Empire: World History - 22. Byzantium and the Rise of the Turks

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

The lights are dimmed. A hush has fallen. The curtain is rising.    Season two of Empire is here. Our topic? The Ottoman Empire. In the opening episode, Anita and William are joined by Peter Frankopan to discuss Byzantium and the rise of the Seljuk Turks.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/xempire   Twitter: @Empirepoduk   Goalhangerpodcasts.com   Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Now, this is the very first of a brand new series, and we thought we'd take a look at the Ottomans. But then we thought, actually, let's not get ahead of ourselves, because to understand the Ottomans, you have to start looking at the world that they took over and the world that they

transformed. And that, you can only do by looking at the great empire of Byzantium, whose capital, Constantinople, they took as their own. It's a subject, I think, of huge fascination. And the full story, I think, of both empires are really very little known outside a fairly small world of specialists. But the Byzantines are an incredible story in themselves, and we're going to start with them, because they were repositories of all that had been salvaged from the fall of classical civilization. The new Rome of Constantine, defended by the greatest city walls ever built, the Theodosian land walls, kept the city safe for a thousand years of attack against Persians, Arabs, Avars, Vikings and many others, preserving the languages and the libraries of the Western classical world after the fall of Rome. And we're lucky to have with us today to talk about it, one of the great historians of our time, and also a good friend of both Anita and I, the great Peter Frankabal. Yay. Now listen, Peter Frank Pan, you are better known as the author of the extraordinarily successful Silk Road. Million selling.

Yeah. I mean, you're working on something else, which I think is going to be possibly arguably even bigger, the forthcoming history of climate change and how the natural world shaped history. It's going to be called the Earth Transformed. But we know that Byzantium is where you started. It is the thing that sets your heart to flutter. It was your very first book. So we couldn't think of absolutely anybody else who could do this. Can I just start with something as somebody who is so enamored of all things, Byzantine and who studied it very, very deeply? Even the word Byzantine, it's got sort of historically negative connotations. I'm thinking for my own world of politics, you know, when somebody says, oh, there are Byzantine operations going on.

It suggests dark art, something sneaky, something behind the scenes, and rarely for the greater good. This must bug the hell out of you. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I've been a huge fan of both of you individually and also collectively since this podcast. So I've been checking my emails for days to see whether I'd be invited. And finally, finally, you've managed to create a topic just so that I can, just for me. So I'm very grateful.

There would be no escape, Frank Epad, no escape whatsoever. No, look, I'm thrilled. I think it's just, it's fantastic to be doing podcasts like this about history and trying to open up topics about areas, people's places that we don't pay that much attention to. So does it bug me? I mean, in the grand scheme of things to worry about in life, how people misuse words. It's quite a good dinner party sort of chat about which other words are misused and things are not understood. But they're absolutely right. The world Byzantine has terrible connotations.

You know, it's quoted by politicians all the time as being synonymous with smoke and mirrors, with too much red tape, with things that don't really work, that they don't really look, you know, they look different to how they really are in reality. and it's a byword for over-elaborate, too much of a civil service, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess what's interesting to me in the first case is, you know, are they right? I mean, first of all, I know they're not right because none of the people who use the word have ever studied the Byzantine Empire, because no one's studied the Byzantine Empire. You study Henry VIII. If you're very lucky, you listen to this podcast, you know a bit about the Mughals and empires. But the Byzantines have pushed out of history for all sorts of reasons.

but it's curious to me that a word is misused by people who really don't know what they're talking about. So if you're studying the Byzantile Empire, the starting point might be, how come something lasted for more than a thousand years? And isn't it odd that it lasted for a thousand years if it's run by bureaucratic ninkum poops? Rather than maybe, just maybe, the Byzantines were odd to something with how to make a state work. And I mean, here we are in 2022, or whenever you're listening to this, we've had a pretty chaotic year here. with rulers being forced out of office after a few days. Palace coups, exactly. Daggers in the back.

Yeah, pushed out the window, never heard from again. Right. And so, yeah, does it annoy me that we look at the Byzantines are somehow all being murders in the bathtub and inefficiency. Yeah, it does, partly because, as a historian, the whole point is to provide perspective. But the Byzantines are not, I suppose, they're saving graces. They're not the only ones who get terribly badly treated by history.

