Hello, everyone. Today we have another Kickstarter back rewards episode. I'll be answering a

listener question and then we'll have another message from a listener with some Byzantine

book recommendations. The question posed to me also touches on books. Listener RB asks

about what goes into each episode, how much research, how many books and other sources,

in other words, a day in the life of a podcaster. As most of you will have worked out over the

years, the answer is very different depending on whether I'm researching the narrative or

for the end of the century. With the narrative things are relatively straightforward. I'm

looking at things from the perspective of the Byzantine state, I stick to a chronological

order of events, and ideally I can produce an episode within a week. For the end of the

century I often have to research a whole topic before I realize how much of it will be relevant

to the show, and because Byzantine history often lacks good sources, in order to tell you

about what happened in 1025, I have to read everything that happened between 900 and 1100

in a particular field, the military, Constantinople, the Arab world, the Balkans, and so on. This can

often take weeks, but I find it usually provides insights that were worth finding, and they

in turn enrich the rest of the show. So with the narrative I start with the best secondary sources.

In other words, modern historians who try to put together a coherent narrative passing through

the sources to remove inaccuracies or fill-in gaps in our knowledge. Not a huge amount of books

actually do this, most are specific to a time period or a topic. For a long time I used

Warren Tredgold's, a history of the Byzantine state and society, in combination with Mark

Wittos, the making of Orthodox Byzantium, both excellent in different ways. For our current

period, as you know, Antonychol Dellis' streams of gold, rivers of blood, is absolutely ideal.

In it he goes through both the ancient sources and more recent histories, deconstructing blind

...