The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 16, 2025


PREVIEW： Epochs #237 ｜ The Fourth Crusade： Part II with Furius Pertinax

PREVIEW： Chronicles #22 ｜ The Eumenides With Stelios Panagiotou The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1297

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Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

185.26

Word count

5,022

Sentence count

3

Harmful content

Hate speech

26

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a look at the legacy of the Sassanids, the greatest generals in world history, and their impact on the history of the Middle East. We discuss their achievements, their failures, and how they became one of the most successful civilizations in history.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 okay so where would you go after what would you talk about after so i think i think i think we
00:00:25.740 can't we can't really reckon with this topic without actually perhaps discussing like a
00:00:30.400 little bit of the arab wars because the the sassanids unlike the romans actually do score
00:00:37.780 i think two victories over the arabs battle the battle the bridge which was one i can't remember
00:00:43.320 the second one but the arabs have this way of just prevailing or with almost every encounter
00:00:50.060 and even though the iranians you might say are more conditioned to fight in this climate than
00:00:55.580 what even like the greeks and romans are you know the arabs are far more familiar with desert fighting
00:01:00.640 they're far more familiar with you know riding through harsh you know desert climates and water
00:01:06.720 scarcity and i mean there's even an anecdote where um khalid abin waleed who's probably you know even
00:01:12.840 if you have like the discussion of like the greatest generals in world history like he's he would have
00:01:16.820 to be in the top five he's on the list yeah he's definitely i mean at the very least the top 10
00:01:20.360 and like he doesn't lose a battle and he's you know like i said but the arab is a bit opportunistic
00:01:25.260 but i mean that still doesn't discount their prowess and their skill um where i think it's
00:01:30.640 after the one of the battles with the persians knowing that the romans have amassed this fairly
00:01:37.020 large army for the battle of yarmulke which is 636 um he actually sends a contingent of the
00:01:42.860 persian army or the you know the arab army in persia across the desert across the what the arabs
00:01:48.260 called al jazeera across mesopotamia and he basically like doubles the size of the camel
00:01:54.140 contingent and just has the camels drink a heap of water yeah and using navigation through the stars
00:01:59.360 completely bypasses all the roman border forts through a way that the romans think is impossible
00:02:04.600 to invade and then pops up somewhere in like southern what they call coel syria and has his men just you
00:02:10.840 know intimately kill cat the camels to take the water out of the hump and they actually make it across the
00:02:16.960 desert with very few losses and the romans are wild there's like 10 000 more men here holy holy moly
00:02:22.420 like we're in trouble now that's the classic arab thing bedouin thing of um where we can take a 0.99
00:02:29.420 a a a camel mounted army where you just cannot even comprehend that that we could do that that men can 0.96
00:02:39.220 do that and then they they do do it and it's like well all right you got us you got us we're not ready
00:02:44.620 we're not prepared from that angle and i mean the romans had varying degrees of success in that part
00:02:48.640 of the world but you look for example you know the crassus and the disaster carri or even mark
00:02:54.300 antony his path in expedition like when you're not prepared the attrition you can suffer is immense
00:02:59.720 they do it all the way up to the killing the ottomans in world war one yeah yeah lawrence of
00:03:05.040 arabia leading camel yeah camel armies against the ottomans in like 1917 bedouin insurgents on
00:03:11.260 yeah i mean so they were doing that in late antiquity absolutely yeah um and all the way
00:03:16.740 through the middle ages and so so so to their credit the the sassanids do fight very gallantly 1.00
00:03:22.440 and for instance once they start losing cities in mesopotamia they mesopotamia they do fortify
00:03:28.220 so like modern day syria and iraq we talked about well in this case modern day iraq right you know
00:03:33.420 basically a stretch from what it would be modern day balzra to mosul right um okay you know the
00:03:38.600 arabs capture city by city by city by city and eventually they reach well in this time it's 1.00
00:03:42.840 called seleucia but tesiphone seleucia it's basically what they bagged at and after a very
00:03:49.160 bitter siege the arabs do take it after certain persians elements defect to the to the arabs
00:03:54.980 cosmo evacuates the city and they do make a couple of stands in and around like the zagros mountains
00:04:01.520 i think the final battle is the battle of navahand i think it's called um but really after that point
