教会历史有多假？
教会历史有多假？格里高利政变和与生俱来的盗窃
这是三篇文章中的第二篇，提请人们关注公元一千年欧洲历史上的主要结构性问题。在第一篇文章（“罗马古代有多假？”）中，我们认为文艺复兴时期古籍的伪造比通常承认的更为普遍，因此我们认为我们对罗马帝国的了解——包括最重要的事件和人物——都建立在可疑的来源之上。（我们并没有声称所有关于罗马帝国的书面资料都是假的。我们还认为，第一个千年的传统观点被偏袒罗马的强烈偏见所扭曲，而牺牲了君士坦丁堡。拜占庭帝国作为罗马帝国最后阶段的共同表现，其首都已从拉蒂姆转移到博斯普鲁斯海峡，今天被认为是伪造的。在政治、文化、语言和宗教上，拜占庭不欠罗马任何东西。“希腊人相信他们自己的文化远远优于罗马的文化，他们几乎不接受罗马文明的影响，”最近的《罗马帝国地图集》指出，只提到角斗士战斗是一种可能的，但边缘的债务。西方文明起源于意大利罗马的假设部分依赖于对“罗马”一词的误解。我们现在所说的“拜占庭帝国”（这个术语在 16 世纪才成为习惯）当时被称为 Basileía tôn Rhômaíôn（罗马人的王国），在第一个千年的大部分时间里，“罗马”只是指我们今天所理解的“拜占庭”。我们认为罗马是西方文明的起源和中心，这也与我们确信拉丁语是所有罗曼语系语言之母有关。但是这种亲子关系在十九世纪中叶成为一种教条，受到严重攻击（我们感谢引导我们观看这部纪录片和那部纪录片的评论者，感谢伊夫·科尔特斯（Yves Cortez）的书《Le Français ne vient pas du latin》以及马里奥·阿利内（Mario Alinei）的作品）。但丁在《通俗雄辩》（De vulgari eloquecentia，约1303年）中假设拉丁语是一种“由许多民族的共同同意”创造的用于书面目的的人造合成语言，这似乎是正确的。造成我们第一个千年教科书历史的歪曲既有地理层面，也有时间层面。地理扭曲是欧洲中心主义的一部分，现在正受到詹姆斯·莫里斯·布劳特（James Morris Blaut）（《殖民者的世界模型》（The Colonizer's Model of the World，吉尔福德出版社，1993年）、约翰·霍布森（John M. Hobson）（《西方文明的东方起源》（The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization，剑桥大学出版社，2004年）或杰克·古迪（Jack Goody）（《历史的盗窃》，剑桥大学出版社，2012年）等学者的挑战。另一方面，时间顺序的扭曲在主流学术界还不是一个问题：历史学家根本不质疑第一个千年的时间顺序。他们甚至不问自己它是何时、如何以及由谁创建的。到目前为止，我们已经提出了一个有效的假设，即西罗马帝国在某种程度上是东罗马帝国的幻影复制品，是罗马为了从君士坦丁堡窃取与生俱来的权利而召唤出来的，同时隐瞒了它对它密谋暗杀的文明的债务。换句话说，罗马帝国是一个梦，而不是一个记忆，就像所罗门帝国一样。但是，人们会立即反对，虽然考古学家没有发现所罗门帝国的踪迹，但奥古斯都帝国的遗迹却很多。没错，但这些遗迹真的来自古代吗，如果是这样，为什么中世纪的遗迹在罗马无处可寻？如果罗马是中世纪西方基督教世界跳动的心脏，它应该忙于建设，而不仅仅是修复。罗马公社成立于 1144 年，是一个共和国，拥有执政官和参议院，紧随其他意大利城市之后（1085 年的皮斯、1097 年的米兰、1099 年的吉恩、1100 年的佛罗伦萨）。它用短语senatus populusque romanus（“元老院和罗马人民”）来定义自己，浓缩在首字母缩略词SPQR中。从 1184 年开始，直到 16 世纪初，罗马城开始用这些字母铸造硬币。但是，我们被告知，SPQR 已经是公元前 509 年建立的第一个罗马共和国的标志，更令人难以置信的是，它被皇帝保存下来，他们显然不介意被忽视。尽管听起来很离谱，但人们不能轻易撇开这种怀疑，即由于彼特拉克的“拼凑”提图斯·李维的《罗马史》，我们才知道古罗马共和国，是一幅富有想象力的中世纪晚期罗马古色古香的肖像。彼特拉克是庆祝罗马过去辉煌的意大利宣传家圈子的一员。法国中世纪学者雅克·希尔斯（Jacques Heers）写道：“他的意图是故意政治化的，他的做法是真正斗争的一部分。他是“他那个时代最恶毒的作家之一，卷入了一场与阿维尼翁教皇的大争吵，这种无情的战斗决定了他的文化和政治选择。在第一篇文章中，我们质疑了那些声称要复活共和和帝国罗马长期被遗忘的辉煌的人文主义者的客观性甚至正直性。在第二篇文章中，我们将注意力转向早期的教会历史学家，他们塑造了我们对古代晚期和中世纪早期的看法。他们关于基督教会的历史，由行神迹的圣人和恶魔般的异教徒组成，很难与政治史联系起来，专门研究古代晚期的世俗历史学家通常乐于将该领域留给“教会历史学家”和信仰教师。这是一种耻辱，因为这些文献的可信度基本上没有受到挑战。宗座伪造工厂“可以说，早期基督教文学最显著的特征是它的伪造程度。”因此，伯特·埃尔曼（Bert Ehrman）开始了他的著作《伪造与反伪造：早期基督教论战中文学欺骗的运用》（Forgery and Counterforgery： The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics）。他说，在公元前四个世纪，伪造是基督教文学的规则，真正的作者身份是例外。赝品是如此系统性，以至于赝品引起了反赝品，即“用来反驳其他赝品观点”的赝品。如果伪造是基督教DNA的一部分，我们可以预期它将在整个中世纪持续下去。中世纪最著名的赝品之一是“君士坦丁的捐赠”。根据这份文件，君士坦丁大帝应该已经将自己对帝国西部地区的权力移交给了教皇西尔维斯特。这种令人发指的大胆伪造是大约一百个伪造的法令和宗教会议行为的核心，这些法令和法案归因于最早的教皇或其他教会要人，今天被称为伪伊西多里安十周年纪念日。他们的目的是为教皇对普世教会以及国王和皇帝行使主权权威开创先例。这些文件直到 11 世纪中叶才被使用，直到 12 世纪，格拉蒂安才将它们纳入他的 Decretum，成为所有教会法的基础。然而，学术界的共识是，它们可以追溯到查理曼大帝时代。出于这个原因，中世纪赝品专家霍斯特·福尔曼（Horst Fuhrmann）将它们归类为“具有预见性特征的赝品”，这些赝品“具有在书写时几乎没有任何效果的特征”。据他介绍，根据具体情况，这些假货必须等待 250 到 550 年才能使用。赫里伯特·伊利格（Heribert Illig）正确地抗议了这种伪造理论，据称这些理论是由神职人员撰写的，他们没有立即使用它们，也不知道他们的伪造品在几个世纪后可以达到什么目的。赝品是为项目服务的，并在需要时按需制作。因此，君士坦丁的捐赠和其他虚假的十进制很可能是格里高利改革的纯粹产物。他们的“预期性特征”是由我们着手纠正的按时间顺序扭曲之一造成的错觉。
君士坦丁大帝对教皇西尔维斯特的捐赠图示
1049年教皇利奥九世即位时开始的格里高利改革是强大的克吕尼本笃会修道院发起的修道院复兴的延续，该修道院在910年成立一个世纪后，已经建立了一个由欧洲各地一千多座修道院组成的网络。格里高利改革可以被看作是欧洲的僧侣政变，从某种意义上说，曾经生活在社会边缘的独身僧侣逐渐接管了欧洲的领导权。值得坚持格里高利改革的革命性。马克·布洛赫（Marc Bloch）在《封建社会》（Feudal Society）一书中写道，这是一场非常强大的运动，毫不夸张地说，拉丁基督教的确切形成可以从中追溯到。最近，罗伯特·摩尔（Robert I. Moore）在《第一次欧洲革命》（The First European Revolution， c. 970-1215）中写道：“格里高利纲领所体现的'改革'无非是将世界（包括人和财产）划分为两个截然不同的自治领域，而不是在地理上按社会划分。改革在1215年由英诺森三世召集的第四次拉特兰会议上取得了胜利。拉特兰四世创造的世界是“一个完全不同的世界——一个充斥着并越来越多地被与'信仰时代'或中世纪基督教的传统愿景相关的训练有素的虔诚和服从所塑造的世界。然而，从某种意义上说，拉特兰四世只是一个开始：1234年，英诺森三世的堂兄格里高利九世建立了宗教裁判所，但猎巫的伟大时期——与异教的最后一战——还有两个世纪。哈罗德·伯曼（Harold Berman）在他的著作《法律与革命，西方法律传统的形成》（哈佛大学，1983年）中也坚持认为格里高利改革具有革命性，通过这种改革，“神职人员成为欧洲第一个实现政治和法律统一的跨地方、跨部落、跨封建、跨国的阶级。“当然，谈论罗马教会内部的革命性变革，就是挑战正统派（尽管不是东正教）的观点，即罗马天主教会的结构是逐渐阐述从很早时代就存在的要素的结果。事实上，这是十一世纪末和十二世纪初天主教改革家的官方观点：他们说，他们只是回到了被他们的前辈背叛的早期传统。换句话说，改革者们打着恢复古代世界秩序的幌子，建立了新的世界秩序。他们创造了一个新的过去，以控制未来。为此，他们雇佣了一支立法大军，他们制定了一种新的规范法律体系来取代习惯封建法律，并通过大规模制造伪造品使他们的新法律体系显得最古老的法律体系。除了伪伊西多利亚的十进制和君士坦丁的虚假捐赠外，他们还制作了西玛基亚的伪造品，注定要产生法律先例，使教皇免受批评。其中一份文件，西尔维斯特里宪法，包含教皇西尔维斯特一世的传说圣用洗礼的水治愈君士坦丁大帝的麻风病，并感谢君士坦丁的帝国徽章和罗马城。查理曼大帝的父亲也被迫为丕平的虚假捐赠做出贡献。现在人们承认，绝大多数据称在九世纪之前建立的法律文件都是文书伪造的。根据法国历史学家洛朗·莫雷尔（Laurent Morelle）的说法，“以墨洛温王朝国王（481-751）的名义命名的行为中有三分之二被确定为虚假或伪造。实际比例很可能要高得多，而且许多仍然被认为是真实的文件是伪造的：例如，我们认为，克吕尼修道院的创始人威廉一世（虔诚者）放弃了对它的所有控制权，其基础宪章的措辞不可能是由中世纪的阿基坦公爵（实际上是国王）口授或认可的。这些假文件在几个方面为教皇服务。他们被用于与德国皇帝的权力斗争，支持他们奢侈的主张，即教皇可以废黜皇帝。在对拜占庭教会和帝国发动的地缘政治战争中，它们也是强大的武器。通过赋予教皇“对亚历山大、安条克、耶路撒冷和君士坦丁堡这四个主要教区以及全地所有上帝教会的至高无上的权力”，君士坦丁的虚假捐赠证明了罗马对君士坦丁堡的优先权，这导致了 1054 年的大分裂，并最终在 1205 年被拉丁人洗劫了君士坦丁堡。具有讽刺意味的是，君士坦丁捐赠的虚假性在1430年被揭露出来，因为它达到了目的。到那时，东方帝国已经失去了所有领土，沦为一个被奥斯曼帝国围困的人口稀少的城市。鲜为人知，但对于理解中世纪非常重要，当时种族在政治中发挥了重要作用，格里高利改革者是法兰克人，甚至在埃吉斯海姆-达格斯堡的布鲁诺作为教皇利奥九世第一次推动之前。这就是为什么东正教神学家约翰·罗曼尼德斯（John Romanides）指责法兰克人以种族和地缘政治动机破坏了基督教世界的统一。在拜占庭编年史中，“拉丁语”和“弗兰克”是同义词。拉丁教会的假自传现在应该清楚的是，格里高利“改革”的概念本身就是改革者计划的革命性质的伪装;“认为格里高利人是严格的传统主义者的想法是一种严重的过度简化，”约翰·梅恩多夫（John Meyendorff）和阿里斯泰德斯·帕帕达基斯（Aristeides Papadakis）认为;“将格里高利主义者视为一贯统一传统的捍卫者的传统结论在很大程度上是虚构的。”事实上，在十二世纪之前，“教皇对西方基督教世界的脆弱控制在很大程度上是虚构的。罗马政治的狭隘世界实际上是教皇的唯一领域。阿维亚德·克莱因伯格（Aviad Kleinberg）甚至认为，“直到12世纪，当教皇的地位被强加为教育和管辖权事务的最高宗教权威时，还没有一个真正可以称为'教会'的组织。在八世纪末之前，当然没有现代意义上的“教皇”：这个亲切的头衔源自希腊的papa，被赋予了每个主教。甚至传统历史也谈到了“拜占庭教皇”时期，该时期以 752 年法兰克人征服意大利而告终，并教导当时民事、军事甚至教会事务都在拜占庭皇帝的希腊代表拉文纳主教的监督之下。这意味着西方教会自己所写的第一个千年历史完全是假的。它的核心作品之一，Liber Pontificalis，一本从圣彼得到九世纪的教皇传记书，今天被公认为一部想象力的作品。它有助于确定教皇声称占据“圣彼得的宝座”，这条链条可以追溯到第一位使徒——耶稣建立王国的“磐石”（马太福音 16,18）。故事是这样的，在克劳狄斯的第二年，彼得前往罗马挑战所有异端教派之父西门·马格斯。他成为第一位天主教主教，并在尼禄的最后一年被钉在十字架上，然后埋葬在圣彼得大教堂现在所在的位置（他的骨头于 1968 年在那里被发现）。这个故事出现在罗马的克莱门特的作品中，他是虚构的旅伴和彼得的继任者，他多产的拉丁文学包含如此多的不可能、矛盾和不合时宜，以至于其中大部分今天被认为是杜撰的，并更名为“伪克莱门汀”。彼得的故事也是《Petri》的主题，据说在二世纪用希腊语写成，但只有拉丁语译本幸存下来。里昂的爱任纽（约公元 130-202 年）也讲述了它，另一位作者据说是用希腊语写作的，但只能通过有缺陷的拉丁语翻译来了解。没有理由把这个故事当作可靠的历史。这是不言而喻的宣传。此外，它与新约不一致，新约没有提到彼得前往罗马，并假设他只是耶路撒冷教会的领袖。