Rome that kept going
323 entries · 504 hours · 17 shows
Ninety-two entries and 283 hours on the half of the empire that did not fall, from a catalogue that holds far more. The bulk of it is The History of Byzantium, which picks up the week Mike Duncan stopped and runs for another 375 episodes; thirty-eight of those are here and the rest are one link away. Byzantium And The Crusades supplies a fourteen-part run on 1453 and The History of Constantinople thirteen hours on the city itself. Forty-seven entries sit in the fall of the west and thirty-seven across the centuries, which is the shape of a subject that starts where most Roman histories end.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
when it happens
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
Before Rome c. 900 – 509 BC · 1
Part of Echoes of Empires
Fifteen minutes opening the series at the founding, which is the shortest route into the whole arc on offer here.
Carthage and the Punic Wars 814 – 146 BC · 5
Part of The History of Byzantium
With Katherine Pangonis
Forty-five minutes with Pangonis on Mediterranean cities that were great and then were not, Antioch and Ravenna among them.
Twenty-seven minutes on Belisarius sailing for Carthage in June 533 with everyone expecting him to fail. He took the Vandal kingdom in six months.
Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius sailing for Carthage in June 533 with everyone expecting him to fail. He took the Vandal kingdom in six months.
Twenty-one minutes on the armada of 468, the largest the eastern empire ever sent west, burnt at anchor by Vandal fireships.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Eleven minutes on a listener's comparison: Rome against Carthage and Rome against the Vandals, same ground, seven centuries apart, and one took decades where the other took a season.
The Late Republic 133 – 44 BC · 1
Part of The History of Byzantium · Robin Pierson, continuing from 476 for the last fourteen years
With Adrian Goldsworthy
Julius Caesar 100 – 42 BC · 1
Twenty minutes covering the whole life, which is enough for the shape and not for the argument. Take it as the map before the longer series.
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 1
Twenty-one minutes covering the whole reign, which gets you the outline and none of the argument. Start here, then move to the multi-part series on Octavian.
The Julio-Claudians AD 14 – 68 · 5
Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards
Part of The Rest Is History
Two halves in thirty-two minutes: Tom sets up the Year of the Four Emperors after Nero, Dominic takes a defeat that started the long Byzantine decline.
Twenty-six minutes on an empire holding more ground than it could pay for, which is the bill the next century had to settle.
Twenty-three minutes on the army Claudius Gothicus began rebuilding in the late 260s, with cavalry moved to the centre. Most of the recovery of the empire runs through this reform.
Sixteen minutes on the moment Claudius Gothicus dies of plague and the recovery looks lost, and on the man who picked it up. Aurelian arrives here.
The Flavians and Vesuvius AD 68 – 96 · 1
Part of Echoes of Empires · Nick Holmes, an argument in audio
The High Empire AD 98 – 192 · 3
With Steve Guerra
Forty-eight minutes with Steve Guerra on what happened to the old capital after the emperors left, which is a story of popes and cattle.
Twenty minutes on the emperor who ended the run of adoptive succession simply by being his father's son.
Severans and the Third-Century Crisis AD 193 – 284 · 7
Twenty-four minutes on 628 to 630 and the complete defeat of Persia. Within a decade both empires lose their southern provinces to the Arabs, which makes this victory the strangest in Roman history.
Twenty minutes on the Sasanian revival that turned Persia back into a rival, ending with a Roman emperor captured alive in 260. That capture is the low point the rest of the century climbs back from.
Nineteen minutes on the instability after Constantine, with three sons dividing the empire while Persia pressed the eastern frontier.
Eighteen minutes on Aurelian against Palmyra in the 270s, when the empire was split three ways and one general put it back together.
Sixteen minutes on the second half of that job: after Palmyra, the breakaway Gallic empire. Aurelian's title, restorer of the world, was earned in these two campaigns.
Dominate and Christian Rome AD 284 – 395 · 32
With Anthony Kaldellis
Eighty-seven minutes with Kaldellis on his single-volume history and on the argument that this was the Roman empire throughout, never a Byzantine one.
Forty-one minutes on Irene, who ended iconoclasm at a council and had herself called emperor in the masculine.
Thirty-five minutes of listener questions from the years of the successor states.
Thirty-three minutes on the short reigns between dynasties, which are usually skipped and are where the succession rules get tested.
Thirty-two minutes on Irene blinding her own son to keep the throne, and on a court that accepted it.
Thirty-two minutes of the last question session, taken after more than three hundred episodes.
