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Imperatore Dario I
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Topic: Greatest Emperor (of Byzantium) Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 20:04 |
Originally posted by ihsan
Cappadocia was inhabited by Greek-speakers AFAIK. |
Greek-speakers? I heard it was full of Roman colonists. Ah I think I get it, Cappadocia was Hellenized by the time Roman influence was felt, which explains why people were so Greek-speaking.
Edited by Imperatore Dario I
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Let there be a race of Romans with the strength of Italian courage.- Virgil's Aeneid
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Degredado
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Posted: 29-Aug-2004 at 12:14 |
I voted for Basil number two.
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Vou votar nas putas. Estou farto de votar nos filhos delas
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ihsan
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Posted: 30-Aug-2004 at 17:26 |
Originally posted by Imperatore Dario I
Greek-speakers? I heard it was full of Roman colonists. Ah I think I get it, Cappadocia was Hellenized by the time Roman influence was felt, which explains why people were so Greek-speaking. |
Most of the Roman citizens living in Asia Minor were Greek-speakers, that's why a great majority of texts written during the Roman era were in Greek. Just come to Ankara and see the Temple of Avgvstvs
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Evildoer
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Posted: 18-Sep-2004 at 14:39 |
I hate Justinian. He brutally crushed the Nike revolution and he closed down all schools of philosophy in Greece.
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Roughneck
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Posted: 18-Sep-2004 at 15:51 |
Any ruler would have crushed a revolt in those days. Although if you want to see a REAL indictment against him, read the Secret History of Procopious. It was written about him after his death in order to keep Procopious alive, but it ventures into the fantastical and fantasy realms (they were deamons and morphed themselves, etc), so it can't be taken as serious. We're debating the "why" in class for the next two weeks.
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maersk
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Posted: 27-Sep-2004 at 17:24 |
heraclius, without him byzantium falls and roman culture (at least in the east) dies early, also there would be no russia as we know it
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"behold, vajik, khan of the magyars, scourge of the pannonian plain!"
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Guests
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Posted: 12-Oct-2004 at 22:03 |
I'am suprised that post missed Johanes Comnenos.Great commander and organizer.Never suprised by cicumstances
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Posted: 06-Dec-2004 at 21:22 |
Heraclius, his military genius was unfairly clouded by the Arab invasions in which he did not participate in direct combat.
I'd venture to say he was on par with Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal (according to military historians trevor and ernest dupuy)
Heraclius had the same qualities as those three men above. He:
- reformed the Roman army
- fought superbly in mountainous terrain and maintained a first class intelligience service allowing him to maintain contact with the capital while he was in Atropatene (Azerbaijan)
- possessed excellent understanding of manuevering allowing him to fight three Persian armies contriving to surround him in the mountain ranges of Azerbaijan
- keeping the Roman EMpire alive?
- instituted currency reform with the silver hexagram to stabilise economy
- marched and sacked the Persian summer capital
- destroyed the the Zoroastarian equivalent of Jerusalem in Ganzaca
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Imperatore Dario I
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Posted: 15-Dec-2004 at 20:33 |
Originally posted by ihsan
Originally posted by Imperatore Dario I
Greek-speakers? I heard it was full of Roman colonists. Ah I think I get it, Cappadocia was Hellenized by the time Roman influence was felt, which explains why people were so Greek-speaking. |
Most of the Roman citizens living in Asia Minor were Greek-speakers, that's why a great majority of texts written during the Roman era were in Greek. Just come to Ankara and see the Temple of Avgvstvs
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Interestingly enough, I'm reading a book called The Ancient Romans, amazingly, there WERE a large number of Roman colonists in Cappadocia. Before Sulla came to power, some 80,000 were slaughtered by an enemy king of some sort.
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Let there be a race of Romans with the strength of Italian courage.- Virgil's Aeneid
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Komnenos
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Posted: 20-Dec-2004 at 15:52 |
I believe that Theodosius I (ruled 379-395) was the most influential and therefore possibly the greatest of all Byzantine Emperors. The Theodosian Decrees outlawed all practises of pagan cults and finally established Christianity as the state religion and the one unifying factor of the Empire. Without the total identification of state and church, that was at the heart of Byzantine political philosophy, the Empire wouldn't have possessed the inner strenght to survive against all the odds for another thousand years. Furthermore, the decision to split the old Roman Empire between his two sons into the Western and Eastern part, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Byzantium. The East-Romans counted their losses and got on with things, for,as I said before, another thousand years.
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TheOrcRemix
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Posted: 30-Dec-2004 at 17:55 |
Originally posted by Ptolemy
Heraclius had a lot of bad luck |
Very true.
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Very true indeed
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True peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice.
Sir Francis Drake is the REAL Pirate of the Caribbean
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Posted: 18-Jan-2005 at 17:58 |
He wasn't on the list but I thought I'd mention Alexius I Comnenus, who saved the empire when it, again, was about to fall. I thought he handled the thousands of Crusaders who went through the imperial territory well, above most things.
I voted for Basil II, because, yeah...
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Perseas
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Posted: 21-Jan-2005 at 16:58 |
I vote for Justinianus. He was the last emperor to attempt the restoration of Roman empire like it was with Theodosius. Surely most of his successes on wars should be counted on Belissarious side but he was the one who rebuilt Hagia Sophia and codified roman law into Justinianus Codex.
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Belisarius
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Posted: 04-Feb-2005 at 22:26 |
I like Justinian as well, but he has an unfair advantage in having both Belisarius and Narses as his generals.
