THE VIKINGS AND BYZANTION

© 2000 by Orchid Land Publications

[12-30-00]

     St. Vladimir was a Viking (named Waldemar).   The Swedish Vikings and even the famous Norwegian King Olaf had relations with Byzantion.  The Viking empire embraced (at one time) most of non-Byzantine Europe.  Under the name Varangians, Vikings had a honored place as mercenaries in Byzantion.  Under the name of Normans, they fought the Byzantine Varangians in the Mediterranean--a Viking-controlled sea.      
     You may not know that after the Byzantines lost (the formerly Phoenician region) of Southern Spain, the Arabs conquered it and named it Andalus.  (The emperor Theodosios had been born there.)  It was from Cordova, a city of 700 mosques, as big as or bigger than huge Byzantion and Baghdad (there were no longer any cities in the Teutonic-Latin West; Rome and Ravenna were villages) that learning came to the West, whose theological categories are based on the intellectual framework of the Cordovan Muslims (and Jews).  After seven and a half centuries of Dark Ages--cf. the time from 1245 till 1994 (it was much longer in many places) the Latins had been utterly cut off from the Greek roots of Christianity (and terms in the Bible like LOGOS "Reason," enéryeia"energy," and omoíosis "assimilation"--misunderstood as non-energetic "likeness").  That's why they cannot think like the Orthodox.  The Reformers accepted an even more will-based/juridical form of Cordovan Aristotelianism than the Latins did and put will (and virtual reality) ahead of reason and being.  Virtual reality and reality by a re-defined "faith" (re-defined as a will-based fiducia "loyalty, trust") became the name of the game, or rather the definition of Grace, Justification, the Presence of Christ is the blessed Bread and Wine, etc., etc.

READ JAMES RESTON JR.'S THE LAST APOCALYPSE
about Europe at the end of the first millennium 

     The Arab Empire extended from southern France to West India.  Even so, it was not so large or so opulent as the Mogul Empire that reached into Europe (it engulfed Russia and most of Asia, except southern India) in the earlier second millennium; its capital was in China.  Much of it had been missionized by the Nestorians--a deviant form of Christianity.  The later Muslim Empire of the Turks and Albanians reached up to Vienna.

    

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