38. The Byzantines Got an Undeservedly Bad Rap in the West
For centuries, the Byzantine Empire was treated with disdain, and at times even with hostility, by Western scholars and historians. When they deigned to refer to them as Roman at all, Western scholars distinguished the Byzantines as “Eastern Romans”. With its Greek culture and Christian religion – and the “wrong” kind of Christianity at that – the Orthodox Greek Eastern Romans was not seen as “real” Romans, like the Classical Age Romans.
That hostility peaked with Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century author whose influential The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire viewed the Byzantines as degenerate travesties of the Romans. According to Gibbon and those who followed his lead, the Byzantine Empire was a mishmash of incompetence, cowardice, conspiracy, venality, intrigue, assassination, low cultural achievement, and religious superstition. According to that view, the Byzantine Empire somehow muddled through for centuries longer than it deserved to exist, until it was finally put out of its misery in 1453. As seen below, that was an undeservedly bad rap.