Thirty-one minutes closing that stretch with the army unpaid, the coinage debased and the Turks in Anatolia.
Thirty minutes of listener questions covering the iconoclast century, where the sources were written afterwards by the side that won.
Twenty-nine minutes on an emperor spending the reserve Basil II had left, which took roughly one generation.
Twenty-eight minutes on Constantine V, called Copronymus by his enemies because of what he supposedly did at his own baptism. The nickname outlived every victory he won.
Twenty-eight minutes on savings that cost more than they saved, which is a recurring Byzantine fiscal move.
Twenty-seven minutes opening the second act of the eleventh-century crisis, after the first one had already cost Anatolia.
Twenty-five minutes arguing that the famous siege of the 670s did not happen the way every summary says. Watching a podcast take a standard story apart is the reason to pick this one.
Anastasius two centuries later, praised for leaving a full treasury and doing it with the same instruments Diocletian built. Twenty-five minutes, and a good argument for how long the reforms ran.
Constantine II, Constans and Constantius II, and the twenty-four years in which they fought each other more than anyone else. Twenty-three minutes.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Twenty-three minutes on AD 330 and the decision to put a second capital on the Bosphorus. Everything else on this page follows from that one act.
Twenty-two minutes on the recapture of Constantinople in 1261, taken almost by accident by a scouting party that found a gate open.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor touring Europe for help and the church union he signed to get it, which his own city rejected.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor remembered for one word, Apostate, and on the rest of him: the writing, the reforms, the eighteen months he had.
Twenty-two minutes on Julian sent to Gaul as a junior Caesar with no military experience, and on what he did with it.
Twenty-one minutes on the fall of the Armenian capital, a city of a thousand churches that the empire had annexed and then failed to defend.
Twenty-one minutes on the years after Adrianople, when the empire had a religious civil war on top of a military one.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades · Nick Holmes, the eastern half
Nineteen minutes on the closing of the old temples and the last pagan academies, done by law over decades.
Eighteen minutes on the same turn from the other side: what changed for the churches once the emperor was paying for basilicas and calling councils.
Provinces cut smaller, a court with ceremony borrowed from Persia, and an emperor who stopped pretending to be a first citizen. Eighteen minutes on the shape that lasted to Justinian.
Seventeen minutes, the shortest way into the founding, from a host who argues the city mattered more than the conversion Constantine is remembered for.
The tax reform behind the price edict: a new census counting land and people together, so the state could finally budget. Seventeen minutes on the dull reform that actually held.
Seventeen minutes arguing the fourth century was a good time to be alive, which cuts against the decline story most listeners arrive with.
Fifteen minutes on how a small movement became the empire's religion in under a century. The shortest route into the question in this whole catalogue.
The Fall of the West AD 395 – 565 · 131
Picks up the exact week Mike Duncan put the microphone down and keeps going for another thousand years. If you have ever told someone at a party that the Byzantines called themselves Romans, this is the show that armed you.
Nick Holmes writes books about the end of the Roman world and this is the argument from them in his own voice, held across 47 episodes. Ran as The Fall of the Roman Empire until 2026, so that name now finds a different show by somebody else.
Six hours from Nick Holmes on the two centuries in which Byzantium asked the West for soldiers and received the Fourth Crusade. 1204 is the hinge, and the case made here is that 1453 was settled then.
Part of Fall of Civilizations
Three and a half hours on the Eastern empire from Constantine to the walls falling in 1453. If you have ever wanted the argument that Rome did not fall in 476 laid out properly, this is it.
Kaldellis has spent a career arguing that the Byzantines were Romans, called themselves Romans, and were renamed by later scholars for reasons that had nothing to do with evidence. Two hours of him making that case will change how you read everything after 476.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Two hours on the most famous eastern emperor, scored the way this show scores everyone. The reconquest, the law code, the plague and Theodora all get weighed, and the verdict at the end is a number you can argue with.
Two hours on the emperor who was deposed, mutilated and exiled, and then came back and ruled again with a gold nose. The second reign is the part most accounts skip.
The companion to the ten greatest, and the more useful of the two: Kaldellis explains what an emperor had to do to lose an empire. Nearly two hours, and the failures repeat in ways the successes do not.
A hundred and seven minutes on the crusader siege, the starvation inside and outside the walls, and the relic that turned the battle.
A hundred and two minutes, the third part with Kaldellis, on narrative history and on what a thousand-year account has to leave out.
