I often wonder how the world would have been different if Irene had accepted Charlemagne’s marriage proposal?

I’m ready to agree with you about it not being a pejorative. I can see that for many historians (Obolensky, Runciman, etc.) it’s a descriptive and not necessarily a pejorative, but the devious connotation is always just beneath the surface.

We can look around us at our institutions: the Federal government is now responsible for doing literally thousands of things that used to be the province of the states. The racial and ethnic composition of our population is more diverse than it was in 1789, and so on. Are we not the same country however?

That’s why I’d be really reticent of assenting to the Western view that the Byzantines could not really be “Roman” in any meaningful sense of the term. At least by their lights, they considered themselves to be every bit the heirs of the Caesars. More so than the Germanic upstarts that came in after the coronation of Charlemagne.

The view that the Franks were heirs to Augustus was far more strained at the time and the papacy had to do backflips to justify it to the real Romans in the East. The discontinuity that existed between AD 476 and 800 was glaring in almost every fashion. It would be like a American teenage garage band today somehow claiming to follow in the footsteps of the Beatles and even affecting Liverpudlian accents. It’d be so obvious.

Anyway, sorry for lecture. I got too much time on my hands today.

It is very true that Byzantine was coined later in 1557.
This was to avoid confusion between the Christian
Roman Empire and the Pagan one which preceded it. In my
opinion, “Byzantine” is no longer a pejorative”.

Scholars such as Runciman, Ostrogorsky use the term
“Byzantine” and I follow their lead.

Theodoros

Indeed, the term “Roman” was meant to signify all Christians throughout the Oecoumene, whereas “Hellene” meant a pagan who spoke Greek.

There are no Byzantines today. Only pretenders.

John,

You deserve an award for that quote. How true! In the meantime though you are probably on the omogenia watch list at 79th Street for crimes against the race.

Welcome to the club my friend.

It would be a mistake to say there are no “Byzantines”
today. The Byzantines considered themselves “Romans”
from a political standpoint but the Empire was essentially
Greek, as Steven Runciman and George Ostrogorsky along
with John Julius Norwhich have all affirmed.

The Empire itself no longer exists but the descendants
of that Empire do exist mostly in Greece and Cyprus,
and a very small few in Turkey. Also, the Byzantine
tradition survives not only in Greece but in Russia and
Serbia as well.

I as an Orthodox Greek consider myself Byzantine in that
I firmly believe in the great ideals that the Empire
advocated and represented which was that Christianity is
universal and that the overriding identity was religious
and not ethnic.

Church-State relations in Greece and also today in Russia
emanate from the model of the Byzantine Empire without the
trappings that have completely fallen out of date. I
proudly display the Byzantine two headed eagle in my home
together with American and Greek flags in remembrance of
institutions which enabled Constantine to hold the First
Ecumenical Council of Nicea, and which permitted Saint
Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Saint Cyril, John of
Damascus, and Saint Maximos the Confessor to flourish
as teachers of Orthodoxy.

The achievements of the Byzantine Empire are limitless
and are best recounted by Steven Runciman in his book
“The Fall of Constantnople 1453”.

Finally, as Americans today involved in a significent
fight against evil in the war on terror we should all
pay homage and respect the Byzantine Empire and its
Emperors and people for fighting heroically in defense of
all of Christian civilization.

The following passage comes from John Julius Norwich in his three volume set on Byzantium and recounts the first
Muslim attack on Constantinople in 678 AD.

“”Blocked from Europe by the impregnable walls of Constantinople and the unyielding spirit of the Emperor and his people, the armies of the Prophet were obliged to travel the entire length of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar before they could invade the continent- thus extending their lines of communication and supply almost to breaking point and rendering impossible any permanent conquests beyond the Pyrenees. Had they captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe- and America- might be Muslim today”.

Theodoros

There never were any Byzantines. Only Romans.

There are no Byzantines today. Only pretenders.