Byzantium And The Crusades

This is a very well done podcast: clear, straightforward and comprehensive. The narrator is insightful in his opening remarks for each episode, and he does an outstanding job of reading the text he has chosen in a way that feels natural and conversational.

This show keeps you on your toes excited to hear what happens next!

This is an excellent series, and wonderfully narrated by the Host.

This is definitely not a bad podcast, and it offers a good combined narrative of both the Latin and Byzantine perspectives (The History of the Crusades focuses on the Latin and Islamic perspectives, while the History of Byzantium’s coverage naturally focuses on the Byzantine perspective), but it’s not exemplary either. There are some standard problems (minor historical inaccuracies like saying Zoe died in 1055 and not 1050), and much of it is just excerpts of books (including one that the author is trying to sell, which seems to undermine the point of selling it) but what disappoints me about this podcast is that it largely draws upon very outdated scholarship. Runciman’s narrative is well written and, as far as I know, is still the standard secondary source for the narrative of the Crusades, but it’s 72 years old at this point and doesn’t take into account the massive developments in scholarship since then. As far as I can tell the author’s own book is similarly focused upon arguments that are at least two generations old. These old narratives are a lot more exciting as stories, which explains part of their appeal, but they’re just not accurate. For example, he repeats the narrative that Manzikert was the death knell of the Empire even though it continued to hold provinces in Asia for another two centuries and defeated Turkic armies several times during that period; Manzikert and especially its aftermath were devastating for the Empire, but it was able to recover like it always was. This sort of verges on Gibbon’s very outdated and incredibly patronizing narrative. This isn’t the biggest problem for a pop history podcast, but the best history podcasts (like THOB, The History of Germany, or Revolutions) have been able to incorporate new scholarship in a really exciting way. The episode comparing Psellos’ and Attaleiates’ accounts of Romanos Diogenes’ reign was easily my favorite, and shows the potential this podcast had if it was more up to date and rigorous. Thus this podcast is reminiscent of John Julius Norwich’s books on Byzantine history; well written and exciting as a piece of literature, but very flawed as a piece of scholarship.