#steven runciman

[dreamconsumer]

Geoffrey of Villehardouin (1150–1213) was a French knight and historian who participated in and chronicled the Fourth Crusade. He is considered one of the most important historians of the time period.

[zerogate]

Byzantium doesn’t fit well in our picture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, because those categories were created to marginalize Byzantium. We have been taught that Byzantium was the left-over of the fallen Roman empire, slowly declining into insignificance. A decline lasting 1,123 years! Think about it! The reality is that Byzantium was the Roman Empire until the West, having seceded from it, erased it from history. “Byzantium in the tenth century resembled the Roman empire of the fourth century more than it resembled any contemporary western medieval state.” Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages are therefore provincial constructs that are irrelevant from a Byzantine perspective — as they are, of course, from a Eurasian perspective (what does “China in the Middle Ages”, or “India in the Middle Ages” mean?).

Even our Western notion of “medieval Christianity” is seriously biased, Kaldellis argues: “‘medieval Christianity’ is understood to be of western and central Europe, even though the majority of Christians during the medieval period lived in the east, in the Slavic, Byzantine, and Muslim-ruled lands, and farther east than that too.” Not to mention that, until the 8th century, the bishop of Rome was appointed by Constantinople.

Byzantine revisionism also means getting the Byzantine side of the story of its long struggle with the West, acknowledging that the victor’s narrative is deceptive, as it always is. We have been told that the crusades were the generous response of the West to the Byzantines’ plea for help. And if, by some historian’s indiscretion, we hear about the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204, he at least explains that “the Venetians made them do it”, or that it was a regrettable case of friendly fire caused by the fog of war. Byzantine revisionism clears that fog away. “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade,” wrote Steven Runciman.

It is hard to exaggerate the harm done to European civilisation by the sack of Constantinople. The treasures of the City, the books and works of art preserved from distant centuries, were all dispersed and most destroyed. The Empire, the great Eastern bulwark of Christendom, was broken as a power. Its highly centralised organisation was ruined. Provinces, to save themselves, were forced into devolution. The conquests of the Ottoman were made possible by the Crusaders’ crime.

Anthony Kaldellis puts it in the correct perspective:

It was in fact an act of aggression by one civilization against another, in the sense that both the aggressor and the victim were acutely aware of their ethnic, religious, political, and cultural differences, and the extreme violence that accompanied the destruction of Constantinople was driven by the self-awareness on the part of many crusaders of those differences.

It is good that John-Paul II publicly apologized for the fourth crusade 800 years later, but it doesn’t change the fact that his predecessor Innocent III had responded to the news of the conquest of the city with joy and thanksgiving, and immediately tried to mobilize a fresh round of soldiers, clerics and settlers to secure the new Latin empire. In a sermon given in Rome and repackaged as a letter to the clergy accompanying the crusaders, “Innocent describes the capture of Constantinople as an act of God, who humbles the proud, renders obedient the disobedient, and makes Catholic the schismatic. Innocent argues that the Greek failure to affirm the filioque (a Trinitarian error), is akin to the Jewish error of not recognizing Christ’s divinity. And, as such, the pontiff suggests that both Greek error and their downfall were predicted in Revelation.”

[...]

Byzantine revisionism is controversial because it challenges not only the image that Westerners have of Byzantium, but also the image that Westerners have of the West. We are the civilization of the crusades, that have destroyed Byzantium, and have since tried to destroy all civilizations that stood in the way of our hegemony. We should know, at least, that this is the way Russia and much of the world is seeing us. As I have argued in “A Byzantine view of Russia and Europe,” we cannot understand Russia without doing some Byzantine revisionism, because Russia is Byzantium redivivus in many ways.

[...]

The best contribution of Anthony Kaldellis to Byzantine studies is the new light he shines on the true nature of Byzantine civilization, by first pealing off layers of Western prejudice, polemic, and deceit, but also by reading through Byzantium’s own imperial propaganda.

For example, Kaldellis argues that Christianity, although essential to Byzantine identity, was not as central and exclusive in everyday life as we have been led to believe, by reading too many ecclesiastical authors. Even during the reigns of Justin and Justinian, reputed to be an era of intolerant Christian orthodoxy, many officials and intellectuals showed not even nominal Christian faith: such is the case of the historian Procopius, who speaks of “Christians” as if excluding himself from that group, and regards as “insanely stupid to investigate the nature of God and ask what sort it is.” As I have argued elsewhere, the very name given by Justinian to his architectural masterpiece—the world’s greatest building for one thousand years—testifies to his high regard for Hellenism: Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, is the goddess of philosophers, not theologians.

