Byzantines Quotes

“With this wealth came arrogance-and resentment. "They came," said a Byzantine chronicler, "in swarms and tribes, exchanging their city for Constantinople, whence they spread out across the empire." The tone of these remarks speaks a familiar language of xenophobia and economic fear of the immigrant. The upstart Italians, with their hats and their beardless faces, stood out sharply, both in manner and appearance, in the city streets. The charges leveled against the Venetians were many: they acted like citizens of a foreign power rather than loyal subjects of the empire; they were fanning out from their allotted quarter and were buying properties across the city; they cohabited with or married Greek women and led them away from the Orthodox faith; they stole the relics of saints; they were wealthy, arrogant, unruly, boorish, out of control. "Morally dissolute, vulgar ... untrustworthy, with all the gross characteristics of seafaring people," spluttered another Byzantine writer. A bishop of Salonika called them "marsh frogs." The Venetians were becoming increasingly unpopular in the Byzantine Empire, and they seemed to be everywhere. In the larger geopolitics of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Byzantines and their errant subjects was marked by ever more violent oscillations between the poles of love and hate: The Venetians were insufferable but indispensable. The Byzantines, who complacently still saw themselves as the center of the world, and for whom landownership was more glorious than vulgar commerce, had given away their trade to the lagoon dwellers and allowed their navy to decline; they became increasingly dependent on Venice for maritime defense.”
― Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire