Hello! This post is going to be permanently stuck to the first page of the blog so everyone who comes here will see this first.
The first thing you need to know is the Twitter address: http://twitter.com/CryForByzantium. Follow it now!
What’s going on here? On the Twitter feed, I’m going to be microblogging the history of the Byzantine Empire, 140 characters at a time. Four times a day, the Twitter feed will update with another post that will present to you, in chronological order, a snippet of the history of the Empire. We’re beginning with the accession of Constantine I (Constantine the Great) in 306, and hopefully will continue all the way through the final collapse of Constantinople in 1453.
What’s this blog for? The Twitter feed is the main thing, but I hope to use this blog to post on various issues related to it, announce things, comments and links related to what’s going on on the feed, etc. I may also archive the old tweets here if I can figure out how to do it.
Do I have to know anything about history to follow the Twitter feed? No. You can pick up at any time, and after a few posts you’ll probably pick up the gist of what’s happening. The tweets are short (obviously) and to the point. Some are preceded by a date, so by going back through the previous tweets you will soon pick up when the events are happening.
Whose “voice” is speaking in each tweet? Usually the “person” speaking will be the Emperor. He (and occasionally she) will explain in brief terms what’s going on. When there’s a change of emperor, the Twitter feed will update with “New Emperor” and the name of the new ruler.
Who is the Emperor now? (updated 9 April 2011) Zoe.
What source material are you using to create the tweets? I am a tremendous fan of Lord Norwich’s 3-volume Byzantium series, which I find is the best-written modern summary of Byzantine history, but I also draw from numerous other sources (I am, for instance, also a big fan of Dr. Warren Treadgold’s books). Email me (cryforbyzantium@gmail.com) if you want to know more.
What does [OFF STORY] mean? Announcements on the feed from me which are not intended as part of the history will be preceded with [OFF STORY]. Any “I” or “me” reference in an [OFF STORY] post comes from Sean (me), the creator of this madness!
When did CryForByzantium start? The first tweet went live at 3:00 PM on Sunday, July 12, 2009. I have no idea how long it will take to get through the whole history of the Empire or how far we’ll make it, but we’ll give it a shot.
Why are you doing this? A–because it’s fun. B–because almost no one knows anything about medieval history these days, and I thought Twitter would be a cool, fast, low-key way to present it. I’m also curious if there will be any interest out there. (Probably not). We have 0 followers now and it’ll probably take a long time to get any signifcant ones. [Update 9 April 2011: We now have 830 followers.] But, we’ll see! This is a pilot project that I’m launching as an idea on how to present history in a fun and interesting way.
That’s all you need to know. Any more questions, email me. Enjoy!
So, it’s been a very long time since I updated this blog. What is kind of nice about CryForByzantium is that it doesn’t need a lot of attention. I’ve been very busy in the past few months with my master’s program in history, so the less time I have to spend on other things, the better.
There’s not much to report. CFB continues to grow by the day, with over 800 followers. I do read all @ replies and messages, and from those it seems that people are really enjoying the process.
Also I note that a lot of people who comment know something about Byzantine history. Particularly when an Emperor says something that proves to be ironic in hindsight–such as when Michael V recently thought there was no chance the people of Constantinople would rise against him–there are followers there to note the irony. I think that’s really great, that so many people who know and care about this history are enjoying watching it unfold tweet by tweet.
Right now we’re in the (brief) joint reign of Zoe and Theodora, to date the only two female co-rulers ever to hold executive power jointly–still, to this day, more than 1000 years later. The fact that they were brought to the throne by a popular revolution, one of the very few in Byzantine history, makes it even more remarkable. Alas, if you know the history you know that this state of affairs won’t last long. Soon we’ll be in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachus, which will bring us, of course, to the great Schism of 1054.
