Your Favorite Empire

[Serrland]

I mean, I guess you could, in the broadest sense of the word, describe that Byzantine wars against the Sultanate of Rum as a Crusade, but that's a real stretch.

That was more them attempting to reclaim former Roman territory than anything. The wars probably would have happened even if Rum hadn't been Muslim.

Aye, that's why I called it a stretch. Not to mention that fighting in Anatolia and Armenia had become something of a Byzantine tradition by that point...

[Farnhamia]

That was more them attempting to reclaim former Roman territory than anything. The wars probably would have happened even if Rum hadn't been Muslim.

Aye, that's why I called it a stretch. Not to mention that fighting in Anatolia and Armenia had become something of a Byzantine tradition by that point...

It's true, the pre-Manzikert border was pretty well settled, and despite the almost annual campaigns never really shifted much, exept when John Tzimiskes fought his way down into Palestine. Those gains were subsequently lost, of course.

[Kleomentia]

Yet the Frist Officals and Rulers of Byzantine Empire Had Roman Blood but that slowly deminish

And then the Roman was slowly become vaporized.

Your right partly but, do you really think that all of the roman empire was roman blood just because the name it was Rome.So if they called them self Romania then they partly are the Romans.But it's true that they soon abounded the Roman culture but thats again the thing Rome does.Take peaces of culture from other nations.So we are all partly right.And anyway it was considered as the roman empire.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Roman_Empire_map.gif
Though its true that people like calling it Byzantia for the familiar reasons,even i like to call it The Byzantine Empire.

[North Suran]

The Byzantines didn't fight in the Crusades - where are you getting that idea from? Crusader states like Venice and Genoa ransacked Byzantium, which was Orthodox and wouldn't have answered a call to Crusade anyway.

You do realise that it was the Byzantines who started the Crusades, right? They were getting pasted by the Seljuk Turks, so Emperor Alexius asked the European countries and the Papacy for assistance. This directly caused the Pope to call for a crusade. In fact, the primary intention of the First Crusade was to restore the Levant to the Byzantine Empire. Of course, once the Crusaders had possession of the Levant, they promptly refused to do so. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to describe the Turko-Byzantine War as being part of the Crusades.

[United Dependencies]

The second German empire followed by the British empire

[St George of England]

The Byzantines didn't fight in the Crusades - where are you getting that idea from? Crusader states like Venice and Genoa ransacked Byzantium, which was Orthodox and wouldn't have answered a call to Crusade anyway.

You do realise that it was the Byzantines who started the Crusades, right? They were getting pasted by the Seljuk Turks, so Emperor Alexius asked the European countries and the Papacy for assistance. This directly caused the Pope to call for a crusade. In fact, the primary intention of the First Crusade was to restore the Levant to the Byzantine Empire. Of course, once the Crusaders had possession of the Levant, they promptly refused to do so. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to describe the Turko-Byzantine War as being part of the Crusades.

To be fair to the Byzantines, they probably were asking for a few thousand mercenary knights, not 10,000 religious crusaders.

[Farnhamia]

You do realise that it was the Byzantines who started the Crusades, right? They were getting pasted by the Seljuk Turks, so Emperor Alexius asked the European countries and the Papacy for assistance. This directly caused the Pope to call for a crusade. In fact, the primary intention of the First Crusade was to restore the Levant to the Byzantine Empire. Of course, once the Crusaders had possession of the Levant, they promptly refused to do so. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to describe the Turko-Byzantine War as being part of the Crusades.

To be fair to the Byzantines, they probably were asking for a few thousand mercenary knights, not 10,000 religious crusaders.

They were, in fact, appalled by the arrival of the First Crusade, both the military elements and the civilian. They couldn't ship them across to the Anatolian side fast enough.

[Angleter]

You do realise that it was the Byzantines who started the Crusades, right? They were getting pasted by the Seljuk Turks, so Emperor Alexius asked the European countries and the Papacy for assistance. This directly caused the Pope to call for a crusade. In fact, the primary intention of the First Crusade was to restore the Levant to the Byzantine Empire. Of course, once the Crusaders had possession of the Levant, they promptly refused to do so. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to describe the Turko-Byzantine War as being part of the Crusades.

To be fair to the Byzantines, they probably were asking for a few thousand mercenary knights, not 10,000 religious crusaders.

What on Earth did they expect asking the Papacy for help? Of course the Pope would use his religious authority to encourage Western Christendom to support the Byzantines- not only was religion the Pope's main line of business, but this happened to be a war between Christians and Muslims in which the West was meant to intervene.

