A SYNOPSIS OF THE WORLD'S LONGEST-RUNNING SOAP OPERA

by Alfred D. Byrd

Once upon a time the ROMAN EMPIRE, of which the first Emperor was AUGUSTUS CAESAR, ruled all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. The Empire had been founded by the ROMANS, who came from the West, from a city called ROME, and spoke a language called LATIN. In the East the Romans ruled a people called the GREEKS, who spoke a language called GREEK and had been a mighty civilization while the Romans were still living with wolves. In the North the Romans faced an enemy, a nation of barbarians called the GERMANS, who admired the Romans and sometimes tried to conquer them.

In the midst of the Roman Empire there arose a religion called CHRISTIANITY, which came into being when the ARCHANGEL GABRIEL announced to a JEWISH virgin named Mary that she had been chosen to bear the Messiah, the Son of God, Who would take away the sins of the world. For nearly three centuries the Romans, who were pagans, persecuted the followers of the Son of God, who were called CHRISTIANS, but managed only to make them more numerous and dedicated to their religion. In the end the Roman Emperor CONSTANTINE was moved to recognize Christianity as a legitimate faith and started the process of making it the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Constantine also made another change with far-reaching consequences: he moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome in the impoverished, depopulated West, open to German invasion, to a Greek city called BYZANTIUM in the wealthy, populous East. He named his new capital NEW ROME, but his subjects came to call it after its founder the city of Constantine, or CONSTANTINOPLE. Through this change of capital power in the empire began to pass from the Romans to the Greeks. Because of this change of capital and transfer of power, historians like to call the Roman Empire in the East the BYZANTINE EMPIRE, after the city that became Constantinople.

The Christians, having come to power, started to suffer from conflicts among themselves. One of these concerned who would head the organization of Christians, the CHURCH. In the West, the Bishop, or Overseer, of Rome, called the POPE, started to press the claim that he was the sole head of the Church. In the East, the Patriarchs ("father-rulers") of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople pressed the claim that the Pope was only one of a council of five equal patriarchs. Latin-speaking Christians in the West generally supported the Pope; Greek-speaking Christians in the East, the Patriarchs.

As Constantine had foreseen, the Empire in the West continued to decline and came under increasing pressure from the Germans. For a century or two there were still Western emperors, subordinate to the senior emperor in Constantinople, but after a while the German invaders and the senior emperor no longer bothered with these, and the West passed into the hands of the Germans. There are three groups of these who will be important to the story: the stay-at-home Germans, who remained in what the Romans had long called GERMANY; the Franks, who settled in what the Romans had called Gallia, but the Franks renamed, after themselves, FRANCE; and the Anglo-Saxons, who settled in what the Romans had called Britannia, but came to be called, after the Angles, ENGLAND. The Pope, however, remained in Rome as head of the Latin-speaking Christians, who were coming to be called ROMAN CATHOLICS, and tried to evangelize the Germans. He made headway with all three groups, but was especially successful with the Franks, who abandoned their Germanic language for a form of Latin that eventually mutated into French.

Meanwhile, to the southeast of the Byzantine Empire, a new people was entering the scene. The ARABS were the descendants of Ishmael, a brother of the Jewish patriarch Isaac, and became the followers of a new religion called ISLAM, which came into being when the Archangel Gabriel announced to MOHAMMAD that he was the prophet of a new revelation that corrected and superseded the revelations of the Jews and the Christians. Mohammad, by preaching and war, converted the Arabs to Islam (followers of Islam are called MOSLEMS); his successors, called the CALIPHS, carried war to the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople was saved, but the Empire lost the patriarchies of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria; and the Moslems, sweeping completely across the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, entered Europe and carried war to the Franks. These, under their mighty leader, CHARLES MARTEL ("the Hammer"), crushed the Moslem invaders and saved the West from their dominion.

The Pope, however, seeing Moslems to the south of him and Moslems to the west of him, recognized that Martel's victory was only one battle, and knew that the Roman Catholics were in trouble unless they could find a permanent champion to defend them. He looked to the East, but the Byzantine Empire that he saw was not the answer: the empire had troubles of its own, and the Greek-speaking Christians, following their own set of rituals and looking down on the fallen Latin-speaking Christians in the West, were growing apart from them. Thus, the Pope made a decision with far-reaching consequences: he summoned to Rome Charles Martel's grandson, CHARLEMAGNE, and crowned him Emperor of a new Roman Empire in the West, called the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Such was Charlemagne's wisdom in ruling and prowess in war that he compelled the Emperor in Constantinople to recognize him as his equal.

