Episode 316 - Questions XVI

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

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Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

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Coach, one more question: play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

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Please play responsibly.

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Byzantium

deception lies fakery fraudulence and forgery this is what Intelligence Speech 2025 will be bringing you

we are delighted to announce three outstanding keynote speakers we have Joe Hedwig Tuise from the awesome fake history hunter Twitter feed and author of Fake History we also have Otto English author of another fake history and fake heroes, and presenter of the Utterbollocks podcast.

And finally, we have podcasting legend and intelligent speech stalwart Wesley Livesey, host of the history of the Great War and the history of the Second World War podcasts.

Intelligent Speech 2025 Deception will be taking place on the 8th of February 2025.

Go to intelligencepeechonline.com to find out more.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 316.

Questions 16.

Before we get to more of your questions, you may have heard from the trailer that played at the start of this episode that there is a podcast conference taking place on the 8th of February 2025.

I will be on two panel discussions: one about Byzantine deception and the other a game of historical call-my-bluff.

There'll be plenty of chances for you to ask questions to the panels, so please come along.

All from the comfort of your home, of course.

This is an online conference.

This is Intelligent Speech 2025.

And if you listen to the trailer, you'll know the theme is deception, lies, fakery, fraudulence, and forgery.

Keynote speakers include Wesley Livesey, host of the History of the Second World War and Great War podcasts, Otto English, host of the Utter Bollocks podcast and author of Fake Heroes and Fake History, and Johedwig Tewisa, better known as Fake History Hunter, on Twitter, and now author of a book, Fake History.

Go to intelligent speechonline.com to find out more and use the code Sophia, as in Azia Sophia, to get a discount on your tickets.

A couple of other things you might be interested in.

You may recall that in our first chat with Professor Nicholas Morton, we talked about the Mongol occupation of Anatolia and that one of the things they demanded as tribute from the Seljuks was 3,000 felt hats every year.

Listener Bethany Brookshire was so intrigued that she did some research to track down what this hat would have looked like.

If you'd like to see the hat that was so popular it was nearly banned in Western Europe and how Bethany found out more about it, then visit her substack.

Go to substack.com and search Bethany Brookshire and you'll find her page which is called Team Trash where people and wildlife meet.

Finally, I know a lot of you are interested in AI.

and Listener TL is working on a really interesting project that might interest you.

He is working on a way to compare and score the semantic similarity of phrases in pre-modern languages.

He's working with TF-IDF models and CADED, compass-aligned distributional embeddings.

He's starting with Middle High German and Latin, but would like to introduce other languages after the initial phase.

If you have an interest in natural language processing, familiarity with alternate approaches and or ideas on how to scale such a project up, then please contact me and I will put you in touch with him.

So last time we recapped Andronicus's reign and looked at some of the specifics of why his time in power was so depressing.

But I sensed a yearning in people's questions.

I think a lot of you want to know why the Romans didn't do more to reform themselves, their government and their army, to perform better on the battlefield.

Why have they accepted losing when their ancestors kept getting up after their defeats and fighting on?

Listener TK, TK, for example, says:

I'm wondering why the Byzantines didn't embrace the Western European feudal system.

Given the Latins took Constantinople, what better proof for the merits of that socio-economic system?

Plus, the Byzantines were taking steps in that direction anyway, with the Pronoia system.

Why didn't they fully adopt feudalism as a means to reinvent the empire?

So I think Listener TK is asking a very fair question, one that gets to the heart of a lot of listeners' feelings about Byzantium.

But before I address the essence of the question, the pedant in me feels the need to unpick each premise first, just to be thorough.

So it's worth remembering that feudalism is a label we now use to describe a broad collection of systems.

It wasn't understood that way at the time, and there was lots of variation between different European kingdoms.

So in that sense, sense there wasn't one model which the Byzantines could adopt.

It's also very much worth saying that the Byzantines defeated the Normans, the Hungarians and the Venetians in battle prior to 1204, and that the Fourth Crusade succeeded because it was a combined operation between tens of thousands of Western Europeans.

