Unlocking the grisly secrets of glorious Byzantium

Byzantium has not always had a good press, John Julius Norwich's popular histories notwithstanding. Its history often seems a grotesque catalogue of palace intrigues and bizarre emperors, from Justinian II, who wore a golden nose after his own was cut off, to Nikephoros I, whose severed head was used as a drinking cup by the Tsar of Bulgaria. Indeed "Byzantine" has become a synonym for bureaucratic over-complication.

Yet Byzantium, originally the Eastern Roman Empire, was one of history's great civilisations, lasting more than 1,000 years. Its history began in 330, when Constantine the Great founded a new city where Europe and Asia met. Now known as Istanbul, Constantinople rapidly became one of the Roman Empire's richest cities. And when the Western Empire collapsed under barbarian invasion in 476, the wealthy East survived.

For the next 10 centuries, Byzantium was one of the dominant powers of the Mediterranean world. Although Italy, North Africa and the Middle East were lost to the Goths, Vandals and Arabs, Constantinople remained the greatest city in Europe, typified by the dramatic chariot races of the hippodrome, the luxury of the bath houses, and the extraordinary beauty of Hagia Sophia, the gigantic church first built in the 530s and still wowing tourists today.

Meanwhile, until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Constantinople had a profound cultural influence on both Europe and Asia. It was Byzantine missionaries who brought Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet to Russia, while Byzantine architects helped to design the mosques and palaces of the new Islamic world.

And as the Royal Academy's exhibition shows, Byzantium was the original cradle of the Renaissance. Not only did its philosophers and scientists transmit classical learning to Italy, but Byzantine art typified by the intensely vivid, ethereal icons of St Stephen and the Archangel Michael on show in London was hugely influential in the development of Western painting, and still forms the basis of art and religion in Orthodox Europe.

Until now, Londoners could only sample Byzantium's unrivalled cultural glories by going to Istanbul. But now that we are tightening our belts, there is no better way to forget the gloom than by losing ourselves in the ultimate historical escapism a trip back in time to the heady days of the emperor with the golden nose.