Nothing like it was ever built before or after. Construction work lasted five years [532-537] and on December 27, 537, Patriarch Menas consecrated the magnificent church.
Posted on 01/11/2002 8:52:14 AM PST by ml/nj
Today in the WSJ, Karen Elliot House reviews a new book from Bernard Lewis entitled What Went Wrong. She begins this way:
How has it come to pass that a civilization that for centuries led the world in science, medicine, and the arts ...Does anyone know what contribution the Islamic world made to science besides giving us our number system (admittedly a biggie) and naming a bunch of stars (less big)? Algebra may have Arabic roots linguistically, but I cannot think of a single concept or theorem that we credit to the Arabs. The Greeks are all over geometry. The Arabs supposedly preserved this and passed it along, but did they contribute? I don't know. I'm asking.
Ditto for medicine. What did they do? (Stop the bleeding when they chopped off someones hand?)
And if House just said "Art," maybe, but Arts? The Islamic architecture should certainly be considered "leading," but is there any philosophy or literature that anyone pays attention to along the lines of Maimonades or Aquinas?
ML/NJ
Not true. They are scarce and have suffered much persecution, but they still hold on. About 75,000 live around Yazd and in a few other places in Iran. This is not a whole lot less than the number in India (about 150,000), although in India they are a wealthy and influential group.
This is fair, since Venice itself was a former province of the Byzantine Empire. The ruler of Venice was the Doge, which is Venetian dialect for Duces, a Greek title for Byzantine noblemen. The Aristocratic title 'Duke' in the west derives from the same source. Late in the first milennium the Byzantine province centering on Venice became increasingly independent from the Imperial capital, partially due to its support for Pepin and Charlemagne of the Franks, against the Lombard rulers of north Italy, recognized by Byzantium. The relationship with the Imperial capital waxed and waned over the next several centuries, with the vagaries of war and politics.
Even now there are churches of Orthodox architecture within this area of Italy and nearby Croatia. The great Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice is an example, and still has icons of the Emperor Justinian and his Empress Theodora, which are great tourist attractions. Venice took control of the coastal area of Croatia, including the islands, nearly as far south as Greece. This is the source of the Roman Catholic influence in the Balkans, since Venice stayed with the Pope in Rome instead of the Ecumenical Patriarch at Byzantium after the Great Schism of 1054 AD.
In any case the Byzantine/Venetian/Italian connection maintained a close relationship of the West with the continued and weakend Roman Empire in its Byzantine capital well into the Renaissance period. As Byzantium fell into decay, and early modern Italy grew wealthy, Byzantine scholars and artists were hired to bringt the knowledge of the ancient world to Italy, and on to France and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
You do not invent a civilization, it is either evolves, over thousands of years, or is imported. The western nations all had historical memories of their contact with, and former membership in the great Mediterranean Hellenistic/Roman civilization. They could hardly avoid it. They used buildings built by the Romans, which they could not build themselves. They traveled on the decaying Roman roads, even in Britain. They used stones from Roman ruins to build their homes. They lived in what was one huge Roman cemetery.
Naturally they wanted to regain the culture they were all too conscious of having lost. From their own point of view they considered that they were still a part of that culture, although not the governmental structure. In fact, since they had little awareness of totally foreign cultures, or of pre-classical civilization, they did not think of it as Roman civilization, they thought of it as just plain civilization. All they had to do was look at the existing art and sculpture of classical civilization and compare it to the relatively clumsy work of the Dark Ages, and the relatively unsophisticated art of the early middle ages to see what they wanted to regain. And they knew that the Byzantines, the 'Greeks', still retained much of it.
(2) The Islamic World came to inhabit sand dunes that covered great depositis of oil, a substance they had no idea how to make use of but which ultimately was extracted by Western technology and then sold to the West in exchange for great wealth.
Don't forget the Red Chinese, not to mention Rwanda Burundi in Africa. But while I am an avid consumer of statistics, I will forbare from crunching the sums and percentages to see which savages 'win' this ghastly contest.
Oops, when I made my post, I said to myself 'not one left', and answered myself (I am a great self-conversationalist you see), 'nah, that crowd could never have left one alive'. Just goes to show you, try to avoid absolutes in statistics. Those Zoroastrians in Iran must be one tough bunch, to have held on this last nearly 1400 years of savage persecution, I wouldn't want to mess with them. Their burial practices still are unlikely to win them many 'good neighbor' awards, I'll wager.
What a bloody (and widely believed nonsense). "Romans fell" when the capital of Rome was moved to the Greek eastern part of the Roman Empire. Muslims learned some Greek culture from the conquered Christian Greeks and some of it passed to the Western Christians through conquered Spain. Eastern part of Roman Empire survived together with Greek learning until XVc despite Muslim conquest. Then many Byzantine scholars moved to Italy.
Greek knowledge survived DESPITE Islam and Islam was the CAUSE for the destruction of Greco-Roman Christian civilisation in North Africa, Levant and Asia Minor. Muslims came from the savage and primitive Arabia, lived in tents and were largely illiterate. Even mosques were designed for them by the Christian architects.
Muslim civilisations were build on the backs of enslaved people and declined with the number of their slaves. If Muslims take over West we will see another "flowering" of their civilisation.
That is why I absolutely "never" use the word "always" -- oops, dang it!
Murdered the greatest number of people since the Nazis
I think that would be Pol Pot.
Pot was a piker, compared to Mao.
ML/NJ
One wonders why are you participating here.
Do you own any history books, or did you get lost looking for wwf.com?
I care because past is prologue. I think these people are mortal enemies of non-Muslims, such as myself, and to the extent I can influence others to be alert to the danger Islam poses and prepare for it, I will do so. Okay?
ML/NJ
You are absolutely correct in this! We eastern Christians know the history of the last moslem power struggles. Little has changed. They still regard courage and a warrior mentality as the ideal. They still like to behead and post the heads on spikes to terrify others into submission. They still target jews and christians.
Sigh. Thank you for this lovely education of all. I often think how lovely the world would be should Byzantium have survived.
The Empire of Byzantium was the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, which was divided in 395 A.D. Its capital of Constantinople, located on a peninsula, was naturally secure from invasion on three sides, and its fourth side was fortified with a network of three walls that withstood direct attack for over a thousand years. Its stable economy provided a strong military and, together with an abundant food supply and advanced civil engineering, a high standard of living. Christianity was firmly entrenched in Byzantium, and literacy was more widespread than in any other nation in the middle ages. Although the predominant language was Greek, Latin was also fairly common, and at one point all seventy-two of the world's known languages were represented in Constantinople. Intellectual and artistic endeavors thrived.
...Its rich historiographical tradition (strongly influenced by the church) preserved ancient knowledge upon which splendid art, architecture, literature and technological achievements were built. It is not an altogether unfounded assumption that the Renaissance could not have flourished were it not for the groundwork laid in Byzantium.
Nothing like it was ever built before or after. Construction work lasted five years [532-537] and on December 27, 537, Patriarch Menas consecrated the magnificent church.
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