I became a fan of the Byzantines and seriously found team Roman Catholic to be a bunch of barbarians. I say team Roman Catholic because this small book[1] makes Byzantine history and trivia so humorous.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-cabinet-of-byzanti...
The catholic/orthodox differences are largely just because of a thousand years of divergence, of speaking different languages and having relatively little interchange, of each individually having movements in response to internal pressures and trends not experienced by the other. Not going to get into a filioque debate on HN but the initial theological dispute, however significant you find it to be, is not the source of the most tangible differences in the two branches today. They've just each been doing their own thing for a millennium and their unique histories took them to two different places during that time.
I don't see how byzantine eunuchs indicates anything about priest celibacy, especially since orthodox priests are usually married. Eunuchs and celibate priests still come from families, they experience love and duty and allegiance and enmity. To the extent a position is admirable people will want to be in it and to the extent it's powerful people will use that power to benefit the people and things they value. No restriction on who can hold an office will by itself address those factors. Byzantine eunuchs got up to plenty of corruption and betrayal in their own right.
I assume by "barbarians" you mean the ottoman turks, but we have to be careful in reading byzantine history not to absorb byzantine attitudes about their rivals. The ottomans were a long-lived, sophisticated, and nuanced entity in their own right. Even their precursors and other byzantine neighbors were not as simple or simply motivated as byzantine or byz-sympathetic sources would indicate.
Orthodox? Which kind? I grew up Greek Orthodox but then I grew up more atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Latins
which was a reaction to the empire becoming near completely dominated by westerns both economically and (to a lesser degree) politically.
The last coup attempt/civil war (which was also a near permanent issue in the empire) before the massacre was between a French Princess ruling the empire as a regent for her underage son and her stepdaughter who was married to a Frankish nobleman from the Outremer (he was -the second highest ranking official in the empire and seemingly the heir apparent together with his wife). Had they succeeded the Empire would probably have had its first Latin Emperor (or at least co-Emperor) without even being directly conquered. Of course instead it ended with late emperor's cousin* murdering (he forced the 12 year old emperor to sign her mothers death warrant and before having him assassinated soon after). mothers everyone and taking the throne for himself after he masterfully utilized the widespread public hatred towards the Latins amongst the general population..
*Andronikos Komnenos, who was in his middle 60s at the time and while being quite a terrible person had a very interesting life. Amongst other things (while in exile due all kinds of scheming) he seduced the former queen of Jerusalem (who happened to be his niece..) and up having two children with her after they ran away to the Turkish Sultanate of Damascus. Eventually she was captured by the emperor who used her to lure Andronikos into Constantinople and then (unfortunately for the emperor's son) decided pardon him and exile him to a remote province instead of executing him.
It seems like it was intellectual, but didn't have a proportional output of science or art that has stood the test of time.
Feel free to disagree and tell me why I'm wrong
Back in 541-542 an outbreak killed about 40% of the city’s population. But even during the period 1347-1453, a total of 61 plague reports were noted.
They only had the wealth, peace and population to focus on science to a very small degree. That they managed to stay afloat for as long as they did is a testament to the science the original Romans left them, and which we can thank the Byzantine's for preserving.
But they did produce significant art and science, and especially architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_science
There would have been no transmission of the classics without the Byzantine, and possibly no Renaissance in Europe.
the "byzantine" people actually called themselves Romans, and the empire was called "Roman Empire".
- In the East side of the empire, Constantine, the Roman emperor who moved the capital to Byzantium ("New Rome") was half-Greek, and the Greek element in the East meant this half of the Roman Empire had a stronger Greek ethnic presence.
- In the West side, the local Roman elite along with newly arrived Germanic peoples (the Franks) were Christianized and established the Papal states, of whose the Pope was king, the Catholic church, and realms that continued from the Roman Empire that was split into West and East. To make their claim over the Roman Empire stronger, there were fabrications of legitimacy (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine ) and a lot of religious infighting with the East.
In short, in terms of a continuum of emperors the Eastern empire was essentially uninterrupted.
Even before the breakup of the empire, Romans were a bit obsessed with lineage and being descendants of powerful Romans. This cultural element carried over in the next two millennia by many people claiming the role of the Emperor of Romans, until the victories of Napoleon forced the rest of Europe to dissolve the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 to prevent Napoleon from claiming the title for himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Holy_Roman_...
The two heads in the Byzantine flags, that is. Byzantines called themselves "Roman", and everyone else in the area called them "Rum" (i.e. "Roman") because they were Romans.
And this guy was the Last of the Romans:
The place the Byzantines got those eggs from tried that too, didn't always work out too great in terms of stability and good governance, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_Ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Tigers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Zhongxian
That was the case for "only" around a third to a half of the empire's existence. But by the 1000 ADs appointing eunuchs to high posts fell out of fashion with emperors appointing family members or leading in the field directly (unlike in Justinians day when emperors spent almost their entire reign being cloistered in the palace).
Somewhere between the first and third crusades there was a non-insignificant chance of the empire becoming much more integrated with Latin/Catholic west. Later Komnenian emperors started adopting Western customs, had fairly good relations with most Crusader and Western States and were attempting to reunite the both churches officially.
Of course this process culminated when a French princess became an effective ruler of the empire as a regent for her underage son, she surrounded herself with Latins and parceled off pretty much everything she could off to Italian Merchants. This was met with an extremely violent backlash culminating in her and her son being murdered and a literal genocide (or at least a massive pogrom) of all the westerns living in Constantinople (10-20% of all the people living in the city). And the split was made permanent by the even more violent sack during the 4th crusade by the westerners.
Or rather, "carrying it to an extreme". But we don't have to carry it that far. Eliminating inherited positions is a huge and sufficient improvement. If you go all the way to "no family or friends at all", yeah, I'd agree the problematic aspects might outweigh the benefits.
Ralph Nader comes to mind.
ok. why?
Samuel Slater brings cotton mill technology to America in 1789: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
Robert Fortune learns Chinese tea production methods and brings them to British India in 1848: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea...
Someone (maybe you!) should write a book about this!
https://geography.name/how-rubber-moved-to-asia/
> The Brazilian monopoly suffered a fatal blow in 1876. In that year the English explorer Sir Henry Wickham (1800–67) gathered about 70,000 seeds from wild rubber trees in the forest close to the city of Santarem, in the state of Para. Wickham smuggled the seeds out of Brazil and took them to Kew Gardens, London, where they were sown. Many of them germinated, and 3,000 seedlings were sent from London to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1877, 22 rubber plants were sent from Ceylon to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The trees were growing there when in 1888 Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley (1855–1956) arrived as the gardens' first scientific director. Ridley spent years studying the trees, and in 1895 he discovered a technique for tapping the latex without seriously harming the tree. That made it practicable to cultivate the trees commercially. In 1890 Ridley exhibited the first cultivated rubber trees, and in 1896 the first rubber plantations were established in Malaysia. Most of the trees were grown from Ridley's seeds. Growers went on to produce hardier, disease-resistant varieties, and large rubber plantations were developed in Ceylon and Singapore as well as Malaysia.
On their side the UK not only banned export of certain technologies to the US but they also banned emigration of the people knowledgeable about them.
This quote and the preceding paragraph about the distrust of the Chinese tea manufacturers are quite something. I hadn't considered the "made in China" stereotype for quality had been around for centuries.
Most books we read were kind of dry. Here's a list of books I found readable and engaging if you want to delve deeper:
* Byzantium trilogy by Norwich. If you don't want to get all three, I suggest getting The Apogee (2nd volume). Fantastically readable and solid historical work with a generous side of gossip.
* Alexiad by Anna Komnene. Written around 1140 after Anna was deposed to a convent, this biography of her father, Alexios, has an immediacy that history books cannot match. The end will probably bring you to tears.
* Anecdota (Secret History) by Procopius. For pure titillation factor cannot be beat! Severe attack against Justinian, Theodora, Belisaurus, and his wife Antonina. "Severe" is an understamenet really, here's Procopius on Theodora's depraved youth:
On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries.
* Chronographia by Michael Psellos covers the reigns of 14 emperors and empresses in a 100 time period
It is unclear if the affected entity ever imposed sanctions or other form of punishment on the perpetrator (presumably they did notice that there was no longer demand for their silk in certain markets??). It also appears that the perpetrators promptly established a monopoly of their own (on the basis of somebody else's know-how which is also somewhat odd with today's eyes :-).
Somehow it is all predicated on very sparse communication between different parts of the world. The flip side is that in today's hyper-connected world you might be able to tell if a secret has leaked just by triangulation.
I've listened to all 265 episodes so far, and I'm still thrilled every time a new one comes out!
Obviously its rarity, social connotations, and mysterious origins had a huge effect on its value. But like gold, its characteristics alone are enough to cause people to go through the trouble to acquire it initially, enough for those other factors to take over.
Sure gold and bitcoin are stores of value and currency, but we don't usually make our boxers out of them.
There is a rumor that Bill Gates will not pay for art because "that is not worth money" .. he famously had giant digital screens hung in his thirty thousand square foot home, displaying reproductions of famous art without paying for them. Yet, he has spent millions of dollars building and acquiring software patents, which are applied with attorneys to generate many times that income. I suggest that is directly reflective of that cultural difference.
It's a funny anecdote, but he has well over a hundred million in art.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/2845331/bill-gates-art-collecti...