The Byzantine Question

When did Rome fall?

The obsession with the political pedigree of Rome seems to be among the driving forces of Western civilization. Everyone wants to be Roman. Everyone wants to claim the Roman Tradition, and for a long time European countries fabricated genealogies of their leaders to link them back to Aeneas and the Trojans, just as the Romans did. The most successful claimant of Rome in this day seems to be the Byzantine Empire, because the Imperial throne had already been moved to Constantinople by the time the Roman Empire split into East (Byzantium) and West.

However, I go by the more traditional or rudimentary understanding that Rome fell in the West, and not the East, and that the Byzantines were not Romans. No matter how much they called themselves Romans, they just weren’t. Especially not later on. I also have some other grievances with the Byzantines, but let us get into the case for Byzantine Roman-ness (and to some degree, Frankish Roman-ness) first and foremost, and why it’s important.

Firstly, there is a popular counterargument to the common sense non-Roman-ness of the Byzantines. The original argument goes something like: “The Byzantines aren’t Roman because they were not ethnic Romans and throughout the general course of their empire they did not control the city of Rome”. Now, firstly, their counterargument of the argument from the city of Rome is that the Roman capital had already moved to the Byzantine before the split, and that the Western Roman capital wasn’t even Rome. But a state’s capital does not necessarily mean a state’s most culturally significant city. Rome remained the largest city in the world throughout the 4th century AD, it’s just that it was more convenient in a time of political instability to have the Emperor closer to the Eastern frontier. But this gets into a larger issue, and something I feel pressed as a right-winger to dispel, that “Roman” was purely idealistic, and had no actual relation to culture or heritage.

Section on Roman ethnic identity (skip if you want to talk about Byzantines)

This, first of all, represents an inability to place yourself into the Roman political space. As many on the right like to tout, there are many similarities between what happened in Rome and what is happening today in the West. Although, sometimes they get their timelines mixed up. Mass immigration in Rome happened during the High Empire. Genetic evidence has shown that urban Rome was swamped with slaves, merchants, and immigrants largely from the Greek-speaking East, just like Juvenal complained of. People see this and assume that Romans were in favor of immigration and had no ethnic conception of themselves, when in reality it had become a very loaded subject by the Imperial era just as it has become in our own civilization. Some Romans like Cicero, pedaled the same sort of retardation we here today. “Rome is a nation of immigrants” (i.e. different Italic tribes) “and therefore we should also consider this Syrian son-of-a-slave who speaks Greek among peers and Aramaic among family, to be Roman”. But just as significant were those Roman conservatives who derided the pollution of Roman blood with the river Orontes. Juvenal, as I mentioned, was one of these, as well as Suetonius and Tacitus. “HBD” was already basically considered obvious in the ancient world. It’s obvious to anyone who deals with livestock, that different strains act a different way. The idea that these differences are explained entirely by upbringing is a secondary ideological machination which questions the common sense of the shepherd.

While a non-Roman could attain Roman citizenship, there was no simple process of naturalization. Roman citizenship was often granted as a personal reward. Only Italians were granted Roman citizenship by virtue their tribal origin before the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD, which was more out of economic incentive and had no real ideological background (although, Caracalla himself was non-Roman). Roman citizenship was also heavily tiered. Roman citizenship was only ever expanded to all Italic tribes was due to the Social War, in which the Italic allies of the Romans (or more broadly, the Latins) warred with Rome for citizenship.

If we are to believe the recordings of Cassius Dio, Augustus too would today be canceled for being a racist bigot! Firstly, let’s go over Augustus’s reforms, unrelated to his speeches recorded by Dio. Augustus released a plethora of moral legislation which were meant to counter some of the things the Roman empire was facing which we see today in the west. Feminism, free love, and low birth rates (especially among the better half of Society. Like today, Rome was having an issue of the more affluent not having kids). Adultery was criminalized. The state ordered all Roman citizens to marry, and particularly not to marry people of significantly lower social standing (ex: Prostitutes and children of slaves), and to have children by those proper marriages.