Of course, then the Byzantines were stupid enough to think that none of the crusaders, who'd just fought a religious war promoted by the Pope, would realise they were about to hand the Levant over to the heretical schismatic Orthodox and have something done about it- so it's hard to tell.

And the rest is history. Copycat attacks took Spain and the Baltic, and Western Europe spent 200 years propping up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, doing some general marauding while they were at it (see: 4th crusade).

[The Archregimancy]

The HRE was not a crusader state. It wasn't even a state. It was a confederacy of Germanic peoples, operating under a name that made them sound Roman, but who spent most of their time killing each other. The leader wasn't chosen by the Pope, he simply crowned whoever the Prince-electors chose.
The Byzantines didn't fight in the Crusades - where are you getting that idea from? Crusader states like Venice and Genoa ransacked Byzantium, which was Orthodox and wouldn't have answered a call to Crusade anyway.

Wrong on two counts.

Count the first: When people talk of the Holy Roman Empire as a 'confederacy', they are referring to the late Hapsburg version of the Empire. From Otto I (crowned 962 AD) through to the death of Frederick II (1250 AD) the Holy Roman Empire was, usually, a fully functioning Western European feudal state that for much of its early history was at least as - and often considerably more so - centralised and united as its French counterpart.

It's an oversimplification, but whereas the medieval history of France after the coronation of Hugh Capet (987 AD) is of a monarchy that goes from controlling very little effectively through to a monarchy that is effectively centralised across most of its theoretical territory, the Holy Roman Empire goes in the opposite direction.

Frederick II's power was so great that the Papacy went out of its way to break the power of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, with strong support from the Empire's Italian vassals. The death of Frederick's son Conrad in 1254 broke the back of the high medieval empire. After the accession of Rudolph Hapsburg in 1273, after an interregnum, the Empire would begin its slow decay into the confederacy that we usually associate with it. But the Emperor would retain considerable residual power until the Reformation and the 30 Years War, which together dealt the final death blow to any conception of effective Imperial unity. It is absolutely wrong to retrospectively apply the confederacy of the Empire's final few centuries across the entirety of the state's history.

Count the second: Others have already objected to your characterisation of the Byzantines as not fighting in the Crusades. Leaving aside some of the valid points already raised in this thread, the fact remains that the Comnenian Emperors Alexius I, John II, and Manuel I all intervened directly in the affairs of the Crusader states, whom they considered their vassals under oaths the Crusader leaders had sworn to Alexius. Taking Manuel as just one example, his second wife Maria was from the royal family of the Principality of Antioch, and Manuel forged an alliance with King Amalric of Jerusalem that launched a joint Crusader-Byzantine invasion of Egypt after Amalric agreed to recognise Byzantine overlordship of Antioch in exchange for an alliance. So stating that the Byzantines "didn't fight in the Crusades" is a fairly uninformed statement.

[St George of England]

To be fair to the Byzantines, they probably were asking for a few thousand mercenary knights, not 10,000 religious crusaders.

What on Earth did they expect asking the Papacy for help? Of course the Pope would use his religious authority to encourage Western Christendom to support the Byzantines- not only was religion the Pope's main line of business, but this happened to be a war between Christians and Muslims in which the West was meant to intervene.

Of course, then the Byzantines were stupid enough to think that none of the crusaders, who'd just fought a religious war promoted by the Pope, would realise they were about to hand the Levant over to the heretical schismatic Orthodox and have something done about it- so it's hard to tell.

And the rest is history. Copycat attacks took Spain and the Baltic, and Western Europe spent 200 years propping up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, doing some general marauding while they were at it (see: 4th crusade).

The Crusades are also the main reason why Protestantism flourished in Europe. Had Innocent III not been obsessed with Crusades, Protestantism (Lutherism at the very least) would've gone the way of Catharism.

[Good Germans]

Snip.

Damn. Maltropia was just pwnt into last week.

[Farnhamia]

What on Earth did they expect asking the Papacy for help? Of course the Pope would use his religious authority to encourage Western Christendom to support the Byzantines- not only was religion the Pope's main line of business, but this happened to be a war between Christians and Muslims in which the West was meant to intervene.

Of course, then the Byzantines were stupid enough to think that none of the crusaders, who'd just fought a religious war promoted by the Pope, would realise they were about to hand the Levant over to the heretical schismatic Orthodox and have something done about it- so it's hard to tell.

