Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Boantium, episode 293, governing Constantinople with John Geebfreed.

Today is the last of our vantage point episodes as we look around Constantinople itself.

What was the physical state of the city under Latin rule and what was the Latin government

like? What was the relationship, for example, between the new quote unquote emperor and his nobles?

To talk us through these topics we are joined by Dr. John Geebfried, who you heard last week telling us about the Venetian colony at the capital.

John completed his PhD in medieval history at St Louis University in 2015 and then went on to work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

Georgia Southern University, East Georgia State College, and since 2022 has been a faculty member at the University of Vienna.

There he teaches history and digital humanities,

and his academic work focuses on the Crusades and Crusader states

and European interactions with the Mongols.

His doctoral work was on the final Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, and he will be back on the podcast in a couple of episodes

time to tell us his life story. Today there we focus on New Rome itself. Here's the interview, as I often do I will butt in from time to time to add a few more details.

John Gepfreed, welcome to the history of Byzantine.

Thank you so much Robin.

I have been listening for years and it's an honor to be here with you today.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you and it's wonderful always to be talking to someone who's actually working on the material right now and uncovering new insights.

And we bring you in at this juncture to tell us more about what's going on in Constantinople itself because a lot of the action in the narrative has been happening out in the Balkans and we've been talking about Theodore Laskaris in Anatolia and people are trying to fill the power vacuum that's opened up with the sack of Constantinople. So what's going on back in the city itself and the new

crusader administration? And so the first thing I think we'd like to talk about is the sack itself and the sort of physical state of Constantinople.

Because I, in my coverage of the sack, I felt it was important to push back on the kind of

Wikipedia version of history which suggests that the Crusaders committed this crime

against humanity, destroying this wonderful pristine city and I had a lot of caveats to that and it sounds like you are very much on the caveat side and want to correct some errors in that sort of popular version of the SAC and the physical destruction of Constantinople.

Yeah, I think, yeah, part of what we have been dealing with is some historians cast long shadows.

...