This obviously serves various purposes, but does it also serve a racial purpose? Here is what Cassius Dio reports on Augustus:

“Considering it also of great importance to keep the people pure and unsullied by any taint of foreign or servile blood, he was most chary of conferring Roman citizenship and set a limit to manumission. When Tiberius requested citizenship for a Grecian dependent of his, Augustus wrote in reply that he would not grant it unless the man appeared in person and convinced him that he had reasonable grounds for the request; and when Livia asked it for a Gaul from a tributary province, he refused, offering instead freedom from tribute, and declaring that he would more willingly suffer a loss to his privy purse than the prostitution of the honor of Roman citizenship. Not content with making it difficult for slaves to acquire freedom, and still more so for them to attain full rights, by making careful provision as to the number, condition, and status of those who were manumitted, he added the proviso that no one who had ever been put in irons or tortured should acquire citizenship by any grade of freedom.”

Here are sections of a speech Dio records Augustus giving relating to Roman birthrates:

“For you [directed at Romans in the audience], heedless alike of the providence of the gods and of the watchful care of your forefathers, are bent upon annihilating our entire race and making it in truth mortal, are bent upon destroying and bringing to an end the entire Roman nation. For what seed of human beings would be left, if all the rest of mankind should do what you are doing? For you have become their leaders, and so would rightly bear the responsibility for the universal destruction.”

“Bethink you, therefore, what wrath would justly seize the great Romulus, the founder of our race, if  he could reflect on the circumstances of his own birth and then upon your conduct in refusing to beget children even by lawful marriages! How wrathful would the Romans who were his followers be, if they could realize that after they themselves had even seized foreign girls, you are not satisfied even with those of your own race, and after they had got children even by enemy wives, you will not beget them even of women who are citizens! How angry would Curtius be, who was willing to die that the married men might not be bereft of their wives! How indignant Hersilia, who attended her daughter at her wedding and instituted for us all the rites of marriage! Nay, our fathers even fought the Sabines to obtain brides and made peace through the intercession of their wives and children; they administered oaths and made sundry treaties for this very purpose; but you are bringing all their efforts to naught. And why? Do you desire to live apart from women always, even as the Vestal Virgins live apart from men? Then you should also be punished as they are if you are guilty of any lewdness.”

“For surely you are not expecting men to spring up from the ground to succeed to your goods and to the public interests, as the myths describe! And yet it is neither right nor creditable that our race should cease, and the name of Romans be blotted out with us, and the city be given over to foreigners — Greeks or even barbarians. […] And do you, then, who are Romans from the beginning and claim as your ancestors the famous Marcii, the Fabii, the Quintii, the Valerii, and the Julii, do you desire that your families and names alike shall perish with you?”

Anyways, this conception of Romans as a distinct ethnic group seems to continue on even by the late Empire, albeit they decayed over time (no thanks to Christendom). Much of the reason the Byzantines were so bent on considering themselves Roman was because Romanness was associated with Christendom, while “Hellene” or “Greek” was associated with the old Roman religion. Greek Paganism actually lasted significantly longer in Greece than Roman paganism did in Italy. But anyways, consider this excerpt from Julian the Apostate’s polemical work Against the Galileans:

“Come, tell me why it is that the Celts and the Germans are fierce, while the Hellenes and Romans are, generally speaking, inclined to political life and humane, though at the same time unyielding and warlike? Why the Egyptians are more intelligent and more given to crafts, and the Syrians unwarlike and effeminate, but at the same time intelligent, hot-tempered, vain and quick to learn? […] As for men’s laws, it is evident that men have established them to correspond with their own natural dispositions; that is to say, constitutional and humane laws were established by those in whom a humane disposition had been fostered above all else, savage and inhuman laws by those in whom there lurked and was inherent the contrary disposition.”