It was hardly a fair fight between two different models of society.

I would also question the idea that it was the feudal system that was responsible for Western Europe's advances on the world stage.

Demographics are surely the prime factor.

The population in North West Europe had grown incredibly rapidly, at a rate unprecedented in that region, in the centuries leading up to 1204,

just as the Romans had benefited from incredible birth rates during the Republican era.

This allowed Western Europe to export soldiers to Spain, to Sicily, to the Levant, all of which could lead one to conclude that their system must be working well, but surely it's a matter of agricultural expansion more than it was the success of a political system.

The methods brought to bear, like the heavy plough, turned previously unused land into productive farms.

And the same just wasn't true in the Mediterranean.

There, the soil was already being used productively.

There were no new techniques available to the Byzantines to expand their population in the same way.

Now, I know I sound very defensive at this point, but it's also worth saying that with the Vikings and the Magyars tamed and Christianized, Western Europe had no natural predators.

So the West's ambitious and violent men went abroad searching for heads to smash in, a luxury the Byzantines never ever enjoyed.

What the feudal system did well was to create a militarized elite, a professional warrior class who could dedicate themselves to violence while the peasants worked the land.

This system did not produce strong states.

Quite the reverse.

Western European states were generally weak, decentralized, and often quagmires of internal violent struggle.

Because if you allow everyone who can afford it to build castles, then it's hard to force them to do what you want.

That's why Byzantium repeatedly defeated Western invaders, because a centralized tax-raising bureaucracy can deliver you the funds necessary to have a larger army than all your rivals.

Once the Ottomans move into Europe, this truth will be revealed once more.

Now, I will get down off my high horse and admit that listener TK really is onto something, which is why did the elites of Western Europe get on their high horses in heavy armour and risk their lives in daring cavalry charges, while the Byzantines did not.

Now, I have tried answering this question several times on the podcast, talking about the different incentive structures in each society, talking about demographics, talking about why the Byzantines hired Latin mercenaries to do that sort of thing for them.

But I do understand what the problem is.

If you keep losing, then why aren't you doing something different?

Again, the best answer I can come up with probably won't please many listeners.

The reality is that coordinated, heavy cavalry charges, the key weapon in Western European warfare, are something best done by those who've been practising since childhood.

Knights and their squires and their horses had close relationships and developed the kind of understanding and communication necessary to perform such a dangerous manoeuvre.

Horses won't run into a solid object unless you train them very well, and ideally some of your enemy will be scared and run, creating holes for the horses to aim for.

And this all takes years of training, lots of expensive armor, and of course, the courage to go through with it.

At times in the past, the Romans did train their own heavy cavalry.

So, why didn't that become a part of their culture?

The answer I would give is that

culture in a society dictates these things rather than it being easy to design.

Nicephorus Phocas was able to develop a heavy cavalry wing to his army because he had a lot of power, authority, money, and was in charge for year after year after year.

And very quickly after his death and after the Arabs he aimed his heavy cavalry at had been defeated, the Byzantines dispensed with heavy cavalry and when they needed them they hired Latins.

So it just wasn't in the soil of Byzantium.

It wasn't in the culture to develop knights.

whereas the fragmented power structure of Western Europe encouraged the nobility to fight for their own land.

This meant if you were a landowner, a rich landowner, then you had to fight.

And so people put on more and more armor to try and protect themselves and survive this endemic violence.

In Byzantium, the dominant state discouraged that kind of build-up of private power.

And because men could get rich by serving the state, they didn't need to acquire land and become knights in their castles the way people did in Western Europe.

Now, the nobility in Byzantium did fight.

Most men who wanted a political career joined the army.

But they didn't have to, and they didn't have to fight in the front line.

And they certainly didn't

volunteer to be a part of this very dangerous way of fighting.

Now, in Western Europe, you therefore develop a culture where all men do this, you know, all men of a certain rank,

and therefore it would seem cowardly not to.