00:04:06.720 the treasury is expended and um because i mean all this in the aftermath too that after the loss of
00:04:13.840 the the final war with heraclius cosmo is is deposed and killed and then you just have this
00:04:20.280 massive succession crisis they do settle on general uh rostom uh uh part of my iranian if it's bad but
00:04:27.540 i think it's farukzad is is the general who basically becomes i won't even attempt it
00:04:31.780 i i don't i just i simply try um because in the end like you know i mean i think it's due that
00:04:37.460 credit that iran gets because i mean perj is a great civilization certainly certainly in the pre-modern
00:04:42.240 time perj was a great civilization um and there are people with a longer history than my own for
00:04:46.100 instance um and uh and rostom actually almost fights the arabs to a standstill but then he's
00:04:52.980 actually killed in in battle uh he's thrown from his elephant and crushed and you know it's one of
00:04:58.220 those tight tight run sort of situations where the arabs just pit the the civilized army um but 1.00
00:05:04.680 really from from that from the loss of cessephon and then afterwards afterwards the the loss of the
00:05:10.180 battle of navihand which was the last rallying of the the persian armies the state more or less
00:05:15.680 collapses and in a bit of a parallel to um to the fate of uh darius with bessus they flee east
00:05:24.780 and the last king is killed in an unhandled way like for instance in this case like i remember
00:05:30.260 what if it's like shippur the third or whichever one is the last emperor or the last king of persia
00:05:36.160 he's killed by miller on the outskirts of merv all right you know so it's a very similar fate to
00:05:40.760 darius yeah yeah hunted down to the ends of the air yeah yeah yeah almost but that being said is is
00:05:46.120 that he's i believe one of his relatives i can't remember if it's like a cousin or a son or something
00:05:50.740 actually survives in the chinese court because the chinese actually have designs to re-establish 0.73
00:05:55.660 the sassanids you know in the in the fagan and faganian plains but just never materializes so
00:06:01.660 persia's wiped off the map and uh although there is a struggle uh um for instance um as an example
00:06:10.400 sake the bavandid dynasty uh which exists the just sort of south of the caspian sea fight on as a as a um
00:06:18.140 and the yustanid so there's a few there's a few you know families that maintain their zoroastrian
00:06:23.960 religion their persian identity and actually sort of fight for another couple of centuries in the
00:06:28.600 in the mountainous regions of gilan and sort of southern azerbaijan what is sort of today
00:06:33.480 actually not far from modern day tehran they're the um the albors mountains but the arabs are just 1.00
00:06:39.180 very powerful and they proselytize with great energy and persia you might say is never the same again
00:06:45.120 so this is when the quote-unquote middle east becomes islamic more or less is this and and
00:06:52.180 then inversely you have um the romans have some initial success against the arabs in terms of the
00:06:58.660 border skirmishes but once the arabs start pouring comprehensive forces into syria for instance the
00:07:04.260 romans lose damascus i think in i want to say in 632 but even then the siege of damascus is like six
00:07:10.100 six month six month affair and it's general thomas is fighting with one eye missing and the city only
00:07:17.020 falls when a defector an arab defector converts and opens the gates for the the the arabs to take 1.00
00:07:23.140 the city all right but you know the romans send a counterattack to damascus and almost retake it
00:07:26.880 um but heraclius at this point realizes that it's not just a border incursion and hearing reports from
00:07:33.200 the persians because this point the romans and the persians are cooperating he realizes that this is
00:07:38.060 actually a major major problem so he's pulling troops from all across the border raising new
00:07:42.700 soldiers and dispatches this army to a place called yarmouk which is a river in modern day it's it's sort
00:07:48.980 of not far from the latani it's it's um sort of one of those parts of the world that sort of separates
00:07:53.440 like what you call lebanon from you know judaea palestine that part of the world um and yarmouk ends
00:07:59.380 up being a almost like a a cataclysmic six-day battle like an absolute struggle for instance even in
00:08:05.600 in sort of arab history i think it's the second or third battle they call the day of the eyes
00:08:09.780 because the romans used so many archers that so many arab soldiers at least lost one eye like it
00:08:18.400 was a pretty hard fought battle if you get what i mean um but you know the romans had um armenian
00:08:23.880 contingents they had slavic contingents that you know um in reference to magna gracia like you know
00:08:30.220 roman contingents a greek contingent you know it was really like them summoning the absolute strength