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast
Ninety-three minutes with Daniel of Eastern Roman History arguing about the worst emperors of the east. Two shows disagreeing about the same shortlist is a faster way into the period than either list alone.
Seventy-six minutes with Kaldellis on his argument that Byzantium remained a republic in which the people could unmake an emperor. The most contested thesis in the field, argued out.
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Robin Pierson treats the death of the last emperor as an open case: what the sources claim, where they cannot have been standing, and what became of the body. Sixty-six minutes on 29 May 1453.
With John Strickland
Sixty-three minutes with an Orthodox priest walking through the liturgy, which is the part of Byzantine life that never stopped.
Part of HistoryMarche
Narses in Italy, the eunuch general who finished what Belisarius started. He was past seventy when he took the command and he won every battle he fought.
An hour on Antioch after the 2023 earthquake, with two historians of the city on what was lost and what can be recovered.
With Maximilian Lau
Fifty-seven minutes with Maximilian Lau on where Komnenian scholarship has moved since his last appearance.
Part of Tides of History
Fifty-seven minutes on 1453, after sixty years of Ottoman attempts, and on what the capture meant for everyone else around that sea.
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Fifty-three minutes with Maximilian Lau on John II, the most competent Komnenos and the least written about.
The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
With Nathan Websdale
With David Gyllenhaal
Forty-nine minutes with David Gyllenhaal on how Byzantines explained defeat: if God favours the empire, what does a lost province mean.
Part one of three, forty-nine minutes on Theodora before the throne, whose early life comes to us through Procopius writing in private and with a grudge.
Part two, forty-seven minutes on Trebizond from 1297 to 1453 under the Grand Komnenoi, the last Roman state to fall and the one nobody remembers.
Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast
Patrick Wyman as guest on whether taking Italy back destroyed it. Forty-six minutes on a reconquest that left the peninsula emptier than the Goths did.
Peter Sarris on his own biography of Justinian, with Patrick Wyman pressing on the balance sheet: the reconquest, the Code, Hagia Sophia, and the plague that arrived in the middle of all three. Forty-six minutes.
With Ben Duval
Forty-five minutes with Ben Duval on Saladin as a planner, which is the part the chivalric legend leaves out.
With Mark Masterson
Mark Masterson on why the emperor who ruled for half a century never married, and on what the sources will and will not say about it. Forty-four minutes, a thousand years after his death.
Part one, forty-one minutes on Trebizond from 1204, when the Fourth Crusade broke the empire into pieces and this piece went its own way.
With David Hendrix
Forty-one minutes with David Hendrix, who has photographed what survives, on the Byzantine remains hiding in plain sight in Istanbul.
Forty minutes taking the site from Greek Byzantion to imperial capital, early in a run that went on for another three hundred and sixty episodes. The compact version of the whole story.
Listener questions: where the gold came from, how Romania ended up speaking a Romance language, whether the Byzantines played polo. Thirty-nine minutes of the loose ends a narrative show cannot stop for.
Thirty-nine minutes of counterfactuals from listeners, answered by someone who has spent fifteen years on the actual sequence and knows where it could have bent.
With Leonora Neville
The companion argument to Kaldellis, from a different angle: the word Byzantine is a seventeenth-century coinage doing quiet damage. Short, sharp, and it will change how you read every book on the shelf.
Part two, thirty-nine minutes on the Nika riots of 532, which burned the city centre and came close to ending the reign in its fifth year.
Thirty-eight minutes of listener questions around the First Crusade, which is the moment the empire and the west start reading each other wrong.
With Ian Huges
Ian Hughes, who wrote the biography, on Belisarius reconquering Africa and Italy on budgets that kept being cut out from under him. Thirty-eight minutes.
With Peter Sarris
Peter Sarris on his biography, arguing the reconquest was less reckless than it reads with hindsight. Thirty-seven minutes with a historian defending an unfashionable position.
Thirty-four minutes on the restoration of icons in 843 and the feast that still marks it in the Orthodox calendar.
Thirty-three minutes weighing what was left in 565: Italy ruined by twenty years of war, the treasury empty, and a law code that outlived every province he took.
Thirty-three minutes on women's lives across the empire, built from law codes, saints' lives and wills.
Thirty-one minutes on the 540s: plague, bankruptcy, the Gothic war restarting, and an emperor who would not stop.
Half an hour on five days of riot, a city on fire, and thirty thousand dead in the hippodrome. Theodora's line about purple making a fine shroud is here.
