TTC - World of Byzantium
by Kenneth Harl
published by The Teaching Company (TTC)
30 lectures of 30 minutes - mp3 - 355 mb
Try this thought experiment: Mentally chart the main phases of European history to 1500.
If you're like most of us, you probably moved from classical Greece through Alexander the Great, from the Rome of the Caesars to the Renaissance, with a detour into the long post-Roman hiatus known as the Dark and Middle Ages.
But this storyline is woefully incomplete, even misleading.
Why? It leaves out Byzantium.
Byzantium is the bridge between the Roman empire and the middle ages, between Eastern and Western civilisation, between polytheism and monotheism, between ancient and medieval.
An Empire of Accomplishment
A list of the achievements of Byzantium would have to include:
Actively preserving and extending the literary, intellectual, and aesthetic legacy of Classical and Hellenistic Greece (the Byzantine patriarch Photius was doing serious Platonic scholarship at a time when only three of Plato's dialogues were even known in the Latin West).
Carrying forward pathbreaking Roman accomplishments not only in law and politics but in engineering, architecture, urban design, and military affairs, at a time when these had mostly been forgotten in the West.
Deepening and articulating Christian thought and belief through church councils and the work of brilliant theologians, such as St. Basil the Great, while spreading the faith to Russia and the rest of what would become the Orthodox world.
Developing the Christian monastic institutions whose eventual diffusion from the deserts of Egypt to the shores of the Irish Sea would help to sustain faith and learning through centuries of hardship and peril.
Shielding the comparatively weak and politically fragmented lands of western Europe from the full force of eastern nomadic and Islamic invasions.
Fusing classical, Christian, and eastern influences to create an art and culture of stunning beauty and splendor.
Helping to shape the course of the humanist revival and the Renaissance in Western Europe through the writings of the Greek Fathers of the church, the preservation of classical texts, and the example of church mosaics and the work of El Greco.
1. Imperial Crisis and Reform
2. Constantine
3. State and Society Under the Dominate
4. Imperial Rome and the Barbarians
5. The Rise of Christianity
6. Imperial Church and Christian Dogma
7. The Friends of God—Ascetics and Monks
8. The Fall of the Western Empire
9. The Age of Justinian
10. The Reconquest of the West
11. The Search for Religious Unity
12. The Birth of Christian Aesthetics and Letters
13. The Emperor Heraclius
14. The Christian Citadel
15. Life in the Byzantine Dark Age
16. The Iconoclastic Controversy
17. Recovery Under the Macedonian Emperors
18. Imperial Zenith—Basil II
19. Imperial Collapse
20. Alexius I and the First Crusade
21. Comnenian Emperors and Crusaders
22. Imperial Exile and Restoration
23. Byzantine Letters and Aesthetics
24. The Fall of Constantinople