-- Laurent Guyénot, Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History

[antiochianorthodoxcumberlandmd]

On TUESDAY, MAY 29, 1453, the City of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.

“Western Europe, with ancestral memories of jealousy of Byzantine civilization, with its spiritual advisers denouncing the Orthodox as sinful schismatics, and with a haunting sense of guilt that it had failed the city at the end, chose to forget about Byzantium. It could not forget the debt that it owed to the Greeks; but it saw the debt as being owed only to the Classical age. The Philhellenes who came to take part in the War of Independence spoke of Themistocles and Pericles but never of Constantine. Many intellectual Greeks copied their example, led astray by the evil genius of Korais, the pupil of Voltaire and of Gibbon, to whom Byzantium was an ugly interlude of superstition, best ignored. Thus it was that the War of Independence never resulted in the liberation of the Greek people but only in the creation of a little kingdom of Greece. In the villages men knew better. There they remembered the threnes [laments] that had been composed when news came that the city had fallen, punished by God for its luxury, its pride and its apostasy, but fighting a heroic battle to the end. They remembered that dreadful Tuesday, [May 29, 1453,] a day that all true Greeks still know to be of ill omen; but their spirits tingled and their courage rose as they told of the last Christian Emperor standing in the breach, abandoned by his Western allies, holding the infidel at bay till their numbers overpowered him and he died, with the Empire as his winding-sheet.”

Sir Steven Runciman, "The Fall of Constantinople"

Konstantine XI Paleologos,

the last Emperor of the Roman Empire

Tassos (Anastasios Alevizos), 1955

[caesarsaladinn]

He appears to have been appointed to the post as a stop-gap until Romanos's own son, Theophylact, was old enough to assume the post. Steven Runciman calls him a "deliberate nonentity". He is a saint, commemorated on July 18.

patron saint of political time-servers

[sgiandubh]

I salute the brave Greek singer Despina Vandi 👏- who refused to go on stage in Turkey, because of hanging a photo of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Dear Despina Vandi Anon,

As promised, here is your audio. It should count as Sunday's delivery for the vast majority of this fandom's time zones, so expect another one the week that just started, on a different topic - Anons never cease to amaze me:

I very much doubt our readers know who Despina is, so I'll make a proper introduction:

Yeah, she'd like to think of herself as Greece's Taylor Swift, but the honest truth is her decent voice serves the cause of bubble-gummy Balkan turbo pop. The kind of forgettable BS you hear on a beach, somewhere around Paralia Katerini, Anon. My favorite in Greece, Kambos Beach, on Patmos, will give you Janis Joplin instead, and I love those guys to bits for that.

But anyhow, the topic is serious, even if the event itself might sound as just another starlet's whim. What happened was immediately instrumentalized by the press on both sides of the Great Post-Ottoman Divide, simply because we are dealing here with fundamental identity tropes - handle with care, always.

In a nutshell, on July 17th, Despina Vandi was scheduled to appear in concert in the (otherwise positively sleepy) town of Çeşme, on the South-western coast of Turkey. The problem with Çeşme is double: a) it is near Izmir, formerly known as Smyrna, before the early-ish days of the Turkish Republic, in 1930, and the epicenter of the troubled transition from the sultan's powerless despotism to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's aggressively secular autocracy. And to add insult to injury, b) it is a municipality run by the left-wing CHP, the main opponent to Erdoğan's overbearing political project. The New Sultan's dream clashes mightily with the Founding Father's ambition of an emancipated, literate Turkey. So much so in fact, that one might see a mild rebellion gesture in the fact that the organizers thought fit to decorate the stage with a Turkish flag and Mustafa Kemal's portrait - something you see pretty much everywhere in today's Turkey, from libraries to pastry shops, to be honest. What followed is emotionally logical: Vandi abruptly canceled her appearance, because she felt that her performance was politically manipulated and the mayor of Çeşme angrily invited her to get out of his town ASAP, because he felt that nobody puts Baby Atatürk in a corner.