So due to our Mongol friends. that, you know, Genghis Khan has not got a great reputation. They get a worse press. They didn't even manage having bureaucrats in them. There's a certain type of British politician who quite often will describe themselves as being to the right at Genghis Khan, which betrays both their sort of mindless ignorance about what Genghis Khan might have thought or what his political platform might have been,

but also the Mongols were empire builders of a hugely capable nature. And then, of course, your friends who you're going to concentrate on later in this series, is the Ottomans who are sort of widely described, almost always describes as the sick man of of Europe and a fading rubbish empire that didn't really compete with the way we do things here in Britain. Who also lasted 400 years? Well, this is why you've come for a podcast. I call it 700 years. It depends when you want to start the clock on the Ottomans. I've never been that good at my math.

If we pick Osman as the founder of the Ottoman Empire, he's in the 1250s, and the Ottoman Empire finally ends in the end of the First World War. So these big empires that last a long time, particularly like the Byzantines, they get squeezed out the way because they're quite inconvenient for how we think about history. But also, there is a hashtag fake news thing that goes on with the Byzantines. And we're sort of going to get into the meat of this. But I'm just really struck by when you first do a flick of who they were. You know, you've got the prejudice that comes from historians like Gibbon

or even go back even further. And you've got sort of like the bishop of Cremona, who's just so entertainingly horrible and rude about the Byzantines is nasty. And those are the things that kind of fly around. But they would, wouldn't they? Because it's stories told by the opposition in a way. Well, I loved, that's why I love your podcast. Okay, so dealing with two clever historians.

I don't think I've ever in my life as an academic been asked about Lutprant of Cremona, apart from academic conferences. So my heart is singing, Anita. Luprand Lopran is a 10th century archbishop who goes on two journeys to Coltentinople. He is a great friend of this podcast.

I'll have you an opinion of Frank Pan. You've got Tread carefully here. He's one of my fantasy dinner party guests. And he goes on two visits. And the first visit is quite successful and he writes very nice things. Second visit, his mission goes unaccomplished and he has to come back with face covering

or backside covering excuses. And so it's not fake news. that's what diplomacy, that's what diplomats do. They write things that reflect what they want to tell their masters. It's so undiplomatic. Can I read you a bit? So everyone knows what we're talking about. I mean, it's so, it's so delicious and gorgeous. But this is, so he's come back from a rather unpleasant visit. I think this is one of the unsuccessful ones. And he's describing the emperor. And he says he's a monstrosity of a man, a dwarf, fat-headed, with a tiny mole-like eyes. He says that he's short, fat, dark-skinned, not a very strong warrior, but coincidentally,

a fox by nature in perjury and falsehoods. He is a Ulysses. I said that he didn't get on. I don't think he liked him very much. Who is that, is that Basil or who's that? No, it's a Nike for us the second for curse. Okay, he's that guy. Just remind listeners, Anita, just say it again, because I I wonder whether Nikefuss Spokest, he's crazy by the name. He was a great general. I'm a great fan of Nykifras. He was a sort of Gordon Brown type of leader where he was a bit dour. But read that description again, because I mean, are we absolutely certain that might not be extremely attractive to the right kind of person?

I don't know which girls you hang out with or indeed boys, but I'll try it again. Let's have a run at this. A monstrosity of a man. Well, that could be the translation. Yeah. Fat-headed with tiny mole eyes. Very attractive. He is described as being, oh yes, contrary, contrary to how an actual Germanic emperor is meant to look like, short, fat, dark-skinned, not a warrior, but coincidentally, a fox by nature in perjury and in falsehood, a Ulysses.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, you know, I'd like to send Lupran to bring him back from the dead. Sounds gorgeous. I wonder what you'd say about Elon Musk or about Xi Jinping or about Rishi Sunak. You know, I think that it's interesting that the body shaming

a thousand years ago, that's how you show that someone is a bad person. It's not that he's, you know, not as victorious or not as rich as you think, but he doesn't look in the part. And of course, a Germanic, you know, nice blonde hair, blue eyes and straight on a horse, you know, that makes the person who hears that feel good

about themselves. But I'm pretty sure that's not what Nike for us the second Focass actually look like, although I'll go with the Wily as a pox line. But, you know, I think that this forms into a pattern about how powerful people in exotic kingdoms who are more powerful than oneself are described. It's a bit like the early descriptions of the British coming to India, how they describe the mogul court of Thomas Row being rude about Jahangir or, yeah, Terry. These are sort of fat rulers and they have lives of luxury and they overindulge and they don't make any decisions. And yet, you know, the bottom line is that running an empire is not

actually that easy and keeping your caught in place requires some quite good soft skills as well as some pretty good hard skills. So I think it sort of makes you play the man not the ball. And so what's what Leupraib is doing there, which he doesn't write that up by the way about Constantine the seventh who's

