Byzantium

  • Aelia Galla Placidia-  Mother of the Western Roman Empire

    If we were judging by famous ancestors, Aelia Galla Placidia had collected quite a few plums.  Daughter of Emperor Theodosius I and his second wife, Galla, who was the daughter of Emperor Valentinian I.  Her half brothers were emperors Honorius and Arcadius, and nephew was Theodosius II, emperor in Constantinople.  Her son went on to become Emperor Valentinian III.  Granted, some of the crop was a bit questionable and possibly moldy, but they were plums all the same.  Added to, or perhaps in spite of, her famous relative, Galla Placidia was one of the most influential figures of the time.  Her biographer Stewart Irvin Oost says, she “played at least…

  • FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO BARBADOS (VIA CORNWALL) -The strange fate of the last Byzantines

    On the 29th of May 1453 Constantine XI Palaeologus, last Emperor of the Byzantines, died fighting the Ottoman Turks besieging his capital. With his death, the 1,000 year history of the Eastern Roman Empire came to an end but not all the imperial family perished in the Fall of Constantinople. Some of the surviving Palaeologus clan ended up in Italy and in the late 1570s, a young man calling himself Theodore Palaeologus was banished from the Adriatic city of Pesaro after becoming mixed up in a murderous vendetta. Theodore, who claimed descent from the last Byzantine emperor’s brother, then vanishes from sight for several years but he reappears on the…

  • The Founding of Constantinople

    Byzantium was an old city. There had been a settlement on the banks of the Bosphorus since the 5th century BCE. Its strategic position guarding the strait from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea made it an important waterway for trade all the way from Western Europe to Asia.By the time of Constantine the Great, it was being revamped into a commemorative treasure city, but circumstances in Rome changed. At the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine underwent some sort of spiritual con [...]

  • Empress Theodora- Purple is the Noblest Winding Sheet

    Born the daughter of a bearkeeper and an acrobat, the prospects for the new baby girl born in the vast city of Constantinople were not that great. Likely she would become a performer like her parents, and if she was lucky the mistress of a wealthy man who would take care of her. At that time an actress was little more than a courtesan and debarred from polite society. If she was unlucky, she would die in poverty like so many others. However, fate had more in store for the young girl her parents named Theodora. It would take her to the highest places in the world, far beyond anyone’s…