Horu

Yeah wow, only about 350 years. I would imagine some of the Noble blood lines in Europe could trace something somewhere, the Byznatines especially in the last century or so really married a lot of their daughters off in that general direction. Not to mention the fact that they were purposely trying to get Western Kingdoms to have some form of claim to their throne in and effort to get help against the Ottomans.

From what I have seen, this part of Spain really had no real purpose. After the conflict with the visigoths it just sat there. The Byzantine Empire did not possess the strength to really reinforce it when it became threatened. As far as recruiting barbarians goes, they did not rely heavily upon mercenaries until later, but they had more then the numbers they needed just located outside Constantinople.

In my recent studies I have had to spend a lot of time focusing on some of the works Psellus wrote. I was just wondering what some of the other people here thought of him. After my initial readings, and digging deeper and reading a bit of Attaleiates it just seems to me Psellus was full of himself. I do realize he was a leading scholar of the day, but the self importance this man possesses and what he must expect us to believe is a little far fetched. I do realize also that his dealing hurt the empire significantly, which means he did control quite a bit of influence. But if we were to believe his importance in the capitol he had connections with every, and if they only listened to him they had a fairly good chance of becoming the Emperor. Those are just my inital impressions of him, and honestly I do not like the man much. The horrible things he wrote about Romanus IV Diogenes alone probably warrent that from most people. On an unrealated note, would any of you perhaps know how to cite him as a source? I ment to grab and Oxford dictionary and I didn't, now i'm stuck. I need to cite his Chronographia book 7 more specificly and I dont know the correct abbreviations for his name, or that work.

My personal opinion on the matter is that the Barbarians did not contribute to the fall of Rome as much as many other important events. With hardly a million barbarians on the boarder of Rome at any given time the population was too small to make a huge impact. It was due to corruption on a much larger scale. The Eastern empire though under much worse outside conditions still managed to hold and and come back from its own crisis. Because of this I really do think the only impact the Barbarians had was to put their own Romanized programs in place of the existing ones, eventually. They all attempted to emulate Rome. It was a problem that most of them remained Arians because of the conflict which was created. But it seems to me with the Eastern Empire staying involved for the next several centuries, until the Lombards really took care of that, the barbarians would come and go just putting themselves in place of the former aristocracy.