in power when he goes there first time. He says he's got excellent table manners, good with small animals, pets and children. Nikephrus get slammed because Nikephress doesn't give Leupram what he wants, which is in the first instance equality, a second instance, a sort of a nice backside kiss for Lupra's boss, but also is not in the business I wanted to give

away recognition of titles or imperial brides. And that means that you've got to come back and you've got to smear. And body shaming, height shaming are quite good ways of doing that. So Peter, give us the counter argument in a sense. So why would you want people to care about Byzantine? Because we're just going to go into seeing the Holy Byzantium smashed up in the next episode. So why should we be sad about that? Well, you shouldn't be sound about it. I mean, everyone cuts their cloth their own way. I mean, I think what I'm sort of slightly surprised about is that it's actually quite interesting. And it's quite interesting, both from a kind of anecdotal point of view, but it's also quite interesting from a micro-stream point of view.

It's also quite interesting from a sort of macro point of view. You know, how do empires rise? How do they stay stable? How do you stay stable if you're not expanding territorially? How do you manage to keep an economy basically inflation-free, apart from a in a couple of moments of compression. We could do with a Byzantine Chancellor and Exchequer at the moment. Well, you know, be careful what you wish for. You know, I'm available. You know, I think how does societies deal with major structural problems caused by pandemic disease, where the Byzantines,

they've got two of the greatest pandemics in global history, the plague of Justinian, as it's known, in the 540s, and then the Black Death in the 1340s. You know, how do you respond? How do you learn from those kinds of things? And then, of course, all the other things we think about today, like climate, like, you know, rise of the east and, you know, military intelligence. And the world that the Byzantines work in and function is, is to do with the Black Sea and

what's now Ukraine. It's to do with North Africa. It's to do with migrations. It's to do with Iraq and what's now Iraq and Iran, Persia, et cetera, and longer distance Australia. There are so many things that I think have residents, even if you can't apply what you learn from those. But it's a terrific story. I suppose as a historian, the first thing is how is it possible that we know nothing about this empire? How come we know quite a lot about Henry VIII and his wives or Battle of Haste? Because, I mean, let's say Battle of Hastings, 1066 wasn't even the most interesting thing that was happening in Europe at that time. But for us, it's the kind of seminal moment in British history.

So we're going to sort that out. That's what this podcast is about. It's all about, exactly. It's all about putting, writing that wrong. But to do that, we need to go right back to the beginning, right back to the fundamental. So let's go back to the emperor who decides that there's going to be a new Rome in constant. Stantonople. He's got two sons. Talk us through, you know, the actual bifurcation of Rome at the end. Okay. Well, we could be a for hours. No, the short version. We've got all the time in the world, Peter Frank of Pan. No, we don't. The short version, Franka Pan. Let's do this as a special. Come on, seven-hour podcast. Seven-hour special.

People do this while they're walking their dogs and just think of the dogs, okay? Just think of the dogs. People haven't flicked on the next episode already, where they should be rewarded. I mean, so part of the problem is, where do we start with Byzantium. Where's the chronological starting point? So this empire does not call itself Byzantine. It calls itself a Roman Empire, they call themselves the Roman Empire. So the starting point is Rome, when it turns from a republic into an empire with the Emperor Augustus, Octavian who becomes renamed Augustus, after the Battle of Actium in 30 BC, then expands this enormous empire that by about the year 300 covers more or less all in North Africa, Spain and Portugal, right the way through France, Gaul, even here in Britain, up to Hadrian's

wall, you know, with these letters, God help us, it's cold, and the food is miserable, and we've always been attacked from the north, exactly. And then the heartlands of the Roman Empire, really in Illyria, so what's now Croatia, Dalmatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and then right the way through into Emperor Trajan reaches Basra, in what's now, Iraq. So this is an enormous empire. by the year 300 it's basically so big that it's thought to be too big for one person to run. So there's an emperor of the west and emperor of the east. And Constantine, who mentioned, decide that it's time to build a new megacity in the east on the banks of the Bosphorus in an old Greek town, pre-Helanic term, called Byzantion,

which is where the later name comes from, which he calls New Rome. And not surprisingly, because he put a lot of cash into it. soon people start to call it the city of Constantine, Constantinopolis. And that then becomes the great queen of cities that survives right up until the present day, known as Istanbul, probably a sort version of in the city, Istanbul, in Greek, so it's just known as the city. But like New Yorkers, big apple, big city. So Constantine is important because he re-founds a new city, new Rome, to mirror the parallel structure of a Rome in the West and a Rome in the East. And I suppose at that point, is typically when most of us think about the sort of beginning point where we can talk about

