Leo I

If I could choose anywhere in the world to visit in the year five hundred AD, I would pick Constantinople without a moment of hesitation.

Enthroned in the great imperial palace ruling over the Balkans, Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece, Syria, and Egypt, you would find the emperor Anastasius I Dicorus, an elderly civil servant turned emperor in the ninth year of his reign.

Anastasius was a pragmatic man, and he's considered by many historians to be among the most effective Eastern Roman emperors.

While the western provinces were administered by barbarian kings, Anastasius reformed the Eastern Roman economy by cutting taxes in some places to incentivize economic growth.

Anastasius' economic policy expanded the empire's tax base and bolstered the imperial treasury.

The Greeks have always been aware of their Eastern Roman heritage, and the prestige of the Eastern Roman Empire played a key role in Greek nationalism, uh, since at least the 1800s.

The Turks also have a deep connection with Eastern Roman history, as it was their people who conquered the Eastern Roman Empire and made it their own.

The Turks claimed Constantinople as the capital of their own empire, and their emperors consciously called themselves the Caesars of Rome in imitation of those earlier Eastern Roman emperors.

"You're gonna do..." And, like, Galla Placidia does it as well, and she is able to, like, um...

Like, she's so invested in the career of, like, Leo I, and is so engaged in, um, trying to change the minds of the Eastern Roman emperors over stuff that she's just c- like, able to use this church power, um-

Yes

... and, and, like, have the church be a repository of wealth and a repository of power that gives women such, like, um, a space and a, a, a, an arena for speaking and, and for acting in the world that they ha- just have not had before.