Julian Barnett
Hidden Rome, Part 3: ‘All That Glitters is Indeed Gold’: Little Visited Wonders of Byzantine Rome
Summary
Amidst the clamour of ancient ruins and Baroque and Rococo masterpieces, Rome also boasts a remarkable collection of little visited Byzantine period churches, tucked away down medieval side streets and in overlooked neighbourhoods. In today’s talk, Julian takes us to these golden mosaiced wonders.
Julian Barnett
Julian Barnett is a teacher, collector, tour guide, and writer with a specialist interest in ultra-orthodoxy within the various faiths. For the last 35 years, he has been investigating and documenting the most extreme sects of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. His experiences and travels were serialized in the Jerusalem Report and also broadcast on BBC Radio Four Religion. Outside of his full-time history teaching post at Southbank International School, Portland Place, London, Julian lectures at numerous venues around the UK and beyond. In 2013 Julian was a joint winner of the National Teacher of the Year Award.
Variety of things. They were financed by, in Constantinople, by trade. They were financed by the remnants of the Roman Empire. They were financed by the early popes, who were immensely wealthy in what they were collecting from the faithful, but in the main, they were financed from the massive trading empire that Constantinople was soon becoming. Constantinople, in the end, was funding Rome, but Rome was becoming more, and more, and more of a backwater. So although I have shown you some of these magnificent Byzantine buildings within Rome, the most magnificent of the Byzantine structures were in the northern part of Italy like Ravenna, the trade routes. Rome was becoming more and more of a backwater, and was becoming almost like the sad elder sister that everybody had loved once, but was now in decline.
Byzantine was Eastern Orthodox, indeed, like Greece, although remember, papal authority was, how can I put it? The papal authority, they wanted it to reach as far as Constantinople, but that simply was not possible. So that is when you get the beginning of the real splintering of Christianity, between the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which still exists to this day. The father figure of all the Orthodox churches is based in Constantinople, Bartholomew, who you can meet any Sunday morning in the Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul, current-day Istanbul, and papal authority existed in Rome over what we would now know as Western Europe. So that’s when we see this real split coming in.
The Roman Catholic Church. 100%. They pay for the upkeep of these.