00:08:35.320 of what they could given the aftermath they found themselves in after the persian war
00:08:39.080 um you know you're talking probably a force of at least 50 60 000 you know if ancient battles ever
00:08:46.160 go beyond one day yeah it's uh it's a big affair yeah it's a very serious affair yeah i mean so for
00:08:52.420 it to go into multiple multiple days well you gotta think that six days is almost a week well yeah it's
00:08:56.740 sort of incredible even the polionic era battles were seldom more than one day yeah it was a two or
00:09:03.380 three-day thing it was gigantic so yeah you could only infer that this was well it was a pivot it's
00:09:09.520 one of those very very very pivotal battles that again i think a lot of people in the west
00:09:13.100 in the western tradition may never even have heard of which is actually a pity uh not not to say that
00:09:19.800 we shouldn't you know keep in mind say like richard the lion heart or that we shouldn't keep in mind
00:09:24.020 the capture of jerusalem in 1099 or you know other battles that are more at the you know the forefront of
00:09:29.480 our uh you know consciousness you know for instance like we a lot of people who aren't even
00:09:34.400 particularly fond of history will sort of know of you know alexander you know they might not know
00:09:39.580 the battle of gorgomela but they know about alexander's victories although they'll know about like
00:09:43.160 caesar and they might not know about pharsalus or whatever but you know they'll have some kind
00:09:47.660 of conception but yarmul just doesn't exist in our you know in our sort of socio our sociocultural
00:09:53.240 memory and i've never heard of it until i have studied yeah uh as we all do eastern roman history
00:10:00.800 yeah yeah and it's one of the most pivotal battles in in the actual entirety of our civilization it is
00:10:05.600 actually up there in importance with marathon it is up there with thermopylae it's up there with
00:10:09.880 um with pharsalus it's up there with milvian bridge it determines a lot yeah yeah a great deal
00:10:16.300 yeah yeah oh it sets the tone for well well until today you could argue could quite well argue we are
00:10:22.720 still living in the reverberations of yarmul in many ways like you got to think if if if the whole
00:10:30.220 um roman persian arab conflict had gone differently there would probably still be a delineation between
00:10:39.520 a a larger more powerful persian civilization with its own sphere and a greco-hellenic orthodox sphere
00:10:48.980 turkey would be christian to this day and syria and palestine and yeah you know if you if you
00:10:57.040 like have in your head a map of say justinian pre the um like you know the the reconquest wars that's
00:11:05.300 kind of what an eastern empire would look like sent to rank on santa mobile if things had gone
00:11:10.240 differently it didn't but i'm just making the point that that has a massive transformational sort
00:11:15.360 of you know right effect yeah yeah so so so yarmulk ends up being a quite a disaster um on the sixth day
00:11:25.420 the arab score an absolutely fantastic victory um and much of the roman armies is is driven off the 0.88
00:11:33.220 field and much of that was killed and even within the battle itself even though the arab suffered
00:11:37.940 pretty horrendous losses um out of a force of say you know things espers sort of very wildly as you
00:11:44.700 know with these kind of battles some say as low as 30 some say as much as 80 i probably settled on
00:11:48.700 somewhere around 50 or 60 because i mean it can be said that a lot of contingents were brought there
00:11:52.960 um but yeah so about two-thirds to three-quarters of the armies destroyed and the romans retreat to
00:12:00.420 their cities and one by one the arabs capture they take you know they take jerusalem they take caesarea 0.99
00:12:06.160 maritama they take um you know amaz emezer and they take all these cities that are through that
00:12:12.500 the levant and really the the east romans only stabilized things along the taurus mountains and
00:12:18.560 that's where it stays for a couple of centuries so they're getting aleppo they're getting damascus
00:12:23.240 homs aleppo damascus the whole thing yeah the whole shebang yeah um you know uh tartus um uh acra
00:12:31.140 tyre the whole shebang yeah i mean it is a gradual process i mean they don't take them instantaneously
00:12:36.180 well like for instance the the siege of caesarea maritama which is you know caesarea and what is
00:12:41.520 monday israel um was took the arabs over a year you know gaza uh the city of gaza took
00:12:47.940 several months and and actually there's um there's a story i think of the 40 40 martyrs of gaza
00:12:53.420 so you you sort of see some of the emergence not this is a religious discussion but you sort of
00:12:57.880 start to see the emergence of like these martyr stories um in the late classical early medieval
00:13:03.060 period as a result of these these battles and these losses against the arabs yeah so that changes