Eastern Roman Empire that then is rebranded, not by anybody at the time, but by later Western historians is the Byzantine Empire. And when does it reach its peak, the Eastern Roman Empire? Under Justinian, when would you say the moment, the kind of the glory days of Byzantine? Well, we have a kind of, we have a funny way of thinking about things here in the West. We tend to a great peak with largest landmass. You might want to say that Britain's highest cultural point was in the 1960s with the Beatles and a point of economic trough and so on. So it's like it depends what you want. So if you want the cultural highlights, you might pick something called the Macedonian Renaissance, this kind of late-night century to the 10th century,

a time of profound experimentation with literary forms, art, culture, music and so on, all brought to an end by our new friend, Dikea for us and second, who, for all of his skills and interest was not a man of the dance floors and was not interested in scholarship. He was a military man. He wouldn't have made it through his admission lecture at Worcester College, Oxford. That's right. Well, it's very hard to get through those these days. Can I just explain? This is a very entranue joke, but this is what Peter is responsible for breaking the hearts, a fresh-faced young people who don't get into his college. So just say, no, no. As luck would have it, I'm not responsible for anybody's heartbreaks. I'm kept safely removed

from the running the gauntlet is just in the process of going through that yet again in Oxford. So it's terrifying experience for undergraduates. But there are lots of different high water marks of where the empire is in it's larger. So Justinian is considered a hugely important moment in

history of Eastern Roman Empire, Justinian Emperor, in the 500s, he takes the throne in 527, reigns until 565. I already mentioned that the plague that happens during his reign, but he also sees a rebuild of large parts of the city, most notably the Great Cathedral of Hagia Sofayor, which was, if I'm not mistaken, the biggest church and the biggest building in Europe until

the Renaissance. So does that look today as it did then? I mean, is that what we see if we go to Istanbul? Few minarets in those days. Few minarets, aka no minarets. Some of the decorations, many of the spectacular mosaics have been uncovered. But yeah, I mean, it's an absolute knockout city, you know, you find visitors to Constantinople say that they walk inside, and it's as though the roof hovers are being suspended over the rest of the structure, and it says this is obviously a place where God lives, because it takes your breath away. And listeners would be lucky enough to visit and go walk inside, we'll know exactly what that means. It still does today. Absolutely. It's dazzling, absolutely breathtaking as an architectural structure, but also as a house of God.

I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary and lavishly endowed and decorated. So, I mean, it's a showstopper, but it was one of many, many showstoppers. It justinian went through a phase of building several of these churches or seven of these churches being built during his reign. So there were lots of kind of of moments of Ebb and flow. Bethlehem, Ravenna, Sinai. Oh, I think it's, yeah, I think I think bigger, bigger and possibly, slightly controversial, possibly, possibly even slightly better than many of those in terms of the attention that was lavished on it. So that is the kind of the signature building. So again, some of my colleagues would say

that's when we should think about the Eastern Roman Empire starting with Justinian. Although Constantine, the predecessor 200 years earlier, is the first emperor to convert to Christianity, the character of the empire starts to shift in the 500 and 600s. By the middle of the 600s, or the 7th century, the bureaucrats start to begin using Greek

rather than Latin. And that's seen as a kind of big important turning point in the kind of nature of the empire. But there's no particular reason why that should be the case. I mean, scholars argue about that and think it makes a big deal. Yeah. I heard somebody say that actually Justinian was the last emperor to speak Latin and then he didn't even speak it well. I mean, do we know that as a fact or is that just pure conjecture? Yeah, that's dinner party banter. That's somewhat just bad bad bad. Is it bans? Yeah. It's my Sephora's focus and brilliant Latin.

No, no, I think that one of my great heroes or heroines is a Byzantine princess by the name of Anna Komina. Anna Kamina! Oh, I love her. It's my favourite, love her. So she's the author of the first narrative history written in a European language in the 12th century, and she has no problem with Greek or Latin. So I think that there's bilingualism carries on.

I mean, it's an elite thing to speak languages normally, unless you are migrants, as we call them these days, unless you have a reason to be speaking other languages. And so the courts will typically be monolingual, but elites and some of the members of the court were perfectly proficient and being able to translate in real time. You've mentioned Anna Komnina,

and thanks to you, she's become one of my favourite people of all time. But I think you need to say a little more about who she is, whose daughter she was and why she's so important. Oh, well, that's no thanks to me. Gosh, I've done nothing. No, it's all thanks to her. So here you get, you get 500 years now in the space of about 90 seconds.

