图：圣马可之马，被威尼斯人从君士坦丁堡掠走

The theft of Constantinople’s birthright
Where 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 uate 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.

窃取君士坦丁堡的继承权
从哪里开始说起呢?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，我们能评估这种扭曲的程度并重建一幅可信的画面吗?我们能做的最好的事情就是把我们自己定位在11世纪，这是我们有大量编年史的最早时期。对于那个时期，我们也许可以相信历史学家给我们一个大致准确的欧洲、北非和近东世界的图景，并且，回顾几个世纪以前，我们可以尝试辨别导致那个世界的历史运动。除此之外，一切都很模糊。

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).

在地理上，我们不妨把自己定位在我们正在寻求理解的世界的中心。那个中心不是罗马。尽管罗马在10世纪和11世纪的宣传中赞扬了“罗马城市的奇迹”，但包括罗马在内的整个文明的政治、经济、文化和宗教中心是君士坦丁堡(亚历山大位居第二)。

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).

在11世纪，君士坦丁堡的城墙可以容纳西方十座最大的城市。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《帕托诺佩·德·布卢瓦》中，君士坦丁堡是天堂的名字。
君士坦丁堡的经济繁荣依赖于它在大贸易路线的十字路口的位置，对丝绸等奢侈品贸易的垄断，可观的黄金货币供应，以及有效的税收管理。

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.

希腊文化从君士坦丁堡辐射到世界的各个角落，从波斯和埃及到爱尔兰和西班牙。在11世纪和12世纪，出现了一场将哲学和科学著作(医学、天文学等)从希腊语翻译成拉丁语的大规模运动。希腊书籍也被翻译成波斯语和叙利亚语，然后又被翻译成阿拉伯语。
在他的书《圣米歇尔山的亚里士多德》中。Sylvain Gougenheim在《Les racines greques de l’europe chrimatienne》一书中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，希腊遗产是直接从君士坦丁堡传到意大利城市的，也就是说，与虚构的君士坦丁帝国的翻译方向相反。

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.

巴塞勒斯与埃及的法蒂玛哈里发保持着良好的关系，后者在10世纪60年代从阿巴斯王朝手中征服了耶路撒冷和下叙利亚。在11世纪70年代早期，拜占庭人和法蒂玛人之间的联盟受到共同威胁的加强:塞尔柱王朝突厥人的入侵，他们控制了巴格达的哈里发。
然后他们从法蒂玛人手中夺取了叙利亚的一部分，包括耶路撒冷在内。

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.

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历克修斯·科米诺斯绝望请求帮助的慷慨回应。西方当代编年史家是这样描述的，他们使用了一封伪造的阿历克修斯写给弗兰德斯伯爵的信，在信中，阿历克修斯承认自己无力对抗突厥人，并谦卑地请求救援。
事实上，这位皇帝并没有陷入绝境，他只是要求雇佣兵在他的指挥下作战，帮助他从塞尔柱人手中夺回安纳托利亚。拜占庭人一直从外国招募战士为他们效力，以换取帝国的慷慨，而法兰克骑士在这方面受到高度赞赏。

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.

相反，乌尔班二世(前克吕尼修道院院长)想要组建一支军队，立即出发去征服耶路撒冷，而阿历克修斯并没有立即对这座城市声索主权，他很乐意把它归还给法蒂玛王朝。一支由教皇使臣指挥的十字军军队从来都不是阿历克修斯所请求的，当拜占庭人看到它的到来时，他们既担心又怀疑。
乔纳森·哈里斯写道:“阿历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，而是对奥库门人的潜在威胁。”他们担心圣墓的解放仅仅是针对君士坦丁堡的阴谋的借口。
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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.

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，一直持续到1291年。12世纪末，耶路撒冷被萨拉丁收复，教皇英诺森三世宣布发动新的十字军东征，这是现代历史上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由亚历山大前往耶路撒冷，而是在狡猾的威尼斯人的帮助下(主流历史学家确实在这里提到了“威尼斯阴谋”)向君士坦丁堡进军。1204年4月，庞大的十字军大军攻入这座城市，并在三天内洗劫了这座城市。
“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，”十字军战士罗伯特·德·克拉利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，城市变成了一片废墟。
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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”.

建立在冒烟的君士坦丁堡废墟上的新法兰西-拉丁帝国只持续了半个世纪。拜占庭人，盘踞在尼西亚(伊兹尼克)，慢慢地夺回了他们的一部分古老的领土，并于1261年，在迈克尔八世的命令下，从君士坦丁堡驱赶法兰克人和拉丁人。但这座城市终已是昔日辉煌的影子：
希腊人被屠杀或逃离，教堂和修道院被亵渎，宫殿成为废墟，国际贸易也停止了。此外，教皇乌尔班四世下令在欧洲各地发起新的十字军东征，从“分裂者”手中夺回君士坦丁堡。

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.

志愿者很少。但在1281年，教皇马丁四世再次鼓励昂茹的查理(国王路易九世的兄弟)夺回君士坦丁堡，建立一个新的天主教帝国。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，在存在了一千年后，奥斯曼苏丹穆罕默德二世于1453年占领了君士坦丁堡，拜占庭文明，崩溃了。

The renowned medi 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.”

