A conversation with Eugene Smelyansky (Washington State University) on the invention of ideologically useful versions of Byzantium in modern Russia. We talk about the much more limited engagement with Byzantium in imperial Russia and the reasons behind some of the current obsessions with it. The conversation is based on Eugene's just-published book…

A conversation with Monica White (University of Nottingham) about the earliest contacts between Constantinople and the first Rus'-Varangian raiders, traders, and mercenaries to cross the Black Sea. Who were these people, what did they want, and how did contact with east Roman culture change them? The conversation is based on a number of Monica's re…

A conversation with Maria Parani (University of Cyprus) on the emperor's clothing and the staging of his public appearances. We talk about his most formal garments, what he wore on the battlefield, his military banner, how he changed, and much more. Maria has published many studies of this topic, which you can find on her Academia.edu page, includi…

A conversation with Michele Salzman (University of California, Riverside) about the resilience shown by the city of Rome and its ability to recover from crisis during the fifth-seventh centuries. These recoveries were usually spearheaded by the Senate of Rome, which continued to invest in the city and its institutions even after the emperors ceased…

A conversation with Nathan Aschenbrenner (Bard College) about western European claims to the Roman imperial title, from the Middle Ages to early modernity. We also discuss some plans in the west after 1453 to reclaim the "eastern empire" and a curious history from the early sixteenth that fuses western and eastern imperial history into one. Nathan …

A conversation with Peter Sarris (University of Cambridge) about the emperor Justinian (527-565), on the 401st anniversary of the rediscovery of Prokopios' Secret History. We talk about Justinian's goals, accomplishments, and victims, all of which continue to spark debate and controversy, just as they did during his own lifetime. The conversation i…

A conversation with Sarah Bassett (Indiana University) about the exploration and discovery of the antiquities of Constantinople, starting in the sixteenth century. We talk about scholars, diplomats, and archaeologists, and the intellectual trends of their times. Sarah wrote the book on The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge Unive…

A conversation with Christian Sahner (University of Oxford) about the notion of Islamic history as a field of study. What does it prioritize, who does it tend to see most, and what about everyone else? No field-name is perfect; they all have advantages and disadvantages, and we need to be clear-eyed about them. The conversation is based on Christia…

A conversation with Alessandra Bucossi (Ca' Foscari University, Venice) about the text "Against the Greeks" and "Against the Latins" that were produced by writers taking sides in the Schism of the Churches (Rome and Constantinople, of Greek and Latin, or Catholic and Orthodox, as we would call them today). There are many of these texts and they con…

A conversation with Christian Raffensperger (Wittenberg University) -- one hundred episodes after our previous one! -- on medieval European rulership from Iberia and Scandinavia to Rus' and Constantinople. We talk about succession and co-rulership and titles in ways that don't prioritize the British, French, and German models. Christian develops th…

A conversation with Olivier Hekster (Radboud University Nijmegen) about the position of Roman emperor, from the beginning to the sixth century. We talk a little bit about titles and mostly about the expectations that subjects had of their emperors and how the latter navigated these demands and tried, or failed, to play their roles properly. The con…

A conversation with Daphne Penna (University of Groningen) about Byzantine law, or (what it really was) the Greek-language phase of Roman law. We talk about the study of east Roman law, its experts (both then and now), and the interaction of Greek and Latin in legal texts. What did the law do and what do we learn from studying it? For an accessible…

Jesse Torgerson (Wesleyan University) and I take a stab at understanding time, as it was measured, structured, and experienced in so many overlapping ways by Christian east Romans. Their days, months, and years were defined by the state tax cycle, the Church festival cycle, and nature itself, to name the most important temporal grids. Jesse's recen…

A conversation with Diana Mishkova (Center for Advanced Study, Sofia) about how the national historiographies of Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania cope with Byzantium -- how they try to appropriate, incorporate, circumvent, or abjure it, and so always reinvent it in the process. The conversation is based on Diana's comprehensive and luc…

A conversation with Ben Anderson (Cornell University) and returning guest Mirela Ivanova (University of Sheffield) on their co-edited volume of papers on the question Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Toward a Critical Historiography (Penn State University Press 2023). We talk about how colonial, imperialist, or exploitative practices …

In this episode, Marion and I talk about our new co-authored book, The Field Armies of the East Roman Empire, 361-630 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). For those interested in the military history of this period, this book contains a downright mutinous revision of the organization of the East Roman field armies and the changing priorities behind …

A conversation with Peter Heather (King's College, London) about his new book Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (New York: Knopf, 2023). Peter is one of the leading historians of the fall of the western Roman empire and the emergence there of the post-Roman, "barbarian" kingdoms. He now brings a revisionist approach to the emergen…