Part of the reason for the Byzantine Empire's inability to help the Pope was that it was under attack, not only by Moslems in the East, but by a new set of barbarians, the SLAVS and the ALBANIANS (actually descendants of a pre-Roman people called the Illyrians), in the North. These conquered a part of the BALKAN Peninsula, the region between the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea. The Patriarch in Constantinople, however, managed to evangelize some of the Slavs: the SERBS and the BULGARIANS, who lived in the Balkans, and the RUSSIANS, who lived in the northern realm from which the Slavs had come. These peoples adopted the EASTERN ORTHODOX faith of Constantinople and learned to write their languages in the CYRILLIC ALPHABET, developed for them from the Greek alphabet by the missionary Cyril. The Pope, however, managed to evangelize other Slavs: the SLOVENIANS and the CROATS in the Balkans, and the CZECHS, the POLES, and the UKRAINIANS to the west of the Russians. These peoples adopted the Roman Catholic faith and learned to write their languages in the Roman alphabet.

Meanwhile the Arabs themselves had come under attack by barbarians, the TURKS from the steppes of Asia. The Turks overran the Arabic lands in the East, but became converts to Islam and continued a line of puppet Arabic caliphs in the glorious eastern city of Baghdad. The Arabs had come to an understanding with the Byzantine Empire and let Christian pilgrims from East and West visit the holy places in Jerusalem; but the Turks, with the blind fervor of barbarian converts to the True Faith, rejected this understanding: they carried war again against Constantinople and barred Jerusalem to the Christians.

Now it was the turn of the Emperor in Constantinople to beg aid from the Pope. The Pope decided to grant it, although not for the reasons that the Emperor had in mind, and preached a CRUSADE to his beloved Germans: the English of England, the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Franks (or FRENCH, as they were now beginning to call themselves) of the developing kingdom of France. The Germans (and most enthusiastically the French) responded, pouring through the Byzantine Empire and conquering the patriarchies of Antioch and Jerusalem for the Christians. Not, however for the Orthodox Christians, but for the Catholics, and not for the Eastern Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople, but for the Pope, who quickly appointed as patriarchs of the liberated patriarchies men loyal to himself. Subsequent expeditions of Crusaders strove to liberate Alexandria as well, the Moslems fought to regain Antioch and Jerusalem, and the Byzantines found their relations with the Catholics going from bad to worse and started to wonder whether the Pope wanted to control the patriarchy of Constantinople as well. Their question was answered when the Franks of the Fourth Crusade prostituted themselves to the greed of the vile Merchant of Venice, ENRICO DANDOLO, and turned aside from their objective of Alexandria to sack Constantinople. Many claim that most of the written works of ancient Greece were lost in the burning of Alexandria by the Romans and the Moslems, but the truth is that they were lost in the burning of Constantinople by the Crusaders. Eventually the Eastern Emperor expelled the Crusaders from Constantinople and the Moslems expelled them from Jerusalem and Antioch, but the Crusades have left lasting distrust of the West throughout the Orthodox and Moslem world.

The Byzantine Empire never fully recovered from the Crusades and came under increasing pressure from a new force, a tribe of Turks called the OTTOMANS after their founder, Othman. Once again the Eastern Emperor sought help from the only available source, the Pope, whom he even promised the conversion of the Orthodox to Catholicism. The Pope sent priests, but was unable to persuade the Germans to send soldiers, and Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan MEHMET THE CONQUEROR. Having conquered New Rome, he claimed to be the Roman Emperor, and, the line of Arabic Caliphs having failed, he also claimed to be the Caliph; thus, he became the priest-king of the greatest empire of his age. The Patriarch of Constantinople became a civil servant in his administration, responsible for ensuring the good behavior and collecting the taxes of the sultan's Orthodox subjects. These, not incomprehensibly, came to view Western Christians as traitors who had delivered them into bondage to the Ottomans, and the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism remains to this day.

Even before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, the peoples of the Balkans were coming under Turkish domination. All resisted at first, and the Serbs resisted longest, but even they fell at the Battle of Kosovo. Some of the peoples -- especially the Albanians -- accepted Islam and became faithful servants of the sultan. Others -- especially the Serbs and the Bulgarians -- maintained their Orthodox faith under Ottoman rule and became second-class citizens under the supervision of the Patriarch of Constantinople. They were not, one might imagine, peaceful citizens, and the sultan and his neo-Moslem friends frequently had to suppress, none too gently, Serb and Bulgarian uprisings.

