HISTORY
22 October 2008
Wednesday 22 October 2008 11:00-11:30 (Radio 4 FM)
Historian Bettany Hughes presents a series that uses the latest archaeological evidence to learn more about the empire of Byzantium and the people who ruled it.
Bettany ventures to the eastern edge of the empire, where the new religion of Islam first gained a foothold.
For nearly a thousand years the empire made war and peace with the Muslim countries to its south and east. However, the fatal blow to Byzantium came not, as is widely thought at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but by from the Christian west 250 years earlier.
