As the recent poll shows, the Byzantine Empire is the most hated empire before 1900. What could the so called "Eastern Roman Empire" have done to save its reputation before and during the modern age?
DBWI: Improve the Byzantine Empire's popularity on this forum
- Thread starter Royalfire999
- Start date
Destroy it before 1900 and people will think about how great it would have been if the empire never fell.This forum has a thing for history’s losers.
Well, maybe if it wasn’t in the news every other week for the atrocities it commits against its Armenian and Sklavenian minorities it would be a bit more popular. I mean, come on! #FreeArmenia has been trending on Tweetster ever since the January riots in Artashat were suppressed. Nobody likes the Byzantines!
Of course, all of their “we are the true Romans, the Germans are a bunch of pretentious upstarts” stuff doesn’t help either...
Of course, all of their “we are the true Romans, the Germans are a bunch of pretentious upstarts” stuff doesn’t help either...
Maybe if the Empire's early reformers hadn't come to power, they would be still vulnerable to the problems that where beginning to plague the Byzantines beforehand. That could potentially destroy the whole empire, if not weaken them.
The real problem is their modern attitude. The Byzantines have never apologized for the genocide of about ten million Arabs in the Ecumenical War.
You can’t pin the entirety of the concluding devastation of that war on them, though, or call it just genocide. There’s a good deal of evidence to back up the Byzantine claim of the Caliphate’s goal of a massive nuclear strike on Byzantine and allied cities had they not struck first.
I didn’t say it wasn’t genocide, though! It was, it was intentional slaughter of the Arabs. I dunno, you just can’t pin it on the Byzantine Empire as a whole, though—it was a decision made by the Emperor himself to launch those missiles.
I mean, their constant refusal to recognize Maria von Habsburg as Holy Roman Empress does get pretty grating, like, okay dude, the HRE is the greatest superpower of the modern world and you're some shithole only staying together by holding your people at gunpoint, what are you going to do about it. I guess if Byzantium hadn't gone National Monarchist during the 20s(as opposed to the HRE's multinational monarchism) a lot of the current nastiness could have been averted, especially since it was only the NatMons who started advocating for the total return of all former Roman territory. Man, I still remember the protests in Paris after the PM referred to France as "Gaul" a few years back. Honestly they're just kind of dicks.
I actually genuinely think the Byzantines pretty much sucked. They lost most of their territory within 164 years of existing (476 to 640). They then fell into a dark age, lost nearly all of their territory (and what little remained was raided and pirated constantly). They failed to produce any notable advances in science, medicine or technology, produced no innovation in the arts, and their contribution to poetry and philosophy is virtually non existent.
Their only achievement is that they managed to survive, barely. But given how intolerant, undynamic and unproductive their society was (scholars fled Byzantium to teach in Baghdad at the House of Wisdom after persecution), that's not much of an achievement.
The Byzantines were repeatedly trounced by the Bulgarians in battle, dismantled their own empire in civil war and literally handed over the keys to Anatolia to the Turks. They then managed to get their own capital sacked by so called co-religionist Christians in 1204. The remaining years were a total failure, and most of the population went over to the Turks pretty rapidly as they saw the system was not working for them. By 1355, the "empire" was basically a collection of villages amid ruins behind a wall.
In 1453 a far more dynamic and vigorous civilisation put them out of their misery. Honestly I can't see why one would bother making such a dismal failure of an empire as Byzantium more popular. They deserved to fall centuries earlier than they did. They probably should have fallen in 717. If they had later history might have been interesting and probably somewhat more productive.
OOC:It‘s already been established earlier on that the ERE managed to reform and became far more powerful than they were in OTL and actually managed to kill 10 million Arabs in a modern war.They are also in a position to occupy Armenia.
Maybe no iconoclasm vs iconophilia period. Reading a large book about Byzanz history, 100 years this particular sectarian issue alone.
