#byzantine history meme

[victusinveritas]

I've got my own answer and it's none of these.

[temtamtom]

If I had a nickel for every time Veneziano stole the body of a Saint to bring back to Venice, I'd have two nickels.

Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Empresses (5/5) ↬ Zoe Porphyrogénnētē (c. 978 – 1050)

When Michael V met his fate on Tuesday evening, 20 April 1042, the Empress Theodora was still in St Sophia. She had by now been there for well over twenty-four hours, steadfastly refusing to proceed to the Palace until she received word from her sister. Only the following morning did Zoe, swallowing her pride, send the long-awaited invitation. On Theodora's arrival, before a large concourse of nobles and senators, the two old ladies marked their reconciliation with a somewhat chilly embrace and settled down, improbably enough, to govern the Roman Empire. All members of the former Emperor's family, together with a few of his most enthusiastic supporters, were banished; but the vast majority of those in senior positions, both civil and military, were confirmed in office. From the outset Zoe, as the elder of the two, was accorded precedence. When they sat in state, her throne was placed slightly in advance of that of Theodora, who had always been of a more retiring disposition and who seemed perfectly content with her inferior status. Psellus gives us a lively description of the pair: Zoe was the quicker to understand ideas, but the slower to give them utterance. With Theodora it was just the reverse: she concealed her inmost thoughts, but once she had embarked on a conversation she would chatter away with an informed and lively tongue. Zoe was a woman of passionate interests, prepared with equal enthusiasm for life or death. In this she reminded me of the waves of the sea, now lifting a vessel on high, now plunging it down again. Such extremes were not to be found in Theodora: she had a calm disposition - one might almost say a dull one. Zoe was prodigal, the sort of woman who could dispose of a whole ocean of gold dust in a single day; the other counted her coins when she gave away money, partly no doubt because all her life her limited resources had prevented her from any reckless spending, but partly also because she was naturally more self-controlled In personal appearance there was a still greater divergence. The elder, though not particularly tall, was distinctly plump. She had large eyes set wide apart, with imposing eyebrows. Her nose was inclined to be aquiline, though not overmuch. She still had golden hair, and her whole body shone with the whiteness of her skin. There were few signs of age in her appearance … there were no wrinkles, her skin being everywhere smooth and taut. Theodora was taller and thinner. Her head was disproportionately small. She was, as I have said, readier with her tongue than Zoe, and quicker in her movements. There was nothing stem in her glance: on the contrary she was cheerful and smiling, eager to find any opportunity for talk. — Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich

[baebeylik]

[historynerdj2]

History Memes #44

[sovietkitty420]

[grimm-the-tiger]

You know what? Fuck you. *Un-Byzans your tine*

[cceanvvaves]

a lil meme i made for a project in ss about the filioque controversy in the Nicaean creed which is one little cause for the great schism (1054) between the orthodox and roman catholic church-

[youvebeengreeked]

ON THIS DAY, 474 AD

ZENO made EMPEROR in CONSTANTINOPLE, alongside his son LEO II 👑

[qqueenofhades]

Hi Hilary! I could use some help with something. Do you know some topics for historical tangents a history professor (Hob) could go on while talking to some students? Like some interesting discussion ideas? I was not a history major and I’m now drawing a blank 😅 I’d appreciate it greatly!

"Right, morning everyone... MORNING... yes, we all do know it is morning and I would like to remind everyone that it's not my fault we were scheduled at eight bloody AM. Consider it building character. Great. Let's get started. Can we put the phones down, please. In my day we didn't even have phones. No really. We didn't. Really didn't.

Anyway, so where were we? Ah, yes. End of the Western Roman Empire circa 476 CE, which stands for the secular Common Era, which historians now generally use instead of the Christian A.D. Anno Domini, which trust me, they used when I was born, because I am very old. Ah, you're laughing again, because you think I'm joking. Which, er, I definitely am. Anyway, the so-called collapse of the Roman Empire is one of the most mythologized events in the Western historical canon, and there are accordingly a lot of misperceptions about what happened and how. As we covered in the last class -- well, can anyone tell me what we covered last class?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Come on, one of you, just raise your hands. I don't bite.

