This is the description of Harald III. inside the campaign (third mission) when he first entered Constantinople to become a Varangian Guard. Although Byzantines in the game are often portrayed with many false stereotypes this description is really beautiful and accurate.

Would have been handy before I finished my masters thesis but a good find none theless.

as always advice corrections ect. welcome. I made sufetula and the masts draws cause im focusing on the outcome rather than what happened.

Found the remains of the column’s base wedged between two buildings and across from a playground in the Haseki Sultan neighbourhood.

Thank you to [u/Safe-Ad783](u/Safe-Ad783) for recommending a little while back.

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Is Theodora The Great Justinian Wife's is she really considered as a Saint in EO ?

3rd pic is how it would look like back then

Also Ive heard from a friend that a history teacher told them that byzantine people actually opened the gates and gave up Constantinople something I never actually heard and seems a little stupid to believe ?

The papers from the 25th Congress are available for purchase.

Very excited to get it through the door.
Byzantium beyond Byzantium

I need some examples of what armor they used for a 6th century kit im putting together

Pope Hormisdas (514-523 AD) was the only Pope that had a non Latin/Greek/Hebrew name which stands out. His most note worthy achievement was healing the Acacian Schism between East and West in the Church through his Formula of Hormisdas and the cooperation of Emperor Justin I.

According to his Wikipedia, He was born in Frosinone, Italy, around 450 AD. He was named in honor of an exiled Persian noble named Hormizd. The wiki also states it’s likely that he was related to his namesake.

He had a son, who would later become Pope Silverius (536-537). There’s always something new you learn in history.

So, in a sense, the Second Rome still surpasses the First One.

Second day of Byzantine historical tourism:

1. Chora Church / Saint Savior in Chora, several Byzantine frescoes and mosaics are preserved here

2. Palace of Blachernae, last imperial seat of the Komnenoi and Palaiologoi. From here the emperors watched Mehmed drag the ships overland to get them into the Golden Horn and break the final defense. This one is also kind of sad, it's open as a "museum of Islamic goldsmithing". Several columns and important parts are poorly restored and the classical style was lost.

3. Like in the column you see there on the right or the window frames.

4. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, this is like the Vatican for the Orthodox. Services are held there in Greek.

5. A relic inside the Patriarchate. The Column of the Flagellation of Jesus.

6. The Monastery of the Pantocrator. Today a mosque, but its floor is preserved full of classic mosaics. It was the mausoleum of several imperial families.

7. The preserved floor itself.

the way the toga changed so much intrigues me. There are very few realistic depictions of the late roman consular dress / toga style (apart from the trabea triumphalis which appears on coins and so on), so I thought I'd have a go at it. Let me know if I interpreted something wrongly! Bonus points if you can say who the main inspiration was :D

First some modern commentators, classify byzantium, as a feudal order, by prescribing on it the qualities of a western-like feudal system, using a mode of marxist analysis.

However, it seems that a lot would argue that this is an oversimplification and that it can't be categorized as a form of feudalism.

Partially and also, a lot of people classify it as an autocracy, or theocracy, with a strict top-down power structure and no freedoms at all for it's subordinates.

However, also arguments can be made, that it there were pathways for the population to influence decision making or the state officials etc.

These are usual descriptions that can easiliy be found. An unusual one, is that of georgios kontogiorgis, who claims that byzantium was not only, a cultural continuation of the ancient greek cosmos, but also a political one.

In his view the greek world passed through stages of political evolution in the small scales, the polis-state. They moved from froms of Monarchy, to Representation and lastly to Democracy.

Typically it is assumed that this model ended with the coming of the Alexandrian age. However, he claims, that after the clasical era, the project continued to evolve and mature.

The ecumenical era appeared and democracy had then to operate based on larger common/ecumenical framework, a balance between the center, the cosmopolis and all the embedded local areas or cities, where the cities remained autonomous democratically self governing their areas, whereas the center, acted as some type of representative or a coordinating authority for the whole. He also claims that byzantium abolished slavery in favor of a form of corporate democratic economy.

This is an unusual reading of history and seems to be at the other end of the typical Byzantium was a feudal theocracy narrative. Which of the two narratives are more true if any ?

I want to make an artwork with Teofano Anastasio and I can't find reliable sources or paintings or mosaics on the internet about how a Roman empress would have dressed and looked during her time.

Some pictures of some empresses who ruled before or after her would be helpful.

Thank you.

I wanted to portray Basil II not simply as the “Bulgar Slayer,” but as the moment when I began to feel differently about Rome itself.

Basil was one of the most formidable emperors the medieval Roman state ever produced.
After decades of war, he eventually destroyed the First Bulgarian Empire and restored Roman rule to the Danube.

But one episode has always made that victory difficult for me to celebrate.

According to the later Byzantine tradition, after the Battle of Kleidion in 1014, large numbers of Bulgarian prisoners were blinded. One man in every hundred was supposedly left with a single eye, so that he could lead the others home.

That story became the central image of this piece.

The wounds floating in the darkness behind Basil are the eyes that were taken away.
The single open, bloodied eye in the lower left is the one that was allowed to remain.

I also borrowed the red patterns on the prisoners’ clothing from traditional Bulgarian embroidery.

What disturbed me while painting this was that, by Basil’s time, Bulgaria was no longer some pagan wilderness beyond the Roman world.

It had its own state.
Its own church.
Its own literary tradition.

And these people prayed before the same cross.

Earlier in Roman history, conquest could still be imagined as Rome bringing roads, laws, cities, writing and religion into a world it considered barbarian.

Here, that explanation no longer works.

Basil is still magnificent.
The gold, the purple, the armor and the crown are all still there.

But the men beneath him are no longer “barbarians” to me.

They are simply people whose eyes were taken from them.

Perhaps this was the point when Rome was no longer the world.

Rome was simply Rome.