eugyppius

Now another precondition, which I don't to spoil too much in this introductory throat clearing, because there's a lot to say about it. I mean the whole problem of the Monophysites vs. the Chalcedonians.

This is a huge religious divide that splits the Eastern Roman Empire in half. In the east, the ancient patriarchal sees at Antioch and Alexandria believe that Christ had *one nature*, namely a divine one.

The patriarch at Constantinople, however, is further West, and he believes that Christ had *two natures*, a divine and a human one. This was also what the monumentally crucial Council of Chalcedon had decreed in AD 451.

The emperors generally fall under the sway of the patriarch of Constantinople and profess Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but sometimes – as under Justinian – they seem less than totally convinced.

(Theodora, Justinian's whoar wife, has Monophysite sympathies.)

It sounds perhaps like an arcane theological dispute to you, but it mattered graetly to many ordinary people on the ground. As big, or bigger, than the Roman Catholic vs. Protestant divide in 15th/16th centuries. Of huge political significance.

Again, we will talk more this in the course of the coming week, but you need to keep in mind that the territories that the eastern empire loses, in the Disaster of the 7th Century, are predominantly Monophysite.

This is also a cornerstone of important conspiracy theories we will come to entertain.