RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Today is September 4. On this day in history, in 476, the barbarian, Odacer, deposed the Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and sent the emperor's regalia to the Roman Emperor in the East, in Constantinople.

English speakers most often refer to this act as the Fall of the Roman Empire, although Rome persisted in the East until overrun by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The reason for this act of historical illiteracy is that the "Protestant" English historians, starting, at least, with Gibbon, despised the piety and religiousness of the Orthodox Peoples of the East. The snobbish English Deists and Protestants thought that such believers should not be granted the dignity of being Roman. That is when the term, "Byzantine," started. This is the Byzantine Empire, not the Eastern Roman Empire, don't you see.

If you ever visit the Holy Land, you will see this extreme Protestant aversion to the Orthodox Christians continue. Most fundamentalists and dispensationalists don't want to visit the ancient Christian shrines with their gilt items, icons, Orthodox vestments on the clergy, incense and other incidents of the Orthodox liturgy. These Protestants are more interested in the Old Testament sites such as Jacob's Well, and other old Jewish sites rather than the churches for the Nativity, Resurrection, Holy Sepulchre and others.

This, above all, shows the distinction between the extreme Protestant Judaizers who would return to the First Century and the New Testament Christian tradition of the last two millennia. History continues. Isn't it fascinating?

One of the 'civilized' barbarians, Odoacer, king of the Ostrogoths, put an end to the Western Roman Empire. Since by this time the empire had degenerated into little more than a protection racket run by puppet-emperors, whose army was entirely composed of barbarian mercenaries, the formal end of empire was no great loss. Odoacer governed better than most of the later emperors, although his empire was limited to Italy. Italy would remain a relatively civilized place for the next half-century-until the destructive Byzantine/Lombard invasions, when it joined the rest of Europe in the Dark Ages.