What do we owe to the Greeks?

Miscellaneous General
1

Between the years 700 AD to 1500 AD, the Greek peoples have fought Occidental invaders with amazing resilience and innovation. In order to stop the giant armies of Turks, built from a coalition of Sudanese, Afghan, Persian, Kurd, Bedou, Syrian, and Turkic tribal forces, the Greeks brought amazing innovations to war such as the flamethrower.

Over and over and over again, they halted armies several times their size.

While, for some reason, I would have my Occidental biases, and I do root for the Eastern powers to always win every time I read a historical story, I do wonder whether the Greeks may have made the world better for all of us. In each of their battles, they had a 50/50 chance of winning, but they used their wits to change the odds.

Had the Greeks lost sooner, Ottoman armies would have marched across Venice, Florence, Bourdeaux, London, and Valencia. And the world…simply would have not been the same.

I don’t know whether it would have been worse, per se.

But with the typical Ottoman lack of respect for stability and foregoing one’s own interests in the name of protecting any higher authority, fratricide and civil wars would likely have been more common. The Emir of Al-Londoni and the Sultan of Roma would have never negotiated and would burn France down trying to get control over it. Five-way battles between Atapakas of Madrid, Bashir of Bern, Shahrukh of Amsterdam, Barkha of Milan, and Malick of Paris would have been the norm.

2

I won’t get much into this, because it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. But to look at the “Byzantine” Empire as a “buffer” zone or a culture of stagnant incompatentcy is probably not doing history correct at all. Honestly, most of these narratives come out of the deluded 18th/19th century West that had no idea what it was talking about in a world it knew little about. These are people who denied that Babylon / Troy/ The Hittites never existed, and had no real working knowledge of anything besides the West. To put things into perspective “The Greeks” (and their language) were pretty obscure to the West until the fall of Constantinople. These people, if they weren’t caught up in insane positivism, were Hegalian type “grand theory of history” people which is even more insane. Though th The West is good at talking about the West, but not much else.

Also, I don’t see any real point in looking at the Greek/ Russian East, The Latin West, The Arabs/Ottomans, or The Persians as anything to root for or against. They are to me, all unremarkable from each other. The West was in the right place at the right time and just happened to be just civilized, remote, by enough sea resources, and poor enough and still within the trade system while avoiding big enough target for the hellish war zone that took place in the far more ancient battle tested civilized world. It was also better at avoiding plauges do to these conditions. But there is nothing to distinguish any of these civs from the next., it probably wouldn’t have mattered much which one was able to exploit trade the most, so long as someone had the opportunity to do so. And they all could have.

3

Nothing. I didn’t make any damn contracts with any dirty Greeks.

The late Byzantines didn’t really contribute much overall - can we really say that history would have been that much different if they had been defeated? The Ottomans, who were extremely powerful and at their height were considered a possible conqueror of Europe, still advanced no further than Eastern Europe.

Also, parts of the West did have quite a knowledge of Greek language and culture (e.g. manuscripts) before the fall of Constantinople. A key example is Manuel Chrysoloras, who came to Italy in the late 14th century and taught Greek throughout the peninsula (e.g. Florence, Rome, Venice and many regional centres). I feel like I’ve posted this on every forum on the internets.

4

The late Byzantines didn’t really contribute much overall

Contribute what to what? I just don’t get these outlooks. That said I will say that after the 4th Crusade Byzantium as a political entity was on an inevitable path of failure.

5

Things I care about.

EDIT: Oh and when I said late Byzantines I was referring mainly to post-1204 conquest of Constantinople.

6

The Ottoman Empire was indeed barbaric, but at least it proved capable of instituting a quite decentralized ‘empire’ (ala Golden Horde), which in fact was no empire at all, but just local landlord paying their fees in gold and soldiers to the Sultan. Also its institution of millets was a very, very interesting import form Persia, as it provided one of the last instances of non-territorial competing jurisdictions (and relative religious tolerance) in our continent.

On the other hand, the Byzantine Empire had turned into a centralized monster by the time the Turks had their way with it (my country to, was able to repel the Ottomans against impossible odds as long as the resistance leader didn’t try to centralize the feudal estates of his allies into a nation-state). had been sacked and indeed occupied by the Venetians prior to its ultimate fall. I doubt that, had it somehow survived, it would had turned into anything but a decaying empire, more or less what the turned by the late XIX century.

Also, let’s not forget that the Byzantines untied temporal and secular power in the Emperor, while the western practice came to be division of these roles. Had it survived, it cannot be ruled out that the adoption of the eastern model in Europe could have been likely.

So don’t lose too much sleep over it. We indeed owe much to the Greeks, but to the tens of independent city-states of antiquity, not to the monster Byzantine Empire. The Turks gave nothing to Europe, but neither would the Byzantines.

7

That would be the Romans.

Great way of disqualifying yourself.

8

Oh hi, Marko. It seems to me you are the expert, Marko.

The implication is that they are all dirty - I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that. More importantly I wanted to put damn and dirty together ala Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.

Also if any Greeks are reading, please know that I am joking.

9

So what now, you are going to be bellicose, because your joke didn’t work?

10

It’s a line from a movie. No offence meant.

11

Cyril Mango (one of the foremost Byzantine historians) rightly remarked that if the West has one debt to Byzantium (whose people called themselves Romaioi, Romans, though very few spoke more than a few words of Latin) it’s the preservation of Ancient Greek texts in their original version. This is especially true after the so-called “Revival of Learning” which came about after minuscule script started to be widely employed. Minuscule had been a very specialized script to that point, the preserve of trained notaries. Combined with the invention of the codex (it the bound book as we know it), which probably originated in the Late Roman Empire and became widely popular thanks to Biblical scholars who preferred it over the ancient scrolls, it’s one of the greatest adavances in the history of letters. It probably came into widespread use in the late VIII century-early IX century and the earliest dated manuscripte whe have is the austere yet magnificent Uspensky Gospels (835 AD), written by the monk Nikolaos of the famous Studius Monastery.

While the loss of Library of Alexandria (variously attributed to marauding Roman troops, neglect or Muslim invaders) is probably the best known to wide public, the heaviest loss to fall on cultural heritage in the ancient world was the fire which gutted the Secular Library in Constantinople in 476. 120000 volumes are said to have been lost, not an impossible figure if those were mostly scrolls. After this loss the Byzantines became wary about “accumulated knowledge” and from what we may surmise large book collections were usually dispersed between as many sites as possible. Many books were lost in the mists of time but many others weathered the storm this way. Patriarch Photios (d. 886 AD) wrote a list of all the books he read in full during his lifetime. It came at an incredible 386 works in 280 volumes, meaning the “dispersal of knowledge” had worked. Emperor Constantine VII Porphirogenitus (912-959), usurped by Romanos Lekapenos, devoted lot of energy after coming back in control to the preservation of knowledge. This set the trend for the rest of Byzantine history.

It is sometimes argued the Byzantine revival not only salvaged many ancient classics but also determined the content of the surviving corpus. This is absolutely true: Byzantines had a preference for text containing practical knowledge (astrology, medicine, agriculture etc), examples of literary style or curious knowledge. Books were expensive: Arethas of Caesarea (d. 939 AD), the foremost disciple of Photios, recorded on his volumes how much he paid for them. Six of his volumes have survived to our day: his copy of Euclid cost 14 nomismata. This was an enormous sum: a medium-ranking court dignitary, well paid by all standards, earned 72 nomismata per year. Istitutional (ie State-provided) sponsorship does not appear on record.

Forgive me if i say that just this is enough to be grateful to them.

12

Sounds like an extremely West-centric way of looking at things. So the main thing these ‘Byzantines’ (non-Westerners) did was not even some creation of its own, but merely the preservation of some Ancient Greek (appropriated by the West as Western) scrolls, for the purpose of later being passed into Western use. “Thanks for watching over our things for a little bit there, Byzantium.”