We should say quickly, this is Peter's first book. Go by the call from the East by Peter Frankabad. Well, no, I'm going to race now from Justinian from the year 5,65 when he dies up until the 1100. So in that sort of 400-year intervening period, the things that are significant and important are, first of all, the collapse of the province in West. in Europe where essentially people stop building in stone, literacy levels plummet, long-distance trade collapses, and the only sort of markets are part of local networks in small little clusters. In the eastern part of the Mediterranean, life carries on pretty well. It goes, it's fine.

And the pandemic is obviously an issue. But this is a moment of transformation. Lots of new people arriving, Bulgaras and Slavs and so on. But the big story comes in the 620s and 630s with the rise of Islam after the Prophet Muhammad. And that creates, in charge. short order, a massive Arab empire, originally sort of spreading out from Mecca and Medina, centered on the Great City of Damascus, that over the course of about three or four decades, spreads right the way across North Africa, into northern, into the middle of Spain, and then eastwards goes more or less up to the Himalayas by the 700s, and towards Afghanistan, to Daibul and so on. And for the next two or three hundred years,

you have a sort of standoff between this great Arab empire and the great surviving Christian empire of the Eastern Mediterranean, set it on Colson-Satidopal. And through that period, you have moments of compression and of attack, of reconciliation, you've got iconoclasm where you don't show images of human beings and so on, and images and statues and artworks smashed by the Christian world, possibly in balance to ideas about images in the Islamic world too. But by about the 850s, about 900, the Roman world is back in the ascendancy and starts to push eastwards to reclaim territories

that are being captured by the Arabs and were now under Islam. Why that's an issue is that, well, when the Christian church establishes itself, there are five primary patriarchs who sit across the structure of the Christian church. We have Rome and Paul Settinople, but also Alexandria and Egypt, Antioch, in what's now Syria, and Jerusalem. And those three Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria come under Arab Susserunian team. So it re-changes how the Christian church is structured, and it basically

leaves the patriarch of Constantinople and his parallel in Rome as the kind of two primary figures. There are still patriarchs in these great cities in the East as well, but it means that the Christianity becomes very closely identified with what the empire means. And by about the year, 1,1025, Basil the Bulgars Slayer, one of the great names in world history, he dies having pushed the Empire back into the Caucasus, into what's now northern Iraq and Syria, and then to the north right the way back to recover most of the Balkans. So in 1025, the Byzantine Empire is sitting quite pretty, it controls the bottom half of Italy, or not the bottom, just below Naples and below, and is looking like it's in the ascendancy, and into this world, you know, about three or four decades

later, Anna Komina is born, and this is a kind of moment where we start to see an existential clash between the forces of Islam and the forces of Christianity with the Crusades. So, Peter, this is the point where, in a sense, our story for this series really picks up, because at the end of the 11th century, as Anna Kameenah is writing, the Seljuk Turks appear through what was Persian? Yeah. Well, the Celtics are, I mean, so the world, you know, world's I work on include the great nomadic peoples of Central Asia, and the Celtic are one particular,

grouping that becomes successful militarily and politically. In 1055 they reach Baghdad. They brought it as mercenaries originally. They take over the apparatus of the Arab Empire based on Baghdad, which is the successor city of Damascus. Baghdad is built in the ninth century as a kind of massive cosmopolitan metropolis.

And the Celtics establish themselves as powerful rulers, undisputed rulers of that world. And then they start to park bands of nomads who are difficult sort of gap-year teenagers looking for cheap thrills and things to do on the kind of frontiers, because you want people who are difficult and ambitious out the way. You don't want them in the quarrelers of power

where they might scare the horses and unsettle you. You want them to go and provoke people elsewhere. And by the sort of 1060s, 1070s, Celtic bands are reaching deep into Anatolia, not for strategic reasons, but as raiding parties. And raiding parties that are a bit like I intelligence services know today, it's very difficult to deal with sort of lone wolves and with small bands. It's quite easy to be able to do things at state-to-state level.

But those kinds of, those what starts off as Pimprix starts to become a rash and then starts to become a proper problem for the empire in Costa Nopal. And in 1071, an emperor called Romanus the fourth, Diogenes, Romanus the fourth, decides to equip a massive army and head out to the east to teach these guys a lesson. And it doesn't go according to plan. So at that point, we're going to take a break. and we're going to come back Battle of Manzikert, 19th of August 1071 after the break. Welcome back. Well, this is a breathless romp through one of the most interesting and neglected periods of history. And we have no one better as our guide on the lead horse galloping ahead of us. Galloping towards the Battle of Manzikert as he speaks.

