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Δημήτριος Γιουματζίδης

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13 December, 2024

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«Ever since our rough crusading forefathers first saw Constantinople and met, to their contemptuous disgust, a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war, it has been fashionable to pass the Byzantines by with scorn and to use their name as synonymous with decadence… All the historians in chorus treated of a thousand years of empire as a short sinister unbroken decline.» […] «But even in the army the poorest could rise on their merits to the top. This lack of snobbishness was characteristic of the whole of Byzantine society. It is true that later chroniclers, wishing to insult Theophano, called her an innkeeper’s daughter; but society would have to be very democratic where such a past would not be thought a little undignified for an Empress; while the fact that an innkeeper’s daughter could become Empress shows a certain elasticity in the social divisions. It was lack of education rather than lack of birth that was considered a subject for mockery.» […] «The Byzantines prided themselves on their culture. Every self-respecting citizen could recognize a quotation from Homer or the Bible, and was well acquainted with the works of the Fathers and many of the masterpieces of the classics. The University…radiated intellectual activity throughout Constantinople; and the Court prided itself on the patronage of literature and the arts.» Steven Runciman
«The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium», 1988.