New Rome

tradeNo, it's the, uh, antipathy of the Venetians towards the Pope kind of makes sense when you look at it as the Venetians are the refugees of Aquileia long ago.

So in a sense, they are the rejects of Rome, and Rome has abandoned them, in quotes.

Take that for what you will.

But, like, you know, Rome didn't come to their aid.

Over the development of the centuries, they were kind of Byzantine-ish, but then the control sort of goes away, and so they have to fend for themselves.

So from a Venetian perspective, screw the Pope, screw the Byzantines.

Yeah, but the Venetians are...

Yeah.

Constantinople was not only the frontier fortress of Europe in the East, it was also the home of Roman law and of a civilization that had become Greek in its outer dress but remained largely Roman in its inner character.

But the inheritance of Rome passed on to the New World through two other channels.

The Teutonic peoples, who poured into the almost depopulated provinces of the West, came under the spell of Rome.

They marched along the roads that Rome had made.

They passed as friends or foes by cities that Rome had built.

The ambition of their greatest leaders, of men like Alaric or Theodoric, was not to destroy but to rebuild the Roman world of ordered rule and equal justice.

In Gaul and in Italy, the language and ideas of Rome turned the Frank and Lombard conquerors into Frenchmen and Italians.

Meanwhile, imperial Rome became papal Rome.

They formed under him part of the enormous Macedonian empire, and passed on his decease through the hands of his successors, Demetrius Poliorcetes and Lysimachus.

After the death of the latter in battle, however, they recovered a precarious freedom, and were again an independent community for a hundred years, till the power of Rome invaded the regions of Thrace and the Hellespont.

Byzantium was one of the cities which took the wise course of making an early alliance with the Romans, and obtained good and easy terms in consequence.

During the wars of Rome with Macedon and Antiochus the Great it proved such a faithful assistant that the Senate gave it the status of a civitas libera effoderata, a free and confederate city.

And it was not taken under direct Roman government, but allowed complete liberty in everything save the control of its foreign relations and the payment of a tribute to Rome.

It was not till the Roman republic had long passed away that the Emperor Vespasian stripped it of these privileges and threw it into the province of Thrace to exist for the future as an ordinary provincial town, AD seventy-three.

Though deprived of a liberty which had for long years been almost nominal, Byzantium could not be deprived of its unrivaled position for commerce.

Most unhappily for itself, Byzantium lay on the line of division between the eastern provinces, where Pescennius Niger had been proclaimed, and the Illyrian provinces, where Severus had assumed the imperial style.

CHAPTER X.

A NEW ROME till truer glory replaces all glory as the torch grows blind at the dawn of day.

Mrs. Browning Over two thousand five hundred years ago, a little fleet of galleys toiled painfully against the current up the long strait of the Hellespont, rowed across the Sea of Marmora, and anchored in the smooth waters of the first inlet which cuts into the European shore of the Bosphorus.

Here, a long crescent-shaped creek, which after ages were to call the Golden Horn, strikes inland for seven miles, forming a quiet backwater from the rapid stream running outside.

One of the strongest fortresses in the Eastern world, it was here that the Emperor of the East made his last stand against his brother-in-law, Constantine, Emperor of the West.

Here Constantine besieged him till the city surrendered, and the Roman Emperor took a victor on the ramparts, which were ever afterwards to bear his name.

He knew the old city well, every inch of it, and he now determined to make it into a new Rome, a new capital for the great empire over which he now ruled supreme, a new center for Christianity.

The limits of the new city were at once marked out.

Impressive, uh, public spaces.

Um, it's referred to as New Rome.

It's referred to as a second Rome.

Mm.

Um, so yeah.

Maybe, maybe not.

Um, you say New Rome.

Obviously, um, the, the Eastern ch- the Eastern part of the empire spoke Greek.

Now, he had heard it prophesied that, quote, we, Muslims, will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome.

Not content with being the conqueror of New Rome, greedy Muhammad was determined to fulfill the second half of that prophecy by conquering Old Rome as well.

So he spent 27 years terrorizing and expanding into the Balkans, until 1480, when his forces crossed into Italy and seized the city of Otranto.

The sack was horrific.