Fine, all right, I'll do it myself. Again. Last class, we covered the eventful fourth century in Roman history, where the empire split into western and eastern halves, eastern Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and established his capital in Constantinople, which would later get the works from the Turks and become Istanbul. The western capital moved to Ravenna in 402, and it had been in Milan before that, not Rome. No longer the center of power as it had been for many centuries beforehand under both the empire and the republic, Rome was infamously sacked in 410 by the Visigoths under King Alaric I. The Supergoths. The Ubergoths. The Verygoths. The Turbogoths. All right, I'll stop. The Visigoths had formerly been a Roman client kingdom in the south of Gaul, which is the modern country of -- anyone?

Anyone? Anyone? Oh come on.

Yes, thank you Sarah, it was in fact France. See everyone? Not that hard. Now that we're up to speed, right, the so-called End of Rome in 476, when the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer, general of the Ostrogoths. Not the Visigoths. Definitely different thing here. The Alsogoths. The Othergoths. The Ohgodthosegoths. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I swear I will actually stop. But the common narrative from then is that Rome just bloody disappeared altogether, the Dark Ages started, it was grim and miserable and murdery all the time, everyone forgot how to do scholarship or art or religion or anything else, and then miraculously a thousand years later, woo, the Renaissance! Everyone sorted their heads from their arses and could do maths again! I'm sorry about saying arses. Please don't report me to HR, they've had enough of me already. Anyway, this argument, despite its long-time supremacy in the Western historiographical canon and Western popular culture, doesn't make sense on any number of levels. And that is because? Can anyone give me just one reason to start with?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Sarah again, yes, thank you. I appreciate you greatly, Sarah. Yes, for one thing, the Eastern Roman Empire still bloody existed! It was literally that meme where we're announcing that Rome is dead, Constantinople wants us to stop telling everyone that they're dead, and we sigh that sometimes we can still hear their voice. Yes, I know what a meme is, don't look so surprised. The city of Constantinople became the center of Roman culture and power, though we call it the Byzantine empire to distinguish it from the pre-476 Roman empire. It used Greek instead of Latin as its primary culture and language, it was Orthodox Christian instead of Catholic Christian, and while it was no longer the multinational power player that its predecessor had been, it still produced some heavy hitters. Such as Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, who actually, albeit briefly, reconquered the territories of former Rome in the west, and was married to the very fascinating Empress Theodora. We'll have to get back to her, but anyway, in the territories of Former Rome, such as modern-day Spain, France, and Germany, there were still client kingdoms who were directly descended from Rome and who premised their new independence on their Roman inheritance. The Visigoths -- yes, them again -- in Spain, the Merovingians and the Franks in France, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in Germany, and other. So tell me, can we really say that Rome collapsed, exactly, and/or disappeared, instead of just dissipated and re-formed? We still had Latin as the language of state administration, the Roman Catholic Church as the supreme religious and cultural arbiter, and other major innovations that would last through the Middle Ages. Where does this whole Dark Ages thing come from?

Anyone?

Anyone aside from Sarah?

Oh, God's wounds. All right then. The idea that Rome disappeared overnight and took everything good with it is a projection, a fiction, popularized by proto-Renaissance and Renaissance writers who wanted to legitimize their look back into the past. We're getting ahead of ourselves, but the idea of the Dark Ages as this backward slovenly time of idiocy and misery -- it just gets me very worked up, all right?! Yes, written texts and certain other traditional markers of historic narrative became much scarcer than before, and we don't know as much about it as we do the more meticulously documented societies on either side, but it's only dark because we've decided that Rome, the brutal excessively slave-owning militaristic expansionist violent empire par excellence, was the marker of all culture and the peak of Western civilization for all time and nobody else could ever come close! This is how we get bloody Game of Thrones insisting that the medieval era was always filthy and dark and full of rape and violence and morally awful people -- so tell me, George, which part of your fantasy novel, the dragons or the ice zombies, were we expected to read as actual literal truth? It's just because we want to protect the idea of ourselves as so much better than people in the past, and the past itself as full of terrible violence that is somehow worse and more primitive than our violence, and that surely we could never do that because we're so much better! Which is total bullshit! Bullshit!

