Ancient Historian on HIDDEN Roman Empire, The Vatican & The Crusades | Anthony Kaldellis

(upbeat music) - So when you introduce yourself to people, do you really say like I'm a Lesbo? That's like an actual thing. - Not a Lesbo. - A Lesboce. - No, it's a joke. I can say my family's from Lesboce. - So you were playing with me before a camera, you don't actually say you're a Lesbo? - Lesbian. - Lesbian. - This guy, he's going all the way with it. This is where like the Greek and the English are overlapped in all the wrong ways. - Yes. - But the island, pretty cool. So you guys were the original Lesbians. - Yes. - And modern day as it were Lesbians take their name from the island because of Sappho, the poet. - Really? - Poetess. - Yes, okay. - Oh, that's a real thing. - So in our cake, Greece, so we're talking 600s, 500s, BC, there's a flourishing lyric poetry movement. And Sappho is one of the most important of those poets, which is a woman. And some of her poetry, not all of it has survived. We have fragments, is homoerotic. So she is a woman is addressing other women. Now there's lots of interpretations about voice and who's talking to her and all of that. But she is the person from who sort of modern female homosexual people are named. - No kidding, she's kind of hot too, look at her. - Well, that's not a, okay, that's a Victorian painter, you know, that's all I'm from New Jersey. We keep it a little light, light humid here, sorry. - Sure. So now the first time that-- (laughing) - Come on, that's good. - The first time in term Lesbians is used for a sexual orientation is in a manuscript from around 900 AD, is one of my people. So it's a Bishop of Cesaria named Adethas. So he's at the court in Constantinople. And he commissioned these very expensive deluxe manuscripts of ancient texts. One of them is his church father from the second century who's talking about, you know, the sins of that woman commit, you know, and in the margins our guy wrote, Adethas wrote, "Lesbians, and it's stuck." - Well, no, it's not from him. So he's the first person who attests that term, that it was being used to refer to female homosexual activity in people. So it's the first time we hear of it. It's a 900. - Wow, yeah. - There were other names. - There were other names before that. - Yes, so the one that he says that, which is called Trivavis, which means rubbing women. - God, yes. Okay, this little visual there. - Well, yeah, anyway. But so you were actually born over there and lived your whole childhood on the island. - No, I was born in Athens. - You were born in Athens. - Yes. - My father was from there. - Oh, okay. - So I served in the army there. - Oh wow. - Yeah, and this is right. We were looking at it maybe deep. We can pull up the map again. This is also like dangerously close to Turkey. It's like kinda almost right on top of it. - Yes. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. - Yeah, we can see, and a good day. You can see cars and buses driving on the highways there. - You guys don't get along with the Turks too well. - No, no, we get along with the Turks just fine. - Really? - The Turks, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, our governments are different matter. - So, okay. - Yeah, no. But Greeks and Turks have very, very many things in common, culturally. - That's what I was gonna say 'cause some of my, I was telling you, my best friend from all my life is a dulcettus and a grease. So he lived there in the summer every single year. And so I have a lot of friends who are born and raised and still live over there to this day. And some of them served in the military and there was always a little rivalry in recent years, like with the Turks. It always be like talking shit on the Turks and I assume back and forth. - Sure. - So that's where I kind of took it from. - Understood. - Yes. - No, that's real, but also we have a shared history for hundreds of years. And so a lot of food and words and all of that in common. Also attitudes, like with Turks I can very quickly get along like just, you know, on just kind of friendly day-to-day level. - In a way that I can't, for example, with a Swiss banker, no offense to Swiss bankers, but you know, there's much more of a cultural difference there. - You know what I mean? - Yes. - Even though they don't have a massive army position, 10 kilometers from where my father grew up. - That's right. - But that's kind of cool. You got to serve in the military where your father was from, but you grew up in the biggest city of them all in Greece and Athens. - That's right. - Those are like grown up in Athens. - Well, Athens is, so Greece is almost like a city state because Athens is just about half the population, right? So it's a, yeah, Athens, well, I was in the Northern suburbs to generally better off. So it's more affluent and it is a very large city, but so when you think of a large city, think more like Eastern Mediterranean style. So it's much closer to, you know, a city in Turkey or Tel Aviv or something like that, than it is to like Berlin or, you know, right? Because it was built up very, very quickly in like the 50s, 60s and 70s. - Why was that? - Because the population, so massive economic growth, that means the transition from agricultural economy to, you know, more industry services, professions, professional life. So Greek professional life just kind of built up very, very quickly. And so, you know, Athens was just developed that way, which why we have a lot of, like these concrete apartment buildings. - Yeah, this just looks a bit different. - Yeah. - Just on the case, kind of like this too, you occasionally have it. It's quesad sort of level of city and then it just gets rebuilt that way. - Okay. So, yeah, I grew up at the tail end of that period of massive development. So it's now this huge, you know, extent, you know, it extends from mountain to mountain and just fills up everything. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's kind of funny when you're there because obviously there's insane history, but like you said, you have a whole built out city, you know, whereas like I'd even say Paris and Rome, they built around the history and everything and there's still a lot of the old architecture kept, but then in Athens city, amazing and grubbless. - You're exactly right. So you nailed it. There's this ancient core and then this modern city around it. - Yeah. - And there's not much of what you might call a medieval or kind of early modern, like Rome, Paris has this. - That's right. - We never had this because Athens is the backwater city of the Ottoman Empire. It's a village, not that many people. And then suddenly gets developed into a modern capital. And so yeah, it is a little bit, you know, kind of disjointed in that way. There are some places in Greece where you can find more of the sort of medieval, like the island of Rhodes, for example, or on Crete, places like that. - Well, and that's more medieval rather than like, you know. - Ancient. - Ancient, exactly. - Yeah, yeah. So that I guess that was like kind of redeveloped in that period and they've just kept it traditionally that way. - Usually these are Western colonies. So, you know, it's occupied by various powers like Venice or, you know, Italy. Italy didn't surrender those islands to Greece until 1948. This is very recently. - Oh, that's even like a few years after the war. - Yeah. - The regime fell, I guess, in like 44, early 45, and Italy, this is part of the postwar kind of rearrangement. - Yeah. - Yeah, I was thinking that on the back of my head, 'cause you're talking about Athens getting so developed in the 50s, 60s and 70s. I would imagine a lot of that as a direct consequence of World War II as well or-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - 'Cause they were occupied, I think, most are the whole time by the Germans, right? - Yes. It was, Greece was kind of partitioned between Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. What was Bulgaria doing in there? - Bulgaria always wanted access to the Aegean. So you see Bulgaria has access to Black Sea, but always wanted to have access to the Aegean and the Mediterranean directly. And then the Balkan Wars, like 130 years ago or so, it got cut out. So Greece kind of won and had that one, the whole piece of trace that goes all the way and joins up to Turkey. So the Bulgarians always wanted access to the sea and so that's the part that they got. - I never realized that. I mean, during the occupation. - During the occupation, right. So when you were growing up, obviously, like we're gonna get all into the Byzantine Empire, which is wrongly named, actually, as your book points out. So we'll get into the background there today, 'cause you've covered that for such a long time now. But did you start really taking an interest in history when you were a kid? Or is that something that came later? - No, not at all. The opposite, in fact. - Really? - Yes. - I was a physics biology guy. - Whoa. - Yeah. So I came to the US to study those topics. - So you were in physics and biology and then moved to history? - Through philosophy. - Yeah. - At the University of Michigan. - Oh, great school, too. All right, so you thought you were gonna be like a scientist and have something changed. - Medical technology, something like this. - This is a vague idea. I just happened to be good at those subjects and hated the others. So anything that had to do with literature, history, ancient Greek, I hated it. But then you got a backdoor through philosophy and got into it. Let's just say, so Greece is a country that is developing right after the war. Emphasis is really on like engineers, doctors, more engineers, and some more engineers. - Right. - So like my extended family, I have an uncle who's an engineer too, 'cause they're just like concrete. They build in concrete. That's what they do. Could be bridges, could be harbors, could be courthouses, but they're just building, right? And so those are the, you know, fields that were encouraged, you know. If you couldn't do those, sorry, that's just a bit of a prejudice, but back in school, if you couldn't do those, maybe you'd do classical philology, you'd learn the ancient languages, you could be a school teacher, 'cause you need people to do that. You're really good. I couldn't do anything they put you in economics. Couldn't do business. This didn't really exist much as a field in the 80s when I grew up, 70s and 80s. So the problem was, I have to say, we were not taught the humanities or history, or even ancient Greek in a way that would encourage us to love them. I never saw the point of why exactly we were doing this. Whereas physics I could understand because it explains you how the world works. But anyway, when I got to Michigan, and there you're exposed to more humanities, and there's a longer tradition of humanistic inquiry, and there were libraries, and I had questions that the Greek school system wasn't that interested in answering. It possibly still isn't, I don't know, I've been out of it for a while. Like what? Well, the question's about like society and history and identity and things like this. So countries that have a very strong national identity like Greece does, they also have strong national narratives. And you are taught the narrative. And there's not much wiggle room for questions or ambiguities or changes or things like this. And this is part of like my work now is trying to probe precisely into those, that's right, you know, corners, right? But that meant that you were taught history as a kind of almost like a doctrine. Like here's the, you know? And we don't talk about these things, and you know, we don't discuss those questions and things like that. No, it wasn't like any, it wasn't harsh or anything. It's just, that's just how the curriculum is designed. I relate. I think there's a lot of countries around the world you could say that about now for sure. You know, yeah. Like where it's like this is just how it is. Yes. So you went to school in the US. You were taught a version of US history. Sure. Yeah, did it include like US Empire? Actually, on mine, it did. Most people I talked to, it did not. I had really, in my opinion, looking back on it now. I'm not sure I appreciated it fully at the time. I had some really good American history teachers. Okay. But yes, you're right. Dave, when you've used nicotine in the past, did you notice that you were having a harder time in the gym or not seeing the results you were looking for? Absolutely. 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Please support our show and tell them I sent you. - Now you benefited from a system that's very decentralized. So each school or school district can do its own thing. That's not the case in Greece. So it's a uniform curriculum set by the ministry. - Cross the board. - Yeah, I mean, look, it's a lot of history that Greece has. I mean, even if you're just going to do Greek history, that's a lot, you can't cover it all meaningfully. But what interested me are the kinds of questions about history, not so much this part of history, that part of history, but I only figured that out after I had left. I also didn't like the way they taught us ancient Greek, like the language. It was just like memorized a bunch of grammar and then do like grammatical analysis on ancient passages. - How much is it significantly different than modern Greek ancient Greek language? - Yes, I mean, it's, it can be similar. There are ancient Greek texts that are very similar to modern Greek. For example, like you know, esophage fables. - Yeah, you know, about the animals and not. - Yes. - So some versions of those in ancient Greek are perfectly intelligible to a modern Greek reader. You look at this and say, okay, there's some funny stuff. I get it. If you have a little bit of schooling, you can figure it out. And then they're like Sappho we were talking about, like that's archaic poetry. Like this is almost incomprehensible. The vocabulary is very different. The grammar is much more complicated in some areas. So yeah, you do need some training in to make the leap from like modern Greek to like full classical Greek. Something like, for example, New Testament Greek is easier. But I mean, I won't lie you as a native speaker. You're completely cheating isn't the right word. But it's totally not the same as like, have you, have you done any Greek? - I know seven words. - I know. - That scans, that's what I got. - Yeah. - I won't tell people what all those mean. But you know, I won't tell you random ones in there. - Yes. - So no, I don't have the understanding at all. Like you do. - But the alphabet, for example, like fraternities and sororities, were you in fraternity or? - Yeah. - So you had the Greek letters. - Yeah, yeah. - If you've done math, you know. You know, most English speakers can put together the Greek alphabet if pressed. But like, okay, learning the language is a different thing. So it takes a lot of training in many years. - Yeah. - For Native Greek speakers, it's not quite that much, right? But still, to get 15 or 16 year olds, to learn all that grammar, why? But you have to explain to them why you're doing this, not just because we're proud of our heritage, or just because we have to, because the ministry says we have to, right? Did you ever figure out why for yourself? When I came to the US, like I had a reason, I, the reason was that I needed to understand these texts in the original, because I had to engage with them more closely than through a translation, right? Look, look, honestly, what I did in school was, I just memorized the translations, right? So they'd say, okay, the test will be something from the Antigone or Plato's Protagoras. You know, these, the long speeches, well, I just memorized translations of the long speeches. I'd see which text it is to put it aside and just write it out, yes, okay? 'Cause they did really emphasize memorization. So it was a skill that we had. So, yeah, that's not a way to learn a language, and anyway. I mean, I don't wanna be too down on the system, but, you know, and this was in the '80s. So I don't know what it's like now. But I discovered reasons for learning these languages and the history in the US. So as a part of like, trying to understand culture, right? And change. Like, change. Change, like how things change? Yeah, I mean, my fifties things have changed. Yeah, very quickly, lots of things have changed, right? Just in the past 25 years. Mm-hmm. And even politically, like, you know, you think that some things are aligned this way politically and I can tell you that in the '90s, they were aligned the exact opposite way, right? Yeah. So I'm just generally interested in those kinds of phenomena. And that bug really got hit when you came here and we're studying at Michigan and you started to think, "Huh, maybe there's more to life "than being an engineer." Eh, yes, yeah, it's like, yeah. Yes, correct. So you got into, you started to study philosophy, I think you mentioned. Yes, specifically. And I mean, the Greeks as far as I'm concerned when I think of like the inventors of philosophy that is who you think of. I don't know if that's historically correct, but that's how it seems. Yes. I mean, within the Western tradition, absolutely. Now, it depends on how you define philosophy. You might find different kinds of philosophy emerging in different parts of the world. I'm not an expert on those. So in so far as we're talking about philosophy versus other kinds of things in the Western tradition, yes, I can talk about that. Okay, right. I mean, God, no, we're not here to talk about philosophy. We can if you want. Of course. But you can talk about whatever you want. I don't have like an agenda with that. So let's talk about it. I think that's wildly interesting. The philosophy? Yes. Well, so I did my first degree was in philosophy. Then I switched to history. Because I also became somewhat dissatisfied with philosophy. So philosophy in American universities has kind of two broad approaches. There's analytical. And there's what sometimes is called continental. Or that focuses more on sometimes questions of ethics and politics and so on. Analytical is more technical, like logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, these kinds of things that led into things like AI and computer science and so forth. I was not that interested in that strand. And that would, for example, you take a dialogue by Plato. Have you read-- Plato has been mentioned a lot on this podcast. Oh, really? I definitely read a little bit of Plato in high school because we had to, but I haven't. Couldn't tell you the last time I looked at it. But yeah. Yeah. So you will recall that Plato's works are dialogues, right? So there are people having conversations, there's a setting, there's specific people, we know like often who they were, they sometimes chat about other things going on in Athens at the time. So an analytical approach to the dialogues would just more or less disregard all of that and try to find something that looked like a syllogism, like a formal argument, extract it from the text, then show why it's wrong, the way it's presented either by Socrates or two Socrates, and then move on to the next one. That might sound a little bit like a caricature and analytical philosophers don't like their approach to be characterized that way, but that is exactly how I experienced it. I wasn't that interested in that, like clearly Plato is doing more than that, right? And so I was also interested in the more literary, aspects of the works, the setting, like how is this addressing what's going on in Athens, you know, responding to problems of the democracy, right? So I got more interested in human creativity in its historical context. It sounds like you were also interested in how it was literally, correct me if I'm wrong here, but literally filling in some blanks about the history because I think you just said something like the philosophy you could then figure out what was happening in society with democracy and things like that based on the things they were arguing philosophically. So maybe we didn't have I'm making things up right now, but a great record in year 350 of what was happening that year, but we do have a record of some philosophical argument that was made by Aristotle or something, and you then are like, oh, so that might mean that this was going on in society. Yes, or at least this is what Plato picked, right, extracted and highlighted because he thought it was conducive to having a philosophical discussion about, say, friendship or bravery or whatever. Take Thucydides, a historian, right? Really brilliant guy, writing about the Peloponnesian War. It's this big war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century. So here's a question that I confronted actually in college. Am I reading Thucydides in order to understand the Peloponnesian War or am I studying the Peloponnesian War in order to better understand Thucydides? Thucydides is the thing. The Peloponnesian War is the background. And for a long time, I was actually in that approach, like understanding that text, like what Thucydides is trying to say was more important for me than just the background history. I have over the course of 30 years kind of come around to the other approach. The dark side. They're both valid. They're both completely valid. It's just a matter of like what your brain is finding, you know, what you're drawn to. So now I'm much more of a boring historian. Do you think it could be both? Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. It's a difficult mix. It has to be both if you're using a text as a historical source for a period. You have to understand that text. Like that's right. And it's not often done. Like sometimes you'll just pick something out of a text and say, ah, this is the proof of the thing I was saying. But that thing in its context, in the text, right? If you read it in context, it's actually saying something different. Right. And it's difficult. I find it better to have a phase of my research where I'm looking more at like a text and a phase where I'm looking more at the history, like more synthetically. So these are kind of approaches that you can toggle between. Yeah. Now what at what point did you really start to zone in on what we now call the Byzantine period, which is like as far as I know, it's like a 4,000 year period. And as you put it in one of your recent books, it's really like the new Roman Empire. It's just never called that. Right. I mean, it is now. I think the shift is happening very, very quickly. So even in my field, like there's an understanding now that this has to be seen within the broader sort of Roman rubric as part of a long Roman history. Now, whether you call it East Roman, I mean, New Roman is a title of that book. It's not meant as a new field name or anything like that. It's kind of hard though. It's a good name. It is. I was inspired by Gibbon, who talked about the new empire that's kind of like being recreated in the late third, fourth centuries. Anyway, yeah. See, New also has its own kind of problems, but all terms have problems like this. So the answer to your question is like around the mid 90s, when I was making the transition from undergrad to grad school and was kind of trying to decide what field to study. So actually, initially drawn to Renaissance history, like Western, yeah, Italian humanism, but it's just a wonderful professor at Michigan who I took classes with him, but he was like 82 and almost blind. So he told me he's not taking any grad students, probably for the better. I was also interested in what was then called Byzantine history. Professor who was a wonderful person, John Fine. He was not the most engaging lecturer in class, but as we spoke to him after class or outside, which he was very, very willing to do. He was incredibly fun and very supportive. So I took on that field because I thought it would be a great opportunity. I'll tell you why I thought so at the time, and I still think that, because it's the only society in history that's genuinely Roman and Greek and Christian in like the original versions. What do you mean by the original versions? Well, it is, it is the Roman state. It's a direct continuation of the Roman state. It's not like some sort of reinvention or anything like that. It is Greek speaking. It's literature. It's language is Greek. It's the one that preserved all the ancient Greek texts. We've already mentioned Thucydides, Plato, Sappho, and so on. We have Plato and Thucydides because of this period. Yes, we don't have Sappho. Sappho, we have from like fragments and bits and quotations. Like Sappho is lost and kind of partially reconstructed. If you look at an edition of Sappho, it's this little bits of lines, and you put it through a meat grinder and keep some bits that come out. That's a shame. It is. Yes, and that was because of choices that were made broadly in the period I study. Like they chose to keep these things and not other things. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So what were they threatened by with the other stuff? That's where my mind goes with that. Sure. So some of it is threatened. So for example, there's a lot of erotic literature from antiquity that we don't have. They just chose not to keep it. They're not necessarily actively destroying anything. Remember in a manuscript culture, I started by talking about manuscripts, right? I'd have to commission these manuscripts. Those are expensive. So you have to make an active decision to pay money to preserve Plato as he did. We have this luxury copy of Plato that he commissioned. It must have cost him a house. Commissized house just to commission these manuscripts. There's a lot of money. Why would it cost that much? Well, think of the materials, especially if these are parchment and just the labor of hand copying the whole of Plato in a, in a, by a professional scribe. Yeah. Yeah. It's time, time consuming. Oh, sure. Absolutely. So, so we'll let's go back to the, so it's a Roman society, it's Greek, and it's also Christian. Original Christians. Now what do I mean by that? Because in a certain sense there's no original, right? Christianity has always been diverse, and there are lots of Christianity's always. But this is the one that, so the New Testament is written in Greek, right? The church fathers, so these are these very important theologians and bishops in the third, fourth, fifth centuries who wrote all the theology and who organized the church after the council and I see around that same time. Yeah. Yeah. So they're the guys who are writing the theology. They're sort of really codifying the religion for the future. Perting much every version of Christianity that exists today is in a way descended from their work in one way or another. Now Protestants split from that tradition, you know, different Protestant groups to greater or lesser degree. And also the church councils. So these are the meetings of hundreds of bishops where they decide these questions and they also come up with rules for the church. This is called Canon Law. Yes. It's just basically church HR, right? I'm going to use that church HR. That's great. Yeah. So those church councils take place just in and around Constantinople, which now we know is Istanbul, but to modern Istanbul, yes, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for a thousand years, Constantinople. I still haven't been there. That seems like one of the coolest places on earth. Yes. Yes. So it's on two continents. It's, yeah, yeah. It's a huge today. It's like huge, you know, millions and millions of people. And yeah, the old city that the part of it that I study is like a little tourist sort of out of the way. Part of it that the main thriving hubs. Right. It's just yeah, it's just yeah, yeah, huge. You just definitely go. I will add that to the list. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So in many ways, other traditions of Christianity, even later medieval Catholicism and so on, They descend from what was done in the east around the Aegean in the 4th and 5th centuries. So to that degree, that society seemed to be a wonderful laboratory for studying the interaction of those, you know, very important elements of history, Greek Roman Christian in an original way. Sure. Before we get into it in the actual history and start to lay out some of the timeline and the morphing from what we know is the original ancient Rome into what became the Byzantines. Why did it get the name, the Byzantine Empire, so much later, seemingly, I guess, from scholars who were studying the period and what was the whole, I don't know, propaganda there if that's the right way to put it. Like why they were doing that? These are ideological decisions. So they're political. And these are decisions that were made in the west. The 800 AD Western powers, like the papacy, the German emperors, they decided that the east is not properly Roman, like it's fake Rome, and that the people there are actually Greeks, and that the mantle of the Roman Empire actually belongs to the west. And so they started calling them Greeks, whereas they called themselves Romans, and they started calling the Eastern Empire the Empire the Greeks, which is like an ethnic label that in the west did not have favorable connotations. You have Greek friends today, you think Greece, a wonderful place, nice culture, Greeks are great, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've experienced this. Greeks are generally liked, like around the world, right? That's great, but this is not the case in the Middle Ages. They didn't like them. They did not like them. They didn't have the diners back then. That's why. They did not. They didn't have them. And so Greek meant someone's shifty, somewhat effeminate, like he'd rather argue with you than fight you. They're a bit of decadent, like they might use silverware to eat with their well-dressed, that's like some suspicious. Some of these are kind of compliments. They are today. Right. Right. They're a little bit more civilized, right? Yes. They're not like raised with weapons to fight all the time, but also, they were not obedient to the Church of Rome, and this was very important. So they're kind of quasi-heretical or actually heretical because they don't submit to the Pope. They regard their Church as independent, which it always was, but these are Western perceptions. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're going to work, going out, or keeping things cash. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. Quince focuses on high-quality staples made with premium materials, like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14K gold, and Italian leather. We love that, Joey Dief. These are all timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. Their cashmere sweater started just 60 bucks, by the way, and the lineup doesn't stop there. Premium down jackets, wool outerwear, and cashmere accessories. 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Shout out to all you guys out there. Finally, when Quince asked you where you heard about them, please support our show and tell them I sent you. So this was not the calling them Greeks was not a compliment. It meant not Romans and Romans are like proper manly types who like should rule. So what was the term Byzantine though, like phonetically where does that come from? Okay. And that is from the ancient name of the city that was on the location where Constantinople was built. Oh, that he changed the name to. He changed it to Constantinople or New Rome. Got it, right? But formally it had been a much, much smaller town called Byzantium, Byzantium. And so when we're referring to this whole medieval empire by that name, we're just repurposing the archaic name of its capital city. It would be like calling all of America, I don't, I don't, Washington didn't have a name but maybe it did. I don't know. But like the new Amsterdam is what New York is called and so all of you would be new Amsterdam and the Amsterdam is something that's good. It's a weird comparison, yeah. So that term came into play in the 19th century. Oh, it didn't even come till then. Yeah, it's pretty late. Who did that? Well, pretty much everybody in the West did it kind of simultaneously after the Crime Union War. So okay, interesting. Yeah, so what's the problem? In the early 19th century you have a Greek state. So did you have the revolution? There's a rebellion right against the Ottoman Empire. Eventually the Western powers are persuaded to join in or at least support the creation of an independent Greek state. Not entirely independent, they force a Bavarian king on it but whatever. Yeah. So there's a Greek state. But the Greek state as a project of liberating Christians or Greek speaking Christians from the Ottoman Empire is potentially liberate a lot of the Ottoman Empire. Not just the little bits that were part of the original Greek. So there's this problem of the potential for a new empire of the Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean. And this is not something that the great powers wanted. So you go around talking about empire of the Greeks in the Middle Ages all the time. You're kind of like ratifying, you're giving historical weight to claims in Greece that to revive the old Greek empire. You're going to get to make Greece great again movement. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Which many Greeks did want. So during the Crimean War they said we want the Greek empire again. Right. And the French and the British were like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not happening. And so you see after the Crimean War in Western writing they switch over to Byzantine which they regarded as, I mean, still had all the negative connotations of the Greeks. But it didn't like interfere in modern politics in quite the same way. It was kind of neutral in that way. But also kind of empty, right? So instead of having this Roman state full of Roman people you end up with this bland Byzantine empire with Byzantines in it. Nobody ever knows who they are. Right. Yeah. The distorting label that doesn't let you see who these people were. Which you can easily see if you just listen to what they're saying. Yes. Right. So that's where those terms come from. They are established as terms of art in academic fields like Byzantine studies. And so there are lots of questions here. My priority is not to change like everywhere that word appears. Byzantine studies as a field name is whatever fine, maybe it can change one day. My priority is in the actual understanding of the thing like when we're writing about these people that we not use these distorting labels, I'd never refer to the Byzantines because that is not a real thing. Byzantine studies is a kind of meta data rubric. I got you. Right. Yeah, because the term can actually cause some mischief because, you know, human beings, once we have a name for something, then we start thinking it has an essence. And then we start treating that essence as a fixed thing. That's right. And that's what happened with this case. Yeah. It's almost when I think about Rome, because like I've always been obsessed with, you know, ancient Roman history, which is on a daily basis, actually according to the meme, yes, I was that guy for sure. How often do you think about it? Yeah, I too. Every day. Yeah. But like you, you do, as we said at the outset, you kind of ignore the fact that it continued. And one of the things that I can't really square in the logic when, when you were explaining how they did this year with the West wanting to separate from the East, if you will, is that the Roman Empire had existed at the point of the Byzantine era beginning for so long that you had all of these different cultures and races that were a part of it and spread out across the continent. It was in some ways, maybe I'm historically wrong to think about this, but I think of the Roman Empire as like one of the original melting pots. And so you then have, as far as I know, a Roman emperor, be the one that did Constantine declares Constantinople new Rome, it's built in Roman roots with all in the same area of the world like this East West thing seems very, very, what's the word artificial? Yeah. Artificial for sure. You know, such that to make that argument later, it feels like the people in the West who were arguing that to me, it sounds like they were kind of arguing against themselves because the same people exist over there. Fair to say? They both stem from an originally unified Roman polity. And it's interesting that you should call it a melting pot. In some ways it was, first of all, a lot of people moved around a lot in the Roman Empire, right? And some, you know, by force, the Romans enslaved a lot of people, moved them around. This is in part why Rome, Imperial Rome, is like a Greek-speaking city to a very large degree. It's probably the third largest Greek-speaking city in the Roman Empire. This is why St. Paul addressed the Christian community in Rome in Greek, right? But you also have the Roman aristocracy. They also know Greek many of them, right? Marcus Aurelius, right, writes his meditations in Greek Caesar when he stabbed in the neck. He's, when he addresses Brutus, he does so in Greek. Yeah, well, that's the Latin. And that's not Greek. He said, it's too Bruta? No, that's that's Latin. Yeah. Okay, so they changed that. They put that in Latin later. It's not really what he said. Well, I mean, they translated it so that Latin readers could understand what he said. Yeah, see Technon Brute. That's what he said. Yeah, that's kind of nicer sounding. Can you say that again? Yes, see Technon Brute. Yeah, that sounds like a movie line right there. I hope I'm quoting correct idea. I didn't like check up on this. They're going to let you know the comments. I'm sure they will. Yeah. Anyway, that's how we taught it in school. So I think so. Tony is puts it in Greek. I think he does. I'm not sure. Anyway, ask a Roman, you know, ancient Roman expert about this, but he wasn't like in the last, you know, someone's sticking a dagger into his throat and he's like, what's the vocative of it? Yeah, to try to do it in Greek correctly. So these are a lot of bilingual people running the Roman state. Okay. So you said melting pot in the early third century. This emperor whom we call Caracalla. He passed this decree. It's called the Antenine decree. And he made everyone in the Roman Empire a Roman citizen. Was this the thing in 216 or 2112, 2112? Yes, yes. So that means that he's declaring everyone who doesn't have racial ties, the original Rome, they're now considered a Roman effectively. Yes, so long as they're not a slave. So whatever, 15% of the population maybe are slaves. So they're not in franchise. This is not a mass-manu mission. It's a mass-in-franchisement of previously free people, but who are not Roman citizens. Right. Now racial connections to Rome, it's just a question of whether that's such a thing even exists. Fair question. Think about Rome as a narrative. The story that the Romans themselves told about Rome, right? So there are a bunch of refugees from Troy who are like what? Fridians and they come to Italy and they merge with the Latins. And they presumably give up their own language and take on Latin. And then they merge with like the Sabines and they intermarry with their women. And then they expand and they just absorb more people, they've got Etruscans who are not like don't even speak an Indo-European language. And they absorb Italy and then they absorb Sicily and they absorb, right? So what racial, there's not, there's really no such thing. The early kings of Greece, a few of the, sorry, kings of Rome, the Seven, right? They come from some of more Greeks, right? Etruscans? Yeah, they made a whole movie about this, it's behind you. He was a spandard. General Rome. This guy, right? So this guy, Maximus. Veridius? Maximus, Desmus, meridius. There you go. Father, two and a minute son. Another two and a half. So what you've done episodes about the Gladiator? Oh, sure. Yeah. My friend told in stone. It did his whole PhD in ancient Rome and Greek history and he's amazing. He's a YouTuber. He's had a YouTube channel for years as well. Travels around the world or around that area of the world, I should say, going through us. We've done some awesome episodes on that. What we talk about. The movie and he debunked some things for me, which kind of ruins it, but I just ignored that part, you know? Like restoring the Republic, that business? Yeah, some of that. Yeah, some of the set, like he's a real stickler for details. So he's like, well, no, the architecture on this building. All right. Okay, we get it. Yeah, we get it. But yeah, this guy, Maximus, so this guy in so far as he's based on a historical person. And he's pretty closely based on one. This is a guy called Pompeianos, who is from Antioch in Syria. He's a native of Syria. That means Greek speaker. So he's one of Marcus Aurelius' top generals, his top general, right? So this is a Greek speaking Roman from Syria. That would have been a different movie because for one thing, you would have had to explain to Western audiences what that means. So they switched that because they don't want to do that work. Right. And they made him a Spaniard, which makes a lot more sense. Spaniards today is a romance language, right? And also, so they cut out the whole Greek aspect. And since they wanted it to be a revenge story, making it a Spaniard is because Spaniards are like stereotypically, you know, passionate people who will, you know, hunt you down like in the Princess bride, right? Am right. Right. Right. Right. Spaniards will hunt you down and don't turn a Spanish woman against you. I'm married to a Spanish woman. Oh, man. So you know, all right. I mean, speaking from personal like, no, no, they're not bad memories. They're not like that today. Okay. But there was a time when Spaniards and the Brits were like, you know, not the best friends. Yeah. And so the Brits developed various stereotypes about Spaniards. They passed into American culture and so forth. Anyway, by the way, are you familiar with the character Zorro? Like the like the superheroes are? Yes. Yeah. So super. Okay. Okay. Sort of. I asked students in Chicago and they, they'd never heard of this character. Anyway, really? Yeah, that's a whole other. The hell is up with Gen Z. You know Zorro, Amanda. There we go. Damn it. She was born after 9/11, too. Something has happened. Yeah, something's going on. The Zorro, the dude with the black and the sword mask. Can we pull it up? It's not central to anything we're talking about. We're talking about Antonio Banderas. No, not ringing a bell. Anyway. Yeah, that's Zorro. Wow. No, it does not ring a bell, does it? Wow. But this is like the original Batman. Yes. This is what it's all based on. Yes. All right. All right. All right. Stop digging a deep hole. Yeah, that's Spanish America. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, that's memory whole, too. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. Like Russian America. You know what Russian America is? No. That's what they call Alaska. Before we bought it. That does make sense. So making him a spaniard gave the sort of story it's right. And that's a change that's that's coming from like modern culture and stereotypes. But if you go back to that period, we're talking about a Greek speaking Roman top Roman general from Syrian Antioch. Okay. So Karakala, so Karakala. Again, you mentioned there's a racial connection to ancient Rome. Karakala's mother was Syrian and his father was North African like Punic. Yeah. So it's quite possible that his father, Septimius Severus, total badass Roman emperor general, spoke Punic that is Phoenician at home. And his mother spoke Aramaic. Now they all they spoke Latin and Greek certainly. So Karakala's like mixed, right? He comes from he's that melting pot. He's precisely that melting space. By the way, so the Nazis referred to they had this concept called Byzantine law, which they didn't there's not favorable term. It's a bad thing. I can imagine. And this is what happens to Roman law once there's all this racial miscegenation going on. So when the original Romans, which the Nazis imagined as being Nordic, right? They started to mix with all of these inferior Eastern whatever people. No, seriously. Yeah. Karakala was for them like the bogeyman, who like opened up Roman citizenship to all these Mongols, whatever, right? Okay. So this is a actual part of you know, 20th century ideology and Nazi regime. The melting pot was real. In other words, Karakala opened Roman citizenship to all of these people in the empire. And the interesting thing about the Romans is precisely because they did not have either sort of a racial or an ethnic view of who they were. There were much more of a civic nation that is belonging to you know, the Roman polity and the values and yeah, and the values and right, the laws and the consensus about justice and whatever, whatever. This is what makes you a Roman. It's like they I think someone famous said this, but they're like Rome Rome was an idea. Yeah. It was more of an idea than an actual place. Well, sort of all identities are ideas on a certain level. Like they they they reflect or correspond to certain kinds of ideals or I invite norms for a community. The Roman one is in a sense portable. It's not linked to the city of Rome. The Romans are everywhere. And it's not so much based on your ancestry. Now if your parents are Romans, you're a Roman. Like that's that. Yeah, but not only those people. It's no secret that studies everywhere are found in microplastics in your heart, blood, brain, and balls. It's 'cause we got too much plastic around in our lives. 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In other words, it's possible to give people citizenship, but to then come up with ways that restricts them from using it, like Jim Crow, right? Like, yeah, nominally, we're treating you as equal, but in practice, we've made it so that you can't really do that. - I got it. - The Romans had done that in the past too. Like after the social war in the first century BC, when they enfranchised all of the Italians, like gave them Roman citizenship, they also made it very hard for them to actually use it. - So, how they make it hard for them to use it? - Just based on how they apportion the voting blocks. So basically, just think that they're dumping them all into one electoral district. - Got it. - So you can elect, you know, one-- - Yeah, the original gerrymandering. - Yes, yeah, yeah. That's not exactly what they were doing, but it's an analogy, right? But in the third century, they meant it. So what that means is that, suddenly the ruling elite of the Roman Empire is really from all over, right? So you mentioned Constantine, who's kind of like crossing between East and West, and all this East West stuff is artificial, you're right. Constantine was from, you know, soldiers who were recruited in the Balkans, like Western Balkans, right? And like all of those generals, like the Declaration Constantine, all these people, were from that area, which was kind of an economic backwater of the Roman Empire. And the reason why so many emperors came from it is because a lot of the people there joined the army just for economic opportunity and they climbed the ranks and became top generals and emperors. So there was a period of like two to three hundred years when the vast majority of Roman emperors came from this area of the former Yugoslavia, it's about the size of Scotland. - I mean, Constantine was one of those-- - Yes. - I didn't know that. - That's wild. - Yeah, and these are people who, like the Romans of Marcus Aurelius' time would have considered as kind of backwater, you know, redneck, whatever, whatever, you know, from, I mean, there were stereotypes about him. They made good soldiers. - Yeah, yeah, right. And then they used that as the jumping point 'cause that is throughout a lot of history, obviously, they top generals become, I mean, it's happened in this country. Eisenhower was the top general and became a president. - Yeah. - So that's interesting though that they used that as the backdoor. Now, you had said though, that in the first century, they gave Italians rights, but, you know, in the parallel world, gerrymandered them, so kind of, like, took it away. I don't know if I've ever thought of this before, but like, when did they start even using the term Italy? And, like, the term, like, these are Italians here, even if they're a part of the Roman Empire. When did that become a thing? - So Italy's an ancient name. But, you know, it's older than we can track for the peninsula. And, I guess your question is, when does it become a politically motivating term? - Yes. - So it was exactly, I think, during the social war. So the social war is, like, early first century BC. So, these are saying, these are as a child. - Okay. - And it's basically a war of protest by Rome's Italian allies who joined together to attack Rome. And this is one of the oddest wars in history. And, you know, it's kind of, this might sound a little bit inaccurate, but it's broadly true, because they wanted in, not because they wanted out. In other words, they felt that they were kind of being abused by the Romans and, like, used, but not given, you know, access and political power in the Roman system that they felt they deserved. And so they kept making demands for, like, citizenship and inclusion and more, you know, access and so forth. And we're denied, denied, denied until finally they took up arms. The Romans defeated them and then gave them citizenship. Yeah. But in this gerrymandered way that kind of limited them. From that point on, you do start to get Romans talking about Italy as the kind of heartland, the homeland. And in the first century AD, like, for example, in Plenty of the Elder. So this is the guy who died in the eruption of Vizuvius. He was a naval commander there. And he wrote this massive work called the Natural History. So he has this kind of pion to Italy as a kind of, you know, the homeland. So this is a Roman talking about Italy in the way that a Greek might talk about Greece. Whereas before they would have probably talked about Rome rather than Italy. Yes, right. So under like Augustus in the early imperial regime, Italy is understood as a kind of Roman heartland. But it's not the only place from where Romans come. 'Cause already the Romans have collings all over them and training, right? So there's still a disconnect between the idea of the homeland and where Romans are. I got it, yeah. So we have in the years after Caesar, you have like sons of sons becoming the leader of Rome and then eventually finds its way this pattern to where some of the generals who often are from a different place start becoming the leader of Rome. When you're charting like the decline of the original Roman Empire, I guess, pre, what is it for, 76? Is that right? The Western Roman Empire. Do you think some of it also has to do with the fact that it changed up the traditional, you know, son of a son becomes the emperor and it more moves towards people who maybe weren't from the heartland becoming emperor and therefore spreading out the empire? Oh, no, no. So the Romans never managed to have dynasties, like succession to, you know, father to son. Never? Until Constantine really. So, yeah, I took that. Yeah, so think about the Julio Claudians. Yeah, they're loosely affiliated. It'll be like a stepson and stuff, but it's still like in the family. It's a very, it's a broad clan, let's say, right? Augustus, the first emperor, he really wanted it to be by descent, like to have children or at least grandchildren and when that failed because they kept dying before him, he just had to resort to his wife's son to whom he was not related, this Tiberius. And so the Julio Claudians are this very weird. You don't have father to son. You get that with like the Spasian and his two sons, but the Romans never actually made it, never had a dynasty that made it to the third generation. Did they ever codify anything with it? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Until Constantine's, Constantine's was the first dynasty that made it to the third generation, right? So that's 300 and some years in. 250 years in, right, that's a long time. So no, the emperors are, yeah, the position is understood to be generally up for grabs, but if you're doing a good job and you have the support of the Senate and the armies, you're unlikely to face challenges, right? So it is open to talent. This is the advantage and disadvantage of the Roman imperial system that you have, it is open to talent, if someone's doing a very, very bad job, there'll be a coup or a rebellion and there'll be overthrown. But also it means that, so you'll generally have capable, experienced men taking over, but it also means that in moments of crisis, they will turn on each other and have a civil war rather than deal with the crisis. So can you explain what you mean by that? is it like, well, why would that happen? Well, because of the setup. So suppose you're an emperor and you're doing a bad job defending the frontiers, right? So bar, let's say barbarians or enemies are coming in. So now your legitimacy is in doubt. And provincials or provincial armies or generals or rivals or you know your your own generals will start to think This guy's not doing a good job, and we need to replace him So suddenly now you're facing a civil war right at the time when I mean you're having it because That regime is failing to deal with the foreign problems. And so now you end up having both So this happens throughout the millennium that I study Right so it's There's a good aspect to it and a bad aspect to it the good is that you have a renewal in the leadership You usually have experienced people you very rarely have a situation where like the air has been raised in the palace and had no idea What's going on outside and is like handled by You know courteers or whatever that that's the pretty it happens occasionally, but it's pretty rare But you also tend to have these moments of intense civil war Which sometimes makes the original problem worse Yeah, disease here is worse than the disease sometimes So Constantine is a really Really consequential historical figure seemingly for a lot of reasons You'll hear a lot of things obviously the religion is a big part of it And and what happened there, but we had talked about this a bit earlier without going all the way into it He's also the guy who then created Constantinople changed the name made that like the capital which you know led to all the Questions of like what is rum and where is it? But you know, do you think that Looking on on Constantine's time do you view him favorably as a leader or ear or infavorably? Well, I mean in what terms As a historian looking at it from a big distance right not looking at him as a human being he was murderous Yeah, like he killed so many people in his own family It's like he's someone you wanted to be at a distance from if you were at a distance from him overall you probably benefited From his reign like he made some good decisions. He made some bad ones You know some worked out some didn't he was very consequential for the reasons that you mentioned right overall He was very capable I think he took his responsibilities very seriously Yeah, I mean I mean overall favorably so long as I'm not related to him right right do you What motivated him though to make the full jump to Christianity with the Empire? We do not know. I mean we can guess what's the best guess oh Well, so many historians would would say that for one reason or another. He came to actually believe in Some of the tenants of Christianity now not the ones that we would Necessarily identify today because those didn't necessarily exist in fact he played a role in codifying them But he didn't know them in advance What does a Roman Emperor want out of a religion? Well one thing that or out of a god when a Roman Emperor is looking for a god What does he want the interesting thing is that we know that Constantine was looking for a divine sort of sponsor or patron because he switched his brand as it Were a few times he started out under the shadow of the tetrarchy So this is a regime of Diocletian and Maximine these these guys before him with whom he rose up through that system He was the son of one of the tetrarchs but broke with that system and he developed his own brand So you can see this on his coins like originally Constantine is like bearded And he's going for the whole Jupiter Hercules thing then he splits from that develops his own brand Which is clean shaven and linked to Apollo or the Sun God? So he's going back to Augustus so less of this like hard military Look and more of a kind of sunlight and renewal Apollo look Right and in the course of that he then kind of switches over to the Christian God and it seems that the decisive moment for him is when Perhaps he thought that the Christian God helped him win a key battle and that's what gods are good for right in the ancient world If you win and you had placed your trust in that God That's it right so There's more to it than that because Christianity means not just That you you revere that one God but that you also Do not recognize the others or you think that they're evil right and Constantine seems to have taken that message on board too He starts referring to the the fraud and the false gods and all of this stuff But he doesn't actually force his subject with a far too many I mean at this point Christians are a tiny minority right in the empire But having the emperor as as part of that minority is very decisive in other words He can flip it he can pull the levers and switch things around so that people are now incentivized To become Christians or at least to pretend yeah Yeah, I think there's a piece of it just looking at it from 30,000 feet in the air. I think you make a good point about finding something you know if to I don't know if you use this word but to kind of cement your power if you can make people make your people Look up to the sky and say hey, I this is what we believe and I I believe in that too They're looking above you and ignoring maybe some of the things you're doing below the sky and some ways when you look when you look throughout history I see that pattern a lot right Now it's difficult for Roman emperors to keep their subjects from noticing what's happening Like in terms of like inflation and foreign wars and I you know, it sounds like a lot of the similar A lot of similar things that are in the news today, right? So Romans aren't easily fooled this way and Yeah, but the empire has gone through this period of tremendous instability in the third century when like Emperors are being swapped out sometimes every couple of years and The period that Constantine is in you know has some major civil wars, but they're they're few and they're very large And it seems to be heading toward a more stable kind of consensus so It's part of that whole new Roman Empire right the kind of Rebuilding of institutions Institutionally, it's a different empire so for example and and all of this is Constantine's predecessor Diocletian There's a new tax system. It's kind of a universal census everyone is taxed It's much more efficient and rigorous their larger armies. There's a larger bureaucracy The emperors are much this is big government. This is Romans doing big government much more interventionist their laws about Because remember everyone's now Roman citizen which means that Roman law now applies to everyone right? So you can't have brothers and sisters married in Egypt. That's against Roman law It wasn't against Egyptian law or custom, but now it is that one was for the best But what about the Egypt? What about states rights? Yeah Yeah, maybe that one we can overlook Okay, but for Diocletian being a Christian was also a violation of Roman law so he persecuted the Christians Right, and this was kind of tricky for Constantine to try to figure out how Christians who don't worship the Roman gods can still be Romans and sort of part of the Roman community, right? And so He had this the edict of Milan in 313 and these kinds of texts are trying to create this kind of dual track Romainess where you can be a Christian or you can be the traditional religion and you're both equally Roman and that's fine That didn't last for very long. So Constantine's Christian successors during the fourth century they eventually can start to sort of revert to the old model but with Christianity as the new religion in other words you're going to be a Roman You're also going to have to be on you know With the program of what the emperor thinks the Roman religion is and the Roman religion now is Christianity So in 380 That's like that 60-70 years later. We have an emperor saying just flat out This is now the it's my the nice seeing Christianity. This is now what all my subjects are going to yeah Now where would you say Because again they history kind of wrote this wrong when they called it as you laid out earlier Byzantine Empire because it kind of writes away how it was built on Rome But it's really like a second act if you will you say maybe third act too, but it's like a second act of Rome In a lot of ways when do you think the original Roman Empire meaning pre-476 Pete and when and what led to the decline leading into 476 to where it at least switches over to something new Yeah, I can ask you what you think it means for a historical society to peak what are we talking about like the art literature or just Everything the culture to me everything is downstream from Political economic power just in general. So if you look throughout history whenever empires or large economic zones were at their Economic military peak to where they held the most land had the most assets things were flowing Not an active war against them to the inside that's getting anywhere You know that tends to be from what I've seen in historians I've talked to what you would view as the peak and then when some of those things start shifting demographic shifts suddenly and things like inflation come in You know more wars happen and there's less great outcomes of those wars and things started literally shrink I'd say. That's when you're passed to get that point fair enough by that definition early second-century AD right so who was on like what amperes or is this agent Hadrian, okay, you know, yeah early Antoninus Pius then you start getting plagues wars instability that kind of thing. However, we should also acknowledge that there's also tremendous amount of economic inequality and there's also inequality between Romans and not non-Romans. It's not clear that there is no reason to use a double negative. It's quite likely that there's a lot of economic exploitation by local elites of the producers. This is actually more difficult to do later on because the central government is censusing all the land and people and taxing them sort of universally. Now today we would consider a flat tax to be regressive but by the ancient standards it's actually progressive because it was possible for local elites in the Roman Empire to shift the tax burden on to, you know, farm peasants. Yeah. And not pay themselves, right? So we're in a similar situation like that today. It was really nice, right? So the people with the most money are like not paying and they're just shifting the tax burden on to like everyone else. 100%. Yeah. So in the sense of just sheer production of wealth you would say the United States is peaking right now but it doesn't feel that way to most people. So that's why I add that caveat that the Roman Empire could be peaking in the terms that you just mentioned. Yes. But not for everybody. But yeah, plus their slaves and all that. Okay, that doesn't really go away in history, at least not for a very long time. But when Constantine gets in there so 100, 200 years after what you're saying might be the peak by those standards I laid out, it's still a very powerful empire at the time. It's not like they're hurting, hurting, but it would be 150, 160 years later to where that empire at least as we know it comes to an end. So that's not that much longer after. So what in the West? In the West, yes. This is very important to keep in mind. The West can be spiraling into decline and fall. The East at the same time is doing much, much better. Now how do you explain that dichotomy? Well, the two different parts of the world, right? I mean, so the Roman Empire was tended to break from the very beginning. Like it got