罗马圣彼得的传说没有告诉我们任何真实事件，但告诉我们罗马教廷从东方教会窃取长子权利的手段。这是铸造的假币，以高价竞标君士坦丁堡的真实主张，即教会的统一已经在其附近，即所谓的“普世”议会（Oikouménê 指定了 basileus 权威下的文明世界），其参与者完全是东方人。虽然我们不能在这里深入研究新约的编辑历史，但有趣的是，保罗前往罗马的故事也带有伪造的印记。如果我们记得拜占庭人称自己为“罗马人”，我们就会对这样一个事实感到好奇，即保罗在他的“给罗马人的书信”（用希腊语写成）中称罗马人为“希腊人”，以区别于犹太人（1,14-15;3,9）。此外，如果我们在地图上查一下保罗在其他书信中提到的城市——以弗所、哥林多、加拉塔、腓立比、塞萨洛尼基（萨洛尼卡）、歌罗西——我们就会发现意大利罗马不是他势力范围的一部分。保罗在使徒行传27-28章中前往意大利的罗马之行（其中明确地提到了意大利）属于使徒行传的“我们部分”，这与第一次编辑显然是陌生的。我们关于教会早期历史的主要来源是尤西比乌斯的《教会史》，共十卷。像许多其他来源一样，它应该是用希腊语写成的，但在中世纪只以拉丁语翻译（后来又被翻译成希腊语）而闻名。它的拉丁文翻译归功于伟大的圣人和学者杰罗姆（Hieronymus）。 圣杰罗姆还应教皇达马苏斯的要求，制作了被称为 Vulgate 的拉丁文圣经，该圣经将在 16 世纪中叶的特伦特会议上被宣布为唯一授权版本。尤西比乌斯是我们关于君士坦丁皈依基督教的主要来源。君士坦丁的两部诗歌被保存下来，它们没有提到基督教。取而代之的是，其中一本包含君士坦丁对太阳神阿波罗的异象的故事，“胜利伴随着他”。从那时起，君士坦丁将自己置于 Sol invictus 的保护之下，在他的一些硬币上也被称为 Sol pacator。尤西比乌斯在他的《君士坦丁生平》中关于米尔维安桥战役的内容显然是对早期异教传说的改写。当进军罗马推翻马克森提乌斯时，君士坦丁“在天上亲眼看到一个十字架的战利品，从太阳的光芒中升起，上面写着'凭着这个标志，你必赢'。第二天晚上，基督在梦中向他显现，证实了这个异象。君士坦丁让他所有的军队在他们的盾牌上画上标志并赢得了战斗。尤西比乌斯将这个符号描述为希腊字母 Chi 和 Rho 叠加在一起，并告诉我们它代表了克里斯托斯的前两个字母。直到查士丁尼时代，这种 Chi-Rho 标志在各种各样的马赛克和浮雕中都可以找到，在比利牛斯山脉地区尤为常见，通常带有一个 sigma，如本专著中所记录的那样。一些人假设它在异教时代具有 pax 的意思。无论情况是否如此，都没有证据表明 Chi-Rho 是基督教血统。
Chi-Rho 与基督有什么关系？
我希望表明，对罗马教会的自传有充分的理由持怀疑态度。伪造的不仅仅是法律文件。整个潜在的叙述可能是虚假的。在17世纪末和18世纪初，耶稣会图书管理员让·哈杜安（Jean Hardouin，1646-1729）花了一生的时间研究和质疑教会历史，直到他得出结论，13世纪本笃会修道院发生了一起大规模的欺诈行为。他的结论在他死后发表在Ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum Prolegomena（1766年）中。根据哈杜安的说法，所有归因于奥古斯丁、杰罗姆、米兰的安布罗斯和格里高利大帝的作品，实际上都是在狡猾的博尼法斯八世（1294-1303 年）将他们提升为“教会的拉丁教父”之前几十年写成的。根据哈杜安的说法，杰罗姆翻译的尤西比乌斯的历史是一个虚构的网络。19世纪，埃德温·约翰逊（Edwin Johnson，1842-1901）将《让·哈杜安的序言》翻译成英文，他将哈杜安的见解融入了自己的作品中，从《基督教世界的兴起》（1890年）开始，一年后又出版了《英国文化的兴起》。约翰逊认为大多数文学资料都起源于古代或古代晚期，并坚持认为罗马教会的整个一千年历史都是罗马教廷为了强加其新的世界秩序而捏造的。约翰逊说，这些文本的中世纪起源解释了为什么它们所谓的作者正在与异端作斗争，这些异端与中世纪教会所反对的异端邪说非常相似。被里昂的德尔图良、奥古斯丁和爱任纽攻击的摩尼教徒和诺斯替教徒，就像十二世纪和十三世纪教皇在同一教派下攻击的那些人的幽灵。根据帕特里夏·施蒂恩曼（Patricia Stirnemann）的说法，奥古斯丁（Augustine）的《浮士德》（Contra Faustus）最古老的手稿在克莱尔沃修道院（Clairvaux）书写和保存，是反对“12世纪新摩尼教复兴”的斗争的见证第世纪“（她没有质疑这部作品的作者身份，但给了我们额外的理由）。根据约翰逊的说法，十字军对东方的拉丁殖民的背景在古代晚期的许多虚假来源中是透明的。杰罗姆的传记就是一个很好的例子：“他被要求从阿奎莱亚到罗马，从罗马到伯利恒和埃及。他定居在伯利恒，紧随其后的是罗马女士，她们在那里找到了一个尼姑庵，他在那里死了。这反映了后来十字军东征期间发生的事情。君士坦丁也是如此：他被钉十字架的标志征服的传说带有十字军东征时代的标志，“当时军人受到僧侣的影响”。如果所有第一千年的教会历史都是虚假的，我们怎么能重建格里高利改革之前教会的真实历史呢？约翰逊说，当时没有西方基督教：西方教会是“一个纯粹的中世纪机构，与过去既没有文学上的联系，也没有口头上的联系”，它的寓言“直到十字军东征时代才在世界上听说过”。一个不那么激进的假设是，基督教只是在格里高利改革后才成为西方的主导力量。无论如何，有充分的证据表明，它强加其宗教霸权与其说是通过破坏异教传统，不如说是通过挪用异教传统。对巴黎圣母院的崇拜在很大程度上归功于伯纳德·德·克莱尔沃（Bernard de Clairvaux，1090-1153 年），它被叠加在对黛安和伊希斯的崇拜之上。格里高利改革者所做的是改写历史，以制造基督教在欧洲已有1000年历史的错觉。并非所有来源都是从头开始编写的。许多只是经过了大量编辑。一个例子是尊者比德（672-735）的《英国人民的教会史》。詹姆斯·沃森（James Watson）表明，它最初是一部英国人民的历史，没有提到基督教;沃森说，它在十世纪被大量插入，当时“作品中的大部分教会通知都与原始历史相结合”。一个稍微不同的例子是波伊提乌斯（约480-524）的基督教化，他在阿贝拉德时代变成了基督教神学家和殉道者，尽管他著名的《哲学的安慰》丝毫没有提到他所谓的基督教信仰。至于《法兰克人的历史》，据说是图尔的格雷戈里在六世纪末写的，几乎是我们关于克洛维斯皈依天主教的唯一资料，它很可能是格里高利时期的神职人员伪造的，可能使用了更早的来源。有趣的是，我们的伪图尔的格雷戈里（也许是克吕尼的奥迪洛，他写了《格里高利的一生》）认为中世纪的强国有可能策划所有书籍的系统重写：他写道，柴尔德里克国王在拉丁字母中引入了新的符号，并“希望用浮石抹去所有旧手稿， 制作其他副本，其中将使用新标志“（第四章）。十一世纪的编年史家是了解欧洲基督教化的重要来源。梅泽堡的蒂特马尔在他的《编年史》中谈到了 1004 年照亮世界的新黎明，法国僧侣 Rodulfus Glaber 写道：“在1000年之后的第三年临近时，几乎在地球上，特别是在意大利和高卢，教堂都得到了重建。虽然他们的状态很好，不需要它，但整个基督徒都在争夺最美丽的教堂。就好像世界本身，摇晃着它年老的破布，用教堂的白色披风覆盖了自己。然后，在信徒的倡议下，几乎所有的教堂，从大教堂到供奉各种圣徒的修道院，再到小村庄的礼拜堂，都被重建了，只是更漂亮了“（第四卷，第13节）。由于罗杜尔弗斯是在克鲁尼亚克的监督下写作的（他将自己的作品献给了克鲁尼·奥迪洛的住持），我们必须警惕他声称看似新的东西实际上是旧的，因为这是格里高利“改革者”的幌子。因为他说教会“处于良好状态”，所以他们的“重建”可能是对他们重新奉献给新邪教的轻描淡写。据报道，格里高利大帝（Gregory the Great，590-604 年）似乎是格里高利七世的复制品，他建议将异教徒的寺庙驱赶并重新用于基督教崇拜，法国的许多当地传统都断言罗马式教堂最初是前基督教的圣所。至于“大教堂”，它们的名字来源于希腊语，指的是一座皇家建筑，更准确地说是巴西里乌斯权威下的司法法庭。教科书历史说，随着罗马帝国接受基督教，大教堂的基本建筑计划被整个欧洲的主要教堂建筑所采用，但这种解释有一种退缩的感觉。
拉文纳的圣维塔莱拜占庭大教堂
实际上，西方基督教在公元 1000 年还处于起步阶段。至于它诞生于东方，它笼罩在神秘之中，因为任何真正的希腊资料可以告诉我们，要么被销毁，要么被大量编辑。这个主题超出了本文的范围，但让我们简单地问：查士丁尼在六世纪建造的大教堂是献给基督教并命名为圣索菲亚大教堂（圣智）的吗？索菲亚是哲学家的女神，而不是牧师，雅克·德·沃拉金（Jacques de Voragine）在十三世纪宣传的“圣人苏菲”无法掩盖这一事实。埃德温·约翰逊（Edwin Johnson）认为，基督教和伊斯兰教诞生于同一时期。可以说，圣索菲亚大教堂在反偶像者利奥三世（717-741）统治期间被基督教化，当时它被剥夺了所有的圣像和雕塑作品，或者在842年被重新装饰。我们现在已经到了可以重新考虑我们第一篇文章中的工作假设之一的地步：尽管法国学者波利多·霍查尔（Polydor Hochart）完全有理由质疑基督教僧侣在珍贵的羊皮纸上抄写异教书籍的流行理论，我们必须考虑另一种理论，即那些在九世纪到十一世纪抄写人文主义者在十四世纪发现的手稿的人实际上不是基督徒。这将在我们的下一个变得更加清晰。君士坦丁堡与生俱来的权利被盗我们该何去何从？假设第一个千年的历史被教皇抄写员和后来的人文主义者的伪造严重扭曲，我们能否评估这种扭曲的程度并重建一幅可信的图景？我们能做的最好的事情就是把自己定位在十一世纪，这是我们有大量编年史的最早时期。在那个时期，我们也许可以相信历史学家会给我们一个大致准确的欧洲、北非和近东世界的图景，而且，回顾几个世纪后，我们可以试着辨别导致那个世界的历史运动。除此之外，一切都是模糊的。从地理上讲，我们不妨将自己定位在我们试图理解的世界的中心。那个中心不是罗马。尽管罗马的宣传在10世纪和11世纪称赞Mirabilia Urbis Romae（“罗马城的奇观”），但包括罗马在内的文明的政治，经济，文化和宗教中心是君士坦丁堡（亚历山大排在第二位）。在十一世纪，君士坦丁堡的城墙可以容纳西方十大城市。它的规模、建筑杰作和财富给西方游客留下了深刻的印象，以至于在法国小说《布卢瓦帕托诺佩》中，君士坦丁堡是天堂的名字。君士坦丁堡的经济繁荣取决于它位于伟大贸易路线十字路口的位置，丝绸等奢侈品贸易的垄断，大量的黄金货币供应，以及有效的税收管理（生意人对城市港口的任何交易征收10%的税）。希腊文化从君士坦丁堡辐射到世界的四个角落，从波斯和埃及到爱尔兰和西班牙。在十一世纪和十二世纪，哲学和科学著作（医学、天文学等）从希腊语到拉丁语的翻译运动非常广泛。希腊书籍也被翻译成波斯语和叙利亚语，并从那里被翻译成阿拉伯语。在他的著作《亚里士多德·圣米歇尔山》中。Les racines grecques de l'Europe chrétienne， Sylvain Gouguenheim 驳斥了中世纪哲学和科学的传播主要归功于穆斯林的普遍观点。实际上，希腊遗产直接从君士坦丁堡传播到意大利城市，也就是说，与君士坦丁虚构的翻译帝国相反。basileus 与埃及的法蒂玛王朝哈里发保持着良好的关系，后者在 960 年代从阿拔斯王朝手中征服了耶路撒冷和下叙利亚。在 1070 年代初期，拜占庭人和法蒂玛王朝之间的联盟因一个共同的威胁而得到加强：塞尔柱突厥人的入侵，他们控制了巴德达的哈里发。1071 年，他们在曼齐刻尔特战役中击败了拜占庭军队，并在安纳托利亚建立了朗姆苏丹国，首都位于距离君士坦丁堡仅一百公里的尼西亚。然后他们从法蒂玛王朝手中夺取了叙利亚的一部分，包括耶路撒冷。直到最近，人们普遍认为十字军东征是罗马教会对拜占庭皇帝阿莱克修斯·科穆宁（Alexios Komnenos）绝望求助的慷慨回应。西方当代编年史家就是这样呈现的，使用了阿莱克修斯写给佛兰德斯伯爵的一封伪造的信，前者在信中承认他对土耳其人的无能为力，并谦卑地乞求救援。事实上，皇帝并没有处于绝望的境地，他的要求只是让雇佣兵在他的指挥下作战，并帮助他从塞尔柱人手中夺回安纳托利亚。拜占庭人总是从外国吸引战士在他们的旗帜下服役，以换取帝国的慷慨，法兰克骑士在这种品质上受到高度赞赏。相反，乌尔班二世（克吕尼的前住持）想要组建一支军队，立即开始征服耶路撒冷，阿莱克修斯没有立即声称拥有这座城市，他会很乐意归还给法蒂玛王朝。一支由教皇使节指挥的十字军军队从来都不是阿莱克修斯所要求的，拜占庭人在看到它到来时感到担忧和怀疑。乔纳森·哈里斯（Jonathan Harris）写道：“阿莱克修斯和他的顾问们认为即将到来的十字军东征不是期待已久的盟友的到来，而是对Oikoumene的潜在威胁。他们担心圣墓的解放只是对君士坦丁堡进行某种险恶阴谋的借口。第一次十字军东征成功地在叙利亚和巴勒斯坦建立了四个拉丁国家，这构成了西方存在的基础，这种存在一直持续到 1291 年。十二世纪末，耶路撒冷被萨拉丁收复，教皇英诺森三世宣布了新的十字军东征，这是现代编号中的第四次十字军东征。这一次，拜占庭人对隐藏议程的恐惧被证明是完全合理的。法兰克骑士没有像官方宣布的那样经亚历山大港前往耶路撒冷，而是被狡猾的威尼斯人（主流历史学家在这里确实谈到了“威尼斯阴谋”）所欠债，向君士坦丁堡进发。1204 年 4 月，庞大的十字军军队深入这座城市，并在三天内洗劫了它。“自从这个世界被创造以来，如此巨大的财富既没有被看到，也没有被征服，”十字军罗伯特·德·克拉里在他的编年史中惊叹道。宫殿、教堂、修道院、图书馆被系统地掠夺，城市变得一团糟。建立在君士坦丁堡冒烟的废墟上的新法拉丁帝国只持续了半个世纪。盘踞在尼西亚（伊兹尼克）的拜占庭人慢慢收复了他们古老的部分领土，并于 1261 年在米海尔八世的指挥下，将法兰克人和拉丁人赶出君士坦丁堡。但这座城市只是它过去辉煌的阴影：希腊人被屠杀或逃离，教堂和修道院被亵渎，宫殿成为废墟，国际贸易停止。此外，教皇乌尔班四世下令在整个欧洲进行新的十字军东征，以从“分裂分子”手中夺回君士坦丁堡。志愿者很少。但在 1281 年，教皇马丁四世再次鼓励安茹的查尔斯（国王路易九世的兄弟）夺回君士坦丁堡并建立一个新的天主教帝国的计划。它失败了，但第四次十字军东征及其后果给拜占庭文明造成了致命的伤害，一个半世纪后，在存在一千年后，当奥斯曼帝国苏丹穆罕默德二世于 1453 年占领君士坦丁堡时，它崩溃了。著名的中世纪历史学家史蒂文·朗西曼（Steven Runciman）写道：“从来没有比第四次十字军东征更大的危害人类罪了。它不仅导致拜占庭过去倾心珍藏的所有宝藏遭到破坏或分散，而且对一个仍然活跃而伟大的文明造成了致命的伤害;但这也是一种巨大的政治愚蠢行为。它没有给巴勒斯坦的基督徒带来任何帮助。相反，它剥夺了他们潜在的帮手。它扰乱了整个基督教世界的防御。
