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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Episode 62, God's Punishment.

Last time we talked about how the Roman government and army managed to adapt to the onslaught of the

Arabs. This week I want to talk about how Roman self-belief survived such an assault on its ego.

At the end of the last century, various listeners asked about whether the Byzantines saw themselves

as diminished and less powerful now that the Western Empire had fallen.

The answer then was no, not really. Once Constantinople was built, the Eastern Empire began to

develop an identity of its own, separate from the old sense of one united empire spanning the

continent. By the time of Justinian's day, men were thrilled to hear that an old province had

been retaken when Vandal Africa fell and they cheered in the Hippodrome as the triumph

processed by them. And I doubt many of them were turning to their neighbours to say,

this is all very well, but geographically we're a much smaller empire than we used to be.

Our ability to look at political maps with the click of a button or perceive events as part of

a decline and fall across the centuries changes our perspective dramatically from the people who lived

through it. But understandably, as we reach 700 AD, listener GT asks,

I have the same question I posed at the end of the sixth century, what is the state of Byzantine

self-identity at this point? How was there ego doing given all the territorial losses?

Did it change how they thought of themselves? The answer now is yes, but also no.

...