...yes. Thank you. Right. I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine, I apologize for that. Just a bit of a trigger for me. We'll get back to the lesson now, yes. I'm warning you, though. If you use Dark Ages uncritically in your essay, I am knocking you down a full grade. No matter what."

[baebeylik]

[shpjarkley]

The Best Prose Writer of the 21st Century Is Writing About Space Lesbians

I don't think I have ever read an author as fearless as Tamsyn Muir. If I have, they have never had the talent to pull off what she does. Her imagery is synesthetic, her syntax is Arachnean, her sentences are dissonant like a maestro's symphony. She's Michael Chabon in one line and Douglas Adams in the next. She's Poe and she's Pukicho. She's the new Shakespeare, complete with sex jokes and pop culture references. The absurdity that her byzantine grammar and archaic language are as parsable as they are visceral is only matched by the absurdity of successfully landing emotional beats that are punctuated by memes (my Alecto prediction is that I will be left sobbing by a sentence that contains "ligma balls").

Muir uses the English language for everything it's worth, reinvents it as a self-aware mosaic of literary history that stretches from antiquity to twenty-first century slang. She has to. The enormity of human love and grief is too vast to be contained within all the languages of the world, let alone one. The praxis of The Locked Tomb mirrors that of Catch-22, for they are united in their foundational tenet: Every atom in the universe put together cannot hold the pain that a single human soul can. Thus time, reality, language - those inadequate vessels of our sorrows - are bent and warped by the gravitational pull of a broken heart. To say it in Muir's own words: "Of such banality was grief made."

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Empresses (2/5) ↬ Catherine de Valois-Courtenay (before 15 April 1303 – October 1346)

The official Neapolitan investigation into Andrew of Hungary’s murder targeted Johanna’s closest supporters and left her isolated and vulnerable. Her aunt, Catherine of Valois, took advantage of that vulnerability to become the queen’s confidant in order to make certain that one of her sons would be Naples’s next king. At first, it appeared that this son would be Robert, the eldest of the Tarantini, who for a time seemed to be winning the competition between the Angevin princes for power and whom Johanna requested a papal dispensation to marry. Soon, however, Louis gained the upper hand, and Johanna’s requests for dispensations began to identify him as her intended. — From She-Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples by Elizabeth Casteen Of the many relatives who chose to avail themselves of the glittering social whirl of the capital, one stood out: Joanna’s aunt, Catherine of Valois, widow of Robert the Wise’s younger brother Philip, prince of Taranto. Catherine was Joanna’s mother’s older half-sister (both were fathered by Charles of Valois). Catherine had married Philip in 1313, when Philip was thirty-five and she just ten. Catherine was Philip’s second wife. He had divorced his first on a trumped-up charge of adultery after fifteen years of marriage and six children in order to wed Catherine, who had something he wanted. She was the sole heir to the title of empress of Constantinople. … Catherine was twenty-eight years old, recently widowed, and a force to be reckoned with when the newly orphaned Joanna and her sister, Maria, first knew her at the Castel Nuovo in 1331. Shrewd, highly intelligent, and vital, Catherine was supremely conscious of her exalted ancestry and wore her title of empress of Constantinople as though it were a rare gem of mythic origin. Even the death of her husband, Philip, in 1331 had not dissuaded her from persisting in her efforts to reclaim the Latin Empire for herself and her three young sons: Robert, Louis, and Philip. A series of shockingly inept leaders had left the Byzantine Empire vulnerable to attack from the west, and this state of affairs was well known in Italy. Moreover, Catherine was used to getting her way. — The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

[hasellia]

@enchanteddaydreams @risingape @broccoli-bitching @daisy-bugs @ghostinthestatic @lynxloverofcandy @crocadilly @ofals @sock-puppet-dinosaur Hehehe, I'm nosey. But as usual, no obligations.

