![455px-Meister_von_San_Vitale_in_Ravenna-379x500[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/f0Mh5Dn.jpg "455px-Meister_von_San_Vitale_in_Ravenna-379x500[1].jpg")
Let's discuss the options Byzantium offers as a campaign setting, or an inspiration for one.
Some topics to get the ball rolling
>Most interesting period: Justinian, rise of Islam, Alexiad, Fourth Crusade or the fall of Constantinople?
>What kind of campaign, military or just a bunch of murderhobos wandering around?
>Unique options/buildings that a Western medieval setting does not offer?
>Orthodox, Monophysite, Miaphysite, Coptic... what's up with this shit and why does it matter?
>Lamellar vs chainmail
>Venice: Why?
>>47383611
>Orthodox, Monophysite, Miaphysite, Coptic
Orthodox and Coptic are churches, Monophysite and Miaphysite are Christological stances, Coptic is a Miaphysite (believing that Christ has one nature that is both divine and man), Orthodox (as well as most churches) is diaphysite, believing that Christ has two natures, one divine and one man. Basically, they're really nitpicky differences in religion
>>47383611
>Alexiad
>military murderhobos
>prevalence of Hellenistic architecture over Romanesque or Gothirc
>Orthodox is one true faith, non-Niceans go home
>Lamellar is fucking cool
>Venice: Sometimes your bro, can't stop screwing about and doing their own thing
I think the issue is that I, as a random anon, don't know much about Byzanthium other than the following facts:
It was a great big empire that lasted for a thousand years, or so
Some issues with the Sassanids, then the rise of Islam, then the muslims, then... Constantinople was sacked? Sometime?
There was a Plague of Justinian, which screwed over the attempts at Western Reconqust and probably destabilized the tax infrastructure and the smaller towns to make it harder to resist the rise of Islam.
541 is a hilariously awful year, with the plague, and the possible volcanic eruption sending ash into the atmosphere and causing slow crop growth and the wars. Interesting end times scenario.
They really liked heavy armor and horses.
And that's the extent of my historical knowledge. What sources or suggestions can you offer? What's actually cool?
>>47383773
The Alexiad is a fun read if you want something not necessarily accurate but from an account from the time period in question.
Here's a bunch of links to Osprey books on them.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/59mttkv1juna688/Byzantine+Fashions.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/m4i7z56zotp6hyw/Osprey++CAM+078++Constantinople+1453.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/7xj4d9hka8bvai6/Osprey++CAM+262++Manzikert+1071.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/1waj1d2hywryh6c/Osprey++FOR+025++Walls+of+Constantinople
+3241453.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/953vnnwul1k527t/Osprey++MAA+089++Byzantine+Armies+8861
118.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/u3m28s44swnism0/Osprey++MAA+247++RomanoByzantine+Ar
mies+4th9th+Centuries.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/w4b5je43jt6dc3a/Osprey++MAA+287++Byzantine+Armies+11181
461.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/w4l52jaz1pzfyw1/Osprey++MAA+459++The+Varangian+Guard+9
881453.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/cs2aikrtei12jbf/Osprey++WAR+118++Byzantine+Infantryman+900
1204.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/tozkpjjtj237w6c/Osprey++WAR+139++Byzantine+Cavalryman+90
01204.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/r0vfq3nv2ia5m2y/SAGA++Varjazi+%26+Basileus.pdf
http://www.mediafire.com/download/42hzrc6c4dahrqn/Field+of+Glory++Byzantium+At+War.pdf
![Doujima.Nanako.full.1287190[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/lwSrZDD.jpg "Doujima.Nanako.full.1287190[1].jpg")
>>47383676
>Coptic is a Miaphysite (believing that Christ has one nature that is both divine and man), Orthodox (as well as most churches) is diaphysite, believing that Christ has two natures, one divine and one man
Is it bad if I don't understand the difference between the two? Two separate natures or one nature with two aspects? Sounds like sophistry to say the exact same thing to me.
At the difference between Arian and mainstream makes sense, they insisted that Jesus wasn't divine at all and fully man, right?
>>47383611
>not wanting to defend the images of saints against the heretics
>>47383905
>Is it bad if I don't understand the difference between the two?
Not at all, like I said, it's nitpicky bullshit.
>they insisted that Jesus wasn't divine at all and fully man, right?
Not quite, they thought that since God the Father created Jesus, that he must be a lesser force, unlike orthodox belief that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are equally God
>>47383982
>participating in idolworship
Iconoclasm is true orthodoxy you fucking barbarian
>all that blinding and castration
>>47384024
Dont forget nose cutting.
>>47383773
Cliffnotes:
Forms late 4th century early 5th century with the split of Western and Eastern Roman empire. However it retains a strong Latin streak (Latin terminology, Latin in military speak, Latin in literature, whatever) until about the 7th century with Heraclius.
-Fervently, incredible, extensively religious. So much of their socio-political problems stem from issues of faith. Iconoclasm periods, the conflicts regarding the nature of Christ (monophysite, Miaphysite, Diophysite, whatever the hell the orthodox/catholic position is called). You cannot underestimate the presence and role of faith in their empire.
-Byzantaboos present a false image of the empire maintaining the kind of grinding war of attrition fighting of the Roman empire. Even an avowed and rather unprofessional byzantaboo ( author of http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674062078&content=reviews ) explicitly pursues this point as a major thesis of his book. The byzantines (Prior to Manzikert) possessed a highly trained, experienced, capable army but one which knew it could not and should not pursue war like the Romans of old. Their frontiers were an ever-revolving door of opponents, and if they were to exhaust themselves fighting the latest Muslim or Steppe or Germanic threat all that would do is leave them exhausted when the next latest threat from those corners arrived. Warfare emphasized ambushes, raids, maneuvering to force the enemy to the diplomatic table rather than to annihilate them wholesale. Enemies today would be allies tomorrow, allies today are enemies tomorrow.
Further, outside of a brief renaissance for infantry of the line in the resurgence of the 700s-900s infantry were far and away subordinate to cavalry in importance, value, and utility.
>>47384066
Thank you anon, that's lovely. I appreciate that.
>>47383999
Take the religious wars to /his/ or /pol/.
>>47384090
>/his/
>/pol/
Same thing. /his/ was a mistake.
>>47384024
It wasn't all that common. Basically they weren't much more likely to go Game of Thrones on their political enemies, they were just a bit more refined about it.
Most interesting period - I would say it depends on the feel you want to put in the game.Justinian and Belizarius are about restoring Rome, the wars with the Caliphate and the Sassanids before that are total wars between superpowers, the rise of the Turks and the subsequent Crusades are about restoring a nearly disintegrated empire, and the late 14 and 15th century are about gradually losing ground and delaying the seemingly unavoidable.
Murderhoboing does not work that well except when the Empire is on the ropes or nearly destroyed (late 11th, early 15th century) or in the very early years, where all matter of barbarians are around on the borders. Intrigue works great,military campaigns work as well.
Unique options - post-Roman architectural style with a lot of Hellenistic elements. As essentially a part of the Roman empire the Byzantines retained quite a few elements, especially early on - i.e. aquaducts, chariot races, etc.
Religion - except early on it is about orthodox Christianity, but there are various interpretations. There was no Pope to fully dictate dogma and in its spread, Christianity had absorbed a lot of pagan elements. Zeus doesn't do lightnings! Okay, but St. Elijah sort of does.
>>47384098
Actually /his/ veers closer to /int/ than /pol/; it has the same nationalistic dickwaving and "my empire is better than your empire" retardation. It certainly was a mistake; Moot was dead right in never allowing it.
>>47383905
There's a quote I wish I could track down that I hope is not apocryphal about someone visiting the Byzantines in the 400s-500s and bitching about how you couldn't get a piece of bread or rent a room without someone trying to engage you in masturbatory religious discussion.
Another point with regards to courtly life is not to think of the Byzantines in a sanitized, quaint and familiar "Western" view of Kingship prior to the absolutism of the early modern era. This was not the tempered kingship inherited from the German successor states to Rome but the despotism of the Dominate Emperors of Rome, not the Principate lipservice to "First among equals".
Eunuchs, blindness and facial dis-figuration being as common as the most stereotypical notion of an oriental court, the kowtowing and arduous, convoluted and ostentatious displays of courtroom ritual and slavish pageantry all illustrate how exceedingly oriental the Byzantine court and aristocracy were. Outside of their religious kinship with Western Europe the Byzantine court was closer to that of the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, the Caliphs, Ottomans, Tamerlane or Babur than to the Richards, Louises, Henries, or Fredericks of the west.
I'm not sure if the Russian practice of married female seclusion a'la the harem which took hold after the Mongol dominion derived from the Romans or from some other source, but I've heard it said the Byzantines did at some points have some level of seclusion of the women. Never to the extremes of the Muslims, admittedly.
>>47384122
>It wasn't all that common.
I don't like just linking to a Wiki but before I go and find some specific accounts from some of my books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_mutilation_in_Byzantine_culture
I'm starting to think I should compile a list of how game of thrones type brutality in the court is far from unrealistic depending on the era. Right now the most vivid example of the Saffavids and Nader Shah can be dismissed because "They aren't Europeans" but I seem to recall the early Franks having an obscene level of political infighting and murder and torture.
