Byzantine history is so important to understand the modern world. It gives us the context for the orthodox/west divide; it gives us an example of a economic and intellectual superpower needing to live with the realities of barbarian neighbors, and being destroyed! It shows us great statecraft lasting a thousand years. It even shows us why generals and senior civil servants were eunuchs and how the next best thing was celibate people. This is the reason why catholic priests should be celibate and therefore the answer against nepotist corruption. We all know how nepotism is a serious issue in states everywhere in the world.
I became a fan of the Byzantines and seriously found team Roman Catholic to be a bunch of barbarians. I say team Roman Catholic because this small book[1] makes Byzantine history and trivia so humorous.
The religious parts of this I'm not sure I can agree with really.... I'm orthodox if it matters or seems relevant.
The catholic/orthodox differences are largely just because of a thousand years of divergence, of speaking different languages and having relatively little interchange, of each individually having movements in response to internal pressures and trends not experienced by the other. Not going to get into a filioque debate on HN but the initial theological dispute, however significant you find it to be, is not the source of the most tangible differences in the two branches today. They've just each been doing their own thing for a millennium and their unique histories took them to two different places during that time.
I don't see how byzantine eunuchs indicates anything about priest celibacy, especially since orthodox priests are usually married. Eunuchs and celibate priests still come from families, they experience love and duty and allegiance and enmity. To the extent a position is admirable people will want to be in it and to the extent it's powerful people will use that power to benefit the people and things they value. No restriction on who can hold an office will by itself address those factors. Byzantine eunuchs got up to plenty of corruption and betrayal in their own right.
I assume by "barbarians" you mean the ottoman turks, but we have to be careful in reading byzantine history not to absorb byzantine attitudes about their rivals. The ottomans were a long-lived, sophisticated, and nuanced entity in their own right. Even their precursors and other byzantine neighbors were not as simple or simply motivated as byzantine or byz-sympathetic sources would indicate.
One thing I learned recently is that 12th Century Fourth Crusade actually culminated in sacking Constantinople and establishment of the "Latin Empire", as the intended successor of the Byzantine Empire, which only existed for a brief time before it was recaptured by a rump state founded by exiled Byzantine aristocrats. Apparently (and understandably) this led to major deterioration in East-West Christian relations, and furthermore the resulting weakening of the Byzantine Empire is what might have enabled the Ottoman Empire to eventually conquer the Byzantine Empire in the 15th Century. The level of geopolitical chaos involved in such an event is unimaginable today. Even the messiest of 20th century wars seem downright orderly by comparison.
AFAIK, an important reason eunuchs were preferred as generals and high officials is because a person who was castrated or had any other deformity could not be emperor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_mutilation_in_Byzant...) Exceptions did occur, e.g. Justinian II, but rare. It was also common practice to castrate sons of deposed emperors.
I do find it curious that not that much science came out of the Byzantine empire- Yes there was some, but (with my admittedly limited knowledge) it does seem to pale in comparison to the earlier stuff from Greece, Rome or even the Arab Caliphates with their scholars in Mathematics and Physics.
It seems like it was intellectual, but didn't have a proportional output of science or art that has stood the test of time.
> It even shows us why generals and senior civil servants were eunuchs
That was the case for "only" around a third to a half of the empire's existence. But by the 1000 ADs appointing eunuchs to high posts fell out of fashion with emperors appointing family members or leading in the field directly (unlike in Justinians day when emperors spent almost their entire reign being cloistered in the palace).
Somewhere between the first and third crusades there was a non-insignificant chance of the empire becoming much more integrated with Latin/Catholic west. Later Komnenian emperors started adopting Western customs, had fairly good relations with most Crusader and Western States and were attempting to reunite the both churches officially.
Of course this process culminated when a French princess became an effective ruler of the empire as a regent for her underage son, she surrounded herself with Latins and parceled off pretty much everything she could off to Italian Merchants. This was met with an extremely violent backlash culminating in her and her son being murdered and a literal genocide (or at least a massive pogrom) of all the westerns living in Constantinople (10-20% of all the people living in the city). And the split was made permanent by the even more violent sack during the 4th crusade by the westerners.
Carrying that logic further, then, would it be better if public servants had no friends? If everyone anywhere but the lowest rung of the corporate ladder (from which one does not typically make hiring decisions) also had no family? For only the least (conventionally) successful to reproduce seems problematic.