圣马可的马匹，威尼斯人从君士坦丁堡掠夺而来
古典希腊有多古老？然而，对于西方，尤其是意大利来说，君士坦丁堡的洗劫开启了惊人的经济增长，最初是由大量掠夺的黄金推动的。十三世纪初，西方出现了第一批金币，到目前为止，西方只发行了银币（西西里岛和西班牙除外）。第四次十字军东征的文化效益也令人印象深刻：在随后的几年里，整个图书馆被掠夺一空，然后讲希腊语的学者开始将其翻译成拉丁语。可以毫不夸张地说，意大利人文主义的兴起是君士坦丁堡沦陷的间接影响。1438年的佛罗伦萨会议是天主教和东正教教会重新统一的最后一次尝试，是希腊文化向西方转移的重要日期。拜占庭皇帝约翰八世帕利奥洛格斯和牧首约瑟夫二世带着 700 名希腊人的随从和西方不为人知的古典书籍来到佛罗伦萨，包括柏拉图、亚里士多德、普鲁塔克、欧几里得和托勒密的手稿。“在文化上，在理事会上发生的古典文本、思想和艺术品从东到西的传播对 15 年代后期的艺术和学术产生了决定性的影响第-世纪意大利。1453年后，君士坦丁堡高雅文化的最后承载者逃离了奥斯曼帝国的统治，许多人为意大利文艺复兴的蓬勃发展做出了贡献。1463 年，科西莫·德·美第奇的佛罗伦萨宫廷结识了新柏拉图主义哲学家乔治·杰米斯托斯，被称为普莱托，他对柏拉图的论述使他们如此着迷，以至于他们决定在佛罗伦萨重建柏拉图学院。他们任命马西利奥·菲奇诺（Marsilio Ficino）为负责人，向他提供柏拉图作品的希腊文手稿，然后菲奇诺开始将整个语料库翻译成拉丁语。在挪用希腊遗产的同时，意大利人文主义者也忽视了他们对君士坦丁堡的债务。因此，直到最近，中世纪的研究都忽略了拜占庭对西方的影响，甚至忽略了拜占庭帝国在中世纪的重要性。剑桥大学教授保罗·斯蒂芬森（Paul Stephenson）在1972年评论说：“在我看来，将拜占庭历史从中世纪欧洲研究中剔除确实是对历史精神的不可原谅的冒犯。一个加重因素是，“拜占庭帝国和宗主教的所有档案实际上都在 1204 年被十字军洗劫时或 1453 年被土耳其人洗劫时灭亡。拜占庭两次被杀：在 1204 年洗劫它后，拉丁西方努力将其从集体记忆中抹去。正如史蒂文·朗西曼（Steven Runciman）所写：“西欧有着嫉妒拜占庭文明的祖先记忆，其精神顾问谴责东正教是有罪的分裂主义者，并怀着一种挥之不去的内疚感，认为它最终辜负了这座城市，选择忘记拜占庭。它不能忘记它欠希腊人的债务;但它认为这些债务只欠古典时代。然而，必须强调的是，在这个阶段，学者们并没有一个一致的全球年表，确切地可以追溯到希腊古典时代;这将是十六世纪耶稣会士的一个项目，我们将在下一篇文章中记录。法国拜占庭主义者米歇尔·卡普兰（Michel Kaplan）发表了一个有趣的评论，即研究从14世纪从君士坦丁堡进口的希腊文学的西方人文主义者“没有区分古典和希腊化希腊的作品与拜占庭时代的作品”。隐含的假设是，现代学者现在能够清楚地做出这种区分。但真的是这样吗？我们在之前的文章中提出的关于拉丁语来源的相同问题可以应用于希腊语来源。例如，我们有什么证据证明柏拉图的作品可以追溯到大约 2500 年前？柏拉图所有已知的手稿都来自一个独特的原型，可追溯到伟大的族长福提奥斯（约810-895）时期。正是在那个时候，拜占庭皇帝哲学家利奥“重新发现”并推广了柏拉图的知识，以及他的弟子波菲里、伊姆布利库斯和普罗提努斯的知识，我们现在称他们为新柏拉图主义者，并认为他们比柏拉图晚了七个世纪。然后是语言问题：俄亥俄州立大学的罗德里克·萨克西二世（Roderick Saxey II）等希腊学者对“即使在三千多年里，语言的变化也如此之小”感到困惑。哈佛大学教授玛格丽特·阿列克修（Margaret Alexiou）说：“荷马希腊语可能比十二世纪的中古英语更接近现代口语。如果我们假设语言的进化遵循普遍规律，那么荷马希腊语应该不会比中古英语古老得多。西尔万·特里斯坦（Sylvain Tristan）在他激动人心的书《重新约会古希腊》（Re-Dating Ancient Greece）中探讨了在第四次十字军东征后统治希腊大部分地区的法兰克人如何不仅为古典希腊文化向西方的传播做出了贡献，而且为它的阐述做出了贡献。特里斯坦还指出，法兰克希腊的建筑遗迹并不像人们想象的那样容易与古典时代的建筑区分开来。雅典卫城上曾经矗立着一座塔，当地人称之为法兰克塔，可能是由十三世纪初雅典公国的创始人奥通·德拉罗什建造的。虽然它是由与相邻建筑相同的石头制成的，但海因里希·施利曼（Heinrich Schliemann）认为它不合时宜，并于1874年将其拆除。订阅新列
1872年雅典卫城及其法兰克塔
根据我们的教科书年表，帕台农神庙建于 2,500 年前。它目前的状态似乎与如此古老的时代一致，但很少有人知道它在 1687 年仍然完好无损，当时它被威尼斯迫击炮发射的炸弹炸毁。法国画家雅克·凯瑞（Jacques Carrey）在1674年为它画了大约55幅画，后来用于修复。
1674 年的帕台农神庙，1687 年爆炸
我们被告知，在古代，帕台农神庙里有一尊巨大的雅典娜·帕特诺斯（“圣母”）雕像，而在六世纪，它变成了一座献给“圣母或雅典”的教堂，直到它被奥斯曼帝国变成了一座清真寺。奇怪的是，历史学家威廉·米勒（William Miller）在他的《法兰克希腊史》（History of Frankish Greece）中告诉我们，在1380年左右之前，中世纪文献中没有提到帕台农神庙，当时阿拉贡国王将其描述为“世界上最珍贵的宝石”。雅典卫城当时被称为“雅典城堡”。它从一开始就是一座中世纪的设防城市吗？古希腊是幻想吗？还是只是日期错误？在我们的假设框架中，在十一世纪和十五世纪之间，罗马发明或美化了自己的共和和帝国古代，作为欺骗君士坦丁堡与生俱来的权利的宣传，罗马也会发明或修饰拜占庭前的希腊文明，作为解释自己的希腊遗产的一种方式，而不承认它对君士坦丁堡的债务。为了解释希腊文化在到达罗马之前是如何充满世界的，亚历山大大帝和他的希腊化遗产也被发明出来了。亚历山大是一个传奇人物。根据他最清醒的传记，由于普鲁塔克，这位马其顿王子（受亚里士多德教育）在 22 岁时率领大约 30,000 人开始征服世界，建立了 70 座城市，并在 32 岁时去世，留下了从埃及延伸到波斯的完全形成的希腊语文明。西尔万·特里斯坦（Sylvain Tristan）在阿纳托利·福缅科（Anatoly Fomenko）之后评论说，在亚历山大之后统治小亚细亚的塞琉古人（Seleukidós）与1037年至1194年控制同一地区的塞尔柱人（Seljoukides）几乎同名。希腊化文明是拜占庭联邦的另一个幻影，在遥远的过去被推回去，以掩盖意大利对君士坦丁堡的债务？这样的假设似乎很牵强。但是，一旦我们意识到我们的年表是一个相对较新的结构，它就变得合理了。在中世纪，没有公认的长年表扫描千年。如果今天维基百科告诉我们亚历山大大帝出生于公元前 356 年 7 月 21 日，死于公元前 323 年 6 月 11 日，那仅仅是因为一些 16 世纪的学者使用任意猜测和圣经卷尺宣布了这一点。然而，随着考古学的最新进展，我们收到的年表所遇到的问题已经积累到一个临界点。这是西尔万·特里斯坦（Sylvain Tristan）提到的一个例子：“安提凯希拉机制”是由至少30个啮合的青铜齿轮组成的模拟计算机，用于预测天文位置和日食，用于提前几十年的日历和占星术目的。它于 1901 年在希腊安提凯希拉岛海岸附近的一艘沉船残骸中从海上打捞上来。它的历史可以追溯到公元前二世纪或公元前一世纪。根据维基百科的说法，“这项技术的知识在古代的某个时候就丢失了”，并且“直到十四世纪欧洲机械天文钟的发展，具有类似复杂性的作品才再次出现。当人们已经相信希腊天文学家萨摩斯岛的阿里斯塔克斯在公元前三世纪开发的日心说模型被完全遗忘，直到尼古拉斯·哥白尼在公元 16 世纪重新发明它时，这种 1,500 年的技术鸿沟也许更容易相信。但怀疑主义在这里没有学术共识那么奢侈。近年来，怀疑论者的数量有所增加，一些研究人员开始挑战他们所谓的斯卡利格年表（由约瑟夫·斯卡利格在他的《时间法》一书中标准化，1583 年）。我们将在下一篇文章中介绍的这些“近代主义者”中的大多数都集中在公元前一千年。他们认为，古代比我们想象的更接近我们，这太长了。他们实际上发现自己与文艺复兴时期的人文主义者一致，根据历史学家伯纳德·格内（Bernard Guenée）的说法，他们认为古代和他们的时代之间的“中世纪”（媒体风暴一词首次出现在1469年乔瓦尼·安德烈·布西（Giovanni Andrea Bussi）的通信中）“只不过是一个括号，介于两者之间”。1439 年，罗马第一位考古学家弗拉维奥·比昂多 （Flavio Biondo） 写了一本关于这一时期的书，书名是：罗马帝国恶化的几十年历史。乔治·瓦萨里（Giorgio Vasari）在他的《乔托生平》（1550年）中写道，乔托（1267-1337年）“使真正的绘画艺术复活了，从活人的自然中引入了绘画，这是两百年来从未实践过的。如果我们的中世纪被人为地延长了七个世纪或更多世纪，这是否意味着其中大部分都是纯粹的虚构？不一定。Gunnar Heinsohn 使用比较考古学和地层学（浏览他的文章或观看他的视频会议）认为，在整个古代、古代晚期和中世纪早期传播的事件实际上是当代的。换句话说，西罗马帝国、东（拜占庭）罗马帝国和日耳曼罗马帝国必须重新同步，并被视为同一个文明的一部分，该文明在十多个世纪前崩溃，在一场全球灾难性事件之后，引起了记忆的骚动和对世界末日救赎崇拜的品味。笔记 克莱尔·勒瓦塞尔（Claire Levasseur）和克里斯托夫·巴德尔（Christophe Badel），《罗马帝国地图集》（Atlas de l'Empire romain）：建筑和远地点：300 av. J.-C. – 200 apr.J.-C.，Édiions Autrement，2020 年，第 76 页。 最有影响力的是埃米尔·利特雷 （Émile Littré） 于 1862 年出版的《法国语言史》。 安杰洛·马佐科（Angelo Mazzocco），《但丁和人文主义者的语言理论：中世纪晚期和文艺复兴早期意大利的语言和思想史研究》，E.J.布里尔，1993年，第175页（books.google.com 阅读）。 用杰里·布罗顿（Jerry Brotton）的话来说，《文艺复兴时期的集市：从丝绸之路到米开朗基罗》，牛津大学出版社，2010年，第66页，正如《罗马古代有多假？ 雅克·希尔斯（Jacques Heers），Le Moyen Âge，une imposture，Perrin，1992年，第55-58页。 Bart D. Ehrman，《伪造与反伪造：早期基督教论战中文学欺骗的运用》，牛津大学出版社，2013年（books.google.com），第1、27页。 Heribert Illig，“异常时代——最佳证据：最佳理论”，2005 年 6 月，第www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/illig_paper.htm 页。 赫伯特·爱德华·约翰·考德雷（Herbert Edward John Cowdrey），《克鲁尼亚克与格里高利改革》，克拉伦登，1970年。 马克·布洛赫（Marc Bloch），《封建社会》，第1卷：依赖关系的增长，芝加哥大学出版社，1964年，第107页。 罗伯特·摩尔（Robert I. Moore），《第一次欧洲革命》，约970-1215年，巴兹尔·布莱克威尔（Basil Blackwell），第11、174页。 哈罗德·伯曼（Harold Berman），《法律与革命，西方法律传统的形成》，哈佛大学，1983年，第15、108页。 Laurent Morelle，“Des faux par milliers”，《历史》，第 372 期，2012 年 2 月。 