>>47384122
Murder hobo works well if you play a warlord/commander and retinue during the 11th century. Norman, Venetian, Greek(Roman). Any sort of leader in the area working to try and get land from the resurgent Komenians or trying to carve out your own thing in the style of Guiscard.
>>47384066
I wouldn't even say they were incredibly religious, but their religion was mixed with their state, and they took matters of state seriously.
In the west, there was no strong state in Italy for a while, so the Pope was essentially independent and could influence policy over Europe. The Patriarch of Constantinople was in a very different position. Instead,Christianity was tied to the state, presenting the Emperor as sort of God's viceroy on Earth. This gave him a lot of authority kings did not have, BUT it also meant that a schism in religion was also a state matter and a danger to the Emperor's authority.
To be honest, Byzantium did not have massive witch hunts or burnings as far as I am aware, but a lot of church schisms spilled over and became social issues, especially early on in the eastern provinces.
>>47384098
/his/ isn't /pol/ but it is certainly retarted. It is more like the circlejerk on /tv/ or consolewar on /v/. More or less the same shit gets posted again and again leading to an endless flow of
> muh superior orthodox/katholic/islamic religion
> H R E
> muh masterrace
and endless quotes from philosophers that get ripped out of context to bait people.
>>47384172
Don't forget the constant "Marx is da ebuls!" threads.
>>47384141
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_mutilation_in_Byzantine_culture
Alright. I objected to the idea that it was practiced wholesale and people would gets bits cut off on a whim, but I do not disagree that it did happen.
I am a bit opposed to the idea that the Byzantines were some unknowably oriental model that was completely different from Western Europe. Yes, there were differences, and often pretty big ones, but they sometimes get way overstated. The Byzantines interacted with the West just as did with the East.
>>47384147
Yeah, it works better when the central authority is weak. I would put a Guiscard-like campaign as a military one, though - I see murder hobos as a small band not working with any authority or having goals to set up a fief.
>>47384212
Working for a deposed emperor trying to get back on the throne like Justinian II might b kewl.
>>47384212
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_mutilation_in_Byzantine_culture
What the fuck man? What is it about Greek/Byzantine culture that made them so much more fond of political mutilation than other civilizations in their vicinity?
>>47384268
The mutilated werent allowed to rule, so before you exile somebody you cut off some face parts.
Although, the above mentioned Justi 2 broke that tradition with his fancy golden nose.
>>47384212
Well, with the 11th century's you can fuck with the usual idea of the Byzantines being perpetually crumbling by focusing on a resurgent time.
>>47384281
>The mutilated werent allowed to rule
Other than Justinian II, were there exceptions to this or was this applied consistently? So if for example an emperor leads his troops into battle, takes an arrow to the hand and needs to get that hand amputated to prevent a deadly infection, he has to abdicate?
>>47383996
I actually prefer the arians view.
>>47384311
So did the Germans
>>47384298
Hes the only one I know of. It had something to do with "the emperor is god's authority on earth and god is perfect so he has to be perfect too" rationale.
>>47384316
aaaand just realized this sounds like a nazi joke, but I'm actually serious. The Germanic tribes were converted through arianist christians
>>47384212
I might be over-emphasizing it because I have a bit of a vindictive streak towards the byzantaboo worship which treats them in the same sort of ridiculous light as samurai era Japan. Acting as if the Byzantines were the kingdom of heaven on earth, this romanticized idyllic urbane and enlightened realm of supreme warriors - which ends up making you wonder "if these guys were so OP with cataphracts and neo-legionaries and all that shit why the hell is their history after Heraclius 50% getting their ass ripped apart and 50% hard-scrabble victories?"
If you cast the story of the Byzantines as one of a people constantly struggling from within and without, having to make due with outnumbered armies on a pursestring income with the corruption and infighting endemic to their society then their story becomes one of hard-wrought success and wonder that they survived as long as they did and thrived even in certain epochs.
If you cast their story as one of the greatest empire ever to grace the world since the fall of Rome, with unconquerable neo-legions fighting like Caesar and Belisarius time-traveled together with their armies, then the story becomes one of "Wow so they had all that potential and they did fuck all with it, GG no RE real impressive".
>>47384268
Any other Western civilization. I use the Safavids and Nader Shah as I just finished reading a great book about his life but the level of mutiliation and game of thrones type bullshit in the Persian-Turkic-Afghan society will make your head spin. And given what I can remember reading about Tamerlane, the almost concurrent going ons on the similarly intrigue ridden wasteland of the Tzarist court, it's not likely this behavior just appeared out of nowhere but seems to have been endemic to the large decadent empires that developed in the region since history began.
>>47384370
This happens after Nader Shah is entering his demented final year(s), but is all the more remarkable because Taqi Khan was one of his best friends (but in this case ended up revolting, possibly because of hearing that Nader was about to arrest him or was demanding a ridiculous sum of money from Taqi, who was governing Shirvan for Nader):
>"Nader had apparently taken an oath never to kill Taqi Khan. Now he sent orders for a punishment that were as extreme as an unhinged mind could devise, save that proviso. Taqi Khan was castrated and one of his eyes was torn out: NAder had given strict orders that every care should be taken that he should not die of it. Taqi Khan was left the other eye in order that he should see what was to follow. Several of his relatives and firends were executed, including his brother and his three sons; then the most beloved of his wives was given over to the soldiers and raped in front of him 'contrary to Nader's usual regard for women'. (Which is rather remarkable, as the author mentions numerous incidents where he, for instance, had 80 of his men vivisected alive for observing the rape of a woman and failing to stop it, demanding all the women seized by his men after the siege of Delhi be allowed to return safe and unharmed).
Few more examples as I find them. Nader is extreme in his brutality as he modeled himself after Tamerlane, but the Safavids he replaced (who were decadent, lazy and given over to the pursuits of pleasure and luxury) did similar mutiliations.
>nobody has posted this
>>47384396
After a failed attempt on his life by a marksman, Nader Shah eventually suspected his son Reza Qoli (who was an asshole but it doesn't seem likely he orchestrated it. He may have known his hanger-ons were planning it and looked the other way as he was increasingly behaving in a pomp and circumstance ostentatious way of heir-apparent that the rustic and soldier's soldier Nader Shah did not like).
He declares the bravery and courage of the man who attempted to kill him will not lead to his death if said assassin was caught. He was, brought forth to Nader Shah and told he will not be killed if he does not say a single lie when answering all that he knows about who hired him. He didn't tell a single lie. Nader "told Nik Qadam (assassin) that he would spare his life as he had promised. But Nik's aim was too good - he would have to lose his eyes".
Nader loved his son Reza, and for a long while tried to get him to show some ounce of humility, of shame and seek forgiveness. Had he done so he would have likely let him go without any punishment. But Reza failed to do so and professed innocence until at last Nader ordered his son's eyes cut out. One version says that Reza said "Cut them out and put them in your wife's cunt".
The entourage around Nader try to dissuade him because Reza, for all his arrogance, was primed to be a perfect successor and was thought to be a great king if he had succeeded his father. And the minute Nader ordered his son's eyes cut out and brought to him he wept, later berating his courtiers for not interceding to save the prince, crying "What is a father? And what is a son?"
Later on (next post)
>>47383611
I ran a short campaign based on this. Sort of.
The players were a group of private citizens who had boughtswindled the rights to some part of the military supply for the reconquest of Italy and Northern Africa. I figured that would work after reading about the publicani. It's not quite Byzantine empire yet since it was still the early days but it worked.
So they'd offered to do it for 20% less than their competitors, which was great - except that their urgent need to ensure shipment of 200 tons of grain and 3000 boots was hampered a little by the fact that they were just a bunch of landless con artists. A retired legionaire, a down on his luck chariot racer (Green), the daugher of a landowner who was exploiting her fathers dementia to do business in his name and a priest who changed his stance on religious matters on a daily basis.
They eventually got this *amazing* offer on large shipments from a grain merchant cartel in Aegyptus, led by a man with a hood and an ineffable accent. They only had to escape the attention of their competitors, a gang of germanic killers and the agentes in rebus who were asking a lot of pointed questions along the lines of "where's all the grain you promised to get" and "which fingernail do you want us to tear off for not getting our grain?"
10.000 gold solidus for each, and cheers were had right up until everyone who had any of their grain started dying.
Turns out the grain cartel were carthegian descendents out for vengeance who smuggled plagued rats into the barges, but by the time anyone found out about a thousand people were dying daily because they'd singlehandedly started the Plague.
They blew their total payment on a galley to Spain.
I always wonder about the Persians. It seems like everyone who wants to have an empire or be the hegemonic power in Anatolia or the Levant for the last 2 and a half millennia has wound up fighting the Persians, but I know next to nothing about their history. Not even a broad strokes kind of understanding.
>>47383611
I would like to offer up the civil war of 1341-1347 as another possible "most interesting period". I mean, this is the era that officially ended any long term chances of byzantine survival. Before the, the empire is still on resurgence, and is just about to recover latin greece, whose lords offered to become vassals. After it, the byzantine empire is basicly a city state. And during the war, you have Serbs, bulgars, turks and greece involved in the ever changing dynamics of the civil war. It's way more depressing, which might be why it's so unpopular, but it's damn interesting too.
