Why Didnt The Eastern Roman Empire Fall When the Roman Empire disintegrated over the course of the fifth century, only half of it actually fell, the western half. The eastern half of the Roman Empire would survive in one form or another for a thousand years. The Empire had always included a tremendous amount of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity within its borders. Watch Zoolander Hindi Full Movie' title='Watch Zoolander Hindi Full Movie' />Country Channel Name Italia IT Rai 1 HD Italia IT Rai 2 HD Italia IT Rai 3 HD Italia IT Rai 4 HD Italia IT Rai 5 HD Italia IT Italia Uno HD Italia. Name ex Yu Federalna ex Yu OBN ex Yu Face TV ex Yu Pink BH ex Yu N1 Bosna ex Yu TV Sarajevo ex Yu TV Sehara BH ex Yu TK Tuzla ex Yu RTV. Since it stretched from the Sahara to the North Sea and Britain to Arabia, thats only to be expected. The greatest split, however, was between the Greek speaking east and the Latin speaking west. When the Romans began acquiring bits and pieces of the eastern Mediterranean in the second century BC, they encountered a highly developed, urban, populous, and rich series of societies stretching from Greece to Egypt. This was the Greek world, the product of both centuries of Greek colonization and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Cities like Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt were centers of culture and trade, holding hundreds of thousands of residents. Even after hundreds of years of Roman rule, the language and culture of these places remained essentially Greek. When emperors wanted to talk to their subjects in the east, they did it in Greek. When those subjects wanted to talk to the emperor, they used Greek to do so. Latin was a learned language of government administration, not what everyday people were speaking. Constantinople, the city founded by Constantine the Great on the spot of the Greek colony of Byzantium, became the center of this Greek speaking eastern world. That essential cultural and linguistic unity became one pillar of the Eastern Empire the others were Roman political concepts and a deep, ostentatious, public Christian piety. Over the course of the fifth century, while things were falling apart in the west, these three things fused to create the unique mixture that would define the Byzantine Empire. What the Ottomans ended in 1. Constantinople was, in fact, a Roman Empire. The fifth century was bad for the entire Roman Empire. Watch Zoolander Hindi Full Movie' title='Watch Zoolander Hindi Full Movie' />While we think of Attila and the Huns as a threat to the west after all, he was eventually stopped in Gaul and went on to ravage Italy he actually did most of his damage along the Balkan frontiers in the east. Like the west, the east had to manage powerful groups of barbarians within its frontiers, and it had its own internal political divisions and usurpations. Why did the east survive while the west fell apart The east had always been richer and more populous than the west, so it had a much greater resource base on which to draw. Its capital, Constantinople, was also its most important city after the construction of its epic walls in the middle of the fifth century, it was practically impregnable. These were deep, structural things from which the east benefited. Despite some upheavals, though, the east also benefited from political stability just at the time when the west was going to hell in a handbasket. The emperor Theodosius II ruled from 4. Theodosius II was feckless at worst and ineffectual at best, but he ruled for 4. In that time, he provided the anchor around whom that mixture of Greek language and culture, Roman political concepts, and Christian piety could take shape. The pieces of government apparatus that allowed the east to run, its civil bureaucracy and standing army, never collapsed the way they did in the west. There was an institutional stability that outlasted any individual emperor, general, or court official. All of those factors and more played into the survival of the east. Im Patrick Wyman, and if youve been around for a while, you probably saw a post or two about my old show, The Fall of Rome. My new show, Tides of History, is my attempt to go pro with these podcasts. Tides of History covers the fall of the Roman Empire in addition to a parallel series of episodes on the rise of the modern world between 1. Think of Tides of History like a TV show that happens to have two seasons running simultaneously. If any of what this post has discussed sounds interesting to you, check out these two episodes below. The first explores the Eastern Roman Empire and what made it tick, while the second goes in depth into how and why the east survived and the west didnt in the fifth century. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, i. Tunes, Stitcher, Google Play, NPR One, and any other podcast app you can think of. Give it a listen and let me know what you think in the comments. Episode 3 Why Didnt the Eastern Roman Empire Fall Episode 4 How the Eastern Roman Empire Survived Attila the Hun and the Disastrous Fifth Century Further reading Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire Power and Belief Under Theodosius II 4. Berkeley, 2. 00. 6Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic People and Power in New Rome Cambridge, 2. Stephen Williams and Gerald Friell, The Rome that Did Not Fall The Survival of the East in the Fifth Century London, 1. Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire Cambridge, 2. Game Of Thrones Is Only Just Starting To Burn It All Down. There is a tension at the heart of both Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, a contradiction which threatens to swallow the world and our heroes whole if they dont manage it properly How do you save the world without breaking it in the process If you burn everything down to win, whats the point of winning Indeed, fire has always proved an excellent vessel for this question, from Melisandre urging Stannis on to messiah dom at cost of his soul to Tyrion defending Kings Landing by unleashing hell on the sailors below. I wrote about this recently with regards to Quentyn Martell, a Dornish character in the books sent by his father the dead on the show Doran Martell to marry Dany. After Dany turns him down, he is haunted by his failure and the thought that his companions who died along the way gave their lives for nothing, Quent tries to tame one of Danys dragons to impress her, and he burns alive for it. Quent took the big foolish romantic risk youre supposed to take as a fantasy protagonist, but died horrifically because the dragons dont care about character arcs. As a companion notes just before Quent gets crisped up, Theyre monsters, not maesters. You cant tell them riddles, you cant flatter their egos, and they have no treasure you can steal. They are nuke armed helicopters with teeth. Yet without the dragons, the Seven Kingdoms would still be eternally at war, as they were before Balerions black wings were seen over Westeros. Without the dragons, thousands upon thousands of people would still be in chains in Slavers Bay. Without the dragons providing their ever regenerating flame, the white walkers might win and slaughter everyone. And as Jon points out in this weeks episode, the dragons arent merely flesh and blood in the minds of the people who see them. Theyre religious icons, and not just for the Dothraki who knelt before the Unburnt last season. They exist, Jon says, as living proof that rules can be broken and anything is possible. So how much is too much Theres an all the protagonists are turning evil, which ones of them are still OK to like instinct in both book and show fandoms that I think obscures the more interesting questions of ambiguity. Can fans accept Dany as a savior figure after she burned a bunch of soldiers alive on this weeks episode Well, Tyrion burned a bunch of soldiers alive at the Battle of Blackwater in order to keep Joffrey on the Throne, and remains a fan favorite. So, yes, clearly we can Reconciling it all isnt simple, and this sort of Faulknerian human heart in conflict with itself theme is central to the source material. Ultimately, this is what the dragons are for That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurpers rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened. Dany will eventually have to save the world the story is about whether the costs are worth it. Speakingof the end times, many of the same issues apply to Bran, and this is where the question goes psychedelic. Its easy to get frustrated that all were getting from the storys ultimate seer is gnomic bits and pieces instead of a full on battle plan for dealing with the White Walkers, but Bran is new at this, and his training was rather fatally cut short. Moreover, what his POV is like right now cant really be conveyed visually without going full Brakhage or invoking the last act of 2. A Space Odyssey. In the books, GRRM has only begun to touch on what it looks like to take the step from humanity to divinity A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. The singers of the forest had no books. No ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they had the trees, and the weirwoods above all. When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers, everything they knew about this world. Maesters will tell you that the weirwoods are sacred to the old gods. The singers believe they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood. Brans eyes widened. Theyre going to kill meNo, Meera said. Jojen, youre scaring him. He is not the one who needs to be afraid. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moths wing, and past, present, and future are one. Nor will your sight be limited to your godswood. The singers carved eyes into their heart trees to awaken them, and those are the first eyes a new greenseer learns to use but in time you will see well beyond the trees themselves. After that the glimpses came faster and faster, till Bran was feeling lost and dizzy. He saw no more of his father, nor the girl who looked like Arya, but a woman heavy with child emerged naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her. Watch Meadowland Download. Then there came a brown haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor. A dark eyed youth, pale and fierce, sliced three branches off the weirwood and shaped them into arrows. The tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn. And now the lords Bran glimpsed were tall and hard, stern men in fur and chain mail. Some wore faces he remembered from the statues in the crypts, but they were gone before he could put a name to them. Its worth noting here that as much as Im coming to enjoy the glam swagger take on Euron that the show is presenting, what you lose with that is the vital role he plays in this dynamic.