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Snippet #3: Monarch Leading the People.

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  #Monarchy Leading the People: An explanation for why, a thousand years on, Crete still reveres its only King and Queen. Let none fool you; Emperor and Emir both deserved worse than what they got. To teach that lesson is the mission of Amina Yang, the Egyptian-Chinese filmographer behind this piece: For a century and a half, Crete's peace was denied. Byzantium had never cared for Crete. Originally a peripheral backwater not even worthy of a proper garrison, the island languished due to Roman disinterest, as even its rulership was given out freely as some sort of sinecure instead of awarded due to competence. The Byzantine Empire could not be bothered to see Crete as anything more than a rural islet which had lost any and all claim to glory well over two thousand years ago. That changed in 824. Abu Hafs was the leader of a band of Andalusian warriors. Having rebelled and lost against the Emir of Cordoba, he found himself exiled, forced to drift
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Snippet #2: An Empire's Terror.

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  #An Empire's Terror: Look into the Byzantine reaction to the Cretan Kingdom's foundation and the popular view of its rulers. It is a terrible thing to destroy an Empire. But to allow it to live knowing you could do so is far worse. That is the message Elena Alexandrovna, the Italo-Russian filmmaker, inserts into her project: whatever the King and Queen did to Byzantium, what they didn't do far surpasses it. Though the time difference would be great, the game-changing news of the King and Queen's change in allegiance would reach both the Cretan and Byzantine headquarters, and as you'd expect, their reactions were worlds apart. Where the Emir got so blasted drunk that he couldn't see straight for a week, Constantinople broke under the shock.  The King and Queen had not just simply betrayed the Empire, they had humbled it. The army sent to Crete, under command of the famous Nikephoros Phikas, had been the largest in a century, wit
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