>>47384512
Cliffnotes:
Mid 600 BCE: Alliance of Scythians, Medians, Babylonians and something else I forget took down the then hegemon of the Near-East the Assyrians. Medes have an amorphously defined empire of the Iranian Plateau to some of the Caucasus. Tried to fight the Lydians and had the famous battle where an eclipse showed up and both decided to call it quits and leave it at a draw because that was spooky (but a Greek guy predicted it).
Late 500s BCE: Rise of the Achaemenids, who dwelt in Pars province (modern day Pars) as some kind of vassal of the Medes. Establish Medo-Achaemenid (somewhat Medo-Achaemenid-Elamite, the Elamites being neighbors in modern day Khuzestan) empire. You know the whole bruhahah with the Greeks. Expand to hold, sometimes tenuously on the peripheries of Central Asia or "India" (not actual India proper but just to Pakistan) or Egypt, the massive empire.
Hold Ionian cities of Western Anatolia, a revolt happens where Athens and some other state in Greece (Euboea or one of the big islands next to the Peloponneese or Attica) support the rebels and help burn down the city and temples of Sardis. This angers the Darius I. He attempts invasion, fails with Marathon. Successor Xerxes attempts new invasion. Much more successful and goes overland through Thrace (He or Darius tried to conquer Scythians but faced the typical Nomadic troubles of conquering the nomads of the Eurasian steppe and left).
>>47384702
Great Greco-Persian wars of infamy occur. Thermopylae, Plataea, ect. Despite propaganda and the usual desire to avoid inconvienient truths Medized Greeks (Boeotians, Macedonians, Ionians and others) play a large part in the Persian army and navy. To the point that after the war when faced with the question of how to defend the Ionian Greeks from the Persians the Spartans propose forcibly ejecting all the Medized Greeks of Boeotia, Thessaly, Macedonia and have the Ionians come and settle in their emptied cities. Status quo goes back to Greece with the Athenians alone busying themselves kicking the Persian's shins now and then with naval raids and pillaging.
Come the Peloponnesian War and the Persians are able to laff as the Greeks are busy killing eachother. They end up pulling the usual superpower proxy shenanigans by bankrolling whomever they want to keep one power from being ascendant - singlehandedly funding the navies the Spartans keep throwing at the Athenians and eventually win with by virtue of attrition. Then Sparta gets muddled in intervening with the Ionian question against one of the Persian's Satraps (circa the Peloponnesian War two main satrapies are the dominant "Persian" power in Western and Central Anatolia - the Satrapy of Phrygia and the Satrapy of Caria). You eventually get Cyrus the Younger hiring the 10,000 Greek mercenaries to help him take the Persian throne which leads to Xenophon's Anabasis after Cyrus is kill in Mesopotamian battle, the leading Greek mercs are invited to a banquet with the victorious rival to Cyrus, are killed, then the middling officers like Xenophon lead them on a great voyage back to the Black Sea and then Greek home.
>>47384753
Persia continues winning with talents (the money kind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement) ) what they didn't with martial power - the Corinthian war between Sparta and those rejecting Sparta's hegemony culminates in the "King (of Persia)'s Peace" which stipulates the Persians hold Ionia, the Spartans are recognized as the big hegemon of the Greeks. Later Thebes says fuck you and wins Leuctra and holds the hegemony until Macedonia says fuck you.
Stuff happens of not real consequence beyond the continued cultural Mediziation of much of the Near East (at least Iran/Caucasus/Eastern Anatolia/Syria/ect.) which lays the foundation for later Iranianized elements of say Armenian or Caucasus culture or that of Medo-Greek culture like that of Mithridates of Pontus"BUT I DONT WANNA PLAY AS PONTUS"
330s BC and Alexander arrives. Conquers Persian Empire by the 329-328 or so after a hard fight in Central Asia against various Persian loyalists/satrapal successors to Darius III who call upon help of the Scythian/Saka nomads. Despite clucking about "Graveyard of empires" Alex has no real trouble from the proto-"Afghans" who don't even exist at this point but rather trouble from those dwelling further afield in modern day Turkmenistan or Kazakstan or Uzbekistan, around the Amu Darya or Syr Darya not Afghanistan territory.
>>47384793
Alexander dies later, having had trouble conciling the more egalitarian 'first among equals' kingship known to the Macedonians and Greeks with the more "Shadow of god on earth" kingship of the Persians which they inherited from the Babylonians (rustic and nomadic Iranians not really having the traditions of absolute monarchism).
Diadochi/Hellenized period through Iranian territory from 320BCE down to, with varying exceptions, 200s AD. There isn't a universal rule to how much a part of the Iranian cultural sphere of the Iranian Plateau/Armenia/Azerbaijan/Afghanistan/Transoxania) adopted or rejected Hellenizing influences. You had the curious Greco-Bactrian kingdom for a few centuries which eventually spread/shifted/migrated over to Pakistan and even produced a 'saint' in Buddhism, but you also had Iranian nomads (Kushans/Saka/ect.) invading and taking over Central Asian or Greco-Bactrian territory.
The very loose generalization I'd make is that Greek influence was most strongly felt in Bactria, Mesopotamia, but the Iranian plateau and Khorasan/Transoxania quickly went back to the norm. However the greek influence can be felt as late as the 1st century BC when after Crassus was killed at Carrahe, the Parthian king was watching a performance of a Greek tragedy when the courier threw Crassus' head onto the stage for the performer to use as a prop.
>>47384840
Going back in time to the 200s BC you had the slow emergence of the Parthians re-asserting Iranian dominion over the Iranians. They were a nomadic Scythian/Saka tribe who migrated into the Parthava province of Iran in the 3rd century and gradually took over territory from the crumbling Seleucid Greeks.
These fellows establish a very decentralized kingdom over the Iranian Plateau, Khorasan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Khorasan Eastern Iranian-ized territory) and some of the Caucasus. Outside of beating Crassus at Carrahe and smashing that male bimbo Marc Antony's abortive expedition into Persia they are Rome's punching bag. One of their capitals is Ctesiphon near Babylon. They appear to have been divided into a loose empire of various "Houses" or royal clans tenuously paying homage to one anointed as the king of kings.
200s AD and you have the Sassanids arriving as a native Persian dynasty from around the Pars/Fars province rebeling against the House of Arsacids. The Arsacids are defeated but linger on as the rulers of Armenia (different family, just same pedigree) for a few more centuries. The Sassanids become the rulers of Iran with the various Parthian houses paying homage to them and cooperating with them as Viziers and generals and so on.
>>47384880
Culturally it can be argued the Sassanids are to the Middle-East what the Romans were to the West - the model of state, governance, military and culture, the golden age all succeeding powers sought to emulate, the foundation for religious (in rome's case), political/courtly power (in both's case), language and art in the centuries to come. Arabic may dominate in religious matters for Middle-East history after the arrival of Islam but Persian remained until the 20th century the language of high culture and governance.
The Sassanids are far more virile, organized and aggressive than the Parthians. They seek predominance in the Middle-East and at certain times even display the ambition to reclaim the old Achaemenid territories of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia. They engage in tit for tat wars with Rome until the 7th century and the final climatic Romano-Persian war of Heraclius vs Khusrow II.
Then cometh the lizard-eating half-naked Arab who humbles Caesar and Shahenshah alike. The Arabs conquer the Persians but in the time honored tradition of high cultured people conquered by savages, they end up culturally conquering their conquerors. The court of the Abbasids and every succeeding dynasty in the Middle-East are highly influenced by Sassanian traditions, norms and ideals. Persians dominate the bureaucracies, courtiers of the palace and government or culture. Much much later in Iran and Central Asia of the middle ages to early modern era will be the characterization of the Persians as being the effete, cultured and intelligent men of the pen/turban and the Turks being the men of the sword and men of the helmet.
As Abbasid influence wanes the Iranian plateau is home to a dizzying array of powers. Before the arrival of the Seljuks in the 11th century and the Ghaznavids of the later 10th you have a brief hurrah of native Iranian dynasties re-asserting and re-invigorating Iranian/Persian culture/language so as to allow (continued)
>>47384948
(continuing) Persian culture and civilization to endure, survive and thrive and not simply be subsumed by their Arab conquerors the way the Coptic Egyptians, Assyrians, Mesopotamians and other non-Arab Semites were. Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids.
Then cometh the terrible Turk, hired first as slave-warriors and then migrating over as tribes wholesale. However the Turks are rapidly Iranianized culturally and exist almost purely as the military and military-ruling elite. The religious, cultural, agricultural and artisan/merchant world is dominated by Persians.