I'm curious, is there a list somewhere of these world-changing industrial espionage incidents? Here's two more I remember off the top of my head. Not sure why the top results are the Smithsonian Magazine but here are some links:
> The Brazilian monopoly suffered a fatal blow in 1876. In that year the English explorer Sir Henry Wickham (1800–67) gathered about 70,000 seeds from wild rubber trees in the forest close to the city of Santarem, in the state of Para. Wickham smuggled the seeds out of Brazil and took them to Kew Gardens, London, where they were sown. Many of them germinated, and 3,000 seedlings were sent from London to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1877, 22 rubber plants were sent from Ceylon to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The trees were growing there when in 1888 Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley (1855–1956) arrived as the gardens' first scientific director. Ridley spent years studying the trees, and in 1895 he discovered a technique for tapping the latex without seriously harming the tree. That made it practicable to cultivate the trees commercially. In 1890 Ridley exhibited the first cultivated rubber trees, and in 1896 the first rubber plantations were established in Malaysia. Most of the trees were grown from Ridley's seeds. Growers went on to produce hardier, disease-resistant varieties, and large rubber plantations were developed in Ceylon and Singapore as well as Malaysia.
>“Foreigners seemed to prefer having a mixture of Prussian blue and gypsum with their tea, to make it look uniform and pretty, and as these ingredients were cheap enough, the Chinese [have] no objection to [supplying] them as such teas always fetch . . . a higher price!”
This quote and the preceding paragraph about the distrust of the Chinese tea manufacturers are quite something. I hadn't considered the "made in China" stereotype for quality had been around for centuries.
The fact that the world's production of nutmeg until the 19th century was restricted only to the remote Banda islands I think falls in that category. The Dutch protected their source with vigilance.
Or just a List_of_ article or even just a category on Wikipedia. There are mentions, sometimes articles dedicated to, other cases but not organized across the topic that I can see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#History
I cant recall where you can see footage, maybe on the documentary "Murder Mountain" where they talk about smuggling Cannabis seeds from Afghanistan to California in the 1960s or 1970s by sewing the seeds into the edge-trimming-folds of (wallets?) to get the seeds into the US... then creating cannabis farms in mendocino county california...
During the 19th century there was an attempt to establish a silk industry in New England. The industry failed, but the White Mulberry (morus alba), imported to serve as the food source for the silkworms, is thriving in North America. It's invasive in many areas and has displaced the native mulberry, morus rubra.
It seems there's a lot of interest for Byzantine History on HN, that's fantastic! My friends and I have run a book club for the past four years on Ancient History with focus on the Eastern Roman Empire.
Most books we read were kind of dry. Here's a list of books I found readable and engaging if you want to delve deeper:
* Byzantium trilogy by Norwich. If you don't want to get all three, I suggest getting The Apogee (2nd volume). Fantastically readable and solid historical work with a generous side of gossip.
* Alexiad by Anna Komnene. Written around 1140 after Anna was deposed to a convent, this biography of her father, Alexios, has an immediacy that history books cannot match. The end will probably bring you to tears.
* Anecdota (Secret History) by Procopius. For pure titillation factor cannot be beat! Severe attack against Justinian, Theodora, Belisaurus, and his wife Antonina. "Severe" is an understamenet really, here's Procopius on Theodora's depraved youth:
On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries.
I like how easily television puts the event into a show set seven centuries later. That'd be like including the signing of the Magna Carta in a show about WWI.
This event lead to the Byzantines having a silk monopoly in Europe. It follows that the Venetians didn’t have the means to produce silk. They may have therefore tried to acquire said means. The show apparently depicts that attempt, with inspiration from the story in TFA.
Perhaps a naive question: What was so special about silk? It seems it was just a luxury article for the rich. I assume unlike today, not many people had a lot of disposable income to spend on luxury products. So I don't understand how silk could have been economically relevant compared to other non-luxury goods.
It is interesting how concepts of commercial secrecy and rule of law evolve over the centuries. In modern terms we might call this "knowledge transfer incident" a form of commercial espionage / intellectual property theft.
It is unclear if the affected entity ever imposed sanctions or other form of punishment on the perpetrator (presumably they did notice that there was no longer demand for their silk in certain markets??). It also appears that the perpetrators promptly established a monopoly of their own (on the basis of somebody else's know-how which is also somewhat odd with today's eyes :-).
Somehow it is all predicated on very sparse communication between different parts of the world. The flip side is that in today's hyper-connected world you might be able to tell if a secret has leaked just by triangulation.
You might have a pretty good clue of who did what but today's winning strategy is to never admit any fault and form coalitions of protection. I suspect that is the winning strategy always, just stonewall, its not particularly honorable but what has that ever won anybody, an honor trophy? You can get trophys by cheating too, and much more!
Byzantine history is interesting and vastly underappreciated (IMO). If you'd like to learn a bit more, the "12 Byzantine Rulers" podcast is a good place to start. It starts off a touch stiff, but loosens up and is great overall.
