Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

[cahn]

I'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.)

Comments

Re: Byzantine tales, brought to you by virtue of me having finished the available podcast

[selenak]

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!

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.)