Byzantium is too-often considered merely the "Eastern rump" of the old Roman Empire, a curious and even unsettling mix of the classical and medieval. Yet it was, according to Professor Harl, "without a doubt the greatest state in Christendom through much of the Middle Ages," and well worth our attention as a way to widen our perspective on everything from the decline of imperial Rome to the rise of the Renaissance.

In a series of 24 tellingly detailed lectures, you'll learn how the Greek-speaking empire of Byzantium, or East Rome, occupied a crucial place in both time and space that began with Constantine the Great and endured for more than a millennium - a crucible where peoples, cultures, and ideas met and melded to create a world at once Eastern and Western, Greek and Latin, classical and Christian. And you'll be dazzled by the achievements of Byzantium's emperors, patriarchs, priests, monks, artists, architects, scholars, soldiers, and officials

• Preserving and extending the literary, intellectual, and aesthetic legacy of Classical and Hellenistic Greece
• Carrying forward path-breaking Roman accomplishments in law, politics, engineering, architecture, urban design, and military affairs
• Deepening Christian thought while spreading the faith to Russia and the rest of what would become the Orthodox world
• Developing Christian monastic institutions
• Shielding a comparatively weak and politically fragmented western Europe from the full force of eastern nomadic and Islamic invasions
• Fusing classical, Christian, and eastern influences
• Helping to shape the course of the Humanist revival and the Renaissance