[stelliosk]

The lion may be Chinese but the four horses in St Mark's Basilica are Greek looted from Constantinople during the fourth crusade (1204).

Perhaps the lion was also looted and brought to Constantinople originally which would fit with pre Marco Polo's travels.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark

[tsimionescu]

If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? Just because they spoke Greek doesn't make them Greeks. Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?

[kitten_mittens_]

At the time, Romans would have said they spoke Roman (Romaic[1])--not Greek.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Greek

[stelliosk]

Not made in Constantinople, made in ancient Greece by Lysippos.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysippos

[noncoml]

> Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?

There is no such thing as Greece before 1821. So they would have to travel back in time.

[tsimionescu]

I meant the Greek Peninsula, but fair enough.

[digging]

If they're Byzantine, calling them "Greek" is not wrong.

Byzantine = specific, inaccurate. Romans = accurate, nonspecific. Greek = a bit of both

[tsimionescu]

To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English". If I brought a vase from Belize and said "I brought you an English vase", would you not find that odd?

Just because someone speaks a related language (and I'm pretty sure the Greek of Constantinople was different from the Greek of Athens at the time), doesn't mean that they are the same people. The Byzantines had hundreds of years as a distinct culture from the Greek islands and peninsula, with a major Roman influence.

[stelliosk]

The sculptor was Lysippos (ancient Greece).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysippos

[digging]

> To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English".

Those situations are nothing alike. The Byzantines lived in Greece. Byzantium was founded by Greeks. Others in Europe called them "the Greeks". They were the genuine continuation of Hellenic culture for over 10 centuries.

It's either that or Greeks ceased to exist between Roman conquest and Ottoman independence - at which point they were ruled by a German and, presumably by your logic, were actually Turks anyway, not Greeks.

If you know much about Hellenic history, you know it's been a culture in flux since prehistory. I'd assert there has never been a group that you would call "true Greeks"... except maybe the Graecoi - Hellenic colonists in Italy. Even the post-Classical period of pan-Hellenism was driven and ruled by Macedonians, who a century prior were not considered Hellenes.

[rsynnott]

> If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right?

I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.

[tsimionescu]

Well, I think we could define it by what the people living there considered themselves to be. And generally, from what I know (but I'm not well read on this subject, so I'm happy to be corrected), the inhabitants of the area would have called themselves Romans, at least by the time the city came to be known as Constantinople.

Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

A better question would be, would the inhabitants at the time in question call themselves "Hellenes", "Graeci" (Greeks), or "Romans"?

[ithkuil]

>>> TIL that in 1912 when the island of Lemnos was occupied by Greece, some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier retorted. "No, we are Romans."

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/thJwKoNhnn

[Exoristos]

Yes.

[sbdhzjd]

Looting a collapsing empire just across the Mediterranean is easy.

Looting an empire halls way across the world is a tad harder.

[rsynnott]

I think their theory is that the lion was brought to Constantinople by legitimate means, then looted _from_ there by Venice.

[ithkuil]

It's a common misconception that the crusades were a crime of white christians versus non-white non-christians. In reality crusades were just as well a crime against other white christians as against non-white christians, white non-christians, non-white non-christians, an excuse would be found for any of these targets

[sbdhzjd]

All true.

But they were also an anti-colonial struggle to liberate occupied native christians from the imperialist ambitions from the Arabian peninsula.

[ithkuil]

Oh yes that was surely a motivator for some but also an excuse for others.

The political landscape of that time was truly complicated and chaotic in a way that is hard to truly capture in the image we have of that time period brought through general education, mostly because of lack of time to explain it all properly