13

Things I care about.

So far as I know Constantinople was still the commercial center of the world, that is really all that matters. That is really the only way to tell if actual people are contributing to actual things. The teaching and preserving of the classics, language, philosophy, etc so that the future West may use it is a moot point that can’t be stated or thought about. It doesn’t matter and if it does, you have to remain silent on the value of it.

Nobody preserved the Carthaginian or Etruscan cultures, and no one cares, and rightly so because this stuff is irrelevant and pointless to think about. It wouldn’t have saved or hurt the the modern West one way or the other.

14

Just some general notes:

  1. States are always state-like, that is, they are always aggressive and militant, backwards and oppressive. Ultimately, there is never any “good” or “bad” side in any armed conflict, even the defensive State is no hero - it’s just defending its turf, that is, its little slice of the world where it can expropriate anyone to its heart’s content. Very often, the aggressing State had earlier offered buyout terms but the defending State refused and this is why conflict has ensued.

  2. Civilization is inversely proportional to State power. Rome reached its zenith of civilization before Julius took power. The same goes for Alexander the Great or any of the other kings and emperors who supposedly ruled over times of great cultural development. As power accretes in the hands of the State, civilization is sapped. In the United States 2011 we can see in High Definition 1080p exactly why this happens. A liberal culture, as Hoppe explains, is more productive and wealthy. As the war-making class gains power over the economy, its productivity is turned to the cycle of conquest (plunder, build more weapons with the loot, plunder more, and so on). Imagine if all those trillions of dollars wasted on the F-35 program had been left in private hands where they would have ended up funding peaceful lines of production and research such as cancer research (or, my favorite example, the new field of resuscitation science which is learning how to revive people who have suffered sudden heart stoppage with many orders of magnitude greater success than the old methods).

  3. The peoples living under the Ottomans and the Byzantines each respectively had their own cultural advances and also exchanged these with one another. The West fell embarrassingly far behind from about 600AD to the time of the Renaissance (the so-called Dark Ages), when the West began to reconnect with the rest of the civilized world again. The West’s resistance of the westward expansion of the Ottoman empire was simply turf protection. The Ottoman empire’s expansion, like every imperial expansion, was funded by the productivity of its advanced, liberal society and, ultimately, destroyed it.

Clayton -

15

The West fell embarrassingly far behind from about 600AD

Good point, but to nitpick:

I don’t think the West “fell behind”, It simply was no where as civilized to begin with (Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, et these areas were never really “there” to begin with). It was slowly being integrated within the trade networks; . Also, and I may be wrong on this but I the Italians and maybe even the Iberians were in somewhat better shape. And if that is the case, that would make sense as they were more intimate with the trade routes and civilization for a longer period of history. It may even make sense as to why they petered out quicker when the rest of the Western nations were on the rise, bit don’t take that thought too seriously.

EDIT

16

"The West fell embarrassingly far behind from about 600AD."

Who fell behind whom and how? This seems like a really broad statement.

17

In terms of culture the mental dividing line in Europe through at least the Rienessance was between the cultured South and the non-cultured North. Sweden, Denmark were definetely grouped together with Poland and Russia/Muscowy as the realms that belonged to the North. (As a residue of that in the 19th century you could still hear Russia, Austria and Prussia being reffered to as the “three Northern Courts”.) Italians thought of the French as semi-barbarians, for example this was the reason why Machiavelli so detested the idea of French having power in Italy. The idea of a Western Europe as some kind of unit that joins together Sweden, Italy and France is invention of the Enlightment. The term “civilization” itself is an Enlightment neo-logism that isn’t necessarily very useful for understanding history, but was very useful for snobs of that era to feel good about the places they came from.

18

The idea of a Western Europe as some kind of unit that joins together Sweden, Italy and France is invention of the Enlightment. The term “civilization” itself is an Enlightment neo-logism that isn’t necessarily very useful for understanding history, but was very useful for snobs of that era to feel good about the places they came from.

Well put