It seems I promised you a series of these once, so let’s continue, shall we?
Constantine V (741-775) of Byzantium:
Kopronymos — the Dung-Named.
Constantine was an Iconoclast, and hostile Iconodules referred to him as “the Dung-Named”, as he was to have defecated in the purple cloth in which he was swaddled during his baptism. Imagine how nice that must have been for him, especially as he was one of the greatest Byzantine emperors, like, ever.
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Aw! Poor chap!
It didn’t pay off to make fun of Byzantine Emperors, though:
“Since monasteries tended to be strongholds of Iconophile sentiment, Constantine specifically targeted the monks, pairing them off and forcing them to marry nuns in the Hippodrome and expropriating monastic property for the benefit of the state or the army. The repressions against the monks (culminating in 766) were largely led by the emperor’s general Michael Lachanodrakon, who threatened resistant monks with blinding and exile.” (Wikipedia.)
Or to piss off the Byzantine clerics or populace, for that matter:
“(In the 9th century he was disinterred and his remains were thrown into the sea.)”
What a pleasant crowd they must have been, the Byzantine civilisation.
There’s actually a small part of me that’s reconsidering my ire at their extinction, and wondering if they didn’t, in fact, kinda deserve it.
Most do. If everyone who deserved it got what was coming to them, humanity would have ended shortly after Noah found land. Luckily, God promised the good ol’ captain that He wouldn’t make us face consequences of our many misdeeds in life anymore.
Not for a very long time, anyway.
The Rapture, you mean? I suppose that could count as a caveat.
So that’s what the Rapture is, then? I’ve always thought that was The Second Coming, and that the Rapture was when the righteous would be taken up to Heaven, or some such thing, but they’re undeniably closely related.
Logically, if the righteous are taking up to Heaven, those who remain are punished in life, no?
Bah, logic rears its ugly head again. Curse that eternally damned thing!
I suspect the use of “eternally damned” in that sentence was some kind of clever joke in this context, but I can’t quite figure it out.
Sorry to disappoint; my familiarity with Christian eschathology isn’t of such a magnitude as to allow for the creation of jokes related to it…
The creation of jokes? And Terje said “Let there be jokes, and be them many and fruitful, flat and crude, witty and obvious, complex and predictable, and amongst them thrive prejudice and simplification, similes and poorly hidden sex-talk, but of the Christian eschatology be there none, for lo, for such I have not the expertise much required.”
Indeed. You hit that one spot-on.
Awesome.
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I will come back