so big from like the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. Yep. Right? So it tends to break this way rather than Lynxwise. Right. And it tends to break where and how? Well, I mean, think already the civil wars like under Caesar, but we'll make it clear like under Augustus. Before we have Augustus is Octavian and Mark Antony, right? And these are two rivals and they're essentially controlling the two halves of the Roman Empire. And it kind of breaks, you know, right along Greece basically. Then you keep having these periodic civil wars with the Roman Empire is breaking again. It breaks again, the civil wars of 68, 69. It breaks again under Septimius Severus. And throughout the third century, and into the era of Constantine, you know where it's tending to break at the city of Byzantium? Like right between Europe and Asia. Yeah. Right? So when Constantine creates Constantinople, though we don't have any source that says this, but our sources are terrible for this period, I suspect that one of the intentions of Constantinople is to clamp together the Balkans and Asia Minor. So concentrate the elites. So create a new Senate, you know, bring elites from the Greek world and the Balkans and Italy to Constantinople. So that will stop the Empire from breaking at that point. And it does. Now the problem is then it tends that the breaking point just gets moved to the Adriatic. Right? So the Adriatic, so it's just long sea and it goes right up and you get to where Venice would eventually be. And from there to like cross the Alps and into southern Germany, it's a very short distance. And so that's where essentially the Empire kind of breaks there or in the former Yugoslavia somewhere or whatever. Now the Roman Empire is so large like no other state has been that large in this part of the world since then. Yeah. And if you think about ancient technology, the transportation and communication and so forth, compared to the way we experienced that distance, it's like essentially a hundred times bigger. Wow. Right? That's wild. Yes. I mean, just the fact that they could pull this off at all. Right? With communications being like that, right? You ever seen that map? I'd cite this. I feel like all the time on the show in different contexts, but the map of like the veins leading out of Rome that go all the way to like it shows the Roman roads. The roads. Yeah. Yeah, but not not the roads. It paints it like or maybe it is a double entendre. I never thought of that. Steve's got it right here. It paints it like a body. Oh, right. Like the veins. Yes. There's got to be some roads that are lined up with that, but like just what you said puts it in a great perspective. It's like when you think about the time it would have taken just to be able to get a message across and stuff like that, it's like managing something a hundred times bigger in America. That's an insane map to me. Is it like all roads lead to Rome or away from Rome? Which is it? Which one? You know, it could be both depending on the time you're looking at. Yeah. So given those distances and the way they were experienced, like moving across any part of that on horseback or on foot or in a card, it just takes forever. Well, he did it pretty fast. I saw him get home. Oh, but here he's in like the illusion field. Yeah, that's after. But like when he was riding home, he was a little bit too late. That would have taken a couple months. Yeah, he grew a little beard. Yeah, they can't show that in the movie. Yeah, you just got to make it fast, you know, a nice little CGI to show the time pass. I'm talking. Yeah, yeah. So this would break is it's keeping it together that needs explanation, not that it would break. And so you can definitely have things going on in one half of this world that are not affecting the other half. They're not the two halves are not dependent on each other economically. They're the same state. They have the same currency, the same laws, the same citizenship, the same identity, the same history. But they're not interdependent in this way. And so the West can to spiral into, you know, whatever happened to the West could happen to the West doesn't affect the East that much. East try to help. They would send some pretty massive armies at times, but you know, whatever didn't work out. They were preoccupied sometimes like with Attila or whatever. So what you're having in the East is economic and demographic growth and a consolidation of institutions while the West is spiraling out of control. And the moment of Constantine quite literally saying Rome is now here in Constantinople is a big, big seismic shift because like you said, it leads to a lot of the centers of power, if you will, now calling that home. So it's a literal geographic and figurative symbolic shift all in one. Yes, but it's not unprecedented. It's not unprecedented. No, no. So a couple of things have happened already. So first of all, emperors have stopped residing in Rome since the early third century. So you start getting emperors who never visit Rome as emperors. Wait, really? Yeah, you're just not there. Rome is just not that important politically. That's not where the power is. The power is with the armies and the armies are along the frontier. Oh, okay. All right. That makes sense. Right. So for like a century and a half, you have like mobile emperors. Yes. Who are just a tinderant. There's moving around the frontiers. Even think of Marcus Aurelius, right? In this movie, right? He's spending all these years in the Danube frontier, right? And so Rome is a place that they visit once, twice, maybe if they rule for 20-year years, or they don't go at all, right? That's so strange to think of that. Your namesake emperor never went. He never visited Rome. Never once. And this is a guy who campaigned from Gal to the east. Well, he made it back in time to get whacked, but he wasn't there. Yeah, Julian died in fighting a war. Oh, I'm thinking of Julius Caesar. No Julian. Oh, yeah, I got it. Yeah, what years was Julian? The emperor. His emperor 361, 363. Okay. He was a young guy. Yeah. He was born in Constantinople. Yeah. Right? His Greek speaking. Well, Latin, he knew Latin too. He fought for years in Gal and then moved to the east. He never went to Rome. It's just not on the, see, Constantinople is strategically located, but in the Balkans, like right where Europe, that's where you cross from Europe into Asia. Right. And it's reachable from the Danube frontier, and it's meant to help you get to the Euphrates frontier. Rome is not. It's not near a frontier. Yeah, you got to go out of the way. You have to go down Italy for, you know, and you do this for symbolic reasons. So Rome is not, it's sort of symbolically central. to the Roman world, but practically it's a museum after the early third century, so that's one development. The other is that wherever emperors went, they kind of took Rome with them. So you've got generals and armies, but you also have the mint, the money, the laws. You have a legal team of scholars because you're receiving petitions from the whole empire. Like, you're running the highest court of appeal in the Roman Empire. Emperor. Did I understand you correctly? They're bringing the mint and the money managers with them like on the road? Yeah. I mean, one of the men's, there are others, an interesting thing. Yeah. It's a whole moving city. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I've never heard that before. Now, they're not going to take it, you know, they don't take the legal scholars with them on them, slogging through the mud of again, new campaigns, right? But they station them in the cities that, you know, are along the route. So you know, sometimes we can reconstruct the movement of the emperors by seeing where their legal team issued responses to petitions from, right? Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think also, like, emperors are also living in a little inflationary bubble. They're living in an inflationary bubble because wherever they go, prices rise, right? Yeah. I mean, if the emperor comes to town, that's a nice attraction. Yeah. I think about Rumi, this is a 13th century Sufi poet in Asia Minor, anyway, he's whatever. And it's a one day his cousin says to him, hey, Rumi, I got to go to a wedding somewhere. Can you mind the inn while I'm out? And Rumi says, yeah, sure. I'll take her to the inn. And it happens during that weekend that the Sultan comes to his inn and he says, like, you know, feed all of my men or whatever, and he's got, okay, I guess I'm going to have to kill all the chickens or whatever, whatever. And then the Sultan says, oh, after the feast, he says, well, what do I do? I owe you good innkeeper. And Rumi says, well, I'm just trying to say $5 million, Ms. Sultan is like, what are chickens so rare here? And Rumi says, no, but Sultan's are. That's funny. That's crazy though that they'd have their own little economic system and just float in one of the things. What's a moving city? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Where these emperors, they would, they would be stationed, you know, sometimes they'd take up in a city and these would be close at the frontier. So it would be like, treer or Milan or Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki was the capital of the emperor Galerius. You went to Galerius's palace presumably when you were there. Which one is that? Like, there's an arch. Yeah, it's like right on the, it's right on the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, or the rotunda. These are a part of Galerius's palace. Galerius. Oh, that's cool. Diocletian's second in command. He was one of the tetrarchy and, and that, Thessaloniki was his capital, right? Constantine. He was based, sermium for a while, Diocletian's based in Nicomedia and all of these places are called like new Rome, little Rome, second Rome, my Rome. So the idea of a mobile Rome was already very much in the air. Constantine just kind of fixed it in Constantinople. They ended up doing that with the whole country kind of too. Like Romania. Okay. Right. So we're getting there. I mean, no, no, but this was the next point. So you mentioned Italy earlier, right? Italy is a kind of Roman heartland. So by around 300, a, that's this constant, during Constantine's lifetime, certainly, there's a name for the Roman Empire, like a proper name. And that name is Romania. And it appears in some texts in the fourth century as something very, very well known. There's a church father who's writing to some monks in Upper Egypt, that's Southern Egypt. And he says, it just casually, it just kind of mentions that Rome is the capital city of Romania, meaning the whole empire. And we start getting other references to it. So it has like a proper name. Romania means something like Roman land. So these, this global Roman world where all of these Roman citizens are from the Adriatic to the Euphrates, they're calling their, their world, their society, their state. Romania. Now, I stress the accent on the eye because that's how it is in the Greek. And so that we don't confuse it with the modern country of Romania. But the more like a Romania, better, it sounds better. Sure. Yeah. Romania, modern Romania is a different branch on the same tradition. So yes, the name comes from the, it's from the Roman name, which is what they call their language and also their ethnicity in some terminology. And so yeah, so Romania comes from that too. But much, much, much later. I don't think the name Romania for the place, the country, is attested before the early 19th century. Oh, wow, way, way later. Yeah. Okay. But a lot of the people there, that's also located in a place where you could say, I guess like the ethnic makeup is a mix of a lot of different places around them from during the Roman Empire time. And medieval times. And yeah, I'm not even going to begin to, we don't want to call it an international incident. That's right. We've done that here before. You have? I'm sure. I'm not an expert in all of that anyway. But they speak a Eastern, sort of Balkan, Romanist language, right? So it is very close to Latin. And so they also have legit claims to the Roman tradition as well. It's like the people I study, the East Romans who speak Greek, but they're also those East Romans. They're from that world. They're from Romania and they called that, they use that term also down to the 19th century when you start to get like the Greek revolution and things like that, you know, throw everything into a spin. But Romans, Romania, even the language Greek is called Romeic, Romeica, Romeica. Really? Yep. It was called for a thousand years. Those are indications of how important this Roman identity was for the Easterners and people I study, right? And they're coming out of this world that we described, where Rome is, like you said, an idea, but it's actually more of a mobile community. It can be here, it can be there. It can be focalized in different places from, you know, in the Comedia that Constantinople to even Carthage was at one point. Oh, yeah. And Carthage, that was something like we didn't even know for a long time existed, right? Like that got found way later. Or am I thinking of the wrong one? Like they're like ten. So the Romans destroy ancient Carthage and it's just kind of like abandoned or something like that for a century and then they re-found it as a Roman colony. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So Roman Carthage is a different. But didn't archeologists like they had to dig that up later and they didn't, they're like, oh, it was here. We didn't know it was here. No, it was nowhere. They knew where it was. Yeah. I think I'm thinking of another one. Well, it was buried under Roman, so Punic Carthage is like Hannibal. That's buried under Roman Carthage. Whatever's left of it. Because they, but that was a famous campaign where they just leveled the whole city. They did. Yeah. And then they built their own army out there. It became a huge, very important city and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for it's city everything. Yeah. Okay. Constantine, when, when he declared Byzantia to be Constantinople at that point, what year was that approximately? The inauguration of it was in 330. Okay. Point being it was already a big city. He now just rebranded it in a way. But because he's now making it like what's going to be the center of the Roman Empire in his mind, I assume a lot of Roman history moved in with that. And the city expanded tremendously at that point as well. And what's the, what is the evidence we can see of that today that maybe still exists or is preserved? That's a very Roman. So how do you make a city look like Rome or be Rome, right? Or be another Rome as Constantine called it in one of his laws, like Altera, the other Rome. Altera. Okay. Right? Well, so it needs, at that time, a palace like the Palatine with a Hippodrome, right? Next to it. Hippodrome probably existed already. Can we pull that up to you just so people can see them? Oh, the Hippodrome. Yeah, yeah. Senate House or two, right? Ideally, the Hippodrome should have an obelisk or two in it, like the circus maximus in Rome, right? Has those obelisks? So you need for a, so Constantine makes a form of Constantine. Just like in Rome, there was the form of the emperor, there's form of Augustus, Nerva, right, Trajan, all of that. And this gets built up by subsequent emperors, you know, over the centuries. So, you know, there are a couple of centuries where they're just investing hard in making it look like what they thought Rome should be, like an ideal version of Rome. There's it. Defe actually got this the top left corner, if maybe that's like kind of a far shot, but if we could just make that bigger. Okay. So those, just, yes, the Hippodrome of Constantinople, just to be clear, a lot of those are sort of modern CGI reconstruction. They're not inaccurate. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That one's at the Salon Niki right there, but it's similar, I guess. Yeah. That one's pretty much gone. There's a lot of Hippodrome survive in the urban topography, in other words, the Hippodrome itself has disappeared, but its shadow outline remains and sometimes like the streets will like do this little run or the monuments in the middle will stay there. So other ways of making cities, Roman is by the collection of artwork that you have in it. So Constantinople gets endowed with like all of this magnificent art from all over the Adjunion world, so they like ship in a lot of existing stuff. they created up and moved it to Constantinople. So the Hippodrome has all of these monuments and statues along the spine of it in the middle. And those are like a kind of museum of Roman history. So it alludes to important events or like the She-Wolf Remus Romulus Augustus's victory and actium, like these kinds of things. It's a kind of like museum of Roman history. And you said they were bringing in the obelis as well, which obviously are still staples we can see in actual Rome today, but that's another. So we're seeing that even at this point, Constantin's similar to emperors who came right before him, there continues to be some sort of, you know, like historical obsession with ancient Egypt as well. - Yes, I mean, you know, Greeks and Romans were kind of fascinated by Egypt, generally, and what's it called, Egyptomania? - Yeah, right, we still have it today. - Oh yes, still have that. - Oh yes, Egyptomania is huge. - Why were they, why were they so fascinated by that place in particularly? Have you been to Egypt? - I have been to Egypt when I was eight. - Like a Karnak, you know, some of the time-- - I went to, I went and saw the pyramids, which I really wish I could see today 'cause I could appreciate it a lot more than I did then. And I was at Port Said, Cairo and a little bit inland from there, but besides that, not a ton. - All right, so ancient Egyptian civilization was just fascinating to just about everybody in the ancient world, including at the time when ancient Egypt was thriving. So there's a whole industry of like Egyptian knockoff, like knick-knacks and everything. Like definitions would trade Egyptian stuff. Sometimes even they would make it, like, you know, like they had their own kind of Egyptianizing artwork to sell to anybody who was willing to buy it. And, yeah, the Greeks imitated Egyptian statu-- Like Egyptian Greek statuary, like the early Kuroi and stuff are very clearly picking up from Egyptian traditions. The pyramids, obelisks, massive temples and statues of Pharaohs just wildly impressed everybody. I mean, Egypt like had a tourist industry in antiquity. People just going there, we know this, they carved their names all over the monuments, right? Would you say they were more obsessed with like the ancient power represented, the culture and artistic things, maybe specifically that came out of that, or both? - Both, also it's antiquity. Like they knew it was very, very old. Sometimes they couldn't know exactly how old and, you know, they either like way overshot it or underestimated it. But they were just fascinated that there could be a place that had like, you know, writing and such sophisticated architecture and, and hieroglyphics, right? They continue to exert this fascination, even among people who can't read them. Like it's this kind of artistic way of writing. - Oh, it's so cool. - Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Okay, Egypt is like cool and they thought it was cool. You know, that has it's sort of a dark colonial side as well, especially when you've conquered it. So it just lent itself so wonderfully to being conquered. In other words, you could start shipping its art to your capital and use it as a kind of display for, but here's a part of the world I control and it's, right? It's like, so in Roman tradition, it kind of became a thing like, that Rome should be endowed with Egyptian artwork. Yeah, actually there were even like private, you know, wealthy like aristocrats in the second century AD who had their own, like in Greece there was Herodaticus and he had an Egyptian villa in New Marathon. Herod, can we look this up Herodaticus? - Herodaticus. - Herodaticus. - One of the wealthiest men of his time, yeah, Egyptian, yeah, in Marathon. And we have some of the artwork. - That's cool. - Yeah. He also, he built the Panethanate Stadium in Athens and the Edolean, which is right underneath the Acropolis. - Yeah, that's third, yeah. Is that about what you're looking for? - That is in Egypt. So, oh sorry, you wrote Herodaticus. Herod is without, it's just H-E-R-O-D. Herod, Egyptian, but if you want to add Marathon, they'll nail it down there, yeah, I don't know, there you go. - Yep, there you go. - Oh, there's some ancient ruins on the left. - Yeah, and then you see a little pharaoh statue right there. - I think Hadrian had some Egyptian, an Egyptian wing in his villa in Kibali. - So, yeah, there was this just general, you know, fascination with Egypt. - Yeah, it's amazing, like standing in Rome. Today, when you do see those Abelists and you think about, look at how big they are, how heavy they must be and when they got them there, told them, "Don't walk me through that one time." Like what that whole process was. But like, you gotta admire a place a lot. If you're going through Hell and High Water to get stuff like that all over your city. - Moving in Abelist and Egypt, yeah. - The one in Constantinople is just the top third. The rest broke. - It broke? - It broke. - It's still huge. - On the way there? - We don't know. - We know where the