He's not in this, and he really shouldn't, bu I like Constantine XI. He's the only Byzantine emperor that I can truly say is a good man. Reading about his final epic defense of Constantinople made me shed a tear.
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tzar
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Posted: 05-Feb-2005 at 02:44 |
Is Conastantin I the Great Byzantine emperor or...? Well if not I vote for Justitian and...... Isak I Angel
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Thracian
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Posted: 05-Feb-2005 at 23:02 |
Originally posted by Imperator Invictus
At the time, the Bulgars still held much of the balkins. After a long war, Basil defeated the Bulars, with a slaughter so intense that he took the title "Bulgar Slayer".
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Well that name was given because Basil had captured 15 000 Bulgarian soldiers through the victorius war and had them blinded as punishment
Anyway I vote for Justinian.
Edited by Thracian
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exodussian
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Posted: 14-Feb-2005 at 21:16 |
constantin palailagos , last emperor who died on 29 may 1453
after turkish troops captured the towers main gate , must be aya romanos.
he is famous of these last words: "Is there no son of christian to cut my head off to hide?"
His body is lost cuz he throw his red cape of empire away just before.
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Constantine XI
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Posted: 06-May-2005 at 01:12 |
Originally posted by Belisarius
He's not in this, and he really shouldn't, bu I like Constantine XI. He's the only Byzantine emperor that I can truly say is a good man. Reading about his final epic defense of Constantinople made me shed a tear.
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Indeed Constantine XI was a true hero, a man I don't think you could reasonably fault from the evidence that has come down to us (the stories of him begging to be decapitated by his men must be dismissed as false as such stories are from a minority of sources of very dubious quality. See Donald Nicol's book). He gave the Eastern Roman Empire an end which it so fittingly deserved. Quite a contrast to the anti-climactic end to the Western Empire. This final act is evidence enough to combat any argument by many of the "Enlightenment" writers who claimed the Eastern Empire was cowardly.
I don't think you can really class Emperors as "greatest". I think you need to classify them according to different attributes. Greatest would be Justinian I, most glorious would be Heraclius, best would be Basil II (his persual of state policy was almost flawless), most resourceful (not least politically) would be Alexius I, wisest would be a contest between Leo VI, Constantine VII and Manuel II. I guess I will have to vote for Justinian as his megalomania led him to make the most impressive achievements even if they were disastrous in the long term. But he was a lucky man, he had years of previous peace behind the Empire which had been ruled by its most economically successful Emperor and had at his disposal a number of brilliant generals and administrators.
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eaglecap
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Posted: 01-Jun-2005 at 13:29 |
Constatine Palaeologus was amongst the greatest Emperors in Byzantine history because of the stand he took in defending Constantinople in 1453 against the Turks.
In another era, in Byzantine history, I think he would have made a great Emperor but given his circumstances he did have the opportunity.
He fought till the bitter end defending his Empire or what was left of it. I would call him a great man, warrior and hero.
Edited by eaglecap
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eaglecap
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Posted: 02-Jun-2005 at 19:17 |
Another great warrior Emporer was Alexius Komnena. I read the diary by his daughter Anna Komnena "The Alexiad" and I really enjoyed it as a primary source. It would potentially make a great screen play. I think one of my favorite studies in history is about the Byzantine Empire and its history.
Anna Comnena /Komnene /Komnena (1083-bef.1156)
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Anna Comnena (Komnene is the Greek for the family name, Komnena its feminine form) was born two years after her father, Alexius, had made himself, not very legitimately, Roman emperor at Constantinople. As Alexius' first-born, she was soon betrothed to the son of an earlier emperor, the "rightful heir to the throne." In 1092 the engagement was broken off, and Anna's younger brother was made heir. But it was only after the death of the "rightful heir" that she was married, in 1097, to Nicephorus Bryennius, the son of a rival of Alexius, with his own claim to the throne. In a will she wrote after her father's death in 1118, Anna said that she had married Bryennius only to please her parents, but she then went on to praise him; at any rate, the couple remained married for forty years and had four children. During this time she wrote some poetry, but only brief fragments are extant.
Anna's husband had written a history of some of the emperors before Alexius, so when Bryennius died in 1037, Anna began to write the history of her father's reign, the Alexiad. She had time to write, because after her father's death, she appears to have been involved in some kind of a plot against her brother John, the new emperor. The problem for historians is that the chief source of the story of the plot is a chronicler, Ioannes Zonaras, who wrote in the 1170s in the service of John's son; later writers simply repeated Zonaras' story. Whatever the reason, Anna was at some point sent off by her brother John to live with her mother at a convent which her mother had founded. John died in 1143, to be succeeded by his son Manuel; Anna remained at her convent. Her history of her father's reign seems to have been completed in 1148, but since the end of the manuscript is mutilated, it is hard to be sure.
A funeral oration on Anna Comnena was given in 1156 (although apparently not immediately after her death) by a classical scholar who had studied with her in her enforced retirement. He and others had worked with Anna at her convent on the study of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy, and of rhetoric and history.
As unbiased history, the biggest problem with the Alexiad is the relationship between its author and its subject. It has sometimes been called hagiography, and it is true that Anna greatly admired her father and her mother, Irene. Anna tries very hard to be objective, but she can find a good (or at least acceptable) reason for almost everything her parents do. However, from the perspective given by 900 years, a reader can afford to be tolerant and simply enjoy her unquestioned ability to tell a good story.
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