A conversation with Peter Heather (King's College, London) about his new book Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (New York: Knopf, 2023). Peter is one of the leading historians of the fall of the western Roman empire and the emergence there of the post-Roman, "barbarian" kingdoms. He now brings a revisionist approach to the emergence of the Church in (mostly western) Europe. This book covers a lot of ground, and so we focus on the early period, where his arguments affect the east too. We talk about the role of contingency, the near-miss of Homoian Christianity, the decisive role of secular rulers, and much more.
19. ”Get out of the way, Battal Gazi is Coming!”: Turkish films on Byzantium, with Buket Kitapçı Bayrı
18. Byzantine soft power in an age of decline, with Cecily Hilsdale
17. The peoples of the Caucasus between Rome, Iran, and the steppe, with Garth Fowden
16. The Parthenon mosque, with Elizabeth Key Fowden
15. When does Roman history end and Byzantine begin?, with Marion Kruse
14. Byzantine Orthodoxy and homosexuality, with Stephen Morris
13. The case for Shenute the Great and the Coptic tradition, with Sofia Torallas Tovar and David Brakke
12. Byzantine Studies in Turkey 2.0, with Siren Çelik
11. Byzantine erotic epigrams, with Steven Smith
10. A Byzantine man of affairs, with Dimitris Krallis
9. From India to Byzantium, with Paroma Chatterjee
8. Hagia Sophia rediscovered, with Bissera Pentcheva
7. The kingdom of Rus' and "medieval Europe," with Christian Raffensperger
6. Armenian art, with Christina Maranci
5. Western fantasies about Byzantium, with Elena Boeck
4. The New Environmental History, with Tina Sessa
3. The Colonial Fourth Crusade, with George Demacopoulos
2. Imagining the Moment of Death, with Ellen Muehlberger
1. Byzantine Gender, with Leonora Neville
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