Vandi's reaction is entirely faithful to the Byzantine centuries-long tradition of defiance and spite towards the Turks. The Mayor's reaction is an irked reply to the uncomfortable situation of losing face because and in front of a woman singer, who showed utter disrespect for the Father Figure in the room. But beyond the heated, almost farcical argument we are perhaps talking about what Jay-Z called an 'Empire state of mind'. 'Never the twain shall meet', to respond to the golden-fanged rapper with some Kipling. At least since the evening of that fateful day of May 30th 1453, when Constantinople finally capitulated in fear, fire and collective trauma to the Ottomans.

Steven Runciman sums up best that feeling of cosmic impending doom:

"The month of May was drawing to a close; and in the gardens and the hedgerows the roses were now in bloom. But the moon was waning, and the men and women of Byzantium, the ancient city whose symbol had been the moon, prepared themselves to meet the crisis that all knew to be upon them." (The Fall of Constantinople)

The Greek mind never quite came to terms with that feeling of being under siege. The Ottoman (and post-Ottoman) mind never quite came to terms with the imposter syndrome that ensues a cursed victory. Its genuine administrative genius that ensured for hundreds of years an almost complete domination of the Levantine world failed to adapt itself to the industrial and bourgeois revolutions of the Nineteenth century. Despite that very costly Berlin-Bagdad railway, the train of modernization was never caught at a moment that could ensure the political survival of its Empire.

But an Empire is never completely dead and done with. As Philip K. Dick famously wrote in VALIS, one of his most strange novels, 'The Empire never ends'. He was, of course, talking about the Roman Empire and how he bizarrely felt about its timeline overlapping with the Watergate Scandal. Yet, despite the clearly psychotic inspiration of that book, I think he was onto something. An Empire never ends, to the extent that its faint echoes still inform even the most apparently trivial news of our own reality.

But this, I suspect you might know better than me, Anon, judging from the tone of your comment. In that case, γεια σας και σας ευχαριστούμε πάρα πολύ για την υπομονή σας.

[antigone-ks]

Lantern of Evil, Epilogue

MARVEL MASTERLIST

READ CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Epilogue: An Eternal Beacon of Light

You are the stars/ Looking down on the world from afar/ You will shine through the night/ An eternal beacon of light

____________________

There’s no occasion for him to give you a gift. The holidays have passed and the sky is spitting down sleet and there aren’t even colorful lights to make it look cheerier. Maybe that’s why he showed up for your date with a brightly-wrapped rectangle and his sweetest smile.

It’s clearly a framed piece of art. You hope, you hope, it’s one of Steve’s drawings. You’d love to hang one of his pieces on your wall. Maybe with a spotlight. Definitely with a little gallery tag.

You gleefully tear off the wrapping paper and flip it over.

“Steve.”

“Yep?” He’s grinning at his feet, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“Steven Grant Rogers.”

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“She has my face.”

“Yours is nicer than the original.” He looks up at you, eyes dancing, and you can’t help but grin back.

“So you’re saying I have a lantern of evil in my pants.”

“Could be a lantern of justice.” He gives you a look. “I’d have to check.”

You pat his cheek. “You have to help me hang this, first.”

There’s a hint of red on his cheeks and ears, and his eyes turn bashful. “So you – you do like it, then?”

“It’s perfect.”

Later, after you’ve properly thanked him, you print out a cardstock exhibition label to place below it:

               

Hamilton, Joan of Arc and the Furies Fuseli, The Nightmare Smith, The Weird Sisters Runciman, Cormar Attacking a Spirit of the Water

(all pieces on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College at time of original publication)

Spotify Playlist

____________________

The Getaway Plan – February

You are the stars/ Looking down on the world from afar/ You will shine through the night/ An eternal beacon of light

[tlaquetzqui]

All encyclopedias have always been retarded, on anything controversial. I’m pretty sure Britannica’s article on the Crusades, for example, was by Steven Runciman, a deranged Byzantinist whose treatment was about as balanced as David Duke writing a history of hip-hop.

The only real value of an encyclopedia is as a work of reference—dates, figures, the Chinese names of stars. And for that, Wikipedia blows everything else out of the water.

The wikipedia article for dead internet theory is one of the best examples I've seen of just how retarded wikipedia has become. The entire article was created just to dismiss the concept as a conspiracy theory. This is the opening sentence:

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.[1][2][3][4][5] 

And you might think to yourself, wait, there's nothing about this phenomenon that requires a conspiracy. That bots would eventually outnumber humans is the inevitable product of 30+ years of bot and AI development, helped by the fact that just one person can run 100+ bots. We all know bot farms exist and that states have their hand in AI development, but just as many bots are run by normal people, and no amount of this is actually coordinated for some larger explicitly stated end: it's actually complete chaos with no end goal, with individual actors working for fun, for research, or for whatever other benefit, with no real concern for how their botting affects other networks or "civilians".