rest of it is. - Can we see that? So the broken Abelist? - Well, so yeah, just do Abelist Hippodrome. Yeah, there it is. - So, wow, so there was a whole, like, two thirds below that before they got it there. - Yeah, yeah. - It is way shorter, let's just look at that, trying to eyeball it. It is way shorter than the one in St. Peter's Square. - I hope that I'm right, that that's the one third and not the two thirds. So I couldn't be wrong, but it's a one third, so it's either lost or it's what we have. - Right, I think it's small. - It's what we have. So you can see they created a whole base for it. It's that cube that has those figures on it. To correct for the mismatch between the original base that they had, which was much wider. And the part of the Abelist that they were finally able to get there. - All right, so yeah, deep down at the Abelist of Theodosius in Istanbul, formerly Constantinopouls, about two thirds of its original height, because its lower section was broken and lost and antiquity built for Farah Thuttmost III. Thuttmost III in Egypt. The red granite pillar was originally about 30 meters or 98 feet tall. The bottom part was damaged likely during the long transport, so they can't confirm it for sure. Down the Nile, we're during an early failed attempt to raise it, and its current height today stands at roughly 18.5 to 19.6 meters, which is about 64 feet tall. Wow. So the Emperor Theodosius, the first brought the remaining upper piece to the hippodrome of Constantinopoulin 390 AD, placing it on a decorated marble base. So like Theodosius, the first you were talking about, like the Emperor Julian was never in Rome at any point. And a lot of these guys were just always moving with the army, but like Theodosius, did he have a, did they have a palace in Constantinopoul? Was there a place where like, this is where the Emperor lives? Yes. There was a palace as one of the first things that you built. Right. Theodosius did actually go to Rome a couple times. And now he was a Westerner, he was from Spain. Yeah. So he was brought in as a Western Emperor to the east after the Battle of Adrianople, so this is in 378, where the Goths annihilate about, you know, maybe 20,000 Roman soldiers, about a field army and a half. Whoa. And so the Eastern command was just kind of wiped out that battle, including the Emperor valence. And so the Western Emperor sends Theodosius to kind of fix things up in the east. So that was the other thing, and we've alluded to this all day, but Rome was split into two at some point. So is that before? Yeah. So the conventional date that we have for that is 395. OK. And that's when Theodosius, this guy, dies, and he leaves the Eastern half of the Empire to one sun, Arcadiaus, and the Western half of the Empire to another sun of his honorius. Now, this to be clear, this wasn't like a formal partition or anything like that. The Roman Empire was never formally partitioned. It was always understood to be one Roman state with the laws from one valid in theory and the other, with the same monetary system, with the-- it was a unified single state. In practice, it was governed by an Emperor in the Eastern and Emperor of the West. And this had started already back in Diocletian's time. Now, they were a bit more mobile, as I said back then. They weren't like fixed, right? But Diocletian had a team for the east, and he was in the east, and a sort of team for the west. And they move around a lot, but there was a kind of broad east-west division going on. And this was for practical purposes, because if you're facing Saxon Raiders in Britain and Persians in the east, you can't be in both places. You need two people, and Diocletian needed four people, because you've also got the Danube, and then you've got the Rhine, and a lot going on. You might have like an internal usurper, maybe someone from Spain, or Egypt, who wants to take the throne, and so you've got to put him down to. So Diocletian thought he needed four. That's why we call it tetrarchy, in his rule of four. Constantine then, he consolidates power back into his own hands and then divides the empire among his sons, like three of them. And he probably was aiming for four or five with some nephews and so on. So it's a kind of collegiate system of emperorship. It almost feels like it's like this understood thing that we're gonna do it this way, but it's not explained. It's not codified or anything like that. That's right. After 395, what happens is that it tends to remain as kind of two parallel states in practice, but not always. So in 425, so 30 years later, The Eastern. Emperor Theodosius II, who's Theodosius I's grandson, he defeats a Western Emperor, he didn't like, whatever reason, and he then is like the ruler of the whole thing. Oh, he goes to war with them. Yes, he sends his generals, yeah. So they defeat this guy who's based in Ravenna or Rome. I mean, Ravenna and Rome are the two Western capitals at that point. And so he's now in charge of the whole thing, but again, for practical purposes, he can't be. So he sends Valentinian III to marry him to his daughter and sends him off to the West to rule as his junior partner. So there's a lot of back and forth here. It's not like a partition that is kind of formal in any way, right? Yeah, no, you explain that really well. I can see how though over the course of 100, 200, 300 years, if you want to go back to when some things may first happen, how that type of, you know, kind of, yeah, we can do it this way. And it's still the same thing. But where it starts to get away from like the clear lock, this is the unity, this is what it is. It leads to eventually some sort of natural, cultural fracturing that's going to happen. Absolutely. Okay. You're right. So especially in like the churches. In the churches. Well, I mean, that's one example. So this is like the original schism, if you will. It kind of starts around this time. You have one church operating in Latin, one in Greek. Oh, that's problematic thinking back then because what's the, what's there for the church law written in? Well, I mean, as I explained earlier, most of this is written in Greek and gets translated into Latin. But eventually, the Western church, Latin church, which we later called the Catholic church, it starts to develop its own traditions of how to do things. The East has its own traditions and those kind of split apart. That's just an example of how East and West kind of drift apart just like you kind of mentioned. Yeah. Or they treat each other as kind of de facto separate administrations. Yeah. So I, I just have my friend John in here who does a lot of great work covering the whole medieval era and it's like a generalist with all the different cultures that we're going on during that time. But one of the things we talked about a little bit that I'd love to really like get a full picture on because it's right in your strikes on a stuff that you study is the breakdown in 476 that happens, which as far as I understand was not like one sack of Rome, if you will. There were multiple that led up to it and then a moment where they're like, okay, Rome is fallen or whatever. But it wasn't, it's not like Rome itself fell, it was like the city kind of fell at that time. So can you like, for people out there that are a little confused how this happened, can you explain like what the build up to that was and then what exactly happened? Sure. So you're asking me to fall to explain the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So there are lots of theories and even we went through a phase where some historians believe that it never happened and there was a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, debate about words and is this a fall, is it a transformation, is it, whatever. So there is all of this. I'm going to mention that and if you want to get into it, we can. But in brief, what happened is that a number of armies from outside the empire, quote, barbarians. So these are goss of vandals, huns, whatever, whatever. For various reasons, they start to come closer to the borders and some of them either ask to be let in. So the goss who want to get away from the huns or others who just break through for whatever reason. We don't know their motivations because they didn't write texts about what they were doing. So some of the Roman sources say, and you know, 20,000 vandals showed up and they pushed through the Rhine border and they moved into Spain or whatever. So the Romans are trying to deal with that situation in a number of ways. So one would be to deputize those armies as kind of, yeah, deputy Roman armies and we'll use them against some other barbarians or against our political rivals or just kind of try to contain them in some region where they've holed up like the Swabian, like Spain and try to contain the damage that they're doing. However, when the vandals, one of these groups of Germanic speaking, right, they cross over to North Africa and take the region around Carthage. And then these goss who had been settled as Roman auxiliary or you know, federated soldiers in Gaul, they also kind of declared their independence. And so that's a region in Gaul, that's a region in North Africa. What happens is that then your revenues go down because you're not getting taxes from those regions, which means that you now have less money to higher soldiers or pay soldiers in order to deal with existing problems, much less new ones. Yeah. In the course, they also lose Britain. They basically, they withdraw the armies for some wars on the continent and they never go back and Britain just kind of plunges back into the Stone Age. It's a remarkable story of like, you know, apocalyptic scenarios in Britain after about 410, just simply by the withdrawal of the Roman army, economy and the whole administration just leaves. And yeah, it's not good. And so gradually, this is a vicious circle. So fewer resources coming in from taxation means fewer soldiers means you can't deal with the problems, the problems get worse. And that leads to the end where basically all you have is Italy and it's left in the, it's controlled by these mercenary barbarian armies. One of, and at one point, their commanders, this guy called Otto Acker, lots of different spellings and pronunciations of that name that you'll see. But anyway, 476 is not a sack of Rome or anything like that. He just decides, we don't need a Roman emperor in the West anymore. Like what's the point? Yeah. In controlling Italy, you know, the Goths are in Spain, the Vandals are in North Africa. There's not much of an empire left for an emperor to rule. You know what? We'll just treat the Roman emperor in Constantinople as the Roman emperor because that's what he is. And he takes the insignia, the, you know, the garments and whatever crown or whatever, the last Roman emperor was the 18 year old, you know, a lad named Romulus Augustulus whom he deposes is, okay, go live in retirement in his villa. Oh, he didn't kill me just no, no, no, he said, no. And he sends the regalia to Constantinople and says, here, I believe these are, did you lose these somewhere here? These are yours. Oh, wow. And I'll tell you what, I'll just rule Italy in your name and I'll just be like, putrition in Italy. And like in your name, like you're the nominal guy in charge because you're the Roman emperor and yeah, kind of like we took Texas from the Mexicans and we're like, all right, we'll be the governor now. Um, yeah, when we took it by force, he, he was, this guy, he was part of the Roman system or what was left of it at that time, right? So it almost became like, he thought there's no point in maintaining the fiction anymore. And so we just dispense with the fiction by that point. So this is a process that lasted something like 80 years from the early fifth century to 476, where you have the sort of the official liquidation of the title of the Roman Emperor in the West. That's a long time. Any years for the whole Roman Empire? Nope. But here's what I mean by that. I've remarked on this before because we do all different eras with all different really technical historians like you on the show and something about recency bias slows down time and it makes sense. Like you think of history in the last 10 years, we live it. Like we just lived it so we can go day by day almost. Right. You get 20 years out. You can still do it kind of day by day. So I have to get 30 years now what a day turns into month by month or week by week. Then you get 50, 60 years. It's really month by month. Then you get 100 years. Now it's like more year by year. Then you get 200 years. It's decade by decade and you get 300, 400 years. Now it's like every 50 years. Then you get 700 years. Now you're looking every 100 years as if it's one day to the next becomes like this exponential curve of getting yourself to the point that you think of in your head. You know, when Augustus was emperor and then when Constantine is emperor, you know, these are hundreds of years apart. But it's a similar time period to you. There's today that be like saying, you know, when George Washington took over America versus today, these are very different times. But as history gets farther and farther back, we like bunch more together, you know. So when you say 80 years, yeah, it's not that long a time in the context of the empire. But the fact that something like that hope happened across what would have been at the time, maybe like five generations because people were living shorter. That's a long time for something to culminate if it was already an idea, meaning like if it was kind of an idea 80 years before 476 is like, yeah, we kind of don't need a Western Roman Empire. You know what I mean? Yeah, it wasn't an idea. No one was planning this thinking that it would happen. It's just something that this cycle led to. But so you're right. This is a process and I don't think it's like teleological. In other words, no one's pushing for it. It's not like that there was any one or a faction or a group that wanted this outcome. It's just that events spiraled in that direction when that kind of made sense to this guy. So when I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of an alternative scenario because ancient empires sometimes come and go very, very quickly, think of like Alexander's conquest, right? Something like that. Or the Mongols. The Mongols, the Arab conquest. These happen really quickly, like in a decade, so I can imagine a scenario where some like hun types or whatever just come in and if they're, if they're goals were different. So the Hunsword. like basically into extortion, they not so much into conquest. But if they were like into conquest, they could just swept the whole thing up like very quickly. And then you have no land, suddenly like in two years. That could happen. That's not what happened. This was a process that was complicated enough because of internal factors and Roman internal conflicts and the hiring of all these barbarians that kind of did deputize, but they're actually de facto independent. And so it gets very, very messy. So you have, like modern historians have tried to depict, like almost as a thought experiment. And then it's perfectly valid to do this, to think about this. Well, maybe this was all just an internal Roman story. Like let's not treat this as like barbarians involved, right? And so we went through a phase where we were doing that. But I think and I think current scholarship now just can't explain those events unless you take into account, no, there are some foreign armies that are coming in here. Right, it makes the story, it's easier to put a bow on the story, if you will, to get to the next era, if you're going to cover it. But it's a good point. It's like you were kind of at a point in the empire where well, what is Roman at that point? Because it's had so many cultures within it. So are the barbarians at the gate a part of Rome? Right, right. So that gets to the next phase in the West, right? Like how much of Roman culture do they keep? And how much of their own? And how different is this? Oh, I mean, it's a mix of both. But you know, I think that the differences are sufficient for me to think that this isn't the Roman system anymore. There is a kind of a historical transition there. Especially if you look at it like economically or institutionally, right? In terms of the infrastructure or the economy, there's a real break in post 476, you'd say? In the fifth century. So broadly speaking, the closer you are, let's see, the closer you are to like Constantinople, the less catastrophic things are. So Italy, for example, Italy doesn't go through a kind of catastrophic phase until like a century later. In the sixth century, when you have these massive wars between Justinian's armies and the Goss, and the Lombards come in and it just gets whatever. And that's where Italy goes off a cliff in many ways. Whereas Britain, this happens in like the early 5th century, one of the first to go. Right, when they pulled out, you're saying they pulled out. Can we actually take that tangent real quick when you said it turned apocalyptic? Yeah. What do you mean? I strongly recommend Robin Fleming's book, which is the material end of Roman Britain. I did a podcast interview with her a couple of years ago. So this is an archeological study of the, it's kind of a foreign after. The economy collapsed, there's no money in circulation. All kinds of skills, metal working basically disappeared. These people are scavenging in villas just to find raw materials. Over night, this kind of happened. Very quickly, yeah, yeah. And yeah, so for quite a long time, like the whole food system kind of collapsed in many ways. So a lot of, even like herbs and like all of this that they had under Roman rule. Just trade shutdown. Oh, yes, yes, trade with the, not 100%, right? You can always find some exceptions. But this is the contrast in the standards of material like, material culture before and after, just really, really striking. In Gaul, for example, like the South, closer to Mediterranean, preserves a bit more of urban culture and institutions. The North being a bit closer to Britain in some ways, right? So remember, what's largely responsible for all of this is the withdrawal of the Roman economy, right? And so the Roman economy is largely premised on taxation, right? So when you tax a population, it has to produce a surplus more than it needs to just survive, right? To maintain the whole apparatus of government, the army, salaries, whatever, whatever, whatever. So that means that people are actually producing more than they would have otherwise. And that, of course, creates a surplus. And the surplus is what leads to trade. If you have nothing to trade, I mean, anyway, this is where sometimes you run into, especially with students, especially American students who have this really, I mean, in my view, wrong ideas about taxation. The idea that taxation is bad because it takes something from you, and this is very ideological. The idea of taxation, stimulating economic growth is something that they have to actually see to understand. I think a bigger problem in the conversations I have with people about taxation today is where the money's going. There have been periods in history where perhaps empires use taxation in the ways that they said they were going to do it. And they actually provided trickle-down value to the people. And now people pay their taxes, and they got to wait in line for fucking 48 hours at the DMV just to get a license. So people are more like-- and then they'll see things where there's so much waste in the government. And we're sending our money overseas or other places we don't feel like we need it when you can't take care of Medicare at home and stuff like that. So there's probably a lot of other examples in time periods where people are like, no, there just should be no taxation and stuff like that strictly because they don't want to pay it, even if they were getting value. But right now it feels more like a value proposition to me. So this is one of the key aspects of the civilization that I study, which is in the East. So this is the one that lasts for another 1,000 years after all of this. Now it has some major losses along the way. Again, these are these brief moments of imperial conquest by others-- Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, that sort of thing-- that lead within the course of very few years to like major loss of territory. Apart from those few years, this is a remarkably stable society that, on its own, tends toward consolidation and economic growth. And even territorial expansion, smaller scale, but it does. So I'm interested in the engines of that sort of thing. And specifically, why it lasted for so long, right? This is one of our major problems, I think, in medieval history that doesn't get-- so we can't see it in part because Byzantium has been defined in terms of decline and fall. Yes, right? So you don't think of it as no. This is actually extremely resilient. And it's survival is a problem that needs to be explained. Not like why did it lose the Asia Minor to the Seljuk Turks in the 1070s. That's actually kind of easy to explain. It's why it managed to recover almost every time, except for one time, right? Obviously, from all of these setbacks, its natural tendency was to recover. And yet, this is a society that taxes its citizen, its subjects, pretty rigorously. Now, we don't know that it was taxing them-- we don't know the absolute rates of taxation exactly. They don't appear to be super-ownerous. They complain about it a