In Byzantium, men did serve as cavalry officers and soldiers, and so they were involved in battles and they were risking their lives, but they weren't in a culture of heavy cavalry charges, which

are very dangerous.

And so, in Byzantium, it wasn't seen as cowardly to not want to be a heavy cavalryman.

And we've discussed this before, so therefore Latin writers accuse the Greeks of being cowards.

But it just wasn't part of Roman military culture.

And when you have a state that dominates and dictates how things should be done, and you have the money to hire Latins to do the heavy cavalry charges for you, that culture just doesn't develop.

And it's worth saying that

the Byzantines did, on a personal level, see that the Latins had developed something impressive.

And so the Byzantines would learn how to joust and, you know, in other ways compete with the Latins.

Manuel Komninos

competed on the battlefield, as it were, to try and kill Turks in Anatolia to impress the Latins in his service.

But again, that didn't mean he was part of a heavy cavalry charge, because as the emperor, he had to maintain some sort of distance in order to direct the battle and then get involved when he felt his presence was valuable.

And of course, being a lighter armed

man on a horse, he could maneuver quicker than you know, heavy cavalry knights who, once they've done their charging, can't really catch anyone because they're so heavy, you know, that they and their horses, they can't really chase down a fleeing enemy, whereas Manawiel could.

Anyway,

the question, I suppose, is why after 1204, after the Fourth Crusade, why didn't the Byzantines fully adopt the Western model?

And again, I think it's just because that's much easier said than done.

You know, you'd have to bring in a whole culture, whole infrastructure and experience necessary to become a heavy cavalry force by nature.

And obviously the way to...

to achieve that would have been to bring Latins in to run things,

which obviously would not have been popular.

so again you have that kind of

xenophobia or national pride comes into things where you say well we don't want to do things the exact way someone else is doing them

and this came up when I started the podcast you know 700 years of narrative ago listeners asked me why don't the Romans train their men to fight like the Huns

which obviously elite cavalrymen did.

They learnt how to shoot from the back of a horse.

But I'm afraid the answer is the same then as it was now: that adopting another fighting method successfully would mean adopting the culture.

And the Romans weren't going to live like Huns, and they weren't going to force their sons to be on the saddle 24-7.

Similarly, you can train your own heavy cavalry, as Nicephorus Phocas did.

That doesn't mean they're going to fight as well as the Latins.

Now, I know some of you will say, but,

you know, so what's the answer?

You do nothing, you never adapt, you never take on techniques that are working for other states and civilizations, you just keep losing and you don't bother to try and change.

And my answer in a broad sense would just be that that's not something we often see in history.

You know, how many

societies today

can operate their military as well as the United States?

You know, you can buy all the gear and you can

bring in Americans to train you, but it doesn't mean you're going to fight as well as them.

And, you know, going back to medieval times, we almost never see states completely change their culture of war over the course of a generation or two in order to improve performance.

It's just asking too much.

The will it takes to achieve something like that is beyond the grasp of most ordinary polities.

One who did, of course, were the Romans of the Republic, who adapted their style of fighting several times, but of course that was over the course of hundreds of years, and they were very much the exception, not the rule.

Why were they able to adapt while others didn't?

Well, that's a question for another time and place.

Why specifically didn't the Byzantines adapt?

I don't know.

It's possible that the history and tradition of Constantinople encouraged conservative thinking and discouraged risk.

But although there are occasionally revolutionary figures, heroic reformers who emerge and change

their country's history, those figures are rare, and they often appear on the back of demographic or economic growth, neither of which the Byzantines enjoyed.

The Romans, by this point, had been training their soldiers their way for a very long time.

And as I've said many times, when they had a skill shortage, they simply hired foreigners to fill those roles.

If they were going to survive

after 1204 and defeat the Turks and the Latins and the Bulgarians and the Serbians, yeah, it probably would have taken a tactical and psychological revolution.

But that didn't happen.