Yes, even Julian though, was derided by some of his Roman soldiers as a Greekling and an Oriental if I remember correctly. I don’t know if this was on account of his Greco-Anatolian lineage or his religion, but Romans and Greeks definitely did not view each other on good terms all of the time, especially in the Republican era. Albeit, Romans and Greeks (true Greeks, not Oriental Greeks who often didn’t have a drop of Greek blood) understood that they had some sort of common ancestry in the earliest days of mankind, but they often really didn’t like each other. Consider the following quote from Cato the Elder:

“[Greeks] are a most iniquitous and intractable race, and you may take my word as the word of a prophet, when I tell you, that whenever that nation shall bestow its literature upon Rome it will mar everything; and that all the sooner, if it sends its physicians among us. They have conspired among themselves to murder all barbarians with their medicine; a profession which they exercise for lucre, in order that they may win our confidence, and dispatch us all the more easily. They are in the common habit, too, of calling us barbarians, and stigmatize us beyond all other nations, by giving us the abominable appellation of Opici. I forbid you to have anything to do with physicians.”

Now, Cato was famously conservative, and other notable Romans like Hadrian and Scipio Africanus were actually more along the lines of being Hellenophilic. But, even then there was a general distaste for peoples who spoke Greek but may not have been Greek by blood. Hell, even a lot of Greeks didn’t like this. Juvenal says this:

“I now proceed to speak of the nation specially favored by our wealthy compatriots, one that I shun above all others. I shan’t mince words. My fellow Romans, I cannot put up with a city of Greeks; yet how much of the dregs is truly Achaean? The Syrian Orontes has long been discharging into the Tiber, carrying with it its language and morals and slanting strings, complete with piper, not to speak of its native timbrels and the girls who are told by their owners to ply their trade at the race-track. (That’s the place for a foreign whore with a colored bonnet.)

Okay, I think I’ve talked enough about Roman ethnic views. My point is, in Rome’s prime Roman meant a lot more than just some sort of set of values. It was deeply tied to the heritage of the Roman people in Italy dating back to the founding of their city and their tribal lineages.

Byzantines

So to call the Byzantines “Roman” based on their adoption of Roman virtues, first of all, is ridiculous. And secondly, I am extremely skeptical of this alleged “Byzantine Adoption” of Roman values! Christianity, sorry, is not a Roman value. Iconoclasm, is not a Roman value. Having a Roman Emperor itself is barely even a Roman value, so much as a necessary action taken by the Romans. The Emperor, by the way, meant something completely different to earlier Roman pagans. Yes, the Byzantines adopted the Roman legal tradition with some modifications, but so too, eventually, did much of Western Europe. It’s extremely convenient to share the “values” of a certain people when you get to pick and choose just what those values are, which is fucking exactly what we see today in places like America and the UK. Are you starting to see why maybe I don’t think pretending the Byzantines are Roman is all that great?

Another common claim made by Byzantoboos is that the Byzantines are the real Roman Empire, even if they were ethnically Greek and stopped using Latin officially during the 7th century AD, because they represent the direct continuation of the Roman imperial line. Now, first of all, Rome has never really had a particularly well-organized mode of succession, nor has the actual office of emperor remained the same throughout the imperial era (as I said), so why exactly is this so special? Do all of the times an emperor was usurped by a powerful general count as new empires? And it isn’t like this stopped under the Byzantines. The entire reason that Charlemagne was granted the title of Roman Emperor by the Pope was because the Byzantines were currently under rule by a woman. This was the first time that a woman ever officially held the office of emperor.

But besides that, the non-Imperial aspects of the Roman state continued on in Italy. While Constantine did bring some aspects of the Roman government to Constantinople, it was a reduced version of the more complex structure of Rome proper. The Roman senate stayed in Rome, with all its titles and what not, and in fact the Roman Senate actually continued to operate under the Ostrogoths. The Roman senate was only destroyed after Justinian had retaken Italy and dissolved much of the power which the Roman senate still held onto, with it fading into irrelevancy in the decades after. It likely ended officially some time in the early 7th century, between its last recorded action in 603 and the conversion of the Curia Julia into the Sant'Adriano al Foro in 630. The Roman aristocracy continued to exist, at least in name, for a while in the west, and in the 10th century Roman nobles were still using senator as an honorary title.