And the rest is history. Copycat attacks took Spain and the Baltic, and Western Europe spent 200 years propping up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, doing some general marauding while they were at it (see: 4th crusade).

The Crusades are also the main reason why Protestantism flourished in Europe. Had Innocent III not been obsessed with Crusades, Protestantism (Lutherism at the very least) would've gone the way of Catharism.

I don't honestly think even Pope Innocent III was good enough to affect events 300 years after his death.

[Verangii]

Out of the ones listed, and not to go with the token answer of Rome, I'd pick the Japanese Empire. Maybe it's because I'm reading a book on them during World War II, but I still love the culture behind it in any case.

In reading my class is reading "farewell to MAnzanar" BOUT Japanese internment during WW2.

[Maltropia]

-snip-

I was over-generalising a bit much, I guess. When I said the Byzantines "didn't fight in the Crusades", I suppose what I was saying is that they weren't the ones called to Crusade. They were requesting assistance, not providing it; they were too busy to reclaim the Holy Land and fend off the aggressors (the decline of Byzantium accounting for this, though that didn't set in severely for a while yet). I am no scholar of history, but my rudimentary knowledge tends to serve me well enough.
My area of "expertise", if you could call it that, is really late-medieval and early modern history, so I'm a bit out of my depth with this.

EDIT: My knowledge of the Holy Roman Empire is also a bit out-of-time here. What I know of it is really just what I picked up from Age of Empires (I know you're wincing) and Europa Universalis III (the latter is more reliable).

And the rest is history. Copycat attacks took Spain and the Baltic, and Western Europe spent 200 years propping up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, doing some general marauding while they were at it (see: 4th crusade).

The Reconquista and Baltic Crusades weren't imitations. As far as I know, the Pope forbade the Spaniards joining the Crusades in the Holy Land, saying that their own war was more important. And to refer to something older than the Crusades as an "imitation" is inappropriate, at best - even before the Battle of Tours the Christian Visigoths had been fighting the Berbers and Moors. The Baltic Crusades were also very important - Danish Estonia and the Teutonic Order (which had been Crusading in the Levant before that) were massively defining of the Baltic's history.

[Maltropia]

Snip.

Damn. Maltropia was just pwnt into last week.

[St George of England]

The Crusades are also the main reason why Protestantism flourished in Europe. Had Innocent III not been obsessed with Crusades, Protestantism (Lutherism at the very least) would've gone the way of Catharism.

I don't honestly think even Pope Innocent III was good enough to affect events 300 years after his death.

O feck. I did it again. :/

[Farnhamia]

I don't honestly think even Pope Innocent III was good enough to affect events 300 years after his death.

O feck. I did it again. :/

Well, all those Popes with numbers instead of proper names like William or Henry or Edward, it could happen to anyone.

[The Archregimancy]

To be fair to the Byzantines, they probably were asking for a few thousand mercenary knights, not 10,000 religious crusaders.

What on Earth did they expect asking the Papacy for help? Of course the Pope would use his religious authority to encourage Western Christendom to support the Byzantines- not only was religion the Pope's main line of business, but this happened to be a war between Christians and Muslims in which the West was meant to intervene.

Of course, then the Byzantines were stupid enough to think that none of the crusaders, who'd just fought a religious war promoted by the Pope, would realise they were about to hand the Levant over to the heretical schismatic Orthodox and have something done about it- so it's hard to tell.

And the rest is history. Copycat attacks took Spain and the Baltic, and Western Europe spent 200 years propping up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, doing some general marauding while they were at it (see: 4th crusade).

I didn't have the time to address this last night, but Angleter is more than slightly unfair on the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I (1081-1181), who along with his son and grandson was one of the three most capable men to hold the throne between the death of Basil II and the Fourth Crusade. He almost singlehandedly stopped the disintegration of the post-Manzikert Empire, stabilised the Empire's control of the Balkans, reconquered almost all of coastal Anatolia from the Turks, and handled the Crusades with real delicacy and skill. He certainly wasn't 'stupid'.

Alexius' decision to send ambassadors to the West to ask for mercenary help against the Turks was the decision of a rational, skilled, and intelligent diplomat. No one at the time thought the Great Schism was permanent (it would take the events of 1204 for that to happen); it wasn't the first significant schism between east and west (for example, google 'Photian Schism'), and Alexius had already made conciliatory overtures towards Urban II, who was a moderate church leader who welcomed the opportunity to respond in kind. In 1095 the two sides often regarded each other with suspicion, but they did not necessarily regard each other as heretical and schismatic, and were often prepared to work together as fellow Christians.