And it is asking a lot of a a state that's in a very vulnerable place,

as the Romans were in 1204 and 1260, and where we've left them now in the 1320s.

So that's the best I can do to answer that question for now.

Let's move on to some other topics.

Listener M.O.

asks about Armenians.

Having played a major role in the story of the Empire, they now seem to have disappeared.

Did this stop in the 11th century, when the Empire no longer longer had a land border with Armenia?

Did the Latins take over their role in the Byzantine army?

And do we have any record of prominent Armenians in Byzantium from the thirteenth century?

So yes, Armenians had a major role in the Byzantine army for many centuries, and yes, this did come to something of an abrupt end after the Battle of Manzikerd.

Armenian recruits had always been able to descend from the mountains and find employment in the Roman military, but no longer could.

The Romans did retake Cilicia after the First Crusade, so technically many Armenians then served the Empire again, but it doesn't seem like they left Cilicia and came to fight in Europe in large numbers.

With the withdrawal of the Byzantines from Cilicia during the post-Manawheel chaos, Armenians generally disappear from our story.

With two exceptions.

There was a colony of Armenians on the Sea of Marmara, and they allied themselves with the Latins after twelve oh four, and their fighting men were cut down by revenge-seeking Romans.

And then Andronicus the second's son, Michael, was married to an Armenian princess, as in the daughter of the king of Cilicia.

So technically our new Emperor, Andronicus the Third, is half Armenian, and a quarter Hungarian, thanks to Andronicus's first wife.

But as far as I know, that will be the last serious contribution Armenians make to the Byzantine story.

There was nothing stopping Armenian mercenaries from travelling to Constantinople to seek work, which I'm sure many did, but in the crusading era, there were lots of opportunities for Armenians to find work closer to home.

Remember, it was an Armenian soldier that Bohemond bribed to get the Latins into Antioch during the First Crusade.

The Armenians had always played a crucial role in Roman armies because, a bit like Western Europeans, they came from a culture of elite militarization, so Armenian men already tough from a life in the mountains were usually trained to fight from a young age.

They were also Christians, which made things a lot simpler for everyone.

Post-Manziker, the Romans looked elsewhere for hardy recruits.

They hired Turks to fight in Europe, and they hired Serbs and Hungarians and Bulgarians to fight in Anatolia.

Latins are, of course, a group they hired often, and they're preponderant in our sources

in part because they cover the whole of Western and Northern Europe.

So

Spanish and Danish troops were present in 1204 defending the walls against their fellow Catholics, but because we call them all Latins, their individual nationalities can get lost.

Listener MO says As a Catalan, I was well aware of the Catalan Company and their adventures.

For example, there are a lot of Roger de Flore streets here.

But I've also heard that the so called Catalan vengeance left generational trauma in the peoples of that area.

I heard that there are some Balkan Slavic cultures which have the Catalan as a monster in children's stories, and that people from Catalonia were forbidden to enter Mount Athos until 2005, when the Catalan government made an official apology and payments to the monks.

Do you know more about this trauma in Greek folklore and language?

Great question.

As you recall, the Catalans cut a swathe of destruction across the Roman world, first in Anatolia, then in Thrace, then moving west to Thessaloniki and the lands around it, including Mount Athos, which was populated by multiple monastic communities.

They then went south to Athens, where they defeated the sitting Latin regime and took possession of that region.

The Catalans would rule Attica, parts of southern Thessaly, and the island of Euboea for the next seventy years.

The Catalans were pretty hated by everyone.

Their brutal takeover caused the usual disruption and dislocation we would expect, but now it wasn't just the colonized Romans who were suffering.

The Latin lords of Attica had been dispossessed, and went whining to the Pope, who excommunicated the Catalans.

The company refused to make nice and apologise or join any crusading ventures, so they remained on the naughty list for the whole of their time in Greece.

They also allied themselves with the Turks, and sold Christians into slavery, which angered everybody.

Then they became pirates in the Aegean, which meant Venice and Genoa disliked them too a pretty impressive effort at becoming universal pariahs.

