The Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was famously fortified with an impenetrable three-wall network, which preserved it from foreign conquest for centuries.
But the Byzantine Empire doesn’t have to be impenetrable to us, today.
Meet our guests
Professor Dame Averil Cameron is one of the world’s most distinguished historians of late antiquity and what we’ve come to call the Byzantine Empire. She was made a Dame in 2006 in recognition of her services to classical studies. Before she retired, Dame Averil was Warden of Keble College at Oxford University and Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London. She was also chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research for ten years and remains the current President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. She’s written several books including Byzantine Matters and Byzantine Christianity: A Very Brief History.
Links
This episode of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic’s new book Five Views on Christ in the Old Testament, edited by Brian J. Tabb and Andrew M. King.
The Byzantine Empire – the thousand-year Christian empire – held some of the best-kept secrets of world history.
Download a full transcript of the episode here
Want more?
- Listen to more of the amazing Cappella Romana, whose voices filled the Hagia Sophia and have let us play one of their tracks for this episode. The track was called Small Litany and Old Kalophonic Antiphon, from their album Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia (2019).
- Read Peter Sarris’ excellent primer ‘Byzantium‘ in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series.
- And here’s a super helpful short video with a sweeping overview of the history of the Byzantine Empire, from TedX.
- More about the rule of Emperor Justinian I.
- Find out more about the Code of Justinian.
- Read Dave Averil Cameron’s book Procopius and the Sixth Century.
- Learn more about Basil of Caesarea.
- Meet Gregory of Nazianzus.
- And Gregory of Nyssa.
- Read Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity AD 150 – 750.
- Get to know John Philoponus.
- Watch the full YouTube clip from The Met on Byzantine Icons
Justinian mosaic, San Vitale, consecrated 547, Ravenna, Italy (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Here is the full Nicene Creed as it exists today:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
- For more on the Crusades, listen to God’s War I and God’s War II, our Undeceptions episodes back in four.
- Here are a few different takes on the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Russia’s idea of ‘The Third Rome’
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