Half an hour of counterfactuals: which Byzantine defeats were avoidable, handled with more care than that usually gets.
Half an hour on finding a doctor in the late Roman world, where your options ran from a trained physician to a shrine.
Thirty minutes on three days in April 1204, when a Christian army sacked the largest Christian city and shipped the bronze horses to Venice.
What happened to the Romans after 1453: enslavement, ransom, flight west, and the families who did well out of Ottoman rule. Twenty-eight minutes on an ending that kept going.
Twenty-eight minutes on the peasant's nephew who inherited an empire and spent it trying to win back the west. The reconquest and the plague arrive in the same decade.
Twenty-eight minutes on the end of the Macedonian line, with the throne passing through elderly empresses to whoever they married.
Twenty-eight minutes on a year-long siege in which the aqueducts were cut and the city never recovered its population.
The legends that gathered around Constantine XI, including the one where an angel carries him under the Golden Gate to wait. Twenty-seven minutes on how a defeat turns into a prophecy.
John VIII asks the Pope for a council to reunite the churches and is told yes. Twenty-seven minutes on the delegation that sailed to Italy, covering 1425 to 1448.
Twenty-seven minutes on the western provinces at the start of the series, still Roman in law and ruled by Goths and Vandals in fact.
Twenty-seven minutes opening a side series on individual lives, starting with a preacher from Antioch whose sermons got him exiled twice.
Twenty-seven minutes taking apart a story the sources tell well and the evidence does not support.
Twenty-seven minutes on the early 550s, when Justinian launched another western campaign with an empire still recovering from plague. The title is the verdict.
Twenty-seven minutes on what came after that six-month conquest: fifteen years of holding North Africa. The occupation cost more than the war.
Twenty-seven minutes on Stilicho's fall in 408 and on Alaric taking his chance. Two years later Rome is sacked, and this is why.
Listener questions on the Secret History, eunuchs, the Crown of Thorns and where the Doukas name came from. Twenty-six minutes.
Twenty-six minutes on why Mehmed did not move his capital to the city he had just taken, and on the arguments that finally changed his mind.
Twenty-six minutes on 29 May 1453, the last assault and the breach. Thirteen episodes build toward this one.
Twenty-six minutes on the civil wars that hollowed the empire out long before the Ottomans arrived. The decline was internal first.
Twenty-five minutes on the taxes, the factions and the resentment that piled up in Justinian's first five years before anyone struck a match.
Twenty-five minutes on the Persian army walking into the third city of the empire while the best troops were in Italy.
Twenty-five minutes on Gelimer, who lost a kingdom in two battles and was given an estate in Galatia to retire on.
Twenty-five minutes on the case against: the wars, the taxes and the Nika riot in which thirty thousand died in a hippodrome.
Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius back in Italy in 544 with almost no troops, in the campaign that ended his career.
Twenty-five minutes on the Gothic war after Belisarius held Rome in 537, when a quick end looked possible and the command was split instead.
Twenty-five minutes on January 532, when a riot at the hippodrome nearly ended Justinian's reign in its fifth year. Theodora's line about purple making a fine shroud comes from here.
Twenty-five minutes on the eastern half after 410, which did not collapse. Comparing the two halves is the useful part.
The last episode of the show, twenty-four minutes making the case for the show itself: the answer you give relatives who ask why Byzantium.
Twenty-four minutes on May 540, Ravenna taken and the Gothic king a prisoner, and on why that did not end the war.
Twenty-four minutes returning to Attila before the Justinian story starts, asking what the Huns actually changed. A hinge episode between two halves of the series.
Twenty-four minutes on 9 August 378, when an eastern emperor rode out to fight the Goths and did not come back. Ammianus called it the worst defeat since Cannae.
Twenty-three minutes on the second Italian campaign, fought with a scraped-together army years after the first one had won.
The question put directly, with the law code and Hagia Sophia on one side and a bankrupt, plague-thinned empire on the other. Twenty-three minutes.
Procopius wrote the official history and then a private pamphlet calling the empress a whore and the emperor a demon. Twenty-three minutes on what to do with a source that contradicts itself on purpose.
The uncle who rose from the peasantry to the purple and the nephew he educated for it. Twenty-three minutes on a succession planned from the bottom up.
Twenty-three minutes on 622, with Avars to the west and Persians to the east, when Heraclius left his capital surrounded and attacked instead.
Twenty-three minutes on what the reconquest cost elsewhere: a west stripped of troops and the frontiers behind it left open.
