Hello everyone, for those who don't know my father died last week. He was diagnosed with cancer back in June and things develop very quickly.

Thank you all for the kind messages that have been coming in on the website I really appreciate your support.

Obviously my work schedule is being disrupted because I'm spending time with my family but I will be back soon with the reign of Manuil Komninos.

I'm also recording this message today October the 23rd 2021 because from today I'll no longer be selling episodes of the podcast at thehistoryabysantium.com.

Obviously selling episodes individually at the website has been a big deal for me over the years. It's enabled me to become a podcast a full time and I'm very grateful to all of you who bought from there.

But the website also caused me a lot of problems and a lot of admin and it's time has come.

As you hopefully know by now the new way to get bonus episodes of the show is at Patreon.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Patreon it's a website that allows you to take out an individual subscription to a particular cause or content creator.

You're not subscribing to a service or to any other podcast or anything else when you take out a subscription with my Patreon.

You're entirely supporting the history of Byzantium.

And in case you didn't know you can end your subscription at any time.

There's no fixed term and you can take up a subscription anytime and get all the episodes you want and then you can drop it and then you can pick it up again and get the episodes back.

I know some of you liked the option of buying episodes individually. Well you can kind of still do that with Patreon by picking up and dropping your subscription whenever you like.

There are three options over at patreon.com forward slash history of Byzantium. For $6 a month you get your own advert free podcast feed with every episode of ever created.

All bonus episodes, House of War, Byzantine stories, fundraising episodes, they're all in there.

For $3 a month you just get the same feed you get for free but there are no adverts and you can also support me at $1 a month which gives no physical benefits but does give you a psychological sense of satisfaction and moral superiority from knowing you're supporting a worthy cause.

I'm afraid the sales site at the history of Byzantium.com will have shut down by the end of today. So if you, you know, we're hoping you to listen to episodes on there I'm afraid it's gone and I can't help you get them.

But I can provide refunds or partial refunds if you bought an episode yesterday and haven't listened to it or if you had a subscription that's still running beyond this date.

Email me the history of Byzantium at gmail.com to sort that sort of thing out. Obviously I will be slow to respond at the moment because I'm spending time with my family but I will reply to all emails eventually.

Thank you again for all your kind messages and all your support and I'll be with you again soon.