One of the most confusing aspects to potential catechumens of Byzantium’s ideology is its ethnography. Unless well-versed in it, the Byz...

Two major elements in the anti-Christian prism through which the jaded West has historically viewed late antiquity (mentioned in the...

It’s easy to line Catherine Nixey between the crosshairs. Almost as undemanding, perhaps, as it was it was for her to portray the...

The Byzantine chapter on Africa (and to a lesser extent, Spain) tends to be a short one. It starts with a whiff of betrayal from men like...

Answering why societies rise and fall is often what brings enquiring minds to study history. And, in the West, the most totemic society...

While it would hysterical to claim Byzantine links to the English were ever stable, considering the fact Lundenwic and Constantinople...

In 1440, Canon Fursy de Bruille arrived in Cambrai with an icon of the Virgin & Child he had received in Rome. Purchased in the belief it...

The road from the achievements of Justinian (527-565) to the drastic actions of Leo III (717-41) was a remarkably short one. Threats came...

In 1860 the chairman of the Select Committee on the British Museum, questioning Sir Anthony Panizzi, the museum’s principal librarian,...

Breakfast around the Middle East is usually a washout. Two places I’ve enjoyed it have been the Hotel Baron in Aleppo and over the border...

Despite Turks being associated with kebab culture in Europe – and much of the world thanks to the antics of Salt Bae (AKA Nusret Gokce)...

Jews Byzantine relations with the Jews have always been complex, not least because the former effectively stole the latter’s ideological...

Bogomils Gnostics to the bone, the Bogomils seem to have snowballed in their Macedonian-Bulgarian heartland after John I transferred...

“One finds me Scythian among Scythians, Latin among    Latins… And also to Persians I speak in Persian… To Alans I say in their tongue:...

In the late third century Diocletian sent his colleague Maximian to Gaul to subdue the “country folk and bandits whom the inhabitants...

Whenever the eunuch is invoked, it’s almost always in the sense that he is a distortion or perversion of nature that only a people as...

Reading a church can be a daunting prospect. Weird Latinate or Greek-based terms are deployed to outline liturgical functions with even...

Have you ever noticed that even though Orthodox icons are bathed in golden light, none of the figures represented ever has a shadow? Far...