After the Schism I’m really looking forward to doing the tweets for CFB. My period of strong interest concerns the late medieval era, and I’ll be lavishing lots of attention on the battles with the Turks and the Crusades. As I get more in-depth into the history the number of tweets per emperor (and per event) tends to go up, so we may be moving more slowly through the next centuries of history than we have previously, and that’s just fine. Some of the real stars of our story are yet to make their entrance: Romanus Diogenes, Alexius Comnenus, and even Eleanor of Aquitaine will be mentioned in our narrative.
Thanks, as always, for following!
It’s been quite a long time since I’ve commented on this blog, so sorry for the lack of updates. As far as CFB is concerned, there really hasn’t been much to report in the last few months. Everything has been clicking along more or less smoothly.
I am now in graduate school, taking a full load of classes and teaching as well. Therefore, the upkeep of CFB is a bit more arduous than it was previously. However, I’m proud to say that there have been no gaps in the story since the very beginning on July 12, 2009, except those occasional flubs caused by technical malfunctions. Lately some tweets have been running a half hour or so late, and on rare occasions a few hours late. I haven’t had to manually post tweets in a while, though. Twaitter isn’t perfect but it’s pretty good, and extremely well-suited for the task I use it for.
One thing that is different: you now have to be registered and signed in to post comments on this blog. I have been flooded with spam comments–hundreds of them. The settings for this blog are such that they don’t show up unless I approve them. If you have a substantive comment, please register with Blog.com, sign in and post it. Otherwise it probably won’t show up. I just haven’t got the time to check hundreds of potential comments anymore.
CFB continues to gain followers and receive favorable mentions. I can’t generally reply to @ comments because it would break the flow of the story, but I read each and every one. Thanks to everyone who RT’s, mentions me on Follow Friday, and spreads the word. This project began in 2009 as an experiment to see if social media can be used to advance the teaching of history. Very clearly it can, and you all, the followers and fans, have made that experiment a success. I have no plans to retire this Twitter account anytime soon.
Substantively, we’re now in the last half of the 9th century. This is a period of relative calm for Byzantium. I’ve spent a lot of time on the earlier 9th century because I find many of the personalities there to be fascinating–Irene, Nicephorus, Krum, Michael the Amorian, Michael III (the drunkard), and Basil I. You may have noticed I spent a lot of time on the Thomas revolt of 821-23, which I find a particularly interesting subject and one that’s often glossed over by history books. The later ninth and most of the tenth centuries may go a little faster, as I’m less enamored with them. But you can still expect to see the usual succession of battles, intrigues, and religious controversies that you’ve come to expect from CFB.
Carry on, and thanks for following!
We have reached a milestone here on CFB: as of today, June 9, 2010, the Twitter feed now has 376 followers. That may not sound like a particularly significant number, except for one thing: my own personal Twitter account (you can follow it here) has, as of this writing, 375 followers. There are as of now more people reading Byzantine history than those who read my own personal tweets, and I think that’s great!
The response to this project has been amazing, and continues to increase day by day. One thing I’ve noticed is that with my personal Twitter account my number of followers rises and falls all the time, but CFB’s almost always increases steadily. I also find it great that people direct @ replies my way even though I can’t reply within the context of the story (usually), but it’s always interesting to hear peoples’ reactions to the history as it unfolds.
I joined Twitter on August 22, 2008. CFB went live more than a year later, on July 12, 2009 (our one-year anniversary is soon approaching!) I think it’s both amazing and heartening that, while I’ve struggled for nearly two years to interest 375 people in what I have to say, by tweeting nothing more than history CFB has attracted more than that number in less than half the time.
Personally, I’m very happy to be less popular than this project. I’m not really that important, but history is very important. People will continue to tell the history of Byzantium for centuries to come, long after I’m in my grave and nobody cares what I think anymore (not as if anyone ever did!) I hope that this project is at least one tiny contribution to the sum total of the world’s knowledge about Byzantium and medieval history in general.
Thank you to everyone who follows, and enjoy! Welcome those of you who just started following!