This continues until the dawn of the 16th century and the Saffavids arriving under Shah Ismail I. A red haired lad treated as almost a messiah or living god by his Sufi order Qizilbashi. Complicatingly although the Safavids are treated as a resurgence of Iranian/Persian autonomy the Qizilbashi are a mix of Turks and Kurds and some Iranians. Like always ethnicity is a very tenuously defined thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_dynasty#Turks_and_Tajiks Can describe it better than I would but you can take the Safavids to be a case of a Turkic/Kurdic but thoroughly Iranified people emphasizing their culturally Persian/Iranian credentials rather than emphasizing their Turkic credentials. Saffavids are also the ones to make Iran Shi'ite. Prior to that Shiism was not the dominant faith in the region.
Keeping with Ibn Khaldun's theory of dynastic change (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah) the Saffavids will be overthrown by a messy 18th century cauldron of Turks (nadir Shah) and Afghans, with civil war following Nadir Shah's death until the Qajar dynasty takes hold in the 19th century and are overthrown by revolutionaries in the early 20th, who in turn are overthrown by a a brigadier general of the Persian-Cossack Regiment who established the Pahlavi dynasty, overthrown in 1979 by the Islamic revolution.
>>47383681
>Venice: Sometimes your bro
>>47385018
If there are consistent 'meta' themes to Persian history much like elsewhere (British Island isolationism, the French desire to assert control over the geographic boundaries of mountains or rivers for national defense, Spanish insularity by virtue of their mountainous terrain, Greece looking always to the sea) they would be:
-"Persia has always been at war with Turan". The dominant political conflict in the Shahnameh is not war with the Arabs or Romans but with the Turanians, the nomadic inhabitants of Central Asia. Prior to the Turks and Mongols this threat was from fellow Iranian speaking nomads like the Saka, Kushan or Parthians. But with exception to Alexander the Great, the Arab conquest, and the unique circumstances of the British Empire Iran's existential threat has always come from Central Asia and the steppe. Only in the 19th century did this really end and that is only because the Russians took over the Khanates of Central Asia.
-Nomadism. A significant part of the population of the Iranian heartlands were nomadic. I want to say 1/3rd, but I am not sure where I got that number from. That was the case until really the 20th century and Reza Shah Pahlavi's efforts to get them under control. These nomads provided a great reservoir of martial talent prior the 19th century's making them horribly antiquated, but they also provided an incredibly unreliable, unpredictable, and worst of all Un-Taxable population that you barely had any control over. Coupled with this I would contend is a similarly large part of the population dwelling in rugged highland villages and towns. Never quite to the level of difficulty Afghanistan has had with its Eastern populations, but Iran is not a place of easy sedentary control the way Mesopotamia was.
>>47384702
>BCE
>>47385084
Well, untill the 10th century Venice and Constantinople were were fairly tight. After that it becomes a much more transactional relationship with Venice being the parasite that kills the host. Even then you get on and off alliances. More accurate would have been
>Venice, sometimes your ally or vassal, sometimes the guy who burns down everything you ever loved and dragging the remains home to put in a museum.
>>47385095
That one letter does not refute his whole post, which, if I may add, is otherwise quite true.
>>47385108
>What is comical exaggeration
>>47385089
I enjoyed the read, anon.
>>47385121
>I was just pretending to be retarded: the post
>>47385150
>Calling others retarded when using the common era notation
>>47385089
And lastly just a random thought: If someone (usually the media or some 'abloobloobloo' apologist) tells you Sunni-Shia conflict and hostility is a modern phenomenon or the fault of some foreign boogeyman stoking it they are 100% full of shit. It was present in the 18th century between Nadir Shah's Persia and the Ottomans, it was present in the 16th and 17th century between the Ottomans and Saffavids, it was present in the 11th century with the persecution of the Nizari leading to the very use of the Assassins as a means of striking back against the persecutions of the Seljuks, it was present in the 12th century when Saladin and his predecessor Nur Al-Din were more interested in dispatching the heretical Fatimids than fighting the Crusaders. At least the Safavids, and I think other Shiite sects, indulge in denouncing and shit-talking the first three caliphs who 'stole' the caliphate away from Ali. Which is basically like expecting Protestants and Catholics to get along swimmingly if Protestants in their sunday prayers talked about how Mary and Peter were pieces of shit.
>>47385095
I just slipped up there by muscle memory or some shit. I don't mind calling it anno domini and before christ or whatever it is in latin.
>>47385174
>I just slipped up there by muscle memory or some shit. I don't mind calling it anno domini and before christ or whatever it is in latin.
I was just shitposting, don't take it too personally
>>47385194
No worries. And speaking of historical shitposting anyone who hasn't seen the dank pompeii graffiti memes go ahead and look that up
>>47383611
On like, the /way/ backburner, whenever I want to compulsively worldbuild/doodle, I have a project inspired by this pic and the general concept of "Rome... in WWI!"
It's since moved way past that to become a weird amalgamation of a bunch of random bullshit but whenever I want inspo now I look at Byzantium. Their soldiers IMO are cooler, and also easier to take inspiration from for something modern, just since medieval troops in mail and leather are /a bit/ closer to trench fighters than your archtypal centurion.
The Alexiad start in CK2 creates the coolest setting I've ever seen, if you focus on the Balkans/Near East.
You get a Militant Order (damn pope always calls for a Greek Crusade) sandwiched between a resurgent ancient empire and the disorganized usurpers from a few decades earlier.
Meanwhile that ancient empire focuses their efforts on conquering the western coastal kingdoms, numerous but squabbling among themselves.
>60 replies
>noone mentions based Bulgarslayer.
>>47386386
I actually prefer the Makedon start it's more comfy.
>>47386399
Makedon start is comfy but West Europe is a mess.
Besides, I'm going by the original scope of the thread, which called for cool setting's featuring Byzantium, and in that regard an Alexiad start in CK2 ran for a couple decades is perfect for that.
Why does the pope think giving the Anatolian coast to Knights Hospitaller was ever a good idea?
>>47386451
to fuck with you of course
>>47386071
I was gonna post a bunch of art I had used for inspiration but then I realized I hadn't saved anything that was actually from this period.
So I guess I'm gonna lurk in this thread and steal all of ur stuff
>>47384172
Because of /his/ I completely despise Voltaire and that stupid HRE quote of his. If you love Voltaire so god dam much, than at least use different quotes from him.
>>47385095
>Christfag
>>47386482
Man, fuck the pope, he's a useful sugar daddy for good little Catholics but he's a pain in the ass for Orthodox.
STOP DECLARING CRUSADE ON JERUSALEM, I NEED THAT TO MEND THE SCHISM.
>>47386558
I wish the HRE got more attention than it does, which is none at all.
>>47386558
>Because of /his/ I completely despise Voltaire and that stupid HRE quote of his.
I think it's funny
>>47386641
It was for the first couple of times, but after having to see that quote every fucking time a discussion about the HRE comes up, makes me a grumpier than a hobo living in a trash can.
>>47383999
Next thing you're going to claim that sola scriptura is the only true way to understand the word of god.
>>47383611
I remember a few years back /tg/ brainstormed a setting that was basically India + Byzantium. A lot of it was just smashing together caste systems and theologies, but I recall that a drawfag contributed a few sketches that did a neat job of blending the two cultures visually. The Indian saris and Byzantine robes kinda worked well together.
>>47386387
Probably because there's no evidence for him blinding all those people untill centuries later. Bulgarslayer is a meme, although a very well rooted one.
>>47386674
It's just a prank, bro
I want to learn about the fall of Rome and the impact on their former territories. What happens to a society that goes from "part of the Empire" to "what Empire?"
>>47387122
As far as I know, in the West at least, barbarian ursurpers take over but leave most of the administration intact. Because the Romans already did it better than anyone else could, so why bother coming up with something new when you've just conquered a perfectly functional territory?
>>47383611
>>Most interesting period: Justinian, rise of Islam, Alexiad, Fourth Crusade or the fall of Constantinople?
7th century. This is where things were starting to go tits-up. There are also a bunch of good books on the period (J.F. Haldon's Byzantium in the Seventh Century is a personal favorite of mine)
>>What kind of campaign, military or just a bunch of murderhobos wandering around?
Set the campaign during either, A: the fall of Carthage in 698 (which basically marked the final transition from 'the Late Roman Empire' -> 'the Byzantine empire'), or B: Justinian's reconquests in Italy. C): would be Lazica shortly prior. Military should be expected for a Byzantine campaign. Unless you want to plop them in the Clergy or the Fisc for some reason.
>>Unique options/buildings that a Western medieval setting does not offer?
Medieval Europe is highly decentralized at the point of Byzantium's apex. You will have clear infrastructure in Byzantium, a smaller amount of overland trade (note how crippled the Byzantine economy was following the loss of Egypt with their reliance on Anatolian crops), and authorities to which the PC will be ought to answer. In regards to physical buildings? Churches would be the most striking thing, especially in major cities.
Here is a quote from the primary chronicle on the Hagia Sophia.
>"We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth," they reported, "nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it."
>>Orthodox, Monophysite, Miaphysite, Coptic... what's up with this shit and why does it matter?
The Orthodox Church follows the Chalcedonian Christological Formula, i.e: Jesus Christ is both fully Man and Fully God (that is not speaking to the second person of the godhead, but to the incarnation). The 'coptic' formula at this time would be that Christ has one (as opposed to the Orthodox) nature (which is both divine and human).
>>Lamellar vs chainmail
Lamellar.
