The Genius of Byzantium: Reflections on a Forgotten Empire

Intellectual Takeout ^ | Oct 12, 2016 | Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna

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“Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire”
C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire

Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that once defined a hierarchy of imagination long ago abandoned by our civilization; of an eleven-century political, religious and cultural struggle that sought to reconcile Christianity and Antiquity, transforming the Western spirit into a brilliant battleground between Latin and Greek, Augustus and Basileus, reason and faith, ancient and modern. Yet to unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind”, as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. It is, instead, to be found retracing the evolution of a new and profound conflict in Western thought that began with the mysterious conversion of the first Constantine and ended, at the gates of the marble and gold City called ‘the world’s desire’ by the sons of that city, with the unconquerable faith of the last Constantine—himself heir to the great Palaiologoi who resurrected the dormant title of Hellene to describe their own noble line of descent.

When we set out to locate this forgotten world... One speaks of the Western roots of the Eastern empire but what of the Eastern roots of the Western empire? “The intercourse of two worlds”, wrote Norman Baynes of the empire, “the Greek and the Roman, one current carrying the armed power of Rome to the East, the other carrying the culture of the Greeks to the West—Byzantine civilization could call upon both”.

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Early in the 1960s the excavation of the post-Roman settlement at Cadbury in England uncovered dark ages chocolate pottery and glass etc from Constantinople. The seagoing trade was robust in the heyday of the Roman Empire, but it continued to be strong, eventually surpassed by the successor states in the former western provinces.

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Once the Muslims took over, they didn’t just blind relatives, they killed all brothers of the chosen ruler. Since there was a harem, this could be a number of people.