00:13:09.340 uh the dynamics sort of the the world pre-heraclius is quite different to the world
00:13:14.880 post-heraclius right it's a different map in the east anyway sorry well yeah and i think it's fair
00:13:20.520 to say that if it isn't a single hinge point then somewhere in between or bookended by justinian and
00:13:28.240 heraclius is before this is the classical world even if rome's fallen it's in the classical world
00:13:34.960 but after it is certainly not the classical world it is a new era a new world in the true sense of the
00:13:42.000 word or like late late antiquity they like to say now uh and then yeah so which is a perfectly
00:13:47.580 accurate yeah yeah that's reasonable yeah i haven't got a problem but late antiquity you could
00:13:52.500 more or less say that late antiquity dies on the battlefield of yarluk yeah right fair enough yeah
00:13:57.280 yeah and i know historians love to uh draw essentially arbitrary lines in the sand although but they're
00:14:04.040 not arbitrary often they're actually not arbitrary it does make complete sense to do that it does make
00:14:08.860 sense it's not just so it makes a textbook easier to cut up into chapters it really is a real
00:14:15.120 thing it really it really was well there are there are events that do delineate and you know forever
00:14:21.520 transform time after things do happen after the event you're saying things do happen absolutely
00:14:27.760 and and things even after even after the fall of yarluk even though the romans are in
00:14:33.320 you know perpetual retreat at this point you know and i've only sort of had a bit of a cursory look at
00:14:38.440 this i mean i'm more well read about other things as well but you know the the arab conquest of
00:14:43.640 egypt was not an easy thing between the romans holding on to alexandria and then fighting on to
00:14:48.100 the the what you could call the nile capital or it was a fortress called heliopolis of which is several
00:14:55.060 heliopolis heliopolis in the ancient world but the one along the the nile i mean again takes the
00:15:01.540 arabs almost a year to capture it you know um even alexandria wasn't a simple thing and even actually
00:15:07.420 after the loss of alexandria it's one of the few instances where i believe heraclis might still
00:15:12.440 have been alive but he dispatches a naval task force to recapture alexandria and they actually
00:15:16.960 push into the delta and like actually start retaking parts of egypt until they're contained and defeated
00:15:22.580 at battle of nikki which is i think in the 640s at some point um but you know the the arabs just have 1.00
00:15:30.300 this irresistible momentum and sort of every every year or two the the if i could call it the government
00:15:37.720 or you know of the caliphate based in in mecca um sends just continual streams of reinforcements to
00:15:44.240 all these generals who are sort of fighting on the periphery um expanding the the rashden caliphate both
00:15:49.320 west along africa um placing a lot of pressure under the byzantines northwards and then they eventually
00:15:54.980 come into conflict with the armenians and later the khazars um and then they're marching eastwards
00:15:59.960 they've completely overrun persia they're at the indus valley they're pushing into coruscant and what
00:16:05.240 you'd call the you know ferganian valley they fight a battle against the the chinese i mean they
00:16:11.260 accomplished that within two generations it's actually quite astonishing yeah if you look at maybe
00:16:16.820 a time lapse you can get you find sort of maps can't you where it's a time lapse of youtube how
00:16:21.660 different empires grow and shrink yeah the the arab one to begin with just boom yeah yeah just a 1.00
00:16:27.880 massive explosion yeah yeah absolutely crazy okay so this impacts um byzantium but of course hugely
00:16:36.220 so they race along uh north africa they race out in eastwards across i i will say that like i said
00:16:45.120 likes about egypt in that it was hard fought over so it was carthage actually because again the carth
00:16:49.200 carthage presents another instance where they counter-attack from sicily with the naval task force
00:16:53.800 and actually funnily enough the visigoths actually assist the byzantines as well um and that's
00:16:58.900 actually where the arabs reckon with destroying carthage and that's where they found the modern 0.96
00:17:03.000 city of tunis um you know and and then you know if we want to touch on we can but you know then they
00:17:07.900 get to you know morocco algeria they cross the straits of gibraltar and then i mean even in sort of
00:17:13.760 shall we say more vanilla um or slightly um you know um more um i'm trying to think uh i'm all
00:17:22.640 sort of mild compatriots in the political sphere will often know about tours portier and you know
00:17:27.680 the charles martel the eighth century isn't it that's the seven yeah yeah i can't remember the exact
00:17:33.560 date of battle of tours portiers but yeah it's charles martel yeah um and then you know there's this