And the talk page thought of all these points. The editors responded to the above objection with "we have reliable sources that call it a conspiracy theory. Check those citations".

The more obvious position, the one actually used by the people who came up with the term to begin with, wouldn't have ever stated itself as "not a conspiracy", because no conspiracy was even being alleged, thus no "reliable sources" can be cited now proving that it's not a conspiracy theory.

The kicker is that you click the reliable sources they quote, and the first one never alleges a conspiracy to begin with, it posits that it is a "speculation about the future of the internet". The second article calls it a "conspiracy theory", but in the colloquial sense of a "out there idea", which is a usage I have always hated. For instance, people call "bigfoot" a conspiracy theory - a conspiracy theory is a secret coordinated plan to commit a crime - that some big humanoid animal lives in the woods is not a plan to commit a crime. The "conspiracy theory" that "the moon isn't real" isn't a plan to commit a crime. These are just memes.

But, a "reliable source" written by a millennial woman used the term as a meme and now wikipedia cites it as an actual conspiracy and you're not allowed to change that framing unless you join a wikipedia council and vote to completely overhaul the editorial framing of this article.

There are much worse instances of this, but this is a good example of how retarded this all is because you don't really need a position on the article to understand that you don't need to frame it in that way for any of the information in the article to make sense.

[ltalaynareor]

How historically accurate is Steven Ruciman crusades book?

Hey,

I will write in French, because my writing english is not that good.

Steven Runciman est une référence quand on parle des croisades, comme René Grousset, le fut à une époque en France. De formation, byzantiniste, il fut l'un des premiers à dépouiller des sources grecques, latines et arabes. Sans compter que le monsieur parlait ou en tout cas lisait le persan, l'hébreu, le français ancien (oc et aïl) et moderne, l'anglais ancien et moderne, le grec ancien, le latin, l'arabe et le syriaque. De ce fait, ses travaux sont encore une référence dans le monde entier, bien qu'ils aient été écrits entre 1951 et 1953, en trois tomes. Toutefois, certains travaux récents permettent d'approfondir son travail et de mettre en perspective des points flous ou de remettre en question certaines hypothèses qu'il a formulées.

I hope i answer your question. If you have another, don't' hesitate, i will be happy to respond.

[eugaenia]

This passage from Crysogonus Waddell's memories may be my new favourite quote regarding Bernard of Clairvaux. :')

I know, of course, that not everyone has a love for Saint Bernard. [...] I was [...] hurt by a general lecture given by the then recognized authority on the Crusades, Steven Runciman. Dr Runciman was speaking about a sensible trade agreement between the Byzantine emperor and the Egyptian caliphate—a trade agreement which Saint Bernard had deplored. Bernard? “. . . a bigoted cleric.” The audience roared with appreciative laughter and approval. For myself, I started thinking dark thoughts about Professor Runciman, “the bigoted Cambridge don.” Medievalists will always be grateful to Runciman for his pioneering work on the Crusades. But scholars refer to him less and less. Runciman has had his day. Meanwhile, Bernard, the bigoted cleric from Clairvaux, is with us still.

(Crysogonus Waddell, An Old Man's Tale, in: Brian Patrick McGuire, ed., A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, Leiden - Boston 2011, pp. 363-364)

[suinhe]

In his personal life, Runciman was an old-fashioned English eccentric, known, among other things, as an aesthete, raconteur, and enthusiast of the occult. According to Andrew Robinson, a history teacher at Eton, "he played piano duets with the last Emperor of China, told tarot cards for King Fuad of Egypt, narrowly missed being blown up by the Germans in the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul and twice hit the jackpot on slot machines in Las Vegas".

[ripplefactor]

‘In his enormously long life, Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and intrigues entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny.

��Outlandish Knight is a dazzling debut by a writer who has prodigious gifts, but who also has had the ability to spot one of the great biographical subjects. This is an extremely funny book about a man who attracted the strangest experiences, but also a very serious one. It is about the rigours of a life spent in the distant past, but also about the turbulent world of the twentieth century, where so much that Runciman studied and cherished would be destroyed.’

