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Updated: June 6, 2025
Among the many perverse historical notions of which we are now ridding ourselves is this-that Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings. There was no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of Saracens, Lombards and other intruders.
Here they could concentrate Moslems where their co-religionists are already the great majority, and so have done with the everlasting friction and weakness entailed in jurisdiction over preponderant Christian elements. Here they might throw off the remnants of their Byzantinism as a garment and, no longer forced to face two ways, live and govern with single minds as the Asiatics they are.
For this statement he utilized the report of a Government official, a certain Leoni, who was sent hither after the earthquake of 1783, and found the use of money not unknown, but forgotten, in consequence of this terrible catastrophe. These vales of Aspromonte are one of the last refuges of living Byzantinism. Greek is still spoken in some places, such as Rocca-forte and Roghudi.
This oriental ceremonial, so marked a feature of late "Byzantinism," involved, as one of its principles, difficulty of access to the Emperor, who, living in the retirement of his palace, was tempted to trust less to his eyes than his ears, and saw too little of public affairs.
The Emperor naturally knows nothing of such a thing, for there is no one superior to him in the Empire in point of rank, and he is much too modern, too well educated, and of too kindly and liberal a nature to encourage or permit Byzantinism towards him on the part of others. Indeed Byzantinism was never a Hohenzollern failing.
The life-story of Yuan Shih-kai, and the part European and Japanese diplomacy played in that story, form a chapter which should be taught as a warning to all who enter politics as a career, since there is exhibited in this history a complete compendium of all the more vicious traits of Byzantinism.
This was necessary, because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements in the state would in all probability have in a very short time occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated too highly.
Education, economic changes, and the art of manners have done much to conceal, if not eradicate, human proneness to servility, and the Byzantinism of the time of Caligula and Nero, of Tiberius, Constantine, or Nikiphoros, of the Stuarts and the Bourbons, has long been modified into respect for oneself as well as for the person one addresses.
Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of realism.
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