转载自 F. Henderson， （Ed.）， Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages， George Bell and Sons， 1910 （on archive.org）， pp. 329-333. 约翰·罗曼尼德斯（John Romanides），《法兰克人，罗马人，封建主义和教义：神学与社会之间的相互作用》，雅典娜哥拉斯宗主教纪念讲座，圣十字东正教出版社，1981年，关于 www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm 约翰·梅恩多夫（John Meyendorff）和阿里斯泰德斯·帕帕达基斯（Aristeides Papadakis），《基督教东方与教皇的崛起》，圣弗拉基米尔神学院出版社，1994年，第55、167、27页。 阿维亚德·克莱因伯格（Aviad Kleinberg），《圣徒史》。Leur rôle dans la formation de l'Occident，Gallimard，2005年，第72页。 Andrew J. Ekonomou， 拜占庭罗马和希腊教皇：从格里高利大帝到撒迦利亚的东方对罗马和教皇的影响，公元 590-752 年，列克星敦图书，2009 年，第 43 页。 米歇尔·卡普兰（Michel Kaplan），Pourquoi Byzance？：Un empire de onze siècles，Folio/Gallimard，2016 年，第 55 页。 Robert Favreau、Bernadette Mora 和 Jean Michaud，“Chrismes du Sud-Ouest”，CNRS Editions，1985 年（Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale，10），第 www.persee.fr 帕特里夏·施蒂恩曼（Patricia Stirnemann），“圣奥古斯丁，反对浮士德”，sur www.bibliotheque-virtuelle-clairvaux.com，引自维基百科。 埃德温·约翰逊（Edwin Johnson），《基督教世界的兴起》（1890年），archive.org，第360页。 埃德温·约翰逊，《基督教世界的兴起》，同前，第50页。 埃德温·约翰逊，《基督教世界的兴起》，同前，第7、80页。 詹姆斯·沃森（James Watson），《比德的教会历史和其他影响苏格兰和爱尔兰早期历史的古代编年史中的插值》，皮布尔斯，1883年（archive.org），第9页。 Grégroire de Tours， Histoire des rois francs， Gallimard， 1990， chapitre IV， p. 103 拉乌尔·格拉伯（Raoul Glaber），《历史》，éd。等传统。Mathieu Arnoux，Turnhout，Brépols，1996 年，IV，第 13 节，第 163-165 页。 托马斯·克雷森（Thomas Creissen），“La christianisation des lieux de culte païens ： 'assassinat'， simple récupération ou mythe historiographique ？”， Gallia – Archéologie de la France antique， CNRS Éditions， 2014， 71 （1）， pp. 279-287， on hal.archives-ouvertes.fr 波利多·霍查特（Polydor Hochart），De l'authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite，1890 年（第 archive.org 年），第 3-5 页。 西尔万·古根海姆，《亚里士多德·圣米歇尔山》。Les racines grecques de l'Europe chrétienne， Seuil， 2008. 埃纳尔·乔兰森，“亚历克西斯皇帝给佛兰德斯伯爵的虚假信件的问题”，《美国历史评论》，第 55 卷第 4 期（1950 年 7 月），第 811-832 页，第www.jstor.org 页。 乔纳森·哈里斯（Jonathan Harris）， 拜占庭与十字军东征，汉布尔登连续体，2003年，第56页。 罗伯特·德·克拉里（Robert de Clari），《君士坦丁堡的会议》，Champion Classiques，2004年，第171页。 史蒂文·朗西曼， 十字军东征史，第 3 卷：阿卡王国和后来的十字军东征 （1954），企鹅经典，2016 年，第 123 页。 乔纳森·哈里斯，《拜占庭与十字军东征》，同前，第50页。 史蒂文·朗西曼，《十字军东征史》，第3卷，同前，第130页。 埃德温·亨特（Edwin Hunt），《中世纪的超级公司：佛罗伦萨佩鲁齐公司的研究》，剑桥大学，1994年。 杰里·布罗顿（Jerry Brotton），《文艺复兴集市：从丝绸之路到米开朗基罗》，牛津大学，2010年，第103页。 西尔万·特里斯坦（Sylvain Tristan）在他的著作《重新约会古希腊》（2008年）中指出了柏拉图和普莱托生活之间有趣的相似之处，并假设柏拉图实际上是普莱托的虚构人物。 保罗·斯蒂芬森， 拜占庭世界，劳特利奇，2012 年，第 xxi 页。 约翰·梅恩多夫， 拜占庭与俄罗斯的崛起，剑桥大学，1981 年，第 2 页。 史蒂文·朗西曼， 君士坦丁堡的陷落 1453 年，剑桥大学，1965 年，第 190 页。 米歇尔·卡普兰（Michel Kaplan），Pourquoi Byzance？Un empire de onze siècles，Folio/Gallimard，2016 年，第 39 页。订阅新列
罗德里克·萨克西二世（1998-99），“穿越时间的希腊语”，http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/greek.html 玛格丽特·阿列克修（Margaret Alexiou），“希腊的双语症”，威廉·哈斯（William Haas），标准语言：口语和书面语，曼彻斯特大学，1982年。 西尔万·特里斯坦（Sylvain Tristan），《重新确定古希腊的年代：公元前500年=公元1300年》，独立出版，2008年。 威廉·米勒（William Miller），《黎凡特的拉丁人：法兰克希腊史（1204-1566）》，P. Dutton&Co.，1908年（archive.org），第315、327页。 伯纳德·格内（Bernard Guenée），《中世纪西方历史与文化》，奥比尔，2011年，第9页。 大卫·卡雷特（David Carrette），《莫延·阿格的发明》（L'Invention du Moyen Âge）。La plus grande falsification de l'histoire，《绝密杂志》，Hors-série n°9,2014年，第43、53页。
This is the second of three articles drawing attention to major structural problems in our history of Europe in the first millennium AD. In the first article (“How fake is Roman Antiquity?”), we have argued that the forgery of ancient books during the Renaissance was more widespread than usually acknowledged, so that what we think we know about the Roman Empire — including events and individuals of central importance — rests on questionable sources. (We have not claimed that all written sources on the Roman Empire are fake.)We have also argued that the traditional perspective of the first millennium is distorted by a strong bias in favor of Rome, at the expense of Constantinople. The common representation of the Byzantine Empire as the final phase of the Roman Empire, whose capital had been transferred from the Latium to the Bosphorus, is today recognized as a falsification. Politically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously, Byzantium owes nothing to Rome. “Believing that their own culture was vastly superior to Rome’s, the Greeks were hardly receptive to the influence of Roman civilization,” states a recent Atlas de l’Empire Romain, mentioning only gladiator combats as a possible, yet marginal, debt.The assumption that Western civilization originated in Rome, Italy relies partly on a misunderstanding of the word “Roman”. What we now call “the Byzantine Empire” (a term that only became customary in the sixteenth century) was then called Basileía tôn Rhômaíôn (the kingdom of the Romans), and for most of the first millennium, “Roman” simply meant what we understand today as “Byzantine”.Our perception of Rome as the origin and center of Western civilization is also linked to our assurance that Latin is the mother of all Romance languages. But that filiation, which became a dogma in the mid-nineteenth century, is under severe attack (we thank the commenters who directed us to this documentary and that one, to Yves Cortez’s book Le Français ne vient pas du latin, and to Mario Alinei’s work). It seems that Dante was correct when he assumed in De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1303), the first treatise on the subject, that Latin was an artificial, synthetic language created “by the common consent of many peoples” for written purposes.The distortions that produced our textbook history of the first millennium have both a geographical and a chronological dimension. The geographical distortion is part of that Eurocentrism that is now being challenged by scholars like James Morris Blaut (The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Guilford Press, 1993), John M. Hobson (The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge UP, 2004), or Jack Goody (The Theft of History, Cambridge UP, 2012). The chronological distortion, on the other hand, is not yet an issue in mainstream academia: historians simply do not question the chronological backbone of the first millennium. They don’t even ask themselves when, how and by whom it was created.So far, we have formulated the working hypothesis that the Western Roman Empire is, to some extent, a phantom duplicate of the Eastern Roman Empire, conjured by Rome in order to steal the birthright from Constantinople, while concealing its debt to the civilization that it conspired to assassinate. The Roman Empire, in other words, was a dream rather than a memory, exactly like Solomon’s empire. But, one will instantly object, while archeologists have found no trace of Solomon’s empire, the vestiges of Augustus’ empire are plentiful. True, but are these vestiges really from Antiquity, and if so, why are medieval vestiges nowhere to be found in Rome? If Rome was the beating heart of medieval Western Christendom, it should have been busy constructing, not just restoring.The Commune of Rome was founded in 1144 as a Republic with a consul and a senate, in the wake of other Italian cities (Pise in 1085, Milano in 1097, Gene in 1099, Florence in 1100). It defined itself by the phrase senatus populusque romanus (“the Senate and the Roman people”), condensed in the acronym SPQR. Beginning in 1184 and until the early sixteenth century, the city of Rome struck coins with these letters. But, we are told, SPQR was already the mark of the first Roman Republic founded in 509 BC and, more incredibly, it was preserved by emperors, who apparently didn’t mind being thus ignored. As outrageous as it sounds, one cannot easily brush aside the suspicion that the ancient Roman Republic, known to us thanks to Petrarch’s “piecing together” Titus Livy’s History of Rome, is an imaginative portrait of late medieval Rome in antique garb. Petrarch was part of a circle of Italian propagandists who celebrated Rome’s past glory. “His intentions,” writes French medievalist Jacques Heers, “were deliberately political, and his approach was part of a real struggle.” He was “one of the most virulent writers of his time, involved in a great quarrel against the papacy of Avignon, and this relentlessness in fighting determined his cultural as well as political options.”In the first article, we have questioned the objectivity and even the probity of those humanists who claimed to resurrect the long forgotten splendor of Republican and Imperial Rome. In this second article, we turn our attention to ecclesiastical historians of earlier times, who fashioned our vision of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Their history of the Christian Church, peopled with miracle-performing holy men and diabolical heretics, is hard to connect with political history, and secular historians specialized in Late Antiquity are generally happy to leave the field to “Church historians” and teachers of faith. That is a shame, because the credibility of this literature has largely gone unchallenged.The pontifical forgery factory“Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree to which it was forged.” So Bert Ehrman begins his book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Throughout the first four centuries AD, he says, forgery was the rule in Christian literature, and genuine authorship the exception. Forgery was so systemic that forgeries gave rise to counterforgeries, that is, forgeries “used to counter the views of other forgeries.” If forgery is part of the DNA of Christianity, we can expect it to continue throughout the Middle Ages.One of the most famous medieval forgeries is the “Donation of Constantine.” By this document, Emperor Constantine is supposed to have transferred his own authority over the Western regions of the Empire to Pope Sylvester. This forgery of outrageous audacity is the centerpiece of a whole collection of about a hundred counterfeit decrees and acts of Synods, attributed to the earliest popes or other Church dignitaries, and known today as the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals. Their aim was to set forth precedents for the exercise of sovereign authority of the popes over the universal Church, as well as over kings and emperors.These documents were not used until the middle of the eleventh century, and it is not before the twelfth century that they were incorporated by Gratian into his Decretum, which became the basis of all canon law. Yet the scholarly consensus is that they date back from the time of Charlemagne. For that reason, Horst Fuhrmann, a specialist in medieval forgeries, classifies them as “forgeries with anticipatory character,” which “have the characteristic that at the time they were written, they had hardly any effect.” According to him, these fakes had to wait, depending on the case, between 250 and 550 years before being used. Heribert Illig rightly protests against this theory of forgeries allegedly written by clerics who had no immediate use of them and did not know what purpose their forgeries could serve a few centuries later. Forgeries are produced to serve a project, and they are made on demand when needed. The Donation of Constantine and other false Decretals are therefore most probably pure products of the Gregorian reform. Their “anticipatory character” is an illusion created by one of the chronological distortions that we have set out to correct.
