not doomed to repeat, but I'll do it anyway

Around a year ago, I decided that my hour-long commutes had to be good for something other than driving me insane with the same 12 songs from Pandora being played over and over again.  I decided that I should try to enrich myself.  Learn something.  Around the same time, I became aware of a superlative podcast series about various historical events known as Hardcore History.  I quickly became engrossed in their series on the end of the Roman Republic, which correlated nicely with my decision to begin studying Latin.

It was enchanting.  The showrunner, Dan Carlin, narrates with an excitement and expression that absolutely absorbs your attention.  He picks the most fascinating tidbits from various histories of the periods he studies and serves them up with a relish that borders on the fiendish.  His sense for the most outlandish, but relatable, elements of these histories animates them in a way that reveals his rare gift for communicating the grand importance of these events, but he never loses sight of the basic elements of human nature that motivate these dramas, great and small.

And from there, I learned about the Eastern Front in WWII, the Mongol Invasions of the 13th century, the Punic Wars, the conflicts between the Apache and the U.S. Army, and other sundry historical reliquiae.  The only problem was that Hardcore History only releases a new show once every few months, and I wanted MORE.

Thankfully, there are many, many historical podcasts just waiting for you to fall into.  The History of World War II Podcast, for instance, which strives to cover the entirety of the war, and all its military, political, and social aspects, in as exhaustive detail as is reasonable; also, When Diplomacy Fails, a podcast centered on the question of why wars between states happen in the first place, when everybody claims to try so hard to avoid them; and, perhaps the most epic of them all, The History of Byzantium Podcast, bringing you fully into the dynamic excitement of the final thousand years of the Eastern Roman Empire.

All of them are deeply fascinating, but for some reason, Byzantium calls to me more than any other.  I'm not sure why -- similarly to Japan, the name Byzantium has held a deep allure for me from a young age.  Perhaps because we learn so little about it in the standard historical curriculum of American primary and secondary schooling, it became even more exotic of an place to me than its very nature as the gateway to the ancient East would suggest.

If you aren't clear, Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire, is our modern name to describe what was then known as the Roman Empire or, if you were feeling catty, the Eastern Roman Empire; that part of the Roman Empire that went on with business as usual after the Western part fall under the combined might of a bunch of upstart savages (who would later form the core of Western European civilization, and whose descendants would feel nothing but admiration for the empire their forebears had fought tooth and nail to bring down).  The name "Byzantium" comes from the ancient Greek city that inhabited the site on which Constantinople (not yet Istanbul) was founded.

The fall of the West was almost meaningless to the fantastically wealthy East, you see, and they went on calling themselves Roman citizens and crowning Roman emperors well into the 15th century.

They also had Vikings as bodyguards, so that's awesome.

You are looking at Norse runes engraved in the Hagia Sophia.

Through an assortment of emperors, repeated wars with the Persians, frequent inner turmoil in the Balkans (yeah, it was bad then, too), and the loss and reconquest of various far-flung territories, the dream of the past glories of the Roman Empire never faded from the minds of the Byzantines.  One of the greatest Eastern emperors, Justinian, dreamed of reclaiming those lands which had been lost and reestablishing Roman rule over the entire Mediterranean:  the vision of Mare Nostrum, our sea.  It was a vision that would survive well into the 20th century, eventually driving Benito Mussolini to embark on a path of war to prove Italy's strength as a true successor to Rome.  Remember how that ended up?  Thanks, Justinian.

For all its claims to the Roman legacy, though, Byzantium fell further and further from its connections to the West.  Geography proved stronger than tradition, and the emperors eventually wound up speaking Greek, rather than Latin.  Constant border troubles with the Persians led the Eastern Empire to all but abandon any pretensions it might have at reclaiming its former western holdings.  And Christianity, which had grown more vibrant and diverse in the East than it ever could under the watchful eye of the self-supreme Pontiff in the Vatican, caused the final, unmendable tear between the West and East with the onset of the Great Schism.  Never again would Christians in the West and East look upon each other with the same sense of brotherhood and mutual respect as they had before the East issued its final rejection of the Pope's ultimate authority over the other bishops.

The Schism's full effects took centuries to become obvious, but when the Turkish Ottoman Empire took up the mantle of the collapsed Persian Empire to seek retribution for the Crusades and bring the Sword of Islam down on the Romans, there was nobody in Europe who was willing to lend aid.  The Ottomans besieged Constantinople in 1453, finally conquering the city and renaming it to its modern Istanbul.  In that moment, the Legacy of Rome was well and truly destroyed.

Would that have happened if the Crusades had never been called?  Although the Western Europeans took the lion's share of the plunder and lands during the Crusades, they were originally called as a result of the Eastern Emperor Alexius I Comnenus writing to Pope Urban II for aid against the Seljuk Turks.  The Crusades were a brutal and bloody affair, and in many ways their echoes are still being felt today.

History is a complex, fantastically interwoven thing, and to study it is to understand the greater patterns that underlie all human endeavor.  I've given you just a taste, here, a simple taste, but the truth of it is that my hunger for such knowledge can never be satisfied.  To understand the present, we really do have to study the past.  Thank goodness it has been recorded so well for us.

(As a final pleasing note to fans of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, I would like to point out that one of the major defenses the Byzantines maintained against a naval attack on Constantinople was a giant chain stretched across their harbor.  Oh, yes.  Yes, yes, yes.)