There is a great podcast (https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com) that is carrying on from Mike Duncan's excellent history of Rome podcast. They just got up to the 4th Crusade sack of Constantinople.
Silk has been produced for 3-4k years, can you imagine what a son-of-a-bitch that was back then? Was silk like gold and bitcoin? Somehow valuable because its such a bitch to produce? Feels like all of it is a goof on the people who accept it at face value.
Silk has unique characteristics as a material, and in a pre-plastic pre-industrial world with relatively few viable fabric materials (and all of them profoundly labor-intensive by modern standards) it would have been valuable regardless.
Obviously its rarity, social connotations, and mysterious origins had a huge effect on its value. But like gold, its characteristics alone are enough to cause people to go through the trouble to acquire it initially, enough for those other factors to take over.
Silk definitely had(has) the immediate day to day use case of a comfortable fabric to wear, I can imagine that alone drove up demand. I'm sure it being difficult to produce increased it's value.
Sure gold and bitcoin are stores of value and currency, but we don't usually make our boxers out of them.
silk materials relate to a sensual world, where the touch, feel and quality of the physical embodiment is valued highly.. It is possible that English-style commerce downplays this sensual value, preferring all forms of money, e.g. rare coins, stamps, securities and financial agreements, as higher value. It is an example of a polarity.
There is a rumor that Bill Gates will not pay for art because "that is not worth money" .. he famously had giant digital screens hung in his thirty thousand square foot home, displaying reproductions of famous art without paying for them. Yet, he has spent millions of dollars building and acquiring software patents, which are applied with attorneys to generate many times that income. I suggest that is directly reflective of that cultural difference.
It is so fascinating that I can find "ottoman" keyword at least 6 times on this thread even-though this smuggling had happened way before the ottomans concurred the Byzantine.
ptsneves|2 years ago
I became a fan of the Byzantines and seriously found team Roman Catholic to be a bunch of barbarians. I say team Roman Catholic because this small book[1] makes Byzantine history and trivia so humorous.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-cabinet-of-byzanti...
giraffe_lady|2 years ago
The catholic/orthodox differences are largely just because of a thousand years of divergence, of speaking different languages and having relatively little interchange, of each individually having movements in response to internal pressures and trends not experienced by the other. Not going to get into a filioque debate on HN but the initial theological dispute, however significant you find it to be, is not the source of the most tangible differences in the two branches today. They've just each been doing their own thing for a millennium and their unique histories took them to two different places during that time.
I don't see how byzantine eunuchs indicates anything about priest celibacy, especially since orthodox priests are usually married. Eunuchs and celibate priests still come from families, they experience love and duty and allegiance and enmity. To the extent a position is admirable people will want to be in it and to the extent it's powerful people will use that power to benefit the people and things they value. No restriction on who can hold an office will by itself address those factors. Byzantine eunuchs got up to plenty of corruption and betrayal in their own right.
I assume by "barbarians" you mean the ottoman turks, but we have to be careful in reading byzantine history not to absorb byzantine attitudes about their rivals. The ottomans were a long-lived, sophisticated, and nuanced entity in their own right. Even their precursors and other byzantine neighbors were not as simple or simply motivated as byzantine or byz-sympathetic sources would indicate.
nerdponx|2 years ago
Jun8|2 years ago
drcode|2 years ago
It seems like it was intellectual, but didn't have a proportional output of science or art that has stood the test of time.
Feel free to disagree and tell me why I'm wrong
kmlx|2 years ago
the "byzantine" people actually called themselves Romans, and the empire was called "Roman Empire".
bigbillheck|2 years ago
The place the Byzantines got those eggs from tried that too, didn't always work out too great in terms of stability and good governance, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_Ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Tigers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Zhongxian
qwytw|2 years ago
That was the case for "only" around a third to a half of the empire's existence. But by the 1000 ADs appointing eunuchs to high posts fell out of fashion with emperors appointing family members or leading in the field directly (unlike in Justinians day when emperors spent almost their entire reign being cloistered in the palace).
Somewhere between the first and third crusades there was a non-insignificant chance of the empire becoming much more integrated with Latin/Catholic west. Later Komnenian emperors started adopting Western customs, had fairly good relations with most Crusader and Western States and were attempting to reunite the both churches officially.
Of course this process culminated when a French princess became an effective ruler of the empire as a regent for her underage son, she surrounded herself with Latins and parceled off pretty much everything she could off to Italian Merchants. This was met with an extremely violent backlash culminating in her and her son being murdered and a literal genocide (or at least a massive pogrom) of all the westerns living in Constantinople (10-20% of all the people living in the city). And the split was made permanent by the even more violent sack during the 4th crusade by the westerners.
