Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin

Byzantium - a Glorious World to Discoverby Bing-Alguin

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July 08, 2009: For a long time, Byzantium was, as a medieval realm of exceptional duration, very much hidden from a Western point of view and outshined by Rome and the history of England, France and Central European countries. In later days, the importance of the Byzantine Empire as a geographical pivot of the great events in the Middle Ages has led to an intensified study and clarification of the ravishing glories of that empire and not least the sensationally dramatical stories that make this long epoch full of horror and suspense. In short, Byzantium is hot stuff, from a historical point of view.

An excellent introduction, and much more, to the history of this great empire is Prof. Judith Herrin's (King's College, London) book: Byzantium. The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. To a high degree, it is a comprehensive compilation of the elementary events and facts concerning Byzantine history, but it is boiling with new material, making the reading both a useful repetition and a odyssey of new discoveries in a field that seems to be like a deep ocean of so far unknown facts. The book is brilliantly written in a popular as well as distinguished way, and it is flavoured with a rich material of pictures (both coloured and in black-and-white) and not least with amazing quotations from sources only known by an expert in Byzantine history. An example: for the chapter on the internal social antagonism between rebels and patrons in Byzantium, Prof. Herrin has found a convenient quotation from Alexios Makrembolites' Dialogue between the Rich and the Poor, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, that seems to me to be hair-raisingly, appallingly actual in these days: "Among us [the poor], the tillers of the soil, the builders of houses and ships and the craftsmen are drawn... and who comes from among you?... Gamblers, voluptuaries, people bringing public calamitites with their greediness, disruptors of civic order, spreading poverty." After all, nothing is new under the sun,not even the Byzantine sun.

This is only one sample among a lot of likewise appetizing and surprising details and glimpses from the Byzantine world. This book is a gold mine of information, presented in a attractive form that makes your reading a pure delight. By no means, it is an annalistic account of what happened in this empire, emperors, empresses, wars, battles and so on. It deals with the life, the movements, the dynamics of an remarkably long-lasting realm. Ingeniously, Prof. Herrin refers to Fernand Braudel's famous notion of the longue durée, the aspects of long duration he himself used for the Mediterranean. It is more than apt to apply it to Byzantine history too. It certainly is the most appropriate object and aim for a Braudelian study.

Highly recommended for all kinds of history-devouring fanaticists - and not the least for all travellers, who once, or more than once, has been enthralled by that gloriously beautiful city Istanbul, once the capital, Constantinople, of Byzantium!

Addition to your library of history books.by WritesInMargins

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March 26, 2009: Those of us who identify ourselves as 'Lovers of Western History' fancy that we are reasonably well read in that history. We know, or think we know, the Minoans, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Persians. And Mongols, and Goths, and Vikings. Then there are castles and princes and intrigue and war. There are Knights and Maidens, and Kings and Queens, and Voyages of discovery and rapine; colonization and servitude, and disease. But all those of us who think we know something of that history are unsettled in our knowledge as if something unnamed, yet massively significant, is missing. It is. It was.

It is not hyperbole to say that every page of Professor Judith Herrin's extraordinarily accessible book, Byzantium, is as a series of hammer strikes; each blow seating huge sections of that missing history. Anyone who delights in learning things they never imagined, or that they thought were otherwise, will enjoy this book. Each page will bring a smile; of minor, and sometimes major, epiphanies that are unique to those who love to learn, and make new connections, and experience intellectual surprise. Finally, we have delight.