I just thought I would check in with a few words on how the CFB project is going. It’s been mostly self-sufficient for the last few months, clicking along without much intervention from me (except that I do still have to write the tweets and upload them, of course!). April has seen a few incidents of missed tweets and a couple of technical glitches, but for the most part they’re short-lived and haven’t caused any major disruption.
As you may have seen in another post I made today, CFB has been featured on a great Byzantine blog from England. I highly recommend Tom’s blog for anyone interested in Byzantium and keeping up with those around the world who promote it on the Web.
Substantively, right now we find ourselves between the two reigns of Justinian II, one of Byzantium’s most violent and ruthless emperors, and, after his nose was amputated after his first deposition, hands-down the ugliest. I find Justinian II a fascinating character. He was certainly more violent and repressive than his famous namesake, but people forget that the first Justinian could also be heavy-handed at times (such as the Hippodrome massacre). Nonetheless, Justinian II’s reign is responsible for a large part of why Byzantine history was so dark and bleak in the decades after Heraclius, and he was only the most stable ruler (which isn’t saying much) in a long line of ambitious incompetents who tried to rule the Empire in this troubled period.
In doing the recent tweets I’ve been struck, as nearly anyone who studies Byzantium in this era is, at how precarious their position really was vis-a-vis the Saracens. If you’ve been following the feed for a couple of months you’ll notice how frequent the sieges of Constantinople were, and there’s another one coming up soon, that one being the granddaddy of them all: the 717 siege which truly crystallized the antagonism of Byzantium and the Islamic world into what became a bitterly personal blood feud that would last for over 700 years. It’s also remarkable the degree to which the Byzantine people eventually became accustomed to living with the constant threat of their civilization being annihilated, much as we ourselves did during the Cold War period, though of course in a markedly different context.
After the events of the early 8th century we will begin to get into Iconoclasm. I admit I’m not as big a fan of Iconoclasm as many historians seem to be; Treadgold, for instance, characterizes it as only the most “flashy” of a long series of doctrinal controversies but not really different in character. I’m probably going to adopt that approach, and while certainly Iconoclasm will be dealt with extensively in CFB, I want to make sure it doesn’t overshadow the other very real issues that were going on in Byzantium in the 8th and early 9th centuries.
As always, thanks for following!
I’m always happy to hear from others who are interested in Byzantium and in bringing this rich and fabulous history to more people, so I’m very happy to recommend a blog about Byzantium that’s recently come to my attention. The Byzantine Blog is a creation of a Byzantinist from Hampshire, England named Tom Sawford, and it’s really a fine project posting a lot of very good information about Byzantium. I recently spoke to Tom by email and just today he posted a blog entry about the CFB project which he recently came across on Twitter: http://mybyzantine.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/the-cryforbyzantium-project/
Thanks, Tom, for your terrific article and getting the word out about this wonderful period in history! Every few months CFB gets mentioned on a blog or in an article here and there, and it always results in more people becoming interested in the Byzantine civilization and what it has to offer our own society and understanding of history.
Tom has recently done some profiles on Byzantine-related books such as The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge and Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips, lectures in England on Byzantine topics, and his own thoughts on modern issues seen through the prism of Byzantine history. All of these thoughts are very interesting and I look forward to his insights in the future.
As always since I began this project nearly 10 months ago, I’m amazed and happy to see how many Byzantine fans there are out there on the Web and the fascinating ways they use technology to indulge their historical passion.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a blog. Sorry about that. The good thing about CFB is that once it’s all loaded into the system it keeps on clicking along without any attention from me, and with all that’s going on in my life it’s nice to be able to leave it alone for weeks at a time and come back to it only when it needs attention.
Technically there’s very little to report. The problems I was having in January have not recurred for a while, and Twaitter’s been doing quite well all month. I don’t think I’ve had to post a tweet manually in quite some time.