This actually gets to a very important subject, and one I think is a good stepping stone from “The Byzantines aren’t Roman” to “I am not a big fan of the Byzantines”. You see, the only reason the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist under Odoacer, was because Odoacer chose to give Suzerainty to the Byzantine Emperor. Odoacer was a Roman general. Plenty of Roman generals had usurped power for themselves in the past, and plenty of them were not ethnic Romans. By this point in the empire, much of the military elite were of Germanic extract. People misconstrue the Goths as akin to immigrants, but they were more like PMCs who got extremely rich off of their service but had questionable loyalty to the Empire. There weren’t very much of them. Odoacer, however, didn’t want to be on bad terms with the Byzantines. He was essentially a Western Roman Emperor, he just didn’t take the title because it staved off Byzantine reprisal. Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, also claimed Suzerainty and was actually ordered to invade Odoacer’s state on behalf of the Eastern Emperor Zeno. While the Ostrogoths are depicted as the destroyers of Roman civilization, Roman life went on essentially as it had before the fall under Ostrogothic rule. Albeit, “as it had before the fall” is already such a contorted form of Roman civilization that I don’t know if I would place much emphasis on it, but obviously in the context of the Byzantines it’s relevant. So, the Byzantines themselves are essentially responsible for the de jure ending of the Western Empire.

What really ended “Roman Civilization” in Italy was not the Goths, but the Byzantines themselves. The conquests of Odoacer and later Theodoric paled in destructive capacity compared to the two-decade-long Byzantine war with the Ostrogoths over Italy. Rome was heavily depopulated after going back and fourth between the Byzantines and Goths. The Byzantine army, after all of that, could not maintain their Italian territories for even two decades. The Lombards took most of Byzantine Italy during the 570s, and were not particularly fond of Roman Culture or interested in claiming Roman titles. They also were not politically unified like the Ostrogoths had been.

For the record, I don’t like Justinian. Roman Emperors don’t marry prostitutes, guys. Get it together. Belisarius should have become Western Emperor.

It’s in this context that you can understand why the Pope was eager to crown Charlemagne the Roman Emperor. The Byzantines proved they could not protect Italy from foreign invasion. Charlemagne came in as a liberator, not only saving Italy from the Lombards but granting Papal authority to much of the old Byzantine land which was lost to the Lombards. On top of that, the Byzantines had spent the past two centuries losing all of their non-Greek lands with the exception of Sardinia to Pagan Slavs and Muslim Arabs. Yes, today we appreciate the Byzantines as “bulwarks of Europe”, but from a medieval perspective the Byzantines had failed at protecting Christendom and were now essentially a state composed entirely of Greeks and Hellenized “Greek” Anatolians (another story). Southern Italy at this point was still largely Greek. The Byzantines no longer even used Latin for administrative purposes, unlike the Franks.

You must understand that, from a medieval Christian perspective, the title of Roman Emperor was not simply a political title but a religious title — The Roman Empire was the last empire in history, and the Emperor was the only actual emperor. This Roman Emperor was invested with ecclesiastical power, and it wasn’t entirely clear who was more powerful — the Emperor or the Pope — until the High Middle Ages. So the idea of “Roman Emperor” being a result of technicalities, simply wouldn’t do.