Twenty-three minutes on December 406 and the Rhine crossing, after which the western provinces were never fully recovered. The title is Jerome's line.
Twenty-three minutes on the summer of 376, when perhaps two hundred thousand Goths appeared on the Danube asking to be let in. What Rome did next is the subject of the following episode.
Twenty-three minutes on Reynald of Antioch invading Byzantine Cyprus, and on the emperor who came to collect. A crusader state attacking a Christian ally.
Twenty-two minutes on how Venice, Rome and Moscow each reacted to 1453, and on the people who later claimed descent from the last emperor.
Twenty-two minutes on the last days, the final liturgy in Hagia Sophia, and an emperor who refused to leave.
Twenty-two minutes on 1204, when a crusade aimed at Egypt ran out of money and took the Christian capital instead. The city never recovered, which is why 1453 went the way it did.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor whose daughter wrote the Alexiad about him, which is both the reason we know him and the reason to be careful.
Twenty-two minutes on 1068 to 1071 and Romanus Diogenes trying to stop the Turkish raids into Anatolia. The battle at the end of it cost the empire its heartland.
Twenty-two minutes on 20 June 451, when Aetius stopped Attila in Gaul with an army of Romans and Goths together. The last great western Roman victory.
Twenty-two minutes on the First Crusade told from the Byzantine side, where the armies arriving were a problem as much as an answer.
Twenty-one minutes on Zeno, a mountain chieftain from Isauria who became emperor and spent most of the reign being driven out of his own capital.
Twenty-one minutes on a counter-offensive after a long stretch of losing, which in this period is rare enough to be an event.
Twenty-one minutes on the relief that never came and the four Genoese ships that fought their way in and changed nothing.
Twenty-one minutes on April 1453: eighty thousand besiegers, seven thousand defenders, and the largest cannon ever cast to that point.
Twenty-one minutes on the cannon Mehmet commissioned, cast by a founder who had offered it to the Byzantines first and been told they could not pay. The walls had held for a thousand years until this.
Twenty-one minutes on Honoria sending her ring to Attila, and on a Hun who chose to read it as a marriage proposal with half the empire as dowry.
Twenty-one minutes returning east after several episodes away, to an empire that lost half its territory and kept going for another eight centuries.
Twenty-one minutes on the plague that struck in 541 and killed on the scale of the Black Death. Everything Justinian planned after this is shaped by it.
Twenty-one minutes on 1396 and the crusade that was supposed to stop the Ottomans in the Balkans. After it, Constantinople was alone.
Twenty-one minutes on Attila turning south into Italy after Gaul, and on the embassy that met him there. The pope in that story is the reason it is remembered.
Twenty minutes ranking the worst, by someone who has covered every one of them in order and can say what the competition was.
Twenty minutes on 433 and Aetius taking control of the west with Hunnic help, while the Vandals took the African grain supply. Rome lost its breadbasket here.
Twenty minutes on the battle itself in August 1071, where an emperor was captured and the defeat mattered less than the civil war it started.
The opening of a fourteen-part run on 1453, nineteen minutes on why an empire with four centuries still to run was already being called dying. Start the run here.
Nineteen minutes on the siege that nearly destroyed the crusade and produced the quarrel over Antioch that poisoned relations with Constantinople for a century.
Eighteen minutes on the other side of the same frontier, and on villages that paid taxes to whichever side reached them.
Eighteen minutes on the two pressures at once, Normans in Italy and Turks in Anatolia, which is how the empire lost both ends in one decade.
Seventeen minutes on how Byzantines expected to be treated by their own state, and what they did when they were not.
Seventeen minutes on the climate argument, which has moved from the margins of the field to the centre in twenty years.
Seventeen minutes introducing the people who shape Roman history from the third century to the sixth. Useful before the Adrianople and Gothic war episodes, because it explains who is arriving and why.
Sixteen minutes closing the Manzikert run on what the empire had left afterwards, and on the appeal west that brought the crusaders.
Sixteen minutes on who the Seljuks were and how they reached Anatolia, before the battle that decided it. Part of the Manzikert run.
Fifteen minutes on what the First Crusade did to Byzantium and to the medieval world, which is the frame for the rest of the series.
Twelve minutes on the Byzantine counter-offensive in the 1060s, the last time the empire moved east under its own steam.
Eight minutes more on the same episode, including the meeting with Pope Leo that turned Attila around.