Jeff_Brown|2 years ago
nsajko|2 years ago
Ralph Nader comes to mind.
throwaway6734|2 years ago
_a_a_a_|2 years ago
ok. why?
exhilaration|2 years ago
Samuel Slater brings cotton mill technology to America in 1789: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
Robert Fortune learns Chinese tea production methods and brings them to British India in 1848: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea...
Someone (maybe you!) should write a book about this!
dormento|2 years ago
https://geography.name/how-rubber-moved-to-asia/
> The Brazilian monopoly suffered a fatal blow in 1876. In that year the English explorer Sir Henry Wickham (1800–67) gathered about 70,000 seeds from wild rubber trees in the forest close to the city of Santarem, in the state of Para. Wickham smuggled the seeds out of Brazil and took them to Kew Gardens, London, where they were sown. Many of them germinated, and 3,000 seedlings were sent from London to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1877, 22 rubber plants were sent from Ceylon to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The trees were growing there when in 1888 Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley (1855–1956) arrived as the gardens' first scientific director. Ridley spent years studying the trees, and in 1895 he discovered a technique for tapping the latex without seriously harming the tree. That made it practicable to cultivate the trees commercially. In 1890 Ridley exhibited the first cultivated rubber trees, and in 1896 the first rubber plantations were established in Malaysia. Most of the trees were grown from Ridley's seeds. Growers went on to produce hardier, disease-resistant varieties, and large rubber plantations were developed in Ceylon and Singapore as well as Malaysia.
mytailorisrich|2 years ago
On their side the UK not only banned export of certain technologies to the US but they also banned emigration of the people knowledgeable about them.
morkalork|2 years ago
This quote and the preceding paragraph about the distrust of the Chinese tea manufacturers are quite something. I hadn't considered the "made in China" stereotype for quality had been around for centuries.
mihaic|2 years ago
mlinksva|2 years ago
samstave|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Floegipoky|2 years ago
Jun8|2 years ago
Most books we read were kind of dry. Here's a list of books I found readable and engaging if you want to delve deeper:
* Byzantium trilogy by Norwich. If you don't want to get all three, I suggest getting The Apogee (2nd volume). Fantastically readable and solid historical work with a generous side of gossip.
* Alexiad by Anna Komnene. Written around 1140 after Anna was deposed to a convent, this biography of her father, Alexios, has an immediacy that history books cannot match. The end will probably bring you to tears.
* Anecdota (Secret History) by Procopius. For pure titillation factor cannot be beat! Severe attack against Justinian, Theodora, Belisaurus, and his wife Antonina. "Severe" is an understamenet really, here's Procopius on Theodora's depraved youth:
So, she fit the full Messalina archetype. Full text available at Fordham (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/procop-anec.asp). Here's an interesting paper on the depiction of Theodora in the Secret History (https://www.mcgill.ca/classics/files/classics/2004-09.pdf)* Chronographia by Michael Psellos covers the reigns of 14 emperors and empresses in a 100 time period
mr_toad|2 years ago
gostsamo|2 years ago
boomboomsubban|2 years ago
alehlopeh|2 years ago
y-curious|2 years ago
cubefox|2 years ago
nologic01|2 years ago
It is unclear if the affected entity ever imposed sanctions or other form of punishment on the perpetrator (presumably they did notice that there was no longer demand for their silk in certain markets??). It also appears that the perpetrators promptly established a monopoly of their own (on the basis of somebody else's know-how which is also somewhat odd with today's eyes :-).
Somehow it is all predicated on very sparse communication between different parts of the world. The flip side is that in today's hyper-connected world you might be able to tell if a secret has leaked just by triangulation.
peteradio|2 years ago
infamia|2 years ago
https://12byzantinerulers.com/
bjackman|2 years ago
I've listened to all 265 episodes so far, and I'm still thrilled every time a new one comes out!
Khaine|2 years ago
peteradio|2 years ago
giraffe_lady|2 years ago
Obviously its rarity, social connotations, and mysterious origins had a huge effect on its value. But like gold, its characteristics alone are enough to cause people to go through the trouble to acquire it initially, enough for those other factors to take over.
Avicebron|2 years ago
Sure gold and bitcoin are stores of value and currency, but we don't usually make our boxers out of them.
mistrial9|2 years ago
There is a rumor that Bill Gates will not pay for art because "that is not worth money" .. he famously had giant digital screens hung in his thirty thousand square foot home, displaying reproductions of famous art without paying for them. Yet, he has spent millions of dollars building and acquiring software patents, which are applied with attorneys to generate many times that income. I suggest that is directly reflective of that cultural difference.
emmelaich|2 years ago
m00dy|2 years ago
cgio|2 years ago
vrglvrglvrgl|2 years ago
[deleted]