Christ Pantocrator, Hagia Sophia
Madeline tracked down a set of torrents for a documentary I regularly obsess over - John Romer’s Byzantium - The Lost Empire (episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4). Awesome stuff, but terrible copies - the series was only ever published on VHS and I think these AVIs are lifted from tape - the colour gamut is very poor, and those mosaics deserve better. I’d buy a DVD reissue in a heartbeat.
Byzantium gets overlooked in Europe; in school I learnt about “The Romans” - the guys in togas who took over in England about 40AD, built Hadrian’s Wall and some roads, and left at the end of the 4th century.
In some ways that’s a very traditional, “Decline and Fall” view of history, but at the same time I was taught in a British state school in the 80s, so social history was all - I learnt how Roman roads were made and how a legion was organised, but couldn’t name a contemporary Roman emperor if my life depended on it. Diocletian’s Tetrarchy, The Eastern Roman Empire, The Eastern Orthodox Church, and Constantinople as a seat of art and learning went completely unmentioned. When I first realised that the Roman Empire existed right up until the middle of the 15th century, almost contemporary with the Wars of the Roses, I was stunned.
Then a couple of days ago, in a classic case of serendipity (or maybe observer bias), 12 Byzantine Rulers cropped up on MeFi. I guess you could call it a podcast, but it’s really a set of lectures centred around twelve of the most important Byzantine rulers, and the quality matches the best of The Teaching Company’s output. I’m burning them out to disc and listening to an episode whenever I have half an hour completely free to concentrate.
Finally, a couple of links on the art of Byzantium: Byzantine Coinage, the Deesis Mosaic at Hagia Sophia (flickr).
(By the way, I know it looks like I’ve been lazy because so many of these links go straight to Wikipedia, but it seems that the best overviews of historical subjects tend to be found there.)