Late Antique and Byzantine

Centuries before it bore its current name, the Romanian port of Constanța was known to the Greek world as Tomis, a colony anchored to a high-cliffed peninsula on the edge of the Black Sea.

A minor Judaic sect with Hellenistic influences, emerging from the Roman province of Judaea in the first century, would go on to shape the course of global history.

On 25 July 306 CE, in the remote Roman outpost of Eboracum—modern-day York—the soldiers of the Western Empire proclaimed Constantine I their emperor.

To understand the history of power in the medieval world, one must look to the tip of the Thracian peninsula, where a single city commanded the watery threshold between Europe and Asia.

For more than a thousand years, the citizens of the state we now call the Byzantine Empire lived and died under the conviction that they were, simply and indisputably, Romans.

The dream of a restored Roman Empire found its ultimate champion in a Latin-speaking peasant from Tauresium.

To rebuild an empire on the cheap requires a commander who can conquer with illusions as effectively as with steel.

The throne that Heraclius seized in 610 CE, after leading a rebellion from North Africa with his father against the emperor Phocas, was already sliding toward ruin.

Before it became the modern administrative capital of Crete, the ground beneath Heraklion was already ancient.