Part of toldinstone
A Byzantine fortress walked through on camera, the kind of site that never makes a narrative history.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 135
Twelve and a half hours on the city itself, foundation to 1453, told as the biography of a place while the emperors come and go through it.
A hundred and thirty-nine minutes on the last Roman-Persian war, which ruined both empires and left neither able to stop the Arab armies that came ten years later.
Two hours in which Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago names his ten greatest emperors and defends each one. It is the clearest short route into who actually ran the eastern empire well, and every choice comes with its argument.
A hundred and sixteen minutes with Kaldellis on the middle period, and on why the standard periodisation of this empire keeps misleading people.
Nearly two hours on Basil the Bulgar Slayer, the high-water mark of the medieval empire, and one host spends most of it unconvinced. The disagreement is the reason to listen.
A hundred and seven minutes on the defeat of 1071, where the emperor was captured and the real damage was the civil war that followed.
A hundred and five minutes finishing the conversation, on the last centuries and on what a thousand-year synthesis costs its author.
Mehmed II becomes sultan in 1451 and starts planning at once. A hundred and one minutes covering 1448 to 1453, which is the planning and the diplomacy; the siege itself comes later.
Ninety-four minutes on the assault of 1204 itself, with the Venetian fleet at the sea walls and a puppet emperor already dead.
Eighty minutes, the longest episode in this stretch, on how the western half slipped away and what the eastern half told itself about it.
With Marco Cappelli
Eighty minutes with Marco Capelli on the Byzantine centuries in Italy, which Italian history teaching largely passes over.
Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago picks ten East Romans the political narrative skips over. Part one, seventy-five minutes.
Part two, seventy minutes, and the half where the choices get stranger.
Sixty-four minutes continuing the same conversation, into the schism and what actually divided the churches.
Sixty-three minutes on how a sixth-century general ended up as a subject for metal bands, and on what modern reception does with Byzantium.
Sixty-three minutes on how an army sworn to Egypt ended up outside Constantinople: a debt to Venice, a claimant with promises, and nobody willing to stop.
With Nicholas Morton
Sixty-two minutes with Nicholas Morton on the whole sea at once, which is the frame that makes the crusades make sense.
Sixty-one minutes on Basil II's long war with Bulgaria, the blinding of fifteen thousand prisoners, and an empire at its widest since Justinian.
Fifty-eight minutes with Morton on his book about the thirteenth-century Near East, where Mongols, Mamluks and crusaders all arrive at once.
Fifty-seven minutes of questions on Orthodox belief and practice, answered from inside the tradition.
With Eric McGeer
Fifty-seven minutes with Eric McGeer on tenth-century military manuals, written by men who had commanded and meant them to be used.
Fifty-four minutes with Nicholas Morton on the crusade that aimed at Egypt, took Damietta and gave it back.
Forty-nine minutes with Leonora Neville on the princess who wrote the Alexiad, the only full history of the period by a woman.
With John Giebfried
Forty-eight minutes on the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, who pawned the crown of thorns and sold the lead off his own roof.
Forty-eight minutes on where Rome kept going after it fell: in Constantinople, in the Tsars, in the Kaisers, and in arguments still running today.
Forty-seven minutes on the defeat of 1176 in a mountain pass, which ended any hope of taking Anatolia back.
Forty-five minutes of listener questions after 1204, which is the point where the series has to explain what an empire in exile even is.
With Peter Frankopan
Forty-four minutes with Peter Frankopan on his argument that the First Crusade began as a Byzantine request for mercenaries.
Forty-three minutes with John Giebfried on the city under Latin rule after 1204, when the conquerors found they had taken something too big to run. The physical decay is the evidence.
Forty-one minutes on the plague of 541, which killed perhaps a third of the empire and ended the reconquest without a battle.
Forty minutes on the emperors after Basil, who inherited a full treasury and an unbeaten army and lost both in fifty years.
With Alexander Christie-Miller
Forty minutes with Alexander Christie-Miller on modern Istanbul and the Byzantine layer still visible under it.
Thirty-nine minutes on who actually lived in the empire: farmers, soldiers, and a capital that ate what the provinces grew.
Thirty-seven minutes on Byzantine diplomacy: gold, titles and marriage used as cheaper substitutes for armies.
Thirty-seven minutes on Constantinople itself, which in Greek is simply the City, and which everyone in this story is trying to reach.
Thirty-seven minutes on the city in 1025, away from the monuments: where people lived, how many there were, which harbours still worked. An ordinary year at the height of the empire.