Anyways, another annoyance I have with Byzantboos is the endless bitching and moaning about the Crusades. Like, you guys asked for Crusaders to retake lands which YOU lost, and you get mad when they take them for themselves? Within living memory of the Schism as well. This is true for the fourth crusade as well. I understand why the Orthodogs hate it, but… Why does almost every internet Catholic I talk to have such a hard on for the Byzantines and hate the Fourth Crusade? Is it to signal that they’re not one of those cringy CrusaderLARPers? Frankly, I was a CrusaderLARPer as a youth. And I hope you were too! Catholics online are extremely passive towards Orthodox Christians while most Orthodox Christians I talk to are dedicated to slighting the Catholic Church at every opportunity.

The Crusaders didn’t really do anything wrong from a Catholic point of view. The Catholics only sieged Constantinople in the first place because Alexios IV promised them things which it’s fair for the Crusaders to fight for. He promised to repay their debts with the Venetians, but also to provide them with soldiers for the Holy Land, and give concessions to the Papacy. This was at a time of extreme unrest between Catholics and Orthodogs. In 1182, a riot broke out in Constantinople which resulted in the destruction of the Latin Quarter. Tens of thousands of Catholics (Mostly descended from Italian merchants, the *actual* descendants of Romans) were murdered, tens of thousands more forced to flee the city. These numbers, by the way, are reported by Orthodox sources. Thousands were even sold into Muslim slavery by the Byzantines. Some Orthos have tried to tell me that the crusaders wouldn’t have even cared about this event, but it was already big news among western courts not long after its happening, and resulted in raids by the Normans and Germans in Greece.

Another thing the Byzantines had done which culminated in the usurping of Constantinople, was the Imperial alliance with Saladin against the Crusaders, and particularly Frederick Barbarossa (yes, that Barbarossa). The Byzantine Emperor was in contact with Saladin and reports having sabotaged Barbarossa’s army on his way through Anatolia, and only allowing him through out of necessity. Contacts between the Byzantines and the Ayyubids had been going on since years prior dedicated to the sabotage of the Crusaders in the east.

The Franco-Italian Crusaders, who from their own point of view were deprived of their compensation, by an empire which hated them and didn’t respect what their forebears had accomplished, decided to take matters into their own hands, and claim the Byzantine Empire (which they understood to be obviously Greek, not Roman) for themselves. While in hindsight it is easy to say that the Latin Empire was ill-fated, it’s already somewhat impressive that it staved off the armies of Greek aristocrats and Bulgarians for half a century in a city of unsympathetic locals. Had they ultimately defeated the Greek rump states, maybe they could have had some success with support from the West. Either way, it isn’t like the Byzantines were thriving before the war. And again, the Byzantines had no issue with sabotaging the Crusaders. The Knights Hospitallers held onto Rhodes until 1522. But I digress. My point is, from the point of view of the Crusaders what they did would have seemed justified. They didn’t have future goggles that could see the rise of the Ottomans, and even if they did and decided not to sack Constantinople, there’s no saying if the Byzantines would have had a resurgence.

I think it’s understandable why people on the right praise Byzantium at first. The last stand at Constantinople against the Turk, it’s a noble image. But, the Roman Empire was dead. The Byzantines were a decadent husk of something which no longer existed. If anything, the West upheld the values of Rome better than the Byzantines. Catholics have always been much more willing to reconcile the philosophy and theology of the Pagan Romans with their own beliefs. The Greeks, while embracing some degree of this, were always more reluctant towards it. I believe that the Greek Church was influenced by Islam, which was also probably part of the reason for which Iconoclastic movements arose in the East sometimes. But I digress. The Byzantine Empire was, on top of my other criticisms, a mutant continuation of the racial cloaca which had stunk up the high and late Roman Empire. I much rather support the Greek Nationalism of the 19th century. Why should Greeks pretend to be Romans any longer, as if there isn’t enough Greek history out there?

Anyways, this is dragging on. When do I think the Roman Empire ended? Some time during the reign of Gratian in the late 4th century. It was in this time where the Roman state priesthood was abolished, the Altar of Victory was removed from the Senate, and the Emperor stopped being considered Pontifex Maximus. No more needs to be said. This is obviously the end of Rome.