Yeah, absolutely. So we left just before the break. We were teeing up to this important date of 1071 in the Battle of Manzikert. Tell us what happens. Well, it's not that important to date, actually. This is like the history boys. Ow, that really hurt my feelings. Why isn't it important? Everywhere I've read, it says it's really important.

Why is it not important? So this is how you get into Worcester College Oxman? The Emperor strikes grand at Manitka in 1071, the modern Turkish town of Malasgert, and is basically, you know, from 3-0 up, manages to lose 4-3 in injury time. And not only gets defeated, but is captured in battle and made to supplicate, pay homage, or some form of ritual humiliation in front of the Turkish Sultan called Al-Barslun. So it is an important event, no question about that.

I mean, I suppose it's like Prince Charles being arrested and being made to sort of, you know, kneel down in front of President Macron in Paris, right? So, I mean, it is hugely symbolic. That would make headlines. It would be headlines, yeah, front page. And it has become a huge, it's become a totemic moment for the Turkish people. So on the Battle of Manzacut Day every year, you get a million people on the streets in Istanbul, in Turkey. It's used by President Erdogan in particular to talk about the origins of Turkish nationhood, empire, success, victory and so on.

Actually, at the time, apart from it being a bit of a, you know, obviously it's a setback. Romanus doesn't have that many mates, because he says, he's got his position because he's the second or third husband of an empress who is the daughter of a former emperor. So people think he's got his position through sort of, not on merit. No one thought it was a great idea in the first place. So seeing him being humiliated, doesn't know anybody really losing any sleep about it. And in fact, he's pushed out the way pretty much immediately. The key thing there is that Maddochard doesn't open that, I mean, historians used to think this opened the floodgates to the invasion of Anatolia or Asian

what's now Turkey. Turks coming into Anatolia? Absolutely. Why doesn't it? Not only does it not do that, it probably stops them from happening. Because one of the things that Alpalsand does as what seems some sort of agreement with the emperor is to try to contain his rowdy Turks on tour to try to keep them under control to not deliver the pinpricks. Because actually creating instability is quite bad for trade, it's quite bad for business,

and it's quite bad for authority. So if you get permission from the ruler to go bananas and go to tax city, that's fine. But if you go do it without permission, then it looks like you're weak. So there's a kind of constant balance and a threat. So that man's a victory amongst some revisionist historians to do today, whom I include myself, it's hugely symbolic, but actually it takes another 25 years for the Turks to really make meaningful progress into Asia Minor, which, and then where they do it, they do it quickly, suddenly, and it creates an alarm bell that goes off in Constantinople, where the then emperor decides to, there's only one thing to do to call for help,

and that's to appeal to the West. Can I just, I mean, just saying with Manzacut, and just for a moment longer, because I'm fascinated, let's just remember, this is only a handful of years after 1066, but you've got the appearance of Anglo-Saxons and Normans meeting at Mazurkut, just, you know, in an eye blink after the Battle of Hastings. Well, some of the Anglo-Saxons have defeated at Hastings, upstakes and head to call Setton, able to go take Imperial service,

and they get deployed some into the Black Sea. That's a bit of an upgrade, isn't it? Having lost in the kind of local division, suddenly to find yourself in the Premier League. It's warmer and better paid, but, you know, if your options are shut down when you're taken over by a new hostile conqueror is going to put all of his own people in power,

it's a very, it's quite a logical thing to go and offer your services and your skill set to someone who is not just willing to pay for it, but also might be willing to look kindly on your status that you bring. So, you know, although the Normans are not an enormous number when they come into England and then around the British Isles, they are, you know, it is the end of an era. So there's an exodus of people go leaving, and Colson to Noble is the magnet of choice. I mean, although we think of it as being sort of unusual that people travelled, you know, Harold Hardrada, who is also the great figure of 1066 at Stanford Bridge,

nothing to do with Chelsea Football Club. he is defeated 1066, he's got to do service with the emperor in court Scytonople too. And got all cozy with the Empress. I don't think that's probably correct. But yeah, let them, they say that sort of stuff. It is said. Yeah, it is said, which means he said, or his mate said.

And so it must be, it must be right. He tells his mate, yeah. Yes, I know. And basically the rest of the court went, you should be so lucky, mate. So, you know, not true. You never know. I can't rule it out. Can't rule it out.

