I've never had any runners with the Met. I just didn't see it as the place for me.

But elevated minds, who coached me to young people, gave me the opportunity of work experience.

And that opened my eyes to what the Met does.

I joined some training with new police recruits, talked about how we can bridge gaps and rebuild

trust between communities and the police. It made me realise I want a career with real purpose

and it really inspired me, now I'm applying to be an officer because policing matters.

Become a Met Police Officer, search Met Police Careers.

Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, Episode 269, Questions 13.

Let's get into the final batch of questions for this end of the century period.

Listeners CK asks why did the Romans rarely attempt to make diplomatic marriages with non-Romans

prior to the Crusades? Could Justinian, for example, have married an

Ostrigothic princess rather than Theodora?

I thought we'd start with this one as it ties into what we talked about last week.

The Comdenian centuries saw lots of marriages between Romans and neighbouring aristocrats.

But in Justinian's day, a foreign marriage was almost unthinkable.

Obviously for a long time the Roman Empire was so powerful that it didn't need to bother with

diplomatic marriages. And its ideology essentially saw Rome as civilization and those outside it

as barbarians. So to offer marital alliances would have been beneath the dignity of the empire.

It would have been an acknowledgement that a neighbouring state were in some sense equal to the

Romans. Over time a few foreign brides were welcomed in, but that was seen as acceptable because

a Kaza woman, for example, would turn up and be baptized and taught how to behave properly.

Whereas to send a Roman woman to the Kaza's would have been intolerable since an orthodox

...