Maybe have the bastards actually freaking die. The Turks conquered them in 1453, they were back in 1529. They were gone again in 1902, they came back in 1920, went weird, somehow got all those machine guns, began the Ecumenical War killings of Arabs, Bulgarians (don't forget ~3,000,000 Bulgarians died in the war by not submitting to the Patriarch of Constantinople [the one those goons in the Byz. Empire appointed] and thus were killed, including 10,000 children who were flung into the Black Sea) and other minorities, and then were finally partitioned at the end of said war in 1942. I will say that the Khwarjite Caliph was an evil, sick man who was 100% okay with mass rape, torture, and murder in the later days of the Ecumenical War, but to nuke Mecca in the middle of the most attended Hajj in history is actively evil.
(OOC: I'm trying to unify the posts)
(OOC: I'm trying to unify the posts)
It doesn't help that they continue to try to flood the internet with "advertisements" and other types of spam, viruses, and cheap propaganda. They have even attacked this forum occasionally. (OOC: I am not talking about this forum's Byzantine timelines just to be clear)
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*sigh* You folks just love to ignore the aurochs in the mead-hall, don't you?
Time for some cartography.
Here's the Byzantine Empire in 1943, one year after the Treaty of Pskov ended the Ecumenical War. The "post-Partition" Empire, as Regensburg would have it. What's wrong with it?
The Sklavenian Commonwealth did arise from the Ecumenical War, but notice how it contains less than half of the territory considered "ethnically Sklavenian." The rest remains under Constantinople's thumb because the Teutons never intended for this new nation to be anything more an a defensible buffer zone for their Carinthian possessions, and set the borders according to mountain ranges instead of ethnic realities.
The lands of Eastern Anatolia and Atropatene (whose reconquest in 1650 was accompanied by the Spanish-style mass expulsion of literal millions of Turks and Kurds) remained with the Byzantines, under the pretext that they were core Byzantine territory. Granted, these areas have been a sparsely populated frontier zone for centuries, where nearly all of the population is Roman (or at least Christian) and half of them are pastoralists (through there are a growing number of neft exploiters sniffing around). These areas might not have managed an independent existence, but the Treaty of Pskov treats their continued union with Constantinople as something natural and desirable, not something to be grudgingly accepted.
The decisive defeat of the Striped Flag Faction in the War of the Cambodian Succession led to the 1902 Revolution and the creation of the Aegean Commonwealth atop the Empire's corpse, which in turn allowed Armenia and Colchis to briefly assert their independence. Both were conquered during the first campaigns of the Restored Empire in the 1930s. The provisions of Pskov did not, however, allow them to restore their independence, and these peoples were instead told to accept "autonomy" under a Byzantine framework. The events in Artashat should tell you how that turned out.
The HRE often used proxies to hold down troublesome territory-- see how the Danube mouth was simply granted to the Kingdom of the Alans and Vlachs, and the Eastern Caucasus to the Pecheneg Confederation, on the basis of very tenuous ethnic connections. The worst example of this, however, may well be the Teutons' treatment of the Arabs. Sure, the Treaty of Pskov executed one of the few true partitions of the Byzantine Empire by forcing it to give up the historically Semitic territories of Syria and Antioch (the vaporized millions of Mecca perhaps demanded nothing less) but Regensburg's friendliness to the Arabs ended there. Rather than attempting to support a faction within the Caliphate of Basra that could maintain order, the Teutons just pulled the plug on the Khawarij regime and let the heads roll. Furthermore, recently declassified files show that the top HRE military brass gave secret approval for the Perso-Turkic Qadirid Caliphate to invade Iraq and "restore local stability"... which they did, after forcing most of the local imams to put the Sunnahite Caliph of Shiraz's name into the khutbah at gunpoint. Luckily, the Shi'i managed to pull themselves together around ten years down the line, and the Caliphate of Beirut isn't such a bad place now. The world had to wait another twenty to twenty-five years, though, before Mecca was in a suitable state to resume the hajj.
Worst of all, the borders of 1943 have hardly changed today.