But I think that in this kind of window, What is key is to be remembering how important, you know, the most connected ruling house in Europe at the time is in Kiev. You know, the way in which Europe is anchored is that the eastern parts of Europe are, particularly the southeastern parts, I should say, are the rich, wealthy, vibrant, literate, urban parts. And the Western and northern parts, the bits that then later inherit the earth, literally, it's bands of castles and of barons building up their forts and their assets at the exclusion of anybody else. and this is a time when Constantinople has a population maybe half a million, Paris, London, maybe 10, 15, possibly 20,000. So the order of magnitude of what we're looking at in the East is much more sophisticated. So let's move the focus just for a second from Constantinople itself

and the Byzantines who are not knocked back quite as much as we used to think at Manziket to the Turks themselves. So who are the Turks? Where do they start? Starting Kazakhstan or Parts East? Where would you trace the origin of the Turks? I don't think there's, I mean, I think what has to be careful about these sorts of things, because people don't start, you know, movement is normal, fluidity is normal. And the idea that there's an ancestral homeland.

There's not a whistle blow at the beginning of play. Yeah. Well, I just think, I just think we need to be careful of that. You know, we sort of think, well, Turks, they must start here, or somewhere in Kazakhstan. There's a kind of bunch of fields. But, you know, we'd never say that about English, where do English start? Or where do Indian start? And when people do ask those questions, there are very uncomfortable answers, because it then turns into very quickly a discussion of what does it mean to be X, Y and Z. And that asks things about genetics and a whole bunch of, so I think the one, rather than thinking about where they actually come from, I think it's the Great Plains and Steps of Central Asia that more or less go from the northern parts of the Black Sea, over the lip of the Black Sea, right the way through to the Korean Peninsula, are home to lots of people who are exploiting the natural environment for

for animal herding, but those, the nomadic people's work side by side with cities. So if you have animal herds, you want to sell their byproducts, dairy, meat, textiles and so on, to people who can pay for them. And so you want to, you want to live quite close to city populations because then you can get the things you want back in return, like brooches or, you know, luxury objects, pepper and leather and things like that. But just to clarify, there are, there are Turks stretching, I mean, I've just been writing about the Northern Way who come into China in the 6th, 7th century. They're also Eastern Turks, aren't they?

Well, I go to supervision mode now. I go very, very earnest. No, please do. No, no, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong, yeah. Well, you're wrong because they don't describe themselves as that. That's why they're described by other people. So when you allow other people to define you

and to explain what you are ethically or religiously or whatever, then you're always in a difficult situation. So histories that are written about different Turkic peoples, and they're often written hundreds of years later. For example, Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, there's zero information from when, from his lifetime. Things that are written about him project backwards, often by one or two or three hundred years. And that's telling you a lot about what's thought to be important one or two or three hundred years later, but not necessarily anything accurate about the Ottomans or Osman at the time themselves. So what the Selchuk is in so far as we can tell, the Central Asian steps are filled with lots of Turkic peoples

who we essentially identify by the languages that they are speaking. So Turkic. Speaking a family of languages related to modern Turkish. Which are constantly changing, moving, borrowing to, and so on. But occasionally what can happen is that one grouping can establish itself as political supremos over a much wider federation. So that's how we might think about the Mongols. It's a sort of single golden unit connected by blood-marriage kinship to Chingiz Khan himself, who then preside over a massive confederation where other people also become

Mongols as a result of their Mongol overlordship. The Stelchiks, it's a lot of a lot is about how the story is told about them, but they are a military elite who are dragged into the politics of the Abbasid Caliphate, or to the Caliphate of Baghdad rather, into what's now modern Iraq. Modern Iraq, but at that time it's a world that connects most of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria. And that world that the Celtics move into, they are highly dexterous at playing the political system well. And that's partly because

the advantage of being nomadic peoples in urban environments, which occasionally happens, is that you don't have alliances and allegiances that can also compromise you. You could be projected onto. So you're sort of quite a good third-party candidates where people can't agree who they should choose. So the Celtics become the kind of masters of this enormous world, slightly by good skill, but by the ability to read the rudes of how to take over, well, let's say small political extremists in other political systems have been quite good at forcing through Brexit's, hardline policies.

You can have small groups that become extremely effective as has happened in the United Kingdom. But they become so effective that they are seen and perceived to be a threat, and so much so a threat to Constantinople, that it starts saying, you know what, We need some reinforcements. We need a crusade to push back against these muscular types who are getting far too big for their boots.

Speak to that a little bit and how successful or not those were. Well, so that's a primary problem. So the Celtics basically knock out most of Asia Minor. The bit that is important is that the central arid plains of Asia Minor are less important than the rich river valleys of the coast. When those fall, then there's a proper alarm bell going off. and the problem is that the emperor in Constantinople at the time, Alexius Komnenos, can't tell his attention to go and take them on head on

because he's dealing also with problems to the north where a different set of nomadic peoples, petchen eggs and Kipchak humans, are causing problems and then further problems in the Balkans. So his hands are tied. There's a very good book about this, by the way, by me, called The First Crusoe from the East. It is a very good book by you.