To try and see things from the Catalan point of view,

some scholars point out that there is a great deal of snobbery going on here, that the Frankish lords of Attica were outraged to have been defeated on the battlefield by a bunch of cutthroats.

And we might look at the Catalans and see the honest face of Latin behaviour in Romania.

The Catalans didn't hide behind papal supremacy or crusading concerns.

They just nakedly grabbed land and power to make a kingdom for themselves.

And why not?

Everyone else is doing it.

To listener M.O.'s question, then, the answer is yes.

We find all sorts of anti-Catalan sentiments in the communities they encountered, lasting for centuries after they'd gone.

May the vengeance of the Catalans fall upon you was a curse in Thrace into the seventeenth century, while while you're a Catalan was an insult in Thessaly into the nineteenth.

In the Athenian countryside it was recorded that what a Catalan or what a devil of a Catalan were well known expressions into the twentieth century, while some traditional songs from southern Euboea preserve the memory of the Catalans as enemies of the local people.

More work has been done on this subject in southern Thessaly, where a variety of expressions were still in use in the 1990s, including leave him alone, he's a Catalan, or read Catalan dog, the latter said to lazy children.

There were also sayings which accused the Latins of being unclean and impious,

including the Greek cleaned himself and the Catalan soiled himself, or the Catalan even eats meat on Good Friday,

or the snappier sounding, he fasts like a Catalan.

These sayings spread to areas where the Catalans didn't even operate.

In the Peloponnese, we find she's acting like a Catalan woman, to mean someone who was coarse and irascible.

Though we should note that the proper name, Catalan, as a first name and a surname, could be found

amongst the population in the Peloponnese and some of the islands well into the 19th century.

And this name had a positive connotation meaning strength courage or even noble birth

and the places where this name could be found seemed to be places that benefited from the maritime trade which the Catalan move into piracy stimulated

so there you go

interestingly both Greece and Catalonia would produce popular literature commemorating the Catalan company in the 19th 19th century.

This was, of course, in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, where nationalism was all the rage across Europe.

And so, the Catalans, looking for a national epic, and the Greeks looking for examples of resistance to foreign invasion, as the Ottoman Empire wilted, both turned to the 14th century.

Popular plays and poems were written in both places, celebrating their people's heroic conquests slash heroic resistance.

Now, I had a lot of questions in the last month or so, and many of them were what I would call evergreen questions about weddings, imperial triumphs, slavery, propaganda, and maps.

Someone asked why Venice was good at trade and Byzantium was not.

You know, what was it the Venetians were doing right?

So, what I'll do is I'll keep these questions till we get to 1453.

And I think it's best if I produce a series of episodes at that point, answering these questions in their own episode.

And hopefully it's the definitive answer as far as this podcast is concerned.

Because, you know, these questions keep coming up.

So imperial triumphs comes up all the time.

What happened to Athens comes up every century?

Why didn't the Romans conscript more soldiers?

You know, we can look at Venice and their success, the Ottomans and their success, Trebizond.

We can do Byzantine weddings, Byzantine Christmas, and I will find someone else to talk about music, fashion, and food,

none of which I'm very qualified to talk about, as those who've met me will testify.

A couple of listeners asked about polo, so I'll add that to the list, though I suspect you'll be disappointed because it's an aristocratic sport, probably only played at court, so I doubt we have a lot of sources to go through.

Listener RW asked about

what we know of the groups who pushed into Western Anatolia.

To what extent were these groups composed of new arrivals fleeing the Mongols, or Turks that had been living in Anatolia since the 11th century, or families of Roman descent who became Turkish through assimilation?

The straightforward answer is I have no idea, and I'm not sure anyone does, but we may get some clues when we come to look at the Ottomans in more detail.

The first actual history written by an Ottoman is still a long way from being written, and it's full of semi-legendary details, but we will see what we can reconstruct when we get there.