Fuck it I'm starting a tag thing

Put one out of context picture in your camera roll and tag at least 2 people

@prisencolinensinainciusol09 @professional-termite @jules-n-gems

[gemsofgreece]

the other day someone told me that greece was actually turkish and that greece stole all turkish food from them and i am shaken to the core and still quite confused ahahahahahahahahah

Oh I have the meme for this

Having said that, Turkish and Greek cuisine also share numerous elements with Balkan and Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisines so it’s not at all an only Turkey vs Greece in fact.

In general the cuisine of this region comes from the Ottoman Empire which simply made modifications over the Byzantine Empire’s cuisine. The specific locality of each dish is usually not known because all these different peoples lived in the same empires and dishes were getting popularised within their broad borders. Most ingredients Turks use are indigenous in the Mediterranean and although they certainly like to think that, it is a little unlikely that they came last in the region only to teach Greeks, Arabs and Slavs entirely how to eat, because apparently we all ate cardboard before the Turks came. Thanks for the rice and coffee tho

It is always beneficial to us how Ancient and Byzantine Greeks recorded all but their daily dookie size, because there is knowledge available. I think you will like this series of three posts about the History of the Greek cuisine. I have added the first part, in which you will also find the links to the second and third part.

[ladyniniane]

Thank you for the tag @tockamybeloved ✨!

Why did you choose your url? Niniane is an alias I've been using for a long time and I added "lady" because I thought it was cool.

Any side blogs? I have @city-of-ladies (and no, it's not dead, I'm currently planning new content). I was also @onna-musha but I'm no longer updating this one. I also have a secret-not-so-secret sideblog for memes and rants.

How long have you been on tumblr? Since 2014. WTF.

Do you have a queue tag? No.

Why did you start your blog in the first place? Because I wanted to reblog stuff about feminism, pretty gifsets and the media I liked.

Why did you choose your icon/pfp? It's this painting of empress Theodora. I like it a lot and I wanted a byzantine theme for my blog to reflect my hyperfixation.

Why did you choose your header? Another painting of Theodora ;).

What’s your post with the most notes? Idk honestly, I think it's this one about women's education in the middle ages. Some of my women's history stuff was also shared around quite a lot.

How many mutuals do you have? Idk honestly.

How many followers do you have? 374 (even if many of them are inactive).

How many people do you follow? 343! Pretty even.

Have you ever made a shitpost? Nope. I try to keep my experience as peaceful and quiet as possible.

How often do you use tumblr each day? Multiple times a day :).

Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? Someone came to my blog trying to stir up some sh*t because I had said something bad about a book they liked. It wasn't even tagged (so it's not like I was putting negative stuff in the main tag). The worst thing was that this post was 3 years old at that time. They were all angry and preachy. I told them to GTFO and blocked them. People really need to chill. If you don't like something, block this person, mask their username. You aren't going to change anybody's mind with your ramblings. And most importantly: not everything on the net is for you and about you.

How do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this’ posts? No, I don't like emotional blackmail and being told what to do.

Do you like tag games? Yes!

Do you like ask games? Of course :)

Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous? I think some are. But I don't pay attention to these things.

Do you have a crush on a mutual? No.

tags? I tag, if you want :), @lilias42 @athenenoctua9 @grabyourpillow,@aninkwellofnectar, @take-me-to-valhalla @merecot @mydaylight and whoever wants to do it!