Thirty-seven minutes on the numbers: how many people, how much grain, and how little of it can be known with confidence.
Thirty-seven minutes with Katherine Pangonis on the women who ruled the crusader kingdom, several of them in their own right.
Thirty-seven minutes on what the sack did to the people in the city, which the political narrative usually passes over in a sentence.
Thirty-six minutes on an emperor who came to the throne as a boy, which in this empire usually meant somebody else was ruling.
Thirty-six minutes of listener questions on the seventh-century collapse, when the empire lost half its territory inside one generation.
Thirty-six minutes weighing the dynasty as a whole: they held the walls against the Arabs and are remembered for smashing pictures.
Thirty-four minutes of listener questions from the middle Macedonian stretch, including the ones about how the army was actually paid.
Thirty-four minutes on a Constantinopolitan triumph: the route, the captives, and the ceremony borrowed from Rome eight centuries earlier.
Thirty-three minutes of listener questions after the Justinianic stretch, where the host answers what the narrative had to leave out.
Thirty-three minutes on a regency run by an empress and her brother, and the son who eventually killed the uncle.
Thirty-three minutes on Alexios rebuilding the state around his own family, which worked for a century and left nothing underneath it.
Thirty-three minutes with Neville on whether the coup attributed to Anna Komnene happened at all, and on who wanted the story told.
With Robert Bruton
Thirty-three minutes with Robert Bruton on the volcanic winters of the 530s, the coldest decade in two thousand years, and the plague that followed.
Thirty-two minutes of listener questions around the early Macedonian period, where the narrative has to skip the most and the host knows it.
Thirty-two minutes on an emperor who spent a generation's revenue on western adventures and left the eastern frontier thin.
Thirty-one minutes on the tax system that paid for that recovery, which is the least glamorous and most decisive part of the story.
Thirty-one minutes on the armies that turned up after Jerusalem fell, and on Alexios telling them which route to avoid. They took it.
Thirty minutes on Manuel II playing an Ottoman civil war for everything it was worth, covering 1402 to 1430.
Thirty minutes on the eight-year Ottoman blockade of Constantinople, lifted when Timur destroyed Bayezid's army at Ankara in 1402.
Half an hour of listener questions from the eleventh century, the decades where every explanation of the collapse is still argued over.
Twenty-nine minutes more of the same, the second half of a long question session.
Twenty-nine minutes on a figure playing both sides of a frontier, which in this period was a normal career.
Twenty-eight minutes on the fourteenth-century civil wars, fought while the Ottomans were crossing into Europe as somebody's allies.
Twenty-eight minutes on Syria, Egypt and Palestine, the richest part of the empire and the part that would be lost fastest.
Twenty-eight minutes on an emperor who needed an heir and married four times to get one, against a church that allowed three.
Twenty-eight minutes on the empire's pull on its neighbours: everyone wanted its gold, its titles and its church, and nobody wanted its tax collectors.
Twenty-eight minutes with a Turkish guide on visiting the sites, which turns a thousand-year narrative into somewhere you can stand.
Twenty-eight minutes on Andronikos Komnenos taking the throne and the purge that came with him.
Twenty-eight minutes on the recall to Italy with too few troops, which is how the reconquest turned into twenty years of war.
Twenty-seven minutes on Basil I, a peasant from Macedonia who murdered his way to the throne and founded the longest dynasty Byzantium had.
Twenty-seven minutes on the eleventh-century economy, which grew while the army and the currency were falling apart.
Twenty-seven minutes with John Giebfried on the Venetian quarter of the fragmented empire, which was run as a business.
Twenty-seven minutes on Latin rule in Greece read as an occupation, with the question of what the locals actually experienced.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Palaiologan heirs inheriting a capital they could not afford to hold.
Twenty-seven minutes on 626, with Avars on the land side and Persians on the Asian shore while Heraclius was away campaigning. The city held with almost no field army inside it.
Twenty-six minutes on the great landowning families buying out the peasant soldiers, which emperors legislated against for a century and lost.
Twenty-six minutes on Nikephoros Phokas, a general who took Crete and Antioch and was murdered in his own bedroom by his wife's lover.
Twenty-six minutes on two cousins, one running the empire and the other waiting, which ends badly for everyone including the empire.
Twenty-six minutes on the Anatolia the empire had lost: who lived there now, and how much had actually changed for them.
Twenty-six minutes on a brother deposing and blinding a brother, which by this point in the story is a standard transfer of power.