lot, but that's a different matter. How did they tax them? Literally, through the monetary coin system or other methods, what was the taxation system? So there was a census of taxable assets that the state undertook periodically updated. So this is land. And in some cases, in periods, depending of people, animals, that sort of thing. So whatever the state deems taxable, it keeps inventories of. And then the state basically had-- so in notional units of land, whatever-- I'm simplifying here, because the tax system is always very complicated. I'm just like they set it up that way. I struggle with that. In this period, let's set that aside. I'm not sure they're trying to make things difficult for their taxpayers. I mean, they want their taxpayers to be able to pay their taxes as easily as possible. So-- and then the Victorian prefect in the early period or whoever the Luguth eat later will say, well, this year, we need-- we're projecting this kind of expense. And so they have the total of taxable assets in unit form, and they know the total expenses. And so they kind of divide-- they have a budget. And so they come up with how much each asset owes. And they have many people-- and this isn't obviously a time where you have computers to keep track everything, but they have many people across the empire that they have to tax. So I would imagine they have a very large sprawling bureaucracy. Yeah, bureaucracy of people that keep track of this. Yes, they do. We don't have those records. We don't. Now, a little bit from Egypt because the papyrus survived there in trash heaps. But otherwise, these aren't things that either you would keep for centuries. It's not something that scribes would copy a century later, like why? And also, the government archives are all lost and destroyed, man, because for the same reason that the state is lost. Right. So there was pretty efficient and rigorous taxation. And yet, the subjects, at least the Roman subjects, of the state never sought to break away from it. They never rose up in a tax rebellion or a agrarian uprising to destroy the system or break free of it. This happens in all other medieval states. Yeah, all the time. No, it doesn't happen. Why do you think it doesn't happen? Well, this is the question. I mean, I'm still struggling with this. Like, there no splinter Roman states, there no warlords who decide to carve out a little territory of their own and rule it on their own. Provincials never side with foreign invaders, really? Certainly the armies never do. And so what's going on? And I think taxation is at the heart of this. And going back exactly to the point that you mentioned, I think that the provincials saw very clearly what they were getting for their taxes, which was, let's say, let's call it national defense in a period of extraordinary danger, like the whole of the Middle Ages. So this is a society that is being hammered by Goths and Huns and Persians and Arabs and Bullgars and you name it, right? All the way down to Mongols and Crusaders and and later Ottoman Turks, like everything and everyone passes or wants to pass through this territory. It's right right at the intersection of of Europe and Asia, right? And so that's interesting. The possibility of being captured and hauled away as a slave to wherever is very, very real, right? And so having soldiers to protect you from that, this was the main project of the state, like this is where it spent all of its money. So it had a standing army, which it recruited from the whole of its territories and could send to any part of its territory. So this was not a kind of federal feudal, whatever state, where Ohno, Baron, so-and-so has forces over there and we can't tell him to come over here and fight this other thing. No, it's a let's say a national army that the emperors of the commanders or whatever can send wherever it's necessary. And so they prioritize, sometimes they're facing three wars at once and they have to prioritize, they might take some losses somewhere and they focus on what they think is most vital. But I think provincials can see where a lot of this money or most of it is going. That's making it, on a sense. Yeah. It's a psychological thing to me. And I don't know if this would relate well historically, but I can relate it to today. We just had the 25th anniversary of September 11th here, right? And one of the things we talked about over the years that a lot of people, obviously, on the 25th, were really reflecting on is that if you were old enough to remember September 12th, 2001, the unity in this country was insane. And that is such a strange thing to think about now, because you can't even get unity on either the sides of the spectrum at all at this point. There's factions everywhere. And people are fighting over what it, you know, politically what we want to be as a country and stuff like that. One of the things I always say, though, is that a really unfortunate human nature, at least in modern times, thing that exists is it has, we've proven that it take it, it takes some sort of massive crisis to put things in perspective for us to come together, you know, on all the stupid shit and say, don't worry about that. Let's focus on the top line thing right here. Pearl Harbor 9/11. And what you're referring to there is in the new Roman Empire that existed in Constantinople that also literally was an even more invitable spot that had all kinds of threats all around it and everywhere. So many people within the empire understood at all times what it was like to be invaded or attacked or have their freedom, sovereignty and life threatened. And so they were able to see the value of existing under one community in that way. And, you know, paying your share to help make that happen. Whereas, you know, in America, outside of terrorist attacks like that, we've never been invaded, you know, besides the war 1812. And it really fucking shows. So that's a really interesting historical point that you could see for almost a thousand years here. A place was able to mostly keep it together because they were under constant threat. And there was a constant reminder in people's faces that like, hey, we might not, we might be slaves tomorrow. That's really interesting. Yeah. Can I pick up the American comparison? Sure. Okay. So I thought America was heading in a different direction in the 90s and 9/11 kind of so my cards on the table. In the 90s, I was getting a sense of a brewing culture war that I think was put on hiatus because of 9/11 in the Iraq war. And that picked up again under the Obama, the first Obama presidency, right? Why did you think in the 90s the culture war was coming? Because I was there. I saw Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and like all the, you know, campus ideologies and all these. These were poised to clash in a big way. And even though, you know, like under Clinton, you know, there was this sense of like the end of politics. You know, Clinton was constantly like co-opting the Republicans talking points, leaving them like whatever, whatever. But you could see that the right was developing its own kind of identity politics in response to those on the left. And it was already getting ugly. It hadn't yet, I think, reached the point of like the top level news, you know, like division in the country and all of that. But I think it was heading in that direction. And 9/11 kind of, I think rerouted American history back onto a more like kind of cold war-ish, like foreign policy and Russia experts, oil men, you know, this kind of thing. For a while, for like about 10 years, and the Iraq war then it kind of extended that for a while. But see, the Iraq war was not a point of unity. Whatever unity existed after 9/11 was shredded by that, right? And I think that whole spectrum of American politics represented, you know, by like, you know, the Chinese and Rumsfelds and all of the, you know, Pentagon types and Russia experts and all of this. They're like out in the wilderness once the culture war picks up again. Which it did, like under Obama, like, all right, are we done with that Iraq thing yet? Right. But see, not even the financial crisis, 2008, 2009. That didn't result in any unity, right? That was a, again, it was, it was almost like a kind of 9/11 moment, right? We're like McCain suspended his campaign to go like look into this financial crisis thing. And yet that, I think, probably exacerbated divisions, even more. You know, what it also did, this is interesting. I didn't even think of this, but you had reactions that were the same in theme and completely divided on politics. That created the rise of populism. Look at 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement. What was the other movement happening at that time? The Tea Party movement. Those two groups didn't agree on it. Goddamn thing, except that the system was working, right? But divided it more. That's how you got like Sanders and Trump. They don't agree on any solutions. But they spoke to the same problems, which that's interesting. Yeah. So think of the East Roman experience as one that's like 9/11 over and over. Over and over. Yep. Right? Because you're just constantly getting these invasions and, you know, your cousin over in that village just got carted away. And so how do you get him back? Well, the church, the emperor, you don't have to raise money to ransom them. The soldiers might go get them. So there's very much the sense of like, no, we have to marshal, we have to pull our resources. Yes. The church, the armies, the emperor, whatever to get our people back to strengthen the defenses to to to to whatever, right? That's human nature, man. That's wow. Well, it is, but it requires institutions because if it were human nature, then everybody would be doing that. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying it's it unfortunately like I just see that point proving again and again in history. It just takes like a horrible and I don't root for this at all, but it takes some horrible rewiring of perspective just to be like, right? Let's top level. Let's let's all skip behind that for a minute. And you know, we all play our part. Yeah. That's interesting. So I haven't found like significant problems with like tax evasion, especially by the wealthy. Really? Yeah. No, they were, it was not. So emperors could give their elites some perks. I mean, that's what it means to be elite, right? Right. People associated with the court or high positions or whatever. And then get some limited tax exemptions. The understanding is that, of course, they're performing services for the state. And for the most part, I think they were. But the complaints are not of the kind that like all these this class of people are not paying their taxes. You don't hear that. That's that's a modern problem. That's one that has been allowed to happen. What you hear about are people complaining about how onerous the taxes are on them. And this is a problem. And I want to address this because it has a lot to do with how we read this evidence, right? So suppose from the civilization, you have like petition after petition for some kind of temporary reprieve or cancellation of taxes. And they just talk in the most, I'm gonna say poetic, but it's actually rhetorical language about how much they're suffering and how cruel the tax collectors are and how terrible this is for their communities. And from all of this evidence, you can draw the conclusion that, wow, this is harsh. This is a heavy oppressive tax system that this state is operating. They're really exploiting the provincials. And that's kind of the impression that Zantium has, that's the kind of image of it in a lot of older scholarship. And we know that that's not true. So for one thing, there aren't like actual tax rebellions. In other societies where that happens, where that actually happens, the populations just make it impossible for the state to collect taxes. This happens in parts of the caliphate, for example. Like the whole of Baghdad becomes ungovernable at some point like the Caliphs can't even control it. Now what's actually happening there is I think something that reinforces the coherence of this society. It's sort of its common purpose. And that is the following. In the Roman system, it was very common to petition the government for, you know, well, any kind of injustice. But also, just to be for leniency, also for an exemption in case of unusual circumstances. How would people petition? Like are they doing things like… And documents to that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to actual like a hearing, like public hearing. Oh, it both would have been involved. So you either petition the governor or the petition might get to the emperor and you might say something like, well, the barbarians pass through here and they ruined everything and we just don't have enough to whatever. Or we've had terrible crops because of the climate and we're starving and whatever. Or tax collection is really, really harsh. Can you just let up a little bit and give us some breathing space or whatever? And I think what's happening there is like instead of drawing the conclusion that, wow, this is a pretty harsh, oppressive system, I think sort of something like the opposite is actually the case. That is, when provincials know that they can petition the government and get something from it, because the emperors will tend to be rather generous when it comes to these things. And we often hear of like, oh, this province was relieved of taxes for a couple of years so that it could recover from the drought or whatever. Then you have an incentive to do so because you lose nothing if it fails. They just say, no, I'm sorry, you have to pay your taxes. Okay, but if you succeed, you get something. And so there's a kind of arms race in the rhetorical description of how much you're suffering because everybody is doing this at the same time and you have to persuade the government that, wow, no, you're really suffering and they really need to do something about it. And what that does in the long term is actually bind provincials to the system even more because what they know is that they will be heard, right? So it's not this arbitrary system with some cruel overlord just comes in and say, this is what you owe me and I'm gonna, you know, cut your own throats, I don't care how you do it, right? It, there's a give and take to it. And so when you feel you're in a situation of a give and take and that you will be heard, even if your petition is denied, this creates a sense that you kind of belong to the system in the sense that you will be heard. Like there is some form of redress for you. And it feels like maybe I'm drawn a wrong conclusion taking a leap here, but it feels like there's more of a communication structure that seems to be set up between the elites and the every man. That's it. Yeah. The government, the elites are understood to be in the same situation. Right, yeah. Right, they're viewed on the same level. If by the elites, you mean, yes. And they are elites running the government. The most part. Yes, that's exactly right. Oh, that's it. So there are forms of communication that are reinforcing the coherence and that sort of common identity of the society. I think that's how it works. So the tax system is at the heart of it. Both in that it is universal and fairly efficient, which results in the emperors having more cash at hand than just about any ruler at the time. We do some with that. Oh, yes. And keep in mind, this is Greece and Asia Minor. These are like naturally the most fertile or productive parts of the world. And yet, the emperors in Constantinople is like routinely described by Western visitors of just having, you know, chest after chest after chest of cash. She's just literally handing these Western visitors with gold coins. And they're like, what is this, right? Like, and how, how is this possible? Oh, yeah, because they're taxing everybody, right? And including their elites. And so Western systems, like in Western Europe, they don't develop the ability to tax all of their subjects. Like, do you know when? Like, it's very, very late. I don't know when. Oh, it's like the 18th century. They weren't taxing until it. It depends on the state, right? So French kings maybe, maybe a little earlier. So how were they run in the government? Yeah, debt. Okay. And without money, I've thought about this before. 'Cause it's like the buck always stops somewhere and we always don't like where it stops. But like, if you don't control the money in some way or the way that it trade, let's keep it easier for historical purposes, how do you hold on to power as a government? Like, if you don't have any say, oh no, no, not any say, no, no, so let me explain. So Western medieval kings and early modern European kings, usually they don't have the authority to tax all of their subjects. That's crazy. They, when they're spending money or collecting revenue, they're mostly doing it from their own personal domains, which are sometimes smaller than the domains of some duke or whatever, right? So you might have a duke who's like richer than the king. That's just crazy to think about that. Like in the times of kings and queens, this is the thing. Plus, you might be authorized to levy some taxes or tariffs or whatever like around the edges. Some of those might be significant, but it's not like you can implement a universal policy of taxation. This means that because these kings are all fighting wars against each other all the time and wars are super expensive, they have to get money from somewhere. And so there are two ways they can do that. One is to borrow it. So these governments are going massively into debt, right? And if you look at like the English Civil War, right? Or we British Civil War. This is, you know, I mean, lots of causes and factors, right? But one of the key ones is that the king, his debts and the revenues, like who's authorized to collect what and what can the king actually expect and can parliament block that and who has the authority to do what? Like it comes down to that. So you constantly finding these kings unable to pay for the things that they're doing and they're just racking up debts that they'll just kicked it down the road. And by the way, those debts then become one of the main engines of sort of state formation because anyway, or you just try to, you know, twist the arms of people in some, you know, dutchy or whatever. And one of these, so a lot of these monarchies are like what are called sort of federated monarchies. So you're the king of this and the king of that and the king of the other thing. And they're different rules governing what you can do in each of your domains. And so sometimes you try to just extort money from there and that results in all kinds of resentment. - What a mess, yeah. - Oh yeah, it's a complete mess 'cause these are not unitary states, right? These Roman Empire is and always was. And so this is one of these blind spots. So when historians are political scientists, they're looking at like the growth of the state. They're always looking at Western Europe. And in Western Europe, this is very, very late. And you know, suddenly some king finally manages to tax his subjects and the scholarship is like fireworks because the state has borne, right? No, wait, Diocletian was doing that bar for bar, yeah. - The late third century, what are you talking about? It's insane. So this is a proper state. And it has the same laws, the same currency, the same economy, the same more or less, the same kind of tax system for everybody. And I think it's set up in a way or it evolves in a way where I think most of the population doesn't have to be everybody. They're always losers in every system, right? Like for sure. But a sufficient amount of people were invested in this and its success that they paid their taxes and they made sure to keep the system going. So they, for example, they never appointed like a chaos agent to wreck the system because they were disaffected from it. - But they also saw that you laid it out perfectly. They also saw a constant value from it. There's such a lesson to be learned on technically like both ends right there. Like you got to have two to tango. You pay into the system, okay, not something ridiculous. I think that's for taxation's total theft when it gets to be ridiculous. But you also get value out of it. Like that was, my dad, I never heard him really complain about shit almost ever grown up. The one thing I ever heard him complain about was his property taxes. 'Cause he's like, "What the fuck do I get for this?" - School's the same. - But that's what I'm saying. He's like the school system was really fucked at the time. and then he's they wouldn't even pick up the trash some weeks. He's looking around. He's like, what do I get? I get the fire department, you know, like if I have a fire, that's great. But outside of that, like, what do I get from this? And that's what it comes back to. You're laying out that people understood. I get this. I get protection. I'm a part of this thing. I'm going to have my armies there to help make sure I'm not sold into slavery. Boom. Works for me. Like that, that's a good deal. That's a good, we have to get to a place where there's more good deals. I think the flip side is the army. And so this is another, I think, component of the same story because the army is recruited locally, like everywhere. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. So there are mercenary armies occasionally. I don't think that the units are that large. So except in times of like unprecedented crisis, like things are falling apart. And you have a few decades where that that's happening. For the most part, the armies are local provincial Romans. And because most of the empires are kind of frontier zone, because enemies can attack pretty much anywhere, except maybe the most western parts of Asia Minor, those armies are stationed locally too. So they kind of form the nucleus of communities. It's a fairly large standing army by medieval standards. If you tally up all of the soldiers, their families, and the neighbors whose taxes went to support that soldier, because sometimes it's like a cluster of families in an area, and their taxes were designated to support the soldier. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Right. So it's like literally their taxes are paying for that guy to go off on campaign. And he's married to my sister. Yeah. So the army and the tax system are very rooted. It's not like, we'll take this. Thank you. And like, okay, that's that's kind of genius, because you see where it's going. You literally can audit your own money. So I don't think it was designed. So you call it genius. I think it evolved in that way. However it happened. Yeah. Yeah. So, but of course, this happened in periods when we don't have the sources to explain the thinking and the strategies. I don't know. Maybe they did think about it. But in practice, what you see is like the core of this state in like, you know, the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries and so on, is is is is operating within this dynamic of tax recruitment. And the emperors are constantly saying this public money is public money. It's for the common good. It's not for us to just have a good life. They're constantly saying this. Even though they didn't have bags of cash to hand out. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But to their officials. So they would have these public ceremonies during like Easter celebration in the palace. And before all these audiences, the emperor would sit at a desk and like his top generals would come by and the emperor would take a money bag and put it in front of him. No, seriously. You get a car. You get a car. Here's another. Because these guys got most of their money from state service. I mean, they bought land with it. But the revenues from their land probably didn't come close to what they were getting as salaries, bags of gold coins. Right. And so it was perfectly visible to everybody where the money was coming from and who was getting what. Right. Like imagine if today the government made it a public where our billionaires are getting their money from. And that includes all of their government contracts, all the tweaks and loop holes in the tax code. Right. All of the patents that were developed from federal grants and universities that they were then assigned the right to market. Like just just give us a list. Just take all the billionaires are not that many. I mean, there are many. But you could do this. And just list all of the public assets that they've benefited from. They wouldn't look so self-made. And that everybody would see that, oh, no, that's our money doing that. Right. Yeah. So they should not disparage government spending and all of that because that's what made them. That's an interesting point. Not entirely. Right. But no, I see what you're saying. Like where you could point out where there's places where like your balance sheets 75% of it is from the money that the taxpayers buy. That's interesting. Yeah. Or that the taxpayers have waived so that you don't pay taxes on whatever. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Real quick, Anthony, I got to go to the bathroom. But I got some questions on comparing the elite system from like old room and new room. Okay. Right back. There you go. So you call me, sir. He calls you, sir. But I can't call you, sir. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah. But the way you weigh it, I was getting afraid you're going to be like, sir, like the, you know what I mean? It's very informal around here. Okay. All right, we're good though. Yeah. All right, we're back. So where we left off with the elites, the thing I was going to ask you is when you look at things that led to the end of the initial of the original Roman empire, one of the patterns people talk about a lot is that separation of elites from the regular people of the empire and the divide that that trove. There's also even like another layer to it where we have on record that elites stopped reproducing a lot. And you know, have you ever seen this? Well, so there's a list of like something like 278 proposed causes for the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And this is like one of them, but we do not have data. So Roman elites like, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. No, it's okay. Please come on. So Romans and editorial families notoriously don't reproduce well. Like even in like the Republic. So it goes all the way back to that. That's interesting. I mean, it's just a pattern in Romans and editorial families and their histories. Why was that? Like I said, it took 300 years for the Romans to produce a dynasty that made it to the third generation. So what's up with that? Yeah, but like the general elite class that I'm going to forget the name of the empire, but we cited that James Lucas tweet a couple times on on recent podcast. Maybe we can pull that up, but there was literally at 1.1 the one of the emperors. I think in the second century Augustus, it was Augustus. So when he was around, he codified in that elites in order to get certain grants needed to reproduce a certain amount. And a lot of them still didn't do it. It was already a problem. Yeah. Yeah. But that's that's getting towards you're getting into the sunset. You're getting into the last 300 years at that point of the empire. You know, you're on the other side of if you're going to separate it 500 or 500 or whatever. So I always looked at that as, you know, kind of tying a little bit into that elite symbolism, but there is a lot on record. As you did say, there are a lot of reasons that the initial Roman Empire fell, but one you do always hear sounds like you're downplaying a little more, which is fair because you're the historian, not me. But one of the things you do here is like that that wealth gap separation and that creating like some animosity between the two. And it sounds like in the new Roman Empire that I don't want to say never really happened, but across the thousand years that wasn't really a problem. At times it was. So it depends on whether you have a kind of elite build up to the point where perhaps an elite class attains a kind of escape velocity to establish itself as a kind of aristocracy, which in some periods of Roman history that I study, this doesn't really exist and in others it does. So for example, some might, some have maintained that the Comdeni dynasty in the 12th century. So this is a series of emperors, three very successful emperors in the 12th, late 11th, 12th century. Comdeni, Comdeni, yeah. KOM and, okay. That they and their affiliated families, so they married with a bunch of other elite families, that they kind of became an aristocracy that was less subject to the normal political ups and downs of Roman life as happened before. So around the year 1000 and emperor, this basal the second one of the longest, you know, raining Roman emperors, he said that the elite families come and go like maybe every century, like they come, they rise, then they out. After 1100, not so much, you tend to have the same family names kind of staying in power more interesting. And this might have led to a greater kind of alienation, right, between sort of normal Romans and just kind of more elite class, who were treating the state as almost an asset of theirs. It's kind of similar to what we see happening now, right, where the state is on the one hand being degraded so that it can't tax elites. But on the other hand, treated as a vehicle for like elite portfolio management. So something like that, but I don't think it ever resulted in a kind of alienation that caused like historical level problems in terms of dysfunction or, you know, separatist tendencies or attacks on the system and these kinds of things. These people were always reminded that this was still the Roman polity, they're always on probation. Emperors are always on probation. That's just the nature of the Roman system. Yeah, whereas before this period, You know, some of the more successful perhaps periods of Roman imperial history, you can see much more of an alignment or at least somewhat less conceded aristocratic class, something like that. That was less constantinopolitan, like big constantinopolitan. Big city aristocrats and more provincial elites who were recruited into the system in Constantinopol. This happened very often, so the top people of most regimes are provincials who have been brought in, right, because of whatever their talents, their connections, their whatever. And it's not some insulated class in the capital that's running things. And we could go regime by regime and just look at the top people like a case I'd like to mention is Justinian. No, you're going to say Justinian. It's got a hard name. Shall we pick another one? No, Justinian, it's great. Justinian. Yeah. So Justinian himself was from the Western Balkans of like peasant origin. And all of his top people were from like the Saloniki and Pesidia and Cappadocia and Thrace and so on, the only one was actually a foreign from Persian Armenia. The only one who was a native Constantinopolitan was his wife, the Adora. So this is a bunch of provincials running the whole empire. And summer of humble origin, John Cappadocia and Justinian, possibly Belisarius, summer local aristocracy, Peter the Petrician, possibly Tribonian, so forth. So it's a mix. Now Justinian, would you say he's the most famous emperor from that whole era after Constantinian? Yeah. Yes. Famous? Well, I mean Julian is also pretty famous for a very different reason. Yes. A really good name. Yes, very popular name. So what made Justinian and Julian so famous and revered in particularly? So Julian is famous not necessarily, neither are necessarily revered. So Julian is a case where he has very strong, sometimes fanatical followers and supporters and also like really kind of vicious enemies because he tried to undo the whole Christianization of the Roman state and society. Oh, we did. Yeah. So yeah. So Julian is a nephew of Constantin who breaks with the whole Christianity, the whole program. And he tries to bring the empire back to its like second century, let's say, I mean, he doesn't actually give up the big government. That's the thing. He keeps the big government. But ideologically, he wants this world of cities with like their ancient traditional religions and like detest Christianity, even though he was raised as a Christian. What made him detest it? Well, we know, we know only what he said later about it and not what necessarily drove him. But he sort of fell in love with ancient Greek culture, like Homer and Platonism and these kinds of things. And he was raised under not the best circumstances. So his cousin Constantius II who was emperor before him had him confined to a farm, murdered most of his family. And so, you know, Julian experienced the sharp end of the Christianization stick, you know, like the dynasty, his dynasty, he hated it. He hated the people in it. Like I said, being a member of Constantin's family, not going to make you like Constantin. Right. You want to be far from Constantin. You're okay. Yeah. That one makes a lot of sense. So, you know, Constantin's son murders all of Julian's family and raises him on a remote farm in Cappadocia, which is like, you know, somewhere off in the deserts of Arizona or something. And like, you know, not good. And he sort of falls in love with Greek culture and he, you know, he then goes back and he reads the scriptures and he realizes none of this is true or you know. And so he writes about it. He wrote a whole book about why he thought Christianity is wrong. But he wasn't successful in divorcing the empire from Christianity. Well, I mean, he died in battle so, yeah, you know, that's not, that doesn't make you unsuccessful at your policies, you know, he wasn't there to cut short. Yeah. I'm going to lend the wind if you will. Yeah. So it didn't, it didn't happen. So, by any standard in the 18 months that he was emperor, he, you know, had some successes in all of this. Like, we actually see individuals and communities. It was only 18. That's like a British prime minister. That's quick. If they have told me, they would, yeah, yeah, that's good. So Julian, because he tried to shake things up and like hated the new order and tried to restore the old order, he generated a lot of heat. And so we have all of these texts that are for him and all of these texts that are against him. And so it's possible that we have more texts about Julian and his 18 months than like for any other Roman. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot. So he was real controversial because of that. I mean, it makes sense. And still it. Yeah. Yeah. And Justinian comes much later. Yeah. Yeah. Two centuries later. And it's a different beast altogether. Okay. There's nobody who really likes Justinian. I said it's a person certainly. The question is whether you think that overall, his, how should I put this, overall it's possibly a wash. Like he did a lot of good things and he did a lot of terrible things. So possibly it, I don't know that we should be using that kind of calculus. Well, I also should say, because I think like some of the ways I've been framing it today, I don't mean to do it, but like I'm making it sound like good or bad or whatever. That's not what I'm trying to say when I'm like revered. I'm saying like revered is like a study of history and why people are so fascinated by the power at the time and, you know, whether or not that was economically successful. I think we can all agree that any tyrannical rule or like killing off your family and stuff like that makes you not such a great guy. It's just like why, when I say like Justinian, like why do people study him so closely and view him as like a major power center of that era? That's a better way to really ask it. Because he came to power with ideas about how to change the world and he had some, you know, very, very long reign in which to do it and he was relentless in pursuing his objectives. And so these, and these are significant things that impacted history in the long term. Like he codified Roman law. He tried to enforce Christianity on all of his subjects, like literally kind of make it illegal for you to be anything else. No, I mean, Jews are always tolerated in the Christian system in this sense. He shut down the schools of philosophy and Athens. He tried to re-conquer the lost provinces of the Western Roman Empire. So his armies re-conquered North Africa from the Vandals. They re-conquered Italy from the Goths. They took a little bit of Spain. So there's all of that. Then. The war is kind of wrecked the place, but he won. Then he builds a geosophia. He builds churches everywhere, like really, really important architectural monuments. Can we pull up a geosophia? A geosophia is like one of the top, you know, five, you know, in the world. If you want to, you know, to rank them, I shouldn't have ranked. I shouldn't have done that. But anyway. Can I hear about that one? Yeah. I guess. Yes. Yes. The comments again. Yeah. But just in terms of like its influence and its importance, intrinsic importance is architectural monument. Yeah. It's amazing. And that's absolutely amazing. Yeah. It's 1500 years old. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's whether in some difficulties it's still there. We don't build things like that anymore. No. No, we don't. Yeah. Yeah. I can't picture that in glass and steel, so, you know, and so then there's his whole reform legislation. So he's just reformed the administration of the empire and endlessly tweaking like marriage, law, divorce law, all of this stuff, property, okay. There's that. Then there's the plague. Now he's not responsible for the plague. But this isn't, it's an outbreak of bubonic plague and it's been named after him, just an Yanic plague. So we have lots of sources that are describing this. It's, it's like linked to him, whether he wanted it or not. Then there are all these wars with Persia. So there is a lot going on. Plus, we have Procopius. So one of my authors, I've studied, I've translated. And he wrote this book called, we call the secret history, which is like all the dirt on the regime and it's crimes and corruption and sex scandals and all of this. So you can now see, this is not Justinian, the kind of aloof legislator that, you know, is regarded in the middle ages as the, he literally created Roman law, I should say this. What we know of as Roman law is what Justinian's team Setting was, that's the Roman law that we have before that's just fragments, right? But when Prokobius's text was discovered in the Vatican archives in 1629, I believe So I've found it in the Vatican archives. Yes, it's manuscript And originally it was published without the sex chapter on Teodora, the so-called pornography, which chapter nine can't have that But a scholar came along and added that pretty quickly afterwards, so we have that And so that suddenly made these people like human or all too human Even though or demonic and so Just from everything that I've said you can see just how busy the topic Justinian is going on and there's more even So he tried to unify the churches and specifically I mean The Calcedonian Orthodox Church of Constantinople and the anti-Calcedonian churches of Syrian Egypt Most of them not like Constantinople and Rome There was also a growing problem there and he had to twist the Pope's arm Literally imprisoned him to get him to agree to some you know councils, but yeah, whatever Sad note. Yeah, so some of these Justinian succeeded it and we just saw a yesofia That was a major success codification Roman law a lot of his other laws especially the rights of women and in terms of like inheritance and and so forth good But then you know he massacres 30,000 people in the Nika insurrection That's that they could he rise up against him and he kills them. That's not great. That's like yeah The unification of the church has produced the exact opposite outcome So it caused a split that we still have The invasion of Italy was successful, but ruined Italy right? So it's mixed bag, right? So He's a great ruler if your standard is just impact on history right for someone who just sticks in he stays in the palace He just stays in the palace and gives orders to people that's this was not someone going out on the front lines No, no spider at the center of the web and so I like that spider at the center of the web. Yeah, that's interesting Well, was there you mentioned earlier like it's not like Constantinople and the eastern part of the empires built on amazing land for agriculture and stuff like that So what was was their economy just Based on a lot of foreign trade I guess. Oh, no, just internally. There's not that much foreign trade Well, I'm sorry when I say foreign trade trade within the empire. Oh, there's a lot of that. Yes, okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah His predecessor or His uncle's predecessor Anastasia's had left the treasury with millions of gold coin and surplus Hmm Anastasia's was a very careful budget manager And so he left a huge surplus and so just singing had money to spend for a lot of these projects That's useful for sure Yeah, then the plague comes along and it degrades your tax base and then the words with Persia You know you lose a city here a city there pretty soon you're you're facing some budget shortfalls He also had all these wars going on at one point. They were like five fronts five fronts How did he even manage that at that time? He didn't so he would prioritize one and then that would lose ground and others and another and yeah Eventually he made enough Push here push there a piece with Persia. So when he died, he had actually wrapped it all up Though everyone was just exhausted So yeah, he he was not born to give rest to his subjects or to historians Yeah, and so we're still writing about just thinking but he's not a beloved figure Yeah, clearly clearly not beloved. It's just very studied. Yeah, what as far as like the culture I mean a thousand years as a long time, but across what we know is the Byzantine Years what what are the biggest cultural impacts? We still see today whether that be art or Ways of life that somehow existed and translated moving down the lane No, in terms of modern impact it would almost certainly have to be like orthodoxy like the orthodox church so this is a a branch of the history of the Christian church and it is the one that today is associated with Well, I mean it is the sort of official National religion of several countries, you know from Greece to Russia, though currently The Russia is somewhat Outside of the club, you know because of the war in Ukraine. Right. There's a kind of split between like the Patriarchate Greece or whatever and Russia and whatever You know allies it might have So have you been to an orthodox service? Yes. Oh, yeah, right My buddy's my buddy's Greek orthodox. Yeah, yeah, so all of that So the churches with the icons they're beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, amazing