Emperor Constantine’s donation to Pope Sylvester illustrated
The Gregorian reform, which started with the accession of Pope Leo IX in 1049, was a continuation of the monastic revival launched by the powerful Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, which a century after its foundation in 910 had developed a network of more than a thousand monasteries all over Europe. The Gregorian reform can be conceived as a monkish coup over Europe, in the sense that celibate monks, who used to live at the margin of society, progressively took the leadership over it.It is worth insisting on the revolutionary character of the Gregorian reform. It was, wrote Marc Bloch in Feudal Society, “an extraordinarily powerful movement from which, without exaggeration, may be dated the definite formation of Latin Christianity.” More recently, Robert I. Moore wrote in The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215: “The ‘reform’ which was embodied in the Gregorian program was nothing less than a project to divide the world, both people and property, into two distinct and autonomous realms, not geographically by socially.” The reform triumphed at the Fourth Lateran Council convoked by Innocent III in 1215. The world created by Lateran IV was “an entirely different world — a world pervaded and increasingly moulded by the well-drilled piety and obedience associated with the traditional vision of ‘the age of faith’, or medieval Christianity.” Yet in a sense, Lateran IV was only a beginning: in 1234, Innocent III’s cousin Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition, but the great period of witch-hunting — the last battle against paganism — was still two centuries away.In his book Law and Revolution, the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard UP, 1983), Harold Berman also insists on the revolutionary character of the Gregorian reform, by which “the clergy became the first translocal, transtribal, transfeudal, transnational class in Europe to achieve political and legal unity.” “To speak of revolutionary change within the Church of Rome is, of course, to challenge the orthodox (though not the Eastern Orthodox) view that the structure of the Roman Catholic Church is the result of a gradual elaboration of elements that had been present from very early times. This was, indeed, the official view of the Catholic Reformers of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries: they were only going back, they said, to an earlier tradition that had been betrayed by their immediate predecessors.” The Reformers, in other words, established a new world order under the pretense of restoring an ancient world order. They created a new past in order to control the future.For that, they employed an army of legists who elaborated a new canonical legal system to supersede customary feudal laws, and made their new legal system appear as the oldest by producing forgeries on a massive scale. Besides the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals and the false Donation of Constantine, they crafted the Symmachian forgeries, destined to produce legal precedents to immune the pope from criticism. One of these documents, the Silvestri constitutum, contains the legend of Pope Sylvester 1st curing Constantine the Great of leprosy with the waters of baptism, and receiving in gratitude Constantine’s imperial insignia and the city of Rome. Charlemagne’s father was also made to contribute with the false Donation of Pepin. It is now admitted that the vast majority of legal documents supposedly established before the ninth century are clerical forgeries. According to French historian Laurent Morelle, “two thirds of the acts entitled in the name of the Merovingian kings (481-751) have been identified as false or falsified.” It is very likely that the real proportion is much higher, and that many documents which are still deemed authentic are forgeries: for instance, it is our view that the wording of the foundation charter of the Abbey of Cluny, by which its founder William I (the Pious) renounced all control over it, cannot possibly have been dictated or endorsed by a medieval duke of Aquitaine (virtually a king).These fake documents served the popes on several fronts. They were used in their power struggle against the German emperors, by backing up their extravagant claim that the pope could depose emperors. They were also powerful weapons in the geopolitical war waged against the Byzantine church and empire. By bestowing on the papacy “supremacy over the four principal sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of God in the whole earth,” the false Donation of Constantine justified Rome’s claim for precedence over Constantinople, which led to the Great Schism of 1054 and ultimately the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1205. By a cruel irony, the spuriousness of the Donation of Constantine was exposed in 1430, after it had served its purpose. By then, the Eastern Empire had lost all its territories and was reduced to a depopulated city besieged by the Ottomans.It is little known, but of great importance for understanding medieval times, when ethnicity played a major part in politics, that the Gregorian reformers were Franks, even before Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg gave the first impulse as pope Leo IX. That is why Orthodox theologian John Romanides blames the Franks for having destroyed the unity of Christendom with ethnic and geopolitical motivations. In Byzantine chronicles, “Latin” and “Frank” are synonymous.The fake autobiography of the Latin ChurchIt should now be clear that the very concept of a Gregorian “reform” is a disguise for the revolutionary character of the reformers’ project; “the idea that Gregorians were rigorous traditionalists is a serious oversimplification,” argue John Meyendorff and Aristeides Papadakis; “the conventional conclusion which views the Gregorians as defenders of a consistently uniform tradition is largely fiction.” In fact, before the twelfth century, “the pope’s fragile hold upon Western Christendom was largely imaginary. The parochial world of Roman politics was actually the papacy’s only domain.” Aviad Kleinberg even argues that, “until the twelfth century, when the pope’s status was imposed as the ultimate religious authority in matters of education and jurisdiction, there was not really an organization that could be called ‘the Church’.” There certainly were no “popes” in the modern sense before the end of the eighth century: this affectionate title, derived from the Greek papa, was given to every bishop. Even conventional history speaks of the period of the “Byzantine papacy,” ending in 752 with the conquest of Italy by the Franks, and teaches that civil, military and even ecclesiastical affairs were then under the supervision of the exarch of Ravenna, the Greek representative of the Byzantine Emperor.This means that the first-millennium history of the Western Church written by itself is a complete sham. One of its centerpieces, the Liber Pontificalis, a book of biographies of the popes from saint Peter to the ninth century, is today recognized as a work of imagination. It served to ascertain the pope’s claim to occupy the “the throne of saint Peter” in an unbroken chain going back to the first apostle — the “rock” on which Jesus built his kingdom (Matthew 16,18).As the story goes, in the second year of Claudius, Peter went to Rome to challenge Simon Magus, the father of all heretical sects. He became the first Catholic bishop and was crucified head downwards in the last year of Nero, then buried where St. Peter’s Basilica now stands (his bones were found there in 1968). That story appears in the works of Clement of Rome, the fictional travelling companion and successor of Peter, whose prolific literature in Latin contains so many improbabilities, contradictions and anachronisms that most of it is today recognized as apocryphal and renamed “pseudo-clementine”. Peter’s story is also the theme of the Acta Petri, supposedly written in Greek in the second century but surviving only in Latin translation. It is also told by Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130-202 AD), another author supposedly writing in Greek but known only through defective Latin translations.There is no reason to take that story as reliable history. It is self-evident propaganda. Moreover, it is inconsistent with the New Testament, which says nothing of Peter’s travel to Rome, and assumes that he simply remained the head of the Jerusalem church. The legend of saint Peter in Rome tells us nothing about real events, but informs us about the means deployed by the Roman curia to steal the birthright from the Eastern Church. It is fake currency minted to overbid on Constantinople’s genuine claim that the unity of the Church had been achieved in its immediate vicinity, at the so-called “ecumenical” councils (Oikouménê designated the civilized world under the authority of the basileus), whose participants were exclusively oriental.Although we cannot delve here into the editorial history of the New Testament, it is interesting to note that the story of Paul’s travel to Rome also bears the mark of falsification. If we remember that the Byzantines called themselves “Romans”, we are intrigued by the fact that, in his “Epistle to the Romans” (written in Greek), Paul calls the Romans “Greeks” to distinguish them from Jews (1,14-15; 3,9). Moreover, if we look up on a map the cities addressed by Paul in other epistles — Ephesus, Corinth, Galata, Philipae, Thessaloniki (Salonica), Colossae — we see that Italian Rome was not part of his sphere of influence. Paul’s trip to Rome in Italy in Acts 27-28 (where Italy is explicitly named) belongs to the “we section” of Acts, which is recognizably foreign to the first redaction.Our main source for the early history of the Church is Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History in ten volumes. Like so many other sources, it was supposedly written in Greek, but was known in the Middle Ages only in Latin translation (from which it was later translated back into Greek). Its Latin translation was attributed to the great saint and scholar Jerome (Hieronymus). Saint Jerome also produced, at the request of Pope Damasus, the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, which would be decreed the sole authorized version at the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century.Eusebius is our main source on the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. Two panegyrics of Constantine have been preserved, and they make no mention of Christianity. Instead, one contains the story of a vision Constantine had of the sun-god Apollo, “with Victory accompanying him.” From then on, Constantine placed himself under the protection of Sol invictus, also called Sol pacator on some of his coins. What Eusebius writes in his Life of Constantine about the battle of the Milvian Bridge is obviously a rewriting of that earlier pagan legend. When marching on Rome to overthrow Maxentius, Constantine “saw with his own eyes in the heavens a trophy of the cross arising from the light of the sun, carrying the message, ‘by this sign, you shall win’.” The following night, Christ appeared to him in his dream to confirm the vision. Constantine had all his troops paint the sign on their shields and won the battle. Eusebius describes the sign as the Greek letters Chi and Rho superimposed, and tells us it represents the first two letters of Christos. This Chi-Rho sign is found in a great variety of mosaic and reliefs up to the time of Justinian, and it is especially common in the Pyrenean region, often with the addition of a sigma, as documented in this monography. Some hypothesize that it carried in pagan time the meaning pax. Whether that is the case or not, there is no evidence that the Chi-Rho was of Christian origin.
What does Chi-Rho have to do with Christ?
