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canyoneer posted:The "wild wild west" era as depicted in films only lasted like, 20 years. The wild wild west actually never existed. It's a Romantic construct that only came to life after the West was tamed, in an era that produced both Owen Wisters' Virginian as well as Teddy Roosevelts' Rough Riders.
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Nov 6, 2015 01:43
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That depends on what you mean by "the Roman empire." Did you mean the actual, original one or the successor states? Or the Holy Roman Empire, which wasn't actually Roman at all? The Byzantine empire saw itself as the legitimate continuation of the Roman empire. The western kings up to Charlemagne did as well: Theoderic the Goth, for example, was invested by Constantinople to rule Italy in the name of the empire. It changed in 800, for two reasons. First of all the bishopric of Rome grew farther apart from the church in Constantinople, and they saw crowning Charlemagne as a good way to get some more political representation; secondly: for the first time, the Eastern empire was ruled by a woman, Irene. The Byzantines had no problem with empresses. However, the law of the Franks did not acknowledge female rulers, so in a sense, the imperial throne was vacant. Hence Charlemagne. It's quite possible to trace most European Tsars and Kaisars back to Constantinople. The Austrian empire was a direct continuation of the HRE, which was the continuation of the imperial title of Charlemagne. The Bulgarian tsar Simeon I got his title after a siege of Constantinople resulting in peace negotiations; the Serbian emperor crowned himself after both Bulgarian and Byzantine influence had waned and styled himself as the successor. The Latin empire ruled over Constantinople as a result of the fourth crusade, while fleeing Byzantines established empires in Trebizond and Nicaea. Hence the third/fourth/fifth Rome jokes. East and West were becoming alienated from each other. The schism between the Catholic and Orthodox only became official when an attempt at reconciliation failed in 1054. The East had become thoroughly hellenized by that point, while in the West, Greek was no longer understood. The fourth crusade of 1204 was aimed at liberating Jeruzalem for the umpteenth time, but the crusaders didn't progress beyond Constantinople - then already seen as not Christian. And even though the fall of Constantinople brought many experts over to Renaissance Italy, reviving the study of Greek, a bias existed against the non-latinate, non-Catholic, no-real-Roman Byzantines. So when someone like Edward Gibbon, a child of the Enlightenment, wrote about the fall of the Roman empire, he didn't even consider the Byzantines a successor to the Roman empire (after all, one of the reasons he believed it fell was due to the corrupting influence of Christianity. It'd be an understatement to say that religion dominated and permeated Constantinople). As an aside, one of the Seljuk Turk sultanates styled themselves (in Persian) the Sultanate of Rum - because it was found on Roman (former Byzantine) lands. The Byzantines called themselves rhoomaioi - Romans.
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Jan 1, 2016 15:45
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