Runciman photographed at Cambridge by Cecil Beaton in 1925.

[vertigo1871]

Portrait of Steven Runciman by Cecil Beaton, 1925

"(...) he was reasoning with Bohemond at Antioch; or counselling Richard Coeur de Lion about his policy at Acre; or playing chess with Saladin, in his tent; then, a bit later, rallying Bessarion for accepting the filioque clause at the same time as a cardinal’s hat; consoling the eastern Comnenes for the loss of Trebizond; or, under Mount Taygetus, exchanging syllogisms with Gemistos Plethon as they strolled along the future Runciman Street. Later on still, we imagined him hobnobbing with Phanariot hospodars in the snows beyond the Danube … It was hard to stop." 

(Patrick Leigh Fermor, Remembering Steven Runciman, The Spectator, 2001)

[robertsmithsonlibraryandbookclub]

Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club [Runciman, Steven, Byzantine Civilization, 1956] Oil paint on carved wood, 2017

[newstfionline]

Crusaders and Zionists

By Uri Avnery, Antiwar.com, September 02, 2017

A few days ago I found myself in Caesarea, sitting in a restaurant and looking out over the sea. The sunbeams were dancing on the little waves, the mysterious ruins of the ancient town arrayed behind me. It was hot, but not too hot, and I was thinking about the crusaders.

Caesarea was built by King Herod some 2000 years ago and named after his Roman master, Augustus Caesar. It once again became an important town under the Crusaders, who fortified it. These fortifications are what now makes the place a tourist attraction.

For some years in my life I was obsessed with the Crusaders. It started during the 1948 “War of Independence”, when I chanced to read a book about the crusaders and found that they had occupied the same locations opposite the Gaza strip which my battalion was occupying. It took the crusaders several decades to conquer the strip, which at the time extended to Ashkelon. Today it is still there in Muslim hands.

After the war, I read everything I could about these Crusaders. The more I read, the more fascinated I became. So much so, that I did something I have never done before or after: I wrote a letter to the author of the most authoritative book about the period, the British historian Steven Runciman.

To my surprise, I received a handwritten reply by return of post, inviting me to come and see him when I happened to be in London. I happened to be in London a few weeks later and called him up. He insisted I come over immediately.

Like almost everyone who fought against the British in Palestine, I was an anglophile. Runciman, a typical British aristocrat with all the quaint idiosyncrasies that go with it, was very likable.

We talked for hours, and continued the conversation when my wife and I visited him later in an ancient Scottish fortress on the border with England. Rachel, who was even more anglophile than I, almost fell in love with him.

What we talked about was a subject I brought up at the very start of our first meeting: “When you were writing your book, did you ever think about the similarities between the Crusaders and the modern Zionists?”

Runciman answered: “Actually, I hardly thought about anything else. I wanted to subtitle the book A Guidebook For the Zionist About How Not To Do It.” And after a short laugh: “But my Jewish friends advised me to abstain from doing so.”

Indeed, it is almost taboo in Israel to talk about the crusades. We do have some experts, but on the whole, the subject is avoided. I don’t remember ever having heard about the Crusades during the few years I spent at school.

Thus is not as astonishing as it may sound. Jewish history is ethnocentric, not geographical. It starts with our forefather, Abraham, and his chats with God, and continues until the defeat of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans in 136 AD.

From then on our history takes leave from Palestine and dances around the world, concentrating on Jewish events, until the year 1882, when the first pre-Zionists set up some settlements in Ottoman Palestine. During all the time in between, Palestine was empty, nothing happened there.

That is what Israeli children learn today, too.

Actually, lots of things did happen during those 1746 years, more than in most other countries. The Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British empires followed each other until 1948. The crusaders’ kingdoms were an important chapter by themselves.

Most Israelis would be surprised to learn that the Crusaders resided in Palestine for almost 200 years--much longer than Zionist history until now. It was not a short, passing episode.

The similarity between the Crusaders and the Zionists strikes one at first glance. Both movements moved a large number of people from Europe to the Holy Land. (During the first half century of its existence, Zionism brought almost only European Jews to Palestine.) Since both of them came from the west, they were perceived by the local Muslim population as Western invaders.

Neither the Crusaders nor the Zionists had one day of peace during their entire existence. The perpetual sense of military danger shaped their entire history, their culture and their character.