places somewhat different way of of performing and experiencing the liturgy. Oh, yeah, yeah, then you might find in a Protestant, you know church or Catholic church. Yeah, yeah, sure You know sort of slightly different doctrines those don't matter most people I don't think you even know the doctrines or really care about them in that way But the iconography. So the art associated with your orthodox church a lot of like mosaics and stuff on the ceiling as opposed to like stainless windows and Catholic churches things like that. Yeah And and that That artistic tradition was also very influential in the West at some point. So buying like icons a la greca It was very fashionable for a while in early modern. It continues to be. Yeah So the devotional life of all of these millions of people does come from this society ultimately But more recognizably in its later form so post 10th century, right Because before that the question of icons hadn't been settled. It's like a different vibe. You'd get a different vibe from it An ancient vibe more than one that you would associate with the either Every Catholic orthodox or any other modern tradition. It would have been more ancient vibe. The renaissance before 1453 when they fall and I'll come to that in a minute But like before that you have the renaissance all beginning which kind of marks like the bridge towards the end of the middle ages But that starts at a time where the Empire is still the Eastern Roman Empire here So would you say that there There's cultural Impacts and influences to emanate from Constantinople that caused something like the renaissance to occur is that not really a fair Cause cause no contribute. Yes I mean causation is very difficult thing, but this is something that picks up in Italy Independently of Eastern influences. It addresses specifically Italian concerns And very much having to do with like the proper composition of Latin I mean the origin of the renaissance is a large part of it. Like how do we recapture ancient Latin? You know, I mean prose Right going back to how do we go back to like Cicero in the Great's? Yes, and move away from like medieval ways of writing Latin Which some early renaissance figures like Petra or whatever regarded as kind of barbarous Oh, that's interesting. So it's more like Earning for the for the golden era of culture. Wow. Yeah, which they had lost touch with yes or felt that they had And so they this sparked a search for manuscripts An effort to try to understand ancient rhetoric and this kind of You know Took on additional dimensions in in just exploring ancient culture Then you're actually reading what these texts are saying and oh look They're talking about like republicanism and there's some cities in Italy that have been republished or they imagine themselves as Republican Along Roman lines and on and on and so you start to get in like civic humanism and you know How do we recreate ancient political virtue? You know ultimately this leads to things like Machiavelli who's like breaking you know from Christianity and moving more toward You know refiguring ancient political virtue for a modern world like even breaking from ancient Rome too In a way, okay, I'm just I'm really condensing things a lot. Yeah. No, that's okay So the Greek contribution and by that I mean Greek scholars So that starts to come in like roughly around 1400 Um when the Italians realized that Hey, wait in order to understand ancient Roman antiquity it like Roman antiquity we have to understand Greek antiquity too Because like Virgil is like doing some sort of combo of the idiot illiterate in the Odyssey Did it in the Odyssey? Sorry, did that there? It's terrible um and also like St Augustine and all of these other patristic authors are referring to Plato all the time But they don't actually have Plato They don't they have a couple dialogues translated into Latin, but no Actual Plato so is it like a passed down word a mouth idea of him and what he essentially yes, hmm And then you know in the 15th century they managed to get a hold of some Plato and they translate it and they read it and it's like oh That's different than we thought that's not it's especially they read the symposium With all these you know homo erotic Elements can't have that apparently. It's like what is that oh they read the Republic The Republic book five right it's like the quality of women and sharing women and children and breaking down families and like, we'd heard about the philosophy. - Can't have that apparently. - Yeah. And so suddenly, a player's like, "Whoa, wait a minute." And so that led to a reckoning. Yeah. I mean, the Greek stuff is, you know, what are these Greeks up to on this bowl? - Yeah, you guys invented a large spectrum of things. - Some good, some interesting stuff. - Yeah, yeah. - Across the board for sure. You know, this is a joke of the, it's like a Greek and a Italian waiting in line. And the Greek says to the Italian, "You know, we invented democracy." And the Italian says, "Well, we invented empire." The Greek is like, "Well, we invented philosophy." And the Italian's like, "Well, we invented law." The Greek says, "We invented sex." The Italian says, "We introduced it to women." (laughing) (laughing) - It's a self-aware joke, apparently. Culturally speaking, just saying. I don't know what the Spartans were doing, but I made my position clear as it led to me in the beginning of this discussion. - That's right, yeah. - That's right. And we fully accept all cultures here. But you also have the Byzantines existing at a time where the Crusades are happening as well, which obviously, these holy wars and the Vatican's involved with all that. But what was like the role of the Byzantine empires or empires at the time within the first, second, and third Crusades? - Ooh, yeah, so the Crusades were, the first Crusade was beneficial to the Eastern Empire, the subsequent ones were disasters. And they were disasters, especially on the PR level. So, Crusades are the sorts of things that originate in Western Europe, among what we might call Catholic populations, they do not have much appeal. Among the Eastern Romans, they're just not into that. - Why? - Oh, well, that's a, well, that gets us into the bigger question of what Crusades are. - Mm-hmm. - And at a minimum, they're a kind of violent pilgrimage, that is like religiously, like spiritually. It's meant as a kind of devotional act for maybe penitential reasons or, you know, some sort of, at the same time, they are movements that, as mass-armed pilgrimages, they are also exploited by rulers who want to use them for their own ends. - That's right. - So, it's a kind of motivation that doesn't, so East Roman Orthodox culture is not a fertile ground for that sort of thing. For a number of reasons. Like, the society is completely different. Even its Christian values are sort of configured differently. Whatever. The Crusades is just a huge topic that, I mean, you could have been, possibly you have had experts, yeah. - So, I have a lot of podcasts on that. - Oh, right. I will defer to them, but I study a Christian society that was not drawn to that. It was caught in the middle, literally. Like, it's situated right between the Crusaders at homelands and their target, that's right. And so, they had to pass through. And they either went by sea in which case, okay, they might attack a few islands on the way. Otherwise, if by land, they had to go directly through Romania. And this causes problems because of the movement of armed men who are bent on like religious violence, coming through your lands is never going to be entirely peaceful. And the fact that they managed it on both sides, on a few occasions was sort of a remarkable achievement. So, the emperors try to use this to their advantage as much as they can. It's not something that they would have wanted. It's a little bit too big and potentially uncontrollable, right? And sort of explosive and it's in the harm, the damage that it can do on the way. So, Alexias, who was the emperor in the first crusade, he actually managed to, he's pretty deft about it. And he managed to use the crusade to recover a great deal of Asia Minor, Western Asia Minor from the Seljuks. So, good. However, the passage of the crusade tended to create sort of resentment and aggravation on both sides. And what happened was that many of the, and so the second and the third crusades are kind of disasters. And there are like many crusades between them that are also disasters. The first one was like so successful. I mean, it took Jerusalem, which was its goal. And it led to a kind of false sense of what was possible. - Right. - And I think subsequent crusades taught the Europeans that that was a fluke. And we now know why it was a fluke. In part because like all of the Muslim rulers at the time had happened to have died. And they were like, there's a power vacuum in the Near East at the time. And the crusading army just cut through it. But that wasn't the case afterwards. And so crusade after crusade just kept getting hammered or just disappearing as they go into like Asia Minor and like very few people come out the other side. And this narrative began to grow up in the West. And it was pushed by survivors, let's say, that those Greeks are helping the Muslims. Yeah, they're in cahoots with the Muslims 'cause they hate us because they're not Catholics and they hate the Catholic Church. - So now it's creating massive European division and church division. - Between whom? - Between East and West. - Yes, oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's building on that. That already kind of exists. - Yeah. - 'Cause they don't recognize the Pope. And so the kind of resentment about the crusades as that the emperors are like secretly working with the Muslims 'cause they wanna destroy us as well. Piles up on top of the, well, they're not proper Catholics either. They don't recognize the Pope. And so during the course of the 12th century, this creates a huge, in fact a critical mass of prejudice against the Greeks that results in the fourth crusade where it feeds into the outcome of the fourth crusade. So this was a crusade that was ostensibly meant to target Egypt, but it's leadership kind of secretly at first later openly maneuvered it toward Constantinople. So they wanted to strike there 'cause there was a lot of money there. And that kind of prejudice was used to move the rank and file who had not signed up to fight other Christians or Constantinople into accepting that outcome. So the crusades were very, very destructive for the image of the Eastern Empire and that quote Greeks in general in Western Europe. It's possibly one of those turning points. I was gonna say it feels like a prelude to 1453. 1453, so the conquest was by the Ottoman Turks, but the fact that the Western Europeans didn't do more than they did, which was very, very little to help. In fact, the Venetian Senate was even having a debate at the time like, well, should we help them? 'Cause they kind of deserve what they're getting, right? It's again, you're hearing that prejudice against the Greeks. - That's what I'm saying. You can really tie it back to that if you wanted to. So the Ottomans take Constantinople in 1453 and that's effectively what we now view is the end of any type of Roman empires, that fair to say. - No, not any type. So there is a parallel Roman Empire in Trebizond. - Trebizond? - Trebizond, so this is North Eastern Turkey. It's on the coast of the Black Sea. It's still there. - Trepezunda, Trepezus, it's an ancient Greek city. So after 1204, so this is the fourth crusade. They take Constantinople, the empire breaks into pieces for a while. The Romans managed to reconstitute it. They take Constantinople back. They're trying to rebuild it again. It's like, I said, their story is one of rebuilding after disasters. And a branch of the Camdeni dynasty, I mentioned the Camdeni, they flee to Trebizond. So way far out there in the borderlands, close to Georgia. And they set up in this city and they establish, here you go. You might want to zoom out so people can see actually where this isn't the world. - Yeah, there's a lot on the coast of the Black Sea. - Right, right there. - It's right there. And they form a Roman state that encompasses territory along a strip. So it's a very, very mountainous region, right? So they're kind of protected by the mountains. And they, the Romans, and they benefit in the 13th century, 14th and so on by the trade routes that are opened up by the Mongol conquests. - Yes. - So a lot of trade, as you can see, once it reaches that point, it can then be picked up by Venetians and Genoese and taken on to the West. So it's a huge trading hub, and that survives for a few more years after the fall of Constantinople, 1461, I believe. So Mehmet who took Constantinople, he also takes Trebizond. - So he made his way there, but it was geographically more protected. I'm just looking at the map right here. - Yeah. - Then where it's a very mountainous region. - It's the Istanbul is today. - And he actually moves large part of the population to content and noble after it's. conquest. Yeah, so the two kind of mergers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think is like the the legacy of this whole era of this whole era today? As you laid out earlier, it's like, you know, historians and scholars later decided to label it a certain way, almost to create this lost history period, if you will. And you've been one of the guys at the forefront of at least saying, like, hey, this is not exactly how they're trying to, I'll use this word, like propagandize it, and label it. But you have such a long period of, basically, like continued rule, just in a different way. What do you think the main takeaways are from a historian's perspective about what we can learn the most from the Byzantine Empire in that period? The whole period. Yeah. Oh, I mean, that's, that's a lot. It depends on how we frame the discussion. But in the most general terms, I see it as a fascinating case of survival and longevity, right? Where you can see major changes taking place, but over the course of centuries. And so these are changes from like the move from Rome to New Rome, talked about this, the expansion of citizenship to new populations over the centuries, they take over this state, right? This is a process that you can even see mirrored in countries like America, right? Where today we had like white ethnics, but 130 years ago, they were regarded as like not proper Americans, right? Like Greeks, Italians, Jews and all that, right? But today, no one would look twice, right? Like an American of Greek origin or Italian or Jewish or whatever, just taking a rightful place in all of the centers of power in the United States. We have a long way to go with other populations, but you can see how over time these things become normalized. And you wouldn't think of an Irish American and think, well, not a real American. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. 100 years ago, you would. They would have. Right? Yeah. And so over, over, if you give it enough time, these changes can take place in a way that naturalizes them and people become adjusted to change. You try to force change through too fast and you get reactions, but over the long term, you can see some fascinating things change, religion. They abandoned their ancient gods. They had for a hundred thousand years and switched to another religion. It took five centuries. That's a long time. That is a long time. It just didn't happen like this, right? So people living through these changes quite possibly didn't quite. This is what we were going talking about earlier about timescales and the way we experience timescales. It's a boiled frog in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yes. Poor frog. But in this case, they wouldn't necessarily have noticed that something world-changing was happening. You'd have to read history books, you know, to get a sense of what was going on, perhaps. And so you see changes in religion, in geography, in culture, like the loss of Latin. This again takes centuries. No one would say these aren't Romans because they speak Greek. Ancient Romans also spoke Greek. We talked about Caesar and Marcus Aurelis, right? Now they didn't speak Latin and that's a change. But that's something that took a very long time for the Roman administration and the elites to just gradually shift from Latin to Greek, right? And other changes that also happen. I mean, Christianity itself changes a lot during this period, right? So the orthodoxy that we were talking about earlier, like I said, you wouldn't have encountered that in the fourth, fifth centuries. It would have looked and felt the vibes of it would have been very different, right? Though some other things don't change, how many orthodox priests does it take to change a light bulb? 11? Change? What change? Just random guess. 11? You got some jokes. You got some jokes. No, I'm sorry. Actually, I may have used that one before. One. That's all right. Yes. That's all right. You can repeat good stand-up. But basically, like, there's a lot to take from this era. Yeah. So I like to see gradual changes play out and societies just become accustomed to, like, how things are normalized that if they happened in the course of, like, 10, 20 years might have been resisted. And so it's kind of like the perfect ship of Thesias. The perfect ship of Thesias. You know the metaphor? It's a philosophical, kind of thought experiment. It's in Plutarch and some other sources. Anyway, so you take an ancient ship, and it's at sea for years and years and years, and it's got a crew and whatever. But, like, at every port of call, some member of the crew changes, not all of them, but, you know, one or two. They make repairs. They swap out the mask. Maybe they get a new sale. They put on some new boards. Like, give this ship enough time. And like, every part of it, every physical part of it has changed. The crew, the crew, it's entirely different crew, like some of those TV shows that run for 50 years, right? But the changes are gradual enough that no one person on the ship notices that, oh, this is a different, oh, today, this is a different ship. So at what point is this a different ship, or is it? Right? I think it is, but I think what you're saying is that when you're living in it, you can't see it. And I think that's 100% accurate. Yeah. So all of the threads are connected here. All of these changes take place over generations and generations. And so this is how you form continuous stories. And if you were to tell the story of the ship, even if you think it's a different ship, it would be one story. It would have the same name, for example, right? The people on it would tell the story of that ship. And it would include all of the previous members who are no longer there, right? And so the identity is a function of narrative, right? So the stories we tell about ourselves and we can change those stories. I don't think it's so easy to change those stories, but they can change. And so that's why I think this, this, this, this Roman society has one identity because they'd understand it that way. And yet it includes all of these layers and layers of change. So that's what I find it fascinating to study. It also allows me to use my interests in Roman stuff, Christian stuff, Greek stuff, Married All Together, put it all together. No, it's, it's amazing context. And you've written a lot of books on this as well. We're going to have them linked down below. Right. New Roman Empire. I love that. I love that cover. If we could pull that up, deep that cover, six. But do you ever get like people saying you look like Mark Ruffalo? Yes, I was going to say, really? It's been tripping me out all fucking day. You literally, when I look at it, it's a compliment for sure. But you look like Mark Ruffalo. Yeah, there's the cover right there. So we'll have that link down below. I've been reading some of that book as well. It's really, really good. I'm proud of that cover. I kind of designed it. Oh, you designed the cover? That's a flex. Yes. I like those colors. They're like neoclassical. Yes. Shout out to Betsy Williams, who proposed the medallion. It looks like a coin. It's actually a medallion. That medallion's hard. So it's got that broken bit. It kind of looks like the orthodox study Bible. Oh, look at that. Look at that. It was plagiarizing. When did that come out? This is the orthodox study Bible. When did it drop? Okay, I have not seen this before. So I'm just saying that 2019 in 2008 or no, 1993. All right. But when did that? How did you find that? Maybe they came after you. Oh, deep, deep will find anything. Okay. I still love your cover though. Well, they have good taste. Whoever they got great taste. All right. So we're going to link that down below. This has been amazing though today. Thank you so much for stopping me when you're in town. This was fun. You are very good at this. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm trying to like good questions and from people of red history and have spoken to so many people that they have like all these different perspectives. Yeah. So well done. Well, you're easy. You got a lot of that. So everyone can check out your work through the books and anything else you want linked down below. You let us know. We'll put that there and people will be able to get it. I will. Thanks again. Yeah. That said, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. 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