Byzantine Empire

Anthony Bryer takes a visit to Nicaea; The seat of early Church Councils and, for a while, of the Byzantine Emperors, it has a history stretching from the reign of Alexander the Great to the present day.

Anthony Bryer describes how, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, between Turks and Byzantines, Armenian kingdoms led a perilous life. 

Michael Grant describes how, during the Roman and Byzantine ages, the co-existence of good and evil in the world led to a variety of dualist religious beliefs.

Tzykanion, or polo, formed part of the ritual of life at the court of the Emperors in Constantinople. Expertise on horseback, writes Anthony Bryer, was one of the requirements of Imperial dignity.

E.R. Chamberlin recounts the Babylonian captivity, as Petrarch described it, which lasted in Avignon for seventy-four years.

On August 26th, 1071, Byzantine army was defeated by the Seljuk Turks, and Anatolia was forever lost to Christendom.

When the rapacious warriors of the Fourth Crusade seized Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, two Byzantine princes set up an empire-in-exile stretching from Georgia along the Black Sea coast. This new empire outlived the parent city. Until 1461, writes Anthony Bryer, it remained an unconquered outpost of Greek-Christian civilization.

The Byzantine ruler claimed his throne on August 16th, 963.

One of the most discreditable episodes in the history of the West is the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, writes Donald Nicol, when the leaders of the Fourth Crusade inflicted a savage punishment upon their Eastern brethren.

Charles Johnston describes how, in the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was near its end, but its sophisticated life found a lucid recorder in Ammianus of Antioch.