Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book isThe Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. Here, he speaks with me about my new book, Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.
“Empire of God: How the Christian Byzantine Empire Saved Civilization,” by Mark Judge, The Stream, December 11, 2023:
Journalist and scholar Robert Spencer has just published Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization. The Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms. Byzantium finally fell to Ottoman Turkish onslaughts in 1453. A deeply scholarly work, Spencer’s book argues that Christian Byzantine civilization kept the learning and faith of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem alive and protected the West from the aggression of Islam in the East. The Stream’s Mark Judge recently spoke with Spencer about his book.
Mark Judge: Your new book Empire of God argues that the Byzantine Empire has not been given the credit it deserves as a dynamic Christian civilization that kept alive the heritages of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. Part of this, you write is due to the bias of certain historians, including Edward Gibbon. What is the real truth behind the Byzantine Empire?
Robert Spencer: There has been a lot of prejudice against the Byzantine Empire over the last several centuries, resulting in a general discounting of its significance and contributions. This is primarily due to a phenomenon that is a recurring theme of Empire of God: the Great Schism between what are known today as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in 1054, and the resulting estrangement between East and West. Instead of seeing the Byzantines as Romans and exponents of Western civilization, albeit on its edges, Westerners all too often tended to see it as both foreign and benighted, featuring confusing (“Byzantine”) cultural and social practices and a form of Christianity that appeared both alien and inscrutable to Western eyes.
Then there was the Crimean War in the 1850s, when the British allied with the Ottoman Empire and an immense Turkophilia swept over the British Empire. This was when the idea that Islam is a “religion of peace” first began to be propagated, to ease the suspicion of ordinary Britons toward an alliance with the Islamic caliphate. And if the Turks were such grand fellows, then the people they defeated and supplanted, the Byzantines, must have been correspondingly backward and benighted. These attitudes took hold among English-speaking historians and have lingered long after the impetuses for them have vanished from the earth.
We Were Almost Muslims
You argue that Byzantine Civilization was “a bulwark” between the Christian West and Islamic jihadism in the East. Could the West really have been lost without the Byzantine Empire?
Most certainly. The Arabs first besieged Constantinople in 675, and the Turks finally breached its walls nearly 800 years later, in 1453. This was the time of the conversion and formation of Christian Europe, with the apex of Roman Catholic philosophy in the High Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which formed the spiritual and intellectual foundations of the contemporary world. Imagine now if the Arabs had succeeded in taking Constantinople in 675, or at any of numerous times after that but well before 1453. There was no significant force in Europe that would have been able to prevent the conquest and Islamization of the entire continent.
Western civilization, with its ideas of the equality of rights of all people and the freedom of speech, and with its philosophical and artistic insights, would have been stillborn. The very presence (and resistance to the jihad) of the Byzantine Empire during Christian Europe’s formative period, even as the pope and other Western authorities were deriding the Byzantines as schismatics, enabled the founding principles of our civilization to develop. If the Byzantines had lost earlier or not been there at all, we wouldn’t be having this discussion now, and the West as we know it would not exist.
Pete Roderic says
What a God given coincidence, I just ordered the book just minutes ago! I then check my inbox and now here is the article.
NIELS KRISTIAN KLAUSEN says
DITTO
Patrick Kelley says
I ordered a copy, can’t wait to read. Thank you prolific writer, Robert Spencer!
࿗Infidel࿘ says
From the main interview
I think that the Russophobia among the Brits – which seems to continue to this day – was what drove their islamophilia. Note that Tsar Nikolai I was the Tsar who was the adversary of the Brits not only in Crimea but also in Central Asia. That was the time when the Brits were undermining Hindu & Sikh entities in the Indian subcontinent, & backing muslim ones like the Nizam of Hyderabad (himself a descendant of Buqharan warlords). They also did what they could to prop up the kingdoms of Afghanistan and Iran, so that Russia didn’t get an outlet to a warm water port in the Indian ocean
Russia, otoh, was an anti-islamic force. They had destroyed the Tatar khanates that used to ravage their territory, & on one occasion, even burned down Moscow. The thing that started the Russian conquest of Central Asia was Kazakh bandits abducting Russian women & children residing in their frontiers, and selling them into slave markets of Buqhara & Xeva. Unlike today’s Brits, who don’t care when muslims do such things to their people, Tsar Nikolai did, & send an army to conquer Turkistan. They overran that khanates of Buqhara, Xeva and Qoqon, and annexed it all to the Russian empire.
Note that for India, all the muslim invasions that they sustained were Turkic ones from places like Ghazni, Ghowr, Samarqand, Kabul and Kandahar. Once Russia overran the bulk of those territories, the external islamic threats to Hindus were pretty much over. Only remaining threat to them was the internal muslim threat, backed by the Brits
So the various Christian rulers of Denmark, Sweden and Norway – were their kingdoms Viking kingdoms? I’m pretty sure they were descendants of the Norsemen, but once they stopped worshiping the likes of Thor, were they the same civilization? I’d argue the same thing here: what prevents the Byzantines from being Romans is not that they didn’t have Rome, or that they spoke Greek rather than Latin, but that instead of worshiping either the likes of Jupiter or Zeus, they embraced Christianity. At which point, they are heavily altering the civilization
Still reading the book
somehistory says
Christians are taught to do as Jesus said to His apostles and early disciples; “Do to others as you wish to be done to you.” He also said that on two Commandments, hang the whole Law and the Prophets: to Love God with the whole heart, mind, soul, and strength and to Love one’s neighbor as one loves their own ‘self.’
These actually came from the Ten Commandments given to the Jews…imbedded in the ‘you must not covet, must not murder, must not commit adultery, …’
mozlums have no such teaching. In fact, just the opposite as they force their way on others while demanding that Christians not attempt to ‘convert’ them.
One can imagine how the West would be so very *unfree* if Christianity had not provided the teaching of Jesus….to “Do to others as you wish”‘ and the fact that “God is not partial” but all are “created equal.”