No, it is a very, very good book by you. But he appeals to the Pope for help and to Western leaders, and he hooks the appeal, from what we can tell, sentences it on threats to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. And so he's not just saying we Byzantines or Romans need your help, because that doesn't really move the needle. There'd been attempts before to say, we Christians need help, but that also doesn't really move the needle,

as we'll talk about in a bit about later periods. But Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, these holy places are under threat. does set fire to Western Europe, and we suddenly see a movement of maybe 60, maybe 80, some people think maybe even 100,000 people heading out east to try and defend the places where Jesus Christ lived, died, was buried, and lived died and rose from the dead. So control of the Christian holy sites are important. The key question, I guess, which most historians haven't really asked, is how come it took 450 years since Jerusalem fell to the Arabs or to Muslims to respond?

And the key is that the situation in the East, in the 1090s, suddenly becomes dramatically different and dramatically worse. And so that opens up a whole chapter of crusades that runs through for the next couple of hundred years. The Latin West, the Western parts of Europe set up colonies in Antioch, in Tripoli and in Jerusalem. And over the next hundred years, they try and hang on to them until Saddam in 1187 knocks out Jerusalem, recovers it, and that then reset what the shape of the Holy Land, Christianity, religions, Middle Ages looks like. But Peter, let's keep our focus on the Turks. So the Turks have come into Anatolia. They've built cities in places like Konya, previously, Iconium. Yeah, I think they've built anything particularly. I think Kankan is something slightly different.

I mean, you want to take control of key access routes, both for trade but also for defensive purposes. Iconium is a big city in the centre of Anatolia. It's called Konya and Turkish. But I think it doesn't, the control of cities doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to flourish. In fact, quite often, Congress means that they go backwards. And the challenges, if you're a new overlord, you know, you want access to their tax take. And to get access to the tax date, you need people to trade and to get people to trade in instability. So there's a constant tension between military pressure, attempt to extract tribute and try to make an economy work. But when you go to Anatolia today,

you can still see these beautiful caravansarized and these gorgeous madrasas and mosques built by the Seljuks at this time. I mean, they're some of the most gorgeous things. Yeah, yeah, they're great builders. I mean, they are better at those kinds of institutional structures, prayer towers, dotted all over Central Asia, likewise, Morselaer and so on.

They're not particularly interested in building from what we can tell, civic institutions, shops, arcades, theatres, the stuff that we would associate with the kind of typical Roman city.

And the challenge is what do you do with the local population? So when you turn up as a new overlord, it's difficult to know whether you think the right thing to do is to allow everyone to keep their faith, whatever that might be, in practice it however they want,

or do you try to convert them? Do you tax them at a different level to people who bring with you? But also, how do you encourage settlement from other Turkic peoples, why on earth would you move to Konya if you were able to live in Baghdad? So millions of people around the world

have been watching Ehterul, this picture of the early Turks in Anatolia, and the picture in that amazing drama that has become one of the most watched dramas anywhere in the world, is of these early Turks living in tents, being basically nomadic, sort of milking cows and riding around on horses.

Is that a pretty accurate picture? or are they more sophisticated than that drama would lead one to believe? Oh, gosh, well, why is that not sophisticated? Tell me about that. That is sophisticated. Are they not got settled palaces and institutions and bureaucracies like our favorite Byzantide byzantides? Yes, but that's how we do things.

So, you know, we think settled, you know, you have art galleries and palaces that sit still and, you know, but I think the mobile and the connection with the understanding of ecologies. I don't think that that is that we should look at that as being somehow inferior or less sophisticated. I think it's highly adaptable. It's highly successful. It's extremely sensitive to moving things around. And in fact, in many ways, we sort of forget that some of those things are things that our own courts in Western Europe do too. You know, the king is constantly on the move in England, for example, taking tents with him and setting himself up and so on. So it's just the way we think of the, you know, that people's outside Europe are somehow,

They don't watch properly, and it's part of a very problematic way in which we think about history, where we sort of think that the other is kind of different and more awkward than us. Yeah, I mean, some of my happiest days have been in a Winnebago. I mean, I'm just saying, you know, don't knock it until you've tried it. We've been going for over 40 minutes. We're still, can you believe it, 300 years from the end point of this amazing story. So what I reckon is maybe we should just pause here, and then we'll get Peter back next week to take us right to the end of Byzantium and set us up for that fateful event. 1453, the fall of Constantinople.

Till then, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durumple.