著名的中世纪历史学家史蒂文·朗西曼写道:
“没有比第四次十字军东征更严重的反人类罪行了。它不仅破坏或分散了拜占庭过去珍藏的所有宝藏，而且对一个仍然活跃和伟大的文明造成了致命的伤害;并且这也是一次巨大的政治愚蠢行为。它没有给巴勒斯坦的基督徒带来帮助。相反，它剥夺了他们潜在的帮助者。它颠覆了整个基督教世界的防御。”
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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.

古典希腊有多古老?
然而，对于西方，尤其是意大利来说，君士坦丁堡之战开启了惊人的经济增长，最初是由大量被掠夺的黄金推动的。13世纪早期，西方出现了第一批金币，到目前为止，西方只发行了银币(西西里和西班牙除外)。第四次十字军东征带来的文化利益也令人印象深刻:
在随后的几年里，整个图书馆都被洗劫一空，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受君士坦丁堡陷落的间接影响。

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 manuscxts of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Euclid, and Ptolemy. “Culturally, the transmission of classical texts, ideas, and art obxts from east to west that took place at the Council was to have a decisive effect on the art and scholarship of late 15century Italy.”

1438年的佛罗伦萨会议是天主教和东正教重新统一的最后一次尝试，也是希腊文化向西方转移的一个重要日期。拜占庭皇帝古约翰八世和大宗主教约瑟夫二世带着700名希腊人的随行人员来到佛罗伦萨，并带来了大量西方尚不为人知的古典书籍，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，古典文本、思想和艺术品从东方到西方的传播，发生在会议上，对15世纪后期意大利的艺术和学术产生了决定性的影响。”

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 manuscxts of Plato’s work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus into Latin.

1453年后，君士坦丁堡先进文化的最后一批传承者逃离了奥斯曼帝国的统治，许多人来到这里，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·吉米斯托斯，即普莱托，他对柏拉图的论述令他们着迷，于是他们决定在佛罗伦萨重新建立柏拉图学院。他们任命马西利奥·菲西诺为负责人，向他提供柏拉图著作的希腊文手稿，于是菲西诺开始将整个语料库翻译成拉丁语。

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, medi 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 medi 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.

在挪用希腊遗产的同时，意大利人文主义者假装忽略了他们对君士坦丁堡的债务。因此，直到最近，中世纪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年评论道:“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。” 一个令人恼怒的因素是，“几乎所有拜占庭帝国和宗法大法官的档案都在1204年被十字军洗劫时或1453年被土耳其人占领时消失了。”拜占庭曾两度被灭：1204年被洗劫后，拉丁西方试图将其从集体记忆中抹去。

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.”

正如史蒂芬·朗西曼所写:
“西欧人对拜占庭文明有着祖先般的嫉妒记忆，他们的精神导师谴责东正教是罪恶的分裂者，他们对自己最终辜负了这座城市感到挥之不去的内疚，于是选择了忘记拜占庭。它无法忘记欠希腊人的债务。但它认为债务只局限于古典时代。”

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?

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来精确地确定希腊古典时代的年代。这是16世纪耶稣会的一个项目，我们将在下一篇文章中详细介绍。法国拜占庭学者米歇尔·卡普兰提出了一个有趣的评论，即研究希腊文学的西方人文主义者从14世纪开始从君士坦丁堡传入。
“没有区分古典和希腊化希腊的作品和拜占庭时代的作品。”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?

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 manuscxts 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.

我们在前面的文章中提出的关于拉丁文来源的问题同样适用于希腊文来源。比如，我们有什么证据证明柏拉图的作品是2500年前的呢?已经确定的是，所有已知的柏拉图手稿都来自一个独特的原型，可以追溯到伟大的族长Photios(约公元810-895年)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，以及他的门徒波菲利、伊姆布利克斯和普罗提诺，我们现在称之为新柏拉图主义者，认为他们比柏拉图晚了七个世纪。

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 [modern Greek] 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.

然后是语言问题:
俄亥俄州立大学的罗德里克·萨克斯二世等希腊学者对“即使在3000多年的时间里，这种语言的变化如此之小”感到困惑。根据哈佛大学教授Margaret Alexiou的说法，“荷马希腊语可能更接近于现代希腊语，而不是12世纪的中世纪英语更接近现代口语。”如果我们假设语言的演变遵循普遍规律，荷马希腊语应该不会比中世纪英语早多少。

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.

西尔万·特里斯坦在他那本令人振奋的书《重新确定古希腊年代》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，可能不仅对古典希腊文化向西方的传播做出了贡献，而且对其进行了阐述。特里斯坦还指出，法兰克希腊式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。雅典卫城曾经矗立着一座塔，当地人称之为“法兰克塔”，可能是由雅典公国的创始人奥顿·德·拉·罗奇在13世纪初建造的。虽然它和相邻的建筑是用同样的石头建造的，但海因里希·施里曼（译注：考古学家）认为它不合时宜，并于1874年拆除了它。
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