michaelspotts
Puritan Board Freshman
I just finished Europe from its Origins, a 25-hour video podcast (iTunes, free) that culminates in the terrible siege of Constantinople by the Turks. I am stunned. Anyone who thinks history is dry stuff is either ignorant or heartless. History is the study of another's present, full of events as real and visceral as anything felt today.
The image of the last Emperor, aware of his place in a royal line stretching back over one-thousand years, fighting to his death in the Romanus gates at an odds of sixteen to one—the bizarre, guttural melodies of the horde of deep-chested Janissary killers singing with swords aloft—the idea of thousands upon thousands of citizens crowding into the ancient Hagia Sophia, cowering and crying out as battering rams burst against the brass doors and surrounded everywhere by sublime mosaics depicting the end of the world—the prayers of a multitude rebounding off cavernous walls, refracting the strange sound of faith, either shattering or crystalizing into harder, denser forms; the sound of eschatology being instantly disavowed or reinterpreted—husbands, wives, and children separated, screaming, stolen away to slavery in the deserts, torture or execution.
I recommend the series as a helpful window into the development of Eastern and Western Christianity, and how often they nearly unified. Not without fault, the series is especially skillful in its display of Islam's true colors as anything but tolerant of other—or even its own—people with different beliefs.
The image of the last Emperor, aware of his place in a royal line stretching back over one-thousand years, fighting to his death in the Romanus gates at an odds of sixteen to one—the bizarre, guttural melodies of the horde of deep-chested Janissary killers singing with swords aloft—the idea of thousands upon thousands of citizens crowding into the ancient Hagia Sophia, cowering and crying out as battering rams burst against the brass doors and surrounded everywhere by sublime mosaics depicting the end of the world—the prayers of a multitude rebounding off cavernous walls, refracting the strange sound of faith, either shattering or crystalizing into harder, denser forms; the sound of eschatology being instantly disavowed or reinterpreted—husbands, wives, and children separated, screaming, stolen away to slavery in the deserts, torture or execution.
I recommend the series as a helpful window into the development of Eastern and Western Christianity, and how often they nearly unified. Not without fault, the series is especially skillful in its display of Islam's true colors as anything but tolerant of other—or even its own—people with different beliefs.
