Byzantine Empire

Jan Read describes Al-Mansur, the honorific name for the leader who restored Moorish power in Spain during the late 10th century.

Christian Byzantium and the Muslim Abbasid caliphate were bitter rivals. Yet the necessities of trade and a mutual admiration of ancient Greece meant that there was far more to their relationship than war, as Jonathan Harris explains.

Five hundred years ago Constantinople—long a bastion of the Western world—fell to the armies of the Grand Turk. G.R. Potter gives his account of how the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire finally disappeared.

The popular image of crusading is derived almost entirely from western accounts of the victorious First Crusade. Yet when historians examine Byzantine sources about the campaign a very different picture emerges, argues Peter Frankopan.

The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.

The building of Istanbul’s new underground railway has uncovered thousands of years of history, including the first complete Byzantine naval craft ever found. Pinar Sevinclidir investigates.

Marius Ostrowski explains why the Church was so dominant in the Middle ages, but also sees traces of a growing secularism.

Jonathan Phillips sees one of the most notorious events in European history as a typical ‘clash of cultures’.

The final moments of Byzantine control of the imperial capital.

Richard Cavendish describes the Battle of Civitate, fought by the Normans and a papal coalition on June 18th, 1053.