Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: On a Byzantine note

[cahn]

This is greeeeat! I'm so glad you are keeping me up to date on this. (I'm inching closer to Canossa in the German History podcast; not yet there. But this is all making me vaguely think more about rereading the John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium book, which I realize isn't the most accurate but which I remember being quite entertaining. (Though I obviously didn't retain very much.)

a personal "Top Ten Greatest Emperors" list, which is the kind of fannish thing academic historians otherwise avoid or at least don't admit it.

Heeee! But they totally should more often! (Though I can see that this would just lead to unending arguments!)

It was this Alexios who as I told you, [personal profile] cahn, after taking power thought he might be able to solve his problem by writing to the Pope and asking said Pope to rouse some Latins to help against the Turks

Ah, yes, he sounded quite reasonable :)

that his murder caused not a single riot in a city famous for its riots but everyone going "yeah, we're cool with that"

Ha! Okay, yeah, that sounds fair :)

Not on the list at all: Justinian. Who had gigantic plusses but also gigantic minuses and in the end the minuses outweighed the plusses for Kaldellis, not least because all the wars Justinian started

Huh! Okay, that makes sense.

Choosing the backwarter army garnison of Byzantium and turning it into Constantinople being one of the two biggest transformative changes he was responsible for. He did it for strategic reasons, because of the way a city at this geographical point could be defended in a way original Rome never could be and because it was able to connect East and West, and it did all that and more for millennia. It's questionable whether any other location (say hello, Ravenna) could have done that and became what Constantinople did, and no Constantinople, no East Roman Empire for the next millennium, and no Istambul.

Oh, that's really interesting!
Okay, tell me about Ravenna? The only thing I know about it is that it has lots of mosaics (I would love to go see these someday) and that it is where my boy Dante went after being exiled from Florence (I'd love to visit it for that reason too). Wiki tells me it was the capital of the Western Roman Empire for a little while?