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How they hell would anyone not know the difference? It’d be like not knowing the difference between Taylor Swift and Madonna.
Most people don’t have a clue. I remember mentionning the word byzantine at the dinner table when I was a teenager and was told “you play too many games and read too many books, this is reality, there’s no such thing as a byzantine”.
When I showed them the wikipedia page about it, “it’s not because it’s on the internet that it’s true”. Yet here we are, in 2024, where they are glued to facebook believing some of the wildest things.
Yeah, I've noticed there's this weird cross-section of people who ask "do you believe everything you heard on the internet?" about some pretty established facts, and blindly believing Fox News.
It's a logical fallacy, aka a debate trick for stupid people. Appeal to authority (something can't be true unless it's said by someone with the authority to be right) plus a claim that source doesn't have the authority to be right. Another version of this is when someone acts like citations are proof (or a lack of citations is a disproof).
I mean, there was no such thing as a byzantine. That's a name we came up with in the modern era to help distinguish between "roman" empires.
To expand on that it was during the enlightenment in the early renaissance where people had a boner over the Roman Empire but still thought the medieval Roman Empire (Byzantine) to not be cool. So they came up with a new name for it. A declining empire that had a massive beauracracy, spoke Greek and had the wrong brand of Christianity (Orthodox) is not nice enough to create a glorious image like the Pax Romana did.
This of course made a lot of people upset in the then Ottoman empire since they identified as Romans but were not counted as Romans according to western people. Think "You're not Romans with a glorious history, you're Byzantines" even though they clearly were.
For extra fun the Byzantine/Roman distinction is also unfair.
- Eastern Rome always spoke Greek, even at 200AD.
- Orthodox and Catholic were the same pre-schism.
- During the decline of the Western Empire the capital was moving a lot anyway so "based in Rome" was soon outdated.
- During the decline Italy was just another province anyway so "based in Italy" was soon outdated.
- They were literally the same thing except one half managed to fuck their shit up while getting invaded by hordes of tribes at the same time.
invaded by hordes of tribes at the same time.
Too much treachery. Maybe if they stopped assassinating their rulers and managed their funds better by continuing to properly fund their military and continuing to pay off the tribes they could've lasted a bit longer.
It's so wild that they survived the Year of the 4 (and 5 and 6) Emperors when you think about it. The entire empire nearly collapses in the third century and what do they do to the man responsible for restoring it? They assassinate him. Or if it's not the emperor then it's the head of the military who had been responsible for holding off multiple tribes, negotiating with them and attempting to keep the city of Rome from being ransacked (unsuccessfully). And then you assassinate the emperor responsible and then the new emperor decides to provoke the biggest tribe of them all.
Maybe it was a good thing that the Roman Empire collapsed. I just wish it had happened before empowering a cult.
It was. There are no good empires.
Of course, instead of the Republic reforming you got a thousand years of warlords calling themselves kings, but that's how it goes when people listen to Popes.
Yeah, though I'm learning about Japan's history and, as much as I don't like how things went in European history, it could have been much worse.
Like one big moment for me was when I realized that the whole seppuku ritual thing was actually rational and intended to prevent an even worse outcome.
A European King (or church) could only kill so many people even with trials before unrest would start up. A Japanese Lord could just politely request subordinates kill themselves at their earliest convenience.
Fuck their shit up by inventing systemic racism
Oh it's cute you think the Roman's invented that.
I didn't say they were the first!
There are plenty of cultures that developed systemic racism independently, I don't want to diminish their shittiness.
Also very curious considering that racism as we would recognize it doesn't have its seeds planted until the 15th century AD.
Humans are pretty racist by default until they realise that everybody is actually also a human being. "Barbarian" is just a different word for "sub-human" that was used back then. Nowadays we use racial/ethnic/religious/housing status or whatever negative term that's out of the person's control to justify instead.
What's fun to me is that Barbarian literally means hairy, referring to cultures that didn't wear beards as superior
That's a common misconception. The word "barba" in Spanish and "barbaroi" in Greek have distinct origin of the gibberish "bar bar bar" which is apparently how all barbarian speak. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia page on barbarians under "Etymology".
The Ancient Greek name βάρβαρος (bárbaros) 'barbarian' was an antonym for πολίτης (politēs) 'citizen', from πόλις (polis) 'city'. The earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek 𐀞𐀞𐀫, pa-pa-ro, written in Linear B syllabic script.
The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking people, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;" the alleged root of the word bárbaros, which is an echomimetic or onomatopoeic word. In various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians, to deride other Greek tribes and states (such as Epirotes, Eleans, Boeotians and Aeolic-speakers) and also fellow Athenians in a pejorative and politically motivated manner. The term also carried a cultural dimension to its dual meaning. The verb βαρβαρίζω (barbarízō) in ancient Greek meant to behave or talk like a barbarian, or to hold with the barbarians.
Well clearly the Earth is flat because here's a picture of some water reflecting off a puddle, and that totally proves it apparently.
Yeah, it's a pivotol part of European history that has ramifications to the present day. It's like not knowing the difference between England and a second thing.
As a high school graduate I can totally tell you the history of Europe.
So first it was 1066, then the Victorians, then the second world war, then it was now. That's it, all of European history. Now perhaps some Americans think another historically important event occurred, but it can't have, because no one mentioned it.
I think some other stuff may have happened, but none of it was really oil/freedom related so we learned about confederate generals and Mormon pioneer history instead.
And the scariest part about history I learned in school is that the Vikings always took over the world because they don't need a Cassus Belli.
I know I learned about them twenty years ago but I don’t recall anything about either of them anymore, so that’s how I can’t know the difference anyway.
It helps that They Might Be Giants wrote a song about it. Constantinople was the capital of what we now call "The Byzantine Empire'' (at the time they just called it 'The Roman Empire') Istanbul was the capital of The Ottoman Empire. And as everyone knows. Istanbul was once Constantinople.
Constantinople was also the capitol of the ottomen empire, the name change came after ww1, when attaturk Formed Turkey
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Nobody knows it but the Turks...