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cahnI'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)
Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-01-29 06:47 am (UTC)there is an Emperor who made a far, far worse mistake in letting a close relation live and thrive, and he had decades to appreciate the utter disaster his cousin was.
Ha! I mean... to be fair, "not killing him" is a rather more understandable error to me than "appointed as heir," but wooooow there were certainly some Consequences there!
(This is the one whose daughter Anna wrote the Alexiad about him.)
Hey, I once read a YA book about Anna! (Anna of Byzantium, by Tracy Barrett.) I don't remember much about it, though... it must have been thirty years ago. But when you mentioned the Alexiad that triggered an ancient memory :)
but the goal as given isn't "help Alexios against the Turks" (though that's mentioned ), no, it's "Take Jerusalem from the Muslims!" Why yes, this is what starts the First Crusade.
...WOW. I did not know this! That's amazing.
and made them swear an oath that any formerly Byzantine property they'd take from the Turks would be given back to Constantinople. Needless to say, this is not what eventually happens.
AHAHAHAHA
Maria is quickly badmouthed as having an affair with her closest advisor
Is this something Andronikos was saying? Or do we know?
but hey, he's a guy
oh noooooo
At last, one of the very distant cousins, Isaac Angelos, more or less accidentally becomes the trigger of the end of Andronikos.
This was fascinating and kind of accidentally hilarious and also while part of me is like gosh, no one deserves that kind of ending, even a supervillain like Andronikos, another part of me is all "...but dude, what did you expect after that reign of terror? Should have had
He was in turn easily dethroned by his older brother Alexios, who was even less competent, and that was when the fourth Crusade happened, Constantinople was brutally sacked by fellow Christians, and what remained was essentially a City State. All of which could have been avoided if Manuel had gotten rid of cousin Andronikos all the way back when!
WOW
I didn't know any of that about the fall of Constantinople! It's a tragic but quite fascinating story, when you tell it!
Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-01-29 02:35 pm (UTC)Indeed, and Marcus Aurelius didn‘t have as much time to observe Commodus in action as Manuel had with Andronikos, is my point. :) Though to be fair to Manuel, while Andronikos in his life time botched political jobs and never missed out on a chance to have sex with a niece, or in lack of a niece cause scandal with another high class woman, there was no reason to assume he‘d slaughter Manuel‘s entire family. And Manuel could even be forgiven for assuming his fondness for Andronikos from their childhood days was mutual. Yes, he‘d joined a conspiracy against Manuel at least once, but that was politics. And at this point of Byzantine history, the default option of how to deal with your deposed Emperor wasn‘t „kill him and his offspring“ anymore, it was „blind him if you must, then make him and his offspring join a monastery“.
I must look for that YA novel, Anna comes across as very interesting in the podcast.
...WOW. I did not know this! That's amazing
It‘s mentioned from the other angle in the First Crusade episode in History of the Germans, but not as detailed and explicitly as in the HIstory of Byzantium podcast, where you get one episode titled „What does Alexios want?“, one „What does Urban want?“, and one „Why Jerusalem?“ before the Crusade begins so that the background and the different original agenda are explained in great and vivid detail.
Maria is quickly badmouthed as having an affair with her closest advisor
Is this something Andronikos was saying? Or do we know?
The impression I had from the podcast was that he wasn‘t in Constantinople at the time - though of course that doesn‘t exclude the possibility his allies had a hand in it - and that originally it really was due to tensions between the two Marias, plus it‘s not impossible there was something to the rumor. Maria of Antioch had been Manuel‘s second wife, was far younger than him and in her early 30s when he died, with him being in his 60s, like Andronikos. Also, Manuel hadn‘t been faithful to either of his wives (the first one had been a German, btw, Bertha). So after a political marriage with a much older man and given her first taste of independence, Maria of Antioch could be forgiven for flirting or even sleeping with someone who was much closer to her own age. But in the middle ages where the ideal woman was a) chaste and b) silent, of course that was a risky thing to do. In any event, the Byzantine aristocracy concluding that what‘s needed for peace in the Empire should bve a man taking over as regent, and that man to be Andronikos, was still on them.
I didn't know any of that about the fall of Constantinople! It's a tragic but quite fascinating story, when you tell it!
All the credit should go to Robin the podcaster, because after a self conscious (not bad, just very self conscious and apologetic for not being Mike the History of Rome podcaster) beginning, he really became excellent, and when I had finally finished marathoning the available episodes, with the most recent one being „The Fourth Crusade (Part 1)“, which ends just before the sacking, I found myself far, far sadder and crushed in anticipation of something I knew would happen than I ever thought I would be.