Furthermore, we have absolutely no evidence that Urban himself 'preached a Crusade'; the earliest extant transcriptions of his speech - which don't agree with each other - were written 5-10 years after the events, and after Urban was dead. There is every reason to believe that they follow in the classical tradition of having historical figures say what they were rhetorically supposed to have said, rather than the boring thing they actually said. What we do have are the letters of Urban to various European rulers, and these make almost no mention of marching to Jerusalem; while he does indeed offer remission of sins for participants, the emphasis is almost entirely on "liberating the Eastern [sometimes Asian] Churches" from Muslim occupation. There is every reason to believe that the subsequent mass movement of soldiers and peasants was a product of spontaneous preaching by individuals who took up, misunderstood, and exaggerated Urban's message, and that deus vult didn't make its appearance as a propaganda slogan until after Urban lost control of the preaching. Significantly, Anna Comnena's Alexiad - the main Byzantine primary source for the period - lays the blame on the "whole of the west and all the barbarians who lived between the Adriatic and the Straits of Gibraltar [migrating] in a body to Asia, marching across Europe country by country..." (Alexiad Book 10) squarely on the shoulders of itinerant preachers like Peter the Hermit rather than the Pope.

Once the serious military leaders turned up, Alexius dealt with them with real skill (he had already dealt with Peter the Hermit's thousands of unruly looting peasants by marching him into Anatolia, and turning a blind eye when they were massacred by the Turks). He had each of them swear in turn a western-style oath of fealty to the Emperor for any previously Byzantine territories (as in pre-Manzikert territories) that they might conquer. A joint Byzantine-Crusader action took Nicea, and Alexius used the Crusader victory at Dorylaeum and the subsequent chaos caused by their march across Anatolia to reconquer and consolidate Byzantine control over coastal and western Asia Minor - precisely the reason why he had asked for mercenaries in the first place. While disappointed by Bohemond's and Baldwin's refusal to recognise Byzantine overlordship over Antioch and Edessa - the main Crusader states that fell fully under the 'previously Byzantine territory' oath - he hadn't expected to take immediate or full control of either state anyway as his focus was wholly on the far more important war with the Seljuks. The oath he forced the Crusader leaders to swear was long-term planning, and it worked in so far as his son and grandson John II and Manuel I were able to use this to frequently exercise their claims to western-style feudal suzerainty over both territories (or what survived of Edessa, anyway).

Given what happened after the fall of the Comnenian Dynasty - especially given the events of the Fourth Crusade - it's easy to retrospectively judge the Byzantine request for Papal assistance in 1095 as poorly judged. But at the time it was, again, a rational decision by an intelligent and capable leader, and from the period between the Crusaders' arrival at Constantinople in 1097 and the death of Manuel I in 1181, the Byzantine response to the Crusades was effective and efficient. And if it did all go pear-shaped in 1204, that says far more about the state of the Byzantine government under the disastrous rule of the Angelos dynasty than it does about Alexius' initial decision to ask the Pope for mercenary assistance.

Incidentally, I'd highly recommend the Alexiad for a broader insight into the Byzantine perspective of the period. Anna Comnena is - naturally enough - biased towards her father, but she's a shrewd and perceptive judge of events. It's available in a paperback Penguin Classics edition.

[-Imperial Japan]

Japanese empire.
They were the only ones capable of world domination.

[Corporate-Entities]

Ancient Egypt

[Tergnitz]

Roman - American - British, In that order

[Meowfoundland]

Byzantines and the Ottomans. They both had amazing cultures and their histories are fun.

[St George of England]

Japanese empire.
They were the only ones capable of world domination.

Lolwhut?

Ancient Egypt

Which one are we talking about? Ptolemaic or one of the others?

[-Imperial Japan]

Japanese empire.
They were the only ones capable of world domination.

Lolwhut?

Ancient Egypt

Which one are we talking about? Ptolemaic or one of the others?

During WW2 they had a great shot!!
If they got Australia then they would have ruled the world!!

[St George of England]

Lolwhut?

Which one are we talking about? Ptolemaic or one of the others?

During WW2 they had a great shot!!
If they got Australia then they would have ruled the world!!

Not really. They would've been overstretched in the Pacific and the losses at Midway meant that any occupying army in Australia (likely to take heavy casualties as Australian Paramilitary units attacked from the outback) would've been at risk from a counter attack launched from New Zealand.