Historicity

A friend recently tipped me off to a podcast series that highlights 12 important Byzantine rulers, starting with Diocletian all the way through Alexius. (I seem to recall that things started getting pretty grim for Byzantium after that.) I’ve not listened to all of the lectures, but what I have listened to is interesting. You can get a pretty good feel for the ebb and flow of the empire by learning about its rulers, and this podcast has chosen its subjects wisely.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about the Byzantine empire but don’t think you can stomach a dozen podcasts about it, the first few episodes are worth listening to–together they give a basic and useful introduction to the subject without assuming you already know anything at all about Byzantium. (And once you’ve been bitten by the Byzantine bug, you can join my little crusade to get it mentioned in high school textbooks for more than a paragraph in between the chapters about “Greece & Rome” and “The Industrial Revolution.”)