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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 10 - Page 2 |
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At the time of Charlemagne At the time of Charlemagne, the Roman Empire extended from its Eastern boundaries with Persia, across to parts of Italy and Spain, and up to the British isles. All of the peoples living there considered themselves Roman citizens, and swore allegiance to and prayed for their Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Charlemagne's grandfather and father had conquered and enslaved the Roman citizens in their territory (Francia), and Charlemagne had to find a way to break their religious and cultural unity with the Roman Empire, whose capital was now in Constantinople. This he did by a clever lie. The Papal States in Italy had been under his family's control since 756. He convinced his Roman subjects that these States were all that was left of the Roman Empire. The government in the East had abandoned the Roman Empire, adopted the Greek language and Greek customs, and were therefore to be considered "heretical Greeks" and not "true Romans." Some of the Popes in Old Rome fought this new interpretation, but the Carolingian dynasty supplanted the Roman Orthodox bishops with Frankish ones, (often former warlords who had no knowledge of true core of Christianity), and by 1046 the Franks had the papacy under their complete control. By the 19th century, this fiction of an Eastern Greek Empire and civilization was deeply ingrained. The complication was that the area liberated from the Turks was to be called "Hellas" and their citizens legally "Hellenes." However, historically, the names Greeks and Hellenes mean the same peoples: Greek is the Latin word and Hellenes the Greek word for the same group of people - Greeks. Thus, the problem with this "liberation of the Greeks" from the Ottoman Empire was that it was viewed politically, and then historically and culturally, as also a liberation from the fallen Eastern Empire which the Western politicians and countries began to call "Byzantine." It would be foolish to claim a liberation of the Greeks from their former masters, also Greeks. So, a new term, "Byzantine" was created to perpetuate the fiction begun with Charlemagne and his claims to be the inheritor of the true Roman Empire. |
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