Episode 3

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 from the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but from the Christian West 250 years earlier.