Hello and welcome to another episode of Most Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I am sitting here with James Harkin,
Anna Tijinski and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered around these microphones to tell you our four favourite facts from the last seven days.
So in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one and this week that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that when a prince in the Byzantine Empire was ready to marry,
court officials would walk around the land with an imperial shoe that they used to check the foot size of potential princesses.
That is amazing.
It's amazing, isn't it?
I mean, I can't really believe that.
No, it sounds very much like a fairy tale.
Yeah, it does.
Like Snow White or something.
Yeah, a Jack of the Beanstalk.
So, does everyone do you think know what the Byzantine Empire was?
I did not until I started researching this fact.
So it is otherwise known as the Eastern Roman Empire and the Roman Empire kind of split into two towards the end and they had the Western side and the Eastern side.
So this was around Turkey and around the Balkans as they are today.
Yes.
In fact, they never called themselves Byzantines, did they?