These were fueled by the encouragement of the one true friend of Orthodoxy in captivity, RUSSIA. Soon after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the ruler of the Russians married PRINCESS SOPHIA, the niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor, and her descendant IVAN THE TERRIBLE proclaimed himself Caesar (in Russian this title came out to "tsar") of the THIRD ROME, Moscow. Ivan saw the mission of the Russian Empire as the liberation of Orthodox Slavs from Ottoman rule, the reconquest of Constantinople (which the Turks were starting to call ISTANBUL) for Orthodoxy, and the safeguarding of Jerusalem for Orthodox pilgrims. For centuries, therefore, Ivan and his successors, the Romanovs, maintained a struggle against the Ottoman Empire to complete Ivan's mission.

During this centuries-long struggle, the West changed radically. PROTESTANTS rebelled against the Pope's authority, and England became a Protestant nation. England's colonies on a newly discovered continent rebelled against the authority of the English crown and established a new, democratic nation called the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Inspired by America's rebellion, the French rebelled against their own king and established a turbulent democracy that was hijacked by a brilliant general named NAPOLEON, who forced the Pope to crown him as the Emperor of a new French Empire that would be the true successor to Charlemagne's. Napoleon managed to destroy the Holy Roman Empire before he destroyed his own empire in a rash attempt to conquer the Russian Empire and reunite all of Christianity under his own rule. After Napoleon's downfall, England, though retaining its kings and queens as beloved figureheads, became a democracy that preached the new gospel of progress, and America and France followed England's lead. To the East, however, the line of Holy Roman Emperors continued in the AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE, and a brilliant statesman named BISMARCK created a new German Empire, which he called the SECOND REICH, "reich" being the German word for the Holy Roman Empire. The Russian Empire continued its endless war against the Ottoman Empire, and it was clear to all that this war, especially as it played out in the Balkans, would inevitably draw the democracies into a mighty conflict against the ancient remnants of the Roman Empire.

This conflict was World War I. In it democratic England, France, and eventually America teamed up against the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire; the Russian Empire, of course, fought on the side of anyone who opposed the Ottomans. The democracies won, and all four successor states to the Roman Empire were destroyed; the Russian Empire, although allied to the democracies, was crushed in battle by the German Empire and fell into the hands of VLADIMIR LENIN, who preached a Western gospel of progress called COMMUNISM (which, oddly enough, became the arch-enemy of another Western gospel of progress called CAPITALISM) and founded the SOVIET UNION. (This, despite its supposedly Western, Communistic nature, oddly enough continued the Russian Empire's policies towards the Balkans, Istanbul, and Jerusalem.) England and France (America, after the war, went back into its shell) divided the lands of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires into tiny countries, ideally one for each ethnic group. In the Balkans they put most of the Albanians into a country called Albania, but put the rest of them into an idealistic concept called YUGOSLAVIA ("the union of Slavs"), which contained Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenians, and Moslem Albanians (Kosovars), Bosnians, and Macedonians. This amalgamation of peoples was held together, sometimes rather loosely, by a line of kings that the victors set over their new nation.

In time the Roman Empire was briefly revived in two new states founded by the apostles of a faith called FASCISM, based on obedience to the state. These apostles, BENITO MUSSOLINI, who based his empire on Rome, and ADOLF HITLER, who called his empire the THIRD REICH, conquered Yugoslavia and sent its king into an exile where he still remains. To replace the king, a nationalistic Communist named TITO led a resistance to the Third Reich, and, when it was overthrown by the old alliance of America, England, France, and the Soviet Union, he turned Yugoslavia into a Communist country that, despite its communism and despite its domination by the Orthodox Serbs, never was quite an ally of the Soviet Union.

After the overthrow of the brief new incarnations of the Roman Empire in WORLD WAR II, America became the head of an alliance of Capitalistic nations in a COLD WAR against the Soviet Union as the head of an alliance of Communist nations. In the end the Soviet Union collapsed as the Catholic Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians rebelled against their domination by the Russians, still Orthodox despite their veneer of Communism. The part of the Soviet Union that was officially Russian became the Russian Federation, officially capitalistic, at least for the moment. Meanwhile in Yugoslavia Tito had died, and the weird amalgamation of peoples held together only by the force of his personality began to fragment under the influence of the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Serbs, under the leadership of SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, president of Yugoslavia, resisted the break-up, but were forced over time to release the Slovenians, the Croatians, and the Macedonians to restore the independence of their own republics. The Serbs fought harder to prevent the independence of Bosnia, but, after a bloody war in which both sides committed atrocities, were forced to grant its independence by an alliance of NATO (basically America, England, France, and a democratic Germany) and Croatia. Eventually the Kosovars, Albanian Moslems in the Serbian province of Kosovo where the Serbs were forced into slavery to the Turks centuries before, also rebelled against Yugoslav rule, and the Serbs reacted with the ethnic cleansing that had horrified NAT0 in Bosnia. Once again NATO intervened against the Serbs . . .

Be with us next time as "East vs. West" carries its conflict into a new millennium.

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