Twenty-six minutes on what happened to the legions: smaller units, federate troops, and a tax base that could no longer pay for either.
Twenty-six minutes on the Frankish kingdom that met the Arab advance into Gaul, and on the conversion that made it Rome's heir in the west.
Twenty-six minutes opening the final season on the dark ages, starting with Iberia falling in a few years. The question the season asks is how dark those centuries really were.
Twenty-five minutes of listener questions on the siege of 1453 and the Palaiologan century around it.
John V faces rebellion from his own sons and grandsons while the empire becomes an Ottoman vassal and a Venetian bargaining chip. Twenty-five minutes, 1371 to 1391.
Twenty-five minutes on an empress who had been an actress, which was a legal barrier until the law was changed for her.
Twenty-five minutes on the tenth-century recovery, when the frontier started moving east again after three hundred years of moving west.
Twenty-five minutes on two new powers in the Mediterranean, one of them soon holding the empire's trade and the other its Italian provinces.
Twenty-five minutes taking stock five hundred years after the west fell, with the east still calling itself Roman.
Twenty-five minutes walking the city: the walls, the forums, the palace and the hippodrome, with what is still standing today.
Twenty-five minutes on the dynasty running out of heirs after two centuries, and on what that did to a state with no succession law.
Twenty-five minutes on Dara in 530, where a Roman army half the size won by digging ditches in front of its own line.
Twenty-five minutes on daily life in the crusader states, Outremer, the part of the story that is neither battle nor politics.
Part of The History of Rome
Twenty-five minutes on Julian marching east against Constantius II in 360, and the death that handed him the empire before the two armies ever met.
Twenty-four minutes on the Arab siege of 717, which this episode argues is one of the hinges of European history. The city had Greek fire and two years of grain; the besiegers had a winter.
Twenty-three minutes on the decade when everything worked: Africa retaken in a season, the law codified, and Hagia Sophia going up.
Twenty-three minutes on what the fall meant, from the end of the Roman state to the scholars who carried Greek manuscripts west. The closing episode of the run.
Twenty-two minutes answering what a visit is actually like, which is a fair question after three hundred episodes about the place.
Twenty-two minutes on the largest army sent east, and on the emperor who drowned in a river before it arrived.
Twenty-two minutes on August 357, when Julian met thirty-five thousand Germans crossing the Rhine. The battle that made his reputation and his claim to the throne.
Twenty-two minutes on the 1180s, when the crusader states could not agree on a leader with Saladin at the door.
Twenty-one minutes on why the empire kept spending on Italy long after it stopped paying for itself, which is an argument about legitimacy.
Twenty-one minutes on the coronation ritual and the building it happened in, where the ceremony and the architecture were designed together.
Twenty-one minutes on the speech at Clermont, of which five versions survive and all were written after the crusade succeeded.
Twenty-one minutes on money pulling the empire and its neighbours apart, with trade privileges handed to Venice that could not be taken back.
Twenty-one minutes on six weeks of bombardment, with walls rebuilt each night by civilians and a garrison that could not be rotated.
Twenty-one minutes on the one weak point in the best-fortified city in the medieval world, and on the Turkish ships dragged overland to reach it.
Twenty-one minutes on Timur smashing the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, which bought Constantinople another fifty years.
Twenty-one minutes on an empire run by two regents, Stilicho in the west and Eutropius in the east, with emperors who were children. The structure that failed in 410 is set up here.
Twenty minutes on Jewish life under the empire, legally tolerated and repeatedly restricted, over a thousand years.
Twenty minutes on the city under Manuel Komnenos in the twelfth century, with two palaces in use and the Italian quarters growing. The Italians in this episode are why 1204 happened.
Twenty minutes on the children's crusade of 1212, one of the strangest episodes in the whole story and one where the sources are at their least reliable.
Nineteen minutes on Anastasius, who abolished a hated tax, left a treasury of three hundred and twenty thousand pounds of gold, and is remembered by almost nobody.
Eighteen minutes on climate as a force in Roman history, from the warm centuries of the early empire to the cooling that came with the plague years.
Sixteen minutes on whether the famous naval weapon was ever used in a siege, and on how closely the recipe was kept.
Eight minutes in the Hippodrome, where the Nika riots of 532 ended with the army penning the crowd in and killing it, and where an obelisk cut for Thutmose III still stands on the base the Byzantines built for it.
The Byzantine city in the Peloponnese that outlasted Constantinople by seven years, filmed among the ruins.