>>Venice: Why?
No need to go to Venice.
>>47387025
>Probably because there's no evidence for him blinding all those people untill centuries later. Bulgarslayer is a meme, although a very well rooted one.
What about the complete collapse of the bulgarian empire shortly thereafter.
>>47386611
How did such a large and prestigious government that lasted a good thousand years just putter out without anyone really caring? Of course, I say that in the same thread as the Byzantine Empire, which is equally "you tried so hard and came so far, but in the end it didn't even matter."
>>47387025
The Byzantines loved blinding people and slicing off their noses.
>>47387331
You forgot the castration, they sure loved there eunuchs.
>>47387112
Now that makes me chuckle, because at least the prank meme (to me mind you) isn't stale.
>>47387358
*their
I'm currently developing setting that puts focus on "successors for great empire" concept. Although more succesful one is more like Venice.
Losers I plan to more heavily base on Byzantium in its worst traits. Even though geographically they are where Ireland counterpart should be.
>>47383611
An interesting question:
What system would work best for a Byzantine-inspired campaign?
>>47383611
I was thinking making a setting based on my latest CK2 save where I'm at war with Caroligian empire in order to reconquer Gaul, andthe idea of a legitimate roman empire fighting the urserper I think it's quite interesting.
>>47383611
>Alexiad, because there's still a chance of things improving and the players could be that chance.
>military+murderhobos=irregulars
>Links for 3d byzantine archictecture:
http://www.byzantium1200.com/index.html
http://www.byzantium1200.com/contents.html
Best murderhobos get triunphal columns.
>Fuck if I know, but I did it that within each god of the pantheon there is sects and views.
>Lamellar over chainmail
>City-estate all out for profit and more profit. Combine with Carthage for maximum profit.
>>47387626
> Reconquer Gaul
Gaul can go fuck itself as long as Aegyptus, the Levant, Italy proper and Iberia remain out of your hands, but once you've got them I'd say jump for it.
>>47387761
I already git all of those, it's time to teach those uppity franks a lessonViceroyalty mechanic is so good
>>47387779
Motherfuckers thinks they wuz romanz and shieet.
>>47387779
> I got all of it
Hmng, yes, restore Roma.
>>47387779
Viceroyalty feels like cheating. I will try to play again without it.
>>47385084
Venice was one of the few countries that sent troops to defend Constantinople when it fell to the Turks
although it's really their fault that it came to that point anyway
>>47387830
That's my plan strategos
>>47386507
>>47387950
>>47387969
>>47387995
>>47387969
Were the byzantines, elves?
>>47388015
>>47388018
Probably
>>47383905
Not really, after all people in the Orthodox church killed each other over how many fingers yoy use when you cross yourself in prayer.
Arian Id more Jesus was not both The Son and The Father, they are two separate beings, example, imo, is LDS and JW.
>>47387950
>Heraclius
The Byzantine-Sassanid war of the early 600s makes me very sad.
>>47388098
LDS and JWs are modern Arians.
I've been saying this for years to people in my circles, it's great to see someone else come to the conclusion too.
>>47388015
>the marble emperors
Stop it with these feels.
>>47387842
More accurate to the Byzantine model of pronoia, where titles would be granted to an individual but remained the property of the Emperor (and by proxy, the Empire) and returned upon their death, rather than being inherited.
Western European style feudalism only caught on in the latter days of the Empire.
>>47388032
>>47388347
>>47388355
>>47383611
>byzantium as a setting
would get quite stale and boring after few sessions.
a game where players are forced to travel medieval world in late medievals is more fascinating.
>>47388368
Is it tacky if I use the real life Roman gods for my not!Byzantines but change their origins somewhat? I just like the idea of creating a world with similar mythology to our own but with some differences here and there.
>>47388383
>>47388397
>>47388419
>>47388419
Are... are you threatening me?
>>47388448
>>47388464
>>47388464
Uh?
>>47388486
Just wondering why you quoted me while dumping.
>>47388486
>>47388513
Oh! Nope, it was a mistake. I'm utterly indiferent to your existence.
>>47388543
>>47388578
>>47388599
>>47388717
>>47388731
>>47388750
>>47388763
>>47388777
>>47388787
>>47387302
I said there's no evidence for the blinding from sources of that era. The bulgarians still got defeated.
>>47388925
I'm implying that all those blinded soldiers contributed for how quickly the bulgarians capitulated.
>>47388018
>Civilization in decline.
>Complex and arcane social and political systems.
>Magnificent art and architecture.
>Last dying embers of an empire that ruled the known world.
Yeah, they're pretty much elves, or at least can serve as elves if you want to play it up.
>>47385174
>>47385089
Thanks for that!
Do you have any popular histories you can recommend?
>>47383905
It's hard to understand the subtlety of these distinctions when phrased as such. A better question to ask is not just what is the nature of Christ but also what relationships does Christ have.
Christ, to Chalcedonian (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) Christians, has two distinct natures but one person. The natures being human and divine. The idea is that God, in the person of Christ, is a member of the human race but at no expense of His divinity. Why does this matter? Well, if you want to look at Christianity's emphasis on "personal relationship" with God, it has to do with God becoming human "And the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us." God became one of us, but not by downgrading Himself, and thus elevating humanity through Himself. We are able to know God and He is no longer out of reach. He also fulfilled the requirement of both having a pure human sacrifice (as there weren't too many pure and sinless humans around to say the least) as well as having a divine sacrifice, which is both an expression of love within the persons of the trinity and a fulfillment of debt to pay for humanity. It provides a way for humanity to participate in the relationship of the trinity.
An easier way to put it, God became Man, did not stop being God, so that Man can know God, love God, and be loved by God.
Continued.
>>47383996
>>47389398
Now, where do the heresies come in?
Nestorianism: In order to say Mary is not the Mother of God (because that sounds icky), we will say she only was the mother of Christ's human nature, and thus His human nature had different relationships than Hid divine nature. His human nature died on the cross, but His divine nature is incapable of dying. Problem with this? What was the point of the incarnation is God only possessed a human soul to come along for the ride!? It defeats the whole purpose of Christ becoming human and one of us! We can no longer know God, just thank Him that He decided to show up in one of our bodies, but He never joined the human race so we can never truly know or be one with Him.
The Church rejected this and said Mary is the Mother of God (using the Greek term Theotokos).
Monophysitism:
Christ has only one nature, and it is divine since His human nature was subsumed and engulfed by His divine nature. He walked and talked like a human but was God piloting a human body.
Problem: Again, not part of the human race. Solves the problem of Arians saying Jesus was "One with God but not quite God Himself" but not the Nestorian and Docetist problem of "Jesus was not a member of the human race."
Miaphysites do not believe this so much but they found the language of Chalcedon to sound too Nestorian for their tastes. Their reason for separation though comes mostly down to politics.
Continued.
>>47383905
>>47389472
>>47389398
Arianism:
Jesus, although one with God, was still not part of the Godhead and not a person of the Trinity equal to God the Father. Jehovah's Witnesses still believe this.
Problem:
Okay, so is He God or isn't He? He said "I and the Father are one." John the Apostle said Christ was the Word that through Him all the world was made. Why should he be subordinate? Well. Arians wanted something easier to comprehend. Nicenes understood that something need be comprehendable to be logically consistent (much like mathematics involving infinity). The Nicene Council declared Arius wrong not because they didn't like him (he was actually more popular than Athanasius), but because they didn't find his arguments convincing when faced with stone cold logic.
Arianism became popular with the Germanic upperclass of the West as a way of distinguishing themselves from the lower class Romans they had conquered. This did not always work in your favor. When you're the 1% and you can only marry other 1 percenters you'll eventually get outbred.
>>47389556
>>47389472
>>47389398
/tg/ does theology
I'm a Nicene myself but that's with the benefit of knowing that so many of these schisms simply helped Islam when it arose, half the (not)problem they had with Egypt was that Egypt was mostly Monophysite, so the idea that Jesus was just a prophet and not God wasn't that far into left field for the populace. They'd have had a much harder time pacifying the populace otherwise. Before Islam there wasn't much of an existential "other" in the east, given that Zoroastrianism was hardly as toxic as Islam and certainly never ruled over as many Christians as the Arabs did.
Damn the Byzantine-Sassanid war of the 600s.
>>47389635
Well, it did not help that the Coptic Christians, seeing themselves as distinct from the Eastern Romans because of the different churches (no matter the theological reasons for the schism) simply did not hold as much loyalty for their Roman government and did not mind when this strange cult of Arab warlords took over..... that is until they Jizya tax kicked in and their children started to convert for socio-economic advantages but that took more than a generation to settle in.
>>47389687
I remember reading that in some cases the Jizya tax, a very explicit implement of conversion, wound up helping to preserve some Christian populations in the middle east, because the empires found they needed cash more than they needed more Muslims. Can anyone else on /tg/ source this?
>>47389398
>>47389472
>>47389556
Unless I'm wrong and stupid, it's pretty weird that all of these schisms arose in the Eastern/Orthodox sphere and tore apart the Church, whereas Catholocism/the Western Church managed to remain pretty stable until the rise of the Protestants. What allowed Catholocism to stick together better than the entire clusterfuck of Eastern churches?
