Quotes About Byzantine

The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later.

How could anyone find words to describe Justinian's character?

In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.

From the 1070s, instability in the Holy Land deepened. In 1071 an army led by the Seljuq commander Alp Arslan, or Heroic Lion, routed Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert, in what is eastern Turkey today. The battle, which marked the beginning of Turkish ascendancy in Anatolia and the slow decline of Byzantium, was a cataclysmic defeat. Humiliatingly Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was captured and taken prisoner.

The persecution of Jews and of Christians outside the Greek Orthodox community caused great disaffection within the empire and explains in part why many Byzantine subjects welcomed the arrival of the more religiously tolerant Muslim rulers.

In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic—an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God—Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.

It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

In many respects, the conquests were swift and largely bloodless. Instead of the usual scenes of wanton death and destruction, the cities and towns occupied by the Arabs were treated almost gently, and seem to have welcomed the exchange of rulers. Given the disarray of both the Persian and the Byzantine armies in the region, and the absence of strong organized resistance, that makes sense. There was, in essence, no need for substantial violence.

The sun played lazily behind the Byzantine silhouette of the town. Bathhouses and a dancing pavilion bleached in the white breeze. The beach stretched for miles along the blue. Nanny habitually established a British Protectorate over a generous portion of the sands.

The Hungarian language, Magyar, resembles Finnish, Your Honor, though its lack of vowels could be attributed to them having been snatched by the wind when the horse-mounted nomad warriors shouted to one another. Allow me to quote Illirio Tepius, a Byzantine traveler, who wrote in 1232 that "when Hungarians speak, there is a windlike whistle that propels the words forward, as if they never dismounted.

Poland is different from the other so-called socialist countries. We have a different background. Poland belongs to the West, not the East. We belong to the Mediterranean, Latin culture, not to the Byzantine, which is very different and which you find in Bulgaria and even parts of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Romania.

In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

Under the direction of the patriarch Niketas (741–775), iconoclasts removed figurative portraits (probably saints' busts) from the council hall of the church of Hagia Sophia and replaced them with plain crosses.31 Already, by 743, Constantine V had rebuilt the earthquake-damaged church of Hagia Eirene and ordered its apse decorated with a simple, unadorned cross. Somewhat surprisingly, this cross has remained its sole decoration to this day.

faith in progress was fundamental to western Christianity. As for Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine East, it prohibited both clocks and pipe organs from its churches.51

was forbidden throughout the empire to produce or to display images of Christ

not even this was enough to prevent a Persian expeditionary force from fighting its way through Anatolia towards the capital in 615.

Heraclius made a humiliating offer of peace.

the last great dynasty of Byzantine emperors, the Palaiologoi, to rule from Constantinople.8

Constantinople had been saved, and with it the Greek-speaking Roman Empire.

Heraclius entered Jerusalem on 21 March 630, at the head of a solemn procession

the Greek-speaking Roman Empire after the death of Heraclius in 641 had turned into the Byzantine.

539, great numbers of them, called 'Huns' by Procopius, crossed the Danube

The Byzantine governor assembled an army considerably larger than that of the Normans and rebels. He then sent a herald to the opposing camp offering either the Normans' safe return to Lombard territory or battle. In response, an enormous Norman knight smashed his mailed fist on the head of the Byzantine herald's horse; the horse fell dead on the spot. (Yes, this actually happened, historians agree.)23 The battle began the next day.

Constantinople, the largest city in the world and capital of the Byzantine Roman Empire (Rum to Arabs and Turks), had fallen. Europe's last surviving link to the age of the Caesars would be remade as a Muslim city and renamed Istanbul. It would remain the headquarters of the sultan's descendants for the next 460 years.