Btw, Constantinople the city after 50 plus years of Latin overlordship becomes independent again and hangs on for two more centuries before the Turks conquer it, but what survives from the infamous 1204 sacking is, like I said, a city state, not an Empire. Also, I remember being in Athens in the early 2000 when everyone was tense because the first visit of a Pope since millennia was on the horizon, and one fiercely debated question was whether or not he would apologize in the name of Western Christianity for the sack of Constantinople in 1204, which was still an incredibly red button. (Now, in fairness, while you can blame Innocent III - who was Pope in 1204 - for a lot, you can‘t blame him for the sacking of Constantinople; he had explicitly FORBIDDEN any Christian-on-Christian fighting when calling for that particular Crusade, and condemned the sacking after it happened. But he had called for a Crusade, and those were Crusaders - and Venetians - brutally pillaging the city which had been Constantine‘s New Rome and was still the grandest and most beautiful city of the existing world at that point. (And that, btw, is how that sculpture of the Tetrachy Emperors ended in St. Marcus Square in Venice. Along with a lot of Byzantine loot ending up in St. Marcus itself.)
Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-01-29 07:29 pm (UTC)Axel Fersen: What'd I do?
Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-01-30 07:28 am (UTC)Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-02-04 05:45 am (UTC)Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast
Date: 2023-02-04 01:29 pm (UTC)Funnily enough, the day before you posted this, I had acquired a bio of Struensee. I haven't read it yet, but I'll let you know if I find anything interesting when I do. (Unfortunately, the biographer is not a serious business historian, just a guy who apparently likes to write biographies--I found him because he wrote a bio of Henry the Lion I read, which should tell you he hasn't specialized in a particular period--so the info will be less reliable, but on the plus side, his prose is reminiscent of Zweig, with the added benefit of not irritating me.)
Struensee
Date: 2023-02-06 12:34 am (UTC)- It's definitely a biographie romancée. Even more so than the Henry the Lion one, because there's so much more material to work with.
- Goldstone levels of readability, Goldstone levels of accuracy. Did you know: MT married a Frenchman because the Habsburg/Bourbon conflict had already ended? You heard it here first!
- But the gossip is so gossipy! Eugene levels of gossip! With the caveat that the author is unreliable, I'm going to have to find time to share this. I'm bookmarking passages as I go, so I don't have to reread, which will increase our chances of a write-up.
- Back when she summarized Hartmann's book on Danish-Prussian relations for us,
Now, how is this story told by Hartmann? As Struensee for entirely selfish reasons scheming his way to power and toppling masterful politician Bernstorff, and then thankfully getting his just deserts at the hands of Fritz fan Juliana. Why is Juliana a Fritz fan? Because Juliana is Juliana of Braunschweig-Wolffensbüttel, (much younger) sister to EC and Louise (Juliana was born in 1729). Fritz hasn't been keen on either Bernstorff or Struenseen, but he's not going to waste the opportunity of another fan on the throne of a neigboring country.
Now, what truly gets me is the presentation of Struensee as a selfish schemer taking over Denmark purely to enrich himself.
According to our author of the biographie romancée:
Johann Friedrich Struensee, son of a pastor from Prussian Halle and three years old when Friedrich ascends the throne, does not admire the Prussian king. But he was also shaped by this once-in-a-century phenomenon, and he incorporated his political ideas so faithfully into his own statesmanlike thinking that he appeared to many to be a copy of Frederick II. Struensee will probably never find out again that after his fall, no one else has spoken about him in such a caustic, poisonous, and utterly devastating way as this king: Fridericus Rex seems to refuse to be taken so shamelessly at his word by a petty bourgeois, and by one of his own former subjects.
Well, there's your answer! He didn't admire Fritz and Fritz spoke caustically about him, so clearly Hartmann won't give him the time of day.
I did order Hartmann, btw, because you said there was material about Denmark and the Great Northern War, and, well, I have to read it. ;) But I will read it through a skeptical lens.
* There is a lot of emphasis by the author of the Struensee bio that Fritz is not der Große so much as he is der Einzige. I laughed. Don't let me not write this book up, it's too much fun so far!
Re: Struensee
Date: 2023-02-06 07:01 am (UTC)MT married a Frenchman
*dies*
Mind you, I do recall some people when MT promoted FS for HRE argued he wasn't German enough, but the people in question just didn't want another (married to a) Habsburg Emperor.
Re: Struensee
Date: 2023-02-06 05:21 pm (UTC)I was going to say, I know the relationship of Lorraine to France in the 18th century is complicated and in flux, but all you have to know is that it's not the same as the relationship to France in the present day! It's been complicated since like 843!
Also, the book was written in 1985, so 1945 was within living memory. No excuse!