Substantively, we’re now deep into the reign of Heraclius, who’s certainly one of the most important Byzantine emperors, and arguably the most successful of all time. I think you could make a case that Heraclius is one of the best national leaders in the whole history of the world. When he came to the throne in 610 the Empire was impoverished, prostrate from the terrible privations and mismanagement of Phocas, and literally about to be destroyed by the Persians who were rampaging through the eastern provinces, while barbarians had a field day in the west. Totally impotent at first, forced to watch helplessly as Persian victories caused a famine that nearly wiped out the Empire from starvation, Heraclius rebuilt the army, reconstituted the treasury and then took vengeance against the Persians in one of the most punishing and vicious wars in recorded history. Heraclius’s numerous defeats of the Persians completely ended Persia as a nation, whose weakened remnants were easy prey for the Muslims who arose just a few years later. Almost no one else in world history has ever taken a country from such depths to such triumphs during his administration.
There was a bit of a stir a few weeks back, at the depths of Byzantine despair, where “Heraclius” tweeted that “CryForByzantium may not continue.” I really appreciated the responses expressing support for this project and sadness that it was ending, but the statement was not meant literally: as a character in the ongoing story Heraclius was expressing how deep the crisis was and that for a while it looked like Byzantium would not continue as a nation. For me, barring some unforseen problem, I certainly plan to continue doing the CFB Twitter feed until the very end of Byzantine history, which as many of you know finally came to an end on May 29, 1453.
Welcome to all the new followers, and thanks very much for the support!
It’s been a while since I’ve done a status blog. Due to my other projects January has been a very busy month, and much of the time I’ve been fighting sort of a rear-guard action to make sure that CFB doesn’t run out of material (meaning, that there are constantly tweets scheduled and I don’t have to play catch-up).
Unfortunately there have been a couple of glitches this month, all technical. You may have noticed a few updates going at odd times and some gaps between them. If you’ve read past blogs you know that since about September or so the tool I’ve used to schedule the tweets is Twaitter (www.twaitter.com). I have set my personal Twitter account (which follows CFB) to notify me via SMS/text when CFB updates. That way, no matter where I am, on the computer or off somewhere, I can see if the site is proceeding normally. Well, during January there have been two separate issues. One is that for a few days in the middle of the month my cell phone service provider couldn’t connect with Twitter at all, which meant I didn’t receive updates and couldn’t find out without actually logging onto the site whether they had gone at all or not. Second, this past weekend Twaitter has been introducing a new version of their site, and I can’t sign into their site. Tweets that were scheduled seemed to be going at the proper times, but I couldn’t log on to the site to upload more, which meant CFB was scheduled to “run dry” beginning yesterday at noon.
Until I can log back on to Twaitter I’ve been trying out some other future-tweet services. This week I’m trying Futuretweets.com which seems to work okay for now. I’d really like to get back to Twaitter because I’m used to it and I have a large archive of previous tweets built up there, but we’ll see if they can roll out their new version. Hopefully so.
Substantively, we’re in a dark period of Byzantine history, the chaotic decades between the death of Justinian and the rise of Heraclius. I confess I had a little fun with Justin II, who actually did go crazy midway during his reign and had to be replaced in matters of state by his wife. The movie buffs among you may have recognized some of Justin’s crazy rantings as quotes from Col. Kurtz (the Marlon Brando character) in Apocalypse Now. These transitional emperors all had relatively short reigns, so you’ll see the throne turning over several times before we get to Heraclius.
CFB continues to attract followers, though at a slower pace than in November and December, but welcome all, and I always like to add that I do read all direct messages and @ replies. Thanks especially to those who have begun mentioning CFB in their Follow Fridays!
See you next month.
Welcome to all the new followers! CFB continues to gain followers, and our graphs on TwitterCounter keep showing a steady increase. With hundreds of years of history still to come I’m curious to see how this project grows over the next several months.
