I'm John Batchel with my colleague Germanicus, and Germanicus often speaks of Byzantium.

It's not a part of the Roman history I know very well.

It's several hundred years in the future.

And it will turn on Rome surviving with Greek speakers in Constantinople for a thousand years.

And that success colored the opinion and the lives of people that we now know as Ukrainians.

Crimea was at that time occupied by Byzantium.

This is before the Turks came in the 15th century. And Moscow was always fencing

with Poland-Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, over the control of Keefe. Those were the elements that danced back and forth for 500 years.

And I bring this up, Germanicus, only because if you take it from Rome's point of view,

Byzantium is a success, a refuge. If you take it from Keith's point of view, or Moscow's point of view, or even

Warsaw's point of view, Byzantium is unapproachable, the golden city, the giant of the age.

It's all lost now. I don't know that anyone in the 21st century appreciates it,

but it wasn't just a refuge, as I've sometimes thought.

It achieved much more than Rome had been able to achieve in its 500 years of power.

And then it was lost when the Turks overran it, and there's a tragedy.

It was not lost.

And it is every bit as big as you say back then and every bit as big as you say right now.

A book that changed my life was by a wonderful historian,

Dmitri Obolensky, and the title is the Byzantine Commonwealth. And what he proposed, this is in 1971, was that the Orthodox world was more than just a shared

religious faith.

It was in effect a unified civilization. It was a commonwealth. And he showed that in many

ways. I mean, one of the best examples was when the dome of the Aes Sophia, the beacon of Byzantine Christendom collapsed in 1346.

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