From the coins on which James I is depicted as a Romanemperor to a huge tapestry of Warwickshire (commissioned by a man with land and connections), these artefacts shaped the way people perceived the world, and help historians to understand what they saw.
It began as a church in 537 under the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, eager to go one up on his Roman antecedents by building a structure on an unprecedented scale.