Several listeners asked questions which I have answered already in one form or another,

which is another good reason to sort of tackle them as standalone topics in the future.

Since I appreciate this is the 16th episode I've done answering listener questions, and it's hard to remember when I answered what.

For example, listener R.W.

asks, if the Fourth Crusade didn't happen, would the Romans have been powerful enough to prevent the Turkish Beyliks from taking Western Anatolia?

Now, we talked about this in episode 304,

and it is complicated because the Romans were in a big mess even before the Latins turned up.

It's certainly possible that they could have recovered.

The Empire of Nicaea's success is testament to that.

If they had, then we're into the realm of wild conjecture when it comes to the Turks.

I suppose I would ask this question, and I don't really know the answer, but would those Turkic tribes have been able to find another way to exist on the plateau within the Mongol orbit if the Byzantines had kicked them out?

If the answer is yes, then yes, the Romans could have survived and pushed them out.

But if the Turks were just going to keep coming no matter what,

then I suspect the Byzantine political system would not have coped even without the Fourth Crusade.

Because in a situation like that, where you have to be at war for decades at a time,

you really can't afford a situation where a general usurps the throne or the emperor is killed in battle.

Because then I suspect Roman defences fall and the Turks move in and the Romans don't get their act together well enough to kick them out.

You know, we've seen this happen over and over again.

The Roman political system just wasn't designed to deal with people migrating en masse into their territory.

Similarly, Listener S290 asks about Roman identity and whether prominent Byzantines were tracing their roots back to classical or Hellenistic ancestors,

sort of skipping the Roman imperial centuries.

And I did answer this in episode 304 as well.

The arrival of the Latins in Romania does seem to have pushed elite Byzantines to identify more securely with Greek ancestors of the past, particularly the great writers and thinkers.

You know, it was a language and a culture which they could idealize and identify with, and which was beyond the understanding of most Latins.

So it becomes a kind of, you know, a secret code that the colonized use to talk behind the back of the colonizer.

And then in the case of people in Nicaea and so on, it becomes the thing you cherish in the face of Latin military superiority.

You say, well, our culture is still better than yours.

So I'd encourage you to go and listen to that for more context.

Listener S290 asks if ancient Greeks were seen as barbarous.

presumably because of their paganism.

And the answer to that is absolutely not.

Homer was still used to teach children how to speak and how to think, and no one seems to have batted an eyelid that this involved stories of Zeus and Aphrodite.

Christian truths were not under any threat from such fairy tales, seems to have been the attitude.

And the ancients were not considered to be at fault for having lived long before Christ.

Elite Romans continued to treat the corpus of Greek classics as prized treasures of their culture.

Listener LC, another question we must have tackled many times, asks why the Angeloi were so illegitimate.

So check out questions episodes 9 through 13

in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade for more details.

But, you know,

just to go over that very briefly.

What seemed to happen after Manuel's death is that there was too much uncertainty about who people owed their loyalty to.

The Komninoi had hoarded power, and their extended family were just sort of standing around awkwardly.

The Angaloi were just one branch of that big family tree, and no one seemed happy that they were in charge.

Most of the other branches thought that they were just as worthy to rule.

So into that chaos, various provincial governors decided to rebel to see what they could get out of the situation.

And then the whole thing went into freefall.

The fleet was lost, the army was defeated by the Bulgarians, the capital fell into mob violence, no one seemed to be able to restore order and the chaos went round and round in cycles.

Listener LC asks if the crown going to Isaac Angelos

would be analogous to the British crown bypassing William and Harry and going to someone like Princess Eugenie.

An analogy that will leave about 90% of you in the dark.

Now, in a sense, it's not a bad comparison because something like that could well finish off the monarchy in the UK.

But at the same time, it's not a great analogy, because I don't think that it was Isaac Angelos' bloodline that made him illegitimate.

It was the fact that he lost the fleet and lost to the Bulgarians and bungled the passage of the Third Crusade.

If he'd been successful, then lots of people would have fallen into line.

