Forgotten Power: Byzantium: Bulwark of Christianity (Hardcover)

Underpins the social, economic, and religious trends that sustained an empire for 800 years

Over 70 colour maps help to untangle the rapidly changing state of Byzantine fortunes

Tremendous historical detail presented in a lively and entertainingly narrative text

Contemporary pictures bring the events to life

From the Author
It is food for thought that until almost the end of the 20th century, most historians considered the Byzantine Empire to be little more than an after-taste of the Roman Empire, a side order to Medieval Europe and an indifferent appetiser to the splendour of the Renaissance. At best, it was a stopping-off place on the crusading route to the Holy Land. In his celebrated trilogy of books on the subject published in 1988–95, John Julius Norwich made amends for the attitudes of earlier historians, or what he called the empire’s ‘atrocious press’. This is typified by the entry for Byzantium in W.E.H. Lecky’s History of European Morals, published in 1869, quoted by Norwich. This is just a taste:

Of that Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed.… The history of the Empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.

Actually, this makes it sound just like any other history – if anything, more exciting than many. And it sweepingly ignores almost one thousand years of human endeavour. The ancient Roman Empire which preceeded it, and from which it sprang, almost fully formed, was never remiss in providing murders, intrigues and generous portions of ingratitude. But the Byzantine emperors, their courtiers and clerics carried off these matters of daily historical life with a flair for the theatrical that their more dour and serious forebears never managed.

Lecky and his ilk also overlooked what the Byzantine Empire accomplished. In its heyday, Constantinople ruled over a vast mercantile empire whose commerce fuelled the development of the barbarian successor states of the collapsed Roman Empire. Under Byzantium, the monastic movement flourished, spread throughout Europe and often acted as a welcome counter-balance to the overbearing power of the established Latin Church. Byzantium gave the emerging medieval Europe many of its laws, enshrined in the codifications of emperors like Justinian I, Basil I and Leo VI. It preserved the skills of art and literature through the sixth to thirteenth centuries – largely a dark period elsewhere in Europe – and its scholars developed humanist thinking, the very mainspring of the Renaissance.

Perhaps most importantly, Byzantium acted as a bulwark of Christianity against the tide of Islam that otherwise threatened to overwhelm all of Europe from the mid-seventh century onwards. And this book explodes the popular myth that the Byzantine Empire survived in a vacuum – far from it, for many European states at the time it was much too involved in European matters.

But that is what makes for exciting history. And this one begins early in the fourth century as – having defeated Maxentius, the usurping ‘emperor’ of Italy, in 312 at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and his legitimate colleague Licinius, ruler of the East in 324 – Constantine the Great becomes the Roman Empire’s uncontested sole and absolute ruler.

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• Books > History > Europe > Vikings, Dark Ages, Medieval Europe 501-1500

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