00:17:38.340 whole thing about oh well the arabs were here and and the franks defeated them it's like there's this 0.96
00:17:42.200 whole backslope how they actually got that bloody far you know you've got to think to get from
00:17:46.400 alexandria the long way around to aquitan to southern france it takes some doing yeah you know
00:17:53.180 and you're talking also the complete destruction of visigothic uh spain essentially they hold a
00:17:59.260 small tiny slither kingdom in the north what they call asturias um yeah and i mean the arabs like i 1.00
00:18:05.600 said they accomplished that in a couple of generations it's it's to draw it back to byzantia
00:18:10.660 so i'll get on the map yeah if they go straight north from arabia from the hejaz straight north
00:18:16.680 up through uh yeah gaza modern jerusalem modern day israel lebanon um that direction
00:18:23.900 they do come up against byzantium yeah and taurus mountains yeah and um well we all know
00:18:30.520 they don't take it until 1453 it takes them that long yeah and it's not even the arabs and it's not 1.00
00:18:36.380 even the true arabs at that point right but so that's really where um byzantium
00:18:41.760 comes into its own really it is a rock against which the arab armies yeah crash against it becomes 0.95
00:18:50.280 you might say recognizably the medieval entity which is still technically the east roman empire
00:18:56.980 but we what we call this byzantium and i mean i i would gladly and do call it the east roman empire
00:19:03.440 but for sake of historical reference you know byzantium is easier for a lot of people and so
00:19:08.800 this is the byzantine empire they sent around are centered around constantinople its army's
00:19:14.120 transformed its demography's transformed also in terms of its internal politics um and this is
00:19:20.240 actually an interesting little sort of side point the arabs had quite an easy time once 0.91
00:19:25.880 east roman armies armies were defeated in the field or when their you know troops were sort of
00:19:31.020 attritioned in the cities you know during sieges um many christians in the east actually opened the
00:19:37.160 doors to the arabs because of the sort of monophysite myphysite split um the the nature of god 0.90
00:19:44.500 you know i can't remember exactly what you'll have to ask apostolic majesty is more into theology than i am
00:19:49.120 um are you talking about the great schism no not the great schism this is like interpretation
00:19:54.660 between like the nature of god whether it's um he's an inter-christian yeah yeah but within but
00:20:00.860 within like the eastern church specifically okay so the idea is that you know is is god you know
00:20:06.600 you know you know like for example when you sort of say pray say father son holy spirit you know
00:20:09.840 it's like does god have three natures or is he sort of three natures in one god right it's it's like
00:20:14.580 the arian not the arian controversy but in this no not the arian but in a similar vein right
00:20:19.800 okay well like for instance you know like armenians are mostly um sorry coptics are mostly myphysite 0.97
00:20:25.140 and then greeks are mostly monophysite okay i know what you're talking about yeah yeah so so that split
00:20:29.340 happens and it's sort of the line between greeks and armenians and christian arabs and copts and
00:20:33.860 it ends up being quite well for instance it to some degree weakened justinian and to some degree kind
00:20:39.640 of crippled maurikios as well so i was gonna say that goes back to like what the the fifth century
00:20:44.440 yeah it's it's like it's like in it's like in the aftermath of arcadia it's more or less like that's
00:20:49.280 how far back it is and so a lot of these christians that don't adhere to the policy of the patriarch which
00:20:55.400 is monophysism you know the monophysites go well if we're going to get punished by constantinople
00:21:00.140 then oh well how bad is the jizya you know we'll be able to practice you know unimpeded and in a lot
00:21:06.340 a lot of cases they do actually cooperate with the arabs and just pay the jizya 0.87
00:21:09.640 um and also too at this point because of all the catastrophes that occurred in byzantium
00:21:14.320 they started to be they started to sort of come as was under justinian's time a very heavy tax
00:21:19.300 regime and the jizya was a flat tax so so for a lot of people actually made sense to welcome the arabs 0.99
00:21:27.460 and the real the true arab uh those earlier invasions are um i think it's fair to say that their
00:21:34.180 their rule is um not as bad let's say as sort of the later ottoman rule which could be extremely
00:21:44.080 oppressive and repressive they were very much again if you pay the jizya yeah yeah then you
00:21:49.960 can they'll likely hands off in so far as i mean i mean we know what the stipulation is it's a rule
00:21:54.200 of three it's what is convert die or pay the jizya yeah and but once the jizya was paid then they'll
00:22:00.520 largely hands off which is something that can't really be said for later you know empires later
