Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History — Laurent Guyénot

I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.[1]

The same author informs you that, in 1018, the same Basileios (or Basil) II was “the most powerful and victorious ruler in the Christian world,”[2] reigning from a city whose walls could contain the ten biggest cities in Western Europe. Vladimir the Great (980-1015), whom the Russians consider the founder and patron saint of their nation, wedded Basil’s sister, adopted his faith, and built a Church of Hagia Sophia in Kiev. The young German emperor Otto III (996-1002), himself half-Byzantine by his mother, was about to marry Basil’s niece when he died at the age of 21. Everything in the Ottonian court was modeled after Byzantium, with their title kaiser borrowed not from the Latin caesar, but from the Greek form kaisar.

At this point you may start to wonder if you have not accidentally stumbled into an alternate history. At least you suspect that you have been missing something in your “medieval studies,” that your picture of the “Middle Ages” has a huge hole in the middle, or, rather, that it is only a fragment of a much bigger image, the larger part of which has been torn off and thrown away. You begin to look for it in the proverbial dustbin of history. Before you know it, you are on the path of “Byzantine revisionism”.

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