Partition was a botched process from the start, and was never intended to do more than nibble at the edges of the Empire. Though the Germans like to play the hero, Regensburg makes no secret of putting stability and harmony before all else, which may perhaps a consequence of the HRE's diverse and fractured nature. But in the process of trying to keep the at-times dystopic Eastern Mediterranean stable by allowing the Byzantines'... overbearing brand of governance to continue in a lightly altered form, the Teuton leadership of 1942 made life worse for all of us. Now, a lot of things could have happened in the Byzantines' 1600-year history to prevent what's happened to this world. Maybe the Aegean Commonwealth could have put some of its genuinely utopian ideals into action, for instance. But if you ask me, positing points of departure in the distant past ignores much more recent (but no less tragic) missed opportunities for change.
Time for some cartography.
Here's the Byzantine Empire in 1943, one year after the Treaty of Pskov ended the Ecumenical War. The "post-Partition" Empire, as Regensburg would have it. What's wrong with it?
The Sklavenian Commonwealth did arise from the Ecumenical War, but notice how it contains less than half of the territory considered "ethnically Sklavenian." The rest remains under Constantinople's thumb because the Teutons never intended for this new nation to be anything more an a defensible buffer zone for their Carinthian possessions, and set the borders according to mountain ranges instead of ethnic realities.
The lands of Eastern Anatolia and Atropatene (whose reconquest in 1650 was accompanied by the Spanish-style mass expulsion of literal millions of Turks and Kurds) remained with the Byzantines, under the pretext that they were core Byzantine territory. Granted, these areas have been a sparsely populated frontier zone for centuries, where nearly all of the population is Roman (or at least Christian) and half of them are pastoralists (through there are a growing number of neft exploiters sniffing around). These areas might not have managed an independent existence, but the Treaty of Pskov treats their continued union with Constantinople as something natural and desirable, not something to be grudgingly accepted.
The decisive defeat of the Striped Flag Faction in the War of the Cambodian Succession led to the 1902 Revolution and the creation of the Aegean Commonwealth atop the Empire's corpse, which in turn allowed Armenia and Colchis to briefly assert their independence. Both were conquered during the first campaigns of the Restored Empire in the 1930s. The provisions of Pskov did not, however, allow them to restore their independence, and these peoples were instead told to accept "autonomy" under a Byzantine framework. The events in Artashat should tell you how that turned out.
The HRE often used proxies to hold down troublesome territory-- see how the Danube mouth was simply granted to the Kingdom of the Alans and Vlachs, and the Eastern Caucasus to the Pecheneg Confederation, on the basis of very tenuous ethnic connections. The worst example of this, however, may well be the Teutons' treatment of the Arabs. Sure, the Treaty of Pskov executed one of the few true partitions of the Byzantine Empire by forcing it to give up the historically Semitic territories of Syria and Antioch (the vaporized millions of Mecca perhaps demanded nothing less) but Regensburg's friendliness to the Arabs ended there. Rather than attempting to support a faction within the Caliphate of Basra that could maintain order, the Teutons just pulled the plug on the Khawarij regime and let the heads roll. Furthermore, recently declassified files show that the top HRE military brass gave secret approval for the Perso-Turkic Qadirid Caliphate to invade Iraq and "restore local stability"... which they did, after forcing most of the local imams to put the Sunnahite Caliph of Shiraz's name into the khutbah at gunpoint. Luckily, the Shi'i managed to pull themselves together around ten years down the line, and the Caliphate of Beirut isn't such a bad place now. The world had to wait another twenty to twenty-five years, though, before Mecca was in a suitable state to resume the hajj.
Worst of all, the borders of 1943 have hardly changed today.
Partition was a botched process from the start, and was never intended to do more than nibble at the edges of the Empire. Though the Germans like to play the hero, Regensburg makes no secret of putting stability and harmony before all else, which may perhaps a consequence of the HRE's diverse and fractured nature. But in the process of trying to keep the at-times dystopic Eastern Mediterranean stable by allowing the Byzantines'... overbearing brand of governance to continue in a lightly altered form, the Teuton leadership of 1942 made life worse for all of us. Now, a lot of things could have happened in the Byzantines' 1600-year history to prevent what's happened to this world. Maybe the Aegean Commonwealth could have put some of its genuinely utopian ideals into action, for instance. But if you ask me, positing points of departure in the distant past ignores much more recent (but no less tragic) missed opportunities for change.