The crusaders had some temporary armistices, especially with Syria, but we, too, now have two “peace agreements” in place--with Egypt and Jordan. Without any real feelings of peace and friendship with these peoples, our agreements do also resemble armistices rather than peace.

Then as now, the Crusaders’ lot was made easier by the fact that the Arabs were constantly quarreling among themselves. Until the great Salah-a-Din (“Saladin”), a Kurd, appeared on the scene, united the Arabs and vanquished the Crusaders in the battle at the Horns of Hattin, near Tiberias. After that, the Crusaders regrouped and hung on in Palestine for another four generations.

Both the Crusaders and the Zionists saw themselves, quite consciously, as “bridgeheads” of the West in a foreign and hostile region. The Crusaders, of course, came here as the army of the West, to regain the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, wrote in his book Der Judenstaat, the bible of Zionism, that in Palestine we shall serve as the outpost of (Western) culture against (Muslim) barbarism.

The Holy City, by the way, remains the focus of a daily battle. Just this week, two extreme-right Members of the Knesset were allowed by the Israeli authorities to enter the Temple Mount area, fortunately without inciting Jewish-Muslim riots as on previous such occasions.

Also last week, our Minister of Justice, (whom I have called “the devil in the guise of a beautiful woman”), accused the Israeli Supreme Court of putting human rights above the “values of Zionism” (whatever these are). She has already introduced a bill which makes it clear that those “Zionist values” are legally superior to “democratic values” and come first.

The similarity is most apparent when it comes to peace.

For the crusaders, of course, peace was unthinkable. Their whole enterprise was based on the aim of liberating Jerusalem and the entire Holy Land (“God Wills It!”) from Islam, the deadly enemy. This excludes a priori any peace with God’s enemies.

Zionists talk endlessly about peace. No week passes without Binyamin Netanyahu releasing some touching declaration about his craving for peace. But by now it is absolutely clear that he does not dream of giving up one inch of land west of the Jordan. Just a few days ago he again publicly confirmed that he will not “uproot” one single Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Under international law every one of these settlements is illegal.

There are, of course, huge differences between the two historical movements, as huge as the differences between the 11th and 21st centuries.

Can one imagine the Templar knights with atom bombs? Saladin with tanks? The journey of Hospitalers from Clermont to Jaffa by airplane?

At the time of the crusades, the idea of the modern “nation” was not yet born. The knights were French, English or German, but foremost they were Christian. Zionism was born of the will to turn the Jews of the world into a nation in the modern sense of the term.

Who were these Jews? In 19th century Europe, a continent of new nations, they were an unnatural exception, and therefore hated and feared. But they were really an unreformed relic of the Byzantine Empire, where the very identity of all communities was based on religion. Ethnic-religious communities were autonomous and legally under the jurisdiction of their religious leaders.

A Jewish man in Alexandria could marry a Jewish girl in Antioch, but not the Christian woman next door. A Latin woman in Damascus could marry a Latin man in Constantinople, but not the Greek-orthodox man across the street. This legal structure still exists in many ex-Byzantine countries, including--you’ll never guess--Israel.

But given all the differences of time, the comparison is still valid, and provides much food for thought--especially if you sit on the shore of Caesaria, the imposing Crusaders’ wall just behind you, a few kilometers from the port of Atlit, where the last Crusaders were literally thrown into the sea when it all came to an end, just 726 years ago.

To paraphrase Runciman, I hope we learn not to be like them in time.

[bookloversofbath]

The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence :: Steven Runciman

The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence :: Steven Runciman

[tribeworldarchive]

Exclusive Interview with Ryan Runciman (Ryan)

What is your favourite film? Billy Madison

What music do you like? Any, new and old, Offspring, Cat Stevens, Queen

When is your birthday? 22 November 1982

How would you describe your character? Staunch, caring and a little slow. He's easy going but can get worked up when he has to.

What are his strengths and weaknesses? Ryan tends to follow others, he sympathises easily and he is physically strong. He's not very academic.

Are you like Ryan in real life? Not really but I look out for my mates and family. I'll stick up for them when they are in trouble.

Have you travelled around - what is your favourte place or places? Yes, I've been to Britain and Australia a few times. Also been to Ireland and Spain and the USA. Edinburgh would have to be my favourite city.

What animals do you like - any favourite ones, any pets at home? My cat Annie and of course Bob the dog.

What is your favourite episode of the Tribe - and why? I really like the paint fight and the stunt fighting when Tribe Circus attacked the mall.