>>47389687
It's incredible how Westerners seem to completely ignore the long-term aspects of Islam until it's too late.
It was the same way in Iberia, when the Muslims conquered the Arianists living there and basically gave an accented retelling of what they already believed, just with a new prophet.
>>47389931
What about Waldenesians, Cathar, Fraticelli and Lollards?
I'd pin it on the iron grip of the pope and the relative literacy of the East; when you get smart people together, they'll start talking religion, ESPECIALLY since the Byzantines were in constant contact with Eastern beliefs (Iconoclasm for example is strikingly similar to the Muslim prohibition on human religious imagery.)
>>47389931
What helped the Western church was that their theology was done in Latin which lacked a lot of the nuance of its Greek counterpart that could spark the subtle distinctions that caused the Greek heresies. But that is not to say the Church was perfectly stable. There were several near schism and heretical uprisings, with Protestantism only succeeding because of the political-economic situation at the time.
Donatism, for example, while during the same time as most of the Eastern Christological heresies, was a North African western Christian heresy. There were also later in the middle ages many other heresies like the Waldensians, Hussites and Lollards (all sort of proto-Protestant but not quite), as well as stranger gnostic heresies.
The Gnostic heresies of the middle ages were strange stuff, seeming like Tzeentch and Slaanesh cults. You had the Paulicians and the Bogomilists (where we get the word Buggery from) in Greece as well as the Cathari (Albigensians) and Flagellants in the West. Not to mention all the strange pseudo-Gnostic doomsday cults that sprung up in the midst of the Protestant Reformation.
>>47389931
When major doctrinal schisms formed in Catholicism they were quickly and effectively suppressed. Which is not to say there weren't political disputes over the papacy and a bevy of popes, anti-popes, a pirate pope, (I believe at one point there were three popes), just that they were pretty good at backing their claim of being "The Church" up with more than words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition
Which actually makes a lot more sense as an institution once you know how fractious the early church was.
>>47390186
The Eastern Orthodox church had the armies of Constantinople and later Moscow as well to keep this from happening. The Inquisition was a tool to maintain doctrinal unity, sure. But it was also that the Church was good at making it economically and politically disadvantageous to not be a member.
>>47390186
This Catholic Cathedral in the south of France does not look like a fortress by accident, for example. It was built following the Albigensian Crusade and the near total destruction of the Cathars.
>>47390288>This will be turned into a mosque within my lifetime
>>47390288
>This Catholic Cathedral in the south of France does not look like a fortress by accident
God needs his house to have strong walls
>>47390343
Islam conquers, friend.
Such is the way of things.At least it won't be turned into a night-club, like some cathedrals.
>>47390288
Huh, I studied that period and I've never even heard of this cathedral. Thanks anon!
>>47390343
I wouldn't have disputed that that, but angry nationalist populism seems to be resurgent along with the Takfiri Jihadis. I hope we find a better way forward than either alternative suggests, otherwise everyone in Europe will be Serbian soon.
>>47390409
>but angry nationalist populism seems to be resurgent along with the Takfiri Jihadis
Even if somehow those angry nationalists win, nothing will change. Mass migration only exists to fill a reproductive hole the native population isn't filling. It shows that Europeans are angry, but unwilling to solve the problem. Or at least the governments of Europe aren't, as bumping up birth rates would demand us to morally and institutionally go back to the 1940s. And we can't do that in THE CURRENT YEAR.
Islam's victory is set in stone by demographics. Even if the conflict arises in one or two decades, in countries like Germany Muslim men of fighting age will outnumber the native population of the same age and gender brackets.
>>47390398
>>47390288
Ok, after some preliminary digging, the fortress-like slab walls may be due to the nature of brick construction than anything else. You can't really do classic gothic arched windows in brick. For whatever reason, external sculptures weren't used either.
Face it, if you're building huge buildings out of brick, they're going to have tiny, tiny windows and thick walls on the lower levels. There aren't too many redbrick fortresses in the world for obvious reasons - bricks are soft compared to stone.
>>47390483
Eh. Going by demographic trends of the past, there should be as many people in Ireland as in England, the first nations in north America should be extinct, the populations of sub-Saharan Africa should be a tiny minority of the world, and Catholics voting Democratic should have meant that Eisenhower was the last Republican American president. Demographics can change in a goddamn hurry.
>>47391017
>Demographics can change in a goddamn hurry.
Those demographics were influenced by very explicit events. The Irish were starved by the English, the North Americans reserved in... well, reserves and sub-Saharan Africans to this very day profit from European agricultural goods.
However, birth rates in an entire civilization dropping below replacement rates, let alone as far below replacement rate as in many European countries (Germany first and foremost), is unprecedented in history. Even if this trend is reversed literally overnight, the damage is already done for the following few decades. And that's assuming it's reversed, where all data we have right now suggests this trend might be irreversible.
>>47391087
This also supposes that Muslims in Europe will remain as vehement as in the days of al-Rashid when I've come across a great deal of stories (they're anecdotal in newspapers so please don't think I'm asserting studies) that purport to show conversion of immigrant Muslims to Christianity.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/15/muslim-migrant-apostates-to-christianity-fear-murderous-islamic-retaliation-in-europe/
>>47391087
>Those demographics were influenced by very explicit events. The Irish were starved by the English, the North Americans reserved in... well, reserves and sub-Saharan Africans to this very day profit from European agricultural goods.
And Christianity is absolutely on the rise, to a staggering degree, in Africa and the Far East. Won't it be funny if 50 years from now Prester John comes to the rescue a thousand years after the was looked for.
>>47391087
And Europeans are completely, 100% okay with it, in fact I recall articles about the same thing happening to whites in America and the general consensus was "we're becoming a minority? Oh well!"
For good or ill, whites have largely accepted their fate to slowly die out and be replaced by the "more diverse", we literally do not give a shit beyond the vocal cries of an irrelevant minority. Ethnic and national identity has been largely replaced by globalism, which is a neutered form of American culture and largely built around pick-and-chose generic Western ideals.
That said, we need to see what happens in the next 20-30 years, as the baby boomers die and communities get a lot browner. From what's happening in places like Malmö and London? I doubt we'll care even then.
>>47391150
>http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/15/muslim-migrant-apostates-to-christianity-fear-murderous-islamic-retaliation-in-europe/
>Many migrants who are recent converts to Christianity
>recent
Oh boy. How many of those conversions are genuine and how many of these migrants are just playing the game?
http://www.friatider.se/ahmed-21-v-ldtog-svensk-flicka-fick-permanent-uppeh-llstillst-nd-trots-att-han-var-d-md-till
This is a Swedish article, but you can probably google translate it. Long story short:
>Islamic Afghan migrant to Sweden
>Rapes a 14 year old girl (what else?)
>Sentenced to deportation
>He "finds Jesus"
>Can no longer be deported because it would mean prosecution that could lead to his death
>He gets to stay in Sweden in spite of raping a minor
It's a trick. These people know exactly how to play the game. That's why they're going to Sweden and Germany but not Spain or even Cyprus.
>>47391181
I'm afraid you're right, but I'm also afraid the younger generations are more indifferent than the boomers.
>>47391087
That's the point though, isn't it?
You're saying "Set in stone". All I'm saying is that should be: "Unless something happens".
Not saying it will, just saying, "Unless something happens".
Pic related.
>What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
It was wrong when we were saying it about how everyone would become western liberals in the 90's, and it's most likely wrong to say western liberals are doomed 20 years on. History is never over, and never set in stone. Hell, just look at the thread above and imagine what people living in the 20 years before any major event, good or bad, might have thought about the issue.
>>47391150
Europe is making no effort in assimilating the migrants, which means they'll have no reason to adopt local customs - indeed, the retraction of native influences means they're in a prime position to enforce their own beliefs on a region, at least in very localized ways (such as the infamous Sharia Zones).
Things will never get as bad as /pol/ likes to claim, but the days of White Europe are dead, and pretty soon Europe will be little more than an older, more liberal United States in terms of values and demographics.
Best part? We'll see a return to tribalism; once society becomes a collection of minorities with no clear majority, politicians won't need to appeal to matters of economics or finance, they just need to appeal to the most ethnic groups.
>>47391223
I'm sure there are some who are crypto-converts but I also would be far from surprised if a great deal are genuine. People are people and the phenomenon of "finding Jesus to plead for a lesser sentence" is hardly unique to Europe.
>>47391223
>I'm afraid you're right, but I'm also afraid the younger generations are more indifferent than the boomers.
That's what I'm saying, the younger generations literally do not give a shit, they've grown up in a global world where the trappings of nationalism and ethnic ties are, at the very best, quaint customs to play around with for a weekend before going back to the daily grind.
>>47391254
>Pic related.
That's an entirely different thing. This "end of history" thinking is retarded hubris that came forth from Marxist thinking (although it already had roots in Whigsian history) that relies on the idea that we are so much more intelligent and better than everyone who came before us, our ancestors were idiots who never perfected perfection and that we'll always rule the world forever and ever.