00:22:05.960 you know islamic regimes yeah but certainly the the uh the rashidans the umayyads and i would say 0.72
00:22:14.580 probably was true sort of around saladin's time with the sort of the abbasids and the fatimids
00:22:18.680 it was like it was fairly kind of hands-offish you know because you've got to think even until
00:22:23.260 like early modern times i mean they have still been very large intact christian arab populations in
00:22:27.780 the near east which like you say about historical amnesia most people in the west don't appreciate
00:22:32.200 you know you've got to think like prior to even the gulf war you know um there were 750 800 000
00:22:39.180 arab christians in iraq like most people would know that yeah you know that's true that's true
00:22:44.780 something like the islamic state or even the post-1979 iranian revolution um or even the wahhabists of
00:22:55.020 saudi arabia today they're actually quite strong highly repressive yeah they're quite um strong in
00:23:02.020 terms of their their um their repression um even in medieval times often an islamic regime wouldn't 0.72
00:23:12.720 be that quite authoritarian quite literally like isis is way more authoritarian than most medieval islamic 0.99
00:23:18.780 well this is the state well this is the irony i know this isn't about the arabs but this is a slight
00:23:22.520 tangent for the sake of curiosity and for our view's sake is that in in a very literal sense the
00:23:29.180 first the initial rashtan caliphate of muhammad's successors you know abubakir and so on um were
00:23:37.720 more lenient to jizya payers than the current regime in saudi arabia like literal food for thought
00:23:44.280 you know that it's the same territory it's still i mean under the capitals riad nowadays but you know
00:23:48.800 mecca medina exists within that country and it's the center of islam or rather you know it's like
00:23:53.440 the holy center point of islam but you know the the and i'm not here to like argue about islamic 0.56
00:24:00.600 tolerance necessarily i'm just giving the the the the perspective of comparing the two eras and the
00:24:08.480 two times and what was the appeal for instance of the myphazites to actually just say well the
00:24:14.640 romans are gone the tax regime's gone i pay the jizya i can just get on my life i mean you know a lot of
00:24:20.280 people like to get pent up about oh well you should just sort of fight to the last man but i mean you
00:24:23.520 know people had lives to live and also the ancient and medieval world was a rather harsher place than
00:24:28.620 it is today and you know i think people kind of grateful to get out of a siege of their life you
00:24:32.360 know and piece of bread in their in their in their hand if you get what i mean
00:24:35.800 so where would you go then do you think because often when you look at um the bazantan empire
00:24:43.820 there's periods where there's someone very very important and pivotal and interesting like
00:24:47.700 and then you might get whole dynasties or whole years decades or even a century or more where it's
00:24:56.700 sort of not that not not as interesting not as pivotal or you get a whole bunch of rulers a quick
00:25:03.760 succession of them and they're all um usurping each other and there's no sort of standout figure
00:25:09.780 necessarily or there's no sort of truly truly massively pivotal event so where where would
00:25:16.960 in your mind where do you go well well well the thing is is that you sort of there's there's sort
00:25:22.080 of a number of these catastrophes you know i mean we know that was it under justinian the second
00:25:26.360 where he temp or was it or was it someone else where they temporarily relocated the capital to
00:25:31.020 sitacusa in sicily and then like the court murdered him and then transferred the the the regime back
00:25:36.820 to constantinople who was that i'm trying to think if that was um i got a feeling it was justinian the
00:25:41.620 second but i can't actually remember now we sound like an amateur i should know does justinian the
00:25:45.280 second get his tongue cut out or his eyes put out uh no because his his nickname was reno like
00:25:50.880 rhino he had his nose cut yeah yeah and he had the mask yeah yeah the fake nose yeah yeah like
00:25:56.300 yeah yeah yeah um but um but anyway you know there's there's a quite a dark period following
00:26:02.580 the death of heracles yeah right which is actually unfortunate because he did have sons but they were
00:26:06.800 not of they were not a stature which which you know put this way if if heracles had had a son
00:26:12.480 as he was to his father the empire would actually stood a pretty decent chance of if not throwing the
00:26:19.260 arab's back but at the very least holding station under a different emperor for instance they
00:26:24.280 probably would have held tunisia and what we call carthage they probably wouldn't have lost sicily
00:26:28.580 but you know fate wasn't kind to the empire at this time we hope you enjoyed that video and if you
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