boxed in Russia.
So much for Christian unity....
Byzantium / Hagia Sophia ping!
Along with the coin - a merchant speaking only Greek (Greeks at this point called themselves Romans as a political identification as we call ourselves Americans) could travel from Britain to India speaking only Greek and he would have found someone who could understand him.
Give Hagia Sophia back to the Orthodox Church! Let it be what it was built to be—a house of God and a center of Orthodox Belief!
Bump for later.
” The Turkish empire was preserved by the so called Christian nations of the West because it boxed in Russia.
So much for Christian unity....”
We expected nothing better, N. We are fools if we do to this very day.
Well, the Christian nations could not get their acts together after about a Christian army was whipped at a place on the lower Danube. In part it was because there was two popes, and then later it was because we Latin wanted the Greeks to eat crow. So while the Turks were threatening Constantinople, we were squabbling over theology. Later we have the Protestant Reform and another religious split, Luther didn’t give a tinker’s dam if the Turks overran Europe. God’s judgement and all that. The Lutheran princes used the Turkish threat to get concessions out of the Emperor. The Hapsburgs managed to stop the Turkish advance, no thanks to France or England. Thank God the Turks had indolent sultans during our Confessional wars.
But, hey, I have been dashing off stuff you know, The trouble is that not even
the students of the elite schools are aware of this, and I have yet to see this narrative on the History Channel. But do they care?
Pretty good summation.
If, of course, you ignore the Carolingian Renaissance. Don’t forget, it was a Frankish army under Charles Martel that defeated the Muslims at Tours. It was a combined Roman and Frankish army under Aetius that defeated the Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. Western Europeans defeated the Vikings by converting them to Christianity (almost a third of the First Crusade was Viking) and they drove the Muslims from Spain.
It’s just about the largest building still intact from ancient times. The maintenance costs would bankrupt Orthodoxy in Turkey.
The Moslem converts and settlers in SW France relocated to Spain. I know it's popular to give Charles Martel credit for convincing them to do so, but economic and social factors also played a part. Frankly, France in that period was entirely too primitive to support the kind of city life that'd was a hallmark of North African and Arabic lifestyles.
By the 16th Century they were rapidly becoming the greatest power in Northern Europe, and during the Thirty Years War the Swedish Army definitely kicked some tail. (We also recall that earlier the Swedish Army set up the Swedish Empire).
I'm not sure today's Viking descendants would agree with you that the Vikings had actually been defeated or that such action was really necessary!
Two out of the last three major leaders of Russia/USSR have been obvious Viking descendants ~ Gorbachov and Putin. Yeltsin was obviously of Slavic "Great Russian" descent.
The last 42 US Presidents have clearly had Viking ancestry (most of them quite provable), and ALL the kings and queens of England since the 11th century have had Viking blood.
You Greek perhaps? Western European people today have no fear of Vikings and look back proudly at their rugged and resourceful ancestors who plundered the world with tiny boats.
No, I’m not Greek. By defeating the Vikings, I mean ending the Viking raids that terrified Europe. This was not accomplished through force of arms on a battlefield (although Harold II of England did defeat a Viking invasion from Norway in 1066). Rather, it was accomplished through evangelism- the Norse people were converted to Christianity. Their conversion coincided with the end of those Viking raids. After that, the Norse became more involved in trade and commerce. The Hanseatic League is a good example.
You would probably be interested to know that the 1st Crusade was roughly one third Greek or Byzantine and one third Frankish (men from the Frankish successor states of France and the Holy Roman Empire). The rest came from areas controlled by the Norse, making nearly a third of the entire Crusade Viking.
Nope, you didn't quite Christianize all of them.
I am sure Putin’s Russia would help with the upkeep of Haja Sophia. It should be a museum yes, but also a church like St. Peters in Rome.
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