What I'm saying is more or less the opposite of that. I'm not saying there's an "end of history", I'm merely saying that the demographics as they are now spell the end of our civilization, and its ursurpation by one that is strictly inferior yet much healthier in its demographics. And for nations and civilizations, demography is destiny, precisely because it's so hard to reverse.
For example, France's decrease in birth rates started in the 1830s, and ensured it would go from the dominant power in Europe to being strictly outmatched by Germany from 1870 until 1945. Hell, the population difference between (a radically downsized) Germany and France today is STILL the consequence of that demographic dip France had in the 1830s. And even that dip did not lead to below replacement level birth rates, just growth much slower than the rest of Europe. That's why even if we reverse the trend tonight, it will already be too late to correct the situation within this century. And this century will be the crucial century for the survival of European civilization.
>>47391284
I think the really interesting thing is what's going to happen to the role of woman in Islam. Particularly the conservative sort that seems to be migrating.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/leading-womens-rights-organisation-says-muslim-women-blocked-from-seeking-office-by-male-labour-a6857096.html
>>47391440
>spend centuries fighting for women's rights
>embrace with open arms and big smiles the very people that want to either exploit the "free woman" society, or destroy it
These people rape so many natives because they associate the casual hospitality and revealing clothes of Western women with promiscuity, which of course is something they believed about the west coming in.
>>47391506
What till Western society gets pissed enough. I can smell the mosques burning.
>>47391571
I doubt that will ever happen, at most you will get some discriminatory laws passed that get repealed by a future parliament.
Europeans really don't give a shit.
>>47390483
>Mass migration only exists to fill a reproductive hole the native population isn't filling
Bullshit. Populations fluctuate. And seeing as more and more jobs are shipped away, we don't need more workers, either, so that too is a bullshit reason.
Why mass migration exists, I do not know. It might just be a complete brainfart and no one has a reason to advocate for it. Obviously the immigrants themselves have reasons to migrate, but why would anyone want them to migrate to their place is a question without an answer.
>>47391647
So that's it? We just lie over with our bellies up and let them rape people without consequence? We just conform to their wishes and let our culture die out?
>>47392312
>question without an answer
The media's been doing a good enough job answering it, that it is the "duty" of the West to answer for our past sins and accept these people with open arms.
>>47392437
Sucks being on the receiving end of a culture shift, doesn't it?
>>47392482
It's ok. I don't like it, but it'll happen to them as well. The cycle continues, just like it always has.
>>47388193
LDS is weird because it's it's Arianism mixed with Nestorianism, and then adds quasimysticall Masonic influences.
>>47388098
>>47383905
Re:Arianism, it is both. Christ is separate of the Father and created, thusly not divine. Therein the heresy.
>>47389849
Tryue, the Turks certainly did it, and Golden Age Baghdad as well. The era of the real Caliphates was a weird time.
>>47391150
One-in-three rule: If three men convert to Christianity, two will eventually fall away.
>>47391647
>>47391571
>>47391440
>>47391181
It sometimes wonder. Europe can go from zero to jackboot really quickly. Who knows what'll happen if Britain drops out of the EU?
>>47392454
Even that makes no fucking sense. Who in their right mind would think that makes any sense? Who in their right mind would think it would be beneficial to anyone in the long term?
Also bloody shit fuck, my country was between fledgling empires since the fucking 12th century, and, as usual, was their little playground until 1809. We were a fucking colony since the high middle ages. Bloody fuck, the migrants should be paying us since we were basically their meatshields for 800 years.
Fuck.
>>47384134
>>There's a quote I wish I could track down that I hope is not apocryphal about someone visiting the Byzantines in the 400s-500s and bitching about how you couldn't get a piece of bread or rent a room without someone trying to engage you in masturbatory religious discussion.
I know what you're talking about, I read it on a blog recently, but I can't track it down to verify either.
>>47392540
Perspective is a bitch innit?
>>47393395
Tolerance is a function of feeling secure and prosperous. It's not a co-incidence that fascism arrived during the great depression. If project fear is right about brexit, and it goes ahead, or they manage a few more terror attacks, or China finally runs out of tools to keep the bubble inflated and people start bringing their money back...
Yeah. I don't see a lot of good ends there.
>>47393445
>Bloody fuck, the migrants should be paying us since we were basically their meatshields for 800 years.
Sure. On an unrelated note, what are your thoughts on reparations for slavery?
Sauce for the goose, etc., etc...
>>47393248
Ah the Ottoman empire. I have to look into how it was structured sometime, because it has to have been very well built to survive the leadership it sometimes got.
>>47393769
Oh definitely. Let's go to Africa and force the descendants all those slave traders who sold their neighbors to pay reparations.
>>47392437
>>47392482
What you should understand is that the culture shift isn't one between traditional White Europe and traditional Asian/African Islam, but between both of these things towards globalism. A lot of modern radical Islamism and Jihadism is fueled by Muslim schadenfreude at the changes their own societies are experiencing at the moment.
>>47389635
>Before Islam there wasn't much of an existential "other" in the east, given that Zoroastrianism was hardly as toxic as Islam and certainly never ruled over as many Christians as the Arabs did.
Islam wasn't much of an existential other for a long time as well, and Zoroastrianism ruled over several millions of Christians in Iraq and Iran before the Arab Conquests.
>>47394059
Sure, I bet the records are meticulous.
>>47393769
T'was a joke, but anyway.
I presume you mean in America? Hasn't slavery been a not-thing since 1865, and didn't segregation and large-scale discrimination stop being a thing in the 60s or 70s?
Anyone who had slaves is long dead, and so is anyone who profited from slaves. Nor is there anyone who has been worse off due to them or their predecessors being a slave alive anymore so no, there's no point in slavery reparations.
Unless they want a one way ticket to Africa, of course.
>>47384134
>I'm not sure if the Russian practice of married female seclusion a'la the harem which took hold after the Mongol dominion derived from the Romans or from some other source
Unlikely Mongols, since unconquered Novgorod gave us Domostroy, or "Patriarchy the Book".
>>47394413
Yeah, but anyone involved in being the "meatshields of Europe" has also been dead for a long time as well. Makes about as much sense to pay the grandchilden of meatshields as it does to pay the grandchilden of slaves.
>>47394482
As I said;
>t'was a joke
The whole idea is, I wholeheartedly agree, preposterous.
In the very same way white man's burden is.
>>47394164
Islam was an existential threat from the get-go, bro. And the shahanshah sponsored the entire Church of the East cause it let him give the finger to Constantinople as "Defender of Christians", the disputes between the two are not comparable to Islam's relationship to either.
>>47394529
It's veeeeeery tricky to tell jokes from real idiocy in /pol/-tier threads.
>>47394595
Well, seeing as it was a sudden 180 spin on what I was saying I thought it'd be clear.
I understand you though, it's hard to distinguish sincerity from sarcasm in text form, bro.
>>47394562
>Islam was an existential threat from the get-go, bro.
You wouldn't know it from the sources, which are barely cognizant of Islam in the first century, and didn't consider it enough of an existential threat to bother with much polemic or apologia. The Caliphate may have been a threat to the existence of the Byzantines, but as much as the Persians before them which is why the Arabs only inherited their mantle in Byzantine chronicles. The caliphs, too, were patrons of independent churches outside of Constantinople's control.
For most of Islam's early history both Christian and Muslim theologians considered Judaism the one, true, existential threat to their faiths, which is why most of their arguments are with Jewish theologians in this period. This is also why one of the major wars between the Byzantines and Caliphate was launched not because of the building of the Dome of the Rock, which was built by loaned Byzantine architects with a clear pronouncement of doctrine, but because the caliph began to mint coins in his own name claiming imperial prestige.
The Sassanids, by the way, ended up massacring more Eastern Christians in the last few Byzantine-Sassanid Wars than the Caliphate ever did in its expansions. It's no coincidence that one of the major sources of inspiration for Mahmud of Ghazni and his destructive raids of India was a Sassanid prince extolled for trampling churches in service to the Light, and not these early caliphs.
>>47394653
Hell, it's hard to distinguish sarcasm from actual policy, with Trump running for office and all.
Anyway, on to Byzantine history. One of my favourite books on the subject is "Byzantium" by John Julius Norwich.
The Folio Society prints are very nice to look at, but like most things the Society prints, they're awful to read. Paragraphs are narrow, fonts are too tightly spaced, indexes and footnotes are mangled...
But the books themselves are written in a dry, slightly ironic style characteristic of the non-academic, upper-class english conservative author. It's like he's inviting us to share in little jokes, chuckling at bad decisions, accidents of fate, or confused and incomplete sources. He's able to turn even the driest, most stable periods of Byzantine history into something worth reading about... or he gives up and skips a few decades ahead with a weary, knowing, sigh.
>>47387995
Tfw no roman warrior waifu.
>>47383773
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_2E0RxVHH4
>>47389272
I really just gathered it all from a culmination of various readings. I'd recommend casting as wide a net as possible and reading as much and as varied sources as possible so you don't end up following a single author or source as gospel.
