Some people have asked me a pointed question: “The world is on fire, the traitors are in power, the barbarians are inside the gates, and you looked around at it all and thought, ‘I’ll write a book about the Byzantine Empire!’ Why would you think that this was a good time for a historical survey of an obscure part of history about which people today know virtually nothing and care even less?” Well, that’s precisely why. The Byzantines, or Romans, as they called themselves, endured a great deal of what we are going through today and looking at for the near future, and their empire lasted for over a thousand years. Are there lessons we can learn from them? Why, yes, there are many.
For 800 of those years, the Byzantines held off repeated and ferocious attacks from the same Islamic jihadis who hit the United States on 9/11, India on 11/26, and Israel on Oct. 7. For 700 of those years, they had a stable economy, untroubled by inflation. Their government often took active steps to encourage moral behavior, rather than celebrating perversion and subsidizing insanity.
If the United States were to last as long as the Byzantine Empire did, the stars and stripes would still wave until the year 2899.
Discover the secrets of the Byzantines’ success in Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization: order it here.
“Robert Spencer’s historical survey of the Eastern Roman Empire argues not just that Byzantium’s extraordinary millennium-long survival saved Western civilization as it collapsed in Europe, but also that Constantinople’s uncompromising adherence to ancient values and traditions still offers a model for a contemporary America, overcome by relativism and nihilism, to rediscover its exceptional and historical custodianship of Western values. A passionate and spirited defense of Hellenism, an enlightened Orthodoxy, and the Byzantine Empire—and why especially now we should rediscover their often forgotten wisdom.” –Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
“Leave it to Robert Spencer to take a Byzantine topic like, well, the Byzantines, and write a concise, popular defense of them that makes even a Byzantine-skeptic like me sit up and take notice.” –H. W. Crocker III, author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, a 2,000-Year History
“Leave it to Robert Spencer to write a history of the Byzantine Empire that has no ideological axe to grind. Few contemporary writers care about truth—wherever it leads—as much as he does. That’s why Empire of God is as important as it is eye-opening. If you know how important history is, or you just care about understanding the roots of Western civilization—the greatest civilization ever created—you should read this book.” –Dennis Prager, nationally syndicated talk show host, co-founder of PragerU, and author of ten books, including The Rational Bible, a groundbreaking, five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I just completed the first chapter of the book – the introduction. I’m not convinced that it’s accurate to call the Byzantines Romans even if they called themselves that. I can accept a Roman empire w/o Rome, I can accept a Roman empire that spoke Greek rather than Latin. What is more indigestible is a Roman empire that abandoned its original faith for Christianity. That’s a major disruption – regardless of whether one regards it as being for better or worse: at that point, one has changed the entire culture of that nation. Would the various Christian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden or Norway be considered as Viking/Norse entities? Even though nobody from outside Scandinavia conquered them?
I’ll comment more as I go through the subsequent chapters
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The other thing about calling the Byzantine Empire the continuation of the Roman Empire is that there was the Holy Roman Empire as well, which seems to have succeeded Rome in the Western part of the continent, and continued until I think ~1800. If a Christian empire can be Roman, same can be said for the Holy Roman Empire
somehistory says
For my view, anyone who calls themselves…or their “empire,” “Holy” is being way too arrogant and *unholy.*
And from what I know of history, the Romans were far from “holy.”
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The “Holy Romans” were essentially the Catholic establishment in Europe: a partnership/rivalry b/w the Emperor and the Pope. It had a very strange transformation of boundaries throughout its history, until it was effectively replaced by the Austrian Empire
somehistory says
I don’t believe that the pope, wanting to be emperor of the people, was one bit holy, either. About like the present pope guy.
I know you are of another belief, but Jesus told His followers not to try to ‘lord it over each other,’ but as they were/are brothers, they are all to see themselves as He sees them…equal.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Voltaire once described the Holy Roman Empire as an entity that was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”
Ryan says
The Byzantine Empire is simply the Eastern Roman Empire – the part of the empire that did not fall to the barbarians. You say that you can’t accept a Roman Empire that abandoned its original faith for Christianity, but that’s exactly what the Western Roman Empire did when it accepted Christianity. If this is the standard, how can the West be considered Roman, but not the East?