A Tale of Heroes

  #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...

  #The March of the Doomed: A short recollection of the Byzantine invasion of Crete and the involvement of the King and Queen. Crete's end was ten years in the making. That is the lesson that Andreas Arda, the Greco-Turkish director, seeks to teach you in this film: Crete was the target of a plan started nearly more than a decade before the invasion. Having been captured by exiles from al-Andalus, men and women who had rebelled against a tyrant and met with failure, Crete went from a backwater, irrelevant overseas province, to a dagger poised at the very center of the Byzantine realm. It was not long before this fact imprinted itself in the minds of all those who lived on Byzantine coasts, as the new Emirate, allied with the Tulunids and the Abbasid Caliphate, soon began to ravage the coastal settlements. Burned fields, destroyed villages, and captured thousands, as fleets led by renegade admirals and corsairs made their fortune through raids on the Byzantine ...