A conversation with Jennifer Westerfeld (University of Louisville) on the scripts that were used to write ancient Egyptian, especially hieroglyphs. Their last attested use was in the 390s AD, putting the end of their long history in our period. Meanwhile, Greek, Roman, and Christian observers were developing their own theories about how the script …

A conversation with Timothy Miller (Salisbury University) about philanthropic institutions in Constantinople, especially hospitals, orphanages, and leprosaria. Tim has done more than anyone to illuminate these remarkable places, starting with his impressive monograph The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press …

A conversation with Valentina Grasso (Bard College) on Arabia before Islam. This used to be known primarily from preserved Arabic poetry, but the picture is now filling in from inscriptions and contemporary texts. There were competing kingdoms, tribal coalitions, and foreign empires with a stake in trade routes. There were pagans, Jews, and Christi…

A conversation with Jeremy Swist (Brandeis University) on why some heavy metal bands write music about Roman and Byzantine history. Expect "good" and "bad" emperors to be reversed here! Jeremy has published much on this, including 'Satan's Empire: Ancient Rome's Anti-Christian Appeal in Extreme Metal,' Metal Music Studies 5 (2019) 35-51; 'Headbangi…

A wide-ranging conversation with Jacques Berlinerblau (Georgetown University) on the changing nature of the academic profession, especially regarding the erosion of academic freedom through the expansion of contingent academic labor and direct attacks on it by the states. Is research becoming increasingly vulnerable to outside political pressures? …

A conversation with Anna Sitz (Universität Heidelberg) on how Byzantines read ancient inscriptions - or modified, re-used, and defaced them. Ancient cities were full of inscribed texts, many on temple walls or referring to the gods in prominent ways. How did Christians cope with these monuments when they took over the cities of Greece and Asia Mino…

A conversation with Anna Henderson (ARC Humanities Press) about the world of academic publishing today, including its challenges, opportunities, and aspirations. ARC is a fairly recent venture, but has already published a number of excellent books in medieval studies (including on Byzantium). You can find out more about it here: https://www.arc-hum…

A conversation with Robin Fleming (Boston College) about how the lives and material circumstances of people in Roman Britain changed when the imperial state and its economy withdrew from the island in the fifth century AD. Among other topics, we talk about food, skills, recycling of materials, and adaptation. The conversation is based on Robin's re…

A conversation with Richard Calis (Utrecht University) about Martin Crusius (aka Kraus: 1526-1607 AD), one of the first philologist-historians who tried to reconstruct Byzantine history from the sources. We talk about his interest in the Greek language and the Ottoman empire, in using Byzantine sources to understand antiquity, and his working metho…

A conversation with Fotini Kondyli (University of Virginia) about our changing picture of rural communities in late Byzantium, based on her book Rural Communities in Late Byzantium: Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean (Cambridge University Press 2022). We talk about resilience in times of crisis -- the fourteenth century was not an …

A conversation with Anna Kelley (University of St. Andrews) about women's labor and occupations in the Roman and later Roman empire. It turns out that they may have engaged in more types of business and workshop production, especially in textile manufacture and marketing, than contemporary gender norms suggest. The conversation is based on Anna's a…

A conversation with Scott Bruce (Fordham University) about dragons, ancient, medieval, and early modern, from around the world. Where did our "canonical" image of the dragon come from? What other kinds of dragons existed? What did dragons mean in different cultures? The conversation is based on Scott's recent anthology, The Penguin Book of Dragons …

A conversation with Amanda Luyster (College of the Holy Cross) on how to organize a museum exhibition, from conception and design to securing the objects and planning events around it. We also talk about the famous tiles of Chertsey Abbey (UK), a royal commission that evoked the Crusades with artistic allusions to Byzantium and the Islamic world. T…

A conversation with Paul Stephenson (Penn State University) about the impact of lead mining and smelting on the miners themselves, the communities around them, and on plants, animals, and human beings across the Roman empire. This is part of a broader and ongoing project on metallurgy and environmental violence. Paul integrates the recent science o…

In this end-of-the-year episode, guest host Marion Kruse (University of Cincinnati) interviews me about writing narrative history. Why and how should we write narrative histories? What do they accomplish in the overall economy of the scholarly production of knowledge? What pitfalls did I identify in writing my new history of Byzantium, and how did …

A conversation with Jake Ransohoff (Simon Fraser University) on the practice of blinding in Byzantium. Why and how was it done? Why was it more prominent in some periods rather than in others? And how did its victims cope with this disability that the state had imposed on them for (usually) crimes of treason? The conversation is based on Jake's dis…