But his repeated failures allowed the chaos which Manuil's death had unleashed to fester.

And by the time his brother blinded him and took over, the crisis was seemingly too deep to resolve.

That period is a whole fascinating and sad story, and it deserves a history book of all of its own.

I don't have a perfect explanation for how we got from Manawheel to the Fourth Crusade in just twenty years, but it is worth reiterating that medieval states can collapse very quickly, and the Romans remain remarkable for having avoided that fate for so long.

Speaking of which, listener L.C.

also asks, when was it too late for the Empire?

Another favourite question,

this one inspired by the fall of Anatolia coming so quickly on the heels of the recovery of Constantinople.

And I think the Fourth Crusade is the end of the Roman attempt to maintain anything like superpower status.

Once you've taken the untakable city, I think a lot is lost.

The Nicene recovery shows that the tools were still there to create a state that resembled the one-man-wheel whoel Komnenos led.

But,

you know, as we've seen, once a serious crisis hit it, everything just fell to pieces.

The Romans,

after 1260, are

very much like their Bulgarian and Serbian

and Hungarian and so on.

They're very much like their neighbours now.

who all, when they suffer a big crisis, just sort of collapse in on themselves because they don't have the state structures to hold themselves together.

And so I think it's clear that that

core strength of the Romans was lost with the sack of Constantinople.

You know, if the city had remained inviolate, for example, they probably could have afforded to pay the Catalans because they'd have had the accumulated treasures inside to provide emergency cash.

and they'd have had the the infrastructure to hold the genoese and venetians you know at a bit more arm's length and so on.

Not that hiring the Catalans would necessarily have saved Anatolia, but it wouldn't have bankrupted the state and left them helpless, as we saw in Andronicus II's reign.

Getting to the end now, listener J.A.

asks, if there are any Byzantine stories that would work well as TV shows, mini-series or movies, as Byzantine sources have improved since the 10th century, have you encountered any new individuals who you believe could have exciting stories to tell on the big screen?

Obviously I'd love to see any representation of Byzantium on screen and I'm still surprised no one has taken up the Theodora story for television.

Rags to riches, prostitute to princess, getting her own back on her enemies, being braver than her husband, in an era looking for more leading roles for women, it seems odd.

I'm a big fan of The Crown, the TV show about the British royal family.

Could you do something similar about the Macedonians?

Maybe.

The problem Byzantium faces is that people know nothing about it, which can be a great asset for storytelling, but is a big problem with marketing.

The First Crusade is something that everyone's heard of and would make a spectacular television show, but...

In the climate we live in, I don't think a show about Christians killing Muslims is going to get the green light anytime soon.

And I would hate to see a show where the main characters are rational atheists and everyone else is portrayed as fanatics.

I'm looking at you, Kingdom of Heaven.

Lots of listeners have advocated for a TV show about Andronicus I.

There's certainly enough material there to have fun with, and many have pointed out that his life may have inspired the character of Damon Targaryen on House of the Dragon.

I sort of pitched the Fourth Crusade as a dark comedy with a tragic ending, but again, I don't want to encourage TV producers to present religion as merely a tool for greed and power, because I don't think it is.

I think the story of Michael VIII and Church Union would be a great film, but the nuance needed to understand what was going on is probably beyond our entertainment industry.

And I'll stop there because I could talk about that all day.

Finally, listener JA asks: as the podcast continues and Byzantine fortunes decline, are you still excited to tell the next, arguably darker portion of the Byzantine story?

I am,

but even I am saddened by the state Byzantium is in.

I do find it depressing at times to realise they aren't going to get their act together.

I remain fascinated by all the new details I learn, but I am also now excited to get to the end and to get to topics which have intrigued me for so long and I've had to skip over and to kind of delve across the whole thousand-year history of Byzantium again.

I'm sure we will have lots more fun ahead of us.

I am very grateful for your continuing support.

But that's it for 2024.

I will see you in the new year.

Happy holidays, everybody.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day, Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

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