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The Legacy of Byzantium
... And finally, I also agree with
Professor Thornton that the Hagia Sophia in Contantinople should be returned to
Christian use. Nothing better would show the good will of the Turks as they
attempt to enter the EU. But this is not going to happen, not only because
Turkey is moving in the opposite direction, but also because the Europeans are
too weak and besotted with multiculturalism to insist on such a thing, or to
raise a whisper about the slow strangulation of the Constantinople Patriarchate
by the Turks.
...Westerners usually say that the Roman Empire
"fell" in the fifth century AD. The Western Roman Empire, which
included the least urbanized regions, did collapse following the partition
after the death of the emperor Theodosius the Great in 395. However, the Eastern
Roman Empire endured until it was extinguished by Turkish Muslims a thousand
years later.
The inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire called
themselves "Romans," not Byzantines. Since the Byzantine Empire was a
direct continuation of the Roman Empire, it is a matter of interpretation when
Roman history ends and Byzantine history begins
...We should not forget the major impact Byzantine
culture had on the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. The Byzantines sent
missionaries to the Bulgarians, the Serbs and others, and greatly influenced
them culturally. The conversion of Russia to Christianity came from Byzantium:
"After the fall of Constantinople, the Grand
Prince Ivan III married Zoe Palaiologina, the younger daughter of Thomas
Palailogos, in 1472. Zoe, known to the Russians as Sofia, thus brought a close
connection between the last imperial family of Byzantium and the ruling family
of Russia, and indeed some Russians had been speaking for a time about the
'mantle' of Constantinople passing to Moscow. In the early sixteenth century
the monk Filofei of Pskov wrote that the 'two Romes' (Rome and Constantinople)
had fallen, and Moscow had become the 'Third Rome.' This was clearly seen in an
apocalyptic sense, prefiguring the end of the world, and the Russian aristocracy
never adopted the idea that Moscow had taken on all the ideology of
Byzantium."
Still, Byzantine civilization had a lasting impact on
Russian culture. This is clearly detectable in modern literature, as "The
novels, plays, and poems of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak, and
Solzhenitsyn have countless references to Russian religion and its close
connections with the religion of the Byzantine Empire
... "Indeed, in the Orthodox areas
there is not surprisingly an acute awareness of the 'superiority' of the modern
West - in technology, wealth, and military power - and a rarely spoken fear
that the reason that the Orthodox countries have not 'developed' in the same
way is because of the Byzantine tradition. Westerners, of course, have often
been happy to encourage this kind of thinking, in part as a result of the
anti-Byzantine attitudes that have been characteristic of the West for the past
thousand years. Indeed, one does not have to look far in contemporary politics
and journalism to find the term 'Byzantine' associated characteristically with
all that is 'wrong' about the Balkans and Russia. The direct heirs of Byzantium
are torn in this conflict of ideas, for they often are ready to admit with the
critics that their Byzantine heritage (often associated with stale religious
traditions and 'backwardness') has 'held them back.' On the other hand,
Byzantine cultures clearly survives in the cities and villages that were once
part of the Byzantine Empire (and increasingly in the diaspora), and ordinary
people often feel closely and personally attached to it.
... It is surely one of history's great ironies that
the Greco-Roman knowledge that was preserved by the Byzantines had a greater
impact in the West than it did in the Byzantine Empire itself."
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Russia