A conversation with Leslie Brubaker (University of Birmingham) on the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm (ca. 730 to 787 AD). What was the problem with religious icons? What did the "Isaurian" emperors Leon III and Konstantinos V try to do about it, and why? A great deal of what we used to know, largely by following pro-icon sources, has come und…

A conversation with Nicholas Morton (Nottingham Trent University) about the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, the terror that they inspired, and the strategies by which its targets tried to survive them. What did the Mongols think they were doing and how did the Byzantines use diplomacy to deflect the danger and even use it to their advan…

A conversation with Linda Safran (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto) on the hitherto-unexplored world of Byzantine diagrams. We talk about maps, sundials, and more abstract representations of the world and even God. The conversation is based on Linda's papers in a volume she co-edited, The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-Cultural Approa…

A conversation with Paroma Chatterjee (University of Michigan) on the power that ancient statues still had in Orthodox Constantinople. In many contexts, they were more prominent than icons. We talk about some of their functions, but also why Byzantine art history is so focused on icons, which were secluded objects, in comparison. The conversation i…

A conversation with Dan Caner (Indiana University) about the different kinds of charitable giving in early Byzantium. We talk about the pre-Christian background, the role of institutions, and views about wealth. Was giving primarily good for the soul of the giver, and under what conditions, or for the material assistance of the needy? How could one…

A conversation with Kim Bowes (University of Pennsylvania) about production and consumption in the Roman world, especially by the 90% of the population who are less represented in our literary sources. How did they get by from day to day? What alternatives does the evidence suggest to the "subsistence" model that many ancient historians have used? …

A conversation with Sergey Ivanov (Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Munich; corresponding member of the British Academy) on the monuments, buildings, and ruins of the Byzantine phase of the City's history. We talk about how to explore them, how to access their history, and even get a feel for the lingering presence of the events t…

A conversation with Jonathan Hall (University of Chicago) about how the archaeological past of the city of Argos was reclaimed in the long nineteenth century. What institutions and political debates took shape around the heritage of the past? What role did the ancient travel writer Pausanias play in defining what the past was? What was the interpla…

A conversation with Eleni Kefala (University of St. Andrews) on the fall of two empires, the Byzantine and the Aztec. What role did these momentous events play in the emerging identity of western Europe? And how were they experienced by the Romaioi and the native Mexica, especially through the laments that they wrote and sang about these events? Th…

A conversation with Gabriel Radle (University of Notre Dame) on the question of why and when adolescent girls or women "bound up" their hair. Which women did so, and under what circumstances? What kind of headgear was involved? And how did the Byzantine practice compare with that in other societies, ancient and medieval? Our discussion is based on …

A conversation with Stratis Papaioannou (University of Crete) about the mismatch between modern ideas of literature (on the one hand) and the texts, conventions, and goals of Byzantine authors (on the other). In what sense are those texts "literature"? Should they be compared to classical texts, modern literature, neither, or both? We talk also abo…

A conversation with Siren Çelik (Marmara University) about the many personas that the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos crafted for himself in his surviving works. In fact, we have more writings from him -- in many genres, and many of a personal nature -- than from any prior Roman emperor. What was he hoping to accomplish and why is he worth reading? T…

A conversation with Alexander Olson (independent scholar, British Columbia, Canada) about the secret lives of olive trees and oak trees in Byzantium. Contrary to what you may think, these were not cultivated consistently in the Mediterranean ecosystem of the Middle Ages; their uses to the human population fluctuated over time, giving the trees a hi…

A conversation with Oana-Maria Cojocaru (Tempere University, Finland) about the images of Byzantine children in our sources, and the experiences that they would have had, once they made it past infancy. Our discussion forms a nice sequel to that with Christian Laes on childbirth (episode 66), and is based on Oana's recent book Byzantine Childhood: …

A conversation with Filippomaria Pontani (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) on the ways that Byzantine scholars engaged with classical texts, and their place in the transmission and study of classical literature from antiquity to the present. In addition to manuscripts, we talk about commentaries, lexika, and encyclopedias. The conversation is base…

In a fun romp through some of the foibles, evasions, pretensions, and generally bad habits of scholarship, Tina and I take our fields to task for practices that make our eyes roll. Sure, we've probably been guilty of most of these too! But what better place to vent a bit than a podcast? Dedicated listeners will know Tina (Ohio State University) fro…

A conversation with Christian Laes about one of the most joyous, dangerous, and often tragic, moments of life in antiquity and the Middle Ages: childbirth. We discuss the sad fact of infant mortality, the first days of children who survived, and the difficult choices that families had to make if the mother did not survive, but the child did. What w…