I hope to have shown that there is ample cause for radical skepticism regarding the autobiography of the Roman Church. It is not just legal documents that were forged. The whole underlying narrative could be phony. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, one man, Jesuit librarian Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), spent a lifetime researching and questioning Church history, until he came to the conclusion of a massive fraud originating in Benedictine monasteries in the thirteenth century. His conclusions were published posthumously in Ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum Prolegomena (1766). According to Hardouin, all the works ascribed to Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose of Milan, and Gregory the Great, were in fact written just decades before the cunning Boniface VIII (1294-1303) promoted them as the “Latin Fathers of the Church.” Eusebius’ history translated by Jerome is a web of fiction according to Hardouin.The Prolegomena of Jean Hardouin were translated in English in the nineteenth century by Edwin Johnson (1842-1901), who built up on Hardouin’s insights in his own works, starting with The Rise of Christendom (1890), followed one year later by The Rise of English Culture. Johnson argued for a medieval origin of most literary sources ascribed to Antiquity or Late Antiquity, and insisted that the whole first-millennium history of the Roman Church was fabricated by the Roman curia in its effort to impose its new world order.The medieval origin of these texts, Johnson says, explains why their supposed authors are fighting heresies that so much resemble the heresies fought by the medieval Church. The Manicheans and Gnostics attacked by Tertullian, Augustine and Irenaeus of Lyon are like the ghosts of those attacked under the same denominations by twelfth and thirteenth-century popes. According to Patricia Stirnemann, the oldest manuscript of Augustine’s Contra Faustus, written and preserved in the abbey of Clairvaux, is the witness of the struggle against “the resurgence of a neo-manicheism in the 12th century” (she doesn’t question the authorship of the work, but gives us additional reason to do so).The context of the Latin colonization of the East by the crusaders is transparent in many spurious sources from Late Antiquity, according to Johnson. Jerome’s biography is a case in point: “he is made to travel from Aquileia to Rome, and from Rome to Bethlehem and to Egypt. He settles at Bethlehem, is followed by Roman ladies, who found there a nunnery, and there he dies. This is a reflection of something that was happening during the later Crusades.” The same goes for Constantine: the legend of his military conquest by the sign of the Crucified bears the mark of the age of the crusades, “when military men came under monkish influence.”If all first-millennium Church history is bogus, how can we reconstruct the real history of the Church before the Gregorian reform? Johnson says there was no Western Christianity then: the Western Church was “a purely Mediaeval institution, without either literary or oral links with the past,” and its fables “were not heard of in the world until the epoch of the Crusades.” A less radical hypothesis is that Christianity only became a dominant force in the West with the Gregorian reform. In any case, there is ample evidence that it imposed its religious hegemony not so much by the destruction of pagan traditions as by their appropriation. The cult of Notre Dame, which owes much to Bernard de Clairvaux (1090–1153), was superimposed on cults of Diane and Isis.What the Gregorian reformers did was rewrite history in order to create the illusion that Christianity was 1000 years old in Europe. Not all sources were written from scratch. Many were simply heavily edited. One example is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede the Venerable (672-735). James Watson has shown that it was originally a History of the English People with no mention of Christianity; it was heavily interpolated during the tenth century, Watson says, when “most of the ecclesiastical notices in the work have been engrafted with the original history.” A somewhat different case is the Christianization of Boethius (c. 480-524), turned into a Christian theologian and martyr at the time of Abélard, although his famous Consolation of Philosophy doesn’t contain the slightest mention of his supposed Christian faith.As for the History of the Franks, supposedly written at the end of the sixth century by Gregory of Tours, and virtually our only source on Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism, it is most probably a clerical forgery from the Gregorian period, possibly using earlier sources. It is interesting to note that our pseudo-Gregory of Tours (perhaps Odilo of Cluny, who wrote a Life of Gregory) believed it possible for a medieval power to orchestrate the systematic rewriting of all books: he writes that King Childeric introduced new signs into the Latin alphabet, and “wanted all the old manuscripts to be erased with pumice stone, to make other copies, where the new signs would be used” (chapter IV).Chroniclers of the eleventh century are important sources for understanding the Christianization of Europe. Thietmar of Merseburg spoke in his Chronicon of a new dawn illuminating the world in 1004, and the French monk Rodulfus Glaber wrote:“At the approach of the third year after the year 1000, in almost all the earth, especially in Italy and in Gaul, the churches were rebuilt. Although they were in a good state and did not need it, the whole Christian people competed for possession of the most beautiful churches. And it was as if the world itself, shaking the rags of its old age, covered itself on all sides with a white mantle of churches. Then, at the initiative of the faithful, almost all the churches, from the cathedrals to the monasteries dedicated to the various saints, and down to small village oratories, were rebuilt, only more beautifully” (book IV, §13).Since Rodulfus writes under Cluniac supervision (he dedicates his work to the abbot of Cluny Odilo), we must be wary of his claim that what appeared new was in fact old, for this was the pretense of the Gregorian “reformers”. Because he says the churches were “in a good state”, their “rebuilding” may be an understatement for their rededication to a new cult. Gregory the Great (590-604), who seems to be a duplicate of Gregory VII, is reported to have recommended that pagan temples be exorcised and reused for Christian worship, and many local traditions in France assert that Romanesque churches were originally pre-Christian sanctuaries. As for the “basilicas”, their name derives from a Greek word designating a royal building, more precisely a chamber of justice under the authority of the basileius. Textbook history says that, as the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the basic architectural plan of the basilica was adopted for major church buildings throughout Europe, but that explanation has the ring of a flinch.
The Byzantine Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna
In reality, Western Christianity was in its infancy in the year 1000 AD. As for its birth in the East, it is shrouded in mystery, for whatever genuine Greek source could inform us has either been destroyed or heavily edited. The subject is beyond the scope of this article, but let us simply ask: Is it conceivable that the great basilica built by Justinian in the sixth century was dedicated to Christianity and named Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom)? Sophia is the goddess of philosophers, not priests, and no “saint Sophie” promoted by Jacques de Voragine in the thirteenth century can hide that fact. Edwin Johnson argued that Christianity and Islam were born in the same period. A case can be made that Hagia Sophia was Christianized during the reign of the iconoclast basileus Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), when it was stripped of all its icons and sculptural work, or in 842, when it was redecorated.We have now reached a point where one of the working hypotheses of our first article can be reconsidered: although French scholar Polydor Hochart was fully justified to question the prevailing theory that Christian monks copied pagan books on precious parchments, we must consider the alternative theory that those who copied in the ninth to eleventh centuries the manuscripts that humanists discovered in the fourteenth century were actually not Christians. This will become clearer in our the next.The theft of Constantinople’s birthrightWhere shall we go from here? Assuming that the history of the first millennium is heavily distorted by the forgeries of pontifical scribes and later humanists, can we evaluate the degree of that distortion and reconstruct a credible picture? The best we can do is to position ourselves in the eleventh century, the earliest period for which we have a good amount of chronicles. For that period, we can perhaps trust historians to give us a generally accurate picture of the European, North-African, and Near-Eastern world, and, looking back a couple of centuries away, we can try to discern the movements of history that led to that world. Beyond that, everything is blurry.Geographically, we might as well position ourselves at the center of the world we are seeking to understand. That center was not Rome. Despite Roman propaganda praising the Mirabilia Urbis Romae (“the wonders of the city of Rome”) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the political, economic, cultural and religious center of the civilization that included Rome, was Constantinople (with Alexandria in second position).In the eleventh century, the walls of Constantinople could have contained the ten largest cities of the West. Its size, architectural masterpieces, and wealth so impressed Western visitors that, in the French novel Partonopeu de Blois, Constantinople is the name of paradise. The economic prosperity of Constantinople rested on its situation at a crossroads of the great trade routes, on a monopoly in the trade of luxury products like silk, on a considerable gold money supply, and on an efficient tax administration (the kommerkion was a ten-percent tax on any transaction in the city’s port).Greek culture was radiating from Constantinople to the four corners of the world, from Persia and Egypt to Ireland and Spain. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there was a vast movement of translation from Greek to Latin of philosophical and scientific works (medicine, astronomy, etc.). Greek books were also translated into Persian and Syriac, and, from there, into Arabic. In his book Aristote au mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, Sylvain Gouguenheim defeats the common idea that the spread of philosophy and science in the Middle Ages was due mainly to Muslims. In reality, the Greek heritage was transmitted to Italian cities directly from Constantinople, that is, in the opposite direction of the fictitious translatio imperii of Constantine.The basileus maintained good relations with the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, which had conquered Jerusalem and lower Syria from the Abbasids in the 960s. In the early 1070s, the alliance between Byzantines and Fatimids was reinforced by a common threat: the incursions of the Seljukid Turks, who had taken control of the caliphate in Badhdad. In 1071, they defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and established in Anatolia the Sultanate of Rum, with their capital city in Nicaea, just one hundred kilometers from Constantinople. Then they took a part of Syria, including Jerusalem, from the Fatimids.Until recently, it was commonly believed that the crusades were the generous response of the Roman Church to a desperate plea for help from Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. This is how Western contemporary chroniclers presented it, using a forged letter of Alexios to the count of Flanders, in which the former confessed his powerlessness against the Turks and humbly begged for rescue. In fact, the emperor was in no desperate situation, and his request was just for mercenaries to fight under his command and help him reconquer Anatolia from the Seljukids. The Byzantines had always drawn in warriors from foreign nations to serve under their banner in return for imperial largesse, and Frankish knights were highly appreciated in that quality.Instead, Urban II (a former abbot of Cluny), wanted to raise an army that would immediately set out to conquer Jerusalem, a city on which Alexios had no immediate claim, and that he would have happily given back to the Fatimids. An army of crusaders under the order of a papal legate was never what Alexios had called for, and the Byzantines were worried and suspicious when they saw it coming. “Alexios and his advisers saw the approaching crusade not as the arrival of long-awaited allies but rather as a potential threat to the Oikoumene,” writes Jonathan Harris. They feared that the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher was a mere pretext for some sinister plot against Constantinople.The first crusade succeeded in establishing four Latin states in Syria and Palestine, which formed the basis of a Western presence that was to endure until 1291. At the end of the twelfth century, Jerusalem having been recovered by Saladin, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a new crusade, the fourth in modern numbering. This time, the Byzantines’ fear of a hidden agenda proved fully justified. Instead of going to Jerusalem via Alexandria, as officially announced, the Frankish knights, indebted by the tricky Venetians (and mainstream historians do speak here of a “Venetian conspiracy”), moved toward Constantinople. The huge army of the crusaders penetrated into the city in April 1204 and sacked it during three days. “Since the creation of this world, such great wealth had neither been seen nor conquered,” marveled the crusader Robert de Clari in his chronicle. Palaces, churches, monasteries, libraries were systematically pillaged, and the city became a shambles.The new Franco-Latin Empire, built on the smoking ruins of Constantinople, lasted only half a century. The Byzantines, entrenched in Nicaea (Iznik), slowly regained part of their ancient territory, and, in 1261, under the commandment of Michael VIII Palaiologos, chased the Franks and Latins from Constantinople. But the city was but the shadow of its past glory: the Greek population had been slaughtered or had fled, the churches and the monasteries had been profaned, the palaces were in ruins, and international trade had come to a stop. Moreover, Pope Urban IV ordered that a new crusade be preached throughout Europe to retake Constantinople from the “schismatics”. There were few volunteers. But in 1281 again, Pope Martin IV encouraged the project of Charles of Anjou (brother of King Louis IX) to take back Constantinople and establish a new Catholic empire. It failed, but the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath had inflicted on the Byzantine civilization a mortal wound, and it collapsed one century and a half later, after one thousand years of existence, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople in 1453. The renowned medieval historian Steven Runciman wrote:“There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Not only did it cause the destruction or dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored, and the mortal wounding of a civilization that was still active and great; but it was also an act of gigantic political folly. It brought no help to the Christians in Palestine. Instead it robbed them of potential helpers. And it upset the whole defense of Christendom.”
