Constantinople

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

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.

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades · Nick Holmes, the eastern half

Part of Echoes of Empires

Seventeen minutes, the shortest way into the founding, from a host who argues the city mattered more than the conversion Constantine is remembered for.

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 The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-six minutes on 29 May 1453, the last assault and the breach. Thirteen episodes build toward this one.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-two minutes on the last days, the final liturgy in Hagia Sophia, and an emperor who refused to leave.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-one minutes on the relief that never came and the four Genoese ships that fought their way in and changed nothing.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-one minutes on April 1453: eighty thousand besiegers, seven thousand defenders, and the largest cannon ever cast to that point.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades · Nick Holmes, the eastern half

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades · Nick Holmes, the eastern half

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades · Nick Holmes, the eastern half

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Harald Hardrada in the Varangian Guard, a Norwegian prince serving as a bodyguard in Constantinople before going home to claim a throne. Sixty-four minutes.

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The History of Byzantium

With John Giebfried

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The History of Byzantium

Thirty-one minutes on the armies that turned up after Jerusalem fell, and on Alexios telling them which route to avoid. They took it.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-one minutes on six weeks of bombardment, with walls rebuilt each night by civilians and a garrison that could not be rotated.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-one minutes on Timur smashing the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, which bought Constantinople another fifty years.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of toldinstone

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.