A byzantine theft http://www.irmina.co.uk/
For the last several days i been buried under a stack of sticky notes, books, notebooks, travel diaries and manuscript drafts for the turkey, anatolia, byzantium, trebizond, constantinople cheap ralph lauren sale chapter of the book. (See, i don even have that kind of focus yet!Grrr. )
I started, then gutted and finally thrown away at least six different versions of the chapter.Seriously, if the word byzantine wasn used as an adjective describing complex, obsure and rather opaque internal politics a similar word would have cheap polo ralph lauren t shirts to be invented.Besides, i can decide if i want the chapter main focus to be on the fall of the empire of trebizond(A byzantine successor state, which emerged after the fourth crusade and outlived constantinople by about a decade), which is now called Trabzon a city in the far north east of Anatolia close to the Turkish Georgian border, the Fall of Constantinople to Mehmet il Fatih in 1453, or, finally, the building of the Hagia Sophia by the Emperor Justinian, which, I must tell you, is an incredible achievment that has gotten short shrift from historians.I find myself leaning towards the fall of trebizond, its environs and importance to the final leg of great inner eurasian trade routes(Trabzon erzerum tabriz)Because the fall of trebizond is, in microcosm, representative of the last 100 years of graeco byzantine imperium;The fall of constantinople, the capture of the italian ports of the crimea, the adventures of an obscure spanish nobleman, plus the story of xenophon 10, 000 and the life of st.Athanasius all fit nicely into the narrative arc that is the of trebizond.Alas, no hagia sophia, however;Perhaps in the next book?
But there is one morsel of information that i just cannot digest.Melamid writes, polo had his luggage stolen here on his journey to china.It a tale i certainly never heard before.
Now, i read two versions of polo work;The simple and relatively un annotated 1983 everyman paperback translated by john masefield;And the two volume, massively annotated yule cordier version of the great traveler story.Both works do not include this strange story.Melamid claim has other problems too.As far as i know, polo visited trebizond at the end of his trip, when he was coming from china, not, as melamid writes, his journey to china.Do i bring this up?Trust me when i tell you that having your luggage stolen, whether it be in the 13th century or the 21st, was and is a big deal.I would rather like to conclusively say it did or didn happen.After all, it not like polo could go to the atm there in trabzon by the tea gardens, which sit in the shadow of the pontic alps, withdraw cash, cross the street, whilst dodging insane turkish drivers and buy new clothes and a backpack trunk, as it were.Travel was just a bit different in the master time.
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