The Horses of Saint Mark, looted from Constantinople by the Venetians
How Ancient is Classical Greece?However, for the West, and Italy in particular, the sack of Constantinople kicked off an astounding economic growth, fed initially by the vast quantities of plundered gold. In the early thirteenth century the first gold coins appeared in the West, where only silver coinage had been issued so far (except in Sicily and Spain). The cultural benefits of the Fourth Crusade were also impressive: in subsequent years, whole libraries were pillaged, which Greek-speaking scholars would then start to translate into Latin. It can be said without exaggeration that the rise of humanism in Italy was an indirect effect of the fall of Constantinople.The Council of Florence in 1438, the last attempt to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, is an important date in the transfer of Greek culture to the West. Byzantine Emperor John VIII Paleologus and the Patriarch Joseph II came to Florence with a retinue of 700 Greeks and an extraordinary collection of classical books yet unknown in the West, including manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Euclid, and Ptolemy. “Culturally, the transmission of classical texts, ideas, and art objects from east to west that took place at the Council was to have a decisive effect on the art and scholarship of late 15th-century Italy.” And when, after 1453, the last bearers of Constantinople’s high culture fled Ottoman rule, many came to contribute to the blooming of the Italian Renaissance. In 1463, the Florentine court of Cosimo de’ Medici made acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher George Gemistos, known as Pletho, whose discourses upon Plato so fascinated them that they decided to refound Plato’s Academy in Florence. They named Marsilio Ficino as its head, supplying him with Greek manuscripts of Plato’s work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus into Latin.At the same time as they appropriated the Greek heritage, the Italian humanists affected to ignore their debt to Constantinople. As a result, until very recently, medieval studies overlooked the Byzantine influence on the West, and even the importance of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages. Cambridge professor Paul Stephenson commented in 1972: “The excision of Byzantine history from medieval European studies does indeed seem to me an unforgivable offense against the very spirit of history.” One aggravating factor is that “practically all the archives of the imperial and patriarchal chanceries of Byzantium perished either in 1204, when the city was sacked by the Crusaders, or in 1453, when it fell under the Turks.” Byzantium was killed twice: after sacking it in 1204, the Latin West strove to erase it from its collective memory. As Steven Runciman writes:“Western Europe, with ancestral memories of jealousy of Byzantine civilization, with its spiritual advisers denouncing the Orthodox as sinful schismatics, and with a haunting sense of guilt that it had failed the city at the end, chose to forget about Byzantium. It could not forget the debt that it owed to the Greeks; but it saw the debt as being owed only to the Classical age.”It must be emphasized, however, that at this stage, scholars did not possess a consistent global chronology to date precisely the Greek classical age; that would be a project of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, as we will document in the next article. French byzantinist Michel Kaplan makes the interesting remark that Western humanists who studied the Greek literature imported from Constantinople from the fourteenth century, “did not distinguish between the works of classical and Hellenistic Greece and those of the Byzantine era.” The implicit assumption is that modern scholars are now able to clearly make that distinction. But are they really?The same questions we have raised about Latin sources in our earlier piece can be applied to Greek sources. What proof do we have that the works ascribed to Plato, for instance, date from about 2500 years ago? It has been solidly established that all of Plato’s known manuscripts derive from a unique archetype, dated from the period of the great Patriarch Photios (c. 810-895). It was at that time that Byzantine emperor Leo the Philosopher “rediscovered” and promoted knowledge of Plato, as well as of his disciples Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, whom we now call Neoplatonists and ascribe to seven centuries later than Plato. Then there is the linguistic issue: Greek scholars such as Roderick Saxey II of Ohio State University are puzzled by “how little the language had changed, even in well over three millennia.” According to Harvard professor Margaret Alexiou, “Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than twelfth-century Middle English is to modern spoken English.” If we assume that the evolution of languages follows universal laws, Homeric Greek should not be much older than Middle English.In his stimulating book stimulating book Re-Dating Ancient Greece, Sylvain Tristan explores how the Franks who ruled much of Greece after the Fourth Crusade, may have contributed not only to the transmission of classical Greek culture to the West, but to its elaboration. Tristan also notes that the architectural vestiges of Frankish Greece are not as easy to distinguish from those of the Classical Age as one would expect. On the Acropolis used to stand a tower known locally as the Frankish Tower, probably built by Othon de la Roche, founder of the Duchy of Athens in the early thirteenth century. Although it was made of the same stones as the adjacent building, Heinrich Schliemann deemed it anachronistic and had it demolished in 1874.Subscribe to New Columns
The Acropolis with its Frankish Tower in 1872
According to our textbook chronology, the Parthenon was built 2,500 years ago. Its current state may seem consistent with such old age, but few people know that it was still intact in 1687, when it was blown up by a bomb shot by a Venetian mortar. The French painter Jacques Carrey had made some fifty-five drawings of it in 1674, which served later for its restoration.
The Parthenon in 1674, and exploding in 1687
In ancient times, we are told, the Parthenon housed a gigantic statue of Athena Parthenos (“Virgin”), while in the sixth century it became a church dedicated to “Our Lady or Athens,” until it was turned into a mosque by the Ottomans. Strangely enough, historian William Miller tells us in his History of Frankish Greece that the Parthenon is not mentioned in medieval texts before around 1380, when the King of Aragon describes it as “the most precious jewel that exists in the world.” The Acropolis was then known as “the Castle of Athens.” Could it be a medieval fortified city from the start? Is Ancient Greece a fantasy? Or is it simply wrongly dated?In the framework of our hypothesis that, between the eleventh and the fifteenth century, Rome invented or embellished its own Republican and Imperial Antiquity as propaganda to cheat Constantinople of its birthright, it makes sense that Rome would also invent or embellish a pre-byzantine Greek civilization as a way of explaining its own Greek heritage without acknowledging its debt to Constantinople. To explain how Greek culture had filled the world before reaching Rome, Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic legacy were also invented.Alexander is a legendary figure. According to his most sober biography, due to Plutarch, at the age of 22, this Macedonian prince (educated by Aristotle) set out to conquer the world with about 30,000 men, founded seventy cities, and died at the age of 32, leaving a fully formed Greek-speaking civilization that stretched from Egypt to Persia. Sylvain Tristan remarks, after Anatoly Fomenko, that the Seleucids (Seleukidós), who ruled Asia Minor after Alexander, bear almost the same name as the Seljukids (Seljoukides) who controlled that same region from 1037 to 1194. Is the Hellenistic civilization another phantom image of the Byzantine commonwealth, pushed back in the distant past in order to conceal Italy’s debt to Constantinople? Such hypothesis seems farfetched. But it becomes plausible once we realize that our chronology is a relatively recent construction. In the Middle Ages, there existed no accepted long chronology scanning millenniums. If today Wikipedia tells us that Alexander the Great was born on July 21, 356 BC and died on June 11, 323 BC, it is simply because some sixteenth-century scholar declared it so, using arbitrary guesswork and a biblical measuring tape. However, with the recent progress of archeology, the problems met by our received chronology have accumulated into a critical mass.Here is one example, mentioned by Sylvain Tristan: the “Antikythera mechanism” is an analogue computer composed of at least 30 meshing bronze gear wheels, used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. It was retrieved from the sea in 1901 among wreckage from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. It is dated from the second or first century BC. According to Wikipedia, “the knowledge of this technology was lost at some point in Antiquity” and “works with similar complexity did not appear again until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in Europe in the fourteenth century.” This technological chasm of 1,500 years is perhaps easier to believe when one already believes that the heliocentric model developed by Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC was totally forgotten until Nicolaus Copernicus reinvented it in the sixteenth century AD. But skepticism is here less extravagant that the scholarly consensus.The number of skeptics has grown in recent years, and several researchers have set out to challenge what they call the Scaligerian chronology (standardized by Joseph Scaliger in his book De emendatione temporum, 1583). Most of these “recentists,” whom we will introduce in our next article, focus on the first millennium AD. They believe that it is much too long, in other words, that Antiquity is closer to us than we think. They actually find themselves in agreement with the Renaissance humanists who, according to historian Bernard Guenée, thought of the “middle age” between Antiquity and their time (the term media tempestas first appears in 1469 in the correspondence of Giovanni Andrea Bussi) as “nothing but a parenthesis, an in-between.” In 1439, Flavio Biondo, the first archeologist of Rome, wrote a book about this period and titled it: Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire. Giorgio Vasari thought of it as a mere two centuries when he wrote in his Life of Giotto (1550), that Giotto (1267-1337) “brought back to life the true art of painting, introducing the drawing from nature of living persons, which had not been practised for two hundred years.”If our Middle Ages have been artificially stretched by seven or more centuries, does that mean that most of it is pure fiction? Not necessarily. Gunnar Heinsohn, using comparative archeology and stratigraphy (explore his articles or watch his video conference), argues that events spread throughout Antiquity, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages were in fact contemporary. In other words, the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire, and the Germanic Roman Empire must be resynchronized and seen as parts of the same civilization which collapsed a little more than ten centuries ago, after a global cataclysmic event that caused a commotion of memory and a taste for apocalyptic salvation cults.Notes Claire Levasseur et Christophe Badel, Atlas de l’Empire romain : Construction et apogée: 300 av. J.-C. – 200 apr. J.-C., Édiions Autrement, 2020 , p. 76. Most influential was Émile Littré with his Histoire de la langue française, 1862. Angelo Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, E.J. Brill, 1993, p. 175 (read on books.google.com). In the words of Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 66, as already quoted in “How Fake is Roman Antiquity?” Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture, Perrin, 1992, pp. 55-58. Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics, Oxford University Press, 2013 (on books.google.com), pp. 1, 27. Heribert Illig, “Anomalous Eras – Best Evidence: Best Theory,” June 2005, on www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/illig_paper.htm. Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform, Clarendon, 1970. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependance, University of Chicago Press, 1964, p. 107. Robert I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215, Basil Blackwell, pp. 11, 174. Harold Berman, Law and Revolution, the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard UP, 1983, pp. 15, 108. Laurent Morelle, “Des faux par milliers” L’Histoire, n° 372, February 2012. Reproduced from from F. Henderson, (Ed.), Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, George Bell and Sons, 1910 (on archive.org), pp. 329-333. John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society, Patriarch Athenagoras Memorial Lectures, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, on www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm John Meyendorff and Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, pp. 55, 167, 27. Aviad Kleinberg, Histoires de saints. Leur rôle dans la formation de l’Occident, Gallimard, 2005, p. 72. Andrew J. Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590-752, Lexington Books, 2009, p. 43. Michel Kaplan, Pourquoi Byzance ?: Un empire de onze siècles, Folio/Gallimard, 2016, p. 55. Robert Favreau, Bernadette Mora and Jean Michaud, “Chrismes du Sud-Ouest,” CNRS Editions, 1985 (Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale, 10), on www.persee.fr Patricia Stirnemann, “Saint Augustin, Contre Faustus”, sur www.bibliotheque-virtuelle-clairvaux.com, quoted in Wikipedia. Edwin Johnson, The Rise of Christendom (1890), on archive.org, p. 360. Edwin Johnson, The Rise of Christendom, op. cit., p. 50. Edwin Johnson, The Rise of Christendom, op. cit., pp. 7, 80. James Watson, Interpolations in Bede’s Ecclesiastical history and other ancient annals affecting the early history of Scotland and Ireland, Peebles, 1883 (archive.org), p. 9. Grégroire de Tours, Histoire des rois francs, Gallimard, 1990, chapitre IV, p. 103 Raoul Glaber, Histoires, éd. et trad. Mathieu Arnoux, Turnhout, Brépols, 1996, IV, §13, pp. 163-165. Thomas Creissen, “La christianisation des lieux de culte païens : ‘assassinat’, simple récupération ou mythe historiographique ?”, Gallia – Archéologie de la France antique, CNRS Éditions, 2014, 71 (1), pp. 279-287, on hal.archives-ouvertes.fr Polydor Hochart, De l’authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1890 (on archive.org), pp. 3-5. Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, Seuil, 2008. Einar Joranson, “The Problem of the Spurious Letter of Emperor Alexis to the count of Flanders,” The American Historical Review, vol. 55 n°4 (July 1950), pp. 811-832, on www.jstor.org. Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, Hambledon Continuum, 2003, p. 56. Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, Champion Classiques, 2004, p. 171. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954), Penguin Classics, 2016, p. 123. Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, op. cit., p. 50. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, op. cit, p. 130. Edwin Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence, Cambridge UP, 1994. Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 103. In his book Re-Dating Ancient Greece (2008), Sylvain Tristan points to intriguing paralells between Plato’s and Pletho’s lives, and makes the hypothesis that Plato is in reality a fictional personae of Pletho. Paul Stephenson, The Byzantine World, Routledge, 2012, p. xxi. John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 2. Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge UP, 1965, p. 190. Michel Kaplan, Pourquoi Byzance? Un empire de onze siècles, Folio/Gallimard, 2016, p. 39.Subscribe to New Columns
Roderick Saxey II (1998-99), “The Greek language through time,” http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/greek.html Margaret Alexiou, “Diglossia in Greece,” in William Haas, Standard Languages: Spoken and Written, Manchester UP, 1982. Sylvain Tristan, Re-Dating Ancient Greece: 500 BC = 1300 AD?, independently published, 2008. William Miller, The Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece (1204-1566), P. Dutton & Co., 1908 (on archive.org), pp. 315, 327. Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’occident medieval, Aubier, 2011, p. 9. David Carrette, L’Invention du Moyen Âge. La plus grande falsification de l’histoire, Magazine Top-Secret, Hors-série n°9, 2014, pp. 43, 53.
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