We’re coming into the Christmas season, and I thought long and hard about how to handle CFB for Christmas. Ultimately I decided that there will be no updates on December 25–not for religious reasons, but largely because I don’t think a lot of people are going to be glued to their computers or Blackberries on Christmas Day reading Byzantine history on Twitter, and taking a hiatus will avoid having people to click back through and see what they missed while their kids were furiously tearing open their gifts. The tweets will resume at midnight Dec. 26. Also as a nod to our Greek Orthodox friends, there will be a “Merry Christmas” message that goes up at midnight on January 7, the day the traditional Greek Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas. (The Greek Orthodox Church did not adopt the Gregorian calendar at the end of World War I as most Orthodox countries did. Therefore, December 25 falls on what is January 7 for the rest of us).
There have been some fascinating things happening lately. The Nika riots went up around Thanksgiving, and this week will see a grim time in Byzantium, that being the Plague of Justinian in 542. That’s pretty bad when history names a terrible pestilence after you, even if you had nothing to do with causing it, isn’t it? It’s very interesting how I feel I’ve come to know Justinian as a personality by trying to write the tweets as if he was saying them. It’s rare that you ever get a sense of personality from figures in medieval history, but Justinian’s is one of the few who comes across. You may also notice a softening of his more ruthless tendencies as his reign continues. He was cruel and bloodthirsty at the beginning of his reign, but he seems to have moderated his behavior toward the end. I hope that comes through on the tweets.
Thanks again for following. As always, I read all direct messages and @ replies. Have a great holiday season!
Hello all, and welcome especially to the new followers of CFB! We’ve gained an incredible 99 followers in the last 30 days, and judging from the RT’s and @ replies, there is an increasing level of interest in the project and in Byzantine history.
I try not to clutter up the story/timeline with extraneous stuff, but the other day I did make a plug for CFB, promising some cool and interesting things ahead. Some of the most fascinating episodes in all of Byzantine history will be coming up on the timeline over the next month (conveniently during the holidays). It’s no coincidence that such momentous events as the Nika Riots of 532, the construction of the new St. Sofia cathedral, the Plague of Justinian and the short-lived reconquest of Rome are happening in the reign of Justinian I. If Justinian wasn’t the most consequential emperor in all of Byzantine history he’s definitely in the top 5, and his reign is one of the most fascinating features in the whole story. Despite his undeniable brutality and cold-bloodedness, Justinian is a surprisingly humanizing character from this difficult-to-understand period in history, and that’s in no small measure due to the influence of Theodora. On CFB we’ve already been through how Justinian met and fell in love with Theodora, and you’ll soon see the huge impact she had on his reign, literally saving it at one crucial juncture. It’s not often that a real-life love story turns historians into romance writers, but it’s not just Hollywood-sounding hyperbole to say that the relationship of Justinian and Theodora was one of the grandest romances in history.
Technically CFB is still functioning pretty well. Just today (Nov. 23) there was an inexplicable flub and one of the updates did not go from Twaitter as expected, but I was at my computer at the time and managed to post it manually within a few minutes. Hopefully that won’t happen again.
As always, I read all the @ replies and direct messages. Thanks again for following, and enjoy the story as it progresses!
Sorry I haven’t posted a blog on this earlier, but I’ve been very busy (doing things such as writing and uploading the new tweets!) I did want to make mention of some recognition that the CFB project has recently gotten, from Medievalists.net, who are also on Twitter (@Medievalists). Read the full blog post here:
http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/history-of-byzantium-one-twitter-post.html
Medievalists conducted a fun little email interview with me, and I really appreciate their interest in the project! You can get some fascinating insight on a great deal of medieval history from browsing their blog and their terrific site (www.medievalists.net).
Every mention of CFB on a blog drives followers to sign up, and a lot of new people have started following the project as a result of this exposure. Welcome everybody!
Thanks again to Medievalists for their interest.