>>47389849
With the onset of the Islamic conquests there was a rather paradoxical or schizophrenic nature to the idea of conversion. At the start Islam was seen very much as the "Arab Faith" for Arabs by Arabs and you can see that with how chauvenistic the Arabs were/are with their language and the weave of said language into their faith (long opposing writing the Quran in other languages.). But conversion also did occur and wasn't completely forbidden. However the status of converts for the first century after the time of Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphs was extremely low and discriminatory as second-class citizens at best. Termed Mawali, they were ostensibly clients to an Arab or Arab tribe patron but under the Umayyads always held lower and inferior status or positions. In fact I believe at some point the Umayyads attempted a pseudo-Jizya tax on them even despite converting.
This discontent is a large reason for the Abbasids' revolution (drawing upon the support of converted Persians and Khorasanis in the East), and for the emergence of Kharijite (Egalitarian proto-ISIS basically) movements among the converted Berbers of the 700s-900s.
There are some accounts that Christians were still the majority of the population in Egypt, palestine and Syria at the time of the crusades. The process has largely been a gradual one - not peaches and cream love and peace, they could be discriminated against and persecuted depending on the monarch and the period, but conversion by sword was not a phemonenon among the Christian conquered. (Continuing)
>>47397781
And it's worth remembering after all that 10% of Egypt is still Christian, 13% of Syria is still Christian, 40% of Lebanon is Christian, 8% of Iraqis in 1987 were Christian. There is no feasibility or reality to the notion that a bunch of half-naked desert savages swept in like a sandstorm, held a sword to everyone's throat and told them to convert and die and then for some reason stopped when the infidel was at 10% population and kept them at that level for a millennium and a half.
Now if you want a story of a religion that Islam mercilessly and brutally raped and shit on you can look to the Hindus and Sikhs. 4,000 Christians died at the final siege of Constantinople in 1453. 4,000 would be an average monday morning killcount between the 10th century and 19th century for some bumfuck Ghazi warband hitting up some bumfuck Hindu village
-30,000 died when Nader Shah sacked Delhi.
-Tamerlane executed 100,000 captives before fighting to take Delhi. I cannot get a death count for his sack of Delhi but it did not recover for a hundred years.
-40,000 to 70,000 noncombatant Hindu or Muslim allies of Marathis slaughtered after the 3rd battle of Panipat.
-30,000 Rajput civilians slaughtered by Akbar at the siege of Chittorgarh.
I can't begin to count or track down the number of Hindu temples desecrated, destroyed, statues taken and used as stairways for folks like Mahmud of Ghazni to walk over every time they left their palace. A tajik friend described Tajik/Pashtun/ect. culture recalling with pride the Ghazi raids and conquests of India in a golden nostalgic and romantic conquistador fashion. But where now Cortez and Columbus and the like are vilified you won't find a Tajik/Pashtun/Muslim speaking very ill of those Islamic Conquistadors.
>>47384134
>I'm not sure if the Russian practice of married female seclusion a'la the harem which took hold after the Mongol dominion derived from the Romans or from some other source, but I've heard it said the Byzantines did at some points have some level of seclusion of the women. Never to the extremes of the Muslims, admittedly.
It's probably not that, but the Byzantines *did* practice the Bride Show, which the Russians inherited soon after.
For those not in the know, a Bride-Show is an event where the Emperor calls for the most beautiful maidens of the Empire to the capital, where they are to be judged by him in feats of beauty, talent and charisma until he picks from among them one he desires the most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride-show
>>47397989
Nader Shah sacked the Delhi Sultanate of the Muslim Mughals. But they were there because Tamerlane sack it the first time.
>>47398634
Actually they were there because the Ghorids invaded India 200 years before Timur.
>>47397989
A lot of that has to do with modern Tajik/Pashtun culture being very poor and marginal today, similar to the veneration for Genghis Khan by modern day Mongolians. That and of course Uzbek/Persian/Urdu literature of this period that glorified the conquistador culture of the Ghazi sultans starting with Mahmud of Ghazni and going well into Nader Shah's reign.
Also, I'd point out that the numbers you cited for modern day Christian minorities is actually greatly reduced from what it used to be in the 19th century, when in many of these regions Christians made up some 30% of the population or more. The change from feudal Islamic sultanates to modern nation-states with all their ethnic clashes, combined with the rise of mass global immigration and the green revolution exponentially increasing the remaining, usually poor, Muslim population, substantially reduced these native Christian groups. The rise of Islamism and groups like ISIS don't help much either.
>>47391180
>Won't it be funny if 50 years from now Prester John comes to the rescue a thousand years after the was looked for.
Someone needs to write this story. NOW.
>>47384123
I was born without a tribal instinct. I wonder why so many people are.
>>47399560
Probably because you're born into a society where nationalities come and go. If you grow up next to a Chinese immigrant, and you see Frenchmen walking around daily, and you played with Indians when you were a kid, you probably don't give as much of a shit about nationality.
>>47390483
I think this kind of thinking really undermines the idea that in the west by the 3rd generation (at least this is true in the US) that they'll have almost completely forgone the ideals of their grandparents and adopted the culture they're living in.
You usually see the hardline "traditional" approach in 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.
>>47401178
>I think this kind of thinking really undermines the idea that in the west by the 3rd generation (at least this is true in the US)
It helps that close to all immigrants in the US came from cultures that were privately/religiously Christian and publically/politically embraced the Enlightenment (hell, Mexico abolished slavery before America did). Of course those people are going to assimilate within a matter of generations. The biggest exception to this rule are America's gigantic Jewish community (this is only a problem for /pol/, and even then they never truly assimilated with the gentiles. Though that may only be a matter of time due to low birth rates and high rates of exogamy in the Jewish community) and East Asians, who are effectively model immigrants.
Maybe Americans will have any right to talk about Muslim immigrants when they have at least three million of them. And even then, do you really think any civilization can afford to "wait" for three generations before these people with an entirely different culture in both the private and the public sphere finally conform to the dominant culture?
allahu akbar
>>47383611
>fall of Constantinople?
Fall. Resisting the subhuman hordes in a forlorn hope, killing as many as possible, dying gloriously.
>>47404734
that's what they say in constantinople now
>>47404801
It's not Constantinople any more, just an Islamic midden-heap.
>>47397989
Muslims need Christians, since Christians are more productive and make a lucrative tax base.
>>47404897
It will *always* be Constantinople.
>Turkish occupied Thrace and Anatolia will be reclaimed
>>47404968
Nea ton Rhōmaîoi anon
>>47404968
>Implying
Rome will be Islamic before Constantinople becomes Christian.
I wonder what happens after that. Do we get a pope in Rio de Janeiro? Or does the pope become a puppet for Islamic interests (much like the current one)?
>>47405348
Are you the Malthusian doom-and-gloom guy from earlier in this thread? Cause knock it off.
>>47405388
>Malthusian
I'm not sure if it means what you think it means. Unless any prediction based on demographic trends, especially those predictions that are expected to come true in a matter of mere decades, are "Malthusian".
>>47405348
The current Pope is busy kissing the feet of the enemies of Christ. It will be no great loss if Rome falls.
>>47405526
Malthusian in the sense that "demographics herald the end of the world" which is what Malthus was talking about, only when he said "food" you're saying "Muslims."
>>47383611
>>Venice: Why?
FUCKING VENETIANS, TRAITORS TO CHRIST AND GENERAL SUBHUMAN CRETINS
ISLAND JEWS GET OUT REEEEE
>>47383611
Long ago in a distant land, I, Mehmet, the devil-worshiping Master of Durkas, unleashed an unspeakable evil! But a foolish Byzantine emperor wielding a jeweled sword stepped forth to oppose me...
>schwing, schwing, clang!
Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a hole in the earth and flung him into the depths, where he was turned to a statue of marble! Now the fool seeks to return to the surface, and undo the future that is Istanbul...
>queue kebab removal journey of Constantine XI reborn
>>47406200
>Constantine the Immortal gathers Greek ultranationalists and Orthodox fanatics to fight against ISIS
>>47399560
I'd say it has to do with the people around you when you grew up and how you learn about the world around you, thought it can change.
To use myself as an example I was an "AMERICA IS BEST" screaming patriot for a while when I was young. My parents weren't particularly patriotic/nationalistic but one of the first things of history I learned about was the second world war and all I really cared to learn from that was "AMERICA IS BEST" Then I grew up and realized I was dumb as rocks. We only won because the krauts were busy being beat to shit by Ivan and once again America was late to the party and only helped finish the job. With the rose tinted glasses off I was able to realize America has its fair share of questionable shit and there goes the patriotism. If I was being raised by a more patriotic family maybe they could have justified it in a way that would allow me to continue with blind patriotism.
>>47399560
I think it's less that you were born without one and more that you never learned to have one as you grew up. Living in multicultural societies, or growing up without a national identity, tends to do that. Unless you just feel no loyalty to anyone at all, you most likely have some semblance of a tribal instinct.
>>47406258
But first they would need to remove kebab and retake the city of Constantinople. The city of cities must be retaken, than we go super kebab removal.
>>47406258
That looks incredibly impractical
>>47406723
Yes, yes it does. But it also looks incredibly awesome.
>>47388380
